Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  Dozing in his study in Swansea, the novelist Kingsley Amis was nudged awake by his house guest Geoff Nicholson. ‘It’s just been announced that Princess Margaret is going to marry Tony Armstrong-Jones.’

  ‘Look, sonny,’ he replied testily, ‘try and think of something a bit less obvious next time.’

  ‘Come out and look. It’s on now.’

  The two men made their way to Amis’s kitchen, where the BBC’s court correspondent Godfrey Talbot was saying, ‘… and everybody is so delighted because this is so obviously a real love match.’

  At this point, Nicholson chipped in, ‘Weren’t you telling me something about you telling him something about Princess Margaret being a bloody fool?’

  ‘I expect I was,’ replied Amis. ‘Anyway, I did.’

  It had occurred over a lunch at an advertising agency just a month before. Amis, then at the height of his fame as a comic novelist, was to be photographed, along with various other celebrities, enjoying, or at least pretending to enjoy, a glass of Long Life beer. He had been chatting away to the photographer when the subject of Princess Margaret had come up. Never one to beat around the bush, Amis had ranted on about her stupidity, based on something she had recently said.

  ‘… the woman obviously has no mind at all – you remember that crap of hers about it not being any good our sending the products of our minds up into space while our souls remained stuck down below in the dives and the espresso bars – schoolgirl essay stuff.’

  ‘I can assure you you’re quite wrong,’ the photographer had replied. ‘She is in fact an extremely intelligent and well-informed woman.’

  ‘Oh, you know her, do you?’

  ‘I have met her on several occasions.’

  Now it struck him that this photographer was the same man who was engaged to the Princess.

  ‘Such a symbol of the age we live in,’ Amis wrote to an American friend, ‘when a royal princess, famed for her devotion to all that is most vapid and mindless in the world of entertainment, her habit of reminding people of her status whenever they venture to disagree with her in conversation and her appalling taste in clothes, is united with a dog-faced tight-jeaned fotog of fruitarian tastes such as can be found in dozens in any pseudo-arty drinking cellar in fashionable-unfashionable London. They’re made for each other.’

  On holiday in Athens, Evelyn Waugh was also taken aback by the news of the royal engagement, declaring it a ‘fiasco’. On the day of the royal wedding he was invited by Ann Fleming to a celebratory party, but he firmly refused:

  Like all loyal subjects of the monarchy, I am appalled by the proposed mesalliance. The happiest solution would be for the press photographer (who I read is constant in his attendance at church) to be ordained a Protestant clergyman & made Archbishop of Canterbury. This would give him precedence immediately below the royal family. It confers no precedence on his wife, but she might be granted the style of a duke’s daughter. They can then rock and roll about Lambeth Palace. I understand Jones likes the smell of the lower Thames. There are several other surviving Anglicans – David Cecil, Betjeman, Lancaster, Piper, Elizabeth Cavendish and two (I think Lesbian) spinsters in Combe Florey who could compose their court.

  In her garden in Barrow-in-Furness, the Mass-Observation diarist Nella Last was ‘pegging out some tea towels on the line’ when her friend Mrs Atkinson popped round. ‘She was shocked at Princess Margaret’s engagement to a common photographer – for once, not asking me what I thought before she began … She said, “Why, she will be Mrs Armstrong-Jones.” I said, “Oh no, she is a princess & will keep her title – perhaps they will give her husband a title.” She said “I hope they do.”’

  Mrs Last’s counterpart in St Pancras, Anthony Heap, disapproved of the ‘gush and ballyhoo’ over the engagement announcement. On the other hand, he hoped that ‘maybe marriage will help her to acquire a little more dignity and decorum’.

  Most upset of all was Betty Kenward. At a party in 1959, the pseudonymous author of Queen magazine’s ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ had brushed aside a photographer who was trying to introduce himself to her. ‘Don’t you dare address me!’ she had snapped, as she turned on her heel. ‘I don’t talk to my photographers!’

  A year later, the announcement came through that the shunned photographer was engaged to be married to HRH the Princess Margaret. Mrs Kenward took the news very badly indeed, occupying the rest of her afternoon with kicking and re-kicking her office wastepaper basket, saying over and over again, ‘What a turn-up this is! What a turn-up this is!’

  Shortly afterwards, she telephoned Tony Armstrong-Jones for a quote. He was afraid he couldn’t help her, he replied, since he knew she never spoke to photographers.

  It is said that she never quite got over the shock of that royal engagement. Nor could she find it in her heart to forgive the groom. For decades to come, whenever the royal couple appeared in Jennifer’s Diary she would refer to them only as ‘HRH the Princess Margaret and her husband’.

  44

  Princess Margaret’s Wedding Book (1960) sits on my bookshelves alongside Debrett’s Book of the Royal Wedding (1981) and Debrett’s Book of the Royal Engagement (1986), all of them souvenirs of dashed hopes.

  ‘There was no doubt about the nation’s delight at the announcement of this engagement after weeks of speculation,’ reads the introduction to Debrett’s Book of the Royal Engagement, ‘and the general consensus seemed to be that Prince Andrew was a fortunate man indeed in having chosen such an obviously warm-hearted and beautiful girl as Sarah Ferguson.’

  The same note of optimism can be found in Princess Margaret’s Wedding Book, though its expression is more tortured:

  Now the future lies before the young couple. May there be many more pictures that they and all their well-wishers can turn to with pleasure, and may all the hopes the young bride holds for her married life be as richly fulfilled to her as the promises she made at the altar are certain to be nobly vindicated by her.

  … When Princess Margaret walked up the nave of Westminster Abbey to the High Altar on the arm of the Duke of Edinburgh she was not only celebrating a uniquely happy personal event but setting a notable precedent for the British Royal Family. She was marrying a commoner … It is fitting that it should have been left for Princess Margaret to take this final step, since there has always been in her a modernity, a feeling for the constantly shifting patterns of twentieth century living that marked her as an innovator.

  The newspapers of the time were every bit as jubilant, perhaps more so. The Evening Standard’s Anne Sharpley set great store by the groom’s lack of blue blood:

  In splendour, sunshine and great sweetness, Princess Margaret married Mr Antony Armstrong Jones, the young man without title, without pretension, today in Westminster Abbey.

  It was something that could have happened only in the 20th century – a Sovereign’s daughter marrying a photographer with all the force of the centuries of this ancient land bringing dignity, grace and deep approval.

  Princess Margaret – perhaps we have never known before how beautiful she is – kept a sweet gravity about her that we had never seen.

  The simplicity and lightness of her gown, her quiet air. She was a woman surrounded by all the white mystery of womanhood.

  Sharpley’s report was topped by two lines from a poem specially composed by the eighty-one-year-old poet laureate, John Masefield:

  All England here, whose symbol is the Rose,

  Prays that this Lady’s Fortune may be fair.

  Printed in full in the souvenir programme, the poem was called ‘Prayer for this Glad Morning’. Like many royal verses, it favours simplicity over verve:

  … Now, here, a nation prays, that a bright spring

  May bless the day with sunlight and with flowers,

  And through this ever-threatened life of ours,

  May bless the lives with every welcome thing …

  Masefield left no notes or first drafts for this poem, and omitted it fr
om his letters and diaries, so we can only guess at the manner of its creation. As he wrote the line ‘Now, here, a nation prays, that a bright spring’, was he hoping that the perfect rhyme would crop up, out of the blue, three lines further on? But what? ‘Bling’? ‘Fling’? ‘Ring’? ‘Sting’? Sometimes, the magic fails to materialise. ‘May bless the lives with every welcome thing’. At this point, did he look at it, sigh, and think, like so many poets laureate before and after, ‘It’ll do’?

  On the other hand, Noël Coward’s delight flowed effortlessly. It had, he thought, been ‘the big week, the glamorous week, the Hurrah for England week!’ (‘In spite,’ he added, ‘of a hacking cough.’)

  On the Wednesday, a court ball at Buckingham Palace had, in his opinion, seen ‘everybody looking their tiptop best and the entire Royal Family charming’. He had enjoyed chats with Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, the Queen (‘brief but amiable’), the ‘dear’ Duchess of Kent and ‘the radiant engaged couple’. And he had been particularly entranced by the groom: ‘He is a charmer and I took a great shine to him, easy and unflurried and a sweet smile.’

  On the Friday came the wedding itself. ‘God in his heaven really smiling like mad and everything in the garden being genuinely lovely … The morning was brilliant and the crowds lining the streets looked like endless vivid herbaceous borders. The police were smiling, the Guards beaming and the air tingling with excitement and the magic of spring.’

  The service was, he thought, ‘moving and irreproachably organized. The Queen alone looked disagreeable; whether or not this was concealed sadness or bad temper because Tony Armstrong-Jones had refused an earldom,* nobody seems to know but she did scowl a good deal.’ Princess Margaret herself ‘looked like the ideal of what any fairy-tale princess should look like. Tony Armstrong-Jones pale, a bit tremulous and completely charming. Prince Philip jocular and really very sweet and reassuring as he led the bride to the altar. The music was divine and the fanfare immensely moving. Nowhere in the world but England could such pomp and circumstance and pageantry be handled with such exquisite dignity. There wasn’t one note of vulgarity or anything approaching it in the whole thing … it was lusty, charming, romantic, splendid and without a false note. It is still a pretty exciting thing to be English.’

  Once it was over, Coward went to ‘a wild but beautifully organised lunch party’ with a motley group drawn from the worlds of politics and the arts, among them James Pope-Hennessy, Lucian Freud, Bob Boothby and Hugh Gaitskell. Later, he sat down to watch the wedding on television, enjoying footage of the royal couple leaving for their honeymoon on the royal yacht Britannia. ‘It was moving and romantic and the weather still held, and when the Tower Bridge opened and the yacht passed through with those two tiny figures waving from just below the bridge I discovered, unashamedly and without surprise, that my eyes were full of tears.’

  Just short of his tenth birthday, Alan Johnson, who was to grow up to become Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, watched the wedding on television with his mother and sister in their slum dwelling in Walmer Road, London W11. ‘Up until then, I had never been able to figure out why a woman could not have babies before she was married. During the Royal Wedding service, after the couple were pronounced man and wife, the cameras had focused on the altar while the bride and groom went somewhere with the Archbishop of Canterbury, out of sight of the congregation and the cameras.

  ‘It came to me in a flash that this must be the point at which a bride was injected to enable her to have babies. It all made sense. Princess Margaret had been injected and the following year she’d had a child.’

  He held firm to this belief for a full two years before his older sister Linda, ‘with a knowing smile’, disabused him. ‘I listened with mounting horror. How could a man do that to a woman? … A simple injection seemed, to my twelve-year-old self, to be preferable in every respect.’

  Sixteen years later, following the announcement of the royal couple’s separation, Auberon Waugh was to look back on their wedding day with mixed emotions. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he had witnessed ‘many scenes of dignified grief in the Christ Church Junior Common Room as she walked up the aisle with her Welsh dwarf of “artistic” leanings. But we may have felt that after her somewhat chequered past she was lucky to catch anyone, and certainly there was nothing like the shock of humiliation we all suffered when Princess Anne announced that she was going to marry her grinning speechless stable-lad.’

  * He did not become Lord Snowdon until the following year.

  45

  During their engagement, Tony and Margaret were invited to dinner by Colin and Anne Tennant. The conversation turned to their honeymoon: they would, they said, be sailing around the Caribbean.

  ‘Why don’t you stop off at Mustique?’ asked Tennant. On a whim, he had bought an entire island for £45,000 three years before, despite it having no fresh water or electricity. ‘It’s very primitive but it has magical beaches. Anne and I will be there, living in our hut, and we won’t bother you at all.’

  Thus the newlyweds first set eyes on Mustique from the deck of the royal yacht. Not unusually for the Princess, she was disappointed. ‘The island looked like Kenya,’ she recalled. ‘Burnt to a frazzle. We drove down a path, the only road, and sat in the brush whacking mosquitoes.’

  The royal couple were greeted by the Tennants on the newly built jetty, Tony Snapshot moodily lurking three paces behind the bronzed, beaming Margaret. The Tennants had cobbled together a little bamboo hut to provide shade. Beneath a roof of coconut fronds, the four of them sipped glasses of lukewarm lemonade. Sensing that she was in a good mood, Colin turned to Margaret and reminded her that he still owed her a wedding present. ‘Look, Ma’am, would you like something in a little box, or’ – and here he swung an arm around – ‘a piece of land?’

  ‘A piece of land,’ replied Margaret, without missing a beat. Tony managed a smile, but inwardly he was bristling with irritation. Why hadn’t he been included in the offer? Why was Tennant always trying to do him down? Knowingly or unknowingly, Tennant had just delivered Tony yet another grievance ready for the nursing. ‘Odd, don’t you think?’ Tony remarked to Princess Margaret’s biographer, Tim Heald, nearly half a century later. In the same conversation he would refer to Tennant once again as ‘that shit’.

  46

  ‘I’m delighted that our castaway this week is Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon,’ announces Roy Plomley, the oleaginous presenter of Desert Island Discs.

  ‘Ma’am, have you a big collection of records?’

  ‘Ears, quate.’

  ‘Have you kept your old 78s?’

  ‘Oh ears, they’re all velly carefully …’ – she pauses, as if searching for the right word – ‘… preserved.’

  ‘They’re very heavy of course – you’ve got them down in the cellar?’

  ‘Eh hev them up in the ettic, eckshleh.’

  These abrupt replies set the tone for the interview. Princess Margaret says the bare minimum. Often she sounds slightly testy, as though grudgingly filling in a form. Or had she not been warned that an interview involves answering questions?

  Their conversation turns to music, and her own piano-playing.

  ‘Do you compose yourself?’

  ‘Oh nyair – well Eh have composed one or two things, but er velly slight.’

  ‘What – songs?’

  ‘Ears.’

  ‘Did you find it very difficult to choose just eight records that may have to last a long long time?’

  ‘Oh ears, Eh found it velly difficult INDEED.’

  She sometimes emphasises words, as if forcing unearned wit or irony upon them. Her first choice is, she says, ‘King Cotton’ by Souza.

  ‘Who would you like to play it?’

  ‘The Marine Bend, if possible, please.’

  ‘Well here it is, conducted by Lieutenant Colonel Sir Vivian Dunn.’

  ‘Well, thet’ll be velly nice indeed, because he was my
childhood hero.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, you see, whenever the Queen goes on the yacht, she still takes the Marine Bend and of course there’s always a Director of Music and it’s usually the senior one end he was the senior one for a gret number of years.’

  They talk of her childhood.

  ‘What’s your earliest memory as a child?’

  ‘In my prairm, Eh think, being told not to push my prairm up and down by moving about in it … after a little while Eh succeeded in tipping up the prairm and was rescued, screaming loudleh.’

  Some vowels are elongated rather than clipped. ‘Yes’ emerges as ‘ears’, ‘no’ as ‘nyair’.

  Her second choice of record?

  ‘“Scotland the Brave”, please. Eh hape that it’s recorded by the pipes and drums of my rairgiment, the Royal Highland Fusiliers.’

  After ‘Scotland the Brave’, they talk of her schooling.

  ‘Did your early education include some rather unusual subjects like protocol?’

  ‘Nyair, I don’t think it did rarely because one was brought up to be able to twalk to anybody … the Prime Minister or Archbishop or somebody like that were friends.’

  ‘Did you study constitutional history?’

  ‘Nyair, I didn’t. My sister did.’

  ‘Much of your life has been spent in historic buildings. Do you have a strong sense of the past?’

  ‘Oh, ears. Tremendously.’

  They talk about the family’s sudden change of fortune in 1936.

  ‘My first impression was of having to leave home. Bettling through these enORmous loving crowds.’

  ‘Buckingham Palace itself must be a very daunting place from its sheer size.’

  ‘Well, nyair, Buckingham Palace is a velly cosy house.’

  They discuss the childhood pantomimes in which she took the lead role.

  ‘I believe they were your idea, weren’t they?’