The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  My darling Mother,

  Most terrible goings-on here.

  At this present moment Fräulein is crying and sobbing in her room, and David is doing lessons with Mr Hewett. They had a dreadful quarrel just before tea, two at lunch, and I really don’t know what to do. For the last week I have’nt had one single moment of peace, even in my room, and its too awful. I can’t tell you how I look forward to Thursday, oh it will be nice. I really cant help just one tear now and then … Everybody is very well, I don’t know about Fräulein, but I do pity her poor thing, and I’m afraid she’ll go away for good, with a bad feeling against this family, though I believe she quite likes me.133

  One bone of contention – literally – between David and Fräulein Kübler passed into the annals of Glamis history: when David shot his first hare, the governess ate the whole animal herself, leaving him only the head.134 Elizabeth was alarmed. ‘I don’t know what is going to happen at lunch today,’ she lamented in another letter to her mother, ‘as David swears he’s not going to let Fräulein have any rabbit pie. He killed the rabbits.’135

  Fortunately there were lighter moments: Elizabeth went fishing with David and was pleased with her own progress. ‘I am really casting quite well, no splashes!’136 Jock came to stay, which cheered her, and she sent one of her mock-Cockney missives to Mike.

  Thank you most awfully for your delightful episal. I was glad to get it, and it made me laugh some, you bet. I suppose you’r moving around pretty slick just now, dinner, balls ect. I hope you are having plenty of champenge, clarit, ’oc, mosel, and baeer, Baaeer, Baaeer, wonderful baaer, fill yourself right up to here (neck). That was by Shakespeare. Oi ad an horful noice toime yesterday playing ’opscotch with Fairweather,* or can taal you he got a talent for ’opscotch. We are coming down on Thursday next, it will be nice seeing you all again. It’s not very peaceful here!137

  Käthe Kübler did go away for good, but not because of David. As the governess expressed it in her memoirs, ‘Then came the day when the world was jolted awake by the shots at Sarajevo. When I came into the breakfast room in the morning I saw distraught faces. Lord Strathmore gave me the “Morning Post”. “Here, read this. It means war.” I would not and could not believe it.’138 It was the end of June 1914. Fräulein Kübler was no doubt being wise long after the event; it would have been remarkable if Lord Strathmore had understood so early that the assassination in Sarajevo would lead to more than local fighting in the Balkans. When Käthe left for Germany on 12 July to attend her parents’ silver wedding and take her month’s holiday, Lady Strathmore embraced her and made her promise to come back. By the time the month was over, it was too late for her to return and she volunteered for the German Red Cross in Erlangen.†

  The Great War broke out late on Elizabeth Bowes Lyon’s fourteenth birthday, 4 August 1914. Her mother had taken her and other members of the family to the London Coliseum to see a vaudeville programme with Charles Hawtrey, G. P. Huntly and the Russian ballerina Fedorova. That same evening King George V held a Privy Council meeting at Buckingham Palace, attended by one minister and two officials. The Council proclaimed a state of war with Germany from 11 o’clock that evening. The King recorded in his diary that the declaration of war was ‘a terrible catastrophe but it is not our fault’.139

  In the Coliseum the audience was filled with people exhilarated by the prospect of war. ‘I think they honestly thought it was going to be about a month and it would be finished,’ Elizabeth commented much later. As she went to bed in St James’s Square, vast, exultant crowds were pushing down the Mall to Buckingham Palace. Ever after she remembered, ‘The streets were full of people shouting, roaring, yelling their heads off – little thinking what was going to happen.’140

  * One account of the origin of the Bowes family traces it to William, cousin of Alan the Black, Earl of Richmond, who came over with William the Conqueror, and who put his cousin in command of 500 archers in the tower of Bowes to protect the region from attacks by the men of Westmorland and Cumberland. (Charles E. Hardy, John Bowes and the Bowes Museum, Friends of the Bowes Museum, 1989, p. 6)

  † Official documents from the time of Queen Elizabeth’s marriage use the hyphenated version of her surname, Bowes-Lyon. But when she was young, she and her family tended to call themselves plain ‘Lyon’, and when they used both names, it was without a hyphen. The senior branch of the Strathmore family continues to omit the hyphen.

  ‡ Mary Eleanor wrote her Confessions in 1778 on the orders of her second husband, who used them against her in their divorce case and later published them, probably to raise money when he was imprisoned for his maltreatment of her.

  * In a history of the Lyon family which Queen Elizabeth’s mother, Lady Strathmore, began writing late in life, he is described as well educated and knowledgeable about architecture and paintings. The history was far advanced but not finished when she died in 1938. There is correspondence with John Murray Publishers and it was clearly a serious project. She received advice from the Rev. John Stirton, minister of Crathie and chaplain to the King, whose Glamis Castle: Its Origin and History was published in 1938. Lady Strathmore’s enthusiasm jumps from the page. A note found in the box containing the text reads ‘ANOTHER DISCOVERY! I can now tell you what Queen Mary ate when at Glamis in 1562!! and who accompanied her.’ (Glamis Archives)

  * Queen Elizabeth took great interest in her Bowes ancestry. She collected John Bowes memorabilia whenever she could, buying back many pictures and pieces of silver which had been sold at Christie’s at the time of the sale of Streatlam Castle in 1922. She was patron of the Friends of the Bowes Museum from 1962 until her death.

  † The legend of the ‘Monster of Glamis’ which originated in the nineteenth century may have arisen from the birth and death of the first child of Lord and Lady Glamis in 1821. The story ran that a deformed creature was kept alive, hidden in the Castle, until some time between 1865 and 1876. There appears to be no credible evidence for this story.

  ‡ The thirteenth Earl kept meticulous diaries from 1861 until shortly before his death in February 1904.

  * Née Caroline Burnaby (1833–1918), daughter of Edwyn Burnaby of Baggrave Hall, Leicestershire.

  † The Villa Capponi was bought by Mrs Scott’s mother-in-law, Lady Elizabeth Scott, in 1882, and was sold by Mrs Scott in about 1908. Mrs Scott seems to have rented houses in San Remo before moving in late 1907 to Bordighera, where she rented the Villa Bella Vista, and later bought Poggio Ponente which she left to one of Cecilia’s sisters on her death. The Strathmores also owned a house in Bordighera, Villa Etalinda, which the thirteenth Earl bought in 1896. It was later sold to Queen Margharita of Savoy who built the enormous Palazzo Regina Margharita in the twenty-acre garden. She gave the palace and the villa to the War Association for the use of the war-wounded, their widows and orphans.

  * The Clarence House press officer was asked to clarify the question in August 1980, when the Queen Mother was in Scotland; her lady in waiting, Dame Frances Campbell-Preston, put it to her directly. Her unhesitating response, ‘London,’ was passed back by telephone.

  * Belgrave Mansions is shown as their address on the invitation list for the Buckingham Palace garden party on 11 July 1900. (RA LC/CER/GP)

  * As daughters of an earl, Elizabeth and her sisters acquired the courtesy title of ‘Lady’. Thus she was now Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon.

  * Catherine Maclean (c. 1890–1966), dresser to the Duchess of York and Queen Elizabeth 1923–52. Owing to ill health she did not work after 1941 and finally retired in 1952. In the 1950s and 1960s the three Maclean sisters ran the Dores Inn on Loch Ness, where Queen Elizabeth sometimes visited them.

  * Ronald Gorell Barnes, third Baron Gorell (1884–1963), Liberal peer and author.

  * The Growler was a spacious Victorian four-wheeled cab; it was eventually replaced by the lighter, faster two-wheeled hansom cab.

  * Frederick Dalrymple Hamilton (1890–1974), entered Royal Navy 1905. Captain of the Royal Naval
College, Dartmouth 1936–9; Captain, HMS Rodney 1939–41. During the Second World War he held various commands, and was naval secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty 1942–4. Flag Officer Commanding Scotland and Northern Ireland 1946–8, and Admiral, British Joint Services Mission, Washington 1948–50. KCB 1945. He married, 1918, Gwendolen Peek.

  * Lady Violet Anson (1886–1974), third daughter of third Earl of Lichfield. She and her brother Rupert, friends of the young Bowes Lyons, had been among the August 1911 house party at Glamis. She married Lancelot Mare Gregson in July 1912.

  † Violet Cavendish-Bentinck (1864–1932), Cecilia’s unmarried younger sister.

  * Mary Wilkie worked as a governess and taught in private schools for twenty-three years, and at a boys’ grammar school for a further eighteen. She died in 1955, aged eighty-one. (RA QEQMH/GEN/1955/May; RA QEQMH/PS/W)

  * No contemporary reference to Elizabeth and David’s attendance at this school has been found in the Glamis Archives; but in 1964 Miss Goff sent Princess Margaret a letter written by her mother as a child. (RA QEQMH/GEN/1964/G) Friedrich Frobel (1782–1852) had pioneered the kindergarten system, developing children’s abilities through play and activity.

  † Elizabeth is quoting the cry uttered by Greek mercenaries when, after a 1,000-mile flight from the Babylonian interior in 401 BC, they at last saw the Black Sea and knew they were back among Greek cities (according to Xenophon’s Anabasis).

  ‡ Mademoiselle Lang left St Paul’s Walden in early 1910 and went to work for Lady Leven and Melville; later she returned to France and married, becoming Madame Guerin. She kept in touch with Queen Elizabeth, and her daughter Georgina, later Madame Reinhold, came to England each year for a few weeks in 1936–9 to teach French to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Madame Guerin died in 1965.

  * Lady Delia Spencer (1889–1981), daughter of sixth Earl Spencer. She married Sidney Peel in 1914. After his death in 1938, she was appointed woman of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth. Miss Wolff’s classes are mentioned in Priscilla Napier, A Memoir of The Lady Delia Peel, J. & J. Peel, 1984, p. 23.

  * Ricciardo Meacci (1856-after 1928), a Florentine painter popular among the expatriate British community in the area. Aunt Vava later commissioned from him an elaborate painting in the style of a Renaissance altarpiece, symbolizing the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of York, as a wedding present; Meacci also painted a headboard incorporating the arms of the Strathmores and of the British Royal Family and the date of the marriage, for another wedding present.

  * William Fairweather, head keeper at Glamis.

  † By the end of August Käthe was caring for a constant stream of wounded soldiers. Remarkably, she continued to correspond with Elizabeth after the outbreak of war, via the British Consulate in the Hague. Two of Käthe’s wartime letters survive at Glamis; one was written from Cambrai in northern France in September 1915, responding to a letter from Elizabeth, who had written telling her that three of her brothers had been wounded, and the second from Erlangen in 1917, asking for a reference from Lady Strathmore. She was to write to her former pupil again in more sinister circumstances in 1933 after the Nazis had come to power, and to visit her in 1937, the year in which her memoirs were published.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TENDING THE WOUNDED

  1914–1918

  ‘It’s so dreadful saying goodbye’

  THE WAR CAME to dominate everyone’s lives. Home was a Front for the first time ever; patriotism and commitment were expected from people of every age and every background. The values on which the British establishment prided itself – courage, self-sacrifice, duty, honour – were deemed to be easily and properly transferable from the playing fields to the battlefields. The young Eric Blair (later George Orwell) published a poem entitled ‘Awake! Young Men of England’ in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard that summed up the feelings of the time:

  Oh! give me the strength of the lion,

  The wisdom of Reynard the Fox,

  And then I’ll hurl troops at the Germans,

  And give them the hardest of knocks.

  Awake! oh you young men of England,

  For if, when your Country’s in need,

  You do not enlist by the thousand,

  You truly are cowards indeed.1

  Chauvinism was not peculiar to Britain. One of the new forces in the first two decades of Elizabeth’s life was the growth in the power of nationalism throughout Europe. Since the Crimean War separatist battles against Ottoman rule had created Serbia, Greece and Romania. By the end of the nineteenth century the new countries of Montenegro and Bulgaria had emerged, and the Balkans remained a place of violent change. There had been wars in 1912 and 1913 as the new states fought over the spoils of the decaying Ottoman Empire. Britain’s nationalist problem was lesser, but still real – in Ireland. Indeed, in the view of some historians, the danger of civil war in Ireland was avoided only by the outbreak of war on a larger scale.

  At the turn of the century European states might have congratulated themselves that they had avoided war between the major powers since 1870, when Germany had defeated France and seized Alsace and Lorraine. But Germany and Italy were both newly united powers, and their leaders encouraged nationalist enthusiasms. Meanwhile the two great European empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary faced massive internal problems of their own. Austria-Hungary seemed stretched almost beyond endurance and here too the demands of industrialization were creating new tensions. In Russia, economic progress coincided with a political revolution after the introduction in 1905 of a parliament, the Duma, albeit with very limited powers. Russia remained dependent on her foreign suppliers, in particular her closest ally, France. The French, after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, knew that they must have allies against any further threat from the German army.

  Since 1870 the balance of power had preserved peace in Europe but through the early years of the twentieth century the likelihood of war increased. Austria-Hungary was prepared to resort to local wars to eliminate threats to her position from nationalism in the Balkans, while Germany was willing to risk war – even a European war – to extend her own imperial reach. Europe began to divide into two camps, and Germany used commercial and colonial issues to exacerbate tensions with France. The German General Staff made plans to fight a two-front war – first to inflict a quick defeat on France and then to deal with her slower-moving ally, Russia.

  In Britain, patriotism was allied to a sense of pride both in the achievements of empire and in the supremacy of the British navy. The continued expansion of German ambitions convinced the British that they would have to involve themselves more directly in the continental balance of power unless they wished to see Germany dominate all of Europe. When Germany began to develop her navy, this could only be seen as a threat to British domination of the seas. By 1911 the race for naval superiority had led to a marked increase in tensions between the two powers. Britain’s Liberal government reluctantly allied the country to France.

  In the event the catalyst came not in the North Sea but in the southern Slav lands. On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife were assassinated by a Bosnian Serb at Sarajevo, in Bosnia Herzegovina, which was under Austrian rule. The Austrians, with German support, blamed Serbia and declared war on her; a week later the mesh of alliances across Europe had begun to drag the rest of the continent into war.

  Few people immediately understood the implications of the Archduke’s assassination. It was three weeks before The Times considered its consequences on its main page.2 Until then, summer sunshine, holidays, pageantry were greater preoccupations. But power was also on display. On 17 and 18 July King George V made an ‘informal’ visit to the Royal Navy and reviewed the fleet at Spithead. He saw before him forty miles of ships – 260 vessels in all, including twenty-four of the new Dreadnought battleships – which resembled, in Winston Churchill’s words, ‘scores of gigantic castles of steel, wending their way across the sea like giants b
owed in anxious thought’.3

  Even while the King was inspecting his kingdom’s apparently impregnable defences, the war machinery of Europe was engaging gear. Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia aroused Serbia’s ally Russia; Austria in turn called upon Germany. Russia appealed for French support and Germany was thus given the rationale for the first phase of her battle plan – a quick assault upon France through Belgium to destroy the threat from the west before she dealt with the massive Slav menace from the east. The principal uncertainty was whether the British would actually fulfil their recent assurances to come to the assistance of their new friend and traditional enemy across the Channel.

  London hesitated. It seemed to some that if Britain refused to be drawn in, a war would have disastrous consequences but it just might remain limited. On the other hand, if Britain entered, the chances of a widespread conflagration were much greater. Moreover the British government had serious domestic concerns. That spring, Britain had been closer to civil war than at any time in the previous hundred years – because of the demand for Home Rule in Catholic Ireland and the absolute refusal of the Protestant north to be governed by the Catholic south. The crisis had split the British army and had divided the parties in Parliament more bitterly than any issue in living memory.

  On 28 July the British fleet moved to face Germany in the North Sea. The next day the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, rejected a German request for a guarantee of British neutrality, Russia ordered partial mobilization, Belgrade was shelled. On 1 August France, Germany and Belgium mobilized; Germany declared war on Russia, demanded unlimited passage through Belgium and sent her troops into Russia and Luxembourg. Next day her troops were in France as well. And on 3 August France and Germany declared war on one another.

  Huge patriotic crowds appeared outside Buckingham Palace. That evening King George V and Queen Mary had to show themselves on the balcony three times, to tremendous cheering. In his diary the King recorded that public opinion agreed that the German fleet should not be allowed into the English Channel to attack France, nor German troops permitted to march through Belgium. ‘Everyone is for war & our helping our friends,’ he wrote.4