The Queen Mother (151 page)

A
S ONE DECADE
succeeded another, Britain continued to alter with almost bewildering speed. In retrospect and perhaps in cliche, the 1960s were deemed the decade of change, but the social revolution that began there had no neat ten-year ending. Rather, its reverberations continued to work through society in all the years that followed. The 1970s, Queen Elizabeth’s eighth decade, were notable for economic failure, for weak government and for the abandonment of old social nostrums. Many time-honoured British institutions – the Church of England, the armed services, the law and the monarchy itself – faced unprecedented challenges and demands for reform. Patterns of authority were discarded. Relativism, the belief that no point of view is superior to another, became the new creed. People of conservative bent became concerned that society was disintegrating, even that Britain was facing its twilight.

The traditional family was in decline as the nucleus of society. More marriages ended in divorce, and the numbers of children born out of wedlock rose inexorably. More women went to work, more people lived alone. Minorities demanded more rights more vocally. University students became more rebellious. Football hooliganism and mugging on the streets became more common. Decimal coinage replaced pounds, shillings and pence in 1971, unsolicited credit cards were sent by banks to their customers, spending became more fashionable than saving, inflation soared, the first of many housing booms gathered pace, the price of oil shot up after the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War of 1973, supermarkets grew and so did the numbers of immigrants from disparate parts of the former empire.
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The nature of secondary education changed as a result of decisions by the Labour government after 1964. For decades selective grammar
schools had been a great help to clever working-class children, but Tony Crosland, Harold Wilson’s Education Secretary, declared that he was going to ‘destroy’ every grammar school in the country.
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Comprehensive schools, less exclusive and less academic, were promoted instead. The result was startling – in 1970 some 34 per cent of British secondary-school children were in comprehensive schools; by 1980 the numbers had swollen to 80 per cent. It would be fair to say that this change did not always seem to lead to a widespread improvement in standards.

Numbers in higher education doubled in the 1960s with the opening of new universities – first, Sussex (at Brighton) in 1961, followed by York, Kent (at Canterbury) and Essex (at Colchester). Numbers of students continued to increase in the 1970s but cuts in government expenditure took some of the gloss off the new institutions. The hope that large numbers of children would take to science and engineering was not realized – sociology was preferred.

In addition to social change, the United Kingdom was under brutal assault from the Irish Republican Army with its frequent murderous attacks in Ulster and in British cities, in pursuit of its demand for a united Ireland. Terrorist atrocities and the consequent deaths of both civilians and members of the armed forces (including some from regiments of which Queen Elizabeth was colonel-in-chief) became a dismal refrain throughout the next thirty years. Queen Elizabeth followed closely the fortunes of her own regiments which were involved in the defence of the United Kingdom. She said that she prayed for Northern Ireland every night.
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Queen Elizabeth was aware of the magnitude of the changes that were taking place. ‘It is almost incredible to think of what has happened in the last 30 years, compared with, say 30 years in one’s grandfather’s time,’ she wrote to a friend at the time of her seventieth birthday.
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Much of it she may have disliked. But she was always careful not to give public voice to her anxieties. Moreover, she was usually both optimistic and philosophical – she did not see it as part of her duties to tilt at windmills.

Such a battery of changes was bound to affect the monarchy and the Royal Family. As the Duke of Edinburgh had said, ‘The monarchy is part of the fabric of the country. And, as the fabric alters, so the monarchy and its people’s relations to it alters.’
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With society becoming so much more open, some Palace officials felt by the end of the
1960s that the Royal Family itself needed to be more accessible. Until now relations with the press had been deliberately kept formal and as distant as possible.

When Lord Brabourne, Lord Mountbatten’s son-in-law, suggested making a film of the family at work and play, the Duke of Edinburgh took up the idea and the Queen agreed to it.
Royal Family
was broadcast by the BBC and then by ITV in June 1969, and the BBC estimated that 68 per cent of the British public had watched it. The film was sold to 140 countries. It was a remarkable documentary which gave people all over the world the opportunity to see for the first time the annual pattern of the monarch’s life, to hear her voice at home and to see her and her children interact (if somewhat stiltedly). Viewers saw the Queen on formal occasions and at ease; she was seen discussing her clothes with her dresser and Foreign Office telegrams with her Private Secretary, at Balmoral and on board
Britannia
. Prince Philip was shown boating with his young son, Prince Edward; at a picnic Prince Charles made salad dressing while Princess Anne tried to get the barbecue going. On the Berkshire downs the Queen and Princess Anne watched racehorses exercise in the morning mist. This first authorized glimpse into the Royal Family’s daily life was far more revealing than anything Crawfie or other royal servants had ever disclosed.

The film was made in good faith as an attempt to portray the family in a more modern, open manner, and it was received in this spirit by many members of the public. It was a huge success at the time and showed the most attractive side of the family itself and of its individual members. Such openness was almost revolutionary. But it carried risks; those who hoped that this one act of collaboration would sate the appetites of the media had made a sad misjudgement. Perhaps inevitably many journalists saw it as a challenge: the Royal Family had breached the walls of privacy from the inside, so their private lives were now fair game.

The theatre critic Milton Shulman maintained that with the film the Royal Family was replacing an old image with a new one. The old image, that of George V and George VI and, till now, of Queen Elizabeth II, had been of authority and remoteness – this had now given way to one of ‘homeliness, industry and relaxation’. He noted that ‘Every institution that has so far attempted to use TV to popularise or aggrandise itself has been trivialised by it.’
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The Queen’s biographer Ben Pimlott later asked, ‘Was it right for a fourth estate worth its salt, to accept such a calculated piece of media manipulation as a given? If royal “privacy” was no longer sacrosanct, why should its exposure be strictly on royalty’s own terms?’
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In fact, real though the dangers were, the Royal Family had no alternative to becoming more open to the world. Had they refused to do so at the end of the 1960s, they would have been dismissed and denounced as utterly irrelevant to the modern age. They were damned if they did and damned if they did not.

The film was immediately followed by another big media event which put the Royal Family at the centre of the national stage. This was the Investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales by the Queen at Caernarvon Castle, on 1 July 1969, in his twenty-first year. It was an effort to show the monarchy as both self-renewing and involved in all parts of the United Kingdom. It was a deliberately theatrical event; the Queen appointed the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, to co-ordinate the ceremony together with Lord Snowdon, who designed the setting and the costumes with the demands of powerful television cameras very much in mind.

In retrospect it was easy to mock both Snowdon’s efforts and, indeed, the entire ceremony, as ‘mock-Arthurian’.
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The Queen and the Prince themselves saw the funny side of it all and the dress rehearsal threatened to reduce them both to giggles; but the actual ceremony was conducted faultlessly.
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The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince were enthroned in the courtyard of Caernarvon Castle under a perspex canopy. Four thousand guests seated on scarlet chairs watched as the Prince, clad in the Snowdon vision of medieval garb, kneeled before his mother who was dressed for 1969, and swore an oath of loyalty to the Queen. She in turn placed a gold coronet on his head. The Prince wrote in his diary that he was very moved by it all.
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So was Queen Elizabeth; she congratulated Snowdon on his efforts, saying that the Investiture was all ‘so perfect and arranged with such marvellous taste that I feel I must send you one line of heartfelt congratulation on a really
super
result … It is so lovely to know that this day, so important to you, is also a sort of turning point for the people of our country. You’ve done so much to achieve this, well done. Your loving MOTHER IN LAW, ER’.
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R
OYAL
F
AMILY
and the Investiture came at a time of increased pressure upon the royal finances. Indeed the costs of the monarchy now became an issue for the first time since the Queen came to the throne. Six years of Labour government made this almost inevitable. The needs of the state seemed to grow inexorably. Government expenditure on health and social services, which consumed 16 per cent of Gross National Product in 1951, had risen to 29 per cent in 1975, or almost half of all public expenditure that year.
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As a result, Labour politicians and others on the left began again to examine royal expenditure. Money for the monarch and the Royal Family has always been a contentious matter in the House of Commons. Parliament first took responsibility for the expenses of the Royal Household after the Revolution of 1688. Since 1760 every monarch has agreed to surrender the income from the Crown Estates to Parliament, and in return Parliament gives the monarch an annual provision known as the Civil List. The amount used to be fixed at the start of every reign and was supposed to remain fixed at that level thereafter.

By 1969 inflation had eaten away at the Civil List, which had been fixed at £475,000 in 1952. Salaries at Buckingham Palace were famously low. That year Prince Philip surprised everyone when he gave a television interview in North America and warned that the Royal Family was about to go into the red and ‘we may have to move into smaller premises, who knows?’
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Harold Wilson, a Labour Prime Minister who was devoted to both the Queen and the monarchy, did not want the issue of royal finances to become party political. He sought and obtained the agreement of Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party, that there should be a new select committee on the Civil List, to be set up after the forthcoming election.

In May 1970, when the polls looked favourable to Labour, Wilson called an election. To widespread surprise, the Conservatives won and the Queen called upon Edward Heath to form her new government. He went ahead and set up the Select Committee. It was chaired by the new Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anthony Barber, but included also such dedicated republican critics of the monarchy as William Hamilton, Labour MP for Fife. In May 1971 the Committee began its examination of royal finances. The hearings were tough. Indeed, Pimlott suggested that the Select Committee put the monarchy more seriously on the defensive than at any time since 1936.
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The Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, came before the Committee and explained in detail the work that the Queen undertook and why there was a need for an increase in the Queen’s public income, the Civil List, to £980,000. The Queen’s work, he said, was endless and unending – no retirement for her.
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The costs of the royal yacht
Britannia
, the royal train and other perquisites were examined closely. There was much speculation on the size of the Queen’s personal fortune. Huge and inflated sums were put around and newspaper editorials criticized the fact that she paid no tax. As for the Queen Mother, the Committee complained that no explanation had been given for the increase in her Civil List allowance – £95,000 was now requested, instead of the £77,000 set in 1952. The Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cobbold, said that it was his personal view’ that it should be considered ‘as something of the nature of payment for services rendered over years of peace and war’. The Committee, arguing that her duties were likely to contract as the years went by, recommended that her annuity be reduced and that she be paid no more than a retired Prime Minister.

When the Committee’s recommendations came up for debate in the House of Commons in December 1971 there was fierce criticism, particularly of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, from the Labour benches. William Hamilton denounced the monarchy’s supporters on the Committee as diligent sycophants’. Why did the Queen Mother need £95,000 a year? He listed by name all her Household with their titles. ‘That is a total household of 33,’ he said. ‘I ask the House: what the blazes do they do? What do the Ladies of the Bedchamber do that the Women of the Bedchamber do not do? Why all the extras? … What size of bed chamber is this?’ He did not mention that the ladies in waiting received only a dress allowance but no pay, or that the extras were all retired and unpaid. Instead he declared that it was ‘obscene’ that the Queen Mother was getting such monies while old folk in his constituency were dying from cold and starvation. He was even more insulting about Princess Margaret, ‘an expensive kept woman’ who did ‘even less than her old Mum’.
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In fact Queen Elizabeth had in that year undertaken eighty-six official engagements and seven for the University of London; 187 further invitations had had to be turned down.