by Anne Edwards
Peter liked to sit on the high cliffs near their home, the sea below, “watching there, [marveling] at the seagulls gliding effortlessly on the invisible air currents.... I longed to be a bird. One day ... a small aeroplane appeared in the Cornish sky, the first I had ever seen. I envied the birds, but infinitely more I envied the man in that flying machine.”
At seven he was sent to Haileybury, a school which he attended for the next decade. He recalled the then Duke and Duchess of York (King George and Queen Elizabeth) coming to dedicate a new dining room at the school. The Duke was dressed in Naval uniform and Peter, who sat in the front row, felt very keen on the idea of someday donning the same uniform. Before long, speed became his fascination. He won cups for swimming races and was ajunior diving champion. “I needed an additional impetus to get me going,” he claimed, “[like] the crack of the starter’s pistol ... it cut through my taut nerves and torpedoed me into the water.”
While he attended boarding school at Haileybury, his passion for flying was sealed when his father took him to an air meeting at Bournemouth, “a kind of aerial Derby Day.” He stood fascinated, watching at the edge of the paddock-like enclosure, “where the shining little thoroughbreds, all biplanes, waited to taxi to the start.”
Planes and flight now became his obsession. At school his house-master, who had been gassed in World War I, took a special interest in him and, with the boy’s father’s permission, drove him to a nearby RAF base where he had arranged for Peter, now fourteen, to ride in a plane.
“I soared off the ground for the first time,” he reflected. “Standing in the back cockpit of the Bristol Fighter—a World War I biplane—I watched the green grass and the golden fields of corn slipping away below, until we rose to a height were we seemed to be poised motionless ... [it took] my heart away.” That flight decided him. He would become a pilot.
He thought of himself as an adventurer of sorts and “no intellectual,” but he was a brilliant student, attaining high scores in math (which he loathed). He enjoyed writing “and worshipped Shakespeare, though I had a perverse preference for the earthy Geoffrey Chaucer.” He graduated Haileybury as one of a dozen of the elite Elysium, the club of the most intellectually gifted students in the school and passed fourth (out of 220) in the written exam for RAF College, gaining a cadetship which spared his father the fees. It was September 1933. The Royal Air Force was just fifteen years old, three years younger than its newest fledgling pilot.
His father died before he received his commission, “written in bold italics on stout linen parchment” and signed by King George V. Townsend was twenty and posted first to a fighter squadron in England, then to 36 Squadron Singapore. During the next four years he honed his craft. “Two things were happening. We [the RAF] were drifting inexorably towards a conflict and, at the same time, perfecting ourselves as aerial killers. We were on the war-path and by mid-March 1939 ... we were David against Goliath, refusing to acknowledge the Luftwaffe’s enormous superiority in weight and numbers.”
When the war began, Townsend was back in England stationed at Acklington, “a bleak windswept terrain near Newcastle.” His squadron’s role was to protect coastal convoys and they patrolled above them “from dawn to dusk, in fair weather and foul, the sea was our dread. Our single Merlin engine kept us flying; if it stopped we would inevitably fall into the drink where with nothing but our kapok-filled Mae Wests to keep us afloat, we stood less chance than the mariners below.”
His squadron was credited with downing the first German bomber on English soil since World War I. He had never before killed anyone; and as he climbed out of the cockpit, a member of the ground crew heard him say, “Poor devils, I don’t think they’re all dead.” Remorse impelled him to visit the survivors in hospital. “One of them, Karl Missy, the rear gunner, had tried to kill me; he was prevented when the bullets from my guns sawed through his leg and felled him. Despite the harm I had done him, he clasped my hand, but in his steady brown eyes, was the reproachful look of a wounded animal.”
Townsend would have conflicting emotions about his job as a fighter pilot which called for him to kill in cold blood. “I never had the slightest wish to kill anybody, least of all young people like myself with the same passion for flying. It was not them but their bomber invading our sky ... we had to win ... we could not lose. I think it had something to do with England. Miles up in the sky, we fighter pilots could see more of England than any other of England’s defenders had ever seen before. Beneath us stretched our beloved country, with its green hills and valley, lush pasture and villages, clustering round an ancient church. Yes, it was a help to have England there below.”
Twenty consecutive months of day and night operations finally took their toll. Unable to sleep, his nerves shattered (he had at this point flown three hundred missions), he was grounded by the doctors, who put him on barbiturates. Brigadier Hanbury Pawle and his wife lived near the base, and Townsend promptly fell in love with their daughter, Rosemary, an attractive, dark-haired girl with flashing hazel eyes and a lust for life. They met in May and married in July in a thirteenth-century church in neighboring Much Hadham; a guard of honor formed by the men of his squadron was on hand to line the way as the bride and groom came out. “I hope this doesn’t mean,” smiled the bridegroom, eyeing the turnout, “that the planes are being neglected.”
Nine months later their first son, Giles, was born. “There was more to it than just becoming a father,” Townsend confessed. “I had been living in an environment of death and, with my own hands, destroying life. I now found, before my eyes, a life that I had actually created. It was a welcome compensation, if only a symbolic one, for the lives I had taken.”
Townsend also needed the stability that marriage and a family implied, the reminder that he had loved ones to return to should he survive the war. Rosemary saw marriage to the young, brilliant, much-decorated airman as her ticket to a more rewarding future than the middle-class life in which she had been raised.
When Townsend had reported to the Chief of the Air Staff at Whitehall, where he was asked to join the King’s staff as Equerry, Rosemary had been waiting on the street below. “In the taxi,” Townsend recalled, “I told her what had happened and she threw her arms around me and exclaimed rather indecently I thought, ‘We’re made!’” Townsend had accepted his new job in the same spirit as he had every RAF reassignment. What he did was done for King and Country. He had not flown with the idea of becoming a hero (he has, in fact, published a wartime memoir in which he does not mention the many awards for valor conferred upon him); and he did not think about his new Palace affiliation in terms of its social or career potential.
He met Lilibet and Margaret his first day at Buckingham Palace. They had come up from Windsor on one of their infrequent visits. A violent, black storm raged outside and they were both rather restless. As Townsend came out of the green-carpeted Regency Room where he had just finished his audience with the King, they were passing in the corridor. “Our meeting might have been a coincidence,” he mused, “but thinking back, I would not have put it beyond the King to have buzzed them on the interphone and told them, ‘If you want to see him, he’s just left my study.’ [The sisters] in those dangerous days lived such a sequestered life at Windsor Castle; the faintest curiosity, like myself, could brighten it.” Indeed, the King had alerted his daughters, who had desperately wanted to get a glimpse of one of England’s most decorated heroes.
His initial reaction to the girls was that Lilibet “had not yet attained the full allure of an adult. She was shy, occasionally to the point of gaucheness.... Her younger sister was as unremarkable as one would expect of a 14 year old girl” except that her eyes were the dark blue “of a deep tropical sea”; and when she came out with some shattering wisecrack, “to her unconcealed delight, all eyes were upon her.”
Within a matter of weeks, Townsend was accepted with a certain intimacy into the closed circle of courtiers who surrounded the Royal Family. The King admired
his flying ability and found himself at great ease with the airman because of his understanding of his speech problem. For almost his entire life, Townsend had patiently dealt with his brother Philip’s painful stammer. The experience had taught him how to set the pace in conversation and how to help the stammerer circumvent those words or letters that caused the most difficulty. The Queen appreciated this ability and her immediate reaction to him was one of warmth.
On April 24, 1944, Lilibet celebrated her eighteenth birthday. Though her majority would not be realized until she was twenty-one, this event did raise new issues. Pressures were placed on the King to bestow upon her the title of Princess of Wales, a move to which he was firmly averse. “How could I create Lilibet the Princess of Wales,” he wrote to Queen Mary, “when it is the recognized title of the wife of the Prince of Wales [who would have been the oldest son of the King had there been one]?”
In his diary entry written at Windsor that day he wrote: “The Changing of the Guard took place in the quadrangle and we made it an occasion for her birthday. The Lt. Colonel, Col. J. Prescott, handed her the Colonel’s Standard, which will be used on her future inspections.... We gave a family lunch to which Mama came. It was a lovely hot day. L. can now act as Counsellor of State.” (On Queen Mary’s return to Badminton after this luncheon, she told Lady Airlie, “I was struck by how very much Lilibet resembles paintings of Queen Victoria at the age of eighteen.”)
Daily life at Windsor must have seemed stultifying to Lilibet, who now had experienced a small taste of heady excitement in her meetings, with Philip at Coppins. A Lady-in-Waiting had been added to her staff to help with her correspondence, the young wife of a Grenadier Guard who traveled to and from the Castle on a bicycle, wearing a scarf on her head when hats were de rigueur. The Queen took a dim view of this, but the choice had been made with the hope that Lilibet might enjoy the company of someone near in age. However, they had little in common.
Townsend had been entirely right when he judged Lilibet to be young for her years. She did have a serious nature and the singularity of her position, her Royal isolation, and the age difference between herself and Margaret gave her a mature, if somewhat superficial outlook. She knew little of the relationship between men and women. Her romance with Philip had been extremely discreet. According to one of Philip’s confidants, it had not gone past the titillation of “compliments, innuendos and pressured hand-clasps.”
King George further attempted to divert Lilibet by inviting to Windsor a succession of young men without Philip’s inbuilt disadvantages—his position as a foreigner and a Greek (“such an unsettled house”), his sisters’ German husbands, his mother’s religious obsessions and last, but certainly not least, the many enemies of his mentor, Mountbatten. For despite his spectacular war record, both Winston Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook disliked him. And “within the court he was seen as not merely vain and politically suspect with that left-wing wife of his [Edwina] but as overwhelmingly ambitious. Queen Elizabeth mistrusted him ... and the more she learned of his attempts to promote her daughter’s marriage, the more it appeared as one more attempt by the Mountbattens to move in on the monarchy.”
Windsor’s weekend guest lists now included Etonians from the Brigade of Guards, attractive young men like Lord Euston and the Duke of Rutland, both with Royal connections that placed them on the possible-suitors list. The danger of bombing had temporarily ceased and the King instituted a small fortnightly dance during the week in the Bow Room on the ground floor of Buck House. The sisters came up from Windsor and young officers from the Guards and other regiments were invited. Lady Pamela and Lady Patricia Mountbatten might be included, along with other young friends. The King and Queen, both very good dancers, always joined the party.
“I remember one evening seeing the King lead a conga line, followed by the Queen, Princess Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, their partners and their guests,” one Palace celebrant recalled. “The King, in a dinner-jacket and black tie, was thoroughly enjoying himself, laughing aloud as he led his guests this way and that way through the maze of corridors of the Palace. For some time the dance-band was playing to a completely empty room, but they continued [with the music] until eventually the line of dancers returned with the King, a little out of breath, leading them back to the room.” But his elder daughter was more restrained.
Whether Philip’s friendship had or had not been the result of a calculated plot, Lilibet was head over heels in love with him and seemed determined that nothing come between them. And while Lilibet dreamed romantically about Philip, his cousin Alexandra claimed, “The fascination of Philip had spread rather like influenza, I knew, through a whole string of girls.” In May 1944 he had suffered a virus attack and she recounted how she sat by his bedside “in a suite in Claridges which belonged to a family who had lodged him there while he recovered.... I ... reproached him for not seeing enough of Mummy and myself, while he cheerfully plucked the grapes somebody else had given him and ejected the pips at me with blithe, naval accuracy.”
The King could not have helped but compare Philip’s seeming libertine characteristics with the worthy qualities of his temporary equerry, who, his term expired, had been asked to remain. The war had been brought close to home. George Lascelles, with the 3rd Battalion of the Grenadiers in Italy, had been seriously wounded and taken prisoner on June 18. The full extent of his condition or his whereabouts were not learned for three months. Soon after he was released from hospital he was moved to Colditz, known as a punishment camp. His offense was to have Royal connections. In a sense he was a hostage along with a small group of prisoners from illustrious families: the Queen’s nephew, John Elphinstone, and two of Churchill’s relatives—his nephew Giles Romilly and a distant cousin, Max de Hamel.
This family crisis brought the war home and when Lilibet asked if she could join the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the King reversed an earlier decision, made for security reasons, that she not enter into any of the women’s services, or any other form of war services. By giving in to this wish, her parents hoped she would be too occupied to give undue time to her thoughts of Philip. An announcement was released that “the King has granted to Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth, a commission with the honorary rank of second subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. Her Royal Highness is at present undergoing a course at a driving training centre in the south of England at the Princess’s own request.”
This had been something that Lilibet had wanted and previously been denied. She badly needed to feel a part of the war effort. Her voluminous correspondence had made her aware of what other young women her age were doing. She had chosen the driving training center because cars fascinated her (and Philip), and it was close to Windsor.
Lilibet’s work with the ATS did not require her to live away from Windsor. The depot, a short drive, was located at Camberly; and every morning Commandant Wellesley, a most efficient woman with a long, striding gait and a weathered complexion, collected her Royal charge at the Castle. Lilibet had great pride in the uniform she wore and made sure that everything was correct so that she would pass inspection. (“Margaret was much too young to join up,” Crawfie recalled, “and as usual she was very cross at seeing Lilibet do something without her. But when she saw how very unbecoming khaki was, I think it made her feel much better.”)
Apart from returning home to Windsor every evening at 7:00 P.M., Lilibet kept strictly to the routine, taking her turn on vehicle maintenance, inspections and as duty officer. She had to learn the complete mechanical working of cars, which involved hard, greasy, physical labor. The Commandant found her “neat and efficient.” Within three months she was driving a big Red Cross van. (“Margaret’s envy ... burst out again,” Crawfie wrote. “She was resentful at having to spend her day in the schoolroom with all those exciting things going on elsewhere.”)
One day, Margaret stormed angrily: “I was born too late!”
For Margaret, Lilibet’s enlistment in the ATS was, indeed,
the cause of much rancor. Her sister was now doing things without her—and it hurt, but not as deeply as the crucial fact that had ruled her young life. Lilibet would inherit the power, glory and vast fortune of the Crown. To this end her sister was being conscientiously prepared. Margaret had grown into a mature fourteen; she was a talented actress and musician, possessing an intellect of far greater capacity than Lilibet’s. Yet all the attention and special education was going to her sister. It did not matter what she, Margaret did—or even, it seemed, how outrageously she acted. While Lilibet had her Crown, she would be forced to accept a compromised life, her impressive abilities confined to home entertainment. Her agile mind would have to lie fallow as she carried out the vacuous ceremonial duties inherent to her position—visiting schools and hospitals, appearing at dedications, Royal performances, and posing with an unending line of petty officials.
Surrounded by an army of deferential courtiers, clever, possessing good looks and a manner that could “charm the pearl out of an oyster,” she had been indulged as “something of a favoured enfant terrible.” But one thing Margaret never was permitted was any outward display of jealousy toward Lilibet. Even a normal sibling relationship is fraught with some competitive and envious feelings. But, brought up as Lilibet and Margaret had been, in regal isolation and with a situation where one sister was, without effort or talent, a “star” and the other, despite her abilities, fated to be a satellite, conflicting emotions of resentment had to exist.
