The Queen Mother (95 page)

The King and Queen were determined to protect themselves. Both of them took shooting lessons (the King was already an accomplished shot) and the King carried a rifle as well as a revolver in his car. Joseph Kennedy noted in his diary a story told him by Brendan
Bracken, now a minister in the government. On one of Churchill’s weekly visits to the King at Buckingham Palace he found him in the garden shooting at a target with a rifle. The King told his Prime Minister that ‘if the Germans were coming, he was at least going to get his German and Churchill said if he felt that way about it, he would get him a Tommy Gun so he could kill a lot of Germans and he is getting him one’.
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The Queen was equally resolute. She told Harold Nicolson that she was taking instruction every morning in firing a revolver. ‘I shall not go down like the others,’ she said. ‘I should die if I had to leave.’
¹¹¹
Nicolson was much cheered by her pluck and the resolution and good sense of both King and Queen. He wrote to his wife Vita, ‘he was so gay and she so calm. They did me all the good in the world … 
We shall win
. I know that. I have no doubts at all.’
¹¹²

Through these months thousands of children were being evacuated from the major cities in anticipation of German bombing. Most were sent to the country but others, especially children of the well-to-do, were dispatched for safety to the United States or to the Dominions. The King and Queen had discussed with Churchill the threat to their own children; on 18 June the King had asked Churchill if he thought the Princesses would be a liability in the event of invasion. ‘No,’ the Prime Minister replied.
¹¹³
The Queen had no doubts. She made it clear that evacuation was not what she wanted for herself or for her children. She has been often quoted (though the precise moment is obscure) as saying, ‘The children could not go without me, I could not possibly leave the King, and the King would never go.’

That being so, the security of the Royal Family was a major concern. On one occasion, King Haakon asked the King what would happen if German parachutists suddenly descended into the grounds of the Palace. The King’s biographer explained what happened next:

The most important of these was the Coats Mission, a hand-picked body of officers and men from the Brigade of Guards and the Household Cavalry who, equipped with armoured cars, stood always ready to spirit the King and Queen into a secret place of safety in the country should the Germans really threaten them.
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At Buckingham Palace the first royal air-raid shelter was somewhat amateurish and probably afforded little or no protection against a direct hit. It was a basement room which had been used by the housekeeper. The ceiling was reinforced by steel girders and there were steel shutters across the high window. The furniture was somewhat eclectic – it included gilt chairs, a regency settee and a large Victorian mahogany table. The shelter was decorated with many of the valuable small Dutch landscapes which had been brought downstairs. Hating the shelter as she did, the Queen said later that she had developed an unreasonable dislike for these little scenes of cows and bridges over canals.
¹¹⁶

There were emergency steps to reach the window, axes on the wall, oil lamps, electric torches, a bottle of smelling salts and a pile of glossy magazines to help while away the hours. In the room next door, the Household took shelter – they were blessed with a piano, but the King was not amused when one of the refugee courtiers attempted a rousing singsong. The Queen’s dressers and other staff had another nearby room, to which many of the Palace’s priceless
clocks had been moved for safe keeping. Their loud ticking provided a useful distraction to those awaiting bombardment. Rats provided another, less welcome diversion.
¹¹⁷

Throughout that summer, as daily dogfights took place across the skies, the Queen continued her visits to troops, hospitals, voluntary services, factories, aerodromes and training centres, carrying out more than twenty solo engagements in June and July and another ten jointly with the King. On 31 July she visited the Free French troops under the leadership of General de Gaulle at Olympia. De Gaulle did not prove an easy ally, but he soon became something of a favourite with her. On the same day she went to see another group of French soldiers, waiting to be repatriated, at White City. A Breton soldier to whom she spoke was impressed by her calm and smiling face, and wrote afterwards, ‘cette Reine ne peut pas être vaincue car elle est la justice même et la vraie conception de la vie démocratique.’
¹¹⁸

For the first time in their married life there was no holiday in Scotland that year, and the Queen celebrated her birthday on 4 August in a low-key manner.

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I
NEVITABLY
H
ITLER
’
S
dash across Europe led to new, more serious concerns with regard to the Duke of Windsor. With the approval of the British Military Mission to which he was attached, he left Paris as the Germans advanced in May; he and the Duchess paused briefly in the south of France before having to flee the advancing Germans into Spain on the night of 20 June.

Berlin had ambitions for the Duke. Ribbentrop, the former Ambassador to London and now the German Foreign Minister, knew that the Duke had been sympathetic to Germany and that he considered the war unnecessary. The fascist government of General Franco was aligned with Berlin and the Germans now tried to have the Duke detained in Spain. Churchill, concerned, telegraphed the Duke asking him to move at once to neutral Lisbon, whence a flying boat would carry him and the Duchess back to England. The Duke’s reply ignored the fact that Churchill was leading Britain in its most perilous hour – he insisted that before he returned he be given guarantees that he and the Duchess would be royally treated in England, and would be extended regular invitations to Buckingham Palace. To badger the Prime Minister on such matters at a time when Britain faced imminent
invasion was, as his biographer put it, ‘conduct that cannot be condoned’.
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The Windsors did then move on to Lisbon, but even there they were subject to German conspiracies. Ribbentrop first sent men to flatter the Duke with praise and promises and then an SS officer with the mission to cajole and if necessary force the Duke back to Spain. At Buckingham Palace Alec Hardinge made notes on an intelligence report: ‘Germans expect assistance from Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Latter desiring at any price to become Queen. Germans have been negotiating with her since June 27th.’
¹²⁰

Churchill then devised the idea of getting the couple far from German reach by making the Duke governor of the Bahamas. The Royal Family were not keen – the King wrote to his mother, ‘I at once said that “she” would be an obstacle as D’s wife.’ But none of the family wanted the Windsors in England at this time and, as the King put it to Queen Mary, ‘it was imperative to get him away from Lisbon.’
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Queen Mary was equally unenthusiastic but she replied, ‘Under the circumstances I think this is the best arrangement for D.’
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The Queen, perhaps, had the greatest misgivings, and she expressed them very clearly in a handwritten memorandum. Although she knew that the appointment had already been decided, she asked Alec Hardinge to send her notes to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Lloyd. The language she used about the Duchess was strong, and undoubtedly reflected the feelings that she had harboured since 1936. But her views on the Windsors’ suitability for public office were shared not only throughout the Royal Family
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and Household, but also by members of the public, some of whose letters criticizing the Duke and Duchess she sent on to Lord Lloyd.
¹²³

She wrote that she was certain that, if the Duke was made governor of the Bahamas, ‘a very difficult situation will arise over his wife.’ Home and marriage ties were ‘sacred’ to the average Briton and the fact that the Duchess ‘has three husbands alive, will not be pleasing
to the good people of the Islands’. Britons were used to ‘
looking up
’ to the King’s representatives, but ‘The Duchess of Windsor is looked upon as the lowest of the low – it will be the first lowering of the standard hitherto set, and may lead to unimaginable troubles, if a Governor’s wife such as she, is to lead and set an example to the Bahamas.’ Her objections, she stressed, were ‘on moral grounds, but in this world of broken promises and lowered standards, who is to keep a high standard of honour, but the British Empire … These few words are written from the point of view of general policy – they are not personal. I feel strongly that such an appointment may lead to great troubles.’ She thought, moreover, that it would displease the Americans, which might be dangerous.
¹²⁴

Hardinge told her that he knew that Lord Lloyd, like most others, shared her views, but thought the appointment was a lesser evil than the only alternative – the Windsors’ return to Britain. ‘I think that
she
will do harm wherever she is – but there is less scope for it in a place like the Bahamas than elsewhere – and the native population probably will not understand what it is all about!’
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The Duke had new demands. He insisted that his former servants be released from active service to accompany him to the Bahamas and that he and the Duchess be allowed to visit New York en route. Churchill absolutely refused to allow the second request but eventually and reluctantly agreed that one valet be discharged in order to return to him. Even then the Windsors’ departure was still not certain. The Germans made sure that the Duke was told that the British Secret Service were planning to assassinate him on the voyage and that he would be far safer under the German wing in Spain. It took another visit from the redoubtable Walter Monckton to convince him to leave; he and the Duchess finally set sail on 1 August.
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The extent to which the Duke would ever have co-operated with the Nazis cannot be known. On one occasion, the King wrote, ‘Winston told me that D.’s ideas and his pro-Nazi leanings would have been impossible during the crisis of the last three years.’
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That was undoubtedly true, but does not in itself imply treasonable intent. The considered view of the Duke’s biographer, Philip Ziegler, is that ‘there seems little doubt that he did think Britain was likely to lose the war and that, in such a case, he believed he might have a role to play.’ Despite all this, Ziegler concluded that in the awful event of a German victory the Duke’s belief in the British meant that ‘he could not have
allowed himself to rule by favour of the Germans over a sullen and resentful people.’
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A
S THE
D
UKE
and Duchess sailed west, the next stage of Hitler’s assault began with the unprecedented, indeed revolutionary use of air power to break Britain’s will and ability to resist a seaborne invasion. The campaign had begun in early July with bombing raids on south-coast ports, and gathered in intensity, spreading through the south-east and on to London. Having given up hope of forcing Britain to the conference table, Hitler knew that no invasion could take place until the Germans controlled the air over Britain and the English Channel. He flung the mass of the Luftwaffe against London itself. For ten days the bright and sunny skies over south-eastern England were filled with the roar of warfare as wave after wave of German bombers growled across the coast towards London and young men in their Spitfires and Hurricanes rose up to shoot them down.

This new phase of the Battle of Britain was deadly. On 8 August the Luftwaffe began a systematic attack on airfields and aircraft factories, and managed to bomb many of them out of action. In the last week of August and the first week of September 1940 there were 600 enemy aircraft attacking Britain every day. In those two weeks, the RAF lost 290 aircraft. On the night of 7 September, 200 German bombers broke through the RAF defences and hit London, killing 300 people and injuring over 1,300 more in the next few hours. The docks in the East End were set alight and hundreds of fires attracted swarm after swarm of enemy aircraft. That night, to add to the horror, the Chiefs of Staff issued the code word ‘CROMWELL’. An invasion was thought to be imminent.

And so it went on every night – by the middle of the month more than 2,000 civilians had been killed and 8,000 wounded, most in London itself. The courage of ‘the few’ in the RAF was extraordinary and gave Britain an essential victory – their resistance to the Luftwaffe until the equinox gales arrived in the fourth week of September meant that Hitler had had to postpone Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain. Nonetheless, the bombing continued week after week and London was raided again and again and again.

On Sunday 8 September, Buckingham Palace itself received its first direct hit. A delayed-action bomb was dropped; it did not explode and
next morning the King worked in his office above where it lay. In the middle of Monday night it went off, blowing out all the windows of his office and many others, and damaging the indoor swimming pool. Some of the Palace ceilings came down, but the main structure was not seriously affected.