Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day

by David Cohen

  Since Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne, the royal family has coped with many stresses that are similar to those faced by ordinary families. Princess Margaret, Prince Charles, Princess Anne and Prince Andrew have all divorced. Princess Margaret also had a much-publicised affair with Roddy Llewellyn. I met him at his house in the Cotswolds during the recent phone-hacking scandal when he felt sure that his phone too had been hacked back in the 1970s. One of the few things he said about his affair with Princess Margaret was that they had somehow managed to have about two years before the press found out and started to pursue them. Llewellyn was furious when one tabloid led on the fact that ‘Margaret’s toy boy’ was on the dole during a week when he was, in fact, working hard to get an exhibit ready for the Chelsea Flower Show. He had been very upset when his brother Dai had sold some of the secrets of the affair, but, by the 1970s, any lover of the royals was fair game for the press.

  The royal family has also had to cope with crises peculiar to their position. Unlike Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II has not been the target of any assassination attempts but, in 1982, she did find an intruder in her bedroom in Buckingham Palace. There was also an attempt to kidnap Princess Anne in 1974, and a very amateurish attempt on Prince Charles’s life on Australia Day in 1994. In 1979, the IRA planted a bomb on a small boat belonging to Lord Mountbatten, the son of the First Sea Lord who had ‘jumped overboard’ and resigned. Prince Philip saw Mountbatten as something of a father; Prince Charles regarded him as an honorary grandfather. Mountbatten was murdered; Princess Diana was not, at least according to the inquiry begun by the French in 1997, a finding endorsed by Lord Stevens after he retired as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Many believe the French inquiry left many questions unanswered.

  When Princess Diana died after the Mercedes in which she was travelling crashed in the Alma Tunnel on 31 August 1997, spurious maturity ruled. The Princes William and Harry were persuaded on the very morning of her death to appear in public. They went to church for the usual Sunday service to make the point publicly that everything was still normal. We cannot understand the reaction of the Queen to these traumas without understanding her own childhood – and the way she mothered her children.

  10

  ‘Crawfie’ and the Little Princesses

  The majority of the most acute insights we have into the current Queen’s childhood come from her governess, Marion Crawford, who only retired in 1948, when her charge was twenty-two years old. In the introduction to a new edition of The Little Princesses, A. N. Wilson argues Crawford was the ‘most important Royal writer’ of recent times, though literary circles tend to be snobbish about her. ‘She was much more like a camera than an authorial intelligence,’ Wilson added, which implies she was a total amateur as a writer.

  The circumstances surrounding the publication of the book were bizarre. Crawford did not tout her memoir to publishers. Soon after she retired, the American publishers Bruce and Beatrice Gould contacted Buckingham Palace and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; they wanted positive stories about the royal family. The Palace dismissed the idea but the British government was keen to boost the country’s image. An appealing portrait of royal family life would be ideal and the Foreign Office suggested Marion Crawford should write something. The Goulds offered Crawford the then fantastic sum of $85,000 for her story. Despite the fee, Crawford asked that the contract state the approval of the royal family would be sought for any material published. However, the contract allowed the Goulds to publish, even if the Palace refused.

  Crawford’s account appeared in Woman’s Own in the UK and in the Ladies’ Home Journal in the United States. To the intense displeasure of Queen Elizabeth II, The Little Princesses became a bestseller. She was quoted as saying: ‘We can only think that our late and completely trusted governess has gone off her head, because she promised in writing that she would not publish.’

  Crawford was the first servant to cash in on the private lives of the royals and she suffered for it. The royal family never spoke to her again and did not even send the routine Christmas card. Remarkably and hypocritically, however, the King and Queen received the Goulds, who published the work, at Buckingham Palace.

  When Crawford retired to Aberdeen, she knew the royal family regularly drove past her front door on their way to Balmoral, but they never stopped to see her. When she died in 1988, neither the Queen, the Queen Mother nor Princess Margaret sent a wreath. The lack of courtesy is startling.

  Marion Crawford became the royal governess because she did well in a summer job. She was studying child psychology at Edinburgh’s Moray House Institute and, in 1926, went to work as the governess for Lord Elgin’s children. Lady Elgin recommended her to the then Duchess of York, who was looking for someone to teach Princess Elizabeth and her two-year-old sister. When Crawford joined the household, no one imagined the Duke of York, Elizabeth’s father, would one day be King.

  Marion Crawford met the then Duchess (who we, of course, think of as the Queen Mother) and they agreed that she should come down to London for a month to see if they liked her, and if she liked them. Crawford went back to Scotland to collect clothes, as she imagined she would need a succession of smart frocks in her new job. That detail reveals she was seen as a cut above the nurses and nannies who wore uniforms. Mrs Knight, the children’s nurse, always wore a white cap, too. Crawford was lucky her mother was a good dressmaker as otherwise her wardrobe would have cost a fortune. In reality, however, life at 145 Piccadilly was rather quiet and did not require much haute couture.

  Marion Crawford described the household as ‘homelike and unpretentious’. The nurseries were on the top floor and very much the centre of all activities. She was given a bedroom next to Elizabeth’s.

  Crawford was an astute observer but, as with all memoirs, it is impossible to be sure how accurate every detail and every word of every conversation she gives may be, especially as some of them took place twenty or even twenty-five years before she wrote them. She never deals with this issue and occasionally the wording of the conversations she reports does not seem convincing. The account Crawford gives of the atmosphere in the family feels, however, utterly convincing.

  At once, Crawford was struck by the differences between ‘Lilibet’, as Princess Elizabeth was called, and her sister, Margaret. Even at the age of six, Lilibet was reserved and controlled; her sister far less so. Crawford gives one nice example. The Princesses’ father was often in the house for lunch and would spoon out some coffee sugar for his daughters. Although Lilibet loved the sugar, she carefully sorted her lumps out on the table and ‘then ate it very daintily and methodically’. Margaret, on the other hand, kept ‘the whole lot in her small hot hand and pushed it into her mouth’. Lilibet seemed special: ‘I had met many children,’ Crawford wrote, ‘but never one with so much character at so young an age.’

  Life at 145 Piccadilly was relatively informal so nothing had prepared the young teacher for meeting the King and Queen. One day, it was announced that George V and Queen Mary would visit the house. Crawford was nervous, fearing the King would disapprove of her. However, her relationship with the Duchess was good and she told her of her anxieties. The Duchess laughed that there had been some idea that ‘someone older would have been a better choice, but the Duke and I don’t think so – we want our children to have a happy childhood, which they can always look back on.’ Crawford then had a panic over etiquette: she had not learned to curtsy and was terrified she might topple over as she tried to do so. She just about managed to keep her balance when Queen Mary and the King came over to her. Crawford wanted to blurt out, ‘Please, will I do?’, but managed to restrain herself. Queen Mary smiled at her and the King just ‘grunted and prodded the ground with his stick’. He then made a remark which reveals his obsession with order: ‘For goodness sake, teach Margaret and Lilibet to write a decent hand, that’s all I ask. Not one of my children can write properly.’

  When George V fell ill in 1929, the family worried, e
specially as David had recently fallen badly when steeple chasing. He was banned from that activity and for once accepted his father’s decision.

  Lilibet was already obsessed with horses and Crawford revealed that her first love was Owen the groom. The Duke once laughed when someone asked what Lilibet thought of something and told them they should ask Owen – he would know.

  The girls had a collection of thirty toy horses, all on wheels. ‘That’s where we stable them,’ Lilibet told her new governess. Each horse had its own immaculate saddle and bridle; the girls polished them and followed the routine of a top-class stable. Every night, each saddle was removed and the toy horses fed and watered. One of Lilibet’s favourite games involved putting a harness of red reins with bells attached on her teacher. Lilibet would then ‘ride’ ‘Crawfie’ – the nickname they used for Crawford – as they went off delivering groceries. ‘I would be gentled, patted, given my nosebag and jerked to a standstill. Meanwhile Lilibet delivered imaginary groceries at imaginary houses and held long intimate conversations with her imaginary customers.’

  Lilibet already knew how horses behaved and told Crawford that, as a horse, she had to ‘pretend to be impatient. Paw the ground a bit.’ The dutiful teacher dutifully pawed. Lilibet loved cold mornings because then her pretend horse breathed out clouds of air, ‘just like a proper horse’. Sometimes the roles would be reversed and Lilibet would prance around, being the horse, whinnying and sidling up to Crawford in the best equine manner.

  From the top of the house, they could see Hyde Park, where the horses trotted up and down Rotten Row. The girls loved looking at the brewers’ dray horses as they did the rounds. Lilibet did not expect to become Queen, but said that, if ever she did, she would make a law giving horses Sunday off because ‘horses should have a rest too. And I shan’t let anyone dock their pony’s tail.’

  The house at 145 Piccadilly had a few surprising domestic issues. Crawford once found a mouse sitting on her towel. Luckily, the postman arrived. Crawford gave him her poker and asked him to kill it. The postie duly obliged.

  There was no schoolroom and so the Princesses did their lessons in a boudoir belonging to the Duchess. Despite the informality, lessons always started at nine in the morning. Crawford did not bring in any specialists to help her until the girls were much older; she felt perfectly competent to teach them English, history, mathematics and to encourage them to read. She had been teaching the Princesses for four years when, in 1936, George V was close to death. His son David wrote: ‘All was still as we – his wife and children – stood together by my father’s bedside waiting for life to be extinguished.’ The moment the King was dead, David’s mother and brother surprised him: they took his hand and kissed it, a correct show of homage to the new King. David was embarrassed but, in his memoir, he does not admit that he was overwhelmed with sorrow and anxiety. He and his father had never resolved their relationship. David started to cry on his mother’s shoulder. Mary of Teck was also embarrassed and felt it was vital for the new King to set an example; his dead father would have wanted that. She curtsied to her blubbering son and addressed him as ‘Your Majesty’.

  The Establishment, and especially the Archbishop of Canterbury, was appalled when David, soon to be crowned Edward VIII, wanted to marry the American Wallis Simpson, who was soon to be divorced for the second time. Within months, Edward was left in no doubt that he must choose between marrying the woman he loved and carrying on as King. The orthodox view is that his younger brother had always been nervous of having to assume the throne, but some recent research suggests George remained on surprisingly friendly terms with the Machiavellian Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang. Lang was plotting Edward VIII’s downfall.

  In the autumn of 1936, the atmosphere at 145 Piccadilly became tense. Then the Duchess sent for Crawford. She held out her hand and said: ‘I’m afraid there are going to be great changes in our lives.’ They discussed how to break the news to the children. It seems quite astonishing that it was left up to Crawford, rather than to their parents, to inform Lilibet and Margaret that their father was about to become King. This is one of the few points in the memoir where it feels as if Crawfie might be exaggerating her role. When she told the Princesses that they were moving to Buckingham Palace, the girls ‘looked at me in horror’. According to her, Lilibet said: ‘What, forever?’ and Margaret added: ‘But I have only just learned to write York.’

  On 12 December 1936, the day after Edward VIII signed the royal assent to his own instrument of abdication, George’s daughters gave their father a ‘final hug as he went off’ in the uniform of the Admiral of the Fleet. Hugging was very normal in their lives. Crawford explained to the girls that they would have to curtsy to their father when he came back for lunch because by then he would be the King. ‘And now you mean we must do it to Papa and Mummy,’ Lilibet said, ‘and Margaret too.’

  When the King came home, his daughters curtsied to him gracefully. ‘Nothing brought the change in his condition to him as clearly as this did,’ Crawford pointed out. The King was taken aback for a moment and then kissed his girls ‘warmly’. After that, they went in to have lunch, which Crawford described as ‘hilarious’. No one in the family ever spoke of their uncle David again. ‘The Royal conspiracy of silence had closed about him as it did about so many other uncomfortable things,’ she added in one of the few trenchant criticisms in her book.

  The girls would have to behave impeccably at their father’s 1937 Coronation. Princess Elizabeth would find that easy, but Margaret was only six years old and Crawford was worried as to how well she would cope. On the day, crowds gathered outside; the children were up early and excited as there was a lot of ‘laughter and squealing’. The King had decided that his daughters needed to be comfortable and arranged for very light coronets to be made for them. Before setting out, the Princesses paraded before Crawford. ‘Do you like my slippers?’ Lilibet asked and lifted her skirt to show off her silver sandals. Crawford noted that she was wearing short socks ‘that revealed a length of honest brown leg’. The older sister behaved much as older sisters often do and worried that Margaret would disgrace them all by falling asleep in the middle of the ceremony. ‘After all she is very young for a Coronation, isn’t she?’ Lilibet noted.

  When they returned, Crawford asked Lilibet how Margaret had coped. She said that her sister had been wonderful and that she had only had to nudge her once or twice when she made too much noise with her prayer book. The two girls were exhausted, but had to rally for an hour while pictures were taken of them. ‘We aren’t supposed to be human,’ Crawford records their mother saying, rather sadly.

  Having the stamina to cope with a Coronation was not exactly a serious problem compared to those the young Prince Philip was facing.

  11

  Prince Philip’s Turbulent Childhood

  After the end of the 1914 war, the Greek royal family returned to Athens. The marriage of Victoria’s great-granddaughter, Princess Alice, and Prince Andrew was still happy. They had four daughters, and a son, Prince Philip, was born in a modest family house, Mon Repos, in Corfu on 10 June 1921. Princess Alice was an attentive mother, which had more of an impact on her son than most commentators have suggested. Winnicott would have approved of her: she slept in the nursery with her son when his nanny was away and his sisters admitted they wanted to squash their spoilt little brother. As a small child, Philip was deeply loved.

  Philip’s father, Andrew, resumed his military career but became a victim of the tangles of Balkan politics. Court-martialled in 1922 for losing a battle against the Turks, Andrew only escaped the death sentence because George V intervened. He sent a cruiser, the HMS Calypso, to remove Alice and her children and a diplomat to plead for Andrew’s life. The King felt he could do more to help Andrew, a Prince of insignificant Greece, than he had done with either Louis Battenberg or the Tsar.

  Once he left Greece, Prince Philip’s father set up house in Paris, but he did not provide a home or much security f
or his children. Alice, who had seen her beloved aunt Ella murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and her father forced to resign from the British Navy, now became increasingly religious. Philip was seven when on 20 October 1928 his mother entered the Greek Orthodox Church. She was still wholly committed to Andrew and translated his defence of his actions during the Greco-Turkish War into English. Soon afterwards, however, she began claiming that she was receiving divine messages, and that she had healing powers. Her eldest daughters became increasingly concerned for her welfare. Andrew came to London and discussed his wife’s problems with Thomas Ross, who ran the hospital that had been financed by Edwina Mountbatten’s grandfather, Ernest Cassel, and organised with the help of Sir Maurice Craig. Alice’s mother, Princess Victoria, got a second opinion and wrote to her friend Nona Kerr that both doctors suggested ‘internment. Andrew and I feel it is the only right thing to do. Both for Alice and her family. How hard it has been to come to this decision and what we feel about it you know. This Easter will be a miserable one.’

  Alice was sent to the Tegel Clinic in Berlin, which was run by Dr Ernst Simmel, a friend of Freud’s. Freud suggested using X-rays on Alice’s ovaries to speed up her menopause as he believed the religious fervour had a sexual root. He may have been correct as there were rumours that Alice had fallen in love with a mysterious young man. Her daughters, however, thought their mother was suffering from the delusion that Christ was appearing to her. Simmel did not help her much and so Alice was sent to another friend of Freud’s, Dr Ludwig Binswanger’s sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Binswanger and Freud were close. Freud complained to him of his fellow analysts, ‘What a gang!’

  Andrew could not cope with yet another stress, that of his wife being incarcerated by psychiatrists. After a few months, he left for the south of France, leaving his children to be brought up by various members of the family.