The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  Elizabeth’s spasmodic diary omits these events, but records that she had a fitting for her bridesmaid’s dress for Violet Anson’s wedding* – ‘White satin, chiffon & lace’. The family gathered at St James’s Square to say goodbye to Jock, who was returning to America for six months. The following week she had another fitting and returned to Hertfordshire in the middle of a violent thunderstorm. ‘Celler 3 feet deep’. The next day she felt quite unwell and took some ‘Gregory Powder’ (a universal panacea in those days). She feared she might have ‘influenzer’, and was not at first allowed to see Mrs Scott and Aunt Vava,† who had just arrived. But the doctor told her she just had a chill, so she was able to come downstairs to see the visitors. ‘Grannie gave me a little cup,’ she recorded. With that she finally lost interest in her diary, which ends decisively: ‘Good night.’107

  May 1912 found the two Benjamins still at St Paul’s Walden, without their parents and busy with their lessons. David was given a bicycle for his tenth birthday; Elizabeth wrote to her mother, ‘I cant help envying him. It is so hot today that its uncomfortable, one person in London has already died of the heat … I simply must fly to lessons, but I will write you a longer letter tomorrow.’ The letter ended with many kisses.108 Two days later she wrote:

  There are no lessons today so I can write you a nice long letter. It was very hot yesterday, and I started out riding in the afternoon, but I had to come back because it was so hot, and there was no ginger beer. (I am sure you will say ‘I am glad.’) … David’s getting on very well with his bicycle, I do so wish I had one, do you think it would stop me growing if I had one, if I only rode little distances. I must stop now Love, as I have got to write to Father before Church, goodbye Precious Darling, from your very very very very loving Elizabeth.109

  *

  ALL ELIZABETH’S brothers went to Eton, but, although boarding schools for girls were becoming more fashionable, they were not yet the norm for aristocratic families. Lady Strathmore herself taught Elizabeth and David to write and introduced them to drawing as well as music and dance. But she did not deem her own teaching to be enough. The two children had a series of governesses and teachers at home, and also attended day school when in London. At St Paul’s Walden, where the children spent most of their time, their governess was Miss Mary Wilkie, who remained with them for nine years.* At Glamis they were taught for a time by Miss Laurel Gray, who later recalled saying to Elizabeth at their first meeting, ‘I expect that you can spell quite long words,’ to which the little girl instantly replied, ‘Oh yes, I can spell capercailzie & ptarmigan.’110 Miss Gray also recounted that Lady Strathmore had asked her to keep an account book of the children’s progress. ‘When they were good, a good mark and a penny. And of course a bad mark, that was shocking. Elizabeth wasn’t too good but she always had a good mark, she was naturally a good scholar. A bad mark made no difference to David. I was as strict as I could be, he was terrible.’111

  In London, when they were eight or nine, Elizabeth and David attended a school in Marylebone run by a Frobel-trained teacher, Miss Constance Goff.* According to the reminiscences of a fellow pupil, Joan Ackland, Elizabeth and David wore tussore smocks, had very good manners and were inseparable. Years later during the Second World War, Joan, by now Mrs Edgar Woollcombe, met Queen Elizabeth; the Queen recalled the French and German plays they had performed at school, the boxing for the boys and fencing for the girls. She also remembered being called a show-off when she had begun an essay on the sea with the Greek words for ‘The Sea, the Sea!’112†

  Lady Strathmore also engaged both French and German governesses. Mademoiselle Lang was known by the children as Made (for Mademoiselle, a nickname they also used for later French governesses); she was with the family from about 1901 to 1910, and appears to have been peripatetic, unlike Miss Wilkie and Miss Gray, moving with her pupils between Hertfordshire, London and Glamis.‡ A few surviving letters to Made Lang show that the nine-year-old Elizabeth had not yet made great progress with her French.

  Apart from formal lessons, Elizabeth and David were sent to dancing classes in London with Madame D’Egville. Elizabeth showed early talent for dancing: her elder sister May taught her the Cake Walk at the age of four, and commented that she did it ‘very well for such a tiny girl’.113 In her twenties she was noted among her contemporaries as an exceptionally good dancer, and for the rest of her life she took to the floor at every opportunity.

  She had music lessons at Madame Mathilde Verne’s Pianoforte School. Madame Verne’s first impression of her was of ‘a very pretty, vivacious little girl’. She was said to have a good ear for music but on one occasion Madame Verne watched her defying her teacher’s attempts to make her persist with a particularly difficult exercise. ‘I looked at the child. Though reverent in face, there was a warning gleam in her eyes as she said to the teacher, “Thank you very much. That was wonderful,” and promptly slid off the music-stool, holding out her tiny hand in polite farewell.’ But she was coaxed back to end the lesson.114

  *

  IN SEPTEMBER 1912, when he was ten, David was sent to St Peter’s Court preparatory school in Broadstairs, where two of King George V’s younger sons, Prince Henry and Prince George, were also pupils. Cynthia Asquith quoted a tear-stained letter written by Elizabeth just after this sad event. ‘David went to school for the first time on Friday. I miss him horribly.’115

  She herself had already had to face the horrors of a new school and new teachers. As she recalled many years later: ‘In London I went to what was called classes. One terrifying person [was] called Miss Wolff.’116 What this lady’s classes consisted of is not clear, but they were held in South Audley Street, and an earlier pupil was Lady Delia Spencer,* whose younger sister Lavinia, Elizabeth’s contemporary and great friend, probably also went to Miss Wolff’s.

  Early in 1912 Lady Strathmore enrolled Elizabeth in the Misses Birtwhistles’ school in Sloane Street, which she attended for a time while the family was in London. She and her nanny would walk – it was quite a long way – from their home in St James’s Square. Elizabeth was told to avert her eyes as they passed the gentlemen’s clubs in Pall Mall.117 She said later that she did not think she learned anything at the Birtwhistles’. ‘A little bit of poetry I certainly remember. So I’m afraid I’m uneducated on the whole.’118 In fact she seems to have prospered at the school. A few weekly reports for 1912 and 1913 survive in the Glamis Archives, and show her doing well in most of the thirteen subjects she studied. English was a strong suit: she had good marks in grammar, spelling, composition, literature and recitation. Then there was French, French history, geography, history, scripture, arithmetic, geometry and natural history; she did best in scripture – her mother’s training, no doubt – and history. Her lowest mark was 7 out of 20 for arithmetic, although she redeemed herself with 17½ the following week, and her place in class varied from sixth out of six to second out of seven. She received the maximum mark for conduct every week.119

  Day school in London could never be a satisfactory solution, however, for a child whose family spent so much time away from the capital. Elizabeth did not return to the Birtwhistles after the Easter holidays in 1913. The highlight of that holiday was what proved to be her last trip to Italy as a girl; it is also the best documented, as she briefly resumed her diary to record it. She and David travelled with their mother, first to stay with Mrs Scott at Bordighera and then on to Florence. They stayed at the Hotel Minerva, next to Santa Maria Novella, visited the principal galleries and churches and motored up to Fiesole. They went to see the painter Ricciardo Meacci,* and Aunt Vava bought Elizabeth, David and their mother paintings by him. There was more shopping: Elizabeth purchased some ‘very pretty old cups and saucers’.120 She loved her visit. But she would be eighty-five before she saw Florence again.

  Back in Hertfordshire she resumed her lessons with a new governess. Lady Strathmore seemed to have found the ideal educator in a young German woman, the twenty-one-year-old Käthe Kübler, da
ughter of a Prussian official living in Erlangen in Bavaria. Fraulein Kubler later published her memoirs, in which she recalled her first day at St Paul’s Walden Bury – it was a glorious spring afternoon and she arrived to find the family having tea in the garden room, which looked out over the park. She was received with warmth and kindness, and Elizabeth, whom she described as charming to look at, ‘with a small, dainty figure, a narrow, finely shaped, rather pale little face, dark hair and lovely violet-blue eyes’, took her to see the horses and her dog Juno, who had five puppies. ‘As soon as she noticed that I loved animals I knew that I had won her over,’ the governess remarked.121

  A fortnight later Lady Strathmore asked Käthe if she would be willing to stay on as Elizabeth’s full-time governess, responsible for her entire education, including piano lessons, drawing, needlework and gymnastics. ‘I was very willing to do so, and so we both set to work with zest. Hitherto Lady Elizabeth had had only French governesses, and she had been to school only for a very short time. A regular education, as we understand it in Germany, was something quite unknown to her. With true German thoroughness I drew up a timetable for her lessons and a plan of study, both of which were approved by Lady Strathmore.’122 The day began with a pre-breakfast piano lesson; after breakfast with the family, formal lessons began at 9.30 and continued in the afternoon until 4 p.m. They included history, geography, mathematics, science, French and German. Fräulein Kübler taught her pupil in English, but outside the schoolroom spoke only German with her. She found Elizabeth intelligent and mature beyond her years and eager to learn; she soon spoke German fluently.

  Käthe Kübler was a companion as well as a teacher. A photograph in her memoirs shows her arm in arm with Elizabeth, walking in the park at St Paul’s Walden, a solid figure in a sensible hat and long-skirted suit with collar and tie, a head taller than her pupil, who wears a shady brimmed hat adorned with a feather and a patterned scarf. After lessons, they would go for walks, play tennis or golf, or eat strawberries and gooseberries in the kitchen garden, where ‘Lady Elizabeth was adept at crawling under the netting and filling herself with strawberries while lying on her stomach.’123 Their greatest delight was to go out in a pony cart taking a basket of sandwiches and cakes, and picnic in the woods, building a fire in a clearing to make tea.

  Fräulein Kübler was struck by Elizabeth’s passionate love for her mother. ‘How often I heard her high, clear voice calling through the house: “Mother darling, where are you?” Every morning when she woke, she went to her mother’s bedroom, where they would read a chapter of the Bible together.’124 Käthe too came to love Lady Strathmore, ‘almost more than my pupil’, for her graceful kindness.

  Lessons continued in St James’s Square when the family migrated to London for the season. Ballet and dancing classes interrupted the regime, with walks in Hyde Park and trips to the cinema by way of further diversion. Once they went to Earl’s Court, where Elizabeth took a switchback ride, screaming with delight when it roared through a tunnel. Käthe Kübler’s memoirs also offer a glimpse of the lively social life the family led: Elizabeth’s beautiful and musical elder sister Rose enjoyed a constant round of balls, parties and concerts, and the Strathmores gave evening parties which Elizabeth and her governess watched from the stairs above the main reception rooms. But they were allowed to attend luncheons at which statesmen and other notables might be present: Fräulein Kübler recalled proudly having sat next to Lord Rosebery, Lord Curzon and Lord Lansdowne.

  Every weekend they returned to the relaxed informality of St Paul’s Walden. ‘On Sunday morning we all went to the little village church together,’ Käthe recounted, ‘and at 4 p.m. there was often a cricket match; Lord Strathmore and his four eldest sons would play with the village lads, and the butler and the valet played too. Lady Rose, Lady Elizabeth and I sat in the field and watched with the villagers.’ She could never understand the game despite Elizabeth’s patient explanations; but ‘there was always much merriment when we had tea at five o’clock. My pupil’s brothers competed with each other telling funny stories, and I often wept with laughter over Lord Strathmore’s comic jokes.’125

  With the approach of the 1913 summer holidays Käthe went back home for a month and Elizabeth looked forward to David’s return from school. She wrote to him from St Paul’s Walden using phrases which suggest that her lifelong devotion to the novels of P. G. Wodehouse may already have begun:

  We have come down here for good now, at least till you come home. Fräulein goes to Germany on Tuesday 22nd next. Well and ’ow are yer, Hay? Boo, you haint no good, you haint woggling yer tooth. Oi ham. Dur. What’s the good o’ not woggeling. Hay? Ant no good at all. Arthur Duff has givn me a NEW PONY. Its 16 years old, but awfully good still.

  Only 11 more days now.

  HOORAY.

  WHAT HO!

  PIP. PIP.

  It’s a very short time. Everybody’s well. Do write me a letter soon.

  Please do Ducky.

  Goodbye your very very very very very very loving Elizabeth126

  Freddy Dalrymple Hamilton, still smitten with Rose, spent a hot July weekend at St Paul’s Walden, playing tennis and cricket with Elizabeth’s brothers and going on a ‘garden robbing expedition’ with Rose and Elizabeth, ‘who did most of the eating. I fell backwards into a gooseberry bush which was rather a painful business. A gorgeous day in every way.’127 Freddy was not the only one to celebrate Elizabeth’s appetites – earlier that year someone had filled in her neglected diary to tease her for her gluttony. The hand could be that of Mike or Jock:

  January 1st

  Overeat myself.

  Thursday Jan 2nd

  Headache in the morning. very good tea. Christmas cake, Devonshire Cream, honey, jam, buns & tea. eat too much.

  Friday Jan 3rd

  Not quite the thing today Breakfast very good. Sausages, kedgeree, Brown Bread, Scones & honey. Excellent lunch – beefsteak – 3 helps – ham and roley poley. I eat a good deal …

  Tuesday Jan 7th

  Barrel of apples arrived today – had one for breakfast. 10 am eat an apple. 11 am had an apple for 11 oclock lunch. 12. had an apple. Roast pigeons and chocolate pudding & apples for lunch! 3 pm eat an apple. 3.15 pm David and I fought and have got bruise on my leg because he said I was greedy. eat two apples for supper.128

  In August 1913 Käthe Kübler went to Glamis for the first time. She was impressed by its splendour, and Elizabeth did not spare her any of its ghost stories and legends. The German governess wrote a full account of life there:

  During the shooting season, in September and October, there were often more than twenty guests in the castle; the gentlemen brought their valets and the ladies their maids. At the head of the whole household was the butler, assisted by the housekeeper, who ruled over the female servants and was also in charge of the linen room. Huge piles of snow-white tablecloths, sheets, towels and napkins were stacked there, and were also used, for guests were constantly coming and going. Glamis Castle had its own laundry, in which half a dozen laundry maids worked. The kitchen was ruled by a French chef, who received his orders from Lady Strathmore every morning. He in turn was in command of a number of kitchen maids and scullery maids. Liveried servants waited at table; several motor cars, carriages and riding horses were at the disposal of the guests … Lord Strathmore did not belong to the celebrated large landowners known for their wealth; nevertheless it seemed to me that life was lived in the greatest style on his estates.

  … Lord Strathmore sometimes took Lady Elizabeth and me with him when he went shooting. The pheasants are put up by the beaters, and the guns must be good shots if they want to hit the birds, which fly high above the trees. Then there was flyfishing for trout in the Glamis burn, the stream that flows through the park.129

  In November life was quieter; there were no more house guests, and often there were only five – Lord and Lady Strathmore, their two younger daughters and the governess – around the great table in the dining room. They re
turned to St Paul’s Walden in time for Christmas 1913, and Elizabeth sent another letter to David at school: ‘My darling David, Thank you so much for your delightful pc. I’m afraid I’ve been a dreadfull long time writing but I’ve been horribly busy, trying to knit Xmas presents and doing lessons. Only 18 days to the holidays. 2 weeks and 4 days. Its nice to think about. Mother got two enormous stockings … I do look forward to us two opening them.’ She was not sure what to give Fergus, who was serving with the Black Watch in India, for Christmas. ‘Its so awfully difficult to give a man something which he really likes, except guns and motors. Good thought. I might send him a motor. Shall we give it between us? Only a few hundreds!’130

  Christmas in Hertfordshire was followed by a visit to Glamis in early 1914. Elizabeth and David went tobogganing. After David went back to school, Käthe Kübler began drilling her pupil for the Oxford Local Preliminary Examination. ‘We worked at such a pace that Lady Elizabeth grew pale and thin. Her mother made us stop, and said with a smile: “Health is more important than examinations,” ’ the governess recalled.131 Lady Strathmore was also receiving complaints from Elizabeth: ‘I do hate my lessons sometimes, and [get] sicker every day of this beastly exam. I know less and less!’132 But Fraulein Kübler’s efforts were rewarded: Elizabeth passed the examination and was awarded a certificate, still preserved in the Glamis Archives.

  To Käthe’s delight, Lady Strathmore asked her to stay on four more years until Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday – to teach her languages, music and history of art and even take her abroad, to Germany, Austria and Italy. The only problem was David. He had taken a violent dislike to Fraulein Kübler, and picked quarrels with her at every opportunity. A distraught Elizabeth reported to her mother from Glamis in June 1914: