The Queen Mother (91 page)

The Queen quickly realized that her role now was to sustain morale, with the King, all around the country. The Crown was the centre which must hold and be seen to hold. On 5 September they visited the London Civil Defence Region Headquarters and inspected ARP (Air Raid Precautions) posts and shelters; another of their early trips was by launch down the Thames to the London Docks where they saw a merchant ship being painted naval grey and watched the unloading of 4,000 tons of grain from a cargo ship which had arrived from South America.
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On 6 September the Queen made the first of many wartime visits to her regiments with a surprise call at the headquarters of the London Scottish, the territorial regiment of which she was honorary colonel. As she left the canteen ‘the cheers made the roof ring,’ the regimental gazette reported.
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She also met women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, whose London headquarters were in the same building. In August she had been appointed commandant-in-chief of all three women’s services: the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the Wrens) and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She was already colonel-in-chief of three regiments in the regular army – the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, the Black Watch and the Queen’s Bays – and honorary colonel of another territorial regiment, the Hertfordshire Regiment.

To rousing cheers everywhere, the Queen also visited civilian organizations, including the Red Cross, the ambulance services, hospitals and the YWCA. She was heartened by a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, telling her what an important part she
had to play in the war, both as the Queen and as a woman. He was sure that the women of Britain, who had offered themselves for the war effort, would look to her for leadership and he knew that she would do everything to encourage them, not least in ‘spreading the spirit of your own sympathy and understanding and calm fortitude. Indeed I feel inclined to say to Your Majesty what was said in the Bible story to Queen Esther – “Who knoweth whether thou art come to the Kingdom for such a time as this.” ’
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Esther, portrayed in the Old Testament as a woman of faith and patriotism, whose piety and courage enabled her to save her people from destruction, was a challenging but apt role model for the Queen.

Like Esther, the Queen was compelled by the terrible drama of the next five years to accept a role of immense importance. She would never have sought it but it was a part for which she was by nature well suited. It fell to her to support the King as leader of his people in a time of total war. She saw her duty plainly. Replying to the Archbishop she wrote,

For the next six years she would use her innate ability to convey hope and encouragement to all those engaged in the war, and her instinctive warmth and sympathy to comfort those in distress. All that had been instilled in her by her mother and other members of her family, all that she had learned in looking after soldiers at Glamis in the First World War, and all the public skills that she had acquired since entering the Royal Family, she put now to the service of the country.

The country and its government began to adapt. Chamberlain brought two of his severest Conservative critics, Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, into the Cabinet, at the Admiralty and the
Dominions Office respectively. Air-raid sirens were sounded, London was blacked out at night and the sky above was filled with barrage balloons. Country houses were taken over for hospitals, schools or the military. Cinemas were closed (they soon reopened) and, as we have seen, hosts of children were rushed to safety in the country or overseas (many soon returned). Government expanded again, as it had after 1914 – there would be new Ministries of Information, Economic Warfare, Shipping, Food and Home Security, among others.
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Many changes were required of the Royal Family and the Household. Queen Mary was at Sandringham when war began. On Sunday 3 September the rector set up his wireless in the nave of the church and, with the other worshippers, she listened in her pew to Neville Chamberlain’s announcement that the country was at war.
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That evening, in tears, she listened to the King’s broadcast; his voice reminded her of her husband’s.
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The King feared that if she stayed in Norfolk, so close to the coast, Queen Mary could be bombed or even kidnapped by German raiders.
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(This was a sensible concern, as the German attempt to capture Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands a few months later showed.) Queen Mary thought leaving town was ‘not at all the thing’.
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But the King persuaded her that her presence in Marlborough House would cause everyone unnecessary anxiety; reluctantly she agreed to go to Badminton, the Gloucestershire home of her niece’s husband, the Duke of Beaufort. She proceeded, with her luggage and her servants, across the country from Norfolk in a long and stately convoy of vehicles. The Duchess watched their arrival ‘with a certain apprehension’.
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Queen Mary, now aged seventy-two, was not accustomed to country life and she found Badminton rather old fashioned. But she determined to adapt as necessary. Before long, she had found an outlet for her remarkable energy and passion for orderliness in constant expeditions to rid the estate of ivy and to clear brushwood.

Among the members of the Royal Household who left for their regiments was the Queen’s Private Secretary, Captain Richard Streat-feild. Her Treasurer and friend Arthur Penn, who was now regimental adjutant in the Brigade of Guards, agreed to come in two or three times a week to help with her correspondence. He was to act as her private secretary throughout the war.

The question of what war would mean for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor was still a concern. They were in Antibes when war was
declared. His biographer states that, although the Duke felt the war could and should have been avoided, he knew he must now support the British cause. The King offered the Windsors a plane to fly them to Britain, but they asked for a destroyer instead – and made their way to Cherbourg to cross the Channel.
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If they had hoped for reconciliation with the family, they were disappointed. According to a letter the Queen wrote to her friend Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, she had sent a private message to the Duchess saying she was sorry she could not receive her. ‘I thought it more honest to make things quite clear.’
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To Queen Mary she wrote, ‘I haven’t heard a word about Mrs Simpson – I trust that she will soon return to France and STAY THERE. I am sure that she hates this dear country, & therefore she should not be here in war time.’
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The King had agonized over what sort of war work to offer his brother. He had changed his mind about giving him an administrative post in Wales, and now thought it would be best for the Duke to remain abroad. So a job with the new British Military Mission to France was devised. On 14 September he and the Duke met at Buckingham Palace – the Queen was out. The King told him of the post on offer; accounts differ as to the level of the Duke’s enthusiasm. The meeting passed without incident, though the King thought it ‘very unbrotherly’ and was struck that the Duke was ‘in a very good mood, his usual swaggering one, laying down the law about everything’.
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In his diary, and in a letter to the Prime Minister the same day, the King recorded that there were no recriminations on either side; nor, however, had his brother shown the slightest remorse. ‘He seemed to be thinking only of himself, & had quite forgotten what he had done to his country in 1936.’ On the contrary, ‘He looked very well & had lost the deep lines under his eyes.’
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The Queen had already expressed a view on that – who had those lines instead? she asked. Her husband.
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Now she was irritated; she reported that the Duke had come to see his brother ‘just as if nothing had happened! Never asked after Mama or me (who he loathes) or the children or anything family, and never communicated with Bertie again!’ Her view of her brother-in-law had hardened; she had written affectionately to him at Christmas in 1937, but the Duke’s increasing hostility towards her and Queen Mary for refusing to receive his wife, his dishonesty over his wealth and his visit to Hitler could not but have roused her antipathy. Perhaps above all she resented his indifference to the harm he had done her
husband and their country. ‘Odd creature, he is exactly like Hitler in thinking that anybody who doesn’t agree with him is automatically
wrong
.’
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By the end of the first month of the war, the Duke and Duchess were back in France to begin his attachment to the Military Mission.

One of the King’s other early wartime visitors was Joseph Kennedy, still American Ambassador to the Court of St James’s. The King was upset by Kennedy’s defeatism, his dismissal of Britain and her Empire and above all by the impact his views must have in Washington. He immediately wrote a frank letter to remind him that the US, Britain and France were the three great democracies in the world and two of them were now fighting that which they all detested, Hitler and his Nazi regime. ‘We stand on the threshold of we know not what. Misery & suffering of War we know. But what of the future? The British Empire’s mind is made up. I leave it at that.’
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Kennedy replied that the people of America were sympathetic and wanted to help Britain and France economically, but did not want to go to war.
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On 18 September, the Queen went back to Scotland to see her daughters; she had been concerned about them. A few days earlier she had written to ‘My darling Lilibet’ at Birkhall to say that she and the King had seen the Australian rugby team who had arrived the day before war was declared and now had to turn around and go straight back. She enclosed little kangaroo pins the team had given her for the Princesses. ‘I am longing to see you again my darling – please give Margaret a big hug from me, & get M to give
you
a big one from me, as you can’t hug yourself very well! Your
very
loving Mummy.’
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The Princesses, meanwhile, were enjoying an outdoor life in fine weather at Birkhall, under the eye of their French ‘holiday governess’, Georgina Guérin. Their cousins Margaret Elphinstone and Diana Bowes Lyon
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came to stay. What made these holidays different from all others, however, were the evacuees. ‘We have got hundreds all around about from Glasgow,’ Princess Elizabeth reported in a letter to Marion Crawford.
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During the week the Queen spent with her daughters she went to
see some of these evacuees, women and children who had been moved out of slums to protect them in case of attack on the city, and who were being cared for on the Balmoral and Abergeldie estates. Many of them did not like country life, she recalled later. ‘Do you know what frightened them most?’ she said. ‘They couldn’t bear the noise of the trees.’
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She discovered that many of the mothers had taken their children back to Glasgow when the threatened bombardment had not materialized, and she disapproved, writing to Queen Mary, ‘I do think that it would be so much better if the wives stayed with their husbands, & let the children stay safely in the country.’
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She herself returned to her husband after a week. Shortly afterwards Marion Crawford and the Princesses’ French teacher Madame Montaudon Smith came up to Balmoral, and lessons were resumed, partly by correspondence with their other teachers.
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They joined a weekly sewing party and knitted for the soldiers; Princess Margaret knitted and played the gramophone alternately, Crawfie reported.
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While she was in Scotland the Queen had visited the Black Watch at their depot at Perth, where she had a poignant encounter which illustrated the turmoil of emotions that the war had unleashed in her. Among the officers, she suddenly saw her nephew John Elphinstone. She had never seen him in uniform before. ‘It gave me such a shock to see John in his Black Watch uniform,’ she wrote to Queen Mary, ‘for he suddenly looked exactly like my brother Fergus who was killed at Loos, & in the same regiment. It was uncanny in a way, & desperately sad to feel that all that ghastly waste was starting again at the bidding of a lunatic.’
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And yet, she asked in another letter, was it waste? ‘Humanity must fight against bad things if we are to survive, and the spiritual things are stronger than anything else, and cannot be destroyed, thank God.’ She felt as if the last twenty years had been swept away and the last war had joined up with this new one. ‘Perhaps we never finished it after all.’
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One of the Queen’s early wartime tasks was to make a broadcast to the women of the Empire. Appeals for her to do so had come from home and abroad, sometimes from unexpected quarters. Harold Laski, the socialist Professor of Political Science at the London School of
Economics, wrote in early September urging the Queen to broadcast a reassuring message to the despondent British mothers whose children had been evacuated.
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From Canada Lord Tweedsmuir went so far as to suggest a monthly broadcast to the Empire describing what the British people, especially the women, were doing. It would also be heard in the United States, he pointed out, where ‘the Queen has become a legendary figure.’ The idea of a regular broadcast had been pressed upon him by many in the USA, he said. After all, ‘It was the American women who brought their country into the last war.’
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Indeed, the Queen had already been asked to broadcast direct to America, but the British Ambassador in Washington advised against any such attempt to put pressure on a nation which at this stage was determined to keep out of the war.
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Nevertheless, suggestions of a direct broadcast by the Queen to the United States continued to be made. For the moment, however, it was not the American effect that preoccupied her.