Counting One's Blessings

by William Shawcross

  † The Hon. Adelaide Mary Biddulph (1901–85), daughter of second Baron Biddulph. Married 1929 Henry Vincent Yorke (the novelist Henry Green).

  ‡ The Hon. Bruce Ogilvy (1895–1976), son of sixth Earl of Airlie and neighbour of the Strathmores. He served in the 12th Royal Lancers, Life Guards and Irish Guards and was equerry to the Prince of Wales, 1921–30.

  § Count Willy de Grünne, Second Secretary at the Belgian Embassy. On 1 October 1978, Queen Elizabeth wrote to her Treasurer, Sir Ralph Anstruther, from Birkhall to say that ‘dear old Willie de Grünne’ had died, aged ninety. She asked Sir Ralph to write to Count de Grünne’s daughter and added, ‘perhaps you could say that he was the best waltzer in London (in my youth) & I adored being waltzed around the ballroom – tho’ I think we called it a valse in those days!’ (RA QEQM/OUT/ANST)

  * Lady Delia Spencer (1889–1981), daughter of sixth Earl Spencer, married 1914 Sidney Peel. After his death in 1938 she was appointed Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth.

  * Lady Katharine Hamilton (1900–85), daughter of third Duke of Abercorn. She married, in 1930, Lieutenant Colonel (later Sir) Reginald Seymour, equerry to King George V, and became a lady in waiting to Queen Mary for some time before transferring to Queen Elizabeth’s Household in 1937.

  † Throughout their lives the Elphinstone children, Elizabeth, John, Jean, Andrew and Margaret, called their Aunt Elizabeth ‘Peter’, ever since one of them had been unable as a child to pronounce the name ‘Elizabeth’.

  * Edward, Prince of Wales (1894–1972), the eldest son of, and heir to, King George V; later the Duke of Windsor. Known in his family as David, he took the name King Edward VIII on the death of George V in January 1936, and abdicated in order to marry Mrs Ernest Simpson in December that same year.

  † Count Michael Torby (1898–1959), son of Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovitch of Russia, whose family lived in exile in England and France after the Russian Revolution.

  ‡ Victor Cochrane Baillie (1896–1951), later third Baron Lamington.

  § Gerard Brassey (1898–1918), a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, was killed in action on 27 August, aged nineteen.

  * Charles, Lord Settrington (1899–1919), eldest son of eighth Duke of Richmond and brother of Doris Gordon-Lennox, with whom Elizabeth began a lifelong friendship at this time. Charles Settrington had been taken prisoner. He was the first cousin of Gerard Brassey (see p. 56).

  † Maréchal Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929), French military commander, appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied armies in April 1918.

  * HMS Scott was torpedoed a few months later, with the loss of twenty-six men. Wisp Leveson-Gower survived.

  * Sam Dickson, Third Secretary at the US Embassy. He invited her to dinner but she said she could accept only if chaperoned by her mother. After the three of them had dined at the Berkeley, she talked to him at home in St James’s Square. He told her all about his family life in America – ‘it sounds exactly like what we imagine cowboys to be,’ she wrote to Beryl later that month ([20 and 25] June, 5 July 1918, Glamis Archives (CH)). There is a charming postscript to this episode (see letter to Lady Johnston, 30 December 1989, p. 597).

  * Lieutenant J. S. Reynolds, who wrote to Elizabeth in September 1918 saying, ‘if I get out of this mess alive will send you an iron cross if you think it will be OK.’ (RA QEQM/PRIV/PAL)

  † Ernest Pearce survived the war and, as already noted, the Duke and Duchess of York subsequently gave him a job as a gardener.

  * The occasion was a Triumphal March of the Household Cavalry and the Brigade of Guards from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s Cathedral and Mansion House and back, with lorries following each battalion carrying the wounded who could not march.

  * Canadian officer convalescing at Glamis, one of the many men who proposed marriage to Elizabeth.

  † Sir George Robey (1869–1954), much-loved music-hall comedian known as the ‘Prime Minister of Mirth’. He raised £500,000 for war charities during the First World War and even larger sums during the Second World War.

  * Having survived the war, Lord Settrington went to fight for the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. He was wounded, and died on 24 August 1919.

  PART TWO

  DUCHESS OF YORK

  ‘If she weren’t late, she would be perfect’

  KING GEORGE V

  THE LONG WAR OVER, people tried to resume their lives despite the immense losses that had been suffered. The grand houses of the land closed their convalescent wards and gradually returned to family and social life. Elizabeth enjoyed her first Royal Ascot in summer 1919 and she was busy ‘in a dissipated way’, as she put it, with many dinners and dances throughout the year.1

  In early 1920 she joined a house party with the Salisburys at Hatfield House. She remained friends of the family for life.

  July 1920 was fateful for her. She was presented to the King and Queen, and on 8 July Albert, Duke of York, saw her across a crowded room at the RAF Ball and invited her to dance. He was reported to have said later that he fell in love with her that night, even if he did not know it at the time. For her the dance was at first less important.

  Prince Albert was a sensitive young man who had always been overshadowed by his glamorous elder brother David, the Prince of Wales. Knock-kneed and left-handed, he suffered from serious digestive problems, fear of his father, a stammer and a temper. But he was also devout, sporting, kind and courageous – as he showed when serving on his ship, HMS Collingwood, in the Battle of Jutland in 1916.

  By the end of the First World War, George V was concerned at the spread of revolution throughout Europe and was anxious to strengthen the ties between Crown and people. He created the Order of the British Empire to open up the Honours system to the mass of people, changed the Royal Family’s dynastic name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor and encouraged his children to look for spouses at home rather than principally amongst foreign royal families.

  In August 1920, only weeks after the RAF Ball, Prince Albert, who had just been created Duke of York, invited himself to Glamis. Elizabeth was nervous, she told Beryl. But the weekend went wonderfully; they played games, sang around the piano, went for walks and laughed a lot. The Prince was entranced by the happiness of all the family and friends whirling around Elizabeth, the free spirit at the centre of the house party. The contrast with the formality of his own family life was intoxicating, and the weekend appears to have persuaded him that Elizabeth was the only woman for him. For her part, she wrote to Beryl that the Prince’s visit had ‘kept us pretty busy! He was very nice, tho’, and much improved in every way.’2

  For more than two years Prince Albert paid devoted court to her. She was far from certain – the prospect of exchanging her carefree life, her friends and family for the golden cage of the Royal Family was not enticing to her. Some of the letters they exchanged throughout this long courtship were painful, showing his unrequited love and her concern, expressed always in the kindest way.

  Finally, on the night of Sunday 14 January 1923, after a weekend together with her family at St Paul’s Walden, she accepted him.

  ELIZABETH’S ENTRY INTO the Royal Family and into public life was an immediate success. King George V, remote and stern with his own children, was at once captivated by her. Queen Mary told her son, ‘You ask what Papa and I think of Elizabeth, well we are simply enchanted with her & think her too dear & attractive for words & you have made a wonderful choice.’3

  The Duke thought so too and a few days after their engagement he wrote to her, ‘My own little darling one … This is my first letter to you since you made me such a very happy person that Sunday at St Paul’s Walden & you don’t know what a wonderful difference it has made to me darling, in all ways. I think I must have always loved you darling but could never make you realize it without telling you actually that I did & thank God I told you at the right moment.’4

  The weeks before the wedding at Westminster Abbey on 26 April 1923 became more and more hectic fo
r her. The demands of her new family were considerable. So were those of the public. Newspapers were less voracious than they later became, but they were still insistent by the standards of the day and she found their attentions tiring. But the crowds were thrilled by her and she discovered she could respond to them with ease and with pleasure.

  The adjustments she needed to make are reflected in her letters. When one of her closest friends, D’Arcy Osborne, wrote to ask how he should address her after she became Duchess of York, she replied, ‘I really don’t know! It might be anything – you might try “All Hail, Duchess”, that is an Alice in Wonderland sort of Duchess, or just “Greetings” or “What Ho, Duchess” or “Say, Dutch” – in fact you can please yourself, as it will certainly please me.’5

  The night before the wedding she spent at her parents’ house, 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair. ‘Felt terribly moved when I said goodnight to the darling boys & mother. I adore them,’ she wrote in her diary.6

  The wedding address was given by the Most Rev. Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of York, who said, ‘You will have a great ambition to make this one life now given to you something rich and true and beautiful.’7 Elizabeth Bowes Lyon left the Abbey as the Duchess of York, the fourth lady in the land. At the end of the day, from her honeymoon home, she telegraphed her mother, ‘Arrived safely deliciously peaceful here hope you are not all too tired love Elizabeth.’8

  FOR THE NEXT FOURTEEN YEARS the Duchess of York became an essential member of the Royal Family, in private and in public. Within the family she was an emollient presence, soothing relations between the King’s children and their father. He was far more indulgent of her than he was of them. As a small example, the King was a stickler for punctuality, but that was not one of the Duchess’s most obvious characteristics. On one occasion early in her marriage she arrived two minutes late for lunch. After she had apologized to him, he replied, ‘You are not late, my dear, I think we must have sat down two minutes early.’9

  One of the crucial roles of the monarchy is in the voluntary, charitable world – members of the family have long been associated with different charities, which enormously increases their visibility and fundraising capacity. Quickly the Duchess demonstrated her gift for raising funds and she built up her own long list of charities and other organizations, including regiments of which she was appointed Colonel-in-Chief by the King. She supported them all her life.

  In July 1924 the Duke and Duchess made a difficult and important official visit to the most troubled part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, riven with tensions between Catholics and Protestants. The trip went well, with the Duchess demonstrating her extraordinary ability to make contact with people. The Duke wrote to his father that she had been marvellous and people loved her. ‘I am very lucky indeed to have her to help me as she knows exactly what to do & say to all the people we meet.’10

  Visits to Scotland were no longer the purely pleasurable family holidays, surrounded with friends, that summers at Glamis had been. Now she had duties, both public and private – and had to spend a good deal of time with the King and Queen at Balmoral. The atmosphere there was formal and other guests were rarely young or enchanting. The Duke and Duchess were always relieved when they could leave for the more convivial atmosphere of Glamis.

  In December 1924 they set off on a great adventure, a tour of East Africa. This visit had been recommended to them by Winston Churchill, who had told the Duchess at a dinner, ‘You ought to go and have a look at the world. I should go to East Africa. It’s got a great future.’11 They left in December 1924; their families were nervous for them. The King warned them not to run unnecessary risks ‘either from the climate or wild beasts’;12 Queen Mary wrote, ‘God bless you both, my precious children.’13 Lady Strathmore hated farewells and so her daughter promised not to come and say goodbye, writing, ‘you won’t worry about me will you darling, as I will take great care of myself in every way, I promise you.’14

  Their journey through Kenya, Uganda and the Sudan was a revelation. The Duchess wrote to her mother that their first safari was ‘simply wonderful. The country is quite unlike anything I expected and it is beautiful.’15 To D’Arcy Osborne she wrote, ‘I rise at 4.30 (I can hear you say “My God”) & go walking with my spouse and the white hunter who is a charming man with an imagination, an accent and a sense of humour. He is exactly what I imagine the Scarlet Pimpernel to be, very slow & sleepy & long, and if he wasn’t so brown he would be rather good looking.’16

  Later another hunter, Roy Salmon, wrote home of the Duchess, ‘She is awfully pleasant to look at & topping manners. He speaks very slowly but has practically no stammer as a rule though occasionally he does.’17 He had no doubt that theirs was ‘a love match’. They each adored the adventure and the release it gave them from the constraints, public and private, of life at home. Soon after they arrived back in England in April 1925 she wrote to D’Arcy Osborne, ‘I am bubbling inside with Africa.’18 Many years later she described the journey as ‘Wonderful. Best bit of one’s life.’19

  On the morning of 21 April 1926 the Duke and Duchess’s first child was born at 17 Bruton Street. They called her Elizabeth Alexandra Mary. Her birth caused great joy in the family and excitement throughout the land; one newspaper, the Daily Graphic, wrote that the family’s happiness was shared by the nation and added, ‘The possibility that in the little stranger to Bruton Street there may be a future Queen of Great Britain (perhaps even a second and resplendent Queen Elizabeth) is sufficiently intriguing; but let us not burden the bright hour of its arrival with speculation of its Royal destiny.’

  The Princess was born at a moment of great industrial unrest, which some feared might tip Britain towards revolution. Both the King and the Duke were concerned by the danger of a general strike called by the Trades Union Congress. Dire consequences of social breakdown were forecast. In the event, the strike caused much less disruption than was feared and after only nine days the TUC called it off. The King was much relieved and thought that ‘our old country can well be proud of itself.’20 His official biographer, Harold Nicolson, later wrote that people of all sorts saw it as a common tragedy, not a purely class tragedy.21

  The strike and its cancellation did nothing to alleviate the terrible economic crisis affecting much of the industrialized world through the 1920s and 1930s, but perhaps it showed that Britain could deal with industrial discontent reasonably and thus avoid the totalitarian solutions which were beginning to seem attractive to many across continental Europe.

  That summer was a happy one for the family. For the Duchess, the only shadow over her delight in her new daughter was the prospect of a long trip to open the new federal Parliament in Australia in early 1927. The Duke was concerned about that but also about whether his stammer would ruin the many public speeches that he would have to make during the tour. In October 1926 the Duchess persuaded him to visit an Australian speech therapist called Lionel Logue, now practising in Harley Street.

  Logue recorded his first impression of the Duke as ‘a slim, quiet man, with tired eyes and all the outward symptoms of the man upon whom habitual speech defect had begun to set the sign. When he left at five o’clock, you could see that there was hope once more in his heart.’22 In the next few weeks the Duke went many times to Logue, often with the Duchess, and the Australian’s treatment had a superb effect upon his self-confidence; his fear of the trip diminished.

  The Duchess’s dread of it, by contrast, grew, as she contemplated parting from her baby. ‘She is growing so big and is as sharp as a needle, & so well. She sleeps beautifully and has always got a smile ready.’23 As the day of departure, 6 January 1927, loomed she became ‘more and more miserable’.24 That morning, when the nanny brought the baby Princess down to say goodbye, the Duchess was emotional and so she ‘drank some champagne and tried not to weep’.25

  The trip – the first time the Duke had been asked by his father to represent him on an imperial mission – was gruelling and long but the young cou
ple learned a lot and the voyage was a personal success for both of them. They were impressed by the apparent strength of the Empire and the loyalty of its citizens to the Crown. Their travels gave the Duke confidence in his ability to confront the world and it showed the Duchess that she could support her husband in his public as well as his private life, abroad as well as at home. On their return to Britain, the Duke and Duchess, with Princess Elizabeth in her mother’s arms, appeared on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, cheered by ecstatic crowds in the Mall. The Times reported, ‘Twice the Duchess, her face radiant with smiles, brought the Princess forward.’

  Both families were delighted to have their children back after a successful tour, and the Duke and Duchess were overjoyed to be with their daughter once more. The Duke told Lionel Logue that he could now talk to his father without any problem. And the King wrote to Queen Mary saying how pleased he was to have his second son back. He had spoken to him several times and found him ‘most sensible, very different from David’.26 The Prince of Wales was charming and charismatic, but the King considered him to be so careless of his responsibilities that he would not allow him access to confidential information. The King was also dismayed that, unlike the Duke of York, the Prince of Wales had shown no signs of wanting to marry and start a family.

  On 21 August 1930, the Yorks’ second daughter, whom they named Margaret Rose, was born at Glamis. The Duchess soon realized that she had a character very different from that of her elder sister. She wrote to Cosmo Lang, now Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘She has got large blue eyes and a will of iron, which is all the equipment that a lady needs!’27

  Through the 1920s and early 1930s the international economic crisis became chronic. Business failures abounded and unemployment grew almost everywhere. As the Depression bit deeper, charities and other organizations needed more and more help with fundraising. The Duchess’s role in the life of the country grew ever more significant as she took on more and more charities, regiments and other public duties. She found it tragic that so many men would never work again and, calling herself an ‘anti-feminist’, she thought that women should give up jobs so that men could work.