The Queen Mother (47 page)

On 10 August they started on their annual summer holiday in Scotland, split between the gaiety of Glamis and the dull routine and restrictions of Balmoral. For some of the time the Duchess left her husband with his parents while she visited her sister in Edinburgh. Although she played her part in the Royal Family with enthusiasm, she was still detached enough to see it clearly. In one letter written from her sister’s house she urged her husband to stick up for himself ‘and remember that you are an elderly married man’ not to be patronized. ‘I miss you frightfully.’
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He replied at once that he had loved getting her letter. ‘I am longing for Monday when you come here. I miss you terribly darling in this awful room. It wants some of your letters lying about & a few papers on the floor!! to make it at all homely.’
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T
HE AUTUMN OF
1925 brought moments of both joy and sadness. The Prince of Wales returned from his long tour to Africa and South America. ‘Your trip has been the most marvellous success from all accounts,’ the Duke of York had written to him. ‘I hope the people here will realise it when you return.’
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In fact, the Prince received a spectacular welcome home. The Royal Family and government ministers gathered at Victoria station to greet him. ‘Great embracings,’ Queen Mary recorded in her diary later.
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Despite the rain, crowds
cheered the King and his sons as they drove back to Buckingham Palace (the Queen and Duchess returned by a shorter, drier route), and cheered again when the family appeared on the balcony, before dining together that evening. It was a clear indication of the popularity of the Prince of Wales.

A few weeks later, however, family and nation were in mourning. On 20 November Queen Alexandra died at Sandringham aged eighty, after a heart attack. It was sixty-two years since she had been welcomed from Denmark as ‘the Sea-King’s daughter from over the sea’.
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A woman of beauty, gaiety and generosity, after the death of her husband she had continued to carry out royal duties and support her charitable causes, but she had grown very frail in the last five years. She lost her hearing completely and much of her vision, and became confused. She was tended with great affection by her unmarried daughter Princess Victoria, and her son the King visited her constantly.

He was greatly saddened by her death. ‘Darling Motherdear’, he wrote in his diary on 22 November, ‘was taken this morning to our little church where she had worshipped for 62 years.’
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The next day the Queen’s funeral took place at Westminster Abbey and she was buried beside her husband in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. The Duchess wrote to her ‘dearest Papa’ to tell him how much she was thinking of him. ‘Words, I know, are useless in a tragic time, but I hope you will allow me to send you my deepest & truest sympathy from the very bottom of my heart.’
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For the Duchess and her husband there was joyous news that autumn. They had both had one overriding preoccupation for some time. In a letter to the Prince of Wales in August, the Duke, speaking of his happiness with his wife, had added, ‘I still long for one thing which you can guess, & so does she.’
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It was around this time, in fact, that the Duchess became pregnant. She soon felt the symptoms of it. ‘I am feeling much better now, tho’ the sight of wine simply turns me up! Isn’t it extraordinary?’ she wrote to her husband in September. ‘It will be a tragedy if I never recover my drinking powers.’
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She need not have worried.

They waited until the middle of October before they told their parents. The Duke wrote to Lady Strathmore, hoping that she was as delighted as he was at the news.
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He added that it would be much easier to turn down engagements for his wife now and she clearly could not motor up and down to White Lodge – a house in central
London was all the more urgently needed. The Duchess’s pregnancy was also a reason not to make constant weekend trips to Sandringham. The Queen agreed, writing to her son, ‘It is most necessary that E. should take the greatest care of her precious self. It is a great joy to Papa & me to feel that we may look forward to a direct descendant in the male line of our family & the country will be delighted when they are allowed to know.’
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The Duke and Duchess discovered that Curzon House, in Curzon Street, was available for rent, and decided to move there and shut up White Lodge for the winter.
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They both wrote to Queen Mary explaining the idea; the Duchess said, ‘It is rather an attractive old house, and we can all squeeze in, which will make things much more convenient. I am sure you will think this a good idea, as after October it gets very foggy and lonely in the Park here.’ As for her health, she was feeling well, except for headaches, and she thought they would soon pass. ‘Bertie & I are so pleased and excited about it all, & talk endlessly on the subject, which is perhaps a little previous!’
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Given the Duchess’s condition, the Queen could hardly object to the move back into London – she just hoped that it would not be too expensive.
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The Duchess kept many, though not all, public engagements during the first months of her pregnancy. In the second half of October she did not travel with the Duke to Sunderland, nor did she go with him to the University of Leeds, whose appeal he had headed as patron. The reason given in both cases was her ‘very heavy list of engagements during the next few weeks’.
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But she did go to Hackney – the site of her unsuccessful examination and the disagreeable tapioca pudding back in 1916. She had a long day there, opening both Hackney’s Maternity and Child Welfare Centre and a nurses’ home of the Hackney District Nursing Association, as well as visiting the headquarters of the British Legion.

In the middle of November she went to Cheltenham to visit the County of Gloucester Nursing Association’s bazaar, at the invitation of the Dowager Duchess of Beaufort. Once she had agreed to this, other local worthies applied for parcels of her time. The Cheltenham branch of the British Legion asked her to visit them. The programme stated, ‘After the vote of thanks the Dowager Duchess will ask Her Royal Highness if she will be so good as to come through the Bazaar to a concert in a side room, for a short time.’ The Dowager Duchess added a further request: could two of her granddaughters make a
presentation?
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In the way of royal programmes, more was constantly required, and generally given. The only invitations which the Duchess was always glad to refuse were formal dinners.
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After the funeral of Queen Alexandra the Duke was expected to stay on at York Cottage with his parents; the Duchess, feeling unwell, remained in London. He went shooting during the day but found the evenings without his wife very dull. He loved talking to her on the telephone. Because it was so easy for telephone operators to listen in, they could not say much to each other, ‘but we hear each other’s voices, which is the nearest we can get to each other. Darling I do feel so sorry for you feeling wretched as you do at this time, but I do hope as time goes on you will not find things such an effort.’
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She was able to join him for the traditional Royal Family Christmas in Norfolk, still at York Cottage.
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On Christmas Eve he wrote her a letter recalling that it was three years since he had been waiting for her to say yes. His heart, he said, still went ‘pit-a-pat’ for her in the same way as it did then. This letter was one which he had to post across the abyss of only a few feet. ‘Why I have written these letters to you when you’re in the room, I don’t know. But I just have. All my love darling.’
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They tried to cheer up the traditional Christmas events by bringing with them from London their own entertainment. ‘We brought down a cinema, & a radio, & a gramophone, which are all hard at work at different ends of the house, which is much the same here as being in the same room!’ the Duchess reported to her sister May. Christmas went off quite well, she said.
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In the New Year the Duke resumed his hunting in Leicestershire; his wife apparently felt some pangs of loneliness, telling D’Arcy Osborne that she was ‘a hunting widow now, & singularly free from visitors’.
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The roads were treacherous and so she did not go to St Paul’s Walden as much as she might have liked.
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She seems to have made her husband aware of her irritation for he wrote an apologetic letter to his ‘own little Elizabeth darling’, declaring, ‘my conscience has pricked me and your letter tonight made me feel that I had been very unkind to you.’
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Early in 1926 the Duchess made sure that the maternity nurse who had looked after her sisters and their babies would be able to come to her in April. Annie Beevers,
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known as Nannie B, ‘tall and dark and very Yorkshire’, as Queen Elizabeth later described her, was a widow who had trained in midwifery after the death of her husband. Writing to Nannie B to confirm the arrangement, the Duchess asked her to recommend a tonic ‘as I get rather tired (& irritable I fear!)’.
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As their lease of Curzon House was coming to an end, the Duke and Duchess had planned to rent another house, in Grosvenor Square, where their child would be born and where they would spend the summer. But when difficulties arose over the new house in March, they abandoned the idea and decided to go instead to the Duchess’s parents’ house, 17 Bruton Street.
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The baby was due at the end of April. Towards the middle of the month the Duchess’s doctors decided that the birth should be induced. The King’s physician, Sir Bertrand Dawson, lunched with the King and Queen at Windsor Castle on 17 April and explained the situation. They both wrote at once to the Duke to say that they were sorry for the extra anxiety this would cause. Queen Mary was full of affectionate concern for the future parents but also, characteristically, for the future of the dynasty. She wished she could be with them, ‘but I am afraid to go to Bruton Street on account of the Press, as the last thing one wants is for any inkling of this to appear in the papers, so I hope you will both understand & will not think me a heartless wretch as indeed my heart & thoughts are with you at this time, which is of such great importance to our family.’ Alive to the ever present danger of eavesdroppers, she said that if the Duke wanted to telephone her ‘you need not mention E’s name as we shall understand.’
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Both the King and Queen suggested that, as Lady Strathmore had a temperature and could not be with her daughter for the birth, they should send for May Elphinstone. ‘Someone who has had a baby & knows is such a comfort to one at such moments,’ Queen Mary wrote.
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A little girl was born early in the morning of 21 April. It was a
difficult labour and the doctors decided to perform a Caesarean section. The Duke was ‘very worried & anxious’,
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and paced the house, as well as looking after the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, who had been summoned in accordance with the convention that this minister must always be present at the birth of a child in the direct royal succession to see that no substitution took place.
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The first medical bulletin, signed by Henry Simson
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and Walter Jagger,
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stated that ‘The Duchess of York has had some rest since the arrival of her daughter. Her Royal Highness and the infant Princess are making very satisfactory progress. Previous to the Confinement a consultation took place, at which Sir George Blacker
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was present, and a certain line of treatment was successfully adopted.’

Queen Mary recorded in her diary that at Windsor Castle she and the King were woken at 4 a.m. to be given the news that ‘darling Elizabeth had got a daughter at 2.40. Such a relief & joy.’
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The new child was the King’s first granddaughter and third in line to the throne, after the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York.

That afternoon the King and Queen motored up from Windsor to Bruton Street. A small crowd cheered them outside the house. ‘Saw the baby who is a little darling with a lovely complexion & pretty fair hair,’ the Queen noted in her diary.
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To her son she wrote, ‘I am so thankful all is going well with our darling Elizabeth & that adorable little daughter of yours, she is too sweet & pretty & I feel very proud of my first grand daughter!’
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Next day the Duke wrote to thank his mother. ‘You don’t know what a tremendous joy it is to Elizabeth & me to have our little girl. We always wanted a child to make our happiness complete, & now that it has at last happened, it seems so wonderful & strange … I do hope that you & Papa are as delighted, as we are, to have a grand daughter, or would you have sooner had
another grandson?
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I know Elizabeth wanted a daughter. May I say I hope you won’t spoil her when she gets a bit older.’
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Among the hundreds of letters and telegrams they received was one from Beryl Poignand. The Duke wrote to thank her and to tell her how overjoyed they were with their baby. ‘You have known Elizabeth for so long & I can tell you how very proud I am of her for the way she has gone through this last week.’
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Lady Strathmore also sent a letter to Beryl saying, ‘The baby is a lovely, healthy little creature … Eliz is getting on but is still very tired & weak – but the Drs are pleased with her progress, so all is well. She often talks of you & the old days & is exactly the same as ever.’
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The most urgent task was the choosing of the new Princess’s names. On 27 April the Duke wrote to his father to say that their choice was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary – the names of the baby’s mother, her great-grandmother and her grandmother. ‘We are so anxious for her first name to be Elizabeth as it is such a nice name & there has been no one of that name in your family for a long time. Elizabeth of York sounds so nice too.’
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The King approved the choices at once.
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