The Queen Mother (99 page)
Authors: William Shawcross
President Roosevelt wrote at once to the King asking him to tell her that the broadcast was ‘really perfect in every way and that it will do a great amount of good’.
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T
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UEEN
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forty-first birthday was spent at Windsor. Queen Mary sent her good wishes and her prayers for peace and victory ‘& that you may be given health & strength to carry on the help & comfort you have given to many since the war started. You have given so much help too, to my & your dear Bertie, help for which I shall ever be grateful as your
joint
loving Mama.’
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Among her many other letters of congratulation was one from the Bishop of St Albans, who praised her and the King for the ‘quiet steady lead’ that they were giving the country ‘in these grim but glorious days’.
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The Queen and her daughters were able to get to Scotland for a welcome holiday in the second half of August 1941. The King joined them a few days later; he had remained in London to see Churchill on his return from his first, secret wartime meeting with Roosevelt in Newfoundland. Churchill sailed in the new battleship
Prince of Wales
, and Roosevelt in the USS
Augusta
. They met at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland and, although they got on together splendidly, Churchill was disappointed that the President’s ability to assist Britain was still restricted by the continued isolationism of Congress.
The Queen loved being in the sharp fresh air, seeing her husband and daughters relax, and walking in the hills. Within a few days she thought the Princesses were looking ‘ten times better, with pink cheeks and good appetites!’
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It felt healing to both mind and body – ‘Also one stores up energy for whatever may lie ahead.’
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Years later she recalled to her elder daughter, ‘Balmoral is such a very happy house, and I remember thinking when we came up in those awful days of 1941 & 42 how
clean
it felt, in a way pure, & I still feel that now.’
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Mackenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister, came to stay for two nights and described in his meticulous diary a lunch in a little cottage across the moors. There were no staff – the Princesses laid the table and decorated it with lettuce leaves. He found Princess Elizabeth ‘very sweet’ and natural in her conversation, and Margaret entertaining. ‘She would cross her eyes to amuse the company. The Queen told
her to stop doing that for fear they might become fixed in that position and the King had also to tell her the same.’
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From Balmoral they returned south to the stress and destruction. By the end of the year they were living more at Buckingham Palace – the Queen thought it was ‘not too bad considering the lack of windows and general atmosphere of dust and distraction’.
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The losses touched her, as everyone else. One of her footmen, Mervyn Weavers, who had joined the RAF, was missing. ‘He went off in a Wellington, & never came back. I fear that there is little hope. Oh this cruel war, & the sorrows the German spirit has brought to so many young wives, for he was happily married.’
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Tragedy struck the Queen’s own family too. Her nephew John, Master of Glamis, son of her eldest brother Patrick, was killed in action on 19 September 1941 in Egypt, while serving with the Scots Guards.
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Q
UEEN WAS
listening to the wireless in her room when she heard the news of Pearl Harbor on Sunday 7 December 1941. ‘I remember going through to the King and saying “Do you know, I’ve just heard the most extraordinary thing on the wireless. The Japanese have bombed the Americans. It can’t be true.” ’ It was indeed true and she said later that she realized at once what it meant.
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America would now at last enter the war.
Next day both Houses of Congress declared war on Japan, and Britain immediately did the same. Obligingly (and unnecessarily) Hitler then declared war on the United States – this was arguably his biggest single mistake of the war. The King sent a telegram of sympathy to President Roosevelt, now the leader of Britain’s most important ally. ‘We are proud indeed to be fighting at your side against the common enemy. We share your inflexible determination and your confidence that with God’s help the powers of darkness will be overcome.’
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American troops began to be shipped to Britain.
The King and Queen set off on the royal train for a prearranged visit to the mining villages of South Wales. En route the Queen wrote Queen Mary a long letter in which she lamented that Hitler had so far had so much more ‘
luck
’ than Britain. ‘But we seem to be gradually pulling up, and if only the poor Americans keep calm & start working in earnest, we may get sufficient weapons to cope with the Germans.’
She thought it would take time for the US ‘to learn total war methods, which those horrid Japanese have much used. I do feel rather sorry for them (the US), tho’ they have persistently closed their eyes to such evident danger, for they are a very young and untried nation.’
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But there was shocking news to come. While they were in South Wales, the Queen noticed that Tommy Lascelles had been called to the telephone. She then saw him returning towards them ‘with a face of doom. We thought, oh, what’s happened now?’
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Lascelles had just been told that two of Britain’s principal ships, the battleship
Prince of Wales
and the battlecruiser
Repulse
, had been sunk by Japanese planes off the coast of Thailand. ‘And that was a dreadful blow. I’ve never forgotten that,’ the Queen said half a century later.
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The loss of these two great ships cast the country into despair. The King and Queen felt a similar sense of horror. As soon as they were back on the royal train, the King wrote to Churchill to say how shocked he and the Queen were to hear of this ‘national disaster’. He went on: ‘I thought I was getting immune to hearing bad news, but this has affected me deeply as I am sure it has you. There is something particularly “alive” about a big ship which gives one a sense of personal loss apart from consideration of loss of power.’
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Many crewmen were saved but more than 800 were lost, including Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, Commander-in-Chief Eastern Fleet, Churchill’s host on the voyage to Newfoundland only weeks before.
The horror of these losses killed any sense of jubilation over the entry of the United States into the war. As 1941 ended the Queen was weary. But she retained her faith in the spirit and the wisdom ‘of this wonderful people of ours’. Writing a New Year’s note to Queen Mary in Badminton, she said, ‘I expect, that we shall have a very difficult time in this New Year, for the Americans have been caught out, and things must work up to a climax, but I do feel confident, don’t you Mama? Confident in the values and good sense of the British people, & confident that good will prevail in the end. We send you every loving wish for a happier New Year, and may it help to bring victory to our cause.’
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In the next six years the Irish Prime Minister, Eamon de Valera, never once criticized Hitler or the Nazis. When Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, de Valera immediately visited the German envoy in Dublin to express his condolences – and later stated that he had been not only correct but wise to do so.
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Margaret Elphinstone (b. 1925), youngest daughter of the Queen’s sister May Elphinstone; Diana Bowes Lyon (1923 -86), fourth daughter of the Queen’s brother John (‘Jock’) and his wife Fenella.
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Princess Elizabeth continued with the historical essays set her by Henry Marten, the Vice-Provost of Eton, and the Princesses’ German teacher, Hanni Davey, sent them exercises.
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An early draft of this part of the speech in her own hand reads: ‘We too are parted from our children. When I told our little daughters that I was going to broadcast they said “oh Mummy please give our love to all the children”, so I do that now – God bless you all.’ (RA QEQMH/PS/SPE)
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Cecil Beaton (1904–80), photographer and designer, worked for
Vogue
and was renowned for his society portraits and fashion photography. On the recommendation of Prince Paul’s wife Princess Olga, he had been summoned to Buckingham Palace in July 1939 to take a series of photographs of the Queen.
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Augustus John, OM, RA (1878–1961), post-impressionist painter and draughtsman, was known for his Bohemian lifestyle and acclaimed for his portraits.
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Maud (Mollie) Cazalet, who had been a friend of Cecilia Strathmore, was the wife of William Cazalet, and mother of Thelma Cazalet-Keir, a girlhood friend of Queen Elizabeth, of Victor Cazalet MP and of Peter Cazalet, later to become Queen Elizabeth’s racehorse trainer.
‡
Myra Hess (1890–1965) was a celebrated British pianist. During the Second World War, when concert halls were closed, she organized popular lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery, and played in many herself. For this contribution to maintaining the morale of the populace of London, she was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in 1941.
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These lines, from the poem ‘God Knows’, had been sent to the King as he was composing his speech. The poem had been written by Minnie Louise Haskins (1875–1957), a lecturer at the London School of Economics, and had been published privately in 1908.
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John Elphinstone (1914–75) was particularly close to his aunt, the Queen, and when he was released from Colditz in 1945 she was the first person he called. After the war he settled in Scotland and in 1951 bought Drumkilbo, an estate on the borders of Angus and Perthshire.
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On one occasion when she was unable to attend she wrote to Churchill, ‘I am so sorry not to be at “the picnic” today, and hope that conversation will flow unchecked by that incessant prowl round the table by attentive varlets!’ (13 April 1943, CAC CHAR 20/98A/56)
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Soon after Victory in Europe Day in May 1945, Churchill praised the King for his weapons training and recalled that ‘if it had come to a last stand in London, a matter which had to be considered at one time, there is no doubt that His Majesty would have come very near departing from his usual constitutional rectitude by disregarding the advice of his Ministers’. In other words, the King would have wanted to fight the Germans himself rather than be taken to safety. (Hansard, 15 May 1945)
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The Coats Mission was commanded by Major James Coats (1894–1966), later third baronet. He married in 1917 Lady Amy Gordon-Lennox, a great friend of Queen Elizabeth all her life, and sister of Lady Doris Vyner. Another old friend of the Queen, Audrey Pleydell-Bouverie, née James, had been married to James’s brother Dudley.
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Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, newly arrived in Canada, where her husband had been appointed governor general, wrote to the Queen that it was ‘a bitter blow to the Monarchy … I am terribly grieved & it puts all of us Governors’ wives in a horrid position; we are supposed to stand for all that’s best in British home & social life, & now what’s the use – & how can we make any difference between people who place themselves outside the pale when one of the King’s representatives has a wife completely outside the pale.’ (11 July 1940, RA QEQM/PRIV/RF)
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One, Alfred Davies, died of his injuries later.
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Queen Elizabeth’s friend D’Arcy Osborne, then virtually imprisoned in Vatican City, was appalled when he heard on the BBC of the Palace bombing. Owen Chadwick, who recorded Osborne’s extraordinary wartime service in
Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War
, recounted, ‘When Buckingham Palace was bombed, Osborne went wild with rage (the only time in all these events, though not the only time he was angry) and persuaded the Pope to send the King and Queen a telegram of congratulation on their escape.’ (p. 137)
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In February 1941 Lord Woolton suggested to the Queen that a mobile canteen service to be dispatched to bombed areas of London should be named ‘The Queen’s Messengers’. She agreed, and in March formally accepted the first convoy of eighteen canteens sent to Buckingham Palace for her inspection. She later visited the Queen’s Messengers in operation at bomb sites. (Bodleian Library, MS Woolton 2)
YEARS LIKE GREAT BLACK OXEN
1942–1945
‘My heart aches for our wonderful brave people’
T
HE SOMBRE
, defensive and defiant mood of the war is caught in images of Windsor Castle. The Round Tower, Castle Hill and St George’s Gate stand darkly, dramatically brooding against an ever blacker sky. These were the wartime visions of the Castle painted by the artist John Piper at the request of the Queen. His watercolours were controversial at the time but they were immediately recognized as, and remain today, an extraordinary invocation of Britain at war – the age-old fortress of the monarch standing strong against the forces of darkness.
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It was the bombardment of London in 1940 and 1941 that inspired the Queen’s decision to have the Castle painted; she feared lest all or part of it be destroyed by the Germans. Her original idea, which she discussed with her friend Jasper Ridley, was to commission a series of watercolours ‘in the manner of Sandby’,
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who had painted 200 or so watercolours of the Castle during the reign of George III. Ridley consulted Kenneth Clark and together they introduced her to the work of John Piper at an exhibition at the National Gallery.
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She liked what she saw and gave him the commission. Piper was honoured and excited. In all he produced twenty-six watercolours. They were not quite what the Queen had expected – indeed they were far removed from the meticulous topographical records of Paul Sandby. But they were a remarkable body of topographical draughtsmanship, which
captured well the dark menace of the war. In the words of one art historian, ‘the towers of the Castle assume an eerie quality of animation, like sentinels beneath impending apocalyptic clouds’.
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