The Queen Mother (98 page)

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Authors: William Shawcross

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That month the King and Queen visited Manchester after a particularly heavy air raid. She saw that the little homes which had clustered around factories had collapsed ‘like packs of cards’. As always, she was impressed by the people’s spirit, despite all that had happened to them.
177

The British reaction to suffering moved Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, who paid a visit to London at this time. He stayed the night at Windsor and dined alone with the King and Queen. They impressed him. ‘He shows no trace of stammer and speaks often loudly with a kind of excitement. She looks older but as fascinating as ever,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘She is as wise as possible and has the shrewdest estimate of all the Cabinet.’
178

There were lighter moments. At the beginning of March 1941 the King and Queen journeyed north to visit the Scottish cities. At Glamis’s tiny railway station they were pleasantly astonished to be met by a Polish guard of honour. As the King said, ‘No one in their sanest moments would have thought such a thing possible a very few years ago.’
179
They lunched with General Sikorski at Forfar and inspected his troops. ‘They were very nice,’ the Queen told Princess Elizabeth, ‘& we walked along miles of coast which they are guarding. We were asked occasionally to go down what looked like a large rabbit hole, & how we did it, I don’t know! But we
did
, & came out again very nearly doubled up!’
180
She was impressed by the Poles’ exquisite manners: ‘what with extremely good-looking young Counts and Princes loose in the countryside, I tremble for the love-stricken young ladies of North East Scotland!’
181

While she was at Glamis, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret wrote to give her the news from Windsor. There, their education continued under the care of their governess. Princess Elizabeth, now rising fifteen, was still being taught history by Henry Marten. In February 1941 Marion Crawford wrote a long letter to Queen Mary reporting on the Princesses’ progress. Mr Marten, she said, tended to forget who his audience was, and would occasionally bark, ‘Is that quite clear to you, gentlemen?’ But he saw ‘great stuff’ in his pupil, and thought she could compare very well with Etonians a year older than her. She had given a very competent hour’s lecture on explorers
from Columbus to the present day, and had just finished a course on American history on which she had an essay to write.

Both Princesses loved playing the piano and often entertained the Household with duets, Miss Crawford wrote. She thought that Princess Margaret had developed ‘wonderfully’; she was more of a companion for Princess Elizabeth, and she was ‘a joy to teach – always asking questions’. The two Princesses were making excellent progress in French, and at family lunches they spoke only French to their governess. All in all, Marion Crawford assured their grandmother, ‘The children are happy and well; and are having knowledge poured in as fast as I can pour it in.’
182

At one stage the Queen became concerned lest the visits she and the King made to bombed towns were actually attracting more German attacks. On 20 March 1941 they took the train to Plymouth, which had been heavily bombed. That night as they were on the train back to London, ‘the foul Germans made a very heavy attack on the town & dockyard. What
brutes
they are – I am certain that they first go for the working class houses, hoping to break the spirit of our people.’
183
Once back at Windsor she wrote to Lady Astor, MP for Plymouth, to say that since hearing of the bombing she had been ‘thinking of you all without ceasing … That is one of the hard things about being King and Queen of a country that one loves so much. Every time this sort of murderous attack is made, we feel it, as if our own children were being hurt. All we can all do, is to do our very best, and leave the rest in God’s hand.’
184

The war continued badly. The German U-boats in the Atlantic sank half a million tons of British shipping in March 1941 alone. Louis Mount-batten lost his destroyer, HMS
Kelly
, in the Mediterranean during the evacuation of Crete. The cruisers
Gloucester
and
Fiji
were sunk. The Blitz continued – particularly against the ports where convoys berthed – and against London. Shortages grew worse and worse. One egg and a few ounces of meat a week were now the standard ration. Cigarettes could still be bought but alcohol was hard to find. Heating fuel and petrol for cars were short, clothing was rationed, people shivered. Even Churchill sometimes succumbed, privately, to the black dog of despair.
185

The Balkans became a new area of great concern in the spring of 1941. Hitler demanded that Prince Paul, the Regent of Yugoslavia, allow German troops to march through Yugoslavia to subjugate Greece. Despite appeals from King George VI, the Prince felt he had
no alternative and at the end of March 1941 he signed a pact with the Axis powers – Germany, Italy and Japan. The Germans advanced inexorably through the Balkans and by the end of May the entire peninsula was in fascist hands. Prince Paul and Princess Olga went into exile first in Greece, then in Kenya, and spent the rest of the war in South Africa; King George II of Greece escaped and, via Cairo, came to London.

Prince Paul’s conduct saddened the King and Queen, whose friend he had been for so long. Queen Mary was shocked that he had behaved as he did.
186
But the Queen responded that she felt sorry for him – ‘he has made such a mess of his job in the eyes of the world, and that after struggling with immense difficulties for some very unhappy years for himself. Of course, one knows that he is very timorous & sensitive & subtle minded, but things have got too serious in the world, for any country to be able to sign a pact with Germany, & yet be pro-English or neutral. It just doesn’t work & he must have known it.’
187
To Lord Halifax in Washington she wrote, ‘I am sure that he was afraid & perhaps weak, but with all his faults I would trust him before any of these politicians. He was always terrified of a coup d’état, as of course it would mean the disintegration of such an uncomfortably sham country.’
188
It was an acute observation.

Throughout this dark period, the Queen’s life continued with many visits intended to raise morale around the country. In early 1941 these included the 2nd Canadian Division, the WVS Salvage Centres in Paddington, the American Eagle Club in Charing Cross Road, London police stations, bombed areas of East and West Ham, New Scotland Yard, the Red Cross, the British Legion Conference, the Staff College at Camberley and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service at County Hall, the RAF aerodromes of Bomber Command, a battalion of the London Scottish in Sussex, war factories in the north-east of England, the Glider Training Squadron, the Maurice Hostel Community Club in Hoxton.

Lord Harlech, the North-Eastern Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence, accompanied her on a visit to Sheffield, and afterwards described it to Harold Nicolson, who reported to his wife: ‘He says that when the car stops, the Queen nips out into the snow and goes straight into the middle of the crowd and starts talking to them. For a moment or two they just gaze and gape in astonishment. But then they all start talking at once. “Hi! Your Majesty! Look here!” She has
that quality of making everybody feel that they and they alone are being spoken to.’
189

*

T
HROUGH ALL OF
this, the relationship between Churchill and the King and Queen became ever closer. Churchill wrote to the King, ‘I have greatly been cheered by our weekly luncheons in poor old bomb-battered Buckingham Palace, & to feel that in Yr. Majesty and the Queen there flames the spirit that will never be daunted by peril, nor wearied by unrelenting toil.’
190
At the lunches they digressed into subjects other than the war. The Queen had impressed Churchill by sending him the lines from Wordsworth in early 1940 and he realized the pleasure she took in the spoken and written word. He gave her a copy of H. W. Fowler’s
Dictionary of Modern English Usage
, saying, ‘He liberated me from many errors & doubts.’
191
She in turn found Fowler ‘entrancing … very amusing and extremely instructive’.
192

On 6 May 1941 Churchill came to the Palace to tell the King and Queen of an imminent operation to get more tanks and aircraft to General Wavell in Egypt. Because they were required at once, he was planning to send them by the risky route through the Mediterranean to Alexandria. On the evening of Friday 9 May, he wrote to the Queen – she had probably left for Windsor – to let her know how the operation was going. ‘Madam, Tiger started with 306 [tanks]. One claw was torn away & another damaged last night. The anxiety will last for another day at least. More than half is over.’
193
She thanked him for sending news of Operation Tiger. ‘Even though he lacks a claw or two, it is to be hoped that he will still be able to chew up a few enemies. Any risk was well worth taking.’
194
The King was able to record that the operation had been safely completed and that 250 tanks and fifty aircraft had arrived at Alexandria. One ship with fifty tanks on board had struck a mine and sunk in the Narrows – this was presumably the ‘one claw’ to which Churchill referred.
195

On 10 May London suffered another gigantic raid by 400 bombers – on that one night almost 1,500 people were killed, 1,800 were injured, 2,000 fires were started and 11,000 houses were reduced to rubble. Both Houses of Parliament were hit, part of Waterloo station was destroyed, Bow Street Church was flattened, Westminster Abbey was damaged.
196
The Queen was outraged, and wrote to her mother-in-law, ‘Alas, poor London, an even more violent & cruel raid on
Saturday night. Our beautiful national shrines and monuments – It seems such
sacrilege
that they should be destroyed by such wicked lying people as the Germans.’
197

By June over two million British homes had been destroyed – more than half of them in London.
198
Air-raid shelters for the homeless were getting better. The Queen noticed that the bigger ones in the East End now had bunks and running water and that the social services had improved as well. But she and the King had begun to wonder ‘what will happen after the war, when the people will want to go back’ to areas such as Stepney which had been completely destroyed. ‘Of course they were terribly overcrowded anyway, but it will be a great problem, for new houses will take time to build. There will be many very difficult moments, I feel.’
199

What was truly astonishing was how well almost everyone coped with this continual grinding assault – in many ways everyday life continued, as normally as possible. Mail was delivered, trains ran (if not always on time), streets were swept (even more than usual), taxis plied for hire, telephones worked, restaurants stayed open and so did nightclubs, weddings were often celebrated in churches which had no roofs. Shattered shop windows were restored or boarded – as the historian Andrew Roberts has recorded, their owners even competed with cheeky slogans: ‘If you think this is bad, you should see my branch in Berlin.’
200

Hitler’s attack on Russia in June 1941 was not immediately seen as the fatal error that it later proved. Indeed, as the Wehrmacht cut deep into the Soviet Union there were many who feared that another Blitzkrieg might well bring the Nazis another huge success. In summer 1941, with the vast losses in the Atlantic and the German capture of Crete, the war was going very badly for Britain.

The Queen was now able to exploit a personal link in the United States. Her youngest brother, David, was posted to the British Embassy in Washington. His mission was to create a Political Warfare Executive (PWE) in both Washington and New York. Bowes Lyon developed a good relationship with President Roosevelt as well as with the Ambassador, Lord Halifax, and was a useful, personal and independent channel of information to the King and Queen. Like every other Briton in the States he saw his task as trying to persuade the President and the American people that much more should be done to support the
British war effort. He understood the scale of the Queen’s personal success during her 1939 visit to the USA with the King, and he felt that she could do more to capitalize on that. He wrote to pass on a request that she write an article for an American magazine.
201
Instead, she agreed to make a radio broadcast to the women of America; such a broadcast was diplomatically more acceptable now than it had been when first proposed in 1939 because she was able to thank the many Americans who were actively helping the war effort, not least in giving medical supplies.
202
A text was drafted, which she amended and then sent to Churchill for his advice, adding, ‘I fear it is not very polished – a good deal of my own.’
203

Churchill made suggestions, and the broadcast went out on 10 August 1941. It was effective. The Queen talked of the heavy burden being borne by the British people and of their unshakeable constancy under attack: ‘hardship has only steeled our hearts and strengthened our resolution. Wherever I go, I see bright eyes and smiling faces, for though our road is stony and hard, it is straight, and we know that we fight in a great Cause.’ She thanked Americans for all the help that they had already given – canteens, ambulances, medical supplies – and spoke in detail of all the tasks that women were now undertaking in the armed services, in factories, in the fields, in hospitals.

It gives us great strength to know that you have not been content to pass us by on the other side; to us, in the time of our tribulation, you have surely shown that compassion which has been for two thousand years the mark of the Good Neighbour …

The sympathy which inspires it springs not only from our common speech and the traditions which we share with you, but even more from our common ideals. To
you
, tyranny is as hateful as it is to us; to
you
, the things for which we will fight to the death are no less sacred; and – to my mind, at any rate – your generosity is born of your conviction that we fight to save a Cause that is yours no less than ours: of your high resolve that, however great the cost and however long the struggle, justice and freedom, human dignity and kindness, shall not perish from the earth.

I look forward to the day when we shall go forward hand in hand to build a better, a kinder, and a happier world for our children. May God bless you all.
204

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