The Queen Mother (96 page)
Authors: William Shawcross
During the week which followed, the King and Queen made their first visits to the devastated East End. They were given emotional welcomes by people picking through the rubble of their streets with extraordinary cheerfulness; they had lost everything but were still determined to try to rebuild their homes and their lives. The sight of their King and Queen walking among them and talking to many of them with obvious interest and concern was immensely reassuring. The King wrote to his mother, ‘we have seen some of the awful havoc which has been done in East London, & have talked to the people who are quite marvellous in the face of adversity. So cheerful about it all, & some have had very narrow escapes.’
129
On the morning of 13 September the King and Queen themselves were nearly killed. In a deliberate attack, a German bomber emerged from low cloud, flew straight up the Mall and dropped a stick of bombs on the Palace. The Queen described what happened in a long letter to Queen Mary:
My darling Mama
I hardly know how to begin to tell you of the horrible attack on Buckingham Palace this morning Bertie & I arrived there at about ¼ to 11, and he & I went up to our poor windowless rooms to collect a few odds and ends.
There was an air raid in progress and she went to find the King to see if he was coming down to the shelter.
He asked me to take an eyelash out of his eye, and while I was battling with this task, Alec came into the room with a batch of papers in his hand. At this moment we heard the unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German plane. We said, ‘ah a German’, and before anything else could be said, there was the noise of aircraft diving at great speed, and then the scream of a bomb. It all happened so quickly, that we had only time to look foolishly at each other, when the scream hurtled past us, and exploded with a tremendous crash in the quadrangle.
I saw a great column of smoke & earth thrown up into the
air, and then we all ducked like lightning into the corridor. There was another tremendous explosion, and we & our 2 pages who were outside the door, remained for a moment or two in the corridor away from the staircase, in case of flying glass. It is curious how one’s instinct works at these moments of great danger, as quite without thinking, the urge was to get away from the windows. Everybody remained wonderfully calm, and we went down to the shelter. I went along to see if the housemaids were alright, and found them busy in their various shelters.
Then came a cry for ‘bandages’, and the first aid party, who had been training for over a year, rose magnificently to the occasion, and treated the 3 poor casualties calmly and correctly. They, poor men, were working below the Chapel, and how they survived I don’t know.
*
Their whole workshop was a shambles, for the bomb had gone bang through the floor above them. My knees trembled a little bit for a minute or two after the explosions! But we both feel quite well today, tho’ just a bit tired.
I
was
so pleased with the behaviour of our servants. They were really magnificent. I went along to the kitchen which, as you will remember, has a glass roof. I found the chef bustling about, and when I asked him if he was alright, he replied cheerfully that there had been un petit quelque chose dans le coin, un petit bruit, with a broad smile. The petit quelque chose was the bomb on the Chapel just next door! He was perfectly unmoved, and took the opportunity to tell me of his unshakeable conviction that France will rise again!
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The King and Queen decided to conceal how nearly they had died, even from Churchill. In the second volume of his memoirs,
Their Finest Hour
, Churchill wrote, ‘Had the windows been closed instead of open, the whole of the glass would have splintered into the faces of the King and Queen, causing terrible injuries. So little did they make of it that even I … never realised until long afterwards … what had actually happened.’ Their near-escape was not made public until after the end of the war.
†
On the day of the bombing, after lunch in their shelter, they drove again to the East End of London. The Queen was horrified and moved. ‘The damage there is ghastly,’ she told Queen Mary.
I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city, when we walked down a little empty street. All the houses evacuated and yet through the broken windows one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left. At the end of the street is a school which was hit, and collapsed on the top of 500 people waiting to be evacuated – about 200 are still under the ruins. It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction – I think that really I mind it much more than being bombed myself. The people are marvellous, and full of fight. One could not imagine that life
could
become so terrible. We
must
win in the end.
Darling Mama, I do hope that you will let me come & stay a day or two later. It is so sad being parted, as this War has parted families.
With my love, and prayers for your safety, ever darling Mama, your loving daughter in law Elizabeth
PS Dear old BP is
still standing
and that is the main thing.
131
But in one way the bombing of the Palace was helpful to the King and Queen – and to the country. Some Members of Parliament had worried in the first days of the Blitz that, if the bombing was concentrated on working-class areas, resentment would grow. The Queen said, famously and more than once, that she was glad that the Palace had been bombed because it meant that she could ‘now look the East End in the face’.
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And it was true that it did help create a closer bond. The King told Queen Mary that he thought their visits to the bombed areas helped people ‘who have lost their relations & homes, & we have both found a new bond with them as Buckingham Palace has been bombed as well as their homes, and nobody is immune.’
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The Queen now found that people would ask her how she felt about being attacked. A voluntary worker in one stricken area related that ‘the
first
thing all the women say to her, as they try to salvage
their own pathetic bundles of belongings from their ruined homes, is “Did the Queen lose all her pretty things too?” ’
134
On one such visit to south-east London, Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, was with them.
The Queen asked me about the morale of the people who had been bombed: when we were coming through a very slummy district a crowd gathered around the carriage and called out, ‘Good Luck’ and ‘God Bless You’ and ‘Thank YMs for coming to see us’. I knew the district and had been there only a week before. I said, ‘You asked me about morale. All these people have lost their homes.’ The Queen was so touched she couldn’t speak for a moment, I saw the tears come into her eyes and then she said, ‘I think they’re wonderful.’
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At one communal feeding centre, there was a moment, noted Woolton, at which ‘a very dirty child’ in its mother’s arms grabbed at the Queen’s pearls. A photographer ran around trying to get a picture but she had just moved away. Woolton, standing behind the Queen, murmured to her, ‘Your Majesty, you’ve broken a press man’s heart.’ ‘Without showing the slightest sign that she had heard,’ Woolton recorded, ‘she moved back into position for the baby again to play with her pearls, and so that the pressman could take his photograph. The incident was, in fact, the only thing recorded in the press!’
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Woolton appreciated the simplicity of both the King and Queen. ‘They were so easy to talk to and to take round, and fell so readily into conversation with the people whom they were seeing, without any hesitation or affectation, or side. They were, in fact, very nice people, doing a very human job.’
137
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That certainly was the impression they gave. After their trip to Bermondsey, the Chairman of the National Council of Girls’ Clubs, Mrs Walter Elliot, wrote to the Queen’s lady in waiting, ‘Everyone in Bermondsey believed that Her Majesty came to see them because she had heard that there had been a direct hit on a shelter, and had wanted
to help them. It is impossible to over-estimate what this visit has meant … The people felt as if an angel had passed through their midst. This must have been said often before, but it was the literal truth.’
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From Chicago the Queen received a poem which began:
Be it said to your renown
That you wore your gayest gown
Your bravest smile, and stayed in Town
When London Bridge was burning down,
My fair lady.
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In fact her gowns in wartime were a constant worry. The King looked elegant in uniform throughout the war; the Queen had more difficulty deciding what she should wear. She knew that press photographs tended to reveal her plumpness rather than her clear skin, let alone her charm. Her dressmaker, Norman Hartnell, advised that she must stand out in the crowd and that since most of the people she mingled with would be darkly if not drably dressed, she should wear light colours. In his autobiography he recalled the problem of how she should appear when visiting the victims of the bombing. ‘In black? Black does not appear in the rainbow of hope. Conscious of tradition, the Queen made a wise decision in adhering to the gentle colours, and even though they became muted into what one might call dusty pink, dusty blue and dusty lilac, she never wore green and she never wore black. She wished to convey the most comforting, encouraging and sympathetic note possible.’
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In such clothes, and often in high heels, she certainly stood out in the bombed streets. Her gentle ostentation was deliberate and it seems to have been effective. It was encouraging for people who had lost almost everything to see that the Queen still had her style.
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She was careful to abide by the rules for ‘austerity’ clothes – the amount of material, the number of seams, the amount of adornment and width of collar and belt. For receptions at the Palace or the Castle more elegant dresses were needed, but restrictions still applied. Embroidery was forbidden, so Hartnell ‘re-tinted and re-arranged’ dresses from pre-war years. Many of them were the clothes he had created for the Canadian tour. In one case he painted by hand garlands of lilac and green leaves on a voluminous white satin gown. The
Queen also encouraged him to accept a Board of Trade request to design utility clothes for the public.
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T
HROUGHOUT THE
Battle of Britain the King and Queen drove to London almost every day and slept at Windsor Castle with their daughters. A large dugout had been constructed for the Royal Family under the Brunswick Tower, at the northern corner of the East Terrace. The King and Queen did not like this hole in the ground (which was also quite far from their rooms) and from early September 1940 they usually slept on the ground floor of the Victoria Tower (now Queen’s Tower) which had been protected outside by huge concrete frames filled with sand, while more extensive reinforcing works took place. The whole tower was clothed in scaffolding and a ten-inch raft of concrete, steel and asbestos was built across the roof, while the four rooms in the cellar were given added protection by constructing a four-feet-thick roof of concrete and girders across the ground floor. ‘At least there we can sleep undisturbed, unless we are attacked by dive bombers,’ the King wrote to Queen Mary. ‘We still have the deep underground shelter to go to as a last resort, which is safe.’
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In the early days of the war, the inhabitants of the Castle were alerted to air raids not only by outside sirens but also by loud electric bells which clanged through the corridors. In one early air raid everyone made their way to their shelters – everyone, that is, except the nine-year-old Princess Margaret. Then, according to Owen Morshead, ‘After a little time Miss Crawford was sent like the dove out of the ark to retrieve her, and after threading her way along endless deserted passages, she found the child still in her bedroom. She was on her knees before her chest of drawers, the room in disarray, hurriedly searching for a pair of knickers to go with her skirt.’
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Reminiscing later, Queen Elizabeth recalled that one of the Princesses’ nannies always wore a nightcap to the shelter – ‘I think she thought it was to be decent in the war.’ She herself wore a gown which Hartnell had made especially for air-raid nights, and he also made her a black-velvet case for her gas mask.
145
Windsor was attacked on two consecutive nights in October 1940, although the Castle was not hit. This, the Queen wrote to her sister May, was ‘the first time that the children had actually heard the whistle & scream of bombs. They were wonderful, & when I went to say
good-night to Margaret in her bed, I said that I hoped she wasn’t frightened etc, & she said “Mummy, it was just like when you take a photograph that doesn’t come out – all grey & blurred, & you see several hands & arms instead of one”, & it is so true, really very much what one feels like.’
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After the raid, the Queen visited bombed areas of Windsor and followed up by sending blankets to some whose houses had been destroyed.
The Castle was never warm in winter – the high rooms were hard to heat, the wind whistled through the tall windows. The King would sometimes sit in his room with a travelling rug wrapped around his feet, having failed in every other way to cope with the draught along the floor. In an attempt to ease the cold, electric radiators were installed in the window bays.
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Now the western end of St George’s Hall boasted a temporary stage on which the two Princesses and their friends from time to time gave entertainments. They played the piano and tap-danced, and put on a performance of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party from
Alice in Wonderland
– Princess Margaret distinguished herself as the Dormouse. Among their constant audience was a company of Grenadier Guards, stationed in the Castle mews to protect the Royal Family. They were welcomed – otherwise the Princesses were often alone with their governesses, a Castle official and perhaps Gerald Kelly the portraitist.
