The seclusion of Birkhall was in strong contrast to the first part of her honeymoon which was spent at Broadlands, the Hampshire home of Earl Mountbatten, where she and Philip had little escape from a curious press and public; the crowds arriving on foot, by car and by motor coach, besieging Romsey Abbey, where they attended morning service on the first Sunday of their week’s stay. Those who couldn’t get inside climbed on tombstones, and propped ladders and chairs against the walls so as to peer through the windows. One family, it was reported, even carried their sideboard into the churchyard and stood on it to watch the couple at prayer. Others queued for a chance to sit in the pew occupied a short while earlier by Royalty.
The Princess in her letter told me that although she liked Broadlands, ‘we were terribly pestered by the Press, and, of course, our going to church at Romsey Abbey was a most vulgar and disgraceful affair’. However she was obviously content with the state of matrimony and in a postscript wrote: ‘I’m blissfully happy, in case you weren’t aware of the fact and I’m enjoying being married to the best and nicest man in the world.’
Birkhall is a very special place and the greatest fun of the whole year was my annual childhood visit to join Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. The garden descended steeply to the river Muick and sometimes we would picnic on an island in the river. I remember a rather sick-making contest to see how many slices of brown bread and golden syrup we could eat. My record was twelve slices and I always won with ease which is not really a matter to be proud of. Princess Elizabeth, just ten months younger than me, was a natural playmate. We endlessly cavorted as horses, which was her idea. We galloped round and round. We were horses of every kind: carthorses, racehorses, and circus horses. We spent a lot of time as circus horses and it was obligatory to neigh. Another game was called ‘catching happy days’. This involved catching the leaves falling from the trees. There was a gramophone and just one record, either ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ or ‘Jerusalem’. I can’t remember which, but we played it all the time. Princess Margaret used to keep me awake at night as I was given the next door bedroom. The walls were very thin and Margaret would sing ‘Old Macdonald Had a Farm’ which goes on and on with its refrain of animal noises. It was an incessant chant and I prayed that she would exhaust herself and fall asleep. We used our imaginations and were easily amused. How we passed our time must seem extraordinarily unreal to the present generation of computer game children, who only seem happy with much more sophisticated pursuits.
In childhood, the only time I can recall Princess Elizabeth pulling rank was when we squabbled over the ownership of a wooden seat outside the front door of Birkhall. Territorially she claimed it declaring: ‘I’m the biggest “P” for Princess’. I don’t know why, but my aunt had somehow acquired the nickname ‘Peter’, bestowed by my eldest sister, Elizabeth, and was regularly addressed as such by the close family. Queen Elizabeth and the King would always come up to the nursery, no matter how busy they were, to tuck up their daughters and kiss their children goodnight. The Queen was sheer magic with her children, as she was with the public, particularly during the Second World War air raids, when as a great unifying force, she was described by a patriotic media as ‘the Queen of the Blitz’.
Setting out for the coronation, 1953. I was pregnant with my second daughter, Victoria
I well remember the preparations for the coronation of the King and Queen in 1937. My cousins had specially designed dresses, robes and coronets. Princess Margaret was a couple of months short of eight, but I was not invited as I was thought to be too young. Everybody else seemed to be going, shaking the mothballs from their robes and ermine — probably rabbit in some cases — including my mother and father as a peer and peeress and also my brothers and sisters.
I was particularly put out because a girl I knew of my own age, who had a tiny drop of Royal blood, was attending in a lovely long dress. However on the morning of the great day I was taken to Buckingham Palace, kitted out in my best pink coat with a velvet collar, where I had breakfast with my cousins and was then taken along the corridor to see the King and Queen in their finery. The King was wearing a white shirt, breeches and stockings and a crimson satin coat and the Queen a wonderful be-sequined long dress. Then a Page came in and said it was time for the Princesses to go down to the Grand Entrance where their carriage was waiting. My only other memory of the coronation was looking out of a window of the palace and watching the procession of the Indian maharajahs and princes, their tunics, coats and turbans encrusted with diamonds worth a king’s ransom. They looked wonderfully grand and romantic. Even the horses pulling their carriages were clad in the most gorgeous tack and over seventy years on the memory of that fantastic procession remains vivid.
The 1937 coronation was the last enactment of British style pomp and circumstance before Europe was plunged into war. Princess Elizabeth recorded her day in a lined exercise book, neatly tied round with a piece of pink ribbon and with a touching dedication inscribed in red crayon on the cover. It read: ‘The Coronation, 12th May 1937, to Mummy and Papa, in memory of their coronation, from Lilibet by Herself. An Account of the Coronation.’ It is preserved in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle and its ingenuous freshness has lost nothing by the passing of the years, setting the scene in my view more effectively than the prose of official historians. I got a small mention on the last page.
I did make it to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, sixteen years later, as one of the privileged 8,000 that had been invited to the Abbey. We all received a list of do’s and don’ts from the Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, the choreographer of the occasion, including notes of what we should wear. I was pregnant with my second daughter, Victoria, but contrived to match up by wearing my wedding dress cunningly let out around the waist. My husband Denys of course came too in the full dress uniform of the Rifle Brigade. Throughout the ceremony we sat on stools stamped with the royal cypher, and were allowed to take them away as souvenirs. One is now, a touch lèse majesté, in the loo and the other in my bedroom. We had to get there hours before the action started and were rigidly enclosed. At the time I wondered about the predicament of the more elderly peers and peeresses when nature beset them.
In 1938 and 1939, despite the sabre-rattling coming from Berlin, my routine continued. In the last August of peace I was dispatched to Birkhall as usual to keep Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret company. The King and Queen must have been desperately worried, but they never imparted the deepening sense of crisis to us. I didn’t know it, but on 22 August Europe shuddered at the announcement of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact and then groaned in anguished apprehension for few doubted that this could but betoken war. The King and Queen at once returned to London.
The tide of war seemed inexorable and at dawn on 1 September, the Wehrmacht crossed the Polish frontier. The timing of the ultimatum sent to the German Chancellor, demanding he withdraw his troops or accept a declaration of war by Britain and France, had passed and so we were at war from eleven o’clock on the morning of Sunday 3 September. We three girls were in Crathie Kirk for the morning service at this time. The Minister, a small, spare man called Dr Lamb preached a highly emotional sermon and told his flock that the uneasy peace which had prevailed since the end of the First World War was now over. It seemed unreal, yet in a strange way it was exciting and it was impossible not to dream of adventure and derring-do. We were so utterly ignorant about the actual horrors of war.
Our routine continued. Every evening at six the King and Queen would telephone and speak to their daughters. We had a French governess, Georgina Guerin, who when the war got fully under way, would return to France and become a leading light in the Resistance. There was also one of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting, Lettice Bowlby, to keep an eye on us. Our two carers were not best of friends and behind her back Georgina called Lettice ‘la sale Bowlbee’. I was just fourteen, Princess Elizabeth thirteen and Princess Margaret was only nine. We were at war but nothing much was hap
pening. There was no sign of Panzer divisions or enemy parachutists. We did lessons of a sort; rode our ponies, went on picnics, all the usual things. Then the week before Christmas the Queen telephoned to say it was safe for the Princesses to go to Sandringham in Norfolk, even though it was close to one of the coast lines where a German invasion was considered most likely. I returned to Carberry for our family Christmas. I tried on my gas mask, just to be on the safe side, and awaited what was to come.
CHAPTER THREE
Wartime with the Windsors
The war made its impact on our daily lives at Carberry as it did for all families. My two brothers put on khaki and set off to join their regiments, John to the Black Watch and Andrew to the Cameron Highlanders. Occasionally there were air raids: to begin with we trailed down to the front hall, which as the most ancient part of the house had the thickest walls, and sat there shivering until the all-clear whined. But soon we gave even that up and remained comfortably tucked up in bed, listening to the thumping of the guns defending the Forth Bridge. Sometimes I was unable to resist the temptation to get dressed and wander solitary in the grounds watching the search lights weaving strange and beautiful patterns in the blackness of the night. Every so often a silver speck would be trapped, as if transfixed on the point of a spear and the guns would then thunder their defiance.
Once I was out seeking to shoot a rabbit or pigeon for the pot with my .22 rifle, when I heard an aeroplane coming; it was flying very low. I could easily see the Swastika on its wings, so I immediately fired my whole magazine of eight bullets at it, in the vain hope that I might just hit the petrol tank. Alas, it flew away unscathed, but I felt better for having made a tiny personal contribution to the war effort.
In those days I almost had Carberry to myself. My father was busy in Edinburgh and my mother had joined the Women’s Voluntary Service, now the WRVS. My eldest sister, Elizabeth, was a VAD in an Edinburgh hospital and very aware of the presence of God in her life. She came under the spell of an order of Anglican nuns of which she later became a lay member. My next sister, Jean, had enjoyed a rather wild coming-out season and was a born flirt. Even at the age of eighty she had lost none of her charm and attraction. When she was first grown up my parents allowed her to have a weekend party at our house Maryland only on the condition that she was strictly chaperoned throughout. A lady duly arrived from a wonderful organisation called Universal Aunts. Jean found her presence something of a hindrance to her idea of having fun. She solved it by telling the poor woman that all her young male guests, every man of them from the Household Cavalry, had been recalled to barracks and that therefore the weekend was cancelled.
The men drove off for half a mile, only to re-emerge when they safely knew that the chaperone’s taxi was out of sight. Jean married one of her clandestine guests and at the beginning of the war was living in Northamptonshire with her two small children. Her husband, John Wills, had been posted to the Middle East and was not to return until the war ended. Jean’s in-laws, Captain Benjy and Hilda Wills, had an estate called Applecross on the north-west coast of Scotland. It was a fisherman’s dream and the salmon often seemed to be lying in layers in the deeper pools. Jean used to invite me there and one day we took the family’s small yacht out to an island which had a row of deserted cottages. We anchored there to picnic and to our astonishment saw smoke rising from one of the cottage chimneys. Then a young kilted man approached, claiming to be a university student who needed complete solitude so as to write his thesis. He seemed perfectly genuine and we swallowed his story, even giving him what was left over from our provisions to help him replenish his scanty supplies. Sometime later we discovered that he and an accomplice were Nazi sympathisers reporting on Allied shipping movements. We had unwittingly aided and abetted a couple of enemy spies.
After my brothers had joined their regiments, my father, who was seventy in 1939, had been appointed Chairman of a board which adjudicated on the appeals of conscientious objectors. It was a difficult and unpleasant task, compounded on one distressing occasion by the appearance before him of William Douglas-Home, the son of the 13th Earl of Home, his oldest friend and best man at his wedding. Whatever the verdict, William subsequently became an officer in the Royal Armoured Corps and in 1944 refused on moral grounds to take part in an attack on Le Havre because the thousands of refugees packed into the town had not been evacuated. Over 5,000 of them were killed in the operation, but William was sentenced to a year’s hard labour, serving eight months for refusing to obey an order. Courage takes different forms. He later became a successful writer and dramatist. His oldest brother, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was Conservative Prime Minister between 1963 and 1964.
I remember my brother John coming home on embarkation leave, looking wonderful in uniform. He was in the Black Watch of which his aunt Queen Elizabeth was Colonel-in-Chief. John was particularly close to her, and when, in the early months of the war, she visited the regiment’s Perth depot she had a poignant encounter with him. She had never seen him in uniform before and wrote to Queen Mary: ‘It gave me such a shock to see John in his Black Watch uniform, for he suddenly looked exactly like my brother Fergus who was killed at Loos [in the First World War] and in the same regiment. It was uncanny in a way and desperately sad to feel that all that ghastly waste is starting again at the bidding of a lunatic.’
Prisoners of war: my brother John is in the back row, second from the left
Five years later, a strange, gaunt figure returned from Germany. We all met him in London and had a celebratory dinner at Buckingham Palace. John had been taken prisoner at St Valery, along with most of the 51st Highland Division at the time of Dunkirk. The 1st Battalion was cut off and forced to surrender near Abbeville after fierce fighting. Only nine men and one officer escaped. By 12 June all fighting had ceased. The officer prisoners were separated from their men, which caused my brother great concern. John, in a contingent of 2,500 prisoners, marched 220 miles in fourteen days from northern France to a railhead in Holland, subsisting on a bowl of soup a day, dandelions, marigolds and acorn coffee. They slept in their clothes, sometimes huddled together in open fields under driving rain. It was very cold at night and they stripped greatcoats from the bodies of dead soldiers by the roadside. The French people in the villages they passed smuggled them scraps of food and fruit, having heard by bush telegraph that les Anglais were passing through. In Holland boy scouts bought them cakes and honey. Their destination was Munich and Oflag VIIC. Thereafter John spent five and a half years in captivity. In the later stages of the war he was incarcerated in Colditz Castle, with a group of prisoners known as the ‘Prominente’, regarded by Hitler as being of special value because of their relationship to prominent Allied figures. The group included Giles Romilly, the nephew of Winston Churchill; Michael Alexander, a relative of Field Marshal Alexander; Viscount Lascelles, the King’s nephew; George Haig, the son of Earl Haig, the British First World War commander, and Charles Hopetoun, the eldest son of the Marquess of Linlithgow, the then Viceroy of India.
I have preserved John’s letters, always written in pencil on German-provided POW forms, from various Oflags. I have also kept his own typewritten detailed account of his final days as a prisoner. A mural John painted is still on the walls of Colditz Castle. The Nazis, faced with defeat, grabbed at any bargaining ace they could pull from their sleeves. My brother and his fellow ‘Prominente’ were one such bargaining ace, and he and the other members of the group were shuttled across Germany, from Colditz to Austria, in a bid by the German High Command to avoid their liberation by the rapidly advancing Allies.
John’s account is set out in full below. My brother described the atmosphere as ‘gangster-like’ and above anything, he dreaded falling into the hands of the more extreme factions of the SS. If that had happened, the ‘Prominente’ may not have survived. John’s state of mind was not improved when he discovered that Himmler, the head of the SS, was taking a personal interest in the operation. John’s account sets out the trial
s and tribulations and eventual liberation through the intervention of the Swiss ministers, reaching the American lines and freedom:
LAST DAYS OF CAPTIVITY
CHRONICLE OF SPECIAL PRISONERS FROM
OFLAG IVC
BY
THE MASTER OF ELPHINSTONE
For some months in Oflag IVC the Germans had been keeping under special surveillance the small group of officers and one civilian concerning whose further moves this account is written. Under roughly the same conditions was also a group of 13 Polish officers headed by General Bor and consisting of high staff officers captured after the battle of Warsaw. The German camp authorities refused to give explanation of this state of affairs other than by saying that the orders came from ‘the highest sources’.
The Final Curtsey Page 4
