by Anne Edwards
The King’s prolonged illness had not been easy for Queen Mary. He had been a bad patient and an even worse convalescent. Often querulous and languishing frequently in moods of self-pity, he was no longer the man she knew, but irascible, delicate, and older by many years than his true chronological age. A nurse, Sister Catherine Black, remained on after he had recovered and was to stay with the King for the rest of his life. For, in truth, King George was never again to be in anything but failing health.
By 1930, Queen Mary had spent twenty years as Queen of England, giving the majority of her days and all of her energy to creating a façade on which nothing private was revealed. Even to her Household, family, and friends, she was hard to get to know. Small talk had no place in her private life. She refused to discuss even the predictability of the English weather or the unpredictability of young people. Anyone’s health, including her own and the King’s, was considered a distasteful topic.
Familiarity was not in her nature. Only the King called her May. To all others, she was either “Ma’am” or “Your Majesty.” Except in print, she was never addressed as Queen Mary. She did not smile in public either frequently or easily. Graciousness and a priceless stateliness comprised her public style, and nothing pleased onlookers (who would wait hours to see her pass in a glass coach or appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace) more than for her to bow or to raise her arm in a gesture of greeting.
No matter what the calendar said, Queen Mary was a pure nineteenth-century personality. The people thought of her as being typically English, and since King George’s illness, they thought of her often. She was now before the public on a daily basis and thoroughly enjoyed her increased popularity. The country had entered into a time of severe Depression, and she used her position tirelessly as a means to stimulate business. British industrialists claimed she and the Prince of Wales were England’s two best salesmen. In a contemporary profile, one magazine writer said, “This is unfair. The Queen is the two best salesmen.”
The Queen, indeed, had the best business head in the family. Her shopping expeditions were legend. Crowds followed her; whatever she was seen wearing or buying would swiftly be in such demand that manufacturers would increase production. She attended all industrial fairs and home-furnishing expositions, and photographs were always taken when she made a homely selection for Buckingham Palace—an electric icebox one time, bath mats another. Immediately a sign would go up on a display of the item, “Purchased by Her Majesty the Queen.”
She made cheap brown pottery teapots from the quite humble Marks & Spencer stores indispensable in English homes by buying them for the King’s morning tea in all the Royal residences. She also bought him “a new design of woollen underclothing” (one-piece with a back-flap but no legs) of all English wool, scratchier, nonetheless, than softer-textured foreign imports. At one fair alone, starting out at 10:00 A.M., she walked seven miles stopping at almost every stall, buying handbags, quince and peach jams, Deeside bilberries, Dundee herrings, paint boxes for her grandchildren, and even an 1887 Jubilee umbrella (copies were instantly made and sold at stores all over England). By 1:30 she reached the last stall having been photographed repeatedly, no signs of weariness in her step or expression and not a wisp of hair out of place. Three rooms at Buckingham Palace were needed to cope with her shopping sprees. But much of what she bought she gave away; at Christmas her list of recipients exceeded even those of King Edward.
In 1931, when the economy was at its worst, the Queen insisted on maintaining the formality of the Courts. The number of young ladies being presented doubled in one year from 1,200 to 2,400 (by 1934, this number had risen to 8,000), and with their curtsies, the commerce of thousands of merchants rose in harmony.
In today’s world where so little protocol has been left intact, these Court presentations are difficult to conceive. London correspondent for the New Yorker, Janet Flanner, in her coverage of the four given in 1934, wrote perhaps one of the best of all descriptions:
“The King and Queen,” she began, “want gowns low and long regardless of fashion. Last year stylish high-fronted numbers appeared. The King didn’t like that. The Prince of Wales’s three white ostrich feathers plus a twenty-seven-inch white veil, must be placed on the head in the Ich Dein motto manner; ... three black ostrich feathers in the case of a widow. The 1934 trains stretch eighteen inches back from the heel ... were four and a half yards long before the war, were cut off entirely in post-war 1919, and the following year cut down to the present two and a half yards from the shoulder (the extra long queues of nouveaux riches, plus their fourteen-foot trains, were apparently more than the Queen could stand) ... the train’s weight is distributed between shoulder hooks and stocking tops by a special net corselet, with garters to prevent the gown from pulling back, or even off. Rehearsal of gown, shoes, feathers, fan, jewels, and curtsy are held in the shop before the gown is delivered. Jewels are a great problem in Court-dress designing where fine family stones form the front of the frock. Court gowns must be flamboyant to show against the Palace gilt, the Queen’s blaze of diamonds, and the Royal Household uniforms; a mere chic Paris frock would stand no chance in Buckingham. Before entry to the Throne Room, trains are settled in place by attendants with long ivory poles. Curtsies have from time immemorial been taught by Miss Vacani; Trufitt or Douglas of Bond Street are still the hieratic hairdressers. A debutante is presented by her mother; after marriage, is re-presented by her mother-in-law. Court begins at 9.30 P.M. and ends around midnight, with supper after, the King’s catering and the Queen’s choice being done by Lyons, the teashop people, and very good.”
Besides the four Courts, there was the annual Royal garden party with a record number of guests, the state balls, and the various state banquets. The King and Queen were expected to receive each guest.* No one ever forgot the superb sight of the stately Queen, a magnificent crown on her tousled greying head, wearing déolletage that evidenced a full womanly breast, loaded with priceless jewels, and seated column-straight, hands poised eloquently on her doth-of-gold or silver or creamy ivory or pale pastel lap. The Queen’s Court gowns had no modern connection whatsoever. Elaborate in cut, beaded, gold-and-silver-embroidered, “gusseted, gored, looped, draped, cap-sleeved,” they were uniquely anachronistic; part Empire, part Edwardian. No Royal jewel collection in the world remained that could compare to hers. At Courts, she liked to wear alternating sets of gems—diamonds and emeralds, or pearls, or sapphires. At state dinners, she often wore an outer rope of a hundred and fifty enormous pearls that fell to her waist, three inner strands, a nine-strand dog collar, pearl-and-diamond earrings, a diamond-and-pearl tiara, and all her brilliant orders.
She dressed during the day in light colours, favouring blues that complemented her eyes. The year before the war, Nicholas II had given her magnificent sables as a Christmas gift, and she often wore them. Fur trimmed many of her tweed outfits, and she never wore one without one of her inimitable toques “worn high on her head like a crown.” Janet Flanner remarked that the Queen “dresses in the height of fashion—for queens,” adding that “she looks like herself with the elegant eccentricities ... of a wealthy white-haired grande dame who has grown into the mature style she set for herself too young.” The fact was that whether the Queen was shopping at a street stall or bowing from inside a Royal landau, she could not have been mistaken for anyone but the Queen.
When little Princess Elizabeth (back already Royal straight, bow and wave near perfect) accompanied her, cockney kerbside admirers would comment loudly, “She’s the spit of her granny!” Lilibet, as Queen Mary called the small girl, bore no resemblance to the Queen, apart from her regal poise and fair hair.
The Queen’s public style was a curious mixture of majesty and maternalism, the last probably inspired by her full bosom and kindly manner. She was the quintessential fairy queen, distant and yet approachable at the same time. Entering the kitchen on a tour of a home for crippled boys at Blackheath, the Queen in high toque, pearls, and wh
ite fox, said to the cook and the scullery maid standing rigidly after their nervous curtsies, “What an airy room! And that stove. I know its kind and how useful it is.”
“Oh, yes, Your Majesty, ’is Majesty warmed ’is ’ands by it ten years gone,” the cook spoke up.
“Really? Was it so cold as that?” the Queen inquired.
“Oh, yes, Your Majesty!” the woman replied, and then, somewhat embarrassed at her outspokenness, curtsied nervously again.
In the workshop of this same institution, the Queen examined the jacket worn by a fifteen-year-old crippled boy that the youngster had restitched himself. “It really looks as good as new,” the Queen said, giving him one of her private smiles and patting his shoulder.
Queen Mary was as clever a manager of money as she was a saleswoman. The twenty or more day dresses and fifteen or so evening gowns she bought yearly cost her twenty-five guineas or less each despite their intricate handwork. For years she bought her clothes from two rival English fashion houses. The top price the Queen would pay was tacitly accepted at these couturiers, and seldom had much to do with the actual cost. The Queen’s patronage was worth many thousands of pounds in revenues to both concerns, and it did them no service if she was photographed in an outfit stitched by some seamstress in the back streets of Pimlico (the Queen would have a dress copied if she could not get it for the price she wanted to pay).
Various members of her Household have contributed to a picture of the Queen “at home.” She rose at 7:30 A.M. on days when she had morning engagements, 8:00 A.M. otherwise. In either case, she always poured the King his second cup of tea (he rose at 6:00) from the brown earthenware Marks & Spencer teapot, at which time they both glanced at the Times (an edition on special paper delivered from Printing House Square).* Lady Cynthia Colville reports that the Queen was an avid reader of social reporter Marianne Mayfayre’s column (page 8, the Woman’s Page of the Times), where every day an item appeared about herself or her family or a member of the Court. Her son Georgie has said that as the Queen passed through the Oriental room on her way back from tea with the King, she would pause in a morning ritual before “a row of tall Buddhas whose heads rest on articulated necks which permit them if touched to nod up and down ... As she approached each figure, [she would] gently tap its head, sending the row nodding.”
She whistled in the morning when alone in her apartments (alone usually meaning just the Queen and a lady-in-waiting or one or two of her three dressers). She enjoyed a glass of sherry before lunch and afterward smoked a Virginia tobacco, strawtipped cigarette (a fact forbidden to be repeated beyond the palace gates). At Sandringham, she poured the afternoon tea herself and passed it around. (The tea—her special blend—was kept in a locked jade tea caddy that she kept in a glass vitrine with other of her jade collection, also under lock and key.)* Her favourite meal was “a nice cut off the joint, two vegs, a spot of cheese (the Queen likes her cheese) and a bit of a sweet,” and she was not in the least bashful about taking a second helping of anything. Knitting, crocheting, and embroidering still kept her hands from being idle in the evening, when she and the King were alone. He liked to listen to the radio; she did not.
“Now, George,” she would say, prodding the King inconspicuously with her umbrella when he either swore mildly or spoke too long in public.
Janet Flanner confirms that the Queen had “one of the best memories in the British Empire, certainly the best in the Royal Family, which is high praise since royalty, unlike its subjects, is trained never to forget ... The Queen can remember in Dresden a miniature she had merely read about twenty years before in Richmond Park ... She knows every piece, and on what shelf it stands, of her Chinese collections, which involve hundreds of objects; she remembers every chair in the formal furnishing of her castles’ hundreds of rooms ... Her memory is ocular, not aural; by nature she is more interested in looking than in listening.” However, the Queen could recall the name and recognise the face of a person she had met years before, only once—and at that in a long queue of men and women who were being presented to her.
The twenties had been dominated by the innocent belief that another world war was unthinkable. Young people were filled with idealism, although the Great War could hardly be packed away along with other souvenirs. Ex-officers retained their titles in civilian life to help bolster their status and careers. Throughout the twenties, most of rural England still had no central heating, electricity, and very few telephones. Almost every middle-class house had a piano or pianola. In most homes, books that were in any small way realistic in their treatment of the brutality of the war or the advent of the sexual revolution were covered in paper to hide the title, and hidden beneath cushions and furniture when not being read. The decade had been strange, frenetic, romantic—almost heroic—and no one was ready to accept a new decade with the fear of another war hanging over everyone’s head.
The one constancy the English had—rich, poor, or middle-class—was the imperturbability of their Queen. She was still démodée enough to count promptness, manners, and awe of the Crown as vital for England’s safe journey through time. No matter how sick the King, despite the rumbles of far-off guns, the economic despair of most of the world, the upheaval in England’s own Government with first the Socialist Ramsay MacDonald and then the Conservative Stanley Baldwin leading the National Government, and the ever-present threat of Mr. Gandhi’s civil-disobedience movement in India, Queen Mary’s public self-assuredness never wavered.
She was a reminder of the matriarchal reign of Queen Victoria, and since her personality exuded good sense and strength of character, the people reacted to Queen Mary in kind. When a Government crisis forced an ailing King George back to London from his usual summer holiday at Balmoral in August 1931, the Queen remarked furiously to Lady Cynthia Colville that she proposed joining the King in London to stand by him during the crisis. “I will not be left sitting on a mountain!” she declared. “Pack immediately.”
Queen Victoria had chosen wisely. Princess May had become every inch a Queen and one whom Victoria’s grandson, the King, could look to for strength. The conundrum was that only the King’s strength could secure Queen Mary’s crown, and as 1934 dawned, the King’s strength was draining slowly and inexorably away.
Footnotes
*King George was sixty-three at the time.
†Always afterwards to be called Bognor Regis.
*The Queen wore a pair of white kid gloves only once and then disposed of them. During this season she had to cast off so many pairs that she complained to her Ladies-in-Waiting of this waste.
*This was the Royal edition of the Times. As well as copies for Buckingham Palace, this special printing provided copies for bound editions of the Times in the Printing House Square archives.
*Queen Mary’s specially blended tea of the finest Darjeeling and China tea was one of her few Royal extravagances. It cost about six guineas a pound.
TWENTY-FIVE
So many things were on Queen Mary’s mind at this time—the King’s illness, the Government crisis, her own busy schedule—that she was unaware that David was under great strain. Close observers of the Prince of Wales noticed changes in him. He paced a lot, smoked more heavily than usual, and drank more than he could hold on numerous occasions. Several times, he sought an audience with his mother to discuss problems that troubled him. In the end, he had mentioned only superficial matters. He belonged to a family whose members did not easily reveal their true nature to each other. Rationalisation of this failure was not difficult. Royalty was well practised in the art of self-containment.
As early as 1934, the Prince of Wales recognised his desperate need for a strong woman at his side if he were ever to be King. But who was there for him to marry? There were few Royal princesses from whom to choose, and a marriage of the Heir-Apparent to a commoner would not have received Royal consent. His family and Britain wanted nothing more than to see the Prince of Wales married. No effort appears to have been made to help
him find an acceptable young woman.
Despite her strong views on her eldest son’s duty to his country, Queen Mary neither pressed him into looking for a bride nor herself took an active interest in the matter. By 1934, the Prince of Wales had celebrated his fortieth birthday. Bachelorhood was at least a possibility, and the King and Queen had by now accepted the fact that he might not marry. Their great devotion had turned to Bertie and the two small Princesses—Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. Elizabeth was her grandfather’s favourite; he mentions her frequently in his diary. If David should have no heir, the Crown eventually (provided she had no younger brother) would pass to her.
History might regard the Prince of Wales as a superficial person. Nonetheless, he loved intensely and with a slavish devotion. Frances Donaldson, his biographer, says that if Freda Dudley Ward “had loved him more than she did, or if she had been insensately ambitious, history might have been not completely different, but altered, because it seems possible that from the earliest time the Prince regarded his predestined role as not inescapable, and viewed the Duke of York much as one brother might another in the case of a family firm.” Mrs. Dudley Ward was a charming but dominating, quasi-maternal woman who, in their later years together, treated the Prince of Wales more as a martinet mother would than like a loving mistress. Angela Dudley Ward recalls the Prince of Wales frequently saying to her mother, whenever she made some proposal to him, “Anything to please, anything to please.”*
