The Queen Mother (61 page)

The demands of their public life in the early 1930s, as well as those of home and family, were slowly changing their priorities. Days, and
sometimes evenings too, were filled with public engagements, and their social life shrank in consequence. Often they dined with a few friends and went to see a film or a play afterwards; sometimes they went to the cinema by themselves, but they did not go as often to dances and balls as in earlier years.

There was increasing pressure year by year to involve their children, or at least Princess Elizabeth, in public events. This was a pressure that the Duchess tried to resist, determined to give her children the kind of happy and unfettered life she herself had enjoyed. In 1933 she took on a young Scottish teacher, Marion Crawford, as governess to Princess Elizabeth. Since finishing her two-year teacher-training course at the Moray House Training College in Edinburgh in 1930 Miss Crawford had been governess to the daughter of the Duchess’s sister Rose. It is evident from the letter she wrote to the Duchess setting out her qualifications that she had received a good theoretical and practical grounding, and her teacher’s certificate, she said, described her as ‘Very Promising’.
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Dermot Morrah, who talked to Marion Crawford for his authorized book on Princess Elizabeth in 1949, described her as attractive and very human, kindly but with ‘the high sense of intellectual discipline which is an honourable tradition of Scotland’.
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Miss Crawford was invited for a trial visit to the family at Easter, and began teaching Princess Elizabeth in the autumn of 1933; Princess Margaret joined the class in due course. A schoolroom was set up at 145 Piccadilly and lessons were from 9.15 to 12.30 with half an hour’s break. The Princesses then lunched with their parents, if they were at home. In the early years at least, there were no more lessons after that; the children spent the afternoons out of doors whenever possible, and at 5.30 they went to their mother in her sitting room for an hour before supper and bedtime.

To judge from Marion Crawford’s letters and timetables preserved in the Royal Archives, she was a serious-minded young woman who did her best to give her pupils the kind of solid education, self-discipline and wide-ranging instruction that would enable them to participate intelligently in conversation and make sense of the world around them, rather than to excel academically. That Crawfie, as they called her, remained with the Princesses for the next fifteen years is evidence that she got on well with them and that her efforts satisfied their parents.

The Duchess seems to have been content to leave timetable and
curriculum to the governess and intervened very little, except in those respects which echoed her own education. Like her own mother, she wished to teach her daughters Bible stories herself, and they came to her bedroom each morning for this. Like her mother, who had curtailed her lessons and told her governess that health was more important than examinations, she insisted on the children getting plenty of fresh air. Later, when the Princesses were a little older, she copied Lady Strathmore’s practice of employing a French ‘holiday governess’, Georgina Guérin, the daughter of her own governess ‘Madé’ Lang.
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When the Linguaphone Institute wrote offering her their First Course in Latin, a French literary course and a set of French songs for Princess Elizabeth, she ordered only the songs.
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As time went by, Marion Crawford did not find the Duchess very supportive; she commented that sometimes ‘things are not made easy for me.’ Even when Princess Elizabeth was eleven her mother was reluctant to allow a full school day. ‘I have been more or less commanded to keep the afternoons as free of “serious” work as possible,’ the governess recorded.
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To her credit Miss Crawford made the best of this, giving the girls lessons as they walked in the garden and devising educational games for them. Not always successfully: she tried giving them a geographical Happy Families to take downstairs after tea, when they went to see their parents, ‘but I am afraid if I am not there to play too,’ she reported, ‘Racing Demon wins the day.’
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Worse still, Crawfie’s timetables were all too often disrupted by ‘distractions like dentists, tailors and hair-dressers who seem very unwilling to come any other time of day than the morning’. When morning swimming lessons were introduced she won her point by persuading the Duchess to allow afternoon lessons in the garden to make up for the lost time. But she complained that her pupils often went to bed too late, so that they missed their morning piano practice and there was much yawning in class.
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The governess found an ally in Queen Mary, who took a close interest in the children’s education; her replies to the Queen’s enquiries reveal the governess’s frustrations with her employer.
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Another
supporter was Owen Morshead, the Royal Librarian, who gave the Princesses regular historical tours of Windsor Castle when they were older. A 1941 letter from Queen Mary to Morshead shows her disapproval of her daughter-in-law’s lackadaisical attitude to the Princesses’ education. ‘Between ourselves,’ she wrote, ‘I asked nice Miss Crawford about your talks to the Princesses which she is so keen about, she says it is so awkward to fix definite hours or days for these as her dear Majesty constantly wants the children at odd moments, a fatal proceeding when one has lessons to do, & one which the late King & I never indulged in where lessons were concerned!’
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Morshead shared Queen Mary’s view, writing to her later that Miss Crawford was ‘apt to feel discouraged about her work from time to time’. He added: ‘I will forbear from enlarging on this delicate point, in which I know Your Majesty’s feelings are deeply engaged.’ However he made clear that he was not impressed that the eighteen books recently ordered for Princess Elizabeth by her mother were all by P. G. Wodehouse.
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All this seems to show that the Duchess did not consider it necessary for her daughters to have any more rigorous or extensive an education than she had received herself. Instead, she wanted them to have plenty of fresh air, exercise, fun – and light reading. In academic terms the education she arranged for her children was similar to that given to daughters of aristocratic families at the time, many of whom were still taught at home. But it was, inevitably, an imperfect education, dispensed mostly by a governess whose experience and expertise were narrow. Moreover the Princesses lacked the companionship and stimulation of other children as classmates, although activities outside the schoolroom, such as Madame Vacani’s dancing classes and the Girl Guides,
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made up for this to some extent.

When it became clear that Princess Elizabeth needed a better training for her future role, her mother followed wise advice in arranging for Henry Marten, the Vice-Provost of Eton, to give her history lessons from 1939. For the first of these tutorials Princess Elizabeth was taken by carriage to Marten’s study at Eton, where she sat and listened, surrounded by piles of books on the floor – an unfamiliar sight for her. Later the carriage was sent to bring Marten to
the Castle. Marie-Antoinette de Bellaigue, an intelligent and cultivated woman who taught both Princesses European history as well as French from 1942 and remained a trusted friend to them for many years, also helped give them a wider outlook. She felt strongly, however, that their mother took too little interest in their academic education.
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What always mattered most for the Duchess was moral and spiritual education, and here her mother’s influence ran deep. She brought up her own children in the Christian principles she had learned; her letters to her daughters remind them to be kind, to be thoughtful to others, and to keep their temper and their word.
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She was also keenly aware of children’s sensitivities, and believed encouragement and understanding vital to their development – something that she felt her husband’s upbringing had lacked. Among her private papers is a note she wrote for him ‘in case of anything happening to me’:

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A
T
C
HRISTMAS
1933 Archbishop Lang sent the Duchess another of his annual letters of praise for her public work. She replied hoping that the new year would be ‘a happier one for many people in this land, and their happiness will certainly make us happier. One cannot help worrying over the misery & hardship suffered by so many good people, and their courage in facing hardship is the thing that I admire most in them. It is a great example to all of us luxurious minded creatures – not
you
, but us – I mean!’
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Her public commitments continued as usual. On 16 February 1934 she opened the X-ray department of the Marie Curie Hospital in
Hampstead and that evening she and the Duke attended the Jubilee Ball at the Dorchester Hotel of the London Angus Association. Aberdeen Angus cattle were to be a lifelong interest to her, and she felt very much among friends at this gathering.
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The Toc H League of Women Helpers was an organization in which she took a special interest and she agreed to open their new headquarters, New June, in the City of London, to be dedicated by the founder of Toc H, the Rev. Tubby Clayton, on 21 February. Her friendship with him lasted for years.
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She continued to work for ‘her’ hospital, St Mary’s Paddington, and many other organizations claimed her time and attention over the next months.

That summer Lady Strathmore was ill again and the Duke suffered acute pain from a poisoned hand, which required surgery. He was out of action for weeks and the Duchess had to make a long-planned trip to Sheffield on her own. The fifth-largest city in the country, Sheffield had a substantial working-class population and had borne the Depression and unemployment bravely. She had a full programme and she was delighted with the warm welcome she received. She visited the Painted Fabrics workshops and the disabled ex-servicemen it employed.
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On the way she stopped at the home of one of the workmen, a much decorated but badly injured old soldier, Sergeant ‘Taffy’ Llewellyn, who was too weak to go to the workshops for her visit. She talked to him, according to the administrator, ‘with such perfect understanding, that his poor shattered body and entire system received just the tonic it needed to put up a fresh fight against the terrible depression from which he has been suffering for so many months, and for which the doctor could do nothing’.
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Her private account of her visit to the city, in a letter to Osbert Sitwell, was exuberant. She declared, ‘It took me three baths and three
days to become clean after my two days in Sheffield – never have I been so dirty. Smoke, steel filings, oil & coal dust all gathered to cast a dusky hue over my person, & five hours on end with the charming and very Labour Lord Mayor completed my rout.’
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Later that year she had an artistic diversion. Oswald Birley, one of the most successful painters of the time, was commissioned to paint a group of her friends known to each other (and to no others) as the Windsor Wets’ Club. The club had been founded a few years earlier with the Duchess as patroness and it reflected her sense of mischief. The Wets were, in a phrase, a secret group of like-minded tipplers intent on raising their collective spirits. Their motto was
Aqua vitae non aqua pura
. ‘The great thing was’, she explained many years later, ‘that being a SECRET SOCIETY we had to have a secret sign, & this was, to raise the glass to other members without being seen by the disapprovers!’
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Most of its devotees were members of the Royal Household, and their clandestine association enlivened the tedium of many a Court function.
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The Duchess’s chief co-conspirator was Dick Molyneux, the club’s Honorary Treasurer, to whom she wrote a spoof letter in June 1931 accepting the post of patroness: ‘It is with pride and pleasure that I accept this responsible position, and if the occasion arises, you may rest assured that your Patroness will be with you to the last glass.’ They kept up a humorous correspondence about club business, including her suggestion of a club tie with champagne stripes on a claret ground.
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In May 1934 the lure of immortality encouraged the Wets to have their portrait painted. The Duchess was also enthusiastic; she had liked Birley’s work – he had painted her portrait for one of her regiments, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. In August that year, when she was staying with the Elphinstones at Gannochy, she wrote to Molyneux – although he was in the same house party – to inform him that:

Birley accepted the commission; his excellent and humorous portrait still hangs at Windsor Castle.
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It shows a number of the gentlemen members of the Club sitting and standing around a table laden with port and wine after dinner at Windsor. Since women were not supposed to participate in such occasions, the Duchess of York and the Duchess of Beaufort are present only as portraits on the wall, while Lady Eldon peers from around a screen; the Duke of York’s membership is also signalled by his portrait. ‘It was a silly, but most enjoyable underground movement,’ Queen Elizabeth said later, ‘& we laughed a lot.’
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