The Queen Mother (49 page)
Authors: William Shawcross
First the Duke opened the new radiology department at the Royal Infirmary. The Infirmary was maintained entirely by voluntary contributions, and the staff of physicians and surgeons – the leading members of the medical profession in Edinburgh – gave their services voluntarily. Afterwards the Duke was presented with the Freedom of the City, and the Duchess inspected the Edinburgh Company of the Girls’ Guildry, of which she was patron, before a civic luncheon. (This was her first patronage; she had accepted it during her engagement.) In the afternoon, the Duchess unveiled a plaque commemorating the new installation of the Edinburgh Corporation’s gas works. Later they visited the club rooms of the Cameron Highlanders’ Association (the Duke was colonel-in-chief of the 4th Battalion), and finally they went to visit the Royal Soldiers’ Home at Colinton. This last visit was arranged only because of the persistence of a Miss Mina Davidson who had known Lady Strathmore as a girl. Like the administrators of the Royal Infirmary, she knew how important the patronage of
members of the Royal Family was to ensure the flow of voluntary support.
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T
HE
D
UCHESS’S
delight in her infant daughter was overwhelming, but she had one cause for serious concern. The Prime Minister of Australia, Stanley Bruce, had asked that one of the King’s sons come out in early 1927 to open the new Federal Parliament buildings in Canberra.
Australia had become a federation on 1 January 1900. Under the Commonwealth of Australia (Constitution) Act, the colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania became states federated together under one Dominion government. It was the last great imperial measure of the Victorian era. In May 1901 the first session of the Commonwealth Parliament was opened by the Duke of Cornwall and York, the future King George V.
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At that time the Commonwealth government had been housed in Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, but in 1911 the government obtained an area of some 900 square miles from the government of New South Wales on which to create a new capital, Canberra. These plans were delayed by the First World War, but the construction of the town finally began in 1923 and the government intended to have the new Parliament buildings ready to be opened in 1927.
The Prince of Wales had made a very successful tour of Australia in 1920; he had been welcomed with rapture and became known as ‘the travelling salesman of Empire’. Robert Graves wrote of him, ‘He became a symbol of industrious go-ahead youth, fully acquainted with all the world’s problems; having, it is true, no plan by which to solve them, but at least a determination to tackle them and to struggle through.’
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The Prince would have been welcomed back to Australia. But the Duke of York was keen to go, and had told Leo Amery, the Dominions Secretary, that he had ‘much enjoyed his unofficial visit to Kenya and would welcome an opportunity of obtaining further experience of the Empire’.
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Amery put the Duke’s name forward, but the King was initially sceptical. Lord Stamfordham replied to Amery that ‘the Duke of York is the only one of the Princes who could undertake this duty; and for many reasons His Majesty cannot, at this distance of time, hold out much hope of such an arrangement being carried
out.’
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In early April 1926 the Governor General, Lord Stonehaven, wrote to Stamfordham urging the importance of the royal visit, and asking him to help persuade the King: ‘The Crown is becoming more and more the only real link which unites the Empire.’
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In July, finally, it was announced that the Duke and the Duchess of York were to go.
Since there was, in those days, no question of children, let alone infants, accompanying their royal parents on such a tour, this would mean that they would be parted from their daughter for at least six months. The Duchess was dismayed by this prospect. There was another anxiety. Both the King and Bruce were anxious that the Duke might not be able to sustain all the pressures of such a tour. In particular there was apprehension – which the Duke himself shared – that his stammer would make it impossible for him to deliver all the speeches that a formal tour would require.
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Bruce was said to be appalled by the inhibitions that the Duke’s speech defect would necessarily impose upon him.
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For the Duke himself the crisis was far worse. Despite the support and reassurance of the Duchess, he had begun to despair about his stammer and his failure to conquer it. According to his official biographer, he had even begun to fear that the problem might be a mental rather than a physical one. But help was at hand.
The Duke’s first broadcast speech at Wembley had been heard by an Australian therapist named Lionel Logue. He had originally trained as an engineer, but he later discovered he had a power of healing and had taken up speech therapy in order to help Australian soldiers traumatized in the First World War. In 1924 he had come to Britain and taken rooms in Harley Street in which to practise. He was recommended to the Prince’s Private Secretary, Patrick Hodgson. The Duke himself was not keen to try yet another therapist; he had had his hopes raised too many times, always to be dashed. It was the Duchess who persuaded him to have ‘just one more try’.
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Lionel Logue recorded this impression of the Duke’s first appointment with him on 19 October 1926. ‘He entered my consulting room at three o’clock in the afternoon, a slim, quiet man, with tired eyes and all the outward symptoms of the man upon whom habitual speech defect had begun to set the sign. When he left at five o’clock you could see that there was hope once more in his heart.’
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Logue evidently did have an extraordinary gift. He saw his first task as being
to persuade stammerers that there was nothing ‘wrong’ or fundamentally different about them, that they were normal people with a common affliction which could usually be cured.
The first stage of his treatment was to teach patients to breathe correctly. He showed the Duke how to regulate his lungs and breathing so as to enable himself the better to relax. He had to do exercises at home, lying on the floor and reciting devilishly difficult tongue-twisters. The Duchess encouraged him in the whole process. She often went with him to Logue’s Harley Street rooms or to his flat in South Kensington for his sessions. But in the end he could only cure himself and Logue said later that the Prince was ‘the pluckiest and most determined patient I ever had’.
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It is hard to exaggerate the almost instant, indeed superb effect Logue had upon the Duke’s self-confidence. As the tour of Australasia loomed closer, his fear of it diminished rather than grew. This was remarkable and deeply heartening for him, and for his wife. Shortly before he left, he wrote to Logue, ‘I must send you a line to tell you how grateful I am to you for all that you have done in helping me with my speech defect. I really do think you have given me a real good start in the way of getting over it & I am sure if I carry on your exercises and instructions that I shall not go back. I am full of confidence for this trip now.’
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Before they left there was still much to do. They had finally found a house in place of White Lodge. Number 145 Piccadilly was perfect, a stone-built house, close to Hyde Park Corner and facing south with a view over Green Park towards Buckingham Palace. They were able to lease the house, and in return White Lodge was leased out by the Crown.
The new house needed a great deal of attention. Queen Mary was, naturally, keen to be deeply involved in all the works. She insisted on inspecting the house early on, declaring, ‘I should like to see it before the improvements are commenced as it is always interesting to see a house before & after it has been done up.’ She also warned her son not to mention to the King loans of furniture to them belonging to the Crown, ‘because the dear soul does not understand about these things’.
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She thought they should keep all the furniture they wanted from White Lodge and she promised them a cheque for £750 to do up a room at her expense. She found them some chandeliers at Osborne and the King lent them another from Balmoral.
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Other
furniture, including a walnut bureau and an octagonal card table, came from Lady Strathmore. The Duchess was grateful for all help – like everyone moving house she found the expense much greater than she had anticipated. None of the curtains from White Lodge were big enough for the windows at 145 Piccadilly – she had to get fourteen new pairs, all four or five yards long – and she found that decent material cost more than £1 a yard. ‘However if it is good wearing stuff, we shall be able to move it and use it for years and years,’ she told her mother.
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For the Duchess, moving home was a diversion from the thought of parting from her baby for the tour. Princess Elizabeth was the object of her parents’ adoration. ‘I am longing for you to see her,’ the Duchess wrote to Nannie B. ‘She is growing so big and is as sharp as a needle, &
so
well. She sleeps beautifully, and has always got a smile ready.’ She asked Mrs Beevers to visit them at Bruton Street, where they were busy preparing for ‘this horrible trip’.
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Perhaps nothing before had brought home to her so clearly the conflict between duty and family, work and pleasure. She told Major Walsh, ‘by next June I shall be old & worn & grey after our Australasian tour. You must prepare for a cynical & hardened old woman of the world by the time I’ve finished with the Aussies.’ She thought she would have to come to Africa, to recover. ‘I’ll bring my gramophone and my ’275, & we’ll vary the Charleston with a little letting off at crocs & other four-legged animals.’
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They stayed at Sandringham House for Christmas that year for the first time, returning to London soon afterwards to make final preparations for their departure to Australia and New Zealand at the end of the first week in January. As the date approached everything became more hectic. ‘I don’t dare think of the 6th it is so awful,’ the Duchess confessed.
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She felt in a complete whirl and all the arrangements she had to make reduced her brain, she said, to ‘chaos’.
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They spent New Year’s Eve, as they preferred, with her family at St Paul’s Walden. On the first day of 1927 the men went shooting and she had ‘a lovely long lie in!’ reading a thriller by Edgar Wallace. ‘Mother and I had lunch and talked hard’ – her way of recording in her diary that she and her mother, on whom she still relied a great deal, had a serious conversation. On Sunday they went as usual to the Church of All Saints. The vicar, Mr Whitehouse, ‘boomed’ at them and after lunch they drove back to London where she found
Catherine Maclean, her maid, exhausted from the packing. That night she had a typhoid inoculation and, unusually for her, she had a bad reaction – she hardly slept and felt ill next morning.
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As the departure date grew closer, the Duchess became ‘more and more miserable’.
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‘The baby was too delicious having her bottle & playing & being naughty,’ she wrote in her diary.
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One of her friends supposed that the child would spend the time with Lady Strathmore in the country, but there were other claims upon her, as the Duchess explained. ‘I expect I shall have to divide her! You see the Queen wants to have her for at least three out of the six months.’
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On Tuesday 4 January, the Duchess tried on clothes and had ‘dozens of questions to answer & decide at home’. James Stuart came to lunch and then she and her sister Rosie went to Heal’s to buy nursery things. That evening the Prince of Wales threw a farewell party for them. Many of their friends came to say goodbye, including Fred Astaire and his sister Adele. The Plantation Orchestra played ‘marvellously’. It was a moment for abandonment: ‘I did a Charleston with David [the Prince of Wales] for nearly 20 minutes!! Home at 3.30! Bed 4. Oh Lord.’
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Wednesday was another day of goodbyes; George Gage came to see her; so did Adele Astaire, who brought her a gramophone record and a book. She ‘felt ill all today’.
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The paediatrician to whom she was entrusting the Princess, Dr George F. Still, came to talk to her about his charge and promised to send her regular reports. They dined with her parents and the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace.
On the morning they had to leave, she awoke and rose early. ‘Feel very miserable at leaving the baby. Went up & played with her & she was so sweet. Luckily she doesn’t realize anything.’
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When they were finally ready to depart, Alah Knight brought the baby downstairs for the final goodbye. The Duchess was very emotional. Watching Princess Elizabeth play with the buttons on her father’s uniform ‘quite broke me up’.
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The Duke was miserable too and felt that his daughter ‘will be so grown up when we return’.
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The Duchess knew she had to drag herself away and so she ‘drank some champagne & tried not to weep’.
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At Victoria station Queen Mary saw that her daughter-in-law was being as brave as possible, and so she said nothing about the little Princess – as she put it in a letter, ‘I purposely did not allude to yr
leave taking of yr angelic baby knowing only too well you would be bound to break down.’
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After long farewells on the platform, the special train drew them away on the start of their journey towards the furthest reaches of the Empire.
At Portsmouth Harbour the Duke and Duchess had a rousing send-off from large, enthusiastic crowds. One of the officials with them wrote next day, ‘If you wanted evidence that the country was not going Bolshevik, you could not have had better proof than was afforded yesterday.’
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Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor (1879–1964). Born Nancy Langhorne in Virginia, USA, she married Waldorf Astor, second Viscount Astor, in 1906. A prominent and controversial politician and society hostess, in 1919 she became the first woman to take a seat in Parliament.
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The King and Queen did not move into Sandringham House until 1926. Both were sad to leave York Cottage, despite its cramped rooms, uninspiring furnishings and cooking smells, for they had lived there for thirty-three years. But they soon came to appreciate the advantages of the main house.
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Anne Beevers (1862–1946), née Greaves, born in Clayworth, Nottinghamshire, daughter of a carpenter from Yorkshire. Her husband died following a rugby accident, leaving her with a small son. After training as a midwife at the London Hospital, she became a much loved private maternity or monthly nurse employed by many society families, and the Duchess remained in touch with her until her death in 1946.
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This practice had been established following the rumours, probably untrue, that a baby had been substituted for the rightful heir to King James II and his second wife, Queen Mary of Modena. The custom was suspended during the Second World War, and King George VI, who thought it ‘archaic’, later abolished it.
†
Sir Henry Simson (1872–1932), obstetric surgeon at the West London Hospital. He had attended Princess Mary at the births of her two sons.
‡
Dr Walter Jagger (1871–1929), physician. He also attended the Duchess of York during bouts of influenza after the birth of Princess Elizabeth.
§
Sir George Blacker (1865–1948), obstetric physician at University College Hospital.
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The first grandchild of King George and Queen Mary was George, the elder son of Princess Mary and Lord Lascelles, who had been born on 7 February 1923. A second son, Gerald, was born on 21 August 1924.
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The nurse carrying the Princess was Nannie B. She stayed with the family for about two months; in July the Duchess wrote to her to say she was glad she had been so happy, and hoping that ‘the next time’ would be the same. She sent a gold wristwatch as a memento of ‘us three here who are so fond of our dear Nannie B’. (Duchess of York to Nannie B, 7 and 9 July 1926, private collection)
