Counting One's Blessings

by William Shawcross

  † Mabel Butcher, housekeeper at Sandringham, 1928–51; Robert Marrington, tapissier (responsible for furnishings) at Sandringham, 1925–68.

  * Princess Alexandra of Kent LG GCVO (1936– ), daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Kent.

  † Lord Halifax had taken up his appointment as British Ambassador to the United States.

  * Elizabeth Elphinstone worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, an organization founded in 1909 to provide nursing services which was widely deployed throughout the First and Second World Wars. She was also involved with the ‘Girls’ Diocesan Association’, which may account for the Queen’s comments in this letter.

  * Donald McInnes, head gardener at Glamis, 1918–53. Fanny was his wife.

  † The Polish government in exile, together with many Polish troops, had moved to Britain. Polish soldiers and airmen played a major role throughout the rest of the war.

  * General Wladyslaw Sikorski (1881–1943), Polish military and political leader. After the German occupation of Poland, he became Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile and Commander-in-Chief of the Polish armed forces in exile. He died when his plane crashed just after take-off from Gibraltar in July 1943.

  * Robert Anthony Eden, first Earl of Avon, KG MC PC (1897–1977), Conservative politician. As Foreign Secretary, 1935–8, he vigorously opposed the appeasement of Germany and eventually resigned in protest. In 1940 Churchill appointed him Secretary of State for War, and then Foreign Secretary when Lord Halifax was appointed Ambassador to the United States. He remained Foreign Secretary throughout the war.

  † King George II of the Hellenes (1890–1947), second cousin of King George VI and first cousin of the Duke of Edinburgh. Greece had fought off an attack by Italy in 1940, but was now facing invasion by the German forces as they swept through the Balkans. Despite brave resistance, Greece was overwhelmed by the end of May and King George, who had moved with his government to Crete, was forced to flee to Cairo and then to England.

  * Nancy Witcher Astor, Viscountess Astor, CH (1879–1964), American society beauty and the first woman to sit as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons. She was MP for Plymouth Sutton, 1919–45. A witty and outspoken woman, she made enemies, and in the second half of the 1930s she was so closely identified with appeasement that some called her ‘The Member for Berlin’.

  † A Toc H hostel was opened in Plymouth in February 1941 to give shelter to those made homeless by the endless German bombing of the naval city. Virginia House was originally the old Batter Street Congregational Chapel, built in 1704. After the First World War, Lord and Lady Astor had bought the site and amalgamated it with the Victory Club next door to create the Virginia House Settlement, a well-equipped and very popular social club. The building was indeed bombed in the Second World War.

  * Hitler had demanded that Yugoslavia join the Tripartite Pact which had been signed on 27 September 1940 by Germany, Italy and Japan. King George VI made personal appeals to Prince Paul, now Regent of Yugoslavia, but the Prince was unable to resist Nazi pressure. He did, however, insist on a clause stating that neither German troops nor war materials were to transit his country. As events turned out, he was powerless to see these terms were met. News of his government’s signature to the Pact provoked fury in Yugoslavia and between 26 and 27 March 1941 Prince Paul was ousted in a coup d’état. By the end of May 1941 the whole of the Balkans was in fascist hands. Prince Paul and Princess Olga were forced into exile. The Queen did not condone Prince Paul’s decisions but was understanding of his predicament and remained friends with him and Princess Olga.

  * 5 January 1941, RA PS/PSO/GVI/C/069/07.

  * RA QEQM/PRIV/PAL.

  * The Queen was determined to do everything possible to encourage American support for the British war effort. Churchill helped draft her speech which President Roosevelt said ‘was really perfect in every way and … will do a great amount of good’. (Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI, p. 530)

  † Queen Elizabeth later recalled such wartime visits to Balmoral: ‘It is such a very happy house, and I remember thinking when we came up in those awful days of 1941 and 42 how clean it felt, in a way pure, & I still feel that now.’ (Queen Elizabeth to Queen Elizabeth II, 3 September 1982, RA QEII/PRIV/RF)

  * Queen Mary lived with the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort (her niece) at Badminton House in Gloucestershire throughout the war.

  * On 19 September 1941 John Bowes Lyon, Master of Glamis, grandson of the Earl of Strathmore, was killed in action in Egypt. Before his death was confirmed, the Queen wrote to Queen Mary on 5 October: ‘It is very sad news that my nephew John is missing in Egypt … He is a dear affectionate boy and I do trust that he may be spared. I am afraid that my father will be grieved, for he is the eldest of his eldest son, and one feels for the family succession.’ (RA QM/PRIV/CC12/177)

  * Cosmo Lang retired as Archbishop of Canterbury in spring 1942. The Royal Family had relied on him for spiritual and moral support, particularly at the time of the abdication and since the beginning of the war. Queen Mary described him as ‘our friend in weal and woe’. (Queen Mary to Queen Elizabeth, 13 January 1942, RA QEQM/PRIV/RF)

  * This letter was written on the death of Arthur’s mother, Constance.

  † Princess Elizabeth was confirmed on 28 March 1942 in the Private Chapel at Windsor Castle by Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  * Most Rev. William Temple (1881–1944), formerly Archbishop of York, appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942. Author of philosophical and theological works of which probably the most influential was Christianity and Social Order (1942). Joint founder, with Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz, of the Council of Christians and Jews, 1942.

  * Doris and Clare Vyner’s daughter, Elizabeth, born 15 January 1924, was named after her godmother, the Duchess of York; she died of meningitis while on active service as a Wren, on 3 June 1942.

  † Sir Gerald Kelly RA (1879–1972), British artist, who was engaged for much of the war at Windsor on full-length portraits of the King and Queen.

  * David Bowes Lyon went to Washington as head of the Political Warfare Executive in 1942, remaining there until 1944. There are many references to him in this role in the diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart (The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, vol. II: 1939–1965, ed. Kenneth Young, Macmillan, 1980).

  † Rachel Bowes Lyon, née Spender-Clay (1907–96), wife of David.

  ‡ The war had brought out the best in Prince George, Duke of Kent. He had insisted on being given wartime military duties and was created Air Commodore in the Royal Air Force. His task was to inspect RAF facilities at home and abroad. On 25 August 1942 he took off in a Sunderland flying-boat from Invergordon in Scotland bound for an RAF base in Iceland. There was thick fog and the plane hit the top of a mountain near Wick. The news came to Balmoral in the middle of dinner and the King passed the Queen a note stating that his brother was dead. All members of the family, especially his mother, Queen Mary, were devastated. The King and Queen did their best to comfort his widow, Princess Marina, and their three children, Prince Edward (who succeeded to the title), Princess Alexandra and Prince Michael.

  * Gentle Caesar: A Play in Three Acts, about Tsar Nicholas II, by Osbert Sitwell and Rubeigh James Minney.

  * Mrs Ronald Greville died on 15 September 1942.

  * The details of Mrs Greville’s will were published in The Times on 8 January 1943. She left £1,564,038 gross and she bequeathed ‘with my loving thoughts’ much of her jewellery to the Queen, including drop diamond earrings, a tiara, and a diamond necklace that was said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette. Mrs Greville left Princess Margaret £20,000. To Queen Victoria Eugenie of Spain, who had lived in exile since 1931, she left £12,500 ‘with deep affection and in memory of the great kindness and affection which her Majesty has shown me’. Mrs Greville also left £10,000 to Osbert Sitwell, which made him feel ‘very rich’. A few months after her death he visited her old French maid Aline, who still lived at Polesden L
acey. He reported to the Queen that the rest of the staff, whom he and she called ‘the Crazy Gang’, had been disbanded – but they had ‘brought off a big coup with the sale of Mrs Ronnie’s cellar – an appropriate finale’. (Osbert Sitwell to Queen Elizabeth, [18] April 1943, RA QEQM/OUT/SITWELL)

  † Perhaps a reference to Peter Cheyney (1896–1951), a writer of crime fiction, whose books sold widely at the time.

  * St George or the Dragon: Towards a Christian Democracy (1941) by Godfrey Elton, first Baron Elton (1892–1973), historian, Labour politician and author.

  † Among the many regiments of which the Queen was Colonel-in-Chief or Honorary Colonel over the years were the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, the Black Watch, the Queen’s Bays, the 7th Queen’s Own Hussars, the Manchester Regiment, the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, the Bedfordshire & Hertfordshire Regiment; other regiments or units of the armed services with which she was associated included the Irish Guards, the Women’s Royal Naval Service and the Royal Army Medical Corps.

  * In August 1942 an Allied raid carried out on the German-controlled French port of Dieppe, by a largely Canadian force, ended in disaster with more than 3,000 troops killed, wounded or captured. The Germans discovered an Allied battle plan that involved the shackling of German prisoners of war. In response, Hitler ordered that the same be done to Canadian prisoners – which caused Churchill to order that German POWs in Canada be shackled too. Both orders were soon rescinded.

  * The short stories of the American writer Damon Runyon (1880–1946) were filled with gamblers and hustlers who spoke Runyonese – a colourful mixture of slang and formality. This style appealed to the Queen’s sense of humour, rather as the P. G. Wodehouse and the Hyman Kaplan stories did.

  * At the President’s suggestion, the Queen had invited Eleanor Roosevelt to come to London.

  * Stella, Dowager Marchioness of Reading, GBE CStJ (1894–1971). The daughter of Charles Charnaud, in 1931 she married the first Marquess of Reading (d. 1935). A dedicated public servant throughout her life, she founded the Women’s Voluntary Service (later the WRVS) in 1938 and served on many public bodies such as the Factory and Welfare Board, the Central Housing Advisory Committee and the Personal Service League; later she became Governor and then Vice-Chairman of the BBC.

  † Queen Mary replied, ‘[…] I can understand your pleasure about the jewels. […] I never had any such luck – but I am not really jealous, I just mention this as it came into my mind!’ (Queen Mary to Queen Elizabeth, 16 October 1942 (misdated November, RA/QEQM/PRIV/RF)

  * Throughout 1942, there had been more and more reports of the Nazi plan to liquidate the European Jews, which had been formulated at a secret conference on Lake Wannsee in January 1942. Thus on 20 June 1942 the Daily Telegraph carried a story headlined ‘GERMANS MURDER 700,000 JEWS IN POLAND’. In early December, Jewish groups in Britain appealed to the Queen to intercede with the government on behalf of Polish Jews; there is no record of the Queen’s response (Council of Jewish Women’s Organisations to Queen Elizabeth, 3 December 1942, RA QEQM/PRIV/MISCOFF). On 17 December, the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the House of Commons that Jews in Europe were being subjected to ‘barbarous and inhumane treatment’. The House then stood in a two-minute silent tribute.

  The Queen’s reference to the mistake of Allied retaliation against the Germans was a repetition of her earlier concern about shackling prisoners after the Dieppe raid.

  * Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909), American author of romantic adventure novels and horror stories.

  † The country residence of the British Prime Minister, in Buckinghamshire.

  ‡ Mrs Roosevelt in fact arrived on 23 October. She was shocked by the damage done by German bombing and by the conditions at Buckingham Palace. She noted the draughtiness, the lack of windows, the black line painted around the bath to show the maximum water allowed and the fact that no fires could be lit until December. Her first night at Buckingham Palace was memorable – while they were at dinner news came through to Churchill of impending victory at El Alamein – the first British victory in three years of war. Touring the country and visiting American troops, Mrs Roosevelt was impressed by the unity and determination of the British people and their gratitude for American help. (Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI, pp. 550–1)

  * The Rough Shoot, Esmond Lynn-Allen and John Elphinstone, Hutchinson, 1942. This book was published while John was in a POW camp.

  * Margaret Elphinstone (1925– ), later Mrs Denys Rhodes. One of the Queen’s favourite nieces, she spent much of the war living with the Royal Family. In 1990 she became a lady in waiting to Queen Elizabeth and was with her when she died. Her memoir The Final Curtsey was published in 2011.

  † The Carberry mine was owned by the Deans & Moore Edinburgh Collieries Company. It was opened in 1866 and closed in 1960.

  ‡ John Piper (1903–92), British artist renowned for his landscapes and architectural paintings, as well as for his abstract work. During the Second World War he was commissioned to record bomb damage in London and elsewhere, and in 1941 the Queen asked him to paint a series of watercolours of Windsor Castle and buildings in Windsor Home Park and Great Park. Over the next three years he produced two extensive sets of drawings, amounting to the most important commission the Queen ever made. Although she had doubts about the prevalence of dark colours and stormy skies in the pictures (the King famously joked that Piper had had bad luck with the weather), the Queen appreciated their quality and gave them a prominent place in her collection.

  * Sir William Walton OM (1902–83), British composer, notable for Belshazzar’s Feast, for Façade (his collaboration with Edith Sitwell) and for the patriotic film scores he wrote during the Second World War, among them the music for Laurence Olivier’s Henry V.

  † When the war began in September 1939 the allies against Germany were Britain, France and Poland. The British dominions – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa – soon also declared war on Germany. After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt devised the phrase ‘The United Nations’ for the Allies, and in January 1942 the Declaration of the United Nations was signed by 26 countries. This became the basis for the international body which replaced the League of Nations in 1945.

  * Sitwell had proposed a poetry reading for the Queen to help ‘keep the arts alive’. The details of time, place and participants were not easy for him to arrange. With great talents often came great egos. Eventually the reading took place before the Queen and both Princesses at the Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street on 14 April 1943. The Princesses found it hard not to giggle when T. S. Eliot incanted from The Waste Land, and loved it when another poet was booed by his friends for exceeding the time limit. The Queen thought Osbert Sitwell’s sister Edith was among the best – she read ‘beautifully’. (Anderson, Conversations, RA QEQM/ADD/MISC)

  † John Masefield OM (1878–1967), Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death.

  ‡ Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967), Soviet writer and propagandist who was allowed by Stalin to travel widely in Europe in the early years of the war.

  * Edward Woods, Bishop of Lichfield (1877–1953), became, in the words of a member of her family, the Queen’s ‘personal bishop’. He helped both her and the King with speeches and corresponded frequently with the Queen. He argued in one letter that the suffering of war would be unbearable unless one could be sure ‘that God is in the midst of it all, & that out of this raw material of evil He is creating something good’. The Queen agreed – she believed that the horror of fascism showed what could happen when a great nation abandoned the teachings of Christ. The war made her, if anything, more devout. Most of her letters to Bishop Woods were lost in a fire in the 1980s.

  † Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845), prison reformer, Quaker minister and gifted preacher.

  * Oliver Lyttelton, first Viscount Chandos (1893–1972), soldier, businessman and politician, Conservative MP for Aldershot, 1940–54, Minister of State and member of War Cabinet (1941–2).

&nbs
p; † Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi (1869–1948), the leader of Indian nationalist opposition to British rule. Inspired by the doctrine of non-violent civil disobedience, with Nehru he led India to independence in 1947.

  * Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942), written by William Beveridge (1879–1963), British social reformer and economist. His seminal work, always known as the Beveridge Report, was the foundation for the post-war welfare state constructed by the Labour government elected in 1945.

  † By Mildred Cable (1878–1952) and Francesca French (1871–1960), intrepid Protestant missionaries who, with Francesca’s sister Eva (1869–1960), travelled and proselytized throughout China, 1901–36. Together they wrote over thirty books about China and their Christian purpose.

  ‡ Sir Richard Winn Livingstone (1880–1960), British scholar and educationalist, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, 1944–7. Other publications include A Defence of Classical Education.

  * The Queen had been urged by people of all political persuasions to make a broadcast to the women of the Empire, praising them for all they were doing for the war effort.

  † The King had gone to Scapa Flow, Orkney, to visit the Home Fleet.

  * The Queen trusted Lady Helen’s judgement and sought her advice on many speeches.

  * Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles PC GCB GCVO CMG MC MA (1887–1981). Appointed Assistant Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales in 1920, he found the Prince’s irresponsibility intolerable and resigned in 1929. In 1935 he became Assistant Private Secretary to King George V and then to King Edward VIII and King George VI. In 1943 he succeeded Sir Alexander Hardinge as the King’s Private Secretary.