by Tom Quinn
A number of former royal servants have confirmed that, apart from the Queen Mother when she was alive, the most popular member of the royal family is Prince Philip.
‘Oh yes, he is no trouble at all,’ said one. ‘Very unassuming and knows that it is not always as easy to do something as it is to ask for it to be done.’
Billy’s service with the royals occasionally extended well beyond working for the Queen Mother. He might be seconded, as it were, to assist visitors and guests of the royal family. He was particularly proud of a signed photograph given to him by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, for whom he worked on a number of occasions. He had helped look after the couple on one of their rare, awkward visits to England following the abdication. As the Queen Mother disliked seeing them, Billy had walked a careful tightrope on these occasions and it is testament to his diplomatic skills that he was sent a thank-you gift by a couple who were decidedly unwelcome at Clarence House.
BILLY CONTINUED TO enjoy the attentions and gratitude of various members of the royal family and he was now mixing with theatre people, including the dancer and choreographer Anton Dolin. He never entirely forgot his origins, however, and if old acquaintances from Coventry came to London, which occasionally happened as late as the early 1990s, he would still give them a tour of Clarence House – provided the Queen Mother was away.
Some of these visitors admitted that they had hardly known Billy in his Coventry days but since Billy had become something of a celebrity in the city, many people used the fact that they were at the same school or had lived close by as sufficient reason to claim an acquaintance. They would turn up at Clarence House and just hope for the best and Billy, who loved his claim to fame, never turned them away. He was incredibly proud of working at Clarence House, as one visitor remembered:
It was as if he had become a pop star. We were in awe both of him and his grand manner and the house. When we got back to Coventry, a visit to Clarence House was something to boast about for the next ten years. But what we marvelled at most was the change in Billy’s accent, his manners and his whole demeanour – he sounded as aristocratic as the royals or their equerries!
Barry Fox was Billy’s favourite hairdresser back home in Coventry. Whenever he visited his mother he would pop in for a quick trim and regale Barry with tales of life in the palace. Billy was always very generous with his invitations, too. Barry recalled Billy insisting that if he was ever in London he should come straight to Clarence House and there was no need to make an appointment. A few weeks later Barry was in London and decided to take Billy up on his invitation. He arrived at Clarence House and was whisked into Billy’s office and then on a lightning tour of the house, which included a great deal of alcohol. Billy seemed entirely in command of the police at the gate, the other servants and even the equerries.
Reta Michael, whose friendship with Billy dated back many years, remembered being shown around Clarence House while the Queen Mother was away.
Reta recalled Billy telling her to wave out the window to a passing group of tourists. ‘They’ll never know you’re not a royal,’ he apparently said to her. ‘It will make their holiday to think that someone at Clarence House waved to them.’
Billy’s brother-in-law, Frank Oliver, a retired Coventry watchmaker, visited Billy on a number of occasions and each time he recalled the welcome was as warm as ever. Frank was escorted up to Billy’s rooms by a policeman who seemed greatly in awe of the immensely self-assured steward. Frank remembered that Billy was enormously proud of the fact that he had been around the world with the Queen Mother. But he used to insist that, while he loved his job and would not change it for any other, it was not all easy going.
On foreign trips he would get to see very little of the country they were staying in – though several of his friends insisted Billy had absolutely no interest in foreign countries anyway, so this was no great loss. However, abroad even more than at home he had to be constantly on call – a job that took up most of his time at home took up all his time during these trips.
Frank Oliver said that he became such a regular at Clarence House that, on one occasion, the policeman, who was by this time well acquainted with him, gave Frank permission to go up to Billy’s quarters alone. Normally he would have been escorted, as would every visitor, but Frank somehow got lost in the big, rambling, unfamiliar house. Eventually he bumped into a maid but was astonished at how long he was able to wander at will without being challenged.
When Billy’s sister Jennie died in 1973 from an asthma-related illness, Frank re-married and lost touch with Billy, but there was always a hope that Billy might visit Frank back in Coventry. He was, after all, godfather to Frank and Jennie’s daughter, Stella.
When he reached the top floor of the house Billy was there to meet him. In his characteristic drawl he said to his visitor, ‘Thank heavens it’s you. For one dreadful moment I thought it might have been one of my lovers.’
A friend of Billy’s who didn’t wish to be named, noticed immediately that rubbing shoulders for so long with the royals, especially the Queen Mother, had given Billy a sort of ‘London polish’ that had left only a few traces of Coventry. Billy had almost completely lost his accent and he had a kind of careful, aristocratic way of moving and talking.
‘I remembered that he had always been a good mimic and very observant,’ recalled his friend. ‘Having worked for the royals for so long Billy had unconsciously become rather like them. At one point and rather maliciously I thought he even had some of the Queen Mother’s mannerisms.’
All Billy’s old friends from Coventry who made the trip to London treated Billy as if he had become a film star. Billy himself knew that whenever he appeared in later years in photographs standing behind the Queen Mother, the picture was bound to be re-printed in the Coventry newspapers. It was why he so carefully manoeuvred himself into the camera shot on so many occasions and it was why the Queen Mother reportedly once said to him at the beginning of one of her birthday walkabouts, ‘Come along, William. Your public is waiting for you.’
But Billy’s few remaining Coventry contacts knew that the ties to his home had really been broken. One friend recalled that shortly before he left to catch the train home, he was offered tea in some ‘absurdly delicate little cups’. Billy asked about various people they had both known, but ‘we were so different now that I knew as he escorted me down and out of the house that I would probably never see him again, and of course I didn’t’.
Chapter Eleven
Wine and roses
A TYPICAL DAY FOR Billy would start at around six in the morning, at which point he would spend at least half an hour carefully dressing in his white tie and tails. He always claimed he much preferred this get-up to the tight tunic with brass buttons up to the neck that he had to wear as a junior footman.
White tie and tails from early morning ’til late at night would have irritated a lesser man, but Billy enjoyed the uniform almost as much as the job. Indeed, he hated to be seen in anything else while he was at work.
Towards the end of the Queen Mother’s life, whenever he went out he would leave instructions that he should be telephoned immediately if there was any news about the Queen Mother’s health. On several occasions this happened and he was soon after seen running across the grounds from Gate Lodge desperately trying to put his shirt and tie on while simultaneously combing his hair.
‘He was a terrific dandy,’ recalled one friend. ‘He absolutely loved dressing up, but especially as the royal household had him measured for all his suits – they were handmade and would have been completely beyond anything Billy could afford if he had not been in royal service.’
After dressing, Billy would visit the kitchens where the Queen Mother’s breakfast had been prepared. This was invariably tea and biscuits or tea and a bowl of seeds. Billy would enter at precisely the same time each day and hover. ‘He was a great hoverer,’ recalled one of the maids.
Immaculately dressed as ever, Billy would pick up th
e tray, inspect it with a very serious look on his face and then stalk off like an elegant if rather gloomy heron, leaving the kitchen door to swing shut behind him. He would carry the tray to the Queen Mother’s apartments and leave it on a small table outside her bedroom.
It has been said that he was the only male servant allowed into her bedroom without knocking but this was almost certainly something Billy himself put about. Other servants of the time pour scorn on the idea.
She had her own personal maid who helped her in the morning and it was she who took the tray in. There is absolutely no way Billy would have dared go into her bedroom unannounced. He did sometimes over-step the mark but that would have been too much, even for him.
Former royal servant Liam Cullen-Brooks, who worked closely with Billy, agrees that Billy’s intimacy with the Queen Mother was sometimes exaggerated. He insists that her breakfast tray was left outside the bedroom and the Queen Mother’s personal maid waited until Billy had departed and only then knocked and took the tray in.
Billy would then spend the morning worrying about the luncheon party that almost always followed breakfast and the long process of the Queen Mother getting ready for her day. She was helped to dress by her maid and would then enter her private sitting room, where Billy would soon appear.
He might be asked to bring the corgis, of which the Queen Mother seems to have been particularly fond, but she didn’t pet them much – she simply liked to have them around.
The Queen Mother disliked bad news or anything gloomy, so on most days Billy would put on one of her favourite George Gershwin records, which she might then insist on playing over and over again. She told Billy that the happiest period of her life had been her twenties, which of course coincided with the 1920s, the great era of jazz and, above all, Gershwin.
Billy understood that every generation falls in love forever with the music of its youth, particularly when that music is popular music, and, for the Queen Mother, the music of her youth was, especially, Porgy and Bess. Billy knew a remarkable amount about the Queen Mother’s early years because on quiet days she talked to him for hours on end about her distant memories. Billy was astonished when she recalled dancing in the great palaces of Park Lane and Mayfair, palaces demolished as long ago as the 1930s.
We danced at Holland House in Kensington when the grounds were still a private park and there were at least a dozen grand houses in the West End where we also danced, and it was always a band, not a dreadful gramophone. Indeed we hated gramophones. They were a travesty. Then suddenly the music was gone and the palaces were demolished and turned into flats or converted to offices.
‘She complained bitterly’, recalled Billy, ‘that land taxes and death duties had destroyed the older, wonderful world she had known in the 1920s.’ Gershwin and other music of that time was the Queen Mother’s route back into an earlier glamorous world.
Even Billy was sometimes shocked at the extent to which the Queen Mother would open up to him on days when there were no engagements and she was, frankly, bored.
She told me she was always astonished that the press thought the royal family never relaxed and spoke to each other in a normal way and never had any fun. In fact, they had huge amounts of fun in Scotland away from the prying eyes of the press. Even Elizabeth and Prince Philip would chase each other and their children along the corridors when they were younger.
The Queen Mother loved to explain how her children had enjoyed playing pranks on her, especially Princess Margaret, who was always hiding things and getting up to mischief. Margaret had once climbed out of a window high up at the front of Clarence House and had to be coaxed down without alarming her – had she realised the danger she was in she might have fallen. Princess Elizabeth, on the other hand, had been devoted to horses and shooting and the Queen Mother worried that the press would get hold of the story that the Queen loved nothing more during the season than picking up at her shoot in the grounds of Windsor Castle. She would say, ‘The problem is that as a picker-up she has occasionally to despatch a wounded pheasant and one can’t help thinking the press simply wouldn’t understand.’
The Queen Mother also thought that it was a terrible mistake that everyone had made such a fuss over Princess Margaret wanting to marry Group Captain Townsend. She thought that if they had been allowed to marry her younger daughter’s life might have been much happier.
Billy, however, disliked the way the press increasingly portrayed Margaret as prone to gloom and depression. In fact, according to Billy, for much of the time she enjoyed her life and, like her mother, relished parties, games and laughter. One of Billy’s favourite stories described how he happened to be walking along the corridor outside the Queen Mother’s private apartments when he heard a crash. He carefully knocked and entered to discover the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in fits of giggles because they had inadvertently overturned a tray of drinks. According to Billy this was absolutely typical of the two women – they inspired laughter and fun in each other to the point where something outrageous might easily happen.
She once told him that she often wondered what life would have been like for her if she had never married into the royal family. She thought she might have been able to write books like the Mitfords or do something outrageous or scandalous. Billy claimed that on a number of occasions she had said to him, ‘Sometimes one simply wants to do the wrong thing to see what it would be like. Kicking over the traces must be such fun.’
These conversations and others like them took place in the mornings when Billy and the Queen Mother might find themselves together and entirely alone for long periods.
‘She liked to talk at these times,’ remembered Billy, ‘but far more than talk, she liked to dance.’
It was above all things the pastime she pursued with a real passion and as she had few partners who were deemed suitable, I was often drafted in. And she might decide to dance on a whim when one was least expecting it, perhaps five minutes before her luncheon guests were due to start arriving.
She sometimes found the constraints of life in the royal family tedious and would occasionally let go. On one memorable visit to the singer Elton John’s house near Windsor Castle, accompanied as ever by Billy, she insisted on dancing with the singer while wearing one of his extraordinary glittering sequined jackets.
But the happiness of the day could easily be spoiled if the preparations had not been made. For example, the sitting room Billy and the Queen Mother shared in the mornings had to be carefully prepared each day or the Queen Mother would be upset, as Billy explained: ‘We had to make sure that fresh flowers were ready every morning in bowls and vases in the Queen Mother’s sitting room and dining room. They were changed every day because if they were not fresh she immediately noticed. They affected her whole mood.’
By contrast the serious aspects of the outside world were anathema to her. Billy always said that she disliked politics and current affairs because, for her, they were a reminder of the horrors of the War – ‘in her case two wars’, as Billy liked to point out.
‘She hated listening to the news on the wireless or even worse on television,’ recalled one of her maids.
She said it was all too depressing and that one should concentrate only on life’s pleasures and ignore unpleasantness of every kind; she thought we should all concentrate on fun and gaiety, but of course that was easy for her and not so easy for the rest of us. I don’t think she knew the least thing about current affairs or politics or how ordinary people lived. She simply tried not to worry about what was happening in the outside world.
If she didn’t have letters to write – and in truth most of her letters were written on her behalf by her Private Secretary – she might glance at a magazine, hardly ever at a newspaper. Many people thought she read magazines such as Country Life and The Field, but Billy insisted she wasn’t that keen on either. One of her favourite magazines, apparently, was a curious little publication that came out quarterly and actually looked far more like a boo
k than a magazine. It was called The Countryman and was published from an old house in Burford in Oxfordshire. It concerned itself with rural history and archaeology, with articles about odd characters, eccentric churches and long-forgotten traditions.
‘I think she liked it because it avoided all the nouveau riche, rather vulgar material to be found in other magazines,’ said Billy.
Sometimes, despite their intimate conversations, the morning would drag and Billy would know that it was up to him to provide the entertainment.
‘Where the Queen Mother was concerned,’ recalled a junior butler who worked closely with Billy for a number of years, ‘Billy was a wonderful conversationalist. It’s very hard to catch his tone and his style but it was a mixture of drawl and wit, slightly bitchy and often very funny, but in a way that suggested he wasn’t really trying to be funny.’
The Queen Mother was always very particular about who she invited to lunch, but occasionally she would feel she was compelled by circumstances to invite someone unlikely to sing for his or her supper. She would say, ‘Oh dear, so and so is coming to luncheon. What shall we do with him? William, will you give him a chair with a view out the window? He will be so much happier not having to bother much with the rest of us.’ Or she would say, ‘William, I fear luncheon today may be rather a trial.’ Billy would nod sagely and assume that this was an indication that he would need to make an extra effort with the guests.
‘Much of what they said to each other was really in a sort of code,’ recalled a contemporary. ‘The Queen Mother might make what to the rest of us would seem like a bit of small talk, but Billy often knew that she was asking for a slight change in the way things were to be organised on that particular day. He was very sensitive to that sort of thing.’
