by Anne Edwards
Alah’s under-nurse was Margaret MacDonald, a twenty-two-year-old Scotswoman whose father was a gardener and coachman at Crowarty, a small village in the Highlands. When the copper-haired Mrs. MacDonald (the “Mrs.” again being honorary) took over the nursery kitchen, her fourteen-year-old sister, Ruby, replaced her. These three women were to have an enormous influence on the molding of Elizabeth’s character. They comprised the whole of her world for the first eight months of her life, and they were entrusted further with her total care when plans were set for her parents to sail from Portsmouth in the battle cruiser Renown to begin a six-month Australian tour.
History was repeating itself. In 1901 Queen Mary and King George, then the Duke and Duchess of York, were dispatched on a colonial tour that separated them from their four young children (David, seven; Bertie, six; Mary, four; and Harry, one)* for eight months. David (who succeeded to the title Edward, Prince of Wales, after his father became King) had embarked on the same tour in 1920. Only seven years had passed, but a historic Australian event was about to take place. The capital had recently been transferred from Melbourne to Canberra. On May 9, 1927, the great doors of a new Parliament House would open for the first time, and the Australian Premier, Mr. Stanley Bruce, had requested a Royal emissary be present to perform the opening ceremony. Determined to force his reticent second son into a “more rigorous public life,” King George decided to send Bertie. When Bruce learned the news, he declared that he was “appalled at the prospect of the King’s representative [because of his painful stammer] being so gravely inhibited.”
More than a stutterer, Bertie suffered a kind of verbal paralysis when—mouth agape, as he tried to utter sound—he feared he could not speak at all. This did not often occur in natural conversation with his intimate family, nor, perversely, in explosions of temper. But reciting memorized text, reading aloud or introductions at formal social or court occasions were fraught with terror (often realized) that he would suddenly be struck dumb.
Nonetheless, King George expected each member of the Royal Family to carry his or her own weight. Upon his orders, Bertie worked daily for six months prior to the scheduled tour with Mr. Lionel Logue, a speech therapist, found for him by the Queen. Progress was made. Yet the prospect of a lengthy tour, filled with speech-giving and all the situations that triggered his affliction, caused Bertie much anxiety, while the Duchess dreaded the long separation it would require from Elizabeth. Queen Mary made it quite clear to her daughter-in-law that duty and self-sacrifice were the cost of being royal. And once the Yorks had sailed, on January 6, 1927, the Duchess not only became her husband’s major support but delivered most of his speeches for him.
On the morning of their departure, Alah brought Elizabeth into the parlor of 17 Bruton Street for a final good-bye. A crowd waited outside to cheer the Yorks on their way. The Duchess had a difficult time returning her baby to the nanny’s arms. When she did, tears brimmed her eyes and she was unable to walk away. Finally, Bertie, in Naval uniform, took her arm and led her to the front door. When they arrived at the railroad station to take the train to Portsmouth, “the car had to be driven around [the block] until she was composed enough to face the crowds.”
With Alah and Margaret and Ruby MacDonald, Elizabeth was first dispatched to St. Paul’s Walden Bury, the Strathmores’ home in Hertfordshire. The Duchess was the youngest girl in a family of ten children and her years at St. Paul’s Walden Bury had been boisterous and filled with “all the things that children could desire—dogs and tortoises, Persian kittens and ‘Bobs’ the Shetland pony, hay to make, chickens to feed, a garden, ... the attic of a tumbledown brew house to play truant in ... and on wet days, the books that are best read on the floor in front of the fire, and a wonderful chest full of period costumes and the wigs that went with the gorgeousness [to put on plays].” But that had been over two decades earlier. When Elizabeth arrived with her nursery staff, St. Paul’s Walden Bury more closely resembled the country home of an older, well-to-do couple gone elsewhere for the winter (which, indeed, was the case). Except for two chow dogs, most of the animals, including kittens, tortoises and pony, were gone. The Strathmores’ other grandchildren lived in Scotland, staff was short, rooms were closed off and the baronial corridors were dark and silent.
Alah’s brother, Harold Knight, farmed at St. Paul’s Walden Bury and occupied the small red-brick house that could be seen from the window of the upstairs nursery. Their father had also been a farmer in Hertfordshire and they had been brought up with “deep Christian principles.” Alah had come to the Strathmores in 1901 as a girl of seventeen, when their youngest child, David, was only one day old. She had spent the intervening twenty-five years in the steady employ of the family and had become extremely attached to them. In the same way St. Paul’s Walden Bury was her much loved and only home. But January 1927 was bitterly cold. Snow and wind whipped across Hertfordshire, making airings for the child in her care limited. As the harsh weather persisted into February, Alah and her helpers returned with Elizabeth to London where they were then installed in a hastily furnished nursery in Buckingham Palace.
“Our sweet little grandchild arrived here [Buckingham Palace] yesterday and came to see us after tea,” the King wrote in his diary on February 11, 1927. King George had been a demanding father and uncomfortable with his children once they reached school age, but unlike Queen Mary, he had enjoyed them as infants. He had even “bathed his babies in turn, weighed them, played with them [and] taken them for walks....” Over the months of his granddaughter’s visit, he made frequent references in his diary to “sweet little Lilibet [his name for her].” He loved to play childish games and, when Lilibet began to crawl, was seen by Archbishop Lang “shuffling on hands and knees along the floor while the little Princess [tugged at] his beard.”
The King—“a man who preferred continuity to variation, the familiar to the surprising, the accustomed to the unexpected”—faced no major foreign or domestic crisis during the months of Lilibet’s visit, and so he was able to relax and enjoy himself. His granddaughter reaped enormous benefit from this. In Australia, the Yorks were receiving “demonstrations of the most genuine enthusiasm and loyalty.” Photographs of Lilibet were taken and sent to her parents every week, and Alah wrote detailed letters describing every new accomplishment and amusing anecdote.
A strong disciplinarian, Alah did not believe in pampering a child. Nor did Queen Mary. The young Princess was well cared for but, despite the number of people looking after her, not coddled. Her schedule for eating, bathing and sleeping was strictly kept and she was allowed to cry rather than disrupt it.
“Here comes the bambino!” Queen Mary would exclaim when Alah carried her ward down to the Queen’s sitting room each day at tea-time. Unless her grandfather was present, no more than a few minutes were given to this routine visit and the child would be whisked back to the nursery. As the weather improved, she was taken out afternoons before tea, in a carriage up Constitution Hill and down Rotten Row, which borders Hyde Park. At the end of May, the nursery contingent moved back to St. Paul’s Walden Bury where Alah tried desperately, but unsuccessfully, to teach Lilibet to say “Mother,” or at least “Mama,” before her parents’ return. The little girl did very well with “Alah” and had renamed Mrs. MacDonald “Bobo.”
The Yorks were met on June 27, at Victoria Station, by the King and Queen, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. “For a few minutes the whole party gave themselves up to warm greetings,” a family member wrote. “Outside the station in the rain a great crowd had gathered to welcome them home.” The house at 145 Piccadilly had finally been made ready for occupancy and the original plan had been for the Yorks to be reunited there with Lilibet, but the Queen had changed this meeting to Buckingham Palace, where another great throng waited outside.
The Royal party disappeared within the Palace to loud cheers. Then came a wait of fifteen minutes while the Yorks visited with their daughter. Lilibet clu
ng desperately to Alah and cried loudly when delivered into her mother’s arms. By the time the Yorks stepped out onto the Palace balcony, she had quieted. After lunch and her nap, the reunited family drove to 145 Piccadilly, where a crowd had also congregated. This time they appeared on their own balcony (the Duchess with her cloche hat in place and still toting the chubby child), a Persian rug draped over the railing, to return the greetings of their admirers.
Number 145 Piccadilly was the only Royal residence without a name. The family referred to it as “1-4-5.” The tall, narrow, four-story white house, attached on either side to others like it, had nothing but a number and a balcony to distinguish it. Four doors away, at the western end of Piccadilly, the Rothschild mansion stood “in the firm and substantial grandeur of Portland stone.” But though 145 lacked the pretension of its neighbor, it did have a fair-sized rear lawn surrounded by shrubs that rimmed a high stucco wall. A few trees contributed shade, but apart from the very pleasant terrace, the landscape design lacked imagination. Gravel paths traced the perimeter of the lawn, the corners anchored by four green benches. Because the garden was overlooked by tall neighboring houses, there was no privacy, but a gate at the rear led to a small enclosed space known as Hamilton Gardens* and the near proximity of Hyde Park. St. George’s Hospital was almost immediately opposite and the lights that shone at night from that vast building meant the shades at 145 had to be drawn tightly. Inside, the fifteen-foot-high ceilings and the elaborate moldings and carved marble mantels imparted a most elegant look.
The decor, originally supervised by the Duchess, was an eclectic brew of flowered-chintz sofas, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dark wood tables and chests, Meissen china, bonzai plants, Persian rugs, and the Duke’s hunting collection (mounted deer heads, elephant and rhinoceros tusks, guns and paintings of the sport). Stone steps led to the front door, which was opened by a footman. One guest remembered being immediately invited “into the long, dim, and overfurnished” entrance hall. “There were enormous oil paintings in heavy gilt frames—one of them ... showing wild horses in motion and labelled: ‘Horses of the Duke of York, 1770.’ Two immense elephant tusks hung on the walls and there was a life-sized [painted] statue of a black boy, ... clothed in courtly style. An ornate clock ticked away the passing minutes on an elaborate chest of drawers, and on an ornamental table, the visitors’ book lay open.... At the end of the hall I could see an old-fashioned lift.” A circular, glass-roofed landing on the top floor led to the “sunny aloofness” of the nursery rooms: Princess Elizabeth’s day and night nursery, a kitchen, bath and Alah’s bedroom and small sitting room (the nurserymaid occupied a room in the basement).
Recalling a backstairs visit to 145 with her mother (a friend of Mrs. MacDonald’s) in 1927, Lisa Sheridan, later to become a Royal photographer, wrote, “As we went down the stone area steps, at the side of the house ... I glanced up to [the window above] the front door where a number of geraniums in pots could be seen through the lace-curtained windows of the [Yorks’] apartments. A trim house-maid in an afternoon frock opened the area door, and we found ourselves in a large semi-basement kitchen which spread across the entire base of the house. ‘Rather like the giant’s kitchen in a pantomime with its immense shiny copper pots and great fire-range,’ I remember thinking.
“There was a ‘doughy’ smell of baking, and a cook was taking little scones and buns from an enormous oven, and placing them neatly on racks on the white scrubbed central table.... [We were led] to Mrs. MacDonald’s private sitting-room which directly adjoined it. The room was a large circular one, on the basement level. It was not dark, for it had a dome-like opaque glass ceiling, which I presumed protruded on ground level at the back of the house. The room was comfortably furnished in Victorian style.”
After tea, Mrs. Sheridan and her mother were invited up to the day nursery, “a large room in the front of the house, with big airy windows.... Mrs. Knight [Alah] was knitting in an old-fashioned rocking chair beside the fire, around which the tiny nightclothes of the baby were airing on a clotheshorse. Under the window stood a large colourful rocking horse.
“The baby Princess [17 months old at the time] interrupted her crawling across the floor to sit back and stare at us with big blue eyes.... She commenced to crawl again, hindering her progress by clutching a substantial teddy-bear. Then, laboriously, she lifted herself to her feet with the aid of the leg of a chair. She took a few tottering steps before flopping down with an exasperated sigh.... I remember the miniature red slippers which were rubbed white at the toes with constant crawling. I remember, too that when the child tired of the bear she crawled over to a cupboard to get another toy. Apparently that was not allowed. For no sooner had she managed with some difficulty to pry open the cupboard door, than Mrs. Knight put down her work and went over to the child.
“‘One at a time,’ she said firmly, helping the child to put her teddy-bear in its correct place before she took a truck from the shelf....
“As we left ... in answer to Mrs. Knight’s command, the baby offered us a diminutive hand in farewell.”
Lady Cythnia Asquith recalled visiting the Duchess of York at 145 about the same time. “Princess Elizabeth ... tottered into the drawing room and was graciously pleased to be amiable. Having relieved me of my handbag, she displayed a precocious sense of the proper use of all its contents; spectacles promptly perched on tiny nose; pennies pocketed; the mirror opened and powder deftly applied.”
The popularity of the Yorks was magnified by the popular belief that their marriage had been a love match and had marked the emancipation of the Royal Family from a tradition of political and dynastic alliances. The Royal Family was—and remains—a representative family of the Commonwealth. A family without children can scarcely be representative, and although the King already had two grandchildren, the sons of the Princess Royal were regarded “as belonging less to the Royal Family proper than to the noble house [the Lascelles] into which she had married.” The appearance of a second generation in the male line was, on the other hand, a guarantee of continuing the line of succession.
Perhaps for this reason, so many more photographs proliferated of Lilibet than of her cousins; and although several years their junior, she was expected more often to be on display at such Royal occasions as “the seemingly endless ceremony of the trooping of the colours.” By the age of three she had been taught by Alah at the Queen’s request to stand still for long periods of time (“Teach that child not to fidget” was one of Queen Mary’s most repeated commands, and to this end pockets were sewn up on all her dresses), to answer a salute, to wave with a slightly stiff white-gloved hand from a balcony or open car, pose politely for photographers and to control her bladder for hours on end. (This last was achieved in infancy, on a reward basis: if Lilibet contained herself for the length of an outing she received a biscuit on her return.)
Her cousins regarded their grandfather with awe and found him quick to fault them. Lilibet did not, perhaps because he treated her in a gender, more fun-loving manner. King George had always had a greater fondness for small girls than for boys. His daughter, Princess Mary, had been the recipient in childhood and into her youth of the seldom revealed affectionate side of his nature. Now Lilibet was the object of his fondest attention. At the time of her birth, the Duke of York had intuitively written his father: “May I say I hope you won’t spoil her when she gets a bit older.” The King obviously could not help himself. Lilibet endeared herself to him during the months of her parents’ absence. The next year he enjoyed having her close by whenever possible. He ordered toys (he had a fondness for finely molded and well-detailed miniature horses on wheels often modeled from horses in the Royal stables) and played with her in the rooms and gardens of Buck House (the family name for Buckingham Palace), Sandringham, Windsor and Balmoral. In return, Lilibet was entirely relaxed and natural in his company.
On November 21, 1928, he took critically ill with acute septicemia, the infection being centered at the base o
f his right lung. The Prince of Wales was on a tour of East Africa. Stanley Baldwin sent several urgent cables to him in Tanganyika where he and a Royal party were hunting rhinos, buffalos and lions with Denys Finch-Hatton.
The Prince of Wales’s relations with his father had never been good.* Whatever his oldest son did seemed to displease the King and they had never been able to talk intimately. A final, urgent message arrived from Baldwin begging the Prince to return to England at once, that his father was dying.
“I don’t believe a word of it,” he told Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, his Private Secretary and a first cousin to the Prince’s brother-in-law, Viscount Lascelles. “It’s just some election dodge of old Baldwin’s. [The Prime Minister, in office from 1923, was sixty at the time.] It doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Sir,” Lascelles angrily replied, “the King of England is dying, and if that means nothing to you, it means a great deal to us [the royal party].” That night Lascelles commented in his diary, “He looked at me, went out without a word, and spent the remainder of the evening in the successful seduction of a Mrs. Barnes, wife of the local Commissioner. He told me so the next morning.”
Lascelles probably knew the Prince of Wales as well as any man did. They shared not only family connections but a great love for horses. Regarding his future King, who was seven years his junior, as a sort of idol, the aristocratic, “always immaculately turned out” Lascelles had joined his staff in 1920, and quickly became the Prince’s speech-writer and press liaison officer. Six feet one and towering over the Prince’s short frame, the sharp-featured, spare, erect man for eight years had been almost constantly by David’s side. He had traveled twice across Canada with him, “camped and tramped with him through Central Africa” and confessed to intimates that he had seen “him sober, and often as near drunk as doesn’t matter.”
