Counting One's Blessings

by William Shawcross

  † The speech benefited from advice from Tommy Lascelles, Winston Churchill and the Bishop of Lichfield. Lascelles commented in his diary that this was ‘a curious trio of collaborationists, who are unlikely ever to be in literary partnership again’. (Alan Lascelles, King’s Counsellor: The Wartime Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, ed. Duff Hart-Davis, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006, p. 122)

  * Churchill’s private weekly lunch with the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace.

  * Throughout the war, the Queen was determined to see that the King received credit for all he did. She felt that too often politicians tried to steal his limelight.

  * Sir Stafford Cripps (1889–1952), Labour politician, British Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1940–2. President of the Board of Trade, 1945–7, and then Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1947–50. Later, Queen Elizabeth would recall to Eric Anderson: ‘I remember when Stafford Cripps came to stay. He was a vegetarian and he had an omelette for lunch. And I remember my children’s faces – horror. This man gulping up their weekly ration, you know. I’ve never forgotten it.’ (Conversations with Eric Anderson 1994–5, RA QEQM/ADD/MIS)

  † In summer 1943, Allied victories in North Africa enabled the King to visit his armies in the field. On 11 June 1943 he set off from Northolt aerodrome, travelling incognito as ‘General Lyon’. The visit was an outstanding success and gave the King the headlines that the Queen thought his work always deserved. He met General Dwight Eisenhower, the Commander of Allied Forces in North Africa, knighted General Bernard Montgomery in recognition of his triumph at El Alamein, and mingled with troops.

  He also made an overnight voyage on the cruiser HMS Aurora to Malta. The island fortress had held out against two years of endless bombing and blockade by the Axis powers. The King had awarded the islanders his personal decoration, the George Cross, and was determined to go there in recognition of their courage. It was dangerous – Sicily, only sixty miles away, was still in fascist hands. His arrival caused spontaneous joy and he was mobbed by weeping, cheering people. He was greatly moved.

  * Air Vice Marshal Sir Edward Hedley ‘Mouse’ Fielden GCVO CB DFC AFC (1903–76), Captain of the King’s Flight for King Edward VIII and King George VI and the Queen’s Flight for Queen Elizabeth II until 1962. During the Second World War, he flew risky missions to drop off and pick up agents in occupied France. He remained a friend of Queen Elizabeth and frequent visitor to the Castle of Mey until his death.

  † Sir Eric Charles Mieville GCIE KCVO CSI CMG (1896–1971), Assistant Private Secretary to George VI, 1937–45; he had previously served as Private Secretary to the Governor Generals of India and Canada.

  * Lieutenant Colonel Sir Piers ‘Joey’ Walter Legh GCVO KCB CMG CIE OBE (1890–1955), equerry to the Prince of Wales, 1919–36, then to King George VI until 1946. In 1941 he was appointed Master of the Household.

  * Most Rev. Cyril Forster Garbett GCVO PC (1875–1955). In September 1943 Garbett was invited to Moscow by the newly installed Patriarch Sergius I. Stalin used the visit to claim that there was full freedom of worship in the Soviet Union. In an interview in the New York Times Garbett supported this line, but during the Cold War he denounced communism as anti-Christian.

  † Ibn Saud (1876–1953), the first king of the unified state of Saudia Arabia.

  * Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts OM CH ED KC FRS PC (1870–1950), Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, 1919–24 and 1939–48, statesman, soldier and philosopher. He led the armies of South Africa in the First World War and was a British field marshal during the Second. He was instrumental in founding the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations; he wrote the preamble to the UN Charter. He was a friend of the King and Queen, who greatly admired him; the Queen later recalled that he ‘was wonderful with the children, which was so nice. He was a great Greek scholar and they sat and listened to what he said.’ (Conversations with Eric Anderson, 1994–5, RA QEQM/ADD/MISC)

  † Sitwell had succeeded to the baronetcy on the death of his father, Sir George Reresby Sitwell, the fourth baronet, on 9 July 1943.

  ‡ Selected Poems Old and New, Duckworth, 1943.

  § ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’ (1915), short story by the Russian author Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was translated into English by D. H. Lawrence.

  * Arrival and Departure (1943), final novel in the trilogy by Arthur Koestler (1905–83) which began with The Gladiators (about Spartacus) and then Darkness at Noon (about the Soviet show trials). Arrival and Departure dealt with Koestler’s life as a Hungarian refugee.

  † Between the Thunder and the Sun, by James Vincent Sheean (1899–1975), American war correspondent and writer.

  ‡ Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65), Victorian novelist, author of North and South and Cranford. Her books were filled with detailed observation of life at every level of society and are prized by social historians as well as by general readers.

  § The Windsor wartime pantomimes were an important event in the year for the Princesses and their friends.

  * Paul Nash (1889–1946), British landscape and surrealist painter. He was an official war artist in both world wars. Landscape of the Vernal Equinox was one of the Queen’s most important purchases. A visionary painting, in which Wittenham Clumps, an ancient British camp in the Thames Valley, is portrayed as in a dream, with the sun and moon together in the sky. The Queen told Eric Anderson, ‘It’s a wonderful picture, imaginative and fascinating.’ However, Princess Margaret told Anderson that ‘We said, poor Mummy’s gone mad. Look what she’s brought back. At the age of twelve we weren’t, I suppose, into that sort of thing.’ (Conversations with Eric Anderson 1944–5, RA QEQM/ADD/MISC)

  * Hero (Heron) of Alexandria (ad 20–62), Greek mathematician, scientist and inventor who created many mechanical devices, including a water organ, a fire engine and what is thought to be the earliest steam-powered engine.

  † The Queen had enclosed two ‘Elizabeth R’ bookplates.

  ‡ Lady Helen Violet Bonham Carter DBE (1887–1969), daughter of Herbert Asquith, Britain’s last Liberal Prime Minister; married Maurice Bonham Carter, 1915. Lady Violet was also a leading Liberal politician and diarist and in 1964 was created Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury, a life peerage.

  § Mark Bonham Carter (1922–94), commissioned in the Grenadier Guards in 1941, captured in Tunisia and then escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy; he walked 400 miles to rejoin British forces and was mentioned in dispatches. In November 1943 he met Princess Elizabeth as Colonel of his regiment and, Arthur Penn told the Queen, was very impressed. ‘It was a new experience for him to find friendliness so allied to dignity and kindness to a perfect naturalness. He left treading on air’ (20 November 1943, RA QEQM/PRIV/PAL/PENN). Bonham Carter became a Liberal politician, publisher and human-rights activist and was created a life peer in 1986.

  * Amelia Rawlings, housekeeper at Windsor Castle, 1912–39. A formidable figure, she was devoted to Queen Mary, who thought highly of her. In her retirement she lived in Windsor Home Park.

  * On Maundy Thursday, the monarch traditionally distributes silver coins to the elderly.

  † Group Captain Peter Townsend CVO DSO DFC and Bar (1914–95), equerry to King George VI, 1944–52, and to Queen Elizabeth, 1952–3.

  * From The Torrents of Spring by Ivan Turgenev (1818–83), translated by Constance Garnett, London, Heinemann, 1897.

  † After the D Day landings on 6 June 1944, Hitler unleashed new weapons against Britain, first the pilotless V-1 flying bomb, and then the V-2 rocket. Known as doodlebugs, the V-1s flew in straight lines from their launch sites across the Channel and when their noisy engines stopped they fell, causing panic and great damage. Almost 3,000 civilians were killed and 10,000 homes were destroyed in just one month.

  On Sunday 18 June the engine of a V-1 bomber cut out just after it had crossed the Thames and it fell between Parliament and Buckingham Palace on the Guards Chapel in Birdcage Walk as Sunday mo
rning service was being conducted, killing sixty-three servicemen and women and fifty-eight civilians. Among them was Olive, sister of Arthur Penn. He was working at the Palace when the disaster happened; he went straight to the Chapel to help, and there he found his sister’s body.

  * Sing High! Sing Low! (1944).

  * Many of the small Dutch landscapes in the Royal Collection had been hung on the walls of the shelter, including works by Paulus Potter (1625–54) and Meyndert Hobbema (1638–1709), all of gentle landscapes with cows, horses and figures. Matthew Smith (1879–1959) was a British painter, greatly influenced by Matisse and the Fauves. The Queen owned one of his typically brightly coloured oil paintings.

  † The Queen’s concern at being ‘done in’ was probably caused by the V-1 flying bomb. Westminster and the Palace appeared to be on one of the direct lines of flight on which these ‘doodlebugs’ were launched. After the Guards Chapel was destroyed, another doodlebug fell on Constitution Hill, blowing out seventy-five yards of the Palace wall. The King, Queen and Prime Minister took to holding their Tuesday ‘picnics’ in the Palace air-raid shelter.

  * Equestrian statue of George III at the end of the Long Walk in Windsor Great Park.

  † Boeing B17 Flying Fortress bombers, one of the principal aircraft deployed by the United States Air Force in the strategic bombing of Germany.

  * Lady Mary Palmer (1920–2000), daughter of third Earl of Selborne. The first lady in waiting appointed to Princess Elizabeth, she served in the Royal Household until 1950. Married 1944 Anthony Strachey (d. 1955); 2nd 1981 St John Gore.

  * Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham KCB KBE DSO MC DFC AFC RAF (1895–1948), First World War flying ace; in the Second World War he commanded the Desert Air Force supporting the Eighth Army in North Africa, including at El Alamein, and was commander of tactical air forces in the 1944 Normandy campaign. On 30 January 1948, he presumably died with all the passengers and crew of an airliner which vanished without trace on a flight from the Azores to Bermuda.

  † Henri Giraud (1879–1949), French general who took part in the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942. His relations with General de Gaulle were poor and he retired in 1944.

  * Field Marshal Harold Alexander, first Earl Alexander of Tunis KG OM (1891–1969). During the Second World War he served as a commander in Burma, North Africa and Italy, eventually rising to become Supreme Allied Commander, Mediterranean Theatre. After serving as Governor General of Canada, in 1952 he became Minister of Defence in Winston Churchill’s Cabinet.

  † Moroccan soldiers who served with the French army.

  * On the eve of his departure the King wrote to the Queen saying that although he did not expect anything to happen to him ‘there are some matters which might want clearing up.’ He said that she would ‘naturally go on living at Buck. Pal, in this Castle [Windsor], Sandringham & Balmoral for the present until such time as Lilibet is on her own. I hope Royal Lodge, Appleton & Birkhall will always be your house on the private estates. The former is our home; the house we built and made for ourselves in Windsor Park.’ RA QEQM/PRIV/RF)

  † ‘Beppo’ was Crown Prince Umberto of Italy (1904–83), to whom his father King Victor Emmanuel III had handed over most of his powers since his country’s September 1943 armistice with the Allies. King George wished to avoid an official visit to Rome, and the government agreed that for political reasons it was inadvisable for him to see any Italian political leaders or members of the Italian Royal Family.

  * Rex Whistler (1905–44), British artist, designer and illustrator. He wrote letters embellished with beautiful drawings to the Queen, amongst others. He was killed by a mortar bomb near Caen on 18 July 1944, while serving with the Welsh Guards during the Normandy invasion.

  * The Queen was dismayed by the government’s decision to disband the Home Guard. She recalled ‘this splendid spirit of loyalty and determination which brought the Home Guard into being during those critical days of 1940’. (Queen Elizabeth, message to Commanding Officer (Lieutenant Colonel Hon. Michael Bowes Lyon) 31 July 1944, RA QEQM/PS/ENGT/1944/43)

  * Dr John Lamb, Minister at Crathie 1937–63. He died in 1974, and Queen Elizabeth wrote to his son Jock saying, ‘My mind often goes back to those happy Balmoral days, & the laughter & the jokes, & delicious tea at the Manse, & Dr Lamb glowing with vigour after his dip in the icy Dee!’ (RA QEQM/OUT/MISC)

  † Soldiers of the 7th Battalion, the Manchester Regiment, stationed at Balmoral at this time. The Queen became their Colonel-in-Chief in 1947.

  ‡ Sir Eric Coates (1886–1957), composer of many well-known pieces of light music, including the film score for The Dam Busters and the theme tune of Desert Island Discs. He had written asking permission to dedicate to the Queen his orchestral suite The Three Elizabeths. The three were Elizabeth I, Elizabeth of Glamis and Princess Elizabeth. They were celebrated respectively by a musical salute to the pageantry of Tudor England, a pastorale with a Scottish atmosphere, and a stirring march evoking Princess Elizabeth as the leader of the Youth of Britain. His dedication was accepted.

  * David Bowes Lyon replied that, as his father had already died, he would not fly home from Washington because ‘I did not feel justified in taking this trip in war-time when all is over.’ (Bowes Lyon Papers (SPW))

  * The war had convinced the Queen that Christianity was vital to the recovery of Britain. In 1944 she met Amy Buller (1891–1974), who had been horrified by the ease with which the Nazis came to power in Germany, a country she knew well. Miss Buller told the Queen of her ambition to create a college to inculcate Christian principles. The Queen, who had been impressed by Miss Buller’s book, Darkness over Germany, promised to help find a site. In 1947 Cumberland Lodge, a residence in Windsor Great Park, fell vacant and the King and Queen offered it to Miss Buller’s Foundation. She became warden and Elizabeth Elphinstone her deputy. St Katharine’s College changed with the times (its name becoming St Catharine’s, and then Cumberland Lodge), but it continued to flourish into the twenty-first century.

  * Charles May, agent at St Paul’s Walden. George Crabbe, head forester on the Glamis estate; Nurse Barrie probably worked with one of the doctors from nearby Forfar; Harry Gilbert Grey Rorison (1879–1963), Rector at Kirriemuir, 1928–48, also serving the Chapel at Glamis; Chaplain at Glamis Castle, 1948–60; Olive Drummond, a local friend of the family.

  † Patrick Bowes Lyon (1884–1949), Queen Elizabeth’s eldest brother, was known as the Master of Glamis until the death of his grandfather in 1904, when he became Lord Glamis. On his father’s death he became the fifteenth Earl of Strathmore.

  * Paris was liberated on 25 August 1944, and Churchill received a rapturous welcome when he visited the city on 11 November.

  * Mrs Way’s husband George had just died. He was a gamekeeper at Sandringham, 1911–43, and kennelman, 1943–4.

  † Produced by May & Baker in 1936, the first effective antibiotic.

  ‡ Ruth Roche, Lady Fermoy, DCVO OBE (1908–1993), lady in waiting and close friend of Queen Elizabeth and maternal grandmother of Lady Diana Spencer.

  * The Auxiliary Territorial Service was formed in September 1938 as a women’s voluntary service and the Queen became its Commandant in Chief in 1939. It was given full military status in 1941. The women served in a variety of roles ranging from cooks and clerks to drivers, radar operators and ‘ack-ack’ anti-aircraft gun crews. At its peak the ATS numbered over 200,000 women. In 1949 it was disbanded and the WRAC (Women’s Royal Army Corps) took its place.

  † After the Germans had fled Greece, violence between Royalists and Communists grew. The Queen was dismayed by the way in which the press and the BBC appeared to support the Communists.

  * D’Arcy Osborne was heroic as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Holy See during the war. He was part of a small group of diplomats and churchmen who helped conceal some 4,000 escapees – Allied soldiers and Jews – from the Nazis.

  Major Sam Derry, an escaping soldier, described Osb
orne in the Vatican in 1943: ‘Seldom have I met any man in whom I had such immediate confidence. He welcomed us warmly, yet I found it impossible to behave with anything but strict formality … I was almost overwhelmed by an atmosphere of old-world English courtliness and grace which I had thought belonged only to the country-house parties of long ago … I felt as though I had returned home after long travels, to find that royalty had come to dinner, and I had to be on my best behaviour.’ (Owen Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War, Cambridge University Press, 1986, passim)

  * Hansard, 15 May 1945.

  † Charles Vyner (b. 1926), the son of the Queen’s oldest friends, Clare and Doris Vyner, was killed over Burma on 2 May 1945. Flying in support of Allied landings to capture Rangoon, his plane crashed into the sea. The news reached his parents only on 12 May 1945, four days after VE Day.

  * The first volume of Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography.

  * The result of the post-war general election was announced on 26 July. The Conservatives, still led by Winston Churchill, were defeated, and Labour, pledged to create a welfare state, won by a majority of 146. The King wrote to Churchill, ‘how very sad I am that you are no longer my Prime Minister … I shall miss your counsel to me more than I can say.’ (Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI, p. 637)

  * The Duke of Windsor had been appointed Governor of the Bahamas in 1940. He made his first post-war visit back to Britain in October 1945. He stayed with Queen Mary, who was delighted to see her ‘dear eldest son’. She was relieved that he had not brought his wife with him. He saw the King, but not Queen Elizabeth. (Owen Morshead, Notes on conversation with Queen Mary, 18 February 1946, RA AEC/GG/12/OS/2)

  * Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone (1883–1981), the last surviving grandchild of Queen Victoria, was married to her second cousin once removed, Prince Alexander of Teck (created Earl of Athlone, 1917), the brother of Queen Mary. He was Governor General of South Africa, 1924–31, and in 1940 he succeeded Lord Tweedsmuir (John Buchan) as Governor General of Canada.