The Queen Mother (74 page)

With the marriages of the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester in 1934 and 1935 the Duchess had acquired two sisters-in-law within a year, after more than eleven years as sole daughter-in-law to the King and Queen. She was no longer the only buffer between the King and his younger sons; and the larger family circle eased some of the pressure on the Yorks to be constantly on call for Court functions, or to spend more time at Sandringham or Balmoral than they wished. As for the Prince of Wales, his charm, high spirits and love of amusement appealed to the same qualities in her, and she remained devoted and sympathetic to him. But in the 1930s their lives diverged, they met less often and he seemed resolutely fixed on a path which dismayed and alarmed her, and which she was convinced was wrong.

For all her commitment to her royal role, contact with her own family was vital to her wellbeing and she made sure that there was room for them in her life. If her parents were in London, she would lunch or dine with them when she could. She saw her brothers and their wives fairly often, especially David and his wife Rachel, whom he had married in 1929.
^*
She saw her eldest brother Patrick and his wife Dorothy, to whom she had never been close, less frequently. Her sisters were habitual visitors, as were her nephews and nieces, especially the Elphinstone children, who came to stay at Birkhall in the summer holidays; and she and the Duke often stayed with the Elphinstones at Carberry when they had engagements in Edinburgh. Each year they and their daughters would spend several weeks at Glamis in the late summer and autumn, and at other times of the year they visited her parents in Hertfordshire.

In the first few years of their marriage, as we have seen, the Yorks had no really satisfactory home of their own, either in London or in the country. The gradual resolution of this problem was a minor triumph for both of them, which took patience on their part and forbearance on Queen Mary’s. The exchange of White Lodge for 145 Piccadilly in 1927 was accomplished with the Queen’s help, when she might have taken umbrage; when the King offered them Royal Lodge as a country home, they accepted it against Queen Mary’s advice and won her round. In Scotland, meanwhile, they gradually established a claim on Birkhall as their base, although the King and Queen seemed not to understand why they preferred this extra expense to free accommodation at Balmoral.

By 1935 the pattern had been set: from January to early August the York family was based at 145 Piccadilly, with most weekends and much of April spent at Royal Lodge. They stayed at Windsor Castle with the King and Queen for a few days in April, sometimes over Easter. From early August to mid-October they were in Scotland, with visits to Glamis at the beginning and end, and six weeks or so at Birkhall in between. Then they returned to London, with occasional shooting weekends for the Duke – often accompanied by the Duchess – in the country, until Christmas, when they all went to Sandringham to stay with the King and Queen for about three weeks. Sometimes
the children would remain longer with their royal grandparents; at other times they would go to stay with the Strathmores.

Since the giddy days of the 1920s when, as Queen Elizabeth later expressed it, ‘we did night club life madly for a few years, but also mixed with dinners & country house visits,’
³
the Duke and Duchess’s social life had become quieter and more sedate, as the demands of both public and family life grew with their own maturity and sense of purpose. ‘Out of the welter, one gradually found one’s feet & head,’
⁴
she wrote. They still dined out frequently with friends and went to private dances – charity balls at the great London houses or hotels were an obligation. More often, the dinner parties they gave or attended were followed by film shows, trips to the theatre and occasionally to the ballet. Their circle of friends had changed little since their marriage. The Duchess had kept many of her girlhood friends, habitués of Glamis house parties and London dances – notably Doris and Clare Vyner, Lavinia Annaly, who had accompanied her to East Africa and was still an ‘extra’ lady in waiting, Katie Seymour and Helen Hardinge, James Stuart and his elder brother Francis, the Earl of Moray.
^*
Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and his wife Princess Olga visited them on their trips to England. Patricia Herbert, now Lady Hambleden, remained a lifelong friend, as did Tortor Gilmour, who had shared the Yorks’ Australasian tour with them; another friend was Audrey Field, formerly Coats, one of the flightier members of their set in the early 1920s.
^†
Among the couples they saw most often were Teddy and Dorothé Plunket, whom they had known since their early married days; Maureen and Oliver Stanley were also good friends, she the daughter of Lord Londonderry, and once admired by the Duke, he a rising politician, the younger son of the Earl of Derby. It was not a fiercely intellectual set, but nor was it as frivolous as that of the Prince of Wales. The Duchess enjoyed people who had brains as well as charm and throughout her life she made sure that her close circle included people whom she found stimulating and amusing.

As well as those of her own generation, there were older friends. She and the Duke were often entertained by her godmother Mrs Arthur James, whom she described as ‘one of the survivors of the Edwardian era’.
⁵
Another Edwardian survivor and friend was Mrs Ronnie Greville, with whom they regularly spent a June or July weekend at Polesden Lacey. Each summer they also visited Trent Park in Middlesex, the home of the rich and hospitable Philip Sassoon, who entertained them lavishly at his London house as well. Here they met his cousin Hannah Gubbay, née Rothschild, who acted as his hostess and later inherited Trent Park: she was a friend of Queen Mary and became the Duchess’s friend too. When public duties took them north, the Duke and Duchess might stay at Studley Royal with the Vyners, at Lumley Castle with Katharine (the Duchess’s girlhood friend Katie McEwen) and Roger Lumley or at Darnaway in Morayshire with Francis and Barbara Moray; they were invited occasionally to Chatsworth, Longleat, Knowsley and other great houses. In the winter they spent shooting weekends at Elveden, Wilton and Lord Mildmay’s house, Flete, in Devon.

This relaxed and agreeable social life amid a group of good friends was something of an innovation in the Royal Family. Had the Duchess been born a princess, she would not have been brought up among such people as her equals, and would have been far less able to form close and lasting friendships with them. Her friends had become the Duke’s friends. Although the King and Queen appeared in society and the King had his shooting and sailing intimates, their sons yearned for a new, less formal life. For the Prince of Wales this quest ultimately led to complete rupture with the world of his parents, but for his younger brother and successor it helped shape his idea of kingship, in which the sovereign would be a far less remote figure than his father had been. It was a social life the Duchess thoroughly enjoyed: although a member of the Royal Family, her position was still sufficiently untrammelled for her to choose, and see, her own friends, yet exalted enough to include plenty of delightful evenings and weekends in beautiful surroundings at the grandest of houses in London or the country.

She had many friends, but she was well aware that the motives of those who sought her friendship might be suspect.
⁶
She said some years later that she had very few intimates, and in 1936 she was still asking herself who her real friends were.
⁷
Despite her caution, she
retained several very close friendships, and in particular those which sprang from family contacts in her unmarried days, notably Arthur Penn, D’Arcy Osborne and Jasper Ridley. Less a confidant or mentor than a clever and well-placed friend was Duff Cooper, politician and diplomat; he and his wife Diana belonged to her social circle.

With these friends she discussed literature, art, education, social problems, domestic and international politics, people and places. She wrote them vivid and amusing letters, roving over serious subjects with a deceptively light touch. Given the reputation she acquired of reading nothing more challenging than the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, the books she discussed with D’Arcy Osborne, Duff Cooper and later Osbert Sitwell, all of whom kept her supplied with reading matter, come as a surprise. As we have seen, she read Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Radclyffe Hall.
⁸
She read Duff Cooper’s biographies of Talleyrand and Earl Haig, and he recommended
The Tale of Genji
, the tenth-century Japanese romantic novel by Lady Murasaki, a work which delighted her.
⁹
Thornton Wilder sent her his
Woman of Andros
.
¹⁰
Osbert Sitwell too sent her his own prolific oeuvre, together with finds on subjects he thought would interest her, such as the letters of William Beckford.
¹¹

D’Arcy Osborne gave her the American Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace’s
Statesmanship and Religion
, which he said showed that politics could be combined with Christianity – a proposition after her own heart – and urged her to send it on to the Prince of Wales, as one of the future ‘leaders of the world’.
¹²
It might not have had much effect on him. But the Christian faith she had learned as a child remained strong; like her mother, she took seriously the need to pass it on to her own children, and she was equally convinced of the importance of Christianity to the wellbeing of the nation as a whole, and of the power of prayer. Archbishop Lang remained a friend and counsellor; and her patronage of philanthropic causes showed that she was drawn to those with a Christian basis, like the Church Army and Toc H.

Owen Morshead later commented that the Queen was ‘noticeably modern in her tastes, whether in books or pictures, or in her outlook on life; and this makes it easy for her to establish contacts in circles new to Court life.’
¹³
Where pictures were concerned, as duchess she had not yet the means, nor perhaps the motivation, to involve herself in the patronage of modern British artists that she would pursue so
successfully as queen. But with the guidance of Dick Molyneux, a considerable connoisseur, and of Kenneth Clark, the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, she had begun to learn about the Royal Collection. She had some acquaintance with the younger artistic and literary scene; she liked the work of Rex Whistler, and she liked him; he wrote her a kind letter after the abdication and promised to design a bookplate for her;
^*
modern ballet was another enthusiasm and Frederick Ashton became a lifelong friend.

Brought up in a traditionally Conservative family, she had decided political views which remained, on the whole, constant, although she was careful not to betray in public the strict neutrality required of members of the Royal Family. Her comments to D’Arcy Osborne on the first Labour government in 1924, flippant and whimsical in the manner of her youthful letters to him, conveyed a fundamental distrust. ‘I am extremely Anti-Labour. They are so far apart from fairies & owls and bluebells & Americans & all the things I like. If they agree with me, I know they are pretending – in fact I believe everything is pretence to them.’
¹⁴
It was an intuitive antipathy, a sense, perhaps, that socialism sought to drag everything down into uniform and unimaginative drabness and political humbug. Her views matured, she could be critical of governments of right as well as left, and in fact she got on well with many Labour politicians, whether Ramsay MacDonald or the Labour Mayor of Sheffield; this sympathy continued all her life, Ernest Bevin and James Callaghan being later examples of socialists she liked.

In a different life she might have become politically active: indeed, despite her position, she did do so to the extent of sending ‘a busload of servants’, as she afterwards confided to Duff Cooper, to vote for him in the by-election in March 1931 in which he stood as official Conservative candidate against the Empire Free Trade candidate supported by Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook.
¹⁵
It was not the battles of party politics that attracted her, however. It was that her public life had brought her increasingly into contact with poverty and unemployment and she felt that she knew what needed to be done. Despite the
occasional frustration her position caused her, her correspondence shows her both deeply concerned about social conditions and aware that sometimes she
could
do something about it.

Her views on the international political scene, like those of most of her correspondents, were inevitably dominated by the threatening developments in Europe and the worldwide economic crisis in the early 1930s. She shared the fears D’Arcy Osborne expressed to her about ‘a regression from civilization under economic pressure’, and about the growth of the malign forces of fascism and Nazism.
¹⁶
By nature more optimistic, however, she praised Britain’s recovery from economic depression and considered that it was ‘the only civilised country in Europe today’.
¹⁷
She had no illusions about the effectiveness of the League of Nations.
¹⁸

By 1937 she had come a long way since the early days of her marriage when she had taken on a modest round of public duties. At first inclined to regard public engagements as mere ‘stunts’, often tedious, she had characteristically got what fun she could out of them – like the fundraising dinner in 1924 at which she looked forward to extracting as much money as possible from ‘RICH SNOBS’.
¹⁹
Nevertheless she was lucky to find herself in a role for which she had a talent, and she had taken to it with an ease born of her natural self-confidence, and out of the early training she had received from helping her mother in charitable activities, and in the wartime convalescent hospital at Glamis. She had gradually built up her own long list of patronages, while at the same time accompanying her husband on many of his public engagements. As a pretty young woman with a charmingly friendly manner she often attracted more favourable press comment than her husband, and she could easily have outshone him and taken the starring role. She never did so.