The Queen Mother (87 page)

At Saskatoon, where they made a two-hour stop on 3 June for the usual mayoral reception and drive through the city, the Queen met yet another former Strathmore employee, John Batterson, who had worked at Glamis in 1908–9, and whom she remembered. They made another impromptu break in their programme, mingling with the crowds at the station when the Queen asked to meet a group of First World War nurses there. At Melville later that evening, when the Queen, ever on the lookout for fellow Scots, stopped to talk to a police officer who had served in the Black Watch, the King laughed that it was a wonder that there were any Scots left at home.
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The next day the inhabitants of Sudbury, who twelve days earlier had stood silently by the track at 1 a.m. so as not to wake the King and Queen during their journey westwards, were rewarded with an hour’s visit. One banner proclaimed that its bearers had ‘Come 400 miles’.
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That evening there was an unscheduled addition to their programme: they were taken down a nickel mine clad in white oilskin coats and miners’ helmets and carrying torches. Over the next two days, in a letter to Princess Elizabeth, the Queen summed up their increasingly hectic progress, from the empty expanses of the west into the populous reaches of Ontario close to the American border.

At Windsor, Ontario, they made only a brief stop at the station on the evening of 6 June. Nonetheless, a crowd of almost half a million, swelled by a large influx of Americans reported to have been crossing the border at the rate of 30,000 an hour, had come to greet them. The throngs around the train were so dense that its departure was delayed while the track was cleared.
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The next day the temperature soared and the King suffered in the heavy uniform of a field marshal while the Queen raised one of her parasols. They smiled their way through six more receptions at stations along the route and a gymnastic display by 1,200 children at Hamilton. Finally, they drove from St Catharine’s to Niagara. ‘The roar of the Cataracts was hushed to a whisper’ by the cheering crowds, according to the local press. They had now been joined by Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British Ambassador to the United States, because the American part of their journey was about to begin.

At 9.30 p.m. the royal train left Niagara Falls; five minutes later, at the end of the suspension bridge, the Canadian officials (except the Prime Minister and his staff) stepped off and, as the official programme put it, ‘At this point the responsibility for the Royal Train will be accepted by the United States.’
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But the Queen, with the King’s support, insisted on keeping the Mounties with them.
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In a ‘dingy brick border station in a decrepit neighbourhood of Niagara Falls’ the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and a welcoming committee greeted the King and Queen.
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It was a historic moment: the first visit by a reigning British monarch to the United States. But it was fraught with potential hazards.

As Eleanor Roosevelt noted, President Roosevelt had invited the King and Queen to Washington in the hope of creating a bond of friendship between America and Britain.
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But throughout the United States memories of the First World War were still fresh. In 1935 Congress had passed the Neutrality Act, aimed at keeping the United States out of any European war. President Roosevelt had attempted to modify the act so as to allow the supply of munitions to Britain and France, but met fierce opposition in the Senate.

In these circumstances the royal visit might well have been regarded with suspicion. In order not to give the impression of embroiling the United States in an unwelcome alliance, Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, did not accompany the King and Queen, as he would normally have done. Indeed, the King had thought it best to take no minister in attendance at all. But he had reckoned without Mackenzie King, who was determined not to be cast aside at the frontier ‘like an old boot’, and won his fight to remain with the King throughout the tour.
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President Roosevelt saw no political disadvantage in the Canadian Prime Minister’s presence: he could be passed off as a frequent visitor to Washington and a personal friend.

For their part, the King and Queen could not expect an exuberant welcome from an American public still dazzled by memories of a popular and glamorous ex-king who had given up his throne for a bride from Baltimore. The President had received a disobliging assessment of the royal couple from the American Ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, who had met them during their state visit to France a year before. The ‘little Queen’, he wrote to Roosevelt, was ‘a nice girl’, whom he found ‘pleasant’ because she reminded him of the female caddies who carried his clubs at Pitlochry; he thought the President would like her, ‘in spite of the fact that her sister-in-law, the Princess Royal, goes about England talking about her “cheap public smile” ’ – not a remark the Princess Royal is likely to have made. Of the King he said, ‘The little King is beginning to feel his oats, but still remains a rather frightened boy.’
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American newspapers were not immediately enthusiastic; in
Scribner’s Magazine
, an article by Josef Israels II insisted that a large part of the USA believed that Edward VIII should still be king and that George VI, ‘a colorless, weak personality’ who allegedly suffered from epilepsy, was very much on probation. As for the Queen, she was ‘far too plump of figure, too dowdy in dress, to meet American specifications of a reigning Queen’.
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The Washington
Evening Star
commented that, despite official denials of a political agenda, the visit was a sensational piece of diplomacy for European consumption, planned by the British government to dramatize the natural ties between the British and American peoples. The
New York Times
called the visit ‘a pageant with a meaning’: whatever policy differences might exist, the two peoples stood together on fundamentals, and the least Americans could do was to give spiritual aid and comfort to sister democracies. The fact that
the representatives of one of these democracies were called King and Queen was ‘a historical pleasantry. The British throne continues to exist because the British people regard it as a safeguard against tyranny … The liberties of England could not be destroyed without danger to our own.’
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In London,
The Times
carefully and a little disingenuously underlined the non-political nature of the visit, describing it as ‘a brief and delightful diversion from the strenuous programme of the Canadian tour … No political motive has prompted the visit. The two Governments understand one another well enough, and have no need to ask King and President to interrupt the pleasures of social intercourse with business of State.’
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There were down-to-earth concerns. Lascelles wrote to his wife that the plans made by the American government were chaotic, ‘and how we shall get through the elaborate programme of the next few days without a series of the most hopeless “box-ups”, I don’t know’. He blamed the President’s ‘happy-go-lucky temperament’, adding that the British Embassy had been scarcely more efficient. The atmosphere on board the royal train was light-hearted, nonetheless. As the train rolled towards Washington it became the scene of a mobile investiture ceremony on foreign territory: the King, ‘giggling in a most disarming fashion’, knighted Lascelles, who had been appointed KCVO in the Birthday Honours, while Sir Ronald Lindsay and George Steward, the press liaison officer, were given the insignia of GCB and CVO respectively.
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At midnight the King and Queen went out on to the rear platform when the train stopped for a while at Buffalo, and talked to groups of spectators.

The train halted at Baltimore before arriving at Washington, and the King and Queen got off briefly. According to Joseph Kennedy’s diary of 21 July 1939, the Queen told him later that a woman looking exactly like the Duchess of Windsor came up to her with a bouquet. ‘I didn’t know what to think. I knew she came from Baltimore and after I realized it couldn’t be she, I thought it must be her sister. Anyhow, I had a few uncomfortable minutes.’
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At 11 a.m. on Thursday 8 June, the King and Queen arrived at Washington’s Union station, ‘in the most stupendous heat!’ as the Queen recorded. The temperature and humidity were made worse by their formal clothes, the King wearing the full-dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. The Queen was ‘looking cool’ according to the
press, but evidently not feeling it, in a full-length pearl-grey dress and jacket with deep cuffs of fur, gloves and a hat. ‘I really don’t know how we got through those 2 days of continuous functions mostly out of doors, as it really was ghastly. It is very damp heat, & one could hardly breathe,’ she wrote to Queen Mary.
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President and Mrs Roosevelt greeted them at the station. The King and the President exchanged formal greetings and ‘a historic handshake’, setting off what one Washington newspaper described as ‘a tumultuous reception in which the Capital outdid itself to make welcome the first reigning British King and Queen ever to set foot on American soil’.
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Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote a regular newspaper column called ‘My Day’, was quick to observe the Queen’s characteristic way of reacting to crowds, as they drove together to the White House: ‘She had the most gracious manner and bowed right and left with interest, actually looking at the people in the crowd so that I am sure many of them felt that her bow was for them personally.’
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At the White House, the King and Queen met the chiefs of mission of Washington’s diplomatic corps before, at last, they could change into lighter clothes and sit down to an informal lunch with the Roosevelts, their three sons and their wives – and, of course, Mackenzie King. The lunch was followed by a sightseeing drive around Washington. During this drive the Queen seems to have given a revealing glimpse of her attitude to her own role. According to Eleanor Roosevelt’s memoirs, the Queen expressed surprise that Mrs Roosevelt had been criticized in the press for attending a meeting of WPA workers,
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for she thought that people with grievances should be allowed to air them, ‘and it is particularly valuable if they can do so to someone in whom they feel a sense of sympathy and who may be able to reach the head of the government with their grievances.’
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‘Both women were committed to serving as their husband’s eyes and ears, and actively advised their mates,’ the historian Will Swift concluded from these remarks, in his account of the Washington visit.
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It is a tempting conclusion, and it is undoubtedly true that Queen Elizabeth kept her husband informed of what she saw and heard. But, as Swift pointed out, Eleanor Roosevelt sent barrages of memoranda to her husband, and that was definitely not the Queen’s style.

The humidity continued to be debilitating. According to Joseph Kennedy, the Queen told him that afterwards she lay on the floor in her room at the White House, the hottest place she had ever been to (despite the newly installed air conditioners), to recover.
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That evening they still had a state dinner and a reception to face. For this the Queen wore a crinoline of white tulle sprinkled with gold paillettes; she sat between the President and Vice-President Garner for the dinner. Harold Ickes, the American Secretary of the Interior, whose diaries provide a jaundiced view of the royal visit, remarked scathingly on the over-familiar behaviour of the Vice-President, who had no breeding and put his arm round the King as if he were a ‘poker crony’. He also commented that the King and Queen ‘looked like pigmies’ beside the Roosevelts.
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The heat was still relentless: according to Harold Ickes’s wife, ‘men’s shirts buckled in the middle and collars wilted. Women, including the unfortunate Queen, turned beetlike.’
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At the end of the dinner the President made a short speech emphasizing the harmonious relations between the USA and Britain, and the King replied in kind; in the interlude after the ladies had left the table, the men conversed in what appeared to be prearranged groups. The King’s group included a noted isolationist, Senator William E. Borah.
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Even now, the day was not yet ended. Two hundred more guests arrived to hear a concert which included negro spirituals, cowboy ballads, folk songs sung by the Coon Creek Girls of Pinchem-Tight Hollow in Kentucky, folk dances by the Soco Gap Square-Dance Team and a finale of ‘art music’ – songs by American and European composers – sung by the radio star Kate Smith, the Metropolitan Opera’s baritone Lawrence Tibbett and Marian Anderson, the black contralto, whose fine voice Mrs Roosevelt admired.
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To the astonishment of the King and Queen, the next day was even hotter – 97 degrees in the shade – and it proved even more strenuous. At the White House in the morning Eleanor Roosevelt gave one of her frequent press conferences to women journalists; she praised the Queen’s interest in social problems, and then – after issuing stern warnings that they must not write that the Queen had attended the press conference – ushered in her guest. The King surprised the eighty-four women by coming too.
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It was then back to the British Embassy, where they received members of the British community, including ex-servicemen, in the garden, before driving to the Capitol to be received by members of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The King
was congratulated by one senator on being ‘a very good Queen-picker’. A Democratic congressman who the previous day had sent the King a telegram demanding the repayment of Britain’s war debt to the United States, stayed away; one of his Texan colleagues, seeing the Queen, remarked, ‘If America can keep Queen Elizabeth, Congress will regard Britain’s war debt as cancelled.’
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