The Queen Mother

by William Shawcross

  Elizabeth was too young to train as a nurse; her task was generally to make the soldiers feel at home. She did rounds of the ward, talked to them all, made friends with many and went to the village shop to arrange large quantities of vital purchases – Woodbines, Gold Flake and Navy Cut tobacco.36 She was intrigued by the soldiers and tried to draw them out: one, a Canadian named Baker who had been as far afield as Nepal, Egypt and South Africa, she discovered had been educated at Malvern; Beryl suspected him of being a wandering black sheep. They gave nicknames to their favourites: one sprightly Cockney named Bill became ‘Twinkly Eyes’.37

  The irony was that the better the care the soldiers received at Glamis, the sooner they were sent back to the Front. There were noisy farewells in the Castle crypt, with crackers and group photographs; next morning the soldiers signed the Visitors’ Book* and were driven to Dundee. The motors that took them brought back ten more invalids, who came with harrowing tales and dreadful wounds from the Front; one was an eighteen-year-old shot in the stomach at Ypres, another had been shot through the lungs, and a third had a damaged spine and was likely to remain disabled for life. There was a ‘London Scottie’ (the London Scottish Regiment), of whom Nurse Anderson reported in awestruck tones that he had beautiful shaving things and pyjamas with a silk stripe.38 He was the author of some suitably polished lines in Elizabeth’s autograph book:

  Farewell! lovely Glamis, for soon I go

  From thy dear old walls to which I owe

  Deep gratitude for the days here spent

  Since welcomed here – a convalescent.39

  This year, 1914, was the first time for twenty years that the Strathmores had spent December at Glamis. Beryl reported to her mother that Lady Strathmore had come into the schoolroom and said, ‘At last I have got out of Father that we are staying here for Xmas.’ At this, Elizabeth ‘jumped up in delight & kissed her Mother exuberantly, as for some reason or other she wanted much to spend Xmas here’.40

  It was a depleted family party: of Elizabeth’s siblings only Rose and David were there. Rose wrote to her friend Delia Peel that she hoped that ‘this horrible time’ would be over soon. ‘Pat, Jock & Mike are all out now, & I suppose Fergus will be going out soon.’41 Despite all the anxieties, family and staff at Glamis did their best to bring good cheer to the soldiers, setting up an immense tree in the crypt and distributing presents. ‘The fun was fast and furious,’ according to Elizabeth. Everyone ate too much, and she and David danced wildly with the soldiers in the ward. All in all, she said, it was ‘a dandy Xmas, you bet your bottom dollar’.42

  Freddy Dalrymple Hamilton, on leave from his ship, came for the New Year and recorded that there were twenty wounded soldiers at Glamis. ‘We played various doubtful card games etc. with them in the evening which was very amusing and after a bit, quite heating! It was a most cheerful evening. Heard several new & wonderful trench stories & I can’t say I envy the soldiers much!’ He could not help recalling his previous visit, playing cricket with the Bowes Lyon brothers, who were now away on active service. ‘I never dreamt then the conditions under which I should be there next! We none of us sat up for the New Year.’43 Next day he left by train with Rose.

  Behind the face of gaiety and good cheer that she wore for her guests, Lady Strathmore was always worrying about her sons. On 3 January 1915 she wrote to her married daughter May with news of acquaintances and friends who had been killed or wounded. She had heard that ‘one of our spys’ who had been sent to Germany claimed that the Germans would run out of ammunition by May ‘& that all the educated people in Berlin knew they could not possibly win – & were talking of what terms we were likely to accept. That is good news – but thousands more will be killed & maimed before then. We have several new wounded here – one or two old ones have been x-rayed – & will have to have operations – which I am very sorry for.’44 Later she was visited by a brother officer of Mike, who told her of a day of carnage on the Kaiser’s birthday, 27 January: ‘hundreds & hundreds of dead Germans everywhere – & not 10 yards of ground unshelled’.45

  A terrible new form of warfare had developed. On the battlefields, machine-gun fire mowed men down like grass; only truly massive bombardment by artillery, which became heavier and heavier in the course of the war, could help suppress this murderous fire. Once the enemies had mobilized their industrial resources to produce such weapons, they turned the battle zones into wastelands, annihilated by iron, through which men edged fitfully, agonizingly forward and back.

  The Germans’ sweep westwards in August 1914 had not awarded them the instant victory that their war plan required, but they had captured almost all of Belgium and much of northern France. In the east the Germans and Austrians had stopped Russian offensives. Brutal and unexpected stalemate everywhere was the norm as 1915 began.

  In mid-January 1915 Lady Strathmore took her two youngest children back to London, where Jock was home on leave and staying at St James’s Square with his wife Fenella. He was confident that the war would be over in the summer; others were more pessimistic. Rose was busy, studying for her first nursing examination. ‘Rosie told us some 1st hand experiences of the London Hospital,’ Freddy recorded after lunching with them all at St James’s Square in mid-January. ‘It didn’t sound very nice & I hope she won’t kill herself over it!’ Barely a month later she had passed her exam and was on a surgical ward.46

  With David back at school, Elizabeth now had one of her greatest friends for company: Lady Lavinia Spencer,* who lived near by at Spencer House on the edge of Green Park. Lavinia was equally high-spirited, and she and Elizabeth shared a passion for the theatre and the cinema. They exchanged teasing girlish letters about their respective idols. ‘She is most awfully nice, very pretty & too charming,’ Lavinia wrote to her brother about Elizabeth.47 Their respective governesses also got on well, and the quartet visited the Wallace Collection and went to concerts at the Albert Hall and to a performance of The Mikado. There were to be frequent visits to the theatre in the next few years.

  Life resumed something of its pre-war pattern. Elizabeth spent the weekdays in London, with lessons in the morning and outings for tea with friends in the afternoon, matinees at the theatre, and occasional visits to the cinema in Regent Street or a bus-ride away at Marble Arch – she and Beryl were impressed by newsreels of the sinking of the Blücher and of an air raid on the east coast, but thrilling adventures featuring their favourite actors were the main attraction. Occasionally Elizabeth might be invited out in the evening by family friends like the Countess of Crawford, who asked her to dinner followed by a performance of the musical Florodora,† as company for her fourteen-year-old son David. Once she narrowly missed a royal encounter: Lavinia Spencer invited her to a tea party for Princess Mary, King George V’s seventeen-year-old only daughter, which had to be cancelled at the last minute because the Spencers’ chauffeur had the measles and the whole house was quarantined.48

  As before, weekends were spent at St Paul’s Walden if possible, and Beryl’s first visit there in February 1915 produced a descriptive letter home. The house seemed small and homely compared to Glamis, quaint, but ‘so beautifully furnished & bright & clean looking … Eliz: simply loves the place – she has all her precious belongings – books, childish toys & clothes & dresses here. Books! I have never seen so many books anywhere. Shelves in every room – hundreds of them.’ Her pupil took her on a long ramble in the grounds, to the lake inhabited by sleepy old carp, where once monks fished for their Friday dinner and now an ancient punt and a waterlogged boat lolled; the walled garden of fruit trees and bushes full of promise for summer raids; the apple-house where they pocketed apples to eat on the way home; the dairy, fowl houses and stables, where Elizabeth’s pony Bobs lived along with Rose’s hunter, still too tall for her diminutive younger sister, who longed to ride her. They picked snowdrops in the woods; crocuses, daffodils and jonquils were beginning to appear everywhere. Beryl was shown the long grassy alleys leading away between the tall trees a
nd copses, and was introduced to ‘Arkles’ – the Hercules statue at the end of one – and ‘the Bounding Butler’, the discus-thrower figure on the lawn.

  Lady Strathmore had returned to Glamis, where Lord Strathmore was ill with flu and needing company, so Elizabeth and her governess were alone at St Paul’s Walden. On Sunday they walked to church, where they sat at the front and felt eyes boring holes into their backs: behind them sat some of the wounded soldiers who were convalescing in the nursery wing of the house, cared for by Red Cross nurses; there were eight men there at this time, and Elizabeth and Beryl spent that evening talking to them. They spoke of friends and companions they had seen wounded or killed; ‘they none of them when once they have been out there want to go again,’ Beryl recorded. ‘Poor things they say the sufferings & privations especially in the early part of the war were too awful.’ The nurses reported that the nerves of one man were quite shattered; he constantly called out in his sleep, and woke up in terror. Elizabeth was pleased to find that another of them had been in the Highland Light Infantry unit to which Mike was attached, and knew him.49

  Back in London after the weekend they found that Jock had returned to Flanders. News came from Mike, who was well but finding life ‘dull’. Remarkably, Lady Strathmore considered going to visit him, but decided against this because the sea crossing – at the mercy of German submarines – was too dangerous; furthermore, her husband, eldest son and youngest daughter were all unwell, so she was ‘rather required’.50

  Lord Strathmore’s influenza and the feverish chill from which Elizabeth had been suffering were not serious; more so was Patrick’s condition. He had been sent home in late February 1915 with a wounded foot. His battalion, the 5th Black Watch, had suffered terrible losses: of the thousand men who had gone out, only 350 were still standing. There was a dearth of recruits; the regiment was counting on Patrick, a major, to raise a third reserve battalion, as ‘he only could do it,’ Lady Strathmore reported to May Elphinstone. As she said, he would have to make his appeal on crutches, ‘which might not inspire, but all the men adore him’.51

  Patrick was a strikingly handsome, popular and charming man (‘He looked really as if he’d stepped down from Olympia,’ his eldest niece later said of him).52 But he was now suffering badly from shell shock, and although at first he was reported to be in high spirits, ‘hopping all over the house with his wounded foot in the air’,53 his nervous condition deteriorated, and with it his physical health: he could not eat, and spent three weeks recuperating in a nursing home. A spell at Glamis with his brother Jock, to whom he was close, helped; but he did not fully recover and was invalided out of active service.

  Towards the end of March 1915 Mike had been able to snatch a few days’ home leave before returning to France. It may have been on this occasion that Elizabeth accompanied her mother to Victoria station to see him off. Many years later she recalled, ‘There was a very young little officer going off, and his mother – I can see her now – was weeping. And I remember my brother leaning out of the train and saying, “Don’t worry I’ll look after him.” And do you know, he was killed the next day. It was so awful when one thinks about it.’54 Two months later a telegram arrived announcing that Mike was in hospital in Rouen suffering from shell shock. He proved to have a head wound as well, and was sent by river steamer to Le Havre and shipped home. Lady Strathmore’s concerns about this son were different: ‘now Lady S. is worrying about how in the world she will manage to keep him at all quiet – he is so headstrong & will want to be going to theatres etc all the time,’ Beryl Poignand recorded.55

  Jock too had been wounded. In early May the first finger of his left hand was shattered by a bullet. He sailed to Southampton among 850 casualties on a ship intended to carry half the number. His damaged finger had to be amputated. Lady Strathmore was relieved that his injury was not worse, while his youngest sister, to her delight, found herself quoted in the Daily Mail, to whose reporter she had spoken when he rang up St James’s Square asking for information about her brother’s wound.56

  For all Lady Strathmore’s preoccupations with her soldier sons and her hospitals, she did not neglect the upbringing of the two Benjamins and stuck to her principles on the profitable use of holiday time. Elizabeth and David had French conversation lessons with yet another Made, Lydie Lachaise,* while Beryl went home for a fortnight, and David had drawing lessons, which his sister was annoyed to have to take in his place when he fell ill.57

  In July 1915 Elizabeth was overjoyed to be taken to the Haymarket Theatre to see a new romantic comedy, H. A. Vachell’s Quinneys,† starring her particular idol Henry Ainley,‡ whom she had been thrilled to glimpse from the window of a taxi a few days earlier.58 Her letters at this time overflow with swooning references to this actor; and she was mercilessly teased about him by her family – particularly her brothers – who told her he was fat and old. They sent her ‘vulgar and insulting telegrams’ on her birthday, ‘about darling Henry’s stomach, was it real or a cushion, he was just having his 25th anniversary on the stage & such insults’.59

  To her delight, later that summer she was able to send Beryl ‘perfectly wonderful, marvellous, absolutely indescribable news’. Her friend Lavinia had a first cousin ‘who KNOWS Darling HENRY VERY WELL!!!! He is 35 (Hahahoo, Rosie and Mike will be squashed!) and she is going to write and find out the colour of his eyes, & everything, also get his signature. Isn’t it absolutely unbelievable … Darling Henry. I am so pleased. I feel that it was quite worth sticking up for him all this time. Oh my sacred Aunt in pink tights, perhaps we shall even meet him, help I shall die in a minute. Yours, Elizabeth.’60 She afterwards acquired a signed photograph of Ainley in his role as Joe Quinney, and continued to follow him in all his stage and film roles. ‘I bet all the housemaids think that he’s my young man!’ she wrote to Beryl after hanging the latest picture of her hero over her mantelpiece at Glamis.61 She and Lavinia, who had a crush on another actor, Basil Hallam,* signed themselves ‘Henriette’ and ‘Basilette’ in the facetious letters they exchanged about their adoration of these idols.

  The two also shared a penchant for handsome sailors, and corresponded irreverently as King George V (Lavinia, who signed one letter in a passable imitation of the King’s writing, ‘Your Lord and Sovereign George R’) and Queen Mary (Elizabeth, rebuked by her friend in the same letter for flirting with sailors: ‘For shame! Tut! Remember your queenly dignity, & don’t make eyes at men in The service, Mary – although, of course, I own it’s a temptation’).62

  Another admirer of sailors came into Lady Elizabeth’s life at around this time: she was Katie Hamilton,† daughter of the Duke of Abercorn, who was to become a lifelong friend. Lavinia wrote that they were both dying to hear about the captivating specimens of nautical manhood Elizabeth had met while staying with her sister May in Edinburgh.63 Katie was determined to marry a sailor, and indeed fell for one – Lavinia’s brother Cecil, a sub-lieutenant in the navy. ‘Wouldn’t it be splendid if you & Lavinia & I all married sailors,’ she wrote to Elizabeth; ‘there would be a lifelong feud between us if by any chance one of the 3 got promoted first!’64

  Handsome men in uniform did not have to be sailors to attract Elizabeth’s attention. In London she and Beryl had taken to watching the Red Cross chauffeurs outside their headquarters in St James’s Square. Elizabeth dubbed one of these drivers ‘The Beautiful One’, and he appears frequently in her letters of these years. ‘I received the most seraphic, glorious, delightful, beautiful, wonderful smile from the Beautiful One yesterday,’ she wrote to Beryl in July 1915. ‘He was perfectly charmed to see me, (whato).’65

  On Elizabeth’s fifteenth birthday, also the first anniversary of the outbreak of war, they went to the Hippodrome. The cast threw hundreds of soft balls into the auditorium which the audience could then fling at each other. Elizabeth, with her usual enthusiasm, embraced this challenge vigorously.66

  Friday 6 August was ‘a fairly decent’ last day in London before she left for Sc
otland, after seven months in the south. She went shopping and bought a hat and a pink dressing gown and ‘lots of chocs’. Perhaps best of all, she had ‘a wonderful last smile from the Beautiful One, we waved to each other for the first and last time, a fitting goodbye’.67 That night she and David travelled ‘alonio’ on the night sleeper to Glamis. She found that ‘two most beautiful sailors’ were travelling in the same coach. ‘We had long conversations in the corridor in the morning.’68

  At Glamis she slipped happily back into her role of friend to the soldier patients. Her unaffected curiosity about them and enjoyment of their company are evident from her letters throughout the war. There seems to be no doubt that the experience of welcoming and cheering men from all walks of life and many parts of the world had a major impact upon her – indeed, one can surmise that everything she learned from this stood her in extremely good stead in the life that lay before her. The soldiers were charming, she reported to Beryl, who was away for the summer holidays; and this time there was a sailor among them, to her delight. ‘My dear Miss Poignand, you are missing something! One is a fisherman and a Naval Reserve, he has been shipwrecked five times. Blue eyes, black hair, so nice. Reminds me of Henry.’69

  Another of the new patients was Corporal Ernest Pearce of the Durham Light Infantry, whose right shoulder had been shattered at Ypres in May 1915. Soon after he arrived, he saw a girl in a print dress swinging a sun bonnet in her hand. It was Elizabeth. He thought she had beautiful eyes and found her delightful; whenever he met her in the weeks ahead, he said later, ‘she was always the same. “How is your shoulder?” “Do you sleep well?” “Does it pain you?” “Why are you not smoking your pipe?” “Have you no tobacco?” “You must tell me if you haven’t and I’ll get some for you” … For her fifteen years she was very womanly, kind-hearted and sympathetic.’70