The Queen Mother (18 page)

Christmas 1917 was spent quietly at St Paul’s Walden. Two weeks later, on 8 January 1918, Elizabeth went to her first ball.
^*
She chose a dress, had her hair done and rushed around looking for shoes. ‘I’m going to my first real dance on Wednesday & feel rather terrified!’ she wrote to Beryl. ‘I’m sure I shall know nobody!’ She was astonished to be lectured by her mother and David who told her ‘that I ought to be more flirtatious. I nearly died of surprise. You know I daresay I’ve got rather quiet from having all those Australians and NZ (!!!) at Glamis, as one simply
must
sit on them!’
¹⁹²

She ‘trembled all afternoon’ before the dance, as she reported to
Beryl; but there is no doubting the excitement and pleasure it gave her. ‘I danced every single dance,
^*
& Mother came to fetch me, & we departed at about 1.30. They had part of Ciro’s black Band … I enjoyed it
very
much. One could only dance with such few people tho’ because the dances were
so
long, but I loved it, and enjoyed it fearfully. Do you know I think my dress really looked quite pretty.’
¹⁹³
From his prisoner-of-war camp in Germany Mike wrote to Lady Strathmore saying he was longing to hear about the ball. Elizabeth had sent him her photograph with her hair up, and he commented, ‘what a pretty little thing Buffy has become’.
¹⁹⁴

On 7 February 1918 the Strathmores had a dance at St James’s Square. It began as a ‘tiny’ party to pay back people who had invited Elizabeth out. But it grew as ‘millions of people’ asked themselves and by the day itself ‘nearly
everybody
is coming. I really had no idea that the Strathmore family was so popular, it’s awful,’ she claimed to Beryl. A young naval lieutenant on whom she had taken pity at an earlier dance had rung her up ‘& we had a I-don’t-know-how-to-describe-it talk.’ She felt sorry for him. You know I’ve got a soft spot in my ’eart for a bhoy in blue, so ‘ave you, and he was so pathetic!’ She had written a four-page letter to Lieutenant Parker, ‘but I simply
can’t
get the last bit in! I wish I could talk to him, it’s so difficult writing … These young men
do
worry me so, I
wish
they wouldn’t. Do come round, & give me some more of your sage (?) advice!’
¹⁹⁵
Ten years later she was to meet Parker again in New Zealand.

Men were fascinated by her. At dinner a few weeks later she met a young man from the American Embassy named Morgan.
^†
She thought he was ‘the cutest thing out. He fair gives me the goat – gee – he’s
some
kid – cut it out Rube – sling us no more of the canned goods, I’m fair up against this stunt, etc.’
¹⁹⁶
At Lady Hastings’s dance in March she danced with Lord Settrington and many others. Charles Settrington was the eldest son of the eighth Duke of Richmond, and
the brother of Doris Gordon-Lennox, with whom Elizabeth began a long and close friendship at this time.
¹⁹⁷

It was during this period that she met the Prince of Wales, widely spoken of as the most glamorous man in London. She danced with him twice at the Cokes’ dance,
^*
where she also danced with Lord Cranborne,
^†
who was to become another lifelong friend. At the Harcourts’ a few nights later she sat between the Prince of Wales and Count Michael Torby.
^‡
She found it both terrifying and enjoyable. ‘As usual I danced the first dance with P.W., I don’t know why, but I usually do!’ In fact she danced three times with the Prince that night and several times with Victor Cochrane Baillie,
^§
a round young man with a large moustache whom she described as a faithful friend, ‘very nice, but extremely ugly, poor thing’.
¹⁹⁸
Cochrane Baillie was smitten with her and wrote to ask her if she would ‘deign’ to write to him sometimes.
¹⁹⁹

The gaiety of her social life could not shut out the painful realities of the war, as her letters to Beryl Poignand in the spring of 1918 show. ‘It was the last dance for some time, so tho’ I enjoyed it very much, I felt slightly depressed at moments. Such a lot of these boys are going out quite soon – in fact nearly everybody I know. I suppose they expect fearful casualties. They are so young, a great many only nineteen.’
²⁰⁰
She worried about Ernest Pearce, now in the field near Arras. She heard that Lord Settrington was missing. (He had been taken prisoner.) ‘I wonder if Peace will
ever
come. I feel as if I never want to go to a dance again, one only makes friends and then they are killed.’
²⁰¹
A few days later she wrote, ‘Doesn’t it make you curse & swear inside you when one thinks that if we’d had a decent Government the War might be over?’
²⁰²

George Thirkell,
^*
an Australian officer who had stayed at Glamis, wrote to her from ‘In the Field, France’: ‘Just a note to let you know that I am still all OK though we have had a fairly strenuous time the last 6 weeks.’ He had just escaped a German gas barrage and he now enclosed some ‘souvenirs’ for her, namely pieces of fabric from three ‘Bosche’ planes.
^†
The red piece came from the wing of Baron von Richthofen’s plane, which had been shot down ‘almost on top of my dug-out’. The Baron had brought down eighty Allied planes, Thirkell wrote. ‘He was chasing a British plane when he was brought down by an Australian Lewis Gunner on the ground.’
²⁰³

At the end of May Elizabeth went to Harwich to visit her brother-in-law Wisp on his destroyer, HMS
Scott
. She described the trip to the ship on board a launch, climbing the ‘wavy ladder’ up the side, saluting the sailors at the top; ‘then one falls heavily down the hatch (is it?) into the waiting arms of a Sub or (preferably) a Lieut!’

The commanding officer, Admiral Tyrwhitt, came to dinner: everyone was frightened of him – everyone except Elizabeth, and he invited her to lunch on his flagship. She went and was shown around by a very nice flag lieutenant – ‘it was unfortunate that when the time came to go, I was found eating chocolates in his cabin!! … I
do
like sailors, they are such darlings. Soldiers, or the most
beautiful
officers, never awaken such thrills as a darling Lieut – don’t you agree? Pip pip.’
^204
‡

In June 1918 she had ‘a very riotous’ lunch with Freddy Dalrymple Hamilton, who always made her laugh. At a dinner dance with Lord and Lady Powis she danced with both ‘a funny little American with nice eyes, from the Embassy’ and Lord Erskine, who walked her home. Each was furious when she danced with the other. ‘I have suddenly taken to blushing again, I do hope it will go soon, it’s such a bore.’
²⁰⁵

The eager young American was called Sam Dickson, Third Secretary at the US Embassy; he began to telephone her and invited her to dinner. She had to explain to him ‘that young ladies did
NOT
dine
alone with young men at well known restaurants!!!’ So her mother chaperoned them to dinner at the Berkeley and they then invited him back to the house where he and Elizabeth ate strawberries and talked till 11 p.m. He seemed lonely and told her all about his family life in the States. ‘It sounds exactly what we imagine cowboys to be!’
²⁰⁶

On 22 June her maternal grandmother, Mrs Scott, died at her home in Dawlish. Cecilia Strathmore went straight to Devon to organize the funeral, leaving Elizabeth to run the household in London. ‘Oh dear! I do miss her so dreadfully,’ Elizabeth wrote to Beryl. ‘I never knew before how much I depended on her – and more things seem to crop up for me to decide than I’ve
ever
known. It’s always the way.’
²⁰⁷

When she returned to Glamis in early August 1918 she found sixteen new soldiers; she did her best to get to know them all. She was also kept busy with duties in the local community: a bazaar at Glamis in aid of prisoners of war, at which they raised £300 despite a violent storm which blew down the marquee and ruined the lavender bags and trimmed hats which Elizabeth had made for her stall; a Baby Show at Arbroath; a charity sale at Forfar which, to her terror, she had to open with a speech. Meanwhile she made friends with an amusing Canadian, Lieutenant J. S. Reynolds, who had ‘grasped me by the arrrm, & hurrrled me into safety!’ in the storm at Glamis.
²⁰⁸

By now the might of America was at last turning the war. The Allies had managed, at enormous cost, to halt the last great German offensive. In August 1918 many of the positions lost during the Battle of the Somme two years before were regained. The Allies attacked the length of the Western Front in a final mood of exhilaration. But the casualties mounted.

Elizabeth was worried for Lieutenant Reynolds, but in September he wrote to tell her that he and his unit were now advancing through northern France. They had collected ‘tons of souvenirs from the Huns’ and ‘if I get out of this mess alive will send you an Iron Cross if you think it will be OK.’
²⁰⁹
She copied a part of this letter to Beryl saying, ‘Rather a nice letter don’t you think? I think he thought he might get killed don’t you?’
²¹⁰
A little later, he did indeed send her an Iron Cross, and she was delighted.
²¹¹

At Holy Communion on Sunday 29 September four soldiers came to worship with Sister. Elizabeth was touched to see them all kneeling in their hospital blues before the altar. ‘It really was a beautiful sight,
tho’ it gave me a lump in my throat. I keep on thinking of it. Poor dear boys.’

That month Austria began to sue for peace and German forces started to withdraw from the Western Front. As the warriors wound wearily towards peace, a new killer, influenza, began to rage. Twenty thousand American soldiers died of the disease in two months. Anarchy spread through Germany. On 9 November 1918 the Kaiser fled Berlin and, having finally agreed to abdicate, drove into exile in Holland. By now three of the dynastic empires of Europe had fallen, the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs. Tsar Nicholas II and his family, King George V’s cousins, had been brutally murdered in July 1918 by the Bolsheviks, who had seized power in Russia following the October Revolution in 1917.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the Armistice effectively ended the war. Elizabeth was at Glamis and ever after she remembered the patients from the Castle, all dressed in their hospital blues, marching happily together up the long avenue to the pub. ‘They went straight to the village to celebrate and I think they drank too much. Seats got broken up to make a bonfire and all that sort of thing. I can see them now, all going to enjoy this wonderful moment.’
²¹²

In London thousands of people rushed into the street and danced around bonfires all over town, even at the foot of Nelson’s Column. King George V and Queen Mary appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace before the exultant crowds. In the next week they drove five times through London in an open carriage and everywhere they were cheered by ecstatic people. In a speech to the assembled Lords and Commons in the Palace of Westminster, the King said, ‘May goodwill and concord at home strengthen our influence for concord abroad. May the morning star of peace, which is now rising over a war-worn world, be here and everywhere the herald of a better day, in which the storms of strife shall have died down and the rays of an enduring peace be shed upon all nations.’

Three-quarters of a million people from the United Kingdom had been killed. Another 200,000 from the Empire also died. France lost many more, both actually and proportionately. No one knows just how many people died around the world. Some say about ten million; others more. Russia alone is thought to have lost between 1,700,000 and 3,000,000 dead and another five million wounded. Typhus killed
another million in the Balkans. Millions more were wounded, families were carved into pieces. Europeans were shocked by what they had done to themselves. Perhaps it is not quite true to say that an entire generation was lost, but it was scarred for ever.

Winston Churchill described well the nature of the war that had just ended.

The economic heart of the continent had been ravaged too. Millions were starving. Economic output in 1919 was a quarter below what it had been in 1914. And at the centre of the destruction lay shattered the country which had been the power of Europe before the war, Germany herself. ‘We are at the dead season of our fortunes,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes, a young economist. ‘Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.’
²¹⁴

A letter that Elizabeth wrote to Beryl at the end of the month reflected the uncertain mood in the country after the initial euphoria of victory. Two Australian officers who had convalesced at Glamis had been to see her. They had had a nice and silly time, ‘& we yelled songs round the piano after tea’. Perhaps because of the long-drawn-out suspense of the war, she was now feeling depressed. ‘Can’t
think
why. No reason on earth. Everything is wonderful. So long waiting for Mike perhaps.’
²¹⁵