by Anne Edwards
An aircraft was never sent, and the Prime Minister directed that the Duke of Windsor could return only under one condition —if he were prepared to take on either the post of Deputy Regional Commissioner to Sir Syndham Portal in Wales or Liaison Officer with the British Military Mission to General Gamelin under General Howard Vyse. He chose the former. Finally the Windsors and Major Metcalfe and three cairn terriers—Pookie, Prisie, and Detto—motored to Cherbourg under “cloak and dagger” circumstances, where they were met by Lord Louis Mountbatten, who, on Churchill’s instructions, had brought the destroyer H.M.S. Kelly to carry them to Britain.
No member of the Royal Family waited to welcome them at Portsmouth, “no messenger, no message.” A large red-plush hotel bedroom had been booked for them. But Churchill had asked Admiral James to invite them to stay the night at his home, and the Metcalfes took the hotel room. The next day, the party motored to South Hartfield House.
The King had one short casual meeting with his brother, but apart from this, the family did not acknowledge the ex-King’s presence. Wallis was heard to say that there was no place for the Duke in Britain and that she saw no reason ever to return.
Not long after the Windsors arrived, pressure was put on the Duke by the War Minister to take an alternate appointment as a liaison officer in Paris without delay. A brief discussion of money was held. The Duke of Windsor asked if his brother Harry was being paid for his services, quickly explaining that he wanted it known he did not wish to be paid. The Military Secretary replied that the Duke of Gloucester was not being paid, and that, in fact, “no member of the Royal Family ever accepted payment for services in the Army.”
The Windsors and Major Metcalfe returned to France at the end of September. When France fell, rumours circulated that a German plot was en force to acquire the services of the Duke. Clearly, something had to be done about removing him from the Continent, where his presence was causing talk. According to Lord Halifax, “although his Loyalties are unimpeachable there is always a backwash of Nazi intrigue which seeks, now that the greater part of the continent is in enemy hands, to make trouble about him.” Because of all the personal and family difficulties his return to Britain would create, Churchill, with King George’s approval, offered the Duke of Windsor the Governorship of the Bahamas. After a dramatic exit from Paris and much more “cloak-and-dagger” en route, the Windsors landed at Nassau on August 17, 1940, where they would remain throughout the war. Ten days before, the Duke’s brother Harry had been appointed Chief Liaison Officer, GHO Home Forces, the position the Duke of Windsor had originally been offered.
George, Duke of Kent, as charming and as animated as ever, remained his mother’s favourite. At the outbreak of the war, he was Governor-General designate of the Commonwealth of Australia, but he at once requested a more active position. He was given the rank of Air Commodore. During the summer of 1941, the Duke of Kent revisited the United States (he had been there in 1935). After a tour of inspection of the Empire training scene in Canada, he renewed his relationship with President Roosevelt, who had “a great affection” for him. In fact, when the Duchess of Kent gave birth to a second son on July 4, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a godfather, and his parents named the child Michael George Charles Franklin.
One of the few excursions Queen Mary took to London was on August 4 for the christening of her new grandson. She saw old friends and servants, as well as many of her royal relations who had been driven out of their own countries by the Nazi invaders. On August 13, she motored to Coppins, the Kents’ country home, to visit with her youngest son and his family. “Had luncheon & tea there—walked in the garden—Georgie showed me some of his interesting things—he looked so happy with his lovely wife & the dear baby,” she wrote in her diary.
After the visit, Georgie had driven back to Badminton to spend a few days with his mother before returning once again to active service. He took her on a tour of an important Air Force Centre close by, at her request. They also visited some antique shops. His departure on August 16 was sorely felt, since his presence had lifted everyone’s spirits. He had gone to Scotland, where he was due to depart on August 25 to fly to Iceland for an inspection tour of RAF establishments. Shortly after 10:00 P.M. the evening of the twenty-fifth, a page interrupted Lady Cynthia Colville as she was reading to Queen Mary. The King’s Private Secretary, Sir Eric Melville, the young boy announced, wished to speak to Lady Colville. “You had better go,” the Queen said.
Lady Corville went to her room to receive the call and was told that the Duke of Kent had been killed in an air crash soon after starting on his journey to Iceland. The plane had failed to clear a range of Scottish hills. When Lady Corville, much shaken, returned to tell the Queen, Queen Mary half rose from her chair. “What is it? Is it the King?” she asked.
“No, Ma’am, I am afraid it is the Duke of Kent; there was an air crash. He was killed instantaneously.”
Queen Mary’s face went white and she lowered herself slowly back into her chair. “I must go to Marina tomorrow,” she said in a quiet voice. Lady Corville saw her shed no tears, either then or at the funeral in St. George’s Chapel on August 29. On her return to Badminton—a journey made in a violent thunderstorm—Queen Mary gave a lift in her limousine to “a charming young American parachutist, most friendly,” and to “a nice Sergeant Observer (Air Force) who had taken part in the raid on Dieppe last week.” The Princess Royal came to spend the next few days with her mother, and before she departed, Queen Mary was once again going out with her “Ivy Squad.”
On September 3, three years to the day from the declaration of war, she wrote in her diary: “I am so glad I can take up my occupations again—Georgie wld have wished me to do so.”
Sympathy for the Royal Family was considerable. Their terrible loss brought them even closer to the people. This first period of the war was considered by many to have been Britain’s “decisive struggle” and for the people of Britain, “their finest hour,” when Britain stood alone. Monarch and subject had shared danger, suffered the threat of death and the loss of someone dear. Throughout much of this time, Britain had been under the shadow of military defeat, following the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the Continent of Europe. But the absolute refusal of the British people to recognise defeat and their ability to overcome disaster with the kind of pride that swept through the land after Dunkirk gave them the power to stand alone in the fight, “stripped and girt for battle, and unimpeded by less determined friends.”*
At 4:00 A.M. on June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. Britain no longer stood alone. On December 7 of that same year, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war as an increasingly dominant force of the Allied alliance. Nevertheless, for the Allies, the first seven months of 1942 were a record of almost unrelieved disaster. Singapore fell to the Japanese on February 15; Corregidor on April 9; and by the end of May the British and Netherlands possessions in the East Indies were overrun, and British and Chinese forces had been driven from Burma.
“We’re going through a bad phase at the moment,” King George wrote to Queen Mary. This kind of refusal to accept the series of disastrous Allied setbacks as anything more than a “bad phase” endeared King George VI to his subjects. And the stoicism that was so much a part of Queen Mary’s makeup caused the people to look to her with pride.
Footnotes
*King George wrote Queen Mary, “I hate leaving here with the situation as it is, but one must carry on with one’s plans as they are all settled, & Canada will be so disappointed.”
†The five occupants were Queen Mary; Lord Claud Hamilton, her Comptroller; Lady Constance Milnes Gaskell, her Woman of the Bedchamber; the chauffeur, and a security officer.
*Sir Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969), author of poems, short stories, novels, and memoirs, including five volumes about British society during the Edwardian era.
†A reference to the campaign Queen Mary waged against scrubby trees and
climbing ivy, two things she abhorred in nature.
*In one dispatch box being returned to London, Queen Mary wrote, “From Mary R. the lock of this box is very stiff.”
*Neville Chamberlain died on Saturday, November 9, 1940, and was buried in Westminster Abbey on November 14, with the War Cabinet as his pallbearers and Henry, Duke of Gloucester, as the King’s personal representative.
*A reference to France.
THIRTY-ONE
Dinner at Badminton (a fairly bizarre occasion) was at 8:30 every night. In a note of wartime austerity, Queen Mary had requested that in place of fresh table linen (which would require daily laundering) oilcloth be substituted. All those living in the house were expected to use their napkins for three meals. Queen Mary had her own heavy silver napkin ring with the crown and her monogram engraved on it; the rest had rings of coloured celluloid or plastic. Despite these economies, Queen Mary was always fully gowned, often in sequins, with an ostrich-feather cape and her famous ropes of pearls, thereby imposing a dress code for the rest of her Household and guests.
Sir Osbert Sitwell had become a frequent and favoured guest at Badminton, and his presence filled the void left by the Duke of Kent’s tragic death. Though the two men were very different and Sir Osbert a decade older, Queen Mary did share with the latter some of the same pleasures she had had with her youngest son. They walked together, discussed literature, and went in search of antiques. Sir Osbert was a brilliant conversationalist, witty and with the writer’s talent for finding good stories and the uncommon ability to tell them exceptionally well. He was also an ardent Royalist, the perfect companion for Queen Mary’s long Badminton stay.
Tall, fair, beardless, with a prominent nose, heavy features, and penetrating blue eyes, Sir Osbert bore an uncanny resemblance to George III, and he occasionally acknowledged that he was illicitly descended from George IV.* Queen Mary had no other intimates in the arts. She had once enjoyed a friendship with Nellie Melba, but the diva had not had the intellectual and artistic passion of Sir Osbert. He and the Queen would walk in the park at Badminton, she occasionally pausing to flick a stick or twig from the path with one of the two canes she was forced to use because of some discomfort from bursitis. She liked to talk to him about his work and about her own early life.
After dinner, Queen Mary would take out her knitting while the Household and guests listened to the news on the radio; but never—whether the news was good or bad—would she show “by the flicker of an eyelash” that she was disturbed. “Only once,” Sir Osbert recalls, “did I see Her Majesty’s expression change during the news ... Hungary or Roumania was under discussion and the word ‘Transylvania’ occurred. At this Queen Mary smiled rather archly, and caught the eye of her niece, nodded to her, and repeated softly, in her rather deep voice, ‘Transylvania, Transylvania.’ And then seeing I had observed this, explained, ‘The joke is that some of us came from there.’ ”†
Sir Osbert was not in the least surprised, for he found many Rumanian traits in Queen Mary—“her manner in which she smoked cigarettes; her love of jewels, and the way she wore them; and the particular sort of film-star glamour that in advanced age overtook her appearance, and made her, with the stylisation of her clothes, such an attractive as well as imposing figure.”
Sometime early in 1943, Queen Mary enthusiastically began a campaign to collect scrap for the war effort, an activity that suited her sense of domestic economy and her desire for order and tidiness. If she found a fragment of old iron, she would pick it up and hand it to a somewhat reluctant lady-in-waiting. Sir Osbert recalls that on one occasion he had to carry back to the house “a really filthy dirty old glass bottle.” And that “one fine spring noon Her Majesty returned to the house in a triumph after a walk, dragging behind her a large piece of rusty old iron to add to the royal dump. A few minutes later, however, one of her pages brought an urgent message from a neighbouring farmer. ‘Please, Your Majesty, a Mr. Hodge has arrived, and he says Your Majesty has taken his plough and will Your Majesty graciously give it back to him, please, at once, as he can’t get on without it!’ ”
One afternoon, Sir Osbert, the Princess Royal, and Queen Mary set off in the vast Daimler to visit some antique shops. Humphries, Queen Mary’s elderly chauffeur (who had a penchant for getting lost, and lumbering and bumping over un-paved country roads), was at the wheel, and next to him in the front a portly security detective. At the start of the excursion (and perhaps to compensate for the additional petrol necessary), Queen Mary remarked that if she saw any man in the forces at the side of the road needing a lift, Humphries must stop and take him. An aircraftsman was eventually sighted. Queen Mary tapped with her umbrella on the window behind Humphries’S head. The motor pulled up, and the detective got down and ushered the young man into the motorcar, seating him on a jump seat that faced the three occupants in the back without telling him whose car it was.
“He entered in a jaunty manner,” Sir Osbert recorded later, “and then saw the Princess Royal. A frantic look of fright came into his eyes, and ... he cast them round wildly—and beheld Queen Mary ... his eyes darted here and there in search of escape. But by now ... the motor had started. Queen Mary ... talked to him so charmingly that she soon reassured him ... she asked him what his profession had been before the war [and] he replied, ‘I worked in a hospital—in the maternity ward.’ ”
Silence followed and during it Humphries managed to get lost once more, and the poor aircraftsman was finally released further from his destination than when he had been picked up.
“ ‘How very odd!’ Queen Mary murmured. ‘He said he was working in the maternity ward! What can he have been doing? It seems very strange! We ought to have asked him. In the maternity ward!’ ”.
Queen Mary confided to Sir Osbert that she was terrified of being kidnapped by the Germans, and she had made arrangements for an aeroplane to transport her from Badminton to a secret destination should the Nazis land in England. Three suitcases were kept packed in case of such an occurrence. One, Queen Mary kept herself, and the other two were kept by her two dressers. When an air-raid alert sounded, their duty was to pack a fourth suitcase, filling it with tiaras and other jewels. The Lady-in-Waiting would be responsible for this case.
Princess Elizabeth, who had spent most of the war with her younger sister at Windsor and in Scotland, celebrated her eighteenth birthday on April 21, 1944, an event that raised several issues of importance. She would not reach her legal majority until the age of twenty-one, but still, there were the problems of her debut into public life and the matter of her title. On February 8, 1944, the King noted in his diary: “I talked to W[inston] about the question of my putting out a statement to say that I did not intend to give Lilibet any title on her 18th birthday. The Press & other people, especially in Wales, are agitating for her to become ‘Princess of Wales.’ W[inston] thought he shld. put it out, but I argued it was a family matter ...” Twelve days later he wrote Queen Mary: “How could I create Lilibet Princess of Wales when it is the recognised title of the wife of the Prince of Wales? Her own name is so nice and what name would she be called by when she marries, I want to know.”
The previous autumn, the King had requested Parliament to amend the Regency Act of 1937 so that Princess Elizabeth could be included among the Councillors of State. The bill met with no opposition in either House. Her constitutional status was therefore established, but the King’s final decision was to not make any change in her title at this time.
On the day of Lilibet’s eighteenth birthday, Queen Mary journeyed to Windsor for the first time since the war. A family lunch was held, and as the afternoon was unusually warm, later they all sat out in the garden. The next day, Queen Mary remarked to Lady Airlie how very much Lilibet resembled paintings of Queen Victoria at the age of eighteen.
In January 1941, Chips Channon had been sent to Greece on government business. On the evening of his arrival, he had attended a cocktail party also attended by Philip of Greece. “He is to
be our Prince Consort,” he wrote in his diary (mere speculation on his part at this time). “I deplore such a marriage; he and Princess Elizabeth are too inter-related.”* In 1943, Chips once again declared after a visit to Buckingham Palace: “... a marriage may well be arranged one day between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip of Greece.”
One cannot be sure whether this was simply good guessing on Chips Channon’s part or if it had been decided when Lilibet was fourteen that she would eventually marry Philip of Greece. The idea of Royal cousins marrying was not an unacceptable idea to Queen Mary, who had herself married a cousin of almost the same relationship after being engaged to his brother.†
Prince Philip had the look of a young Viking with much of the Mountbatten charm. He was five years older than his Royal cousin and more worldly than any of the men in her circle. The teen-age Princess Elizabeth quickly became infatuated. When Prince Philip visited Windsor at Christmas 1943, Marian Crawford (her former governess) had commented, “I have never known Lilibet more animated. There was a sparkle about her none of us had ever seen before. Many people commented on it.” During the spring of 1944, numerous mutually timed visits of the couple were arranged by the Duchess of Kent at Coppins. In such troubled and grim days, a Royal romance was a grand respite, and Queen Mary and the Court quite enjoyed its titillation.
* * *
Operation Overlord—D-Day—a combined British and American enterprise that the Allies were certain would end in the liberation of Europe had been scheduled for dawn on June 5. Gale-force winds prevailed, and it was delayed twenty-four hours. The King and his Prime Minister were so certain of victory that their main concern was whether either of them should cross the Channel with the men and lead the forces on the beaches to victory. Finally, on June 2, the King wrote to Churchill:
