The Queen Mother (34 page)

All in all, the Duchess was isolated and restricted in a way she had never been before. Her own family life had been so relaxed that the rules of the Palace, the Court and the King himself cannot have been
easy to assimilate. The King’s life, as the Duke of Windsor later wrote, was a ‘masterpiece in the art of well-ordered, unostentatious, elegant living’. The King and male members of the Household wore frock coats every day. Ladies of the Household dressed in formal clothes and wore, or at least carried, gloves at all times. In the evenings, dinners were sumptuous and formal. The King wore white tie and tails and the Queen wore full evening dress with tiara, even when they were dining alone. At Windsor, men wore the Windsor Coat, a dark-blue evening dress coat with scarlet collar and cuffs, gilt buttons and knee breeches. In Ascot Week, before dinner, guests gathered in the Green Drawing Room. Ladies would mingle on one side of the room, men on the other.

Members of the family would wait in the Grand Corridor until the King and Queen arrived. In the State Dining Room the dinner table was laden with the Grand Service of silver gilt, originally made for George IV. When the Queen led the ladies out at the end of the meal, they each dropped the King a deep curtsy. In the drawing room, the Queen had her own settee to which one or two women were brought to talk to her, while the others talked rather formally in small groups. The King and the men then came out of the dining room, paused for a moment with the ladies and went on into another room where they smoked cigars and talked.
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The Duchess, whose family dinner parties were far less formal and considerably more fun, did what she felt she could to enliven Court life. She found that she was able to put nervous guests at ease in ways which the King and Queen could never have done. When possible, she would sit down at the piano after dinner, play and sing and encourage other guests to join her.
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The King and Queen were perhaps surprised by how much they enjoyed this breath of informality. They quickly became fond of their new daughter-in-law and were openly affectionate towards her. They asked her to call them Papa and Mama, their own children’s names for them; fortunately she had always called her own parents Mother and Father. The King made concessions to the Duchess that other members of the family would have thought quite impossible. Of them, he demanded perfection in every detail, and precision was essential to perfection. Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Keeper of the Privy Purse, wrote subsequently that there was no greater crime than being late. ‘When I say late, the ordinary meaning of the word hardly conveyed the
wonderful punctuality of the King and Queen. One was late if the clock sounded when one was on the stairs, even in a small house like York Cottage.’
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Punctuality was not known to be a passion of the Duchess. Remarkably, that did not seem to matter. It was soon part of Court lore that on one occasion early in her marriage she and the Duke arrived two minutes late for lunch and she apologized. To the delighted amazement of others at table, the King replied, ‘You are not late, my dear, I think we must have sat down two minutes too early.’ On another occasion when someone mentioned to the King her tendency to tardiness, he replied, ‘Ah, but if she weren’t late, she would be perfect, and how horrible that would be.’
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Adding to the King and Queen’s affection for her was the fact that Prince Albert was clearly so happy. He had rarely appeared to be a very confident young man; his stammer compounded his general nervousness and his nervousness exaggerated his stammer. He was hard to get to know, but those who did know him valued him highly. It is a cliché but nonetheless true that he blossomed on marriage. He revelled in having achieved both freedom (at least some) and love (of an abiding sort). He found life in a new home with the Duchess to be an enchanting adventure, which not even the problems of White Lodge could diminish. Whenever he was upset – whether by a chance remark or request from his parents, or a failure on the tennis court or in the butts, or a problem with making a speech – she gently calmed and reassured him. ‘I shall never forget the Duchess’s wonderful gentleness with him in the car afterwards,’ said one of her ladies in waiting after he was trounced at tennis at Wimbledon.
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At the end of June she had to prepare for a stressful moment – entertaining her parents-in-law to a meal at White Lodge for the first time. The Duchess may well have been concerned – the Duke wrote to his mother in advance, ‘I had better warn you that our cook is not very good, but she can do the plain dishes well, & I know you like that sort.’ The lunch went well, and Queen Mary thought that they had made the house ‘very nice’.
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P
UBLIC LIFE
began to demand the Duchess’s attention. The politics of the time was dominated by the problems of the economy and, in particular, by the decline of Britain’s principal export industries – coal,
steel and shipbuilding. The brief post-war boom had ended by 1921, and unemployment remained above one million until the Second World War. Hopes that the sacrifices of 1914–18 would bring about a better world were shrinking, and by 1922 the idealism of the immediate post-war years had almost entirely disappeared. For, instead of prosperity, peace had brought deflation, higher unemployment, lower wages and lower profits.

Economic gloom was accompanied by cultural questioning, a reaction against what were thought to be the stuffy and traditional values of the Victorian era. Writers began to question these values. In
Eminent Victorians
, published in 1918, Lytton Strachey had satirized celebrated Victorians such as Dr Arnold, General Gordon and Florence Nightingale, treating them as plaster saints. Where Strachey led, lesser talents followed. By the end of the 1920s, many people were coming to believe that Britain had blundered through the Great War under the leadership of incompetent politicians and bloodthirsty generals. The new atmosphere of cynicism and questioning posed difficulties for the Royal Family, who were forced to redefine their role in a society greatly changed from that which they had known before 1914.

In politics new men were coming to power. The Lloyd George era ended with the fall of his Coalition government in October 1922. The Coalition had been widely condemned for its policy of repression in Ireland, for its aggressive attitude towards organized labour, and for corruption in the sale of honours. In the general election which followed in November 1922, two-party politics was restored, but with the Labour Party replacing the Liberals as the main party of the left. The Conservatives, however, under their new leader Bonar Law, won the election, although Law was forced to resign on grounds of ill health in 1923, and died shortly afterwards. The new Conservative leader, who, with Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald, was to dominate the inter-war years, was Stanley Baldwin. Both of these men believed in moderation. MacDonald sought to wean the Labour Party away from doctrines of class war and direct action. Baldwin, a former West Midlands ironmaster, tried to persuade the Conservatives and the leaders of industry to adopt a more conciliatory attitude towards organized labour. In a speech to the House of Commons in 1923, shortly after becoming prime minister, he declared: ‘Four words of one syllable each are words which contain salvation for this country and for the whole world. They are “Faith”, “Hope”, “Love” and
“Work”. No Government in this country today which has not faith in the people, hope in the future, love for its fellow-men, and which will not work and work and work, will ever bring this country through into better days and better times.’
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Baldwin’s conciliatory sentiments naturally endeared him to George V and the Royal Family. In modern times, the constitutional monarchy has become a unifying institution, and so successive monarchs have been temperamentally inclined to conciliation and moderation. Between the wars, George V, Edward VIII and George VI all saw themselves as having a role to play in helping to mitigate class feeling.

The Duchess’s first public engagement as a member of the Royal Family came on 30 June 1923 when she and the Duke attended the Royal Air Force Pageant at Hendon. Aeroplanes, still an awe-inspiring novelty, provided an increasingly popular spectacle. Attempts to fly the Atlantic had excited huge publicity since 1919 when two RAF pilots, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Brown, had managed to cross from Newfoundland to Ireland, some eight years before Charles Lindbergh made his epic solo flight. An airmail service between London and Paris had been opened in 1919 and in 1923 a regular passenger service was just gaining popularity; aircraft became a little more comfortable – made of metal rather than wood and wire – and safer, as radio communications were developed. In the summer of 1923, some 80,000 people came to the Hendon show to see the de Havillands which had been formed into a special new squadron to defend London and had a top speed of 150 mph.
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In early July the Duke and Duchess visited Edinburgh, where they drove through the city with the King and Queen, cheered by large crowds. For the next five days they stayed at the Palace of Holyroodhouse – which the Duchess loved, as she wrote to D Arcy Osborne. She was pleased to find herself back among her Scottish countrymen. ‘They are
so
romantic, & sentimental, & generous & proud that they have to hide it all under a mask of reserve and hardness, & they seem to take people in very successfully!!’
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She and the Duke accompanied the King and Queen on engagements in and around Edinburgh, they toured the Border country together by motor, and on 13 July they went to Dunfermline. Although the press photographs of these visits show the Duchess in an obviously secondary role, a girlish figure in pretty summery clothes, often just in the background, a sharp-eyed reporter at Dunfermline noticed her particular talent with crowds,
which was to endear her to the public in the future. At the Carnegie Orthopaedic Clinic, she ‘suddenly recognised among the ex-Service men one whom she had met in a war hospital’ – presumably Glamis. ‘She at once went across to the patient, shook hands with him, and chatted with him for some minutes.’
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Later that month, on 19 July, she undertook what appears to have been the first solo engagement of her public life. She spent the morning with her husband visiting a thousand children from the slums of London who were on a holiday in Epping Forest organized by the Fresh Air Fund. That afternoon she set off without the Duke to visit the children’s hospital in Cheyne Walk.
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A few weeks before, she had tactfully declined an invitation to open the new open-air ward on the roof of the hospital because Queen Alexandra was its president. But she had indicated that she would ‘be very glad indeed to pay a visit to the Hospital’ once the new ward was opened. The Cheyne Hospital was set up for handicapped and incurable children, and in the years ahead she became closely associated with her patronages of similar homes and hospitals.
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Over 24–25 July the Yorks spent two days in Liverpool where, among other duties, they laid the foundation stone of a new wing for the Infirmary. While they were there victims of a serious street accident were brought into the casualty department; most were children. The Duke and Duchess offered to contribute to a relief fund and continued to request reports on the injured after they had returned to London. While there, the Duchess also judged a children’s essay competition. In his letter of thanks, the Lord Mayor of Liverpool wrote, ‘On all hands one hears beautiful tributes to the kindness of the Duke and the wonderful charm of the Duchess.’
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Her particular gift for engaging with individuals was evident privately as well as publicly. Sergeant Ernest Pearce, whom she had befriended when he was a convalescent at Glamis in 1915 and with whom she had kept in touch ever since, had fallen on hard times. With barely enough money to feed and clothe his family as a result of a strike, her letter and gift of £10 came as a ‘godsend’. ‘The children are all rigged out in boots & clothes and I do not care who sees them now – they all look neat & smart and we have just enjoyed the best Sunday dinner we have had for many a bright week,’ he told her, going on to vent his anger at the strike leaders, ‘a d—d rotten lot … – all out for themselves – yet the men has not the blinking courage to
shift them … it makes me mad to think these are the men who stop an honest working man from a full week’s work.’ Sergeant Pearce also expressed the hope that she had recovered from her whooping cough, as the papers said she was not looking very well. ‘I’m afraid Richmond Park is not a Glamis Castle – pardon me saying so.’
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A
FTER THEIR
Liverpool trip there was a break from public duties. They spent five days at Molecomb, Lady Doris Vyner’s childhood home in Sussex. ‘So delicious seeing Doris again – the first time since we married,’ wrote the Duchess. They attended the races at Goodwood, played the piano and the banjo or danced in the evenings, and held a married couples tennis tournament, which the Yorks won ‘easily!’
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Wherever she went the Duchess’s appearance was, understandably, a focus of attention. She clearly enjoyed clothes and the press loved reporting on her outfits. She quickly evolved a way of dressing which not only suited her but became instantly recognizable. When she first stepped into the public eye, while slim young flappers dressed in somewhat mannish clothes and sported cropped hair, she was photographed with her hair prettily curled, wearing cloche hats, shoulder-hugging fur collars and long skirts. At Goodwood the
Daily Telegraph
described her attire each day. One outfit was ‘a café au lait-coloured crêpe marocain dress, with a long straight bodice and draped skirt’ and ‘a brown lace hat over gold tissue … having a bunch of brown grapes shaded to gold at one side’.
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Her preferred colours seem to have been darker than they later became, and she often chose brown or grey, fashionable colours at the time.
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