by Robert Lacey
When her husband did get home, Margaret’s welcome could often be needy, demanding reassurance from which Tony sought to escape. He had a studio and metal-welding workshop at KP to which he would retreat for entire evenings with his friend and fellow designer James Cousins, working on his furniture into the small hours. Taking pity on Margaret, Cousins might join her for dinner – through most of which the Princess sat watching the television. But Tony stayed resolutely working in the welding room.
The tension erupted in February 1965 when the family gathered for their annual service at Windsor to commemorate the death of the revered King George VI. Margaret wanted to stay at Windsor that night, but Tony insisted that he had to go down to Old House, his former family home in Sussex. The couple were with the Queen Mother when the row broke out, and they stalked up and down her drawing room at Royal Lodge shouting fiercely at each other – as if she were not there.
This uncontrolled rancour in front of a family member – Margaret’s own mother and the number one fan of ‘dear Tony’ – was the start of a downward spiral charted by Tony’s biographer Anne de Courcy, who spent many hours interviewing her subject.372 Now arguing in front of other people came to be something of a Snowdon performance – it was almost as if the pair of them took pleasure in it. That summer they got into an argument at the home of Margaret’s friend Judy Montagu in Rome, where Tony climbed out of a window and took refuge on the roof, shouting, ‘It’s the only place I can get away from her!’373 Later that summer, he also cut short his stay with the whole family up at Balmoral. In the early to mid-1960s the royal sisters had been enjoying their family time in Scotland with their husbands and growing broods of young children, but now Tony slipped away two weeks early.
This was the background for the Snowdons’ visit to New York and Washington in November 1965, the subject of Episode 302.374 The couple had made two overseas tours before – to Denmark and Uganda – but America was the big time. The serious political setting was provided by Britain’s ongoing economic difficulties – a combination of the debts run up by Harold Macmillan to fund his ‘Never Had It So Good’375 years, and the mistrust with which the banks and other financial institutions were viewing Harold Wilson’s new Labour government.376 Where better to visit and generate monetary goodwill than in the very heartland of American capitalism?
Harold Wilson had been working hard with the Queen to charm Jack Kennedy’s Texan successor in the White House, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had taken over after JFK’s 1963 assassination. The possibility that Elizabeth could help Wilson secure a US financial bailout by issuing a highly coveted invitation to President Johnson to some intimate royal event, like a weekend of shooting in Balmoral, may or may not have been discussed. But LBJ’s description of Elizabeth and Wilson operating as a ‘double act’ does correspond to the historical evidence. After their initial difficulties, which we witnessed in the previous episode (301), the Queen and her Labour Prime Minister could fairly be described as acting, in LBJ’s words, like ‘tag team wrestlers’.
In November 1964 ‘LBJ’ had been re-elected in his own right by a landslide. With over 60 per cent of the popular vote, the new President had won the largest share of the US electorate for more than a century, and his triumph encouraged his already assertive style.377 In this episode we see him coarsely discussing the Queen, Harold Wilson and the Brits in general with his old friend Marvin Watson – all while urinating. This crude display was a lifelong habit that started when Johnson was a young senator and used to make use of his office wash basin for this purpose – during meetings. In mixed company, the President might pull down his trousers to scratch his rear end, and he once mortified his National Security Advisor McGeorge ‘Mac’ Bundy by demanding that he should deliver an important set of documents to him in the toilet stall – while he was still moving his bowels.378
LBJ’s crudity knew no bounds. Arthur Goldberg, the US ambassador to the United Nations, recalled a White House meeting in which a group of journalists asked Johnson why America was involved in Vietnam. The President unzipped his fly, according to Goldberg, drew out his substantial organ (which he liked to call ‘Jumbo’) and declared, ‘This is why!’379
The Vietnam War was the tragedy that came to define the Johnson presidency – in 1968 it would bring him down380 – and it was the underlying theme of his relations with Harold Wilson and Britain. US military involvement in Southeast Asia to hold back Communist China and North Vietnam had been a staple of US foreign policy going back long before Kennedy. It was a cornerstone of Western Cold War strategy, in Washington’s view, and Johnson’s response to Harold Wilson’s perpetual pleas for financial bailouts was that Britain should repay the favour by sending troops to help the effort in Vietnam.
Over the months, the President moderated his requests – from an aircraft carrier and fighter squadron down to one regiment, the Black Watch, and eventually to just a few token pipers. But Wilson consistently refused. Popular feeling in Britain was running high against Vietnam, and inside his own party in particular. Wilson knew he would be finished as Labour leader if he conceded to the US – which only made LBJ more furious. ‘We’ve got enough pollution around here already,’ he complained in response to yet another London request for a meeting, ‘without Harold coming over with his fly open and his pecker hanging out, peeing all over me.’381
This backdrop presented the two flying Snowdons with quite a challenge when they landed in New York for their three-week tour in November 1965, and Episode 302 depicts them pulling off the trick with some elan. Harold Wilson’s exuberant descriptions of drinking and limerick contests, with Margaret kissing LBJ, are fictitious – but we do know that the occasion was judged a jovial success, with dancing into the small hours. Margaret’s role in procuring the financial bailout is original to the drama, and while there were, in fact, three economic rescue efforts – one in November 1964, one in September 1965 and one in July 1966 – none was as a result of this dinner.
In reality, the Snowdons’ mishmash of private parties and official events failed to excite many Americans – and generated active hostility back in Britain. Elizabeth had welcomed the idea that her brother-in-law should celebrate the New York publication of his new book of photographs, Private View, but the British press saw this as an abuse of the £30,000 or so that taxpayers had stumped up to facilitate the ‘jolly’.382 Margaret and Tony were becoming increasingly unpopular with the press – or, rather, increasingly popular as an easy target. Criticism had started with complaints about the expense of renovating Apartment 1A in 1961383 – now this US tour marked a further shift in media hostility. The Queen was still off limits, but the Snowdons, it seemed, were not.
Towards the end of the episode we sit in with Philip and Elizabeth as they discuss the Snowdon problem. ‘Margaret does suffer more than anyone else by not having a more meaningful role …’ says Elizabeth sympathetically. ‘She IS overlooked. And in terms of ability and character and intelligence and flair, she doesn’t deserve to be overlooked. So why shouldn’t we consider expanding the role? Sharing the job a bit more?’
‘There are two answers to that question,’ replies her husband. ‘Neither makes for pretty listening. Yes – the system IS unequal. And unjust. And cruel. Primogeniture divides and destroys families. The system stinks. But in its cruelty and injustice, it reflects something brutal and unfair which no one is suggesting we rearrange – LIFE. We all desire equality, but here’s the thing, we weren’t born equal.’
Then Philip moves on to his second answer, which turns out to be a story about ‘that God-awful monster, Tommy Lascelles’, the courtier with whom viewers of The Crown will be familiar from Season 1.384 Sir Alan Frederick Lascelles (1887–1981), ‘Tommy’ to his friends since his days at Marlborough College and Oxford, was the long-serving private secretary to the Sovereign from 1943 to 1953. And he certainly ran Buckingham Palace – and just about the whole monarchy – for both King George VI and then for the new young Queen Elizabeth II, stee
ring the crown through the Second World War, the challenges of the post-war Labour government and the coronation of 1953.
If anyone knew the different faces of the house of Windsor it was ‘Tommy’, and Philip relates how he got drunk one night with the old courtier, who divulged his personal theory about the family that he had studied at such close quarters – ‘which I’ve not repeated to anyone since’.
‘Go on,’ says the Queen, intrigued.385
These speeches are all fictitious, remember, as invented by writer Peter Morgan, but the Lascelles theory, as now repeated by Prince Philip, is solidly based on historical fact. Start by imagining, says Philip, that exotic creature of royal heraldry, the imperial double-headed eagle, or Reichsadler, as it is known in Germany. ‘For the purposes of this conversation, I should like you to think of this eagle as representing us – this family. YOUR family. One body, two heads. One name. But two minds. Two characters. Two personalities. Two strains. There have always been the dazzling Windsors and the dull ones.’386
Philip then goes on to show how the ‘dull’ Windsors and the ‘dazzling’ Windsors have often tended to operate side by side, like the double-headed eagle, in a set of contrasting pairs: ‘For every Victoria, you get an Edward VII. For every George V, you get a Prince Eddy. For every George VI, you get an Edward VIII.’387
To explain these comparisons – let us start with the dazzling delinquents as listed by Lascelles and Philip: King Edward VII (1841–1910) was Queen Victoria’s playboy son and successor as monarch, compelled in 1891 to appear in court following his involvement in the illegal card-playing ‘Baccarat’ scandal;388 Prince Eddy (1864–92) was Edward’s eldest son, Prince Albert Victor, implicated in the Cleveland Street homosexual brothel scandal and unfairly rumoured – but popularly rumoured just the same – to be the (unidentified) Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper;389 while Edward VIII (1894–1972) was the dashing but wilful Edward the Abdicator, the Duke of Windsor who, as we have seen in previous chapters, was very happy to suck up to Hitler.390 Tommy Lascelles had worked for Edward VIII on two occasions, actually resigning from his service in 1929 in protest at his poor behaviour as Prince of Wales, then returning to steer the monarchy through the abdication.391
To match these erratic shooting stars, Philip lists the dull but dependable Queen Victoria (1819–1901), who gave the name ‘Victorian’ to an entire style of smug, boring and priggish behaviour;392 her plodding grandson King George V (1865–1936) stolidly sticking stamps into his stamp album;393 followed by his equally unexciting son King George VI (1895– 1952) stuttering his way to anonymity394 – all three of them combining, says Philip, to create a thoroughly reliable but ‘uninterrupted line of stolid, turgid, dreariness…’
‘Culminating in me!’ says Elizabeth ruefully, as she understands where her husband is leading.
‘For every Lilibet,’ smiles Philip, ‘you get a Margaret.’
‘Let’s not delude ourselves,’ he continues. Margaret and her glamorous husband might attract some headlines in America, but ‘this is no time to rewrite the constitutional rule book … You are the Queen – and she is your dangerous baby sister.’395
As future episodes will show, the theory of the double-headed eagle will provide a shrewd insight into many of the dramas confronting the house of Windsor as it continues its progress into the final quarter of the twentieth century.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘ABERFAN’
OCTOBER 1966
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1939, RICHARD LLEWELLYN’S How Green Was My Valley romanticised the mining villages of South Wales to the world – via a bestselling novel, a Hollywood movie, two BBC TV drama series and even a musical that opened on Broadway on 21 May 1966. Llewellyn painted an idealised picture of the coal-mining communities whose back-breaking labour underpinned Britain’s industrial greatness – all thanks, of course, to the ‘black gold’ that was hacked out so painfully, shovel by shovel, from beneath the green grass of the picturesque surrounding hills.396
But those valleys seemed a good deal less green after 21 October 1966 – five months to the day, by chance, following the New York opening of the musical – when the pupils of Pantglas Junior School wended their way through the pouring rain to school in the little village of Aberfan. ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ was the hymn that they sang every morning – composed in another Welsh valley, as it happened, just 20 miles away beside the River Usk, in Monmouthshire.397 But the hymn was postponed that Friday. With school due to end at midday to mark the start of half-term, the headmistress decided to delay the singing until the farewell assembly, when she could wish all her charges a safe and enjoyable holiday. The children never sang the hymn.
Sometime around 9.15 a ‘rumbling, rumbling, rumbling’ was heard, as if a jet plane was passing low overhead.398 ‘It’s only thunder, it will go soon,’ said young Jeff Edwards’ maths teacher reassuringly, as he started chalking on the blackboard. But the next thing Jeff remembered was waking up on the floor, only alive and able to breathe because he was trapped in the air pocket beneath his desk. His classmates were dead around him, as was his maths teacher, swallowed in a glistening black avalanche of colliery rubbish and mud that had overwhelmed the school and was already starting to harden like cement.
‘My desk was pinned against my stomach, and a girl’s head was on my left shoulder,’ remembered Edwards. ‘She was dead. Because all the debris was around me, I couldn’t get away from her. The image of her face comes back to me continuously.’399
A huge refuse tip of colliery rubbish – discarded, unmarketable pit dust – had come roaring down the hillside through the mist like a river of slime, engulfing rocks, trees and cottages, then rupturing a water main which engorged the flood still further and speeded the velocity of its murderous descent. The powdery waste combined with the water to form a lethal flood of sludge that killed 20 people in the flattened hillside homes and village houses beside the school – all creatures great and small.
Inside the school, the death toll would total five teachers and 109 pupils – almost half the children in the village. Nansi Williams, the school’s beloved dinner lady, threw herself on top of five children as they walked down the corridor to save them from the debris of a collapsing wall, and they lay stunned and flattened beneath her body as she took the full impact. After a while, the children began to recover and call Nansi’s name, then started tugging at her hair to get some response – ‘She wasn’t saying anything to us.’ After more calling and tugging, the children came to realise that their protector must be dead.400
‘It was black all around me,’ recalls Jeff Edwards of the small space below his desk. ‘But there was an aperture of light about ten foot above … I remember seeing particles of dust spinning and glistening where the light caught them. I could hear crying and screaming. As time went on, they got quieter and quieter as children died. They were buried and running out of air.’401
Edwards lay for 90 minutes or so beneath the hardening muck, gasping for breath, with death on his shoulder. Rescuers had dived bravely into the wreckage within minutes. The crash had been heard more than a mile away. But it was hard-going to fight a path through the chaos.
‘I heard the men breaking a window and someone said, “There’s someone down here …”,’ the boy remembered. ‘They started to remove all the girders and debris from around me, but they still couldn’t get me out. The firemen got their hatchets out and hacked away at my desk.’402
Jeff Edwards was the tenth child to be brought out of Pantglas alive – and the last. By the time the final corpses had been recovered, the rapidly congealing slag which had a bone-hardening and also a corrosive effect, had eaten away at their skin and their features. Wrapped in blankets, the little bodies were taken to a makeshift mortuary in the Bethania Chapel, where grieving parents queued for hours to identify their children.
‘I saw such dreadful things, Mummy,’ wrote Alix Palmer, a trainee journalist who was confronted by the heartbreaki
ng corpses of children on her first major assignment for the Daily Express. ‘They brought out the deputy headmaster, still clutching five children, their bones so hardened that they first had to break his arms to get the children away, then their arms to get them apart. And the mothers of two of them watched it happen.’403
Palmer reported on the rescue operations, with firemen, police and desperate parents tearing away at the sweating and solidifying tar. ‘Every now and again, the organiser of the operation would yell through a loud-hailer for quiet. That was the most terrible moment of all. Someone had seen an arm or a leg, and everyone longed for the sound of a child crying.’ But after Jeff Edwards there were no more…404
Episode 303’s account of the Aberfan disaster closely follows the dateline of 21 October 1966 and the other events reported through the days that followed, together with the evidence heard during the subsequent tribunal of investigation. All the Aberfan characters in the episode are identified by invented names in order not to cause any further distress to survivors and families of the victims. To this day, as a mark of respect to their classmates who died, Pantglas survivors decline to specify names when discussing the incident.
