The Queen Mother (20 page)

‘L
UCKILY
ONE
DOESN’T
“come out” much in War time,’ Elizabeth had written at the end of 1916, referring to the ‘awful thought’ that Lavinia Spencer, a year older than her, was about to be launched into society as a debutante.
¹
For although the war had by no means put a stop to dances, dinners and parties – and Elizabeth had found them far from awful when her turn came in early 1918 – the formalities of the ‘season’, in particular the glittering royal occasions, had been suspended since 1914. Presentation at Court, the sine qua non of social recognition, which for debutantes meant parading in evening dress with ostrich-feather headdresses and long trains before the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace, had ceased. There were no levées (at which men were presented), no Court balls, no garden parties and no Royal Ascot. Similarly, country-house entertaining on the grand prewar scale had come to a halt; shooting was much reduced, with parkland ploughed up, coverts felled for timber, and keepers, beaters, loaders and the sportsmen themselves away in the forces.

With the end of hostilities, however, social life at Court and in the great houses of the land gradually resumed its old pattern. Presentation ceremonies were resumed,
^*
with one startling innovation: the King abolished the ban on presenting actors and actresses, provided of course that they were ladies and gentlemen of irreproachable character.
²
It
was a small signal of the increasing social mobility which the war had accelerated.
^*

Royal Ascot reappeared on the social calendar in glorious weather in June 1919. Queen Mary was pleased by the good turnout after five years of war, and the King recorded that everyone wore ‘a high hat’ as in the old days.
³
Elizabeth was there for the first time and enjoyed it very much. That summer she was constantly busy ‘in a dissipated way’, as she put it, with dinners and dances.
⁴
In September 1919 Glamis was once more filled with young people dancing and dining by candlelight, laughing and singing around the fireplaces. Elizabeth’s grief at Charles Settrington’s death overshadowed the gaiety for her, but her friends pronounced the party a great success.
⁵
Christmas at St Paul’s Walden, going out shooting with Mike and David, and playing with Jock and Fenella’s children, revived her spirits. ‘I can hardly write sense, as the grammy is blazing forth “Indianola”, the best dancing tune in the world!’ she told Beryl; and then there was the Hertford Ball to look forward to and dread a little.
⁶

For that ball, in early January 1920, she was invited to join a house party with the Salisbury family at Hatfield, quite close to St Paul’s Walden. She found them delightful, particularly Lord David Cecil, whose heart she had captured when they were both children and who remained a lifelong friend. ‘He is
very
clever, &
most
entertaining. Quite vague like they all are.’

She had been afraid that she would know no one, but the party included two of her dancing partners from her first ball in 1918, Count Willy de Grünne, a Belgian diplomat who danced ‘too divinely’, and Bruce Ogilvy, son of the Strathmores’ neighbour in Scotland, Lady Airlie. Several other friends, including Helen Cecil, a Salisbury cousin,
^†
and Lord Dalkeith, the eldest son of the Duke of Buccleuch, were also there. They played tennis in the real tennis court and violent games of hockey, and one night of dancing ended with ‘a terrific game of follow-my-leader
right round the house, which is immense, under the dining room table & even across the roof!!’ The Hertford Ball was ‘heavenly’ and she had worn her new white frock. ‘Several people admired it, which pleased me
immensely
!!’ Walter Dalkeith drove her back to St Paul’s – it was a hair-raising drive as he had hardly ever driven before. They swerved into ditches and crashed into the Strathmores’ gate. ‘I wonder that I am alive.’
⁷

In March more decorum was required when Elizabeth went to Buckingham Palace for the first time, with a group of Scottish ladies led by her elder sister May. They had embroidered new covers for a set of chairs in the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and were presenting Queen Mary with their handiwork. Elizabeth stood in for Rosie. ‘Only ¼ of her chair is finished, so I shall be chucked out for certain!’
⁸
she told Beryl. Fortunately the Queen noticed neither the missing work nor the substitute delegate and was delighted with the offering.
⁹

Coincidences are not necessarily the work of fate; nevertheless it is tempting to describe as fateful the week in July 1920 when Elizabeth was at last formally presented at Court. For in that same week she also dined with the King and Queen and, by sheer chance, had her first significant meeting with Prince Albert. That it happened at a propitious moment in his life was yet another operation of chance.

Social life in Edinburgh reached its peak every year in early July when King, Queen and Court took up residence at Holyroodhouse. As today, there were garden parties, receptions, presentations and investitures at the Palace and a variety of external royal visits and functions. In 1920 the King and Queen arrived on Saturday 3 July and on the following Monday they gave a dinner for forty. Their guests were Edinburgh dignitaries with a sprinkling of Scottish peers, including the Elphinstones and Lord and Lady Strathmore, who were accompanied by Elizabeth. Apart from the twenty-three-year-old Princess Mary, she was the youngest by far and the only woman unmarried. She had perhaps been invited as company for the Princess, although the two did not know each other well. Elizabeth enjoyed herself, seated between the Lord Justice General and the Admiral Commanding at Rosyth, both of whom she pronounced ‘very nice’.
¹⁰

Next day, 6 July, the King and Queen held an afternoon reception in the Throne Room at which Elizabeth was presented, along with 150 other young ladies and hundreds of other ‘presentees’, both male and female: the King and Queen shook hands with 1,100 people in the
space of an hour and a half. There was one more royal occasion – a large garden party on the following day – after which Elizabeth and her mother took the night train back to the south.

Thursday 8 July, the day on which she arrived back in London, was the most momentous of the week. That night Elizabeth went to the Royal Air Force ball at the Ritz. ‘It was really most amusing, & there were some
priceless
people there,’ she reported to Beryl. ‘All the heroes of the Air too.’ Prince Albert had also come to the ball. With him was his new equerry, James Stuart, youngest son of the Earl of Moray.
^*
Stuart and his elder brother Lord Doune belonged to Elizabeth’s circle of friends and neighbours in Scotland. Many years later, in his memoirs, he wrote that Prince Albert had asked him that evening ‘who was the girl with whom I had just been dancing. I told him that her name was Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon and he asked me if I would introduce him, which I did.’
¹¹

The Prince invited the young woman on to the floor. Elizabeth continued in her letter to Beryl: ‘I danced with Prince Albert who I hadn’t known before, he is quite a nice youth.’
^12
†
She seems to have forgotten their tea-party meeting in 1916 and this new encounter apparently made little impression on her. For the Prince it was different – he is reported to have said subsequently that ‘he had fallen in love that evening, although he did not realize it until later.’
¹³
He became determined to win Elizabeth’s favour and eventually her hand. That was not to be easy. She was widely admired and was much in demand, and she enjoyed the carefree, open, happy lifestyle in which her parents had brought her up. It was almost the opposite
of the Court routine with which Prince Albert had been surrounded since childhood.

*

P
RINCE
A
LBERT
was a sensitive young man, whose upbringing had been fraught rather than idyllic. He was born in 1895, in the early hours of the morning of 14 December, the anniversary of the death of his great-grandfather, Prince Albert, and therefore a day which Queen Victoria held sacred. His parents, the Duke and Duchess of York, were concerned lest the old Queen should be upset.
¹⁴
They need not have been.

Queen Victoria’s journal for the day begins: ‘This terrible anniversary returned for the 34th time.’ But she went on to record that she received ‘telegrams from Georgie and Sir J Williams, saying that dear May had been safely delivered of a son at 3 this morning, Georgie’s first feeling was regret that this dear child should be born on such a sad day. I have a feeling it may be a blessing for the dear little Boy, and may be looked upon as a gift from God!’
¹⁵
The baby’s grandfather the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) suggested that he be called Albert, his parents agreed readily, and the Queen was touched. She wrote, ‘I am all impatience to see the new one, born on such a sad day, but rather the more dear to me, especially as he will be called by that dear name which is the byeword for all that is great and good.’
¹⁶
He was christened Albert Frederick Arthur George.

Albert’s childhood was not easy. His elder brother Edward (known in the family by the last of his seven Christian names, David), whom he adored, had enormous, easy charm, which he deployed at will. Albert, by contrast, was born with knock knees and was left handed, a condition considered in need of correction in those days. He was obliged as a child to write with his right hand and for several years he wore splints on his legs which day and night caused him great pain.

His parents were devoted to their children but each found it hard to establish intimate relationships with them. King George V’s official biographer, Harold Nicolson, asked delicately but properly how it was that ‘a man who was by temperament so intensely domestic, who was so considerate to his dependents and the members of his household, who was so unalarming to small children and humble people, should have inspired his sons with feelings of awe, amounting at times to
nervous trepidation?’
¹⁷
From both his parents Prince Albert learned at an early age that he must always be obedient. His infancy was made all the more difficult by the fact that he had for many years a cruel nurse who appears to have fed him so badly that he was afflicted for the rest of his life by digestive problems.
¹⁸
He also suffered from both a crippling stammer and a fearsome temper which he always found hard to control.

Like his father and elder brother before him, Prince Albert was destined for the navy and was enrolled in the Royal Naval College at Osborne in January 1909. He was small and at first found the rough-and-tumble of school life hard. His stammer made lessons difficult for him. In his final examinations at Dartmouth, the senior naval college to which he went after Osborne, he was shown no favouritism and was placed sixty-first of sixty-seven students. At the same time, however, he enjoyed both colleges for the friendships he was able to form with boys of his own age. People liked him, despite his volatility. He was well mannered, kind and generous and impressed everyone with his determination and character. He rose a little from the bottom of his class and in due course progressed to join the Royal Navy.

When his grandfather King Edward VII died in May 1910 the fourteen-year-old Prince Albert walked behind the gun carriage bearing the King’s coffin past mourning crowds to Westminster Abbey. One biographer has speculated that ‘he must have been aware, perhaps for the first time now that he was old enough to realise it, of the importance of the public face of kingship and the deep emotions which centred on the person of the King’.
¹⁹
His father, now King George V, proved to be a conciliatory monarch, bluff and straightforward, no intellectual but with a wisdom conferred upon him by simplicity and honour. During his reign of almost twenty-six years five emperors and eight kings would disappear, and many other dynasties with them. But the British monarchy emerged stronger than ever.
²⁰

The King and Queen and their six children now had to move from their London home, Marlborough House, into Buckingham Palace – a soulless office with residential rooms attached, which has inspired little affection among members of the Royal Family since it was transformed in the nineteenth century from an unassuming house into a grandiose official residence. They were able to enjoy both Windsor Castle and Balmoral, where Queen Mary attempted to lighten the decor without interfering with her husband’s affection for his childhood memories.
At Sandringham little changed, because King Edward VII had bequeathed the house to his widow Queen Alexandra for her lifetime. The new King and his family continued to live near by at York Cottage, a small house which he and Queen Mary had been given on their marriage.

Now that their father was king, the Princes’ status was enhanced. Prince Edward (David) became heir apparent and was created prince of Wales in 1911. Prince Albert, only eighteen months younger, had always felt unequal to his more obviously gifted brother and now he seemed more overshadowed than ever.
²¹
One of their tutors wrote of him, ‘One could wish that he had more of Prince Edward’s keenness and application.’
²²
Comparisons between the two were all the more likely because their next sibling was a girl – the tomboyish Princess Mary, who became a passionate horsewoman – and five years separated Prince Albert from his next brother. Prince Henry, a cheerful boy destined for a military career, and Prince George, the most debonair and self-assured of the brothers, were the first monarch’s sons to be sent away to preparatory school. The youngest in the family, Prince John, born in 1905, suffered increasingly from epilepsy and died in 1919.