The Queen Mother (142 page)

Upstairs the bedrooms and bathrooms remained as the Duke and Duchess of York had designed them, simple and somewhat tired. Queen Elizabeth was always reluctant to change familiar, much-loved furnishings and, as the years went by, Royal Lodge showed its age. Doors could get stuck, light switches tended to flash, the central heating and the plumbing were unpredictable. All this, together with the clutter of Wellington boots and gardening clothes just inside the front door, enhanced the feeling of old-fashioned country-house living at Royal Lodge, and the sense of continuity was reflected in the garden tombstones of the corgis who had barked before.

Here, as at her other homes, Queen Elizabeth developed annual rituals. She would have two pheasant-shooting weekends. Every spring she welcomed a lawn meet for the Eton College Hunt (Beagles). In March she had what was called the Musical Weekend (sometimes also called the Geriatric Weekend within her Household) at which she entertained those of her friends who were less interested in shooting or fishing. In the last two decades of her life, the guests often included Archbishop Runcie and his wife Lindy, Peter Carrington and his wife Iona, Fitzroy and Veronica Maclean, Sir John (later Lord) Sainsbury, merchant and philanthropist, and his wife Anya, a former principal ballerina with the Royal Ballet. She admired the Sainsbury family for both its business success and its record of philanthropy. In 1985, John Sainsbury, the chairman of the company, invited her to make her one and only visit to the modern phenomenon of a supermarket, the big Sainsbury store in Cromwell Road. There she spoke to surprised and delighted customers and staff and told the French manager of the wine department (in French) of her fondness for claret. She appreciated the Sainsburys’ generous interest in ballet and much approved of their donation of the new wing of the National Gallery at the end of the
1980s. The original, modernist design was fiercely criticized, including by the Prince of Wales who described it as ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend’. Many architects never forgave the Prince but, after a long controversy, the modernist plans were scrapped, a more harmonious design by the firm of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown was approved instead, and the new Sainsbury wing opened to acclaim in 1991.
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Other frequent guests at Royal Lodge included Lord David Cecil, the Duke and Duchess of Grafton, and Lord Gowrie, Conservative politician and poet, and his wife Nitie, whose father, Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, had been executed for his part in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. There was always fine poetry and music at these weekends, provided by such poets as Stephen Spender and John Betjeman, actors like Sir John Gielgud, and young musicians, sometimes from the Royal College of Music. Like other guests, Spender found these weekends ‘magical’ and told her, ‘I think you float on the pleasure that you give to all those around you.’
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One Royal Lodge house party was amusingly evoked by another guest, the diplomat Sir Charles Johnston, who described the fun and games after dinner, with Lord Ballantrae playing the piano while the guests danced in and out of the room led by the ‘dynamic little figure’ of the Queen Mother, ‘arms up in Highland attitudes’, until ‘we all got noisy and over-excited and the ex-bish of New York began to lose his collar.’
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She had met the ‘ex-bish’, Horace Donegan,
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on her trip to the United States in 1954, when she had heard him preach on the importance of family life. Thereafter, as Hugo Vickers expressed it in his biography of her: ‘The Queen Mother warmed to him, and, once he had found her, he never let her go.’
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Bishop Donegan appreciated the martinis that flowed at Royal Lodge. One year he had so many, Lord Carrington recalled, that he was unable to remember Grace when Queen Elizabeth asked him to say it. ‘After dinner she said to
Martin [Gilliat] “You really must not give him so many martinis next year.” The next year I
heard
Martin saying to him, “Have another martini Bish – it will steady your nerves for Grace.” ’
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Royal Lodge was also the base for many of her expeditions to see her racehorses and attend race meetings. Horses enlivened the whole of the second half of her life. She read
Sporting Life
every day and she had installed in Clarence House a rather primitive loudspeaker system, such as usually exists only in betting shops, to relay minute-by-minute news from racetracks around the country.

Her racing colours, derived from those of the ‘racing’ twelfth Earl of Strathmore, were blue with buff stripes, blue sleeves and a black cap with a gold tassel. She brought a new excitement and glamour to steeplechasing and she was welcomed warmly at every racecourse. An early annual meeting that she always wished to attend was the Royal Artillery Meeting at Sandown Park in February. To coincide with the Grand Military meeting in early March, she held a house party and gave a reception for owners, trainers, jockeys and race officials every year. Then came the National Hunt Festival at Cheltenham. For some years she stayed with Lady Avice Spicer at Spye Park for Cheltenham, but later she drove down daily from Royal Lodge, where she always had a house party for the meeting.

At the end of April there was the Whitbread Gold Cup at Sandown Park. Billy Whitbread, who had started this sponsorship, was one of those flamboyant characters she enjoyed. After attending the Derby, with the Queen, the Queen Mother always went to Royal Ascot, and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at the end of July. She had house parties at Royal Lodge for the latter.

Her first important race meeting of the winter was the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury for which she would have a different group of friends to stay at Royal Lodge. At the Ascot Christmas meeting on the Saturday before Christmas, she would have a children’s lunch party in the royal box for the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of friends. It was often a riotous affair, for Martin Gilliat was adept at making children roar with laughter. Father Christmas drove down the racecourse, and crowds of children would gather round the entrance to the Royal Box, where the Queen and Queen Elizabeth gave out the presents – sweets and chocolates – from his sack. When Christmases were at Windsor, Queen Elizabeth always went to the King George VI steeplechase at Kempton Park on Boxing Day.

In addition to all these regular meetings, she tried to go wherever she had a horse running. She and Michael Oswald, her Racing Manager, once went to Warwick by train; the steward brought her tea in his own earthenware teapot instead of the standard British Rail metal one, which he didn’t think good enough. ‘How nice,’ she said, whereupon he gave it to her. She used it often thereafter at Royal Lodge, Birkhall and Sandringham.
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Of her trainers, Peter Cazalet probably gave her the most fun, both with the horses he trained and at his beautiful house, Fairlawne in Kent. Cazalet’s grandfather, Edward, who had made a fortune through trade with Russia, had become the squire of the neighbouring village of Shipbourne and had acquired Fairlawne in the 1870s. He had added to the house and built the Queen Anne-style stables which his grandson used to create his racing establishment in the late 1940s. Cazalet’s first wife, Leonora, was the stepdaughter of P. G. Wodehouse. She had died during the war and in 1949 Cazalet married Zara Strutt, a bubbly and attractive woman who immediately began to enhance Fairlawne and became a lifelong friend of Queen Elizabeth. The Cazalets appreciated fine living and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as Cazalet built up the racing successes of Fairlawne, his wife entertained generously. Every December, they would throw a big house party to coincide with the races at nearby Lingfield, a small Surrey racecourse. Weekends at Fairlawne were glamorous and fun and the Queen Mother enjoyed them. All in all she stayed with the Cazalets about twenty times.

On one occasion Peter Cazalet’s son Anthony, aged about nine, invited Queen Elizabeth for a drive in the ancient car he drove about the grounds. To Zara Cazalet’s consternation Queen Elizabeth replied, ‘Oh yes, I would love to,’ and sat on the floor of the banger, which disappeared into Fairlawne’s Home Woods, while Mrs Cazalet uttered anxious cries of ‘Where
are
they?’ Eventually they returned, both smiling happily, and Queen Elizabeth remarked on what a wonderful time she had had.

Among her fellow guests at Fairlawne were the film star Elizabeth Taylor, Noël Coward and the historian Elizabeth Longford and her husband Frank, the Labour peer, who lived near by. Once when Coward was at Fairlawne the Cazalets invited to lunch a couple they had met in Tahiti; the wife’s father had written about the mutiny on the
Bounty
. They presented the Queen Mother with a Cartier box. Its contents were unexpected: a nail from the
Bounty
. Never at a loss at
such moments, she received it with her usual charm. Afterwards, Noël Coward teased her for the way she had exclaimed in tones of wonderment, ‘Oh, a
nail
!’, ‘as if it was a Crown Jewel!’
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At Noël Coward’s weekends there would always be at least one singsong around the piano. Queen Elizabeth, like everyone else, loved Coward’s affectionate parodies of British manners. Particular favourites were ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun’, ‘The Stately Homes of England’ and ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’.
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Peter Cazalet always ensured that the Queen Mother had horses running at Lingfield during these weekends. These included Double Star, The Rip, Laffy, Makaldar and Escalus. Double Star had been found in Ireland by Cazalet; he had cost £4,000, a considerable sum in 1956, but he justified this, winning the Ashdown Handicap Chase at Lingfield three times; overall he won seventeen out of the fifty races in which he was entered between 1956 and 1963.

Perhaps her best racing weekend there was in December 1961 when she had three winners – Laffy, Double Star and The Rip. The Rip was by Queen Elizabeth’s own early favourite, Manicou, out of a mare called Easy Virtue, which was owned by Jack Irwin, the son of the landlord of the Red Cat pub at Wootton Marshes near Sandringham. The Queen Mother acquired him for 400 guineas, which turned out to be a bargain.

He was sent to be broken in by Major Eldred Wilson DSO, the senior tenant farmer on the Sandringham estate, who had been a prisoner of war and on his return became a successful farmer and horseman. He brought on Queen Elizabeth’s young horses and became a friend to her; she liked to compliment him by saying that he had ‘a touch of Irish in him’. Wilson had been a brave point-to-point rider and, after he retired, he continued to live on the estate. She visited him at home every July and each year the same conversation was repeated, the same jokes rehearsed, the same laughter enjoyed. She made similar visits to other retired members of her staff and Household every year until the end of her life.

Wilson did a fine job with The Rip, who won four races in a row in 1962; in the 1964 Hennessy Gold Cup he was placed third behind the illustrious Arkle and Ferry Boat. Altogether The Rip won thirteen races under the Queen Mother’s colours. Among her other more successful horses, Double Star and Chaou II each won seventeen races.
In 1964 she had her one-hundredth win with a rather temperamental horse, Gay Record, in the Sevenoaks Chase at Folkestone. To celebrate, she held a dance to which she invited all her friends from the racing world and many from the acting world as well and, according to Dick Francis, danced with all the jockeys.
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During the Cazalet years Queen Elizabeth had up to sixteen jumpers in training with him and with other trainers. After his death in 1973 she cut back somewhat – the expenses were not sustainable – and usually had fewer than ten, many of them with Fulke Walwyn at his stables at Lambourn in Berkshire. Walwyn had his own distinguished racing history and, when he was a jockey, had actually won the Grand National on Reynoldstown in 1936. He had fewer winners for the Queen Mother than Cazalet, but his winners won bigger races. The first race he won for her was, appropriately, the Fairlawne Chase at Windsor, with Game Spirit, and the next the Reynoldstown Pattern Hurdle at Wolverhampton, with Sunnyboy. In 1975 he won her the popular Schweppes Hurdle at Newbury with Tammuz, ridden by Bill Smith. It carried a purse of over £9,000 – her most valuable win up to that time. For her 200th and 300th winners, her rumbustious friend Dick Wilkins, a stockjobber in the City of London and a man of generous instincts and proportions, gave her parties at the Savoy.

Racing and horses afforded her not just seasonal but daily pleasure. Like her daughter, she was a good judge of horseflesh and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of racing form. She and the Queen were both patrons of the Jockey Club, and when the National Hunt Committee, of which she was patron, merged with the Jockey Club, she became joint patron.

Sir Michael Oswald recalled that, unlike many owners, she took an interest in everyone from stable boys and girls upwards. ‘Very few people looking at a horse pay any attention to the person holding the horse. She always spoke to them and shook hands before looking at the horse.’ Oswald thought that the Queen Mother understood well what people wanted from her. If she found herself surrounded by people with cameras at an event, she would smile and wave to each side of the road. She invariably stopped to talk to people in wheelchairs. ‘She always wanted to make sure that people who wanted to see her went away happy.’ She would often repeat the maxim she had learned from her mother – ‘There is no one who is really boring – if you find someone so, it must be because of you.’ She had wonderful
manners and to the end of her life she would try to get out of her chair to shake people’s hands. She managed to remember people year after year.
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She was loyal to horses as well as trainers. She would never sell a horse; instead homes would be found for them with her regiments, or with local farmers who could use them for hacking, and she would send them off on permanent loan. None of this came cheap and, throughout, her racing had to be subsidized by the Queen. After one particularly disappointing year, the Queen offered to pay her mother’s bill from Peter Cazalet. The Queen Mother accepted gratefully, signed the bill and wrote underneath the total, ‘Oh dear’.
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