Backstairs Billy

by Tom Quinn

  In addition to poor wages, servants had to put up with some appallingly menial work. A former palace servant who did not want to be named, but who worked as a hall boy for several years, recalled cleaning not only the royal household’s shoes but those of the upper servants, a perk Billy Tallon was later to enjoy:

  My job meant endless boot and shoe cleaning, and I can tell you that footwear had to be absolutely gleaming or boots and shoes would come flying back – quite literally hurled at my head by a senior footman.

  I sometimes did Prince Philip’s shoes but mostly I was cleaning the upper servants’ shoes and boots. I did the butlers’ and the footmen’s, but not the junior footmen’s – they had to do their own! Together with the scullery maid I also had to empty the chamber pots every morning – you’d hardly believe it but some of the royals didn’t like traipsing along the corridors to the loos at night, so they used chamber pots well into the 1960s.

  BILLY HAD SEVERAL great advantages over the other servants in his early days at Buckingham Palace. Chief among these were his good looks and his explicitly stated determination to stay for life. He already knew a great deal about the royal family and was so eager to learn how to be a good servant that he was quickly marked down as the sort of person who should be kept on if at all possible. The equerries and other senior advisers knew by this time that it was very difficult to get footmen and butlers who were discreet and well mannered and who could be convinced to stay in the job for life – not to mention work up to seventy hours a week.

  Employment agencies such as Greycoats were always trying to poach staff for other wealthy clients – who would invariably pay more than the notoriously stingy royals – and it became at times a struggle to get good people and to get them to stay. In later life Billy was regularly approached with immensely lucrative offers of work in America. He always refused even to discuss the possibility.

  But the problem for the palace in those early days when Billy first came to London was that, apart from low wages, work in the royal household was based on a regime that regularly asked its employees to work twelve-hour days, six or even seven days a week. Billy made his mark early because he didn’t mind this at all. His other great advantages were that he was tall, handsome and extremely attentive.

  A friend who knew him in his junior footman days recalled another of his remarkable qualities:

  He was always there but in the background whenever Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, was having lunch or dinner or needed anything. It was an uncanny ability to be right where they needed him, when they needed him. I know how he learned to do this – he watched Walter Taylor, who was then still Groom of the Backstairs, as if his life depended on it. You could see where Billy had almost absorbed the mannerisms, the style and even the way Walter walked.

  Billy worked for various members of the family in those early days in Buckingham Palace. He just had a gift for the work. They all wanted him. He was ornamental – I mean classically tall, dark and handsome – and the royal household knew even as early as 1950 that he was probably going to be happy to spend almost all his time at the palace and at work. He was always available and rarely asked for time off.

  Billy himself acknowledged his debt to Walter Taylor:

  He was a great model for any young servant. He had a presence and a kind of dignified bearing that was as impressive in its way as anything demonstrated by the royals themselves.

  But I’m not sure anyone would say that they liked Walter – in the sense of feeling close to him – because he was aloof. He never let his guard down, but he was immensely impressive. He had an air of greatness – I don’t think it would be too much to say that.

  But, whatever the influence of below-stairs events, it was changes in the wider world that transformed Billy’s life. The death of Queen Elizabeth’s husband King George VI in 1952 was the catalyst that began the young footman’s meteoric rise to the top – the first major consequence being the widowed Queen’s removal from Buckingham Palace to Clarence House in 1953. This left Buckingham Palace free for the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth, her husband Prince Philip, her young family and, of course, her servants.

  Chapter Six

  The shy King

  THE SECOND SON of George V, Albert Frederick Arthur George Saxe-Coburg-Gotha – known to the family as Bertie – was not, as we have seen, expected to become king. It was the abdication of his brother Edward VIII in 1936 that changed everything, and the details of Edward’s love affair with twice-married Wallis Simpson are so well known as not to need repeating.

  The fact was, however, that the abdication pushed what was essentially a very shy man into one of the most high-profile roles in the world, and this inevitably had a profound effect on the woman he had married in 1923. It has been said on good authority that Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, never forgave Edward or his wife Mrs Simpson for putting personal relationships before duty. In 1939, she wrote to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, ‘The mass of people do not forgive quickly the sort of thing that he [the Duke of Windsor] did to this country. And they hate her.’

  Elizabeth believed, rightly or wrongly, that being thrust into the limelight hastened her husband’s death. The fact that he was a heavy, lifelong smoker who had had a lung removed some time prior to his death was of course the more immediate cause of his demise, but, whatever the case, it seems undeniable that Elizabeth was deeply in love with Bertie as well as being highly protective of him. He had put duty before his own health, as she saw it, where Edward and Mrs Simpson had put their happiness before duty.

  WHEN ALBERT WAS crowned in Westminster Abbey in May 1937 he took the regnal name George VI. From then on he was under enormous pressure to stamp his authority on the role. He knew he would inevitably be compared to his hugely popular brother who, as Prince of Wales, was cheered wildly by crowds wherever his tours took him. But the new king simply did not have Edward’s charisma, although he tried hard to make the best of the situation.

  Elizabeth’s attitude to Bertie throughout these early years of his reign tells us a great deal about her relationships with men in general and, later on, with Billy. She was intensely loyal and supportive, but only perhaps because Bertie relied on her totally. Had he been more aloof and independent – less reliant on her advice and support – she would have responded in kind. William Tallon was always aware of this: where she found loyalty, she reflected it back. Where she found indifference, she reflected indifference.

  Bertie was a quiet, diffident man who, like so many royal males, knew that he really didn’t have to try hard in life. The triumph and the tragedy of his life was that, prior to his brother’s abdication, he was destined for a life of luxury and idleness with the additional benefit that he could live this life well out of the public gaze. He had been trained, as it were, to expect this; it was implicit in his upbringing. Then, against all the odds, to find himself doing something for which he was singularly unsuited – and untrained – almost certainly outweighed all the advantages of royal birth.

  He was neither ambitious nor particularly driven to succeed in any area of life. He had been allowed to enter the Naval College at Osborne on the Isle of Wight in 1911 despite not being ‘officer material’, either by personality or by inclination. He entered as a naval cadet but fared so badly that he came bottom of his class in the final examinations. The trouble may have had more to do with lack of ambition than lack of intelligence, or it may have been simply that Bertie knew that his life would remain the same whether he tried hard or not. This is something that invariably affects members of the royal family, but in different ways. It perhaps reached its nadir when in more recent times Prince Charles was offered a place at Cambridge University despite A-level grades that would have led to rejection for any other candidate.

  During his Isle of Wight days, Bertie was known by fellow crew members as ‘Mr Johnson’. He served aboard HMS Collingwood during the First World War and was mentioned in despatches during the Battle of Jutland (May 1916–Ju
ne 1916). He spent the rest of the war recovering from an ulcer operation and then entered Trinity College, Cambridge for a year. He seems to have gone to Cambridge much as he went to the naval college: he was sent there with few academic qualifications simply because he had nothing better to do.

  After his early years spent somehow drifting through life, Bertie’s marriage to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon came as a surprise. It showed that he was prepared occasionally to kick over the traces and make a decision that seemed out of character – and, strictly speaking, outside the rules.

  IT WAS CLEARLY a love match. Although an aristocrat, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was not royalty and indeed she was apparently so appalled at the prospect of marrying Bertie and becoming a member of a family so much under the spotlight that when he first proposed in 1921 she turned him down. She hated the idea that she would no longer be able to think and speak for herself – an astute comment on the nature of life in Britain’s most famous family.

  But Bertie was so besotted that he told everyone, including his mother Queen Mary, that if he could not marry Elizabeth he would not marry at all. The story goes that Queen Mary was so concerned that she visited Glamis Castle in Scotland to meet Elizabeth and speak to her privately. Mary was apparently so impressed that she immediately gave her permission for the match – if Bertie could prevail. There was clearly some indefinable strength combined with gentleness in Elizabeth that appealed to the vulnerable Bertie. And there is no doubt that Elizabeth had had other offers. For several years after the war she had been pursued by equerry James Stuart and had he not gone to America to earn his fortune, Elizabeth might well have married him rather than Bertie.

  There are clear parallels between Elizabeth’s almost maternal affection for her shy, stuttering, unambitious husband and Queen Victoria’s affection for Prince Albert. Victoria’s love for Albert was reflected in forty years of mourning – Victoria wore black for the rest of her life after Albert’s premature death in 1861 and the country, monarchist to a degree impossible to imagine today, followed suit. Black clocks, black suits, dark furniture and dark interiors became the norm due to the all-pervasive influence of the Queen. Indeed, the dark clouds didn’t lift until 1901, when Victoria died.

  But behind the public mourning and elevation of Albert to a status of quasi sainthood, Victoria, as we have seen, appears to have fallen in love with someone else after her husband’s death: her servant John Brown. Victoria could never re-marry (at least not if it became public knowledge) but needed a close relationship with a man – likewise Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. When Albert – George VI – died in 1952, aged just fifty-six, there is no doubting Elizabeth’s genuine distress. She didn’t quite go into a lifetime of mourning as Victoria had done, but she similarly needed male company – without any risk that she might compromise her status as national treasure by provoking rumours that she might re-marry.

  It is easy to forget the peculiar difficulties under which many members of the royal family labour. The revolution of the past few decades that has seen three out of four of the Queen’s children divorce would have been unthinkable back in the 1940s and 1950s, which is why the King’s abdication in 1936 was such a shock. It was the idea of the King trying to marry someone who would have been perfectly acceptable to the establishment if she had remained his mistress that was unacceptable.

  So, when George VI died in 1952 Elizabeth knew she would have to reconcile herself to a life without a partner. It was a question of being seen to remain loyal to the dead king, just as Victoria had remained loyal, at least publicly, to Albert. A new relationship for the monarch’s mother would have been viewed as unseemly, so Elizabeth had to reconcile herself to a life of loneliness, a life without intimacy.

  Of course, to some extent her whole upbringing was about learning to live without intimacy; instead it was about learning to live surrounded by servants and advisers with barely a moment of solitude from morning till night.

  But Elizabeth had enjoyed her relationship with Bertie and hated the fact that she could never again enjoy a similar relationship of real closeness. This is why she threw herself into a lifetime of dinner parties and lunch parties; why she travelled from one royal residence to another; and most especially why she relished the company of Billy Tallon.

  There is no record of Elizabeth having a long close relationship with any female servant nor with a man who was not an adviser or servant; in other words with someone who was not ‘safe’ because he was effectively employed by her. Billy was to Elizabeth what John Brown was to Victoria.

  Despite the difficulties of her position and her public persona, Elizabeth was determined to have fun. Very determined. Her resourcefulness and force of character is nowhere better illustrated than in her reaction to the death of her husband. Within weeks of her daughter Elizabeth becoming queen, the widowed Elizabeth decamped to Clarence House a few hundred yards along the Mall and here she was to remain for the rest of her life. She took the title Queen Mother, a title entirely of her own invention and without historic precedent, and she managed to create a court to rival that of her daughter. It was a remarkable achievement but it depended very largely on the public perception that she had sacrificed her own pleasure and her own personal life for the country. Privately, of course, she had a whale of a time.

  Where Elizabeth II seemed to be everything a queen should be – regal, aloof, dignified and impeccably well behaved – her mother created a role for herself as a sort of royal grande dame. She always seemed slightly softer and less detached than her daughter, more willing to engage with the emotions of the crowd rather than simply acknowledging their adoration. And of course everyone remembered that she had insisted on remaining in London during the worst of the Blitz. It was all part of an image that was brilliantly created and maintained, and Billy was a central part of that image.

  BILLY HAD BEEN working at Buckingham Palace for just over a year when Elizabeth found herself a widow. He was still a junior footman, whose duties were as mundane as they had been when he started work, but as a contemporary and fellow royal servant recalled, he had already distinguished himself.

  I remember Billy coming along a corridor and thinking ‘that bloke will go far’ – he had a mimic’s genius for taking on the airs of his betters. I don’t mean that he was affected, it was never as crude as that, but he absorbed their manners and mannerisms in a very subtle way – the way a child in the playground would absorb a new language. It all became second nature to him. At first I thought it might lead to trouble – I mean ‘aping your betters’ as they used to say, but I realised that Billy absorbed only enough of upper-class ways to avoid saying things that might irritate them.

  He never said ‘phone’ or ‘toilet’, which someone from his background might have said. He always said ‘napkin’, not ‘serviette’; ‘writing paper’, not ‘note paper’; ‘looking glass’, not ‘mirror’. Most of the royals’, and especially the equerries’, ears were primed for this sort of thing – if you used the wrong word they could place you, as it were (‘dreadfully common’) – but Billy was so quick to lose his northern accent and instinctively to know which word to use that within a few years he was a figure even the grandest equerries could not quite place.

  Of course, everyone knew all about Billy’s origins and the fact that he was a footman and later groom meant they also knew he was not, as it were, out of the top drawer as they themselves inevitably were, but his ambiguous nature often made them slightly uneasy. Even when Billy made a mistake it was often a mistake that did his career no harm at all. In his first year, for example, he gave the Queen Mother a postal order for seven shillings and sixpence on her birthday. He was given a good telling off and the money was returned, but it is hard to imagine that the Queen Mother was not touched by the gesture. She must have noticed this oddly deferential boy who was so eager to please yet so dignified at the same time. It was around this time too that Billy first came to the attention of the equerries when the Queen Mother asked about her ‘rather dash
ing young footman’.

  Billy was always rather vague about this early period, but it seems as if he really was noticed at first because he looked the part, rather than because he was especially efficient at his daily duties. ‘Looking the part’ may not sound a particularly important part of a footman’s duties, but fifty or sixty years earlier it had been standard procedure in many grand houses to measure the calves of applicants for footmen’s jobs. A good calf was seen as absolutely essential as recently as the 1880s because footmen were not just employed to work; they were also status symbols and ornaments.

  James Lees, who worked as a footman in a number of grand houses, recalled the importance of appearance:

  My first boss, who had started work as a junior footman in one of the London palaces at the end of the nineteenth century, was a fascinating character who loved telling me about how things were done when he first began in service. After working for a number of years in a very lowly position, he had applied for a job elsewhere as a footman proper. Satisfactory references were forthcoming and as there was no stigma attached to the desire to change jobs he was full of confidence when he presented himself for interview. But the interview was a very odd experience. It began with the senior butler staring at him for ten minutes without saying a word and then asking the young man to walk about the room while he continued to stare. He then asked a series of very general questions about former duties before suddenly standing up and leaving the room without a word of explanation. Five more minutes elapsed before he returned with an extremely elderly and rather unsteady man in tow. This second man appeared to be dressed in the fashion of the late Georgian period! Having done his share of staring, the doddery old chap pulled a strange looking pair of callipers out of his pocket and then knelt at the young applicant’s feet. He applied the callipers to the boy’s calves, staggered back up, said, ‘He’ll do!’ and promptly left the room.