The Queen’s House

by Edna Healey

  exterior without alteration, removing Pennethorne’s defacements and restoring the original work of Nash. Pennethorne introduced height by raising the roof but instead of doing this the nave floor has been lowered so as not to interfere with the roof line as originally designed.

  It is understood that the King and Queen desire to sit in the nave and the suggested approach is from the ground floor ante-room down a flight of 12 steps, positioned immediately below those which originally served the Royal Gallery.

  The suggested plan was based upon the adoption of nave and side aisles, enabling arcading to be introduced to support the semi-circular or barrel ceiling of the nave. This ceiling treatment is continuous from the gallery to the altar. Solid fillings to the windows on both sides of the Chapel would be removed and glazing provided as a means of natural lighting; roof or clerestory lights are dispensed with. The solid wall behind the altar is retained.

  This plan too was rejected, as was a scheme to build a cinema under the Chapel. This would not be possible, it was said, ‘without producing a structure incompatible with the existing elevation of the Palace, unless the present Chapel is pulled down and rebuilt. The estimated cost of this would be £50,000.’79

  In 1945 this was obviously an indefensible expense. The memory of the devastated cathedral the King had seen at Coventry kept the loss of this little-used Chapel in perspective.

  The greater problem was the installation of central heating. In 1945 the cost was estimated at £50,000, but it was argued that its installation would effect great economies. The work could be finished in twelve to eighteen months if the Palace were unoccupied, but otherwise, if the work had to be phased, it could be done in four sections so that three-quarters of the ‘Palace would be habitable during the whole period of work’. Although this would take three and a half years, the King needed to use the Palace; it was to be his headquarters during the trials of peace as it had been in war – conferences, audiences and investitures were to be held there during the post-war period. But these were years of considerable discomfort in the Palace.

  In the bitter February of 1947 a cri decïur from the Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, Sir John Monck, was sent to Sir Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse. He made a plea for central heating in his offices, where the temperature remains in the low fifties in cold weather, ‘a very cheerless welcome to give all the new Ambassadors’, who ‘mostly come from centrally-heated hotels such as Claridges, the Ritz, the Dorchester etc. and it is not very dignified, after they have experienced the cold entrance passage, to ask them to keep on their overcoats as the temperature is much lower than anything to which they are accustomed’.80 Sir Ulick Alexander promised that in August 1947 work would begin on the installation of central heating ‘as part of the overall modernisation of the Palace’.81

  So many different projects and costings were envisaged that it is difficult to ascertain exactly what the work at the Palace finally cost. But the news of armies of workmen there set the Parliamentary watch-dogs barking. When thousands were homeless few tears were shed for the chilly ambassadors. And at this period there was the strictest control of building materials.

  In Parliament on 31 March 1947 Mr Ernest Davies

  asked the Minister of Works the nature of the works now being undertaken at Buckingham Palace, the cost thereof, and the numbers employed thereon.

  Mr. Key [replied]: The special work now in hand at Buckingham Palace includes bomb damage repairs, excavation work for a new boiler house and mains in connection with the modernisation of the heating system, and the improvement of the servants’ quarters in the attics. There is also some work in connection with redecoration of certain rooms and the re-wiring of part of the State rooms. The total cost of this work is about £54,300, of which about half is on bomb damage repairs. The number of men employed is 178. I am satisfied that this work is necessary. The general programme for modernising engineering services in the Palace will be spread over many years, but the opportunity has been taken of the absence of the Royal Family in South Africa to carry out certain noisy and dirty work connected with the installation of new boilers which will be oil fired.82

  The King’s planned tour of South Africa in February, taking the Queen and Princesses with him, was a relief to his staff, who were anxious to begin the work: and the ministers and Household, concerned about the King’s health, hoped that the sea trip would revive him.

  Queen Mary had noticed how desperately tired the King was at the family gathering at Sandringham over the New Year in 1946–7. The constant stress of the war years had taken their toll of a man who had never been strong. In the seven years ahead, until his death in 1952, he was to face fundamental changes and crises at home and abroad. Like George III he had a deep sense of his royal responsibilities, and like him he insisted on being involved in every major and most minor decisions. He did not have George Ill’s wide cultural and scientific interests, but he carried a similar burden. George III had to face the loss of America; King George VI had to accept the transformation of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations, with the granting of independence to India and the separation of Eire from the Commonwealth.

  The problem of India had weighed heavily on the King. He had been shocked when in July 1942 Churchill told him that his colleagues ‘and all three parties were quite prepared to give up India to the Indians after the war’.83 When Attlee came to power, determined to give India her independence, the King studied the complex problems of the Hindu and Muslim communities, followed closely the progress of the talks held at the London Conference of December 1946, and worried. He invited the leaders of the Muslim and Hindu communities to luncheon at Buckingham Palace and, after sitting between the silent Indian leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, reflected gloomily that they would never agree.

  The appointment of his cousin, Lord Mountbatten, as Viceroy of India did much to change the King’s attitude. Attlee’s choice was a brilliant stroke. Mountbatten was sympathetic to the Labour government, but, at the same time, was in his devotion to royalty more royal than the royals. His charm, energy and ruthless drive, combined with Attlee’s determined idealism, were to bring about the change at a remarkable speed. Appointed on 20 February 1947, he left for India in March; meanwhile the King himself had left for South Africa on 1 February, on a tour which, he hoped, would strengthen the ties with that country and keep it in the Commonwealth.

  If the Household had hoped the sea voyage would take his mind off his worries they were mistaken. In fact, he followed closely all that was happening at home, consumed with guilt that he was not there to share the misery of frozen England as he had been during the war. Britain was suffering the worst winter on record: fuel stocks were low, transport was bogged down and the whole country was encased in a glittering coat of ice.

  There was another change ahead that he dreaded. He now had to accept that Princess Elizabeth had made up her mind to marry Prince Philip. However, to delay the moment of separation, he insisted that she should wait until her twenty-first birthday and that she should go with them on the South African tour.

  Her birthday was to be during the tour and the night before they left, Lady Airlie led a deputation to present the Household’s birthday present – a silver inkstand. One member from each grade of the Household stood outside the Princess’s room in the Palace. Lady Airlie spoke for them all, adding that she ‘had played as a child with her grandmother Queen Mary, seen her mother learning her first dancing steps in the nursery at Glamis, and had watched herself grow up from babyhood’.84 This continuity of service has always been deeply important to Queen Elizabeth II.

  Their tour gave Princess Elizabeth an understanding of the vast continent and its problems that would be invaluable to her when she became Queen. It was in South Africa that, on 21 April 1947, she celebrated her coming of age with a moving speech of dedication.

  I should like to make that dedication now. It is very simple. I declare before you all that my
whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Commonwealth to which we all belong. But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do; I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God bless all of you who share it.’85

  The King returned from South Africa desperately tired and alarmingly thin. In fact, he had lost seventeen pounds during the tour. Standing in line with the other members of the Household in the Grand Hall of the Palace to welcome home the royal family, Marion Crawford was shocked to see how ill and tired they all appeared.

  It was the beginning of a gradual deterioration in the King’s health. However, he could not rest. Attlee and Mountbatten were pressing ahead with their plans for Indian independence. On 10 July 1947 Attlee introduced the Indian Independence Bill in the House of Commons without opposition. It became law on 18 July. None of us who saw Attlee’s unaccustomed emotion that July day could fail to be moved. He had realized an ideal. Attlee’s determination, and Mountbatten’s drive and royal magic, had succeeded.

  On 15 August, Lord Mountbatten became Governor General of the Dominion of India, and Jinnah of the Dominion of Pakistan. It was with great sadness that the King ceased to sign himself ‘GRI’. On 18 August 1947 Queen Mary received a letter from him. On the back of the envelope she wrote, ‘The first time Bertie wrote me a letter with the I for Emperor left out, very sad.’86 For Queen Mary, more than any other member of the royal family, India had been, indeed, the ‘Jewel in the Crown’.

  The King accepted the inevitable with good grace, just as he did on 10 July 1947 when he announced the engagement of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Lady Airlie watched them both at the Buckingham Palace garden party in July. Elizabeth was

  flushed and radiant with happiness and I was again reminded of Queen Victoria. Although the Queen had been old, fat and plain when I had seen her and this girl was young, pretty and slim, she had the same air of majesty. Even Queen Mary was not as regal as the 21 year old Princess.87

  Queen Mary herself saw in Princess Elizabeth ‘something very steadfast and determined … like her father. She won’t give her heart lightly, but when she does it will be for always.’88

  In July there had been little ease for the King. In that month a new economic crisis made further stringent measures necessary. During his summer break at Balmoral he worried about the world. And he worried that Attlee did not appear to worry. ‘I do wish one could see a glimmer of a bright light anywhere in world affairs,’ he wrote to Queen Mary. ‘Never in the history of mankind have things looked gloomier than they do now and one feels powerless to help.’89 In fact, the King was ‘burned out’, and unlike his Prime Minister he could not look forward to the respite of a possible period of opposition.

  That autumn the Palace was not a restful place. It was still the King’s headquarters, where he received Attlee for their silent Tuesday sessions. But workmen were still hammering, rushing to complete the repairs to the State Rooms in time for the wedding on 20 November.

  Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would have been perfectly happy with a simple wedding, but it was decided to make this marriage an occasion for national celebration. The royal wedding was to take place in the sanctified setting of Westminster Abbey and it was hoped that the unpleasant affair of King Edward VIII would be forgotten.

  Attlee, however, was strongly criticized by some members of his left wing for extravagance in a time of economic crisis, especially since the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, was to bring in a stringent emergency budget. Not all critics were silenced by the statement that the King would bear most of the cost out of his Civil List allowance. Most members of the Labour Party were content, however, knowing that the country needed a chance to cheer.

  Settling the income of the royal couple was a more difficult problem. By tradition the heir to the throne could expect an increase in his or her Civil List allowance on marriage. Sir Alan Lascelles and Sir Ulick Alexander, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, asked for an increase of £35,000 – bringing Princess Elizabeth’s annuity to £50,000. Dalton rejected this proposal. It would be unacceptable when the nation was being asked to tighten its belts. However, in the middle of the negotiations, Dalton resigned. He had accidentally let slip some part of his budget to a journalist just before his speech to the Commons. There was great relief at the Palace, where Dalton was very unpopular. His successor, Stafford Cripps, recommended that Princess Elizabeth should have an annuity of £50,000, with £10,000 for Prince Philip. The King was to provide £100,000 from his own savings from the Civil List. The annuity was approved by the Cabinet – even Aneurin Bevan remarked that ‘so long as Britain had a monarchy we ought never to lower [its] standards’.90

  The marriage became a rare chance to celebrate. ‘London was grey, life was grey,’ Princess Elizabeth’s Private Secretary, John Colville, wrote. It was an ‘event which with nationwide rejoicing, splendid decorations and the re-emergence of State Carriages and the House-hold Cavalry in full-dress uniform, helped to lift the encircling gloom’.91

  Queen Mary, for all her frugality, firmly believed that majesty should shine on such occasions, and delighted in the ‘magnificent evening party’92 held at Buckingham Palace before the wedding, for which sparkling tiaras and orders emerged from long years of storage. To Lady Airlie it seemed

  after the years of austerity like a scene out of a fairy tale … Old friends scattered far and wide by the war were reunited … most of us were sadly shabby – anyone fortunate enough to have a new dress drew all eyes – but all the famous diamonds came out again, even though most of them had not been cleaned since 1939. Queen Mary looked supremely happy … For the first time in many years I saw the old radiance in her smile. When Winston Churchill went up to greet her she held out both hands to him, a thing I had never known her to do before … Philip had won … her liking and her approbation. When someone complained to her that he had been at a ‘crank school where boys were taught to mix with all and sundry and that it remained to be seen whether the objects of this training would be useful or baneful to the King’s son-in-law,’ she had replied decisively ‘useful’.93

  John Colville remembered:

  The guests were as various as half a dozen foreign Kings and Queens on one hand and Beatrice Lillie and Noël Coward on the other. An Indian Rajah got uncontrollably drunk and assaulted the Duke of Devonshire (who was sober) … Queen Mary, scintillating as ever in a huge display of jewellery without giving the least impression of vulgarity or ostentation, was somewhat taken aback when Field Marshal Smuts said to her, ‘You are the big potato; the other Queens are small potatoes.’94

  Food at this time was still rationed, so the menu at this party and for the wedding breakfast was simple. In fact the Palace had been ‘overwhelmed by food parcels from all over the world. Hundreds of tons of tinned food of every variety arrived, given by British communities abroad.’95 The official solution, to hand it over to the Ministry of Food, was rejected by Princess Elizabeth as being too ‘unimaginative’. At Colville’s suggestion Lady Reading brought in her WVS volunteers after the wedding and took over the Palace kitchens during the royal family’s Balmoral holiday.

  By the end of September 1948 thousands of beautifully packed and well assorted food parcels had been despatched to widows and old age pensioners throughout the Kingdom, each containing a message from Princess Elizabeth personally. These were sent by the Post Office free of charge.96

  As John Colville remembered, it was a hectic time for all the House-hold. Presents arrived from all over the world to be unpacked and put on display at St James’s Palace. There were jewels and ‘hundreds of beautiful handkerchiefs, linen, lace and lawn. Hundreds of pairs of nylon stockings … gifts of silk and muslin and brocades that came from distant parts of the Empire.’97 Gandhi sent a tray cloth, woven by himself, which some humourist said was a loin cloth. Queen Mary was deeply shocked.

  On hi
s marriage Prince Philip was made Duke of Edinburgh. The night before the wedding, while he enjoyed his stag night with his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, the Princesses were practising a new descant to be sung in the Abbey the next day. Marion Crawford heard ‘the most awful sounds coming from the old music room. They were all trying to sing Crimond’s setting of the old Scottish paraphrase of “The Lord is my Shepherd” … [and] they could not get the descant right.’98 That descant, as John Colville recorded, had been taught to the Princesses on the moors at Balmoral by one of Princess Elizabeth’s Ladies-in-Waiting, Lady Margaret Egerton, ‘endowed with a beautiful voice. She had been wont to sing a metrical psalm “The Lord is My Shepherd” (Crimond) in the heather at Balmoral and had taught the Princesses a little known descant.’*

  Nobody could find the score of the descant. Lady Margaret tunefully accompanied the two Princesses, and sang it to the Organist and Precentor of Westminster Abbey who took the notes down in musical shorthand and taught it to the Abbey Choir. On the wedding day nobody was more surprised than the composer of the descant who, far away in Stirling, listened to the service on his radio. Since then both the metrical psalm to the tune Crimond and the descant have been consistently popular in churches throughout the British Isles and the Commonwealth.99

  On the morning of the wedding Marion Crawford went early to Princess Elizabeth’s room and found her in her dressing gown watching the crowds outside the Palace. Crawfie was justly proud of Princess Elizabeth that day. She had, for sixteen years, through war and tragedies, given her love and total loyalty. As she later said to the Queen, she felt that ‘she too was losing a daughter’.100 She had not the elegance of style of Fanny Burney but, like her, brought humanity and immediacy to her description of the great occasion. If her usual common sense was on this day touched with sentiment, it can be forgiven. ‘I could not help remembering’, she wrote, ‘that small golden-headed little girl I had first seen sixteen years ago, sitting up in bed, the cord of her dressing gown tied to the bed posts, driving her imaginary team round the Park.’101