Matriarch

by Anne Edwards

  During the first week of the war, under government order, three million children, invalids, and elderly were evacuated from London and twenty-eight other cities in Britain’s greatest ever mass movement of population. To Queen Mary’s great irritation, the Government and the King agreed she should be in this first evacuation group.

  Her popularity had never waned. In fact, she was held in higher state in 1939 than ever. Several factors contributed to this. First, perhaps, was the visit King George and Queen Elizabeth made to Canada and the United States in May of that year, despite the likelihood of war.* Queen Mary was photographed on the jetty waving goodbye with her handkerchief to the King and Queen, dwarfing Lilibet and Margaret who stood at her side. “I have my handkerchief,” Margaret was overheard to say, and Queen Mary warned, “To wave, not to cry into.” This kind of “no nonsense” courage which Queen Mary expected and received of her family was also given to her by the country. “If it’s good enough for Queen Mary ...” became a standard, whether it was the earthen teapots she still used or acceptance of the Prime Minister’s appeasement policies. (Not that she would ever publicly voice approval of anything political, but she was photographed smiling at the dour Chamberlain, which was approval enough.)

  The country did not know that while the King and Queen were on this tour the red dispatch boxes were sent to Queen Mary, but if they had, no doubt they would have approved—for whatever she did was a step toward order and correctness. She had become a symbol of an enduring England and a proud reminder of the glory of Empire and of the matriarchal Victorian years.

  Almost every large social gathering was livened by a new Queen Mary anecdote. One favourite, while the King and Queen had been on the Canadian tour, involved a serious accident in which a heavy lorry collided head-on with her maroon Daimler, which overturned trapping her inside. It was a wonder that none of the five occupants of the car was killed.† Ladders were swiftly brought to help extricate them. One witness wrote that “Queen Mary climbed up and down these ladders as if she might have been walking down the steps at the Coronation. She had not her hat or one curl out of place ... The only outward sign of disorder was ... her umbrella broken in half.” In fact, a piece of glass had grazed and injured Queen Mary’s eye in the accident; and besides being bruised and shaken, she had hurt her back “abominably” and was confined to bed for ten days, but this information was not given to the public.

  Queen Mary’s popular appeal owed something to the bland personality of the King. Britain had a loving family on the Throne, and the little princesses had charmed the nation. But Bertie, albeit well-meaning and duty-bound, was uninteresting and certainly no intellectual. Chips Channon, who knew him fairly well, thought “he had no wit, no learning, no humour, except of a rather schoolboy brand.” Channon also found him “nervous, ill-at-ease, though slightly better after some champagne” (he was actually making a concerted effort to control his drinking), and possessing “no vices and few interests other than shooting.” He had a small Court, few friends, and was “almost entirely dependent on the Queen whom he worshipped.” To his credit, he was also “an affectionate father and a loyal friend to the very few people he liked ...” What he lacked was the ability to stir people. No one was moved to shout or to sing patriotic songs after hearing him speak.

  Queen Elizabeth was infinitely more appealing, and what charm her husband lacked she amply supplied. However, her charm was best suited to garden parties and receptions and galas, where she could flash her spellbinding smile and speak to people on an individual basis. She had a lilting voice; dressed in an utterly feminine, unspectacular fashion; “rustled greatly and gracefully” when she walked; and looked somehow very Victorian, short, almost plump. She had a pretty but oddly “old-fashioned face.” Anne Morrow Lindbergh describes her after a meeting at a ball as being like “an old-fashioned rose, the small full ones, not brilliant in colouring but very fragrant ... she really looks at you, too, when she shakes hands. A real person looks out at you. How can she do it, when she must go through it so often?”

  Queen Elizabeth was the quintessential Royal Consort. In everyday life, her counterpart would have made the perfect wife for a business executive or politician, able to ease most awkward social situations for her husband and charm his associates or constituents, while at the same time gaining the admiration of all their wives. But she did not have the sweep of majesty or the bold appearance of the independent woman of strength that Queen Mary possessed. And her particular style called for a man of strong personality; the King—who had found his task as difficult and as painful as he had feared it might be—was not such a man. Had there not been a war, his reign might well have been ineffective. Yet his every frailty worked in his behalf as London steeled itself against the enemy. Perhaps the King did not display strength or shrewd thinking, but he had remained in London and before the people, when he could easily have chosen the safer position of Balmoral. Bertie had shown the same kind of doggedness on the sporting field as a young man. Britain had a King who—no matter what the odds—was no quitter. For a nation facing a long, harrowing ordeal, that was a matter of great pride and gave rise to an even greater confidence that England would prevail.

  Queen Mary would spend the duration of the war in Gloucestershire at Badminton House. The Duke and Duchess of Beaufort, whose home it was, greatly revered and were fond of their Royal guest. Indeed, Henry, Duke of Beaufort, was none other than a great-nephew of Lady Geraldine Somerset, and the Duchess of Beaufort was Queen Mary’s niece, Prince Dolly’s daughter. Badminton was one of the great mansion homes of Britain and had been in the Beaufort family since the seventeenth century. Queen Mary had visited the house for a long stay in the 1880s with her mother, the Duchess of Teck, and again only the previous year when the government and the King first suggested she be evacuated from London should there be a war. The Beauforts had been quite enthusiastic in their invitation to their aunt to spend “the duration” of the war (a time no one could project) as their guest. They had not foreseen that they would end up with only their bedrooms and a small sitting room for themselves, and although they dined with Queen Mary at their own table, they were, in effect, “the guests” in their own home.

  Pandemonium erupted upon Queen Mary’s arrival with over seventy pieces of personal luggage and fifty-five servants. The Duchess of Beaufort reported to her husband’s cousin, Osbert Sitwell:*

  “The servants [the Beauforts’] revolted ... They refused to use the excellent rooms assigned to them. Fearful rows and battles royal [were] fought over my body—but I won in the end and reduced them to tears and to pulp ... I can laugh now, but I have never been so angry! ... The Queen, quite unconscious of the stir, has settled in well, and is busy cutting down trees and tearing down ivy.† Tremendous activity.”

  There was also the problem of the Duke of Beaufort’s mother, the Dowager Duchess Louisa, a fading beauty Queen Mary’s age, who lived in a cottage on the grounds and had immensely enjoyed her senior position at Badminton. The two women did not become boon companions and, at best, might have been said to have tolerated each other. Standing at her cottage window watching Queen Mary and her “Ivy Squad” battling against the green vines that clung tenaciously to stonework, brickwork, and trees, the Dowager Duchess would grimace and make deprecating remarks to whomever was in her company—servant or guest —about the unsuitability of a Queen Mother being engaged in such a task.

  Queen Mary was certainly obsessed by her enmity toward ivy. She felt it was a destructive element and dealt with it in a manner that suggested how aggressive she could be, if necessary, to the enemy. The activity gave her days direction, however, and an outlet for her still-great energy.

  “Lovely morning which we spent clearing ivy off the trees in the grounds,” she wrote in her diary on September 25. “The gardeners began to clear a wall of ivy near Mary B’s bedroom.”

  And on September 26: “Lovely morning which we spent clearing ivy off trees—We watched a whole wall of i
vy of 50 years standing at the back of Mary B’s bedroom being removed—most of it came down like a blanket.”

  Queen Mary’s Equerry, her current Lady-in-Waiting, her Private Secretary, and anyone who was staying in the house were quickly enlisted to the “Ivy Squad.” To save petrol, Queen Mary rode to the more distant “blighted areas” in a farm cart, drawn by two horses and containing a couple of basket chairs for herself and her Lady-in-Waiting. “Aunt May,” remarked her niece, “you look as if you were in a tumbril!”

  “Well, it may come to that yet, one never knows,” Queen Mary retorted back as the cart jolted off.

  She was not cut off from London or from the war news despite her country life. Foreign Office news summaries were sent daily to her in an official leather dispatch box of which she kept the key.* She travelled to London one day a week, although the train ride there and back, due to wartime interruptions, was often over five hours and meant she had to leave Badminton at 6:15 in the morning. “I long to be at Home,” she wrote to Lady Bertha Dawkins on September 20. “I feel rather useless here but I can visit Evacuees & Work depots, they seem to like to see one which is a mercy!”

  But London looked very warlike, “sand bags, ARP men with tin helmets & gas masks, police ditto—windows boarded up ... It was curious to see all the precautions on the railway for the blackout,” she observed. “From 7.-til 8.15 we could not read as we had only a faint blue light—” Air-raid warnings and planes overhead were a daily occurrence. Under such circumstances and with the pressure for her to remain safely in the country so strong, by the summer of 1940 Queen Mary stopped going to London because it was “simply a waste of time.”

  Queen Mary was much affected by the air raids in her immediate district and on her beloved London. Lost in the destruction were many City churches with their irreplaceable contents and in particular the Guildhall, which contained among its many other treasures the collection that she had spent so many hours tracing, classifying, and obtaining. Gone was the piece of tapestry mentioned in inventories of Queen Elizabeth I and a matching silver vase of a pair made for King George IV. Every Londoner was now, in actual fact, a soldier at the ready. As one survivor of the summer of 1940 wrote, “... sounds became an integral part of life; the bombers circling ... like dogs trying to pick up a scent ... the aching empty silence after a bomb fell, broken only by small sounds, the rustle of water from fractured pipes, the little cries of the trapped and wounded, the stealthy shifting of debris. Dawn brought the most welcome sound of all: the notes of the All Clear, like a liner nearing safe haven, crying over the city.”

  The smells were soon to become as familiar. “The harsh acrid smell of cordite from high explosive bombs, leaking gas and blue London clay, charred wood and pulverised plaster.”

  By summer’s end, 177,000 Londoners were spending the nights underground in damp shelters and tube stations, bedding down on floors made gritty by leaking sandbags. They queued for nighttime shelter as early as 10:30 A.M., and by 4:00 P.M., the permitted hour of descent, there would be more people than designated space. Yet no one was forbidden entry. Sanitation was primitive, confined to bucket latrines behind makeshift screens. At dawn the crowds emerged to scenes now commonplace: huge mounds of fallen brick and timber, clouds of dust, and “the fine glitter of powdered glass that covered the pavements like hoar frost.”

  London’s plight was heart-wrenching, and Queen Mary, through the newspapers and the King, her London friends and her dispatch boxes, kept up with every indignity. She was always the first at Badminton to hear of the destruction of any famous building, or the loss of an acquaintance or friend. She rigidly observed all the war regulations concerning food, dress, coal, and motoring. Without sufficient petrol to drive to the places of historic or artistic interest in the country, Queen Mary was left with considerable time on her hands. The duties of her “Ivy Squad” were thus extended to include clearing away fallen branches and twigs of trees, and she spent several hours every day supervising the stripping of ivy and the tidying of a wooded strip, some ten miles in length, that circles the park at Badminton.

  Day after day during London’s grim fight, the King and Queen would appear without formality among the debris from the enemy’s most concentrated bombardment. On September 9, the Luftwaffe attacked central London. All the windows at Buckingham Palace were shattered, but the structure was otherwise unharmed. Three days later, the Germans scored a direct hit.

  “We were both upstairs [the King wrote in his diary] ... talking in my little sitting room overlooking the quadrangle (I cannot use my ordinary one owing to the broken windows). All of a sudden we heard an aircraft making a zooming noise above us, saw 2 bombs falling past the opposite side of the Palace, & then heard 2 resounding crashes as the bombs fell in the quadrangle about 30 yds. away. We [the Queen was with the King] looked at each other & then we were out into the passage as fast as we could get there. The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. We ... wondered why we weren’t dead. Two great craters had appeared in the courtyard. The one nearest the Palace had burst a fire hydrant & water was pouring through the broken windows in the passage. 6 bombs had been dropped. The aircraft was seen coming straight down the Mall below the clouds having dived through the clouds & had dropped 2 bombs in the forecourt, 2 in the quadrangle, 1 in the Chapel and the other in the garden. The Chapel is wrecked, & the bomb also wrecked the plumber’s workshop below in which 4 men were working. 3 of them were injured & the fourth shocked. Looking at the wreckage how they escaped death is a wonder to me. E & I went all round the basement talking to the servants who were all safe; & quite calm through it all. None of the windows on our side of the Palace were broken. We were told that the bomb in the forecourt was a delay action (DA) bomb so we gave orders for all the east windows to be opened in case it exploded & we remained in our shelter & had lunch there. There is no doubt that it was a direct attack on Buckingham Palace. Luckily the Palace is very narrow, & the bombs fell in the open spaces ...”

  A few days later he noted further, “... It was a ghastly experience & I don’t want it to be repeated. It certainly teaches one to ‘take cover’ on all future occasions, but one must be careful not to become ‘dugout minded.’ ”

  “This war has drawn the Throne and the people more closely together than was ever before recorded,” Winston Churchill wrote the King, “and Your Majesties are more beloved by all classes and conditions than any of the princes of the past.”

  The fact that the Sovereign’s home had been bombed as well as their homes, and that the King and Queen were not immune from the same dangers they suffered, awakened a greater loyalty, devotion, and determination in the people. The attack on Buckingham Palace was a major error in enemy psychological warfare. As Lord Louis Mountbatten wrote to his cousin, the King, “If Goering could have realised the depths of feeling which his bombing of Buckingham Palace has aroused throughout the Empire & America, he would have been well advised to instruct his assassins to keep off.”

  Although he had remained as Lord President of the Council in Prime Minister Churchill’s Cabinet, Neville Chamberlain was a sick and failing man. At the end of September 1940, he sent his resignation to the King, who replied that “as I told you once before your efforts to preserve peace were not in vain, for they established, in the eyes of the civilised world, our entire innocence of the crime which Hitler has determined to commit.”*

  Be that as it may, Britain remained under siege. Hitler severed their supply lines, hoping to starve the British people into surrender.

  “The Battle of France is over,” Churchill had warned the nation on June 18. “I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin.”

  Myopic, bull-headed, his memorable voice like a beacon of hope, Winston Churchill gave the British courage, while the King shared their lot. The combination was powerful, for when the Prime Minister told the British people “... we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end ... we shall fight in the seas and oceans ... we shall defen
d our Island whatever the cost may be,” they looked to the King and the Queen who walked so often among them—and somehow felt confident that Mr. Churchill spoke the truth.

  In April 1939, Chips Channon reported that when Queen Mary was asked when the Duke of Windsor would return to England, she had replied, “Not until he comes to my funeral.” However, the war changed that. Within a few hours after Britain had declared war on Germany, Walter Monckton, with the King’s permission, arranged for a plane to be sent that very week to bring the Windsors and their party “home” from Cap d’Antibes, France. To Major Fruity Metcalfe’s disbelief (he was the person in charge), the Windsors refused to go unless they were invited to stay at Windsor Castle and the invitation and the plane were sent personally by the King.

  Major Metcalfe wrote to his wife, “I just sat still, held my head & listened for about 20 minutes & then I started. I said ‘I’m going to talk now. First of all I’ll say whatever I say is speaking as your best friend, I speak only for your good & for W[allis]’s, understand that. After what I’ve said you can ask me to leave if you like but you’re going to listen now. You only think of yourselves. You don’t realise that there is at this moment a war going on that women & children are being bombed & killed while you talk of your Pride. What you’ve now said to Walter has just bitched up everything. You talk of one of H.M.’s Government planes being sent out for Miss Arnold [the secretary] and me!! You are just nuts. Do you really think for one instant they would send a plane out for me & Miss Arnold? It’s too absurd even to discuss ... It was 3.15 A.M. Well at 7.30 I was wakened by her maid telling me to get up! to arrange for a car to go to the fiying field ...”