Backstairs Billy

by Tom Quinn

  A fellow servant at the time remembered stumbling into Billy’s office sometime after Reg died and finding the elderly butler quietly weeping as he sorted his various papers. Unusually, Billy was not in the least put out by the intrusion. He simply said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m rather upset at the moment. Would you mind coming back a little later?’ It was typical of a man who could be vindictive at one moment, witty the next and finally quite open about his distress.

  He told friends that he felt lost and rudderless, but his real anguish only came out when he drank and he was certainly drinking heavily at this time, partly because he was upset at losing Reg but also because his strength – and he was an immensely strong man – was beginning to ebb. It was not exactly that he was ill, although as one close friend put it ‘he just wasn’t right’ after Reg died; it was as if some of the cords that bound him so tightly had weakened or snapped.

  But Billy’s ill health was also the result of decades spent drinking too much and working hideously long hours. There were rumours too that he had developed HIV. Other staff occasionally heard him crashing around while working late in his office but no one dared check on him. ‘He would definitely fall asleep at his desk,’ recalled one, ‘and then sometimes wake in the early hours and carry on as if nothing had happened.’

  I once saw him asleep on the floor and I was told that he used to try to do exercises when he was drunk. He would try a few press-ups and then give up and go to sleep. He was once interrupted trying to do a cartwheel across the floor.

  Billy’s drinking became a serious matter in the last decade of the Queen Mother’s life. On one occasion Sir Alastair Aird asked to see Billy on the pretext of discussing one of the junior footmen. He mentioned some minor misdemeanour and then in a manner that he clearly thought reasonable and diplomatic he gently mentioned that one or two people had been talking about Billy’s drinking; they had said he seemed to be slightly the worse for wear by mid-afternoon each day. Billy was outraged and not just because he knew that the Queen Mother would always back him against Aird. On this occasion he adopted his usual tactic: he simply stood up, turned on his heel and walked out without a word. He slammed the door. Aird was furious but knew there was nothing he could do – for now. Reporting Billy to the Queen Mother would be worse than useless. There is no doubt that this was one of those occasions, and there were many, when Aird thought Billy should have been sacked or at least quietly retired. He is known to have confided in the other equerries that the Queen Mother was entirely unreasonable about Billy, who Aird felt was a dangerous liability.

  In a remarkable echo of the John Brown–Queen Victoria romance, during which top level meetings were convened to discuss how to get rid of Brown, Aird got together with various other officials in a secret meeting to discuss the ‘Tallon issue’. What exactly was agreed is not known but the meeting would at least have given these men (who were used to getting their own way) a chance to let off steam, and there is no doubt that meetings like this eventually paved the way for Billy’s removal from Clarence House in the weeks following the death of the Queen Mother.

  Those who knew Aird speak warmly of him. Major Colin Burgess, who was an equerry at Clarence House for a number of years, is on record as saying that Aird was a decent man, but Burgess – who was from a similar military background – would probably have shared Aird’s views about the importance of the right tie and shoelaces. At times, Burgess’s memoir makes Aird sound like a rather benign but fussy old nanny.

  The fact that the Queen Mother always backed Billy when there was a row, proved, in the long run, to be a disaster. It meant he was safe only while she lived. A number of commentators have pointed out that Billy was so obsessed with the Queen Mother that he failed to see the wider picture or to consider the future – his own future. He must have known he would almost certainly outlive the Queen Mother, yet he enjoyed making enemies among those who, once she was dead, would suddenly have the power to get rid of him.

  In a conversation a year or two after he retired to Kennington, Billy insisted that he had not deliberately twitted and teased the various equerries. He insisted it was simply that they did not understand the Queen Mother as he did, and as he always put her interests first it didn’t bother him in the slightest if the equerries’ noses were sometimes put out of joint. And he had some inkling that his position might become precarious.

  He said:

  I had served the Queen Mother in the same way for so long and according to the standards I thought she would expect so, as she moved towards the end of her life, I couldn’t change just to ensure I had a softer landing after she died than might otherwise have been the case. Besides, the damage – if there was any – had already been done.

  The equerries and various advisers and I had worked together for years, in some cases decades, and nothing I did in the last years of the Queen Mother’s life was going to make any difference. If I had enemies, and I know I did, then they were always going to remember things that blackened my character. I’m not mentioning any names and I was certainly part of the intrigue and gossip at Clarence House, but however hard I might have tried it would always have been unlikely that I would be allowed to live on at Gate Lodge. I sort of knew it but thought I might be lucky – that I might just be left in peace if the Queen Mother left specific instructions that I should have Gate Lodge for as long as I liked. And I was told by the Queen Mother that she would instruct the household to that effect. She even said she would write a letter confirming it.

  Even without enemies, Billy must have known it was going to be difficult because it has always been the case that when a member of the royal family dies all the relevant staff lose their jobs automatically. Press enquiries immediately following the death of the Queen Mother produced the following frosty response from a palace spokesman: ‘When any member of the royal family dies their staff, in effect, become redundant.’

  In terms of redundancy payments, the lower staff are paid so little that financial recompense is insignificant, while the equerries almost always have private incomes and are not paid anyway. Some of the servants who suddenly find themselves without a job are offered other jobs – often in the royal household – but this is by no means certain.

  As the 1990s slowly passed Billy spent more weekends quietly in the Kennington flat he had once shared with Reg, but he still thought of Gate Lodge as home and he was convinced, despite his misgivings, that the Queen Mother’s instructions about what should happen to him after her death would ensure that, at the very least, he could hope for a relatively soft landing.

  For now there was work to do. If the Queen Mother had a less busy public schedule as she reached her mid-nineties she still loved to entertain at home, which meant that in many ways Billy was as busy as ever, despite his own increasingly poor health.

  Billy still saw his friends regularly at his champagne parties. He still saw an occasional visitor from Coventry and still went out to pick up young men who were then slipped past the guards at Clarence House just as they had been in the old days, only now the policemen probably believed Billy when he said, ‘Oh, he’s just staying for tea.’

  As the Queen Mother grew increasingly frail she continued to rely on Billy, but doctors and others became involved and as she weakened and became confused other advisers whom Billy had formerly been able to keep at bay were able to exert greater influence. She accepted the need for a younger team to nurse her, especially as her lunch and dinner parties came to an end. Billy knew he was being frozen out. He was convinced as he always had been that in matters relating to the Queen Mother’s health he was the best judge of what was good for her, but by now his voice was increasingly drowned out by experts of one kind or another.

  He was hurt by this because he had actually had a great deal of experience of looking after her when she was ill. He was always there when she went down with colds and occasional bouts of flu – she would insist that only Billy should be allowed to make what he described as a royal hot toddy.
‘It was strong enough to numb all feeling!’ he said later.

  But more seriously he also helped when she had two hip operations and took some months to recover. He was one of the very few people she would allow to take her arm – so long as they were in private – and help steady her. And he was her main source of solace after a cataract operation. He later said she hated to be immobile and was by no means a good patient.

  As Billy had less to do with the Queen Mother and she began seriously to decline, he saw a little more of the other royals, or at least those who had always liked him. Billy had always got on very well with Prince Charles and, alone among members of the immediate royals, he was to visit Billy in hospital a few months before he died.

  Charles had written numerous letters to Billy when he was a child and Billy had always seemed wonderfully entertaining and avuncular to the young prince. Charles never forgot and when rumours reached him that, following the Queen Mother’s death, Billy was struggling to survive on his tiny pension, the Prince is said to have added £100 a month.

  The extent of Billy’s gradual separation from the Queen Mother can be gathered from the fact that when she finally died in her sleep aged 101, Billy was not told the news by a member of the royal household. Whatever his faults, this might seem a particularly callous way to treat someone who had been so close to her for so long. It was no doubt the result of the equerries sensing that at last they had the upper hand. Billy’s feeling that he had simply been cut adrift can be judged by a comment he made to his friend Basia Briggs on a number of occasions during the last few years of the Queen Mother’s life. He said: ‘I don’t even know if she likes me anymore.’

  Billy knew from newspaper and television reports that she was close to death but he was so shocked he could hardly speak when a reporter from a tabloid finally rang him to tell him the news. In the only interview Billy ever gave to the media – it is a thirty-second clip snatched as Billy tried to reach Gate Lodge soon after the Queen Mother died – he said simply, ‘I loved her’.

  Anyone who has seen the clip will detect something very slightly theatrical in Billy’s words, but they are nonetheless charged with deep emotion and they express perfectly the sense one has that the Queen Mother was partly Billy’s employer, partly a maternal figure and partly the central figure in his romantic world. He was in love with her as perhaps the medieval troubadours were in love with those unattainable French queens. The point of their adoration was that the object of it should be and remain ultimately unobtainable. Unlike Queen Victoria’s servant John Brown, who, it is said, was rather bossy and even scolded her occasionally, Billy was genuinely besotted. For him, the Queen Mother could do no wrong, although she might be badly advised by others.

  Billy certainly knew about her extravagance but he shared her view that a queen should not have to bother about money. He hated the suggestion that she was selfish and self-centred, an accusation that others have levelled at her. He was also certain that a vital piece of paper had been lodged in the right quarter to guarantee his future after her death. When he was pressed about this he always insisted that it was the household staff, jealous of his influence over the Queen Mother, who had deliberately destroyed this document in the days after her death.

  I think they knew that she would have been upset that I was simply made to leave Gate Lodge. The Queen Mother had promised that after my years of service it would be my home for life. I thought she had left instructions to that effect but I could hardly ask her to put it in writing to me. I suppose I was rather naïve in thinking that a letter would survive if it meant everyone had to put up with me for a few more years. In some ways they were quite ruthless, you know.

  Though Billy hated to complain, he missed his earlier life terribly once the Queen Mother died. It was some months later that he received a short letter telling him that Gate Lodge had to be vacated. The deadline gave him little time to prepare, but obedient to the command he packed his things and left. There was no leaving party, no letter of thanks, no formal goodbye; an official made sure he was out on time and that all his things had been cleared ready for exile in south London.

  THE BIGGEST PROBLEM now that life at Clarence House was over for Billy was that though he had numerous friends and acquaintances, he worried that many of them had enjoyed his company because of what he did rather than because of who he was. But, as it turned out, he need not have worried. His friends stuck by him and there were always new friends. But even Billy could not fill all his time with parties and his fifty-one years of service had given him no time to learn how to live in the evenings and at weekends when work is over and there are no parties to go to. For more than half a century Billy’s work and life had been one and the same thing. Now he was on his own.

  For years he had organised lunches and dinners for the Queen Mother, but he had never had to make his own meals or wash up – and these were tasks he hated. They made him realise that though he had been a servant, he had enjoyed a uniquely privileged life with dozens of staff at one time effectively working below him, awed by his presence.

  ‘Oh, he loved it,’ recalled one friend, ‘because every day in the palace when he passed a junior footman, a gardener or a maid or even a lady in waiting he could tell they were looking across at him and thinking, “That’s the legendary William Tallon!”’

  It was a curious sort of fame and localised power but nonetheless real for all that. And that is what he really missed when it was all over, which is not to say that he did not miss the Queen Mother too. He did, but if he had been allowed to stay in Gate Lodge after she died – as might easily have happened – he would have been happy and I think might have lived a little longer.

  As it was, he shambled along to the shops and bought his food like any other elderly, retired, single man. But he was hopeless at it and began to eat irregularly and sometimes not at all. He was also shocked at the cost of a good bottle of wine as he hadn’t had to buy wine himself for decades. He occasionally had to drink what he described as ‘plonk’ and even, at his worst moments, ate out of tins. He kept his sense of humour, though, remarking once, ‘I suppose if beans were good enough for Anstruther they should be good enough for me.’

  Billy had developed a taste for the finer things in life and he was suddenly cut off from them all. He found himself in what some people called a ‘scruffy, run-down part of Kennington’ shambling along the streets to the corner shop, with a plastic bag and his shirt tails hanging out.

  But there were compensations. Because Billy was an amusing man with a remarkable employment history, he was invited to a seemingly endless series of parties which gave him a faint glow of the life he had once enjoyed with the Queen Mother. Occasionally he felt out of place at these gatherings, but then he often under-valued his own virtues as an entertaining and witty dinner guest. As another friend recalled:

  Billy sometimes went into terrible glooms that were alleviated only by alcohol. He drank, I think, because he really was an alcoholic in the sense that he relied on alcohol; he relied on having it every day but it was a habit he had got into at Clarence House over many years and he found that even though he couldn’t afford the sort of things he was used to, he had to have something – alcohol restored some of his charm, his confidence and his wit. But the fact that he was no longer drinking the finest wines in the finest company – as he saw it – took a lot of getting used to and he never really managed it.

  He went to parties in Chelsea and Belgravia, in Highgate and Kensington and he was treated in a way that other ordinary ex-servants would never have been treated. He was the grand old man of royal service. It was his unique status, his numerous appearances – admittedly in the background – at royal events, his medals [which included the very rarely awarded Royal Victorian Gold Medal for long service] that made him special. It was all these things that made him a celebrity. And the great thing about Billy was that in his exile he became a humbler figure, some might even say a nicer man. Power had corrupted him a little and
he knew it. He had been beastly, he once said, to some of those who worked for him and I think he felt rather bad about it.

  Everyone speculated about whether he was writing his memoirs and a number of his friends were absolutely convinced that by the time he died he had written a very great deal.

  Another close friend of Billy’s said:

  He was definitely writing something, which is perhaps why so many odd things happened after he died. I’m sure that in the same way that someone probably destroyed the Queen Mother’s instructions that Billy should be allowed to stay on at Gate Lodge, they also destroyed whatever it was he had written about his life with the Queen Mother at Clarence House. Why else would a team of people have arrived at the Kennington flat to go through his things so soon after he died? They were there for several days and a great many of Billy’s things vanished as a result.

  But if Billy had written about his life in service he did not talk about it much among his friends.

  ‘I heard people at parties try to draw him out but it never worked,’ recalled a journalist and television scriptwriter who knew Billy in his last years.

  This was partly the habit of a lifetime, I think, but partly also that whatever the tabloids might like to think, Billy wanted to save his best stories for publication. The royals, as he explained to me on a number of occasions, grow up in such an exposed way – exposed to public scrutiny – that they are very careful about what they say and do, but they still have lives to lead with all the mistakes and confusions that can involve. And Billy had known them all for so long. He knew the scandals and the tittle-tattle.

  Billy had seen the Queen Mother tipsy on many occasions and he’d seen her lose her temper or do absurd things, but his main aim in writing his memoirs would not have been to show her in a bad light. It would have concentrated on the eccentrics who run Clarence House and might well have been Billy’s revenge on the equerries who he felt had treated him so badly.