by Craig Brown
Straining her neck to peer out of the window through her ill-fitting contact lenses, the Princess – who as a young girl had suffered not only mumps and chickenpox, but also German measles – would have known that if the elderly plane were to crash-land, her chances of survival would be minimal.
Hundreds of yards below, the inhabitants of Nether Stowey – a village stricken by a deadly plague three centuries before – coughed and sneezed, placed their heads in their hands, sighed, and prepared themselves for the end.
Non-sequitur
In order to finish an official function, Princess Margaret went round and round in circles. She flew over a cottage in Somerset because she had read a book. And that’s why Richard Holmes wrote a biography of Coleridge.
Index
Coleridge, S.T. (see Nether Stowey)
Holmes, Richard (biographer; see Coleridge, S.T.)
Margaret, HRH Princess (see Holmes, Richard)
Nether Stowey (see Somerset)
Somerset (see Margaret, HRH Princess)
Optimistic
Margaret’s heart soared as she stepped into the aeroplane. Her dream had finally come true: at last, she was to set eyes upon her beloved poet’s cherished village from the air.
Her devoted pilot delighted in doing exactly what she wanted. Even the little birds bowed their heads as she swept by, chirruping their pretty songs in her honour. It was the smoothest flight imaginable, and she gasped with delight as the magical scene generously unfurled itself beneath her.
So this was where Samuel Taylor Coleridge had lived, so very long ago! How happy she was to see it! Oh, yes! she thought: life has nothing to show more fair!
Phonetic
Eh jest abite menaged to streggle through dyeeeah Richard’s dreadfully lawng book on that tiresome little payit. After enduring a ghastly événement nearby, one prevailed upon one’s pailot to flay one to the beck of beeyawned. Tairble waste of tame! Eh mean, realleh!
Suggestive
It’s an open secret that the Princess had just been lapping up a biography of Coleridge, who was widely known to have been addicted to opium, and whose poems swell with sexual references. By the time she had gasped her way through it, she had become so overwhelmed with desire to visit his home that she climbed into her four-seater and commanded her pilot to pull hard on his joystick and dip and dive in smooth, luscious circles around the Somerset cottage that lay nestling in the cleavage of the Quantocks.
Limerick
There was an old Princess called Margaret
Who had downed rather more than a lager; it
Made her yearn to say ‘Coo-ee!’
High above Nether Stoowey,
That contrary old Princess called Margaret.
Psychedelic
She’s flying high, high, high in the sky, looking down, down, down on all those like crazy blades of grass and the red chimneypots open to the heavens like fishes’ mouths when from out of nowhere the cat who once lived there, all those centuries before, appears like beside her in the cabin, telling her all the latest from Xanadu and Porlock and all that shit, and so together they soar into the evening sky on the outspread wings of this like great big bird, this albatross, and they circle around and around and around and she thinks, this is Nether Stowey, this is Stether Nowey, this is Weystone NeverNever Land, together forever, and everything is like far out and totally unreal, like totally unroyal.
Multiple Choice
1) Princess Margaret was in:
a) a plane
b) a car
c) a boat
2) She had just finished:
a) a fun-run
b) an official chore
c) her lunch
3) The book Princess Margaret had just read was:
a) The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
b) The World is Full of Married Men by Jackie Collins
c) Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes
4) The village over which she flew was:
a) Nether Stowey
b) Preston Candover
c) Bovey Tracey
Answers: 1 a; 2 b; 3 c; 4 a
Psychoanalytic
Because her dominant father had died as she entered into puberty, and her sibling had beaten her to become HMQ of GB, M. fell victim to the overwhelming urge to re-enter the womb that was her small private plane and to stare long and hard at the two sides of a particular village with which she had become obsessed: Nether (anus) and Stowey (vagina).
Nursery Rhyme
Her Royal Highness
Went up in a plane!
Her Royal Highness
Was never seen again!
Where did she come from?
What did she see?
Margaret flew over
The house
And
Never
Came
Back
For
Tea!
Queen’s Speech
At this time of year, few sights evoke feelings of happiness and goodwill more readily than the lovely spire and rooftops of the peaceful West Country village of Nether Stowey.
And so, once more, our thoughts turn to the age-old story of my younger sister, journeying in her modest aeroplane high above a Somerset idyll in order to catch a glimpse of the home of one of that illustrious region’s most distinguished poets, who is sadly no longer with us.
And as we remember this story, we take comfort from this heartwarming tale of valour in the air, and its eternal message of hope for all mankind.
Zippy
She read, ordered, flew, circled, peered, and went home.
Spoonerism
The tory is sold that Mincing Pargaret, Snowess of Countdown, had been laking a took at a tolarly schome about the Morantic poet Camel Sailor Toll Bridge.
Rather than shake in a toe or foot her peat up with a tug of me or bay on the pleach with a sucket of band, she cold the tapped-in cloud and lear on the bay wack from a dormal futy to wry in flings around the pate growit’s Comerset sausage.
Tautological
The tale is told by a story-teller that a high-born Royal Princess read page after page of a non-fiction biography of the versifying poet Coleridge. Coming back on a return journey from an official function, she commandingly instructed the pilot in the cockpit to fly his plane up in the air over and above the rural country village where the bookish man of letters had lived and breathed for a period of time before his tragic death.
Upwardly Inflected
Princess Margaret? read a book about Coleridge? and got the guy who was driving her plane? to fly her over his home village? so she could take a look?
Vague
I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that someone like Princess Margaret, or the other one, whatever she’s called, or perhaps it was someone more like Prince, but basically someone incredibly famous, the name escapes me, apparently this man, or woman, had been reading a book about someone, I forget who, but someone pretty well known, and as they were near where he or she either used to live or still lived, and it was definitely somewhere in Britain, or possibly abroad, they asked their chauffeur – or was it their pilot? – yes, it must have been their pilot, because they were either in a plane or a helicopter – to fly over whatever the place was called, and I’m pretty sure that that’s what they did, though I’m not sure I can remember every detail.
Tragic
Thousands of feet up in the air, the Princess had never felt so utterly, utterly alone. Did she consider, however momentarily, the possibility of throwing open the door of the aircraft and hurling herself out? And as she hurtled to her doom, who can say what her thoughts might have been? Would she have reflected on the futility of all human aspiration? Would she have felt that, in death, she would at last be the centre of attention? Or would she have let out one last, piercing yelp, a defiant outburst against the cruel whims of providence?
* Private information.
* Private information.
* Private information.
33
And there are also an infinite number of ways to interpret the young Antony Armstrong-Jones.
A clue to his character might be found in a list of items with which he decorated his ground-floor bachelor lodgings at 59 Rotherhithe Street, overlooking the Thames. It was carefully transcribed by his landlord, William Glenton, a shipping reporter, when Tony moved in:
A golden cage containing three stuffed lovebirds
A large ornate mirror
A miniature brass catafalque
Dusty wax flowers and a blue glass rolling-pin
A rocking-chair with a basketwork back
A papier-mâché chair inset with mother-of-pearl
A lifesize portrait of an eighteenth-century admiral on his flagship
A fishnet hammock
A stand carved in the shape of a Nubian page boy
Or in another list, like this, of his favourite clothes, circa 1958:
Hip-hugging slacks
Suede shoes
Rollneck jumpers
A fancy suede jacket
Tight jeans
Chukka boots
And there was, of course, always a camera around his neck: he would either walk around London with it, looking for suitable subjects, or stay indoors snapping his then girlfriend Jacqui Chan, a petite Chinese dancer from Trinidad. According to Glenton, the two of them looked ‘like a pair of goblins’ as they set about decorating the riverside pied à terre.
The young Tony was something of a tearaway, a sort of upper-class Mod. He used to enjoy riding pillion around London on his friend Andy Garnett’s Triumph motorbike, performing cock-snooking japes on other drivers. Garnett’s wife Polly Devlin recalls: ‘Their motorbike would pull up at a red light alongside a glamorous open-topped car – preferably a two-seater XK120 Jaguar, usually driven by an odious young man in his dinner jacket showing off to his girlfriend who would be dressed to the nines; the car had its rear-view mirror fitted to the front wing, far forward from the cockpit. Andy would inch the motorbike alongside and Tony would lean over, turn the adjacent mirror around and then with his nose a couple of inches from it he would squeeze an imaginary spot and adjust the parting of his hair, occasionally jiggling the mirror to get a better view. Sometimes the driver would join in the fun, but more often he’d get into a rage, especially if his girl was laughing at him too – in any case, the motorbike was off before he had a chance to retaliate.’
It was when William Glenton noticed that his tenant had changed the flat’s standard Bronco toilet paper* – hard, grey and almost aggressively non-absorbent, like tracing paper – for a brand that was not only softer and much more absorbent but also lilac-coloured, that he suspected something was up. And when his old friend Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, cagily explained that she had just dropped by to ‘tidy Tony’s room’, his suspicions multiplied. ‘It did not need my reporting intuition to make me realise that there had to be some very special reason for a duke’s daughter to act as a home help.’
A day or two later, Glenton was about to go upstairs when the door of the Armstrong-Jones flat opened. He recognised the silhouette in the candlelight as ‘the unmistakeable figure’ of Princess Margaret. Following an official visit to the Isle of Dogs, she had crossed the Thames by the Deptford ferry, disguised in a hat and a scarf, and then slipped into No. 59. This was to be the first of many visits. Before long, she was calling the flat ‘the little white roomo’. Others described it as a ‘love-nest’. ‘She certainly didn’t go short in that direction,’ remarked one keen observer.
Tony was what might these days be called a ‘metrosexual’. Like Princess Margaret, he had a strong taste for camp, perhaps fostered by his uncle, the stage designer Oliver Messel, whose photograph albums contained a few shots of his nephew in drag. Stuck in hospital with polio, the teenaged Tony had been visited by Noël Coward and Marlene Dietrich, who sang ‘Boys in the Backroom’ to him. The taste never left him. The author Philip Hoare recalls sitting behind the then Lord Snowdon at a first night of Coward’s Hay Fever, and noticing that ‘he greeted an actress’s stage entrance with the exclamation, “Love the dress.”’ Decades later, Sir Cecil Beaton delighted in telling friends that he had once seen Tony and a male friend in New York performing wicked impersonations of his former wife. ‘I didn’t fall in love with boys,’ Tony once said. ‘But a few men have been in love with me.’
* Discontinued in October 1989, presumably owing to lack of demand.
34
Princess Margaret felt most at home in the company of the camp, the cultured and the waspish. It was to be her misfortune that such a high proportion of them kept diaries, and moreover, diaries written with a view to publication. To a man, they were mesmerised less by her image than by the cracks to be found in it. They were drawn to her like iron filings to a magnet, or, perhaps more accurately, cats to a canary.
Some were blessed with peculiar prescience. As early as June 1949, when Margaret was only eighteen, Chips Channon spotted her at a ball at Windsor Castle. ‘Already she is a public character. I wonder what will happen to her? There is already a Marie Antoinette aroma about her.’*
Seven years later, on 21 July 1956, the historian A.L. Rowse noticed the twenty-five-year-old Princess at a Buckingham Palace garden party. ‘Interesting to watch her face, bored, mécontente, ready to burst out against it all: a Duke of Windsor among the women of the Royal Family.’ She was also attracting opprobrium from other, less well-connected diarists, among them Anthony Heap, the local government officer who was writing his diary for Mass-Observation. ‘When is Princess Margaret going to be her age (which is 26) and behave like a member of the Royal Family instead of a half-baked jazz mad Teddy Girl?’ he asked. ‘For what should be reported in this morning’s papers but that last night she went to see the latest trashy “rock ’n’ roll” film [The Girl Can’t Help It] at the Carlton – she never goes to an intelligent play or film – and, taking off her shoes, put her feet up on the rail round the front of the circle and waved them in time with the “hot rhythm”.’
A few days after Channon’s sighting of her at Windsor, the Princess merited her first mention in the diaries of the camp, waspish, etc. James Lees-Milne, after his friend, the camp, waspish, etc. James Pope-Hennessy, told him that the Princess was ‘high-spirited to the verge of indiscretion. She mimics Lord Mayors welcoming her on platforms and crooners on the wireless, in fact anyone you care to mention.’
By the 1960s there were at least two more diarists biting at her heels: first Cecil Beaton, and then, towards the end of the decade, the up-and-coming young museum director Roy Strong. Beaton tended to zero in on her face and her clothes, on red alert for mishaps in both departments. On 4 May 1968, he went with his friend Dicky Buckle to watch the Danish Ballet at Covent Garden. He found the performance ‘agony’, but there was amusement provided by having ‘a good gawk’ at the Royal Box: ‘Princess Margaret with an outrageous, enormous Roman matron head-do, much too important for such a squat little figure’,* and ‘the common little Lord Snowdon, who was wearing his hair in a dyed quiff’.
Ten days later, on 14 May, Princess Margaret spent the evening with yet another closet diarist, Lady Cynthia Gladwyn. We have already seen how Lady Gladwyn recorded with icy precision the Princess’s wayward misbehaviour in Paris in the spring of 1959. Nine years on, at a party at St James’s Palace, she noticed that Lord Snowdon’s hair was ‘tinted in a curious new colour. Sachy Sitwell afterwards described it as peach, but I would say apricot.’ Six months later, she was invited to see a pair of Italian plays, Naples by Day and Naples by Night. Though she found them ‘a little slow in places’, her interest was again quickened by the recently refurbished hair of Lord Snowdon, who was sitting immediately in front of her. Against his fashionable white polo-necked jersey, it now seemed ‘auburn coloured … dressed in two handsome waves, the perfection of which seemed to preoccupy him very much’.
After the theatre, the group
went on to the Italian embassy for dinner. Sadly, they found themselves trapped there, unable to leave before Princess Margaret, who clearly had another late night in mind. ‘She kept on approaching the door, and just as we were encouraged to think she was really about to take her departure, she suddenly went back into the centre of the room and became engaged in animated conversation – all just to tease and annoy.’
Inevitably, the Princess’s performance set tongues a-wagging. Diana Cooper told Lady Gladwyn of the time she had stayed at Hatfield. After dinner, there had been calls for the Princess to play the piano or to sing, but she had refused right up until everyone wanted to go to bed, at which point she had beetled over to the piano and played it until four in the morning. Needless to say, even the sleepiest guests had bowed to royal protocol, listening until the bitter end.
Roy Strong first encountered Princess Margaret on 27 November 1969, at a dinner thrown by the soon-to-be Lady Harlech to celebrate the opening of his exhibition ‘The Elizabethan Image’ at the Tate Gallery. In his diary, the thirty-four-year-old Strong noted that the Princess, ‘wearing a cream sheath dress with a bolero in pink’, refused to sit down for three quarters of an hour, ‘thus obliging the pregnant Ingrid Channon to remain standing for all that time’.
(John Downing/Getty Images)
Placed next to Strong, the Princess made her dissatisfaction obvious, ignoring him until the pudding course. ‘Then she wiped her plate slowly with her napkin, at which point Beatrix* leaned over and said, “The food here’s great but let’s face it the washing-up’s rotten.”’ After escorting the Princess around the exhibition, Strong concluded that ‘Princess Margaret is a strange lady, pretty, tough, disillusioned and spoilt. To cope with her I decided one had to slap back which I did and survived.’
Earlier that year, Cecil Beaton had been unimpressed by the television documentary The Royal Family, finding Princess Margaret ‘mature and vulgar’, and her husband, his professional rival Lord Snowdon, ‘common beyond belief’.* He encountered the royal couple in the flesh at a party held at Windsor Castle in April 1972 for bigwigs in the arts, including Flora Robson, ‘in a terrible wig’, and Lord and Lady Olivier, who were ‘cheap and second rate’. Beaton was, however, rather more forgiving towards Princess Margaret, who at least ‘managed to create a solid, clean, well-sculpted simplicity of line and colour’, though this pleasing effect was offset by the way in which ‘she wore harsh white and hair scraped back like a wealthy seaside landlady’. But at least she fared better beneath his unforgiving gaze than Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, who, said Beaton, ‘looked nice and cosy and sympathetic in spite of her ugly little face with unseeing small eyes and pig snout …’*
