The Crown

by Robert Lacey

  ‘My Princess’s taste was definitely low-brow,’ noted the footman disdainfully. Margaret had a ‘very fine’ collection of classical music, but when her friends came to call, ‘the symphonies, concertos and arias remained solidly in their covers’.94

  The leading characters of the ‘Margaret Set’ in the years 1956–9 were young aristocrats – Colin Tennant, the future Baron Glenconner; Johnny Dalkeith, the future Duke of Buccleuch; and John George Vanderbilt Henry Spencer-Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, who was known as ‘Sunny’ Blandford after one of his lesser titles as Earl of Sunderland. Lacking a title, but not short of money, was the tall but stooping figure of William Euan ‘Billy’ Wallace, the son of Euan Wallace, who had been Neville Chamberlain’s Minister of Transport. Shambling and languid with a receding jawline which rendered him almost chinless, Wallace was witty and well-read, with an entertaining line in repartee. He was three and a half years older than the Princess and was constantly proposing marriage to her. Early in January 1956, to their mutual surprise, she accepted him.

  The brief – and secret – engagement of Billy Wallace to Princess Margaret opens Episode 304 of The Crown, entitled ‘Beryl’ after the nickname the Princess scratches out for herself, at one point, using a diamond to make her marks on a mirror. Margaret later explained to her biographer Christopher Warwick that she accepted Wallace early in 1956 (the fateful year of Suez) because she felt it was better ‘to marry somebody at least one liked’ than to end up on the shelf.95 The previous August she had passed 25, the age by which society women were expected to be safely ‘hitched’ in the 1950s, with a couple of children. That was certainly what the Queen had managed to accomplish, and Margaret had always fancied herself rather niftier than her sister.

  Billy Wallace was amusing and original. He used to turn up at Clarence House in his little Italian ‘bubble car’, whisking Margaret off to his South Street townhouse in Mayfair, where they were served by liveried flunkies, or down to Beechwood near Petworth in Sussex, well positioned for the polo at Cowdray Park and the races at Goodwood. Wallace’s four brothers had all died in the course of the Second World War, leaving him sole heir to his father’s seven-figure fortune. With his faux-diffident style, which some compared to P. G. Wodehouse’s bumbling Bertie Wooster – ‘I know perfectly well that I’ve got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess’ – Billy was fondly known among Margaret’s friends as her ‘Old Faithful’.96

  Faithful, heh? After her experience with Peter Townsend, Margaret had told Wallace that she would only marry him if she had her sister’s express blessing and provided that no obstacles were found to the marriage. Elizabeth and Philip were then away on a state visit to Nigeria, not scheduled to return for the best part of a month, so Billy took himself off to the Bahamas – to recover from the recurring kidney infections that plagued him, according to some sources or, according to the columnist Nigel Dempster, to enjoy a final ‘bachelor’ holiday before marriage.97 The young man did this in style, staying with friends at Lyford Cay, an exclusive new development comprising a golf club and villas near Nassau that had been started by the Canadian brewer E. P. Taylor – with a beautiful daughter Louise, whom Billy promptly seduced.

  ‘Flushed with his conquest,’ Colin Tennant later related, Billy ‘didn’t even bother to call Princess Margaret on his return. She naturally soon heard that he was back, and telephoned to ask him if he was doing anything that evening. He said, “Nothing much,” so she asked him to Clarence House to have an egg or something for supper, and when he arrived he told her all about his fling. She was furious and threw him out … He told me he was rather surprised by her attitude.’98

  Margaret did not speak to the wayward Wallace for more than a year. According to another friend and member of the ‘Margaret Set’, the publisher Jocelyn Stevens, the Princess ‘became very bitter about Billy’99 – although she did eventually come to realise what a lucky escape she had had, and even forgave him. Besides, by the early months of 1958, Margaret had developed other interests. Her new lady-in-waiting Elizabeth Cavendish had made efforts to introduce Margaret to a less chinless and rather more socially representative group of friends, some of whom are imagined in this episode: film director Ken Russell; jazz singer George Melly; painter Lucian Freud; pianist and comedian Dudley Moore – and an unconventional young photographer, Antony Armstrong-Jones, of whom we shall hear a great deal more in subsequent episodes …

  On Saturday 23 August 1958, a group of nine white youths armed with iron bars, blocks of wood, an air pistol and a knife, set out on what one of them described as a ‘nigger hunting expedition’ in the streets of Notting Hill, little more than a mile north of Kensington Palace. By the time the ‘hunters’ were finished that Saturday night, five black men lay in hospital, three of them in a serious condition.100

  Matters worsened the following Friday when a mob of two hundred or more whites armed themselves with sticks and butchers’ knives to parade aggressively through the streets with shouts like ‘Go home you black bastards!’101 The riots that followed were the worst racial violence that Britain had ever seen – the beginning of a series of conflicts both in Notting Hill and more widely across the country that would provide a sorry sub-plot to much of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.102

  Preserved today in the National Archives, the papers that document the first Notting Hill riots make clear that the aggression that summer originated with neo-Nazi, ‘Keep Britain White’ activists.103 There were three more days of rioting, in which local Jamaicans retaliated by hurling homemade Molotov cocktails and by wielding machetes of their own. By the time the violence was over, 108 people had been arrested, with dozens hospitalised104 – and in the agonised debate that followed, comparisons were inevitably made to the Suez Crisis of two years earlier.105 In 1956 Britain had forfeited her foreign reputation in the sands of Egypt. Now she had lost what remained of her moral prestige as well. What price the ‘Mother’ country?

  Britain’s ‘Immigration Issue’, as politicians described it, could be traced back ten years to 22 June 1948, when the troopship Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks in Essex carrying 492 Jamaicans who had embarked at Kingston.106 The image of the new, non-white arrivals filing down the gangplank of the Empire Windrush with their suitcases has come to symbolise the beginning of modern British multicultural society. But 20 years later opinion polls showed discouraging support for the views expressed by Enoch Powell, MP, former Health Minister and Shadow Defence Secretary, in his inflammatory ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of April 1968, when he criticised current rates of immigration and opposed the anti-discrimination laws that were being proposed at the time.107

  The Windsor response to the issue has always been to remain resolutely colour-blind, with Elizabeth, Philip and the entire royal family exuding genuine warmth towards a succession of black African activists and, quite strikingly, as we shall see in Chapter Eight, towards Ghana’s firebrand leader Kwame Nkrumah. In her 1961 Christmas broadcast, the Queen paid tribute to ‘the quiet people who fight prejudice by example’.108 But when it comes to racial relations inside Britain, Elizabeth II’s own example, certainly as an employer, has been quiet to the point of silence. Through the racially turbulent second half of the twentieth century when the nation’s buses, trains and hospitals relied heavily on African-Caribbean workers, there was a striking absence of black faces at Buckingham Palace, with just 6 per cent of domestic staff coming from ethnic backgrounds, by one estimate – and plain zero per cent of the senior courtiers and private secretaries.109 Only with the marriage of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle in 2018, and the birth in the following year of their son Archie, the first mixed-race member of the modern royal family, has the contentious question been laid, to some extent, to rest.110

  In the late 1950s Princess Margaret was unique among the modern young Windsors for her obvious non-white interests and friendships. She attended concerts by the American jazz trumpeter and singer Louis �
�Satchmo’ Armstrong, who hailed her loudly from the stage as ‘one hip chick’,111 and she was a similar fan of Count Basie and his orchestra who, in 1957, recorded the song ‘H.R.H.’ in her honour.

  1948 – New arrivals: HMT Empire Windrush docking at Tilbury

  Closest of all was the Princess’s friendship with Grenada-born Leslie Hutchinson, ‘Hutch’, the tall and handsome black crooner who had been popular with King Edward VIII and also with Dickie Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina – with whom ‘Hutch’ was rumoured to have had a lengthy affair.112 Although Buckingham Palace refused, as a consequence, to allow ‘Hutch’ on the bill of any Royal Command Performance, Margaret always insisted on sitting as close as she could to the singer’s trademark white grand piano whenever he was performing at Quaglino’s, the St James’s restaurant favoured by the ‘Margaret Set’. She would chat animatedly with ‘Hutch’ between songs, and sometimes dance with him, inviting him to go with her and the rest of the party to round off the evening at the Colony Club, George Raft’s nightclub in Berkeley Square.113 But whenever ‘Hutch’ came and went from these establishments without Princess Margaret, it was usually via the tradesmen’s entrance.114

  Tony Armstrong-Jones may or may not have encountered Princess Margaret at the April 1956 wedding of the Tennants in a significant fashion. Both were certainly present as friends of the couple, and Tony had been commissioned to take the wedding pictures. Tony did meet Margaret at a dinner party at the home of her lady-in-waiting, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, as depicted, though this was in early 1958, several months after the other events in this episode. The image of Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret, which closes the episode, is based on one that Tony took of Margaret published in 1959 – his first official birthday portrait of his future wife.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘MARIONETTES’

  AUGUST–DECEMBER 1957

  ‘THERE ARE PROBABLY QUITE A LOT OF PEOPLE,’ WROTE THE journalist and commentator Malcolm Muggeridge in October 1955, ‘… who, like myself, feel that another newspaper photograph of a member of the royal family will be more than they can bear. Even Princess Anne, a doubtless estimable child, becomes abhorrent by constant repetition. Already she has that curious characteristic gesture of limply holding up her hand to acknowledge applause. The Queen Mother, the Duke of Edinburgh, Nanny Lightbody, Group Captain Townsend – the whole show is utterly out of hand …’115

  Thirty months after her coronation of June 1953, the new Queen Elizabeth II and her family were still basking in the ongoing warmth of national veneration, and Muggeridge was a rare voice in arguing that Britain’s slavish cult of royalty was both unnatural and foolish – and could even be dangerous. As editor of the satirical magazine Punch, charged with what he later described as the doomed occupation of ‘trying to make the English laugh’, Muggeridge felt that exposure of the royal family to humour and caricature was, in fact, a healthy thing, since it emphasised that the royals were ‘mortal men and women like the rest of us’.

  ‘To put them above laughter,’ he wrote, ‘above criticism, above the workaday world, is, ultimately, to dehumanise them.’ Such idolatry, he contended, was actually a threat to the monarchy’s very survival.116

  Entitled ‘Royal Soap Opera’, Muggeridge’s article attracted little notice when it appeared in the New Statesman in 1955, ignored by all the newspapers117 and shunned by the BBC as just the sort of diatribe that a one-time Communist sympathiser might well compose in a journal for lefties.118 Muggeridge gave shape to the discomfort that a minority had come to feel at the ‘royalty worship’ of the coronation era, but it took the 1956 humiliation of Suez to open more people’s eyes and minds – along with the publication in August 1957 of a special issue of a small circulation journal, the National and English Review (formerly the National Review), that was devoted to ‘The Monarchy Today’.119

  Founded in 1883, the National Review sought to promote ideas of social reform within the Conservative Party, notably under the editorship of Edward Grigg (1879–1955), a progressive Tory MP for the Manchester suburb of Altrincham, who had been raised to the peerage as Baron Altrincham in 1945 in recognition of his services to Churchill’s wartime government.120 His son John, the second Lord Altrincham, pursued the same liberal agenda when he took over the Review in 1954, attacking Suez when it happened, then deciding to investigate the work and purpose of the crown the following summer because, as he later put it, ‘I was rather worried by the general tone of comment, or the absence of comment really in regards to the monarchy – the way we were sort of drifting into a kind of Japanese Shintoism’ (Shinto being the traditional religion of Japan that glorifies the emperor with rigidly ritual practices).121

  Most of Altrincham’s contributors to the August 1957 issue were rising Conservatives of a reforming frame of mind, notably Humphry Berkeley, a future MP who provided an article about the royal finances in which he argued that the royal family gave good value for money.122 The journalist B. A. Young was not so approving in his analysis of recent royal public engagements, suggesting that 34 public appearances in 90 days was ‘hardly a back-breaking programme for a company whose principal raison d’être is the making of public appearances’.123 Looking more closely at those 34 royal engagements listed for the May–July 1957 Season, Young noted that only three could be considered ‘cultural’ activities – adding that if those particular three performances reflected Buckingham Palace’s idea of ‘culture’, then one could only conclude that the royal family had ‘deplorably bad taste’.124

  But it was editor Altrincham who really landed the issue’s knockout blow in an unashamedly personal analysis of Queen Elizabeth II that has never been equalled in its directness and vigour – starting with all the hoo-ha of the ‘New Elizabethan Age’ which had set the theme for the coronation four summers earlier: ‘“Crawfie” [the young Elizabeth’s nanny], Sir Henry Marten [her constitutional history teacher], the London season, the race-course, the grouse-moor, Canasta, and the occasional royal tour,’ wrote Altrincham scathingly, ‘– all this would not have been good enough for Queen Elizabeth the First! It says much for the Queen that she has not been incapacitated for her job by this woefully inadequate training. She has dignity, a sense of duty, and (so far as one can judge) goodness of heart – all precious assets. But will she have the wisdom to give her children an education very different from her own? Will she, above all, see to it that Prince Charles is equipped with all the knowledge he can absorb without injury to his health, and that he mixes during his formative years with children who will one day be bus drivers, doctors, engineers, etc. – not merely with future land-owners or stockbrokers? These are crucial questions.’125

  Altrincham made clear his sympathy with the royal dilemma – ‘the seemingly impossible task of being at once ordinary and extraordinary’126 – and he acknowledged that the Queen was not helped in this respect by the exclusive and upper-crust character of her advisers. They ‘are, almost without exception,’ he wrote regretfully, ‘the “tweedy” sort’.127 But he did not shrink from blaming Elizabeth herself for the monarchy’s central passivity and lack of initiative. When she has ‘lost the bloom of youth,’ he wrote, the Queen would have ‘to say things which people can remember and do things on her own initiative which will make people sit up and take notice’.128 So far, she had signally failed to do this, in Altrincham’s opinion, and he was particularly critical of her public speaking style and content – or, rather, the lack of either.

  ‘She will not …’ he wrote, ‘achieve good results with her present style of speaking, which is, frankly, “a pain in the neck”. Like her mother, she appears to be unable to string even a few sentences together without a written text … But even if the Queen feels compelled to read all her speeches, great and small, she must at least improve her method of reading them … The personality conveyed by the utterances that are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation.’129 />
  The newspapers that had ignored Malcolm Muggeridge’s criticisms two years earlier now leapt on Altrincham’s remarks about the royal speech-making with delight and fury – his ‘priggish schoolgirl’ remark drew particularly gleeful repetition130 – and Episode 205 of The Crown opens with the widespread outrage that the peer’s remarks provoked. We see Philip Kinghorn Burbidge, a member of the League of Empire Loyalists (an anti-immigrant group with Fascist origins, which would later merge with other right-wing organisations to form the National Front), striding up to Altrincham as he left the studios of ITV where he had just been interviewed by the news presenter Robin Day. Burbidge struck the peer forcefully across the face, then spat on him derisively, shouting, ‘You traitor!’131

  Imposing a nominal fine of 20 shillings on Burbidge for his assault, the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate expressed his sympathy for the defendant’s patriotic feelings. ‘Ninety-five per cent of the population of this country,’ he declared, ‘were disgusted and offended by what was written.’132 Up in Cheshire, the town council representing ‘the ratepayers of this ancient town of Altrincham’ joined in the protests, summoning a meeting ‘completely to disassociate from’ the young scoundrel who, thanks to his father, their former MP, just happened to carry their name. ‘No town has a greater sense of loyalty to the Crown,’ they proclaimed, ‘than the Borough of Altrincham’.133

  But as the storm calmed, it turned out that quite a number of people actually agreed with Altrincham’s sentiments. Bill Connor (‘Cassandra’ of the Daily Mirror) reported that readers’ letters were running thirteen to two in the peer’s favour134 – and Altrincham’s comments appeared to strike a special chord with the young. Forty-seven per cent of 16–34-year-olds agreed with him, according to the Daily Mail, as compared to 39 per cent disagreeing – while there was widespread support across all age groups, by a ratio of 55:21, for his arguments that the court’s social circle should be widened beyond ‘a tight little enclave of English ladies and gentlemen’.135