by Richard Mead
One guest, in April 1950, was the Duke himself. He and the Princess had expressed great enthusiasm for the idea during Boy’s first stay at Balmoral, but no earlier opportunity had emerged and it would be many years before the Princess would come. Boy got into a terrible state over the correct way to lay the table, this never having been a priority in the house, and he and Tod nearly came to blows. Daphne confined herself to decorating the house with flowers, but was the most relaxed of them all once the Duke arrived. The Duke subsequently remembered the occasion as having been rather chaotic but great fun.
Notwithstanding the regular routine of his weekends Boy found the whole experience unsettling, the pleasure of being at Menabilly and on his beloved boats being offset by the thought of having to return to his dismal little flat. The du Maurier family had a great penchant for nicknames – Daphne was variously known as ‘Bing’, Track’ and ‘Tray’, whilst she and Boy usually called each other ‘Duck’ – but Boy’s moods on a Sunday afternoon now spawned another, ‘Moper’, by which he became commonly known in the family and to very close family friends. He could still derive considerable enjoyment from his time at Menabilly and he and Daphne were more than capable of both bursting into spontaneous laughter whenever anything remotely ridiculous caught their attention. However, the contrast between his private and public persona became even more marked than it had been, the former characterized by informal clothes and by genuine pleasure interspersed with bouts of introspection sometimes amounting to depression, the latter by authority, charm and impeccable dress.
In June 1948 Daphne persuaded Boy to accompany her to the United States to stay with the Doubledays. From the time of their first meeting in late 1946 she had been obsessed with her hostess, Ellen, fantasizing about their being together and even using her as the inspiration for Stella, the heroine of her new play, September Tide. Ellen, whilst flattered by the attention, was unable to reciprocate in kind and there was never anything physical between the two women. This might have led to some awkwardness on the trip, but in fact Boy and Ellen hit it off immediately and he was particularly delighted when she invited Eisenhower to dinner, as the two men had always got along well.8 For Daphne the visit was less successful, as Ellen made it clear that, whilst they could continue as good friends, a closer relationship was out of the question. They kept in regular contact and even went on holiday to Italy together, but to Daphne’s disappointment Ellen allowed no real intimacy.
September Tide introduced a new object of attraction to Daphne in the form of the actress who played Stella, Gertrude Lawrence. ‘Gertie’, some nine years Daphne’s senior, had been one of her father Gerald’s lovers twenty or more years earlier. Unlike Ellen, she was receptive to Daphne’s advances and the two women began to see much of each other. There can be little doubt that Daphne was emotionally ‘in love’ with Gertie, as she had been with Ellen, but the extent of their physical relationship, the subject of constant conjecture, has never been conclusively proved one way or the other. One thing is certain: when Gertie died in 1951, Daphne’s grief was so intense that she went into something approaching a catatonic state. Boy remained as blissfully unaware of his wife’s inclinations towards the two women as he had been over her affair with Christopher Puxley.
Possibly because these relationships stimulated her creative gifts, Daphne became more prolific in her writing. She had come to something of a halt after the publication of The King’s General but 1949 saw not only September Tide, but also a new novel, The Parasites, the first book to be written in the shed which she had had erected in the Menabilly garden and to which she would retire in almost all weathers, for long periods and in complete solitude. It was a critical failure but was followed in 1951 by one of her very best and most enduringly popular works, My Cousin Rachel, whose eponymous heroine was once again inspired by Ellen.
Boy’s gloom about returning to London every Sunday night was understandable. Although he spoke to Daphne every morning on the phone, he was bereft of family life and his boats for the next five days and had to return every night to a lonely and featureless flat which had little attraction for him. On the other hand he was hardly short of activities outside his job. He remained highly sociable and rarely had to spend an evening on his own. When not in attendance on the Princess and the Duke, he would often be invited to events in his own capacity and on the evenings when he was not otherwise engaged, he had a number of friends whose company he enjoyed. These included old wartime companions like Dempsey, Hollinghurst and Freddie Gough, who had served with distinction in 1 Airborne Division,9 and family members such as George Browning and two cousins on his mother’s side, Brian Johnston, already establishing a reputation as a cricket commentator and broadcaster, and Victor Noel-Paton, who was to become one of the first life peers in 1958 as Lord Ferrier. Another friend of whom he saw a great deal was Augustus Agar, a retired Royal Navy captain who had won the VC in the Baltic in 1919 and whom he had first met in Alexandria in 1936.
Entertaining, impossible at Whitelands House, was made much easier for Boy by following his father into a directorship of The Savoy Hotel Limited, whose board he joined in 1949. The D’Oyly Carte family had remained friends and, although Rupert had died in the previous year, his daughter Bridget, who headed the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company and had helped her father in the hotel, was now herself a director. This was to be Boy’s only paid appointment outside his full-time job, but he commented that his directors fees were more than consumed by his expenditure in the bars and restaurants of the Savoy itself and its sister establishment, the Berkeley, which was located at that time in Piccadilly and was thus conveniently close to Clarence House and Buckingham Palace.
Boy and Bridget D’Oyly Carte found common ground in musical theatre, for all types of which he had a considerable enthusiasm. This was the golden age of the Broadway musical, with productions of Carousel, South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun and Kiss Me Kate all coming to London in the late 1940s. Boy would see every one of these and many others, taking the children with him, and then bring the music on records down to Menabilly. However, his abiding passion was for ballet. He attended whenever possible every production at Covent Garden and Sadler’s Wells and became very friendly with both the dancers and with other members of the classical music establishment, so much so that he was invited to become a Member of the Executive Committee of the Royal Academy of Dancing10 at the end of 1950. Margot Fonteyn became a close friend and spent a day at Menabilly, Boy justifying the visit to Daphne on the grounds that he needed to demonstrate to the prima ballerina the proper use of a bow and arrow for a ballet which she was rehearsing.
In his enthusiasm for this particular art form, Boy even wrote a script for a new ballet, called Jeanne d’Arc and based on the story of France’s great heroine. He suggested that it should be set to music by one of Benjamin Britten, Ernest Block, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold, Gordon Jacob or Leonard Bernstein, who between them certainly covered the waterfront in terms of musical styles. The composer Sir Arnold Bax, to whom he also sent the manuscript, was dubious about the concept, replying that ‘dancing is incapable of suggesting very much beyond its own beauty and the simplest of dramatic ideas’.11 Sir Arthur Bliss, a fellow member of the Royal Household as Master of the Queen’s Music, was deputed to talk to Vita Sackville-West, who had written a biography of Joan, but she also doubted that it would make a good ballet scenario, whilst Dame Ninette de Valois pointed out that the real difficulty was that by half way through Joan would be attired as a soldier, presumably in armour and could no longer be used as a dancer. Princess Margaret, on the other hand, told Boy that she could not wait to see Fonteyn in the role. Undeterred by the lack of interest from the musical establishment, Boy persevered in his search for support for about five years before eventually accepting that the project was never going to get off the ground.
Boy had one other intellectual pursuit, his membership of the Kipling Society. He had long been an avid reader of Rudyard Kipling’s works
and on the death of the president of the society, Field Marshal Earl Wavell, Boy assumed the position ‘with engaging modesty’12 at the annual luncheon in October 1950. He was to continue in the role for over a decade and to take the chair at the luncheons almost every year. Not all his reading interests were so literary. One of his great enthusiasms was for the ‘Biggles’ novels of Captain W. E. Johns, and he was also fond of Peter Cheney’s ‘Lemmy Caution’ novels and anything by Damon Runyon.
Boy retained numerous connections with the military and particularly the airborne forces. His continuing involvement with the Airborne Forces Security Fund brought him into regular contact with the leading personalities from the wartime years, including Gale, Frost and Lathbury, and when Harvey Bowring resigned as Chairman in September 1951, the trustees unanimously voted to ask him to accept the appointment once again. This he did and was present thereafter at the vast majority of their meetings. He would also always attend, if he could, the Airborne Forces Memorial Service each November and sometimes read the lesson.
In 1948 Boy was in the chair at the annual dinner of airborne officers, at which the guest of honour was Brereton. Any differences which he may have had with the Americans during the war were now, if not always forgotten by them, at least forgiven, and he also became the first president of the British chapter of the United States-British Comrades Association. Never one to bear any grudges himself, Boy was appalled when he discovered that his old rival Ridgway had not received any British decoration after the war, unlike many of the most senior American officers. ‘I personally feel very put out over this,’ he wrote to the then Military Secretary, ‘as Matt Ridgeway [sic] was one of the few American Generals who personally commanded British troops in action. In my opinion he was quite the outstanding American General, certainly on any Corps or Army level, that I came across in the war. If anything can be done in the matter, perhaps you would let me know in time, so that I can make sure that The King is fully briefed on the subject if it should come up to him.’13 At the time nothing could be done, as the opportunity had passed for the award of decorations to foreign officers in respect of their services in the War. To Boy’s pleasure the injustice was rectified some years later, following Ridgway’s tenure as Supreme Allied Commander both in Korea and in Europe, when he was made an honorary KCB.14
In May 1949 the Princess and the Duke were at last able to move into Clarence House, a most welcome development as Prince Charles had been born the previous November and the family needed more space. It was very much larger than Windlesham Moor but still of a manageable size. Boy had been working on the refurbishment project from the commencement of his appointment and had initially struggled to instil some order into chaos. The building had been lit throughout by gas and needed to be completely rewired. It was not only in a poor decorative state, but had been damaged by German bombs and was in some respects structurally unsound, so considerable remedial work was required, all the while under the constraints of a limited budget agreed with the Government. Both the Princess and the Duke were closely involved with choosing the décor, whilst the Duke, always interested in technology, was responsible for innovations such as an intercom system. The result of everyone’s efforts was a bright, airy and highly functional house which the royal couple could make into a family home.
In October 1949 the Duke, who had held a desk job at the Admiralty immediately after his marriage, before going on a course at the Royal Naval Staff College at Greenwich and then working at the NPFA, was appointed First Lieutenant of HMS Chequers, the Leader of the 1st Destroyer Flotilla based in Malta. This pleased him enormously, but created some difficulties as the Princess was initially committed to a number of engagements in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, she was able to join him after Prince Charles’s first birthday in November and stayed in Malta until shortly after Christmas. She was back there for six weeks from the end of March 1950, returning to London in plenty of time for the birth of Princess Anne that August. Shortly beforehand, the Duke had been promoted to lieutenant commander and given his first command, the frigate HMS Magpie.
Boy accompanied Princess Elizabeth on her first visit to Malta in late 1949, returning to London when she did at the end of that year, the demands on him now including the recruitment of nannies for the royal children. At the beginning of 1950 Jock Colville returned to the Foreign Office, from which he had been seconded, and was replaced as Private Secretary by Martin Charteris. The Princess went out to Malta once more at the end of November and was joined by her sister Princess Margaret in mid-December. Boy escorted the latter, their plane arriving in the middle of a gale, and subsequently accompanied the two princesses on to Tripoli in Libya to visit the 1st Battalion of the Grenadiers which was stationed there.
As the spring of 1951 turned into summer, it became apparent that the King was far from well. A very bad attack of bronchitis in May was followed by a series of tests which in due course revealed that he had lung cancer, and in September he underwent an operation to remove his left lung. Two months before that it had been decided that both the Princess and the Duke would have to increase their royal engagements and much to the regret of both of them, because he was thoroughly enjoying his career and because their time in Malta had brought them closer to a ‘normal’ married life than they were to experience at any time, the Duke stood down from active service. One result of the King’s illness was that he was unable to go on a planned tour of Canada and the United States. The Princess and the Duke were deputed to stand in for him and though their departure was initially delayed by the King’s operation they eventually left on 8 October, accompanied by Charteris and Parker, Boy remaining at home. They were away for over a month and missed the annual Remembrance Day service and parade at the Cenotaph, during which Boy placed a wreath on their behalf.
Another marathon royal tour had been planned to Australia and New Zealand for early in the following year but it was clear that the King, whilst apparently making a recovery, would not be well enough for such an exhausting journey. The Princess and the Duke stood in for him again, beginning their trip with a brief holiday in Kenya, for which they departed on 31 January, accompanied once more by Charteris and Parker. In the early hours of 6 February the King suffered a coronary thrombosis and died in his sleep. The new Queen arrived back at Heathrow on the following day in the gloom of late afternoon, to be met by her Prime Minister Winston Churchill and members of the Cabinet. Boy stood with the reception committee on the tarmac.
Boy went to pay his respects to the late sovereign as he lay in state in Westminster Hall, possibly recalling the time, almost exactly sixteen years earlier, when he had stood guard over the coffin of his father with the officers of the 2nd Battalion. On 15 February he walked between Charteris and Parker in the funeral procession from Westminster to Paddington, whence the coffin and the mourners were taken by train to Windsor for the funeral in St George’s Chapel. Daphne had been invited to the funeral as well, sitting next to Parker’s wife, Eileen.
Chapter 28
Duke (1952–1956)
The accession of the Queen brought about profound changes for her husband and her staff, the most immediate of which for the latter was that she was now served instead by the enormous Household of the reigning monarch. Another consequence was a move out of Clarence House and into Buckingham Palace. The Duke, in particular, had hoped that they might stay in what had become a well-loved family home, whilst working in and holding formal functions at the Palace, but Sir Alan Lascelles, who had automatically become the Queen’s Private Secretary, insisted that they should live there as well and he was strongly supported in this by Churchill. Clarence House was to become the residence of the Queen Mother, who would inherit its domestic staff.
Martin Charteris remained with the Queen to provide some continuity as an additional Assistant Private Secretary, whilst Mike Parker stepped into the role of Private Secretary to the Duke. With no physical establishment to run, Boy’s job as Comptroller became redundant. Instea
d he was appointed Treasurer to the Duke alone, as part of a very much reduced Household in which his role was to reflect the future activities of his employer. He moved into a spacious office in Buckingham Palace, from which he ran a team which now comprised just himself, Parker, the Duke’s new Equerry1 Squadron Leader Beresford Horsley, five secretaries including Maureen Luschwitz as Boy’s Personal Assistant,2 the Chief Clerk, the Sergeant Orderly and a police officer. He was also responsible for The Duke’s personal staff of two Pages, two valets and chauffeur. Parker dealt with requests for engagements and handled the general correspondence, while Horsley saw to the details of the engagements once they had been accepted, agreed the programmes and made the travel arrangements. Boy, as the Treasurer, looked after financial matters, including the allocation from the Civil List, and acted as the main point of contact for the Duke’s numerous honorary appointments in the armed forces and his growing number of patronages.
Whereas the duties of monarchy were well defined, there was no constitutional role for the Duke. He supported the Queen in every way possible, but the position of consort was never likely to satisfy him on its own and he now had to forge alongside it a unique new career for himself, which would take some time to shape. Between his marriage and the Queen’s accession he had accumulated a small portfolio of external interests, to which he felt that he could make a worthwhile contribution. The number now grew substantially and covered a wide range of activities, although there were some common themes, notably those of a sporting, maritime, educational and scientific nature. There was also a strong emphasis on youth.
