Royal Sisters

by Anne Edwards

  Footnote

  * The service was carried to radio audiences across the world; the first time a Royal Wedding had been broadcast.

  13

  At Waterloo Station, banks of brilliant fall flowers lined the platform from which the Royal Train was to start its journey to Broadlands. A great crimson carpet extended from the train to the gate where the newlyweds would step from their carriage. Crowds massed at the entrance and a loud cheer was raised as the open coach and its cavalry escort drew up. Lilibet’s corgi tumbled out onto the carpet first in a shower of rose petals and added cheers.

  Broadlands, Edwina Mountbatten’s ancestral six thousand acre estate, was an Elizabethan manor with magnificent Robert Adam interiors. The honeymoon couple occupied Edwina’s elegant white and dove-gray suite: sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, and dressing room. The Mountbattens had begun their married life in the same bedroom, but Edwina had recently (and lavishly) refurbished it with an oversized, silk-quilted bed and a newly acquired collection of Dali drawings.

  The staff left them discreetly alone but from the moment of their arrival the newlyweds were besieged by the press and overzealous well-wishers who hid in trees and long grass to stare at them when they went for a walk. At Romsey Abbey, where they attended Sunday morning service, over a thousand people tried to gain entry: “Those who could not get in,” John Dean recalled, “carried chairs, ladders, even a sideboard into the church yard to stand on in order to get a glimpse of the honeymooners. It was a shocking performance.”

  After what amounted to an extended weekend, the newlyweds fled Broadlands, returning for a day to London, and then surreptitiously entrained for Scotland and the privacy they knew awaited them at Birkhall, the old Jacobite house near Balmoral, where Lilibet had vacationed as a child.

  Deep snow covered the ground and the huge hearth log fires in the vast rooms seem to create mere pockets of warmth in the otherwise frigid interior. Within three days Philip had caught a severe cold. Lilibet nursed him lovingly and wrote her parents how happy she was. Her father—with more than a touch of self-pity—replied:

  ... I was so proud of you & thrilled at having you so close to me on our long walk in Westminster Abbey, but when I handed your hand to the Archbishop I felt that I had lost something very precious.... Our family, us four, the “Royal Family,” must remain together with additions of course at the suitable moments!!! ... Your leaving us has left a great blank in our lives but do remember that your old home is still yours & do come back to it as much & as often as possible.... I can see you are sublimely happy with Philip which is right but don’t forget us is the wish of

  Your ever loving & devoted

  Papa

  Home, one assumes, referred to both Buck House and Royal Lodge, for “us four” always considered the latter to be their true home. The newlyweds had originally planned to return from their honeymoon a few days before Christmas, which they would spend with the family at Sandringham. They arrived unexpectedly in London two weeks early, a change in plans precipitated by the bone-chilling Scottish winter and Philip’s cold (and, perhaps, the bride’s loneliness for her family). They moved back into Lilibet’s old rooms. Margaret’s reign as “the only Princess in the Palace” seemed, at least momentarily, to be threatened.

  Philip went back to work at a desk job at the Admiralty and began to settle into his new role as husband to the Heir to the Throne. For the first time in his life he was being treated in the Royal manner that had been denied him almost from birth. His attitude with staff was cool and distant. He had only one servant, his valet, Dean; but he never allowed the barrier to drop between them. Dean had dressed him for his wedding, accompanied him on the honeymoon and was now living at the Palace.

  When Dean had first met the “small, very smart, rather peremptory” Bobo MacDonald (his opposite on the domestic staff), he told her to call him “John, everybody does.” She replied, “Well, to me you will always be ‘Mr. Dean.’ We have to keep up a certain standing in the house.” Eventually, she thawed. “I greatly enjoyed her company,” Dean confessed. But Bobo, who referred to her mistress as “My Little Lady,” never addressed him other than as “Mr. Dean.”

  Dean felt that a strong class barrier existed between those servants employed to care for the Royals and the rest of the domestic staff, who always addressed him as “Sir ... which I found embarrassing. I could never get used to the ridiculous distinctions so rigidly observed at the Palace; after all we were all servants. When I returned to my room to find a housemaid there she would actually bow her way out of my presence!”

  At staff meals precedence was strictly observed, with thirty to forty heads of the various domestic entourage seated at a long table “in strict order of precedence. The King’s valet, the Queen’s dressers and their pages at the top end with the Steward of the Palace, Mr. Ainsley, at the head. Everyone stood until he was seated. Then Grace was said. The food was not always what one would expect in such an establishment.” At the end of the meal they would toast the King’s health—“in water”—then toasts to the Queen and other members of the Royal Family also “drunk in water.” And the staff were required to leave the table single file in order of their precedence in the Royal Household.

  An official residence for Lilibet and Philip had been arranged shortly after their engagement was announced. The King had chosen Clarence House (the home of William IV before his accession in 1830), which was only a short distance from the Palace. Queen Victoria’s son Arthur, Duke of Connaught, had been its most recent Royal resident, although he had not regularly inhabited it for twenty years before his death in 1942. During the war the British Red Cross had been given office space there and the residence had suffered bomb damage. Unoccupied since then, the badly outmoded structure, which still lacked electricity, had fallen into serious disrepair: “Windows were boarded up or else encrusted with a decade of London grime; the gloomy corridors bristled with obsolete gas pipes and mysterious relics of plumbing; walls were stained with the ghosts of vanished picture-frames, and the only discernable bathroom was a copper bath in a dark cupboard.”

  To be made into a fitting residence for the Heir Presumptive, Clarence House was to be totally renovated. Parliament voted £55,000 to provide “electricity, central heating and the re-equipment of the kitchens, service quarters and Household offices.” The King had contributed a considerable sum to this amount so that the dwelling could also be enlarged. Since the building backed an old vacant Georgian house owned by the Crown, simply by knocking through the walls on each floor, a large wing and a double-sized reception room could be created.

  The work, begun in July 1947, was to take fifty-five workmen a year to complete. After a few months at Buck House, and while renovations were being made, the Edinburghs* were offered occupancy of the Earl and Countess of Athlone’s home, Clock Tower, at Kensington Palace while the Athlones were on an extended stay in South Africa.

  For their country estate, Lilibet and Philip were first given Sunninghill Park, a twenty-six-room white elephant near Ascot, vacant since the war and only recently purchased by the Crown Commissioners for the purpose of becoming a grace-and-favour house. Another large sum was appropriated for renovation. The workers had no sooner set foot on the premises than Sunninghill Park was destroyed by a mysterious fire believed to have been started by dislodged squatters. The damage was so extensive that the conversion was abandoned. A larger nearby estate, Windlesham Moor, the property of Mrs. Warwick Bryant, widow of Philip Hill, a financier who also owned Sunninghill Park, was rented by the Royal couple as their country home; and they would spend weekends there over the next two years.

  Lilibet was thrilled. Although it was probably the smallest house she had lived in, the white stucco façade resembled the architecture of Royal Lodge, which had made it instantly appealing. The house had been thoroughly renovated after the war and decorated with “glossy mirrors and green marble pillars.” Estate agents had described it as “a highly desirable moderate-sized r
esidence with four reception rooms, five main bedrooms and servants’ quarters and the usual offices.” Set in fifty acres of grounds, it had a miniature golf course and a tennis court, which Philip turned into a cricket pitch.

  Lilibet remained devoted to her dogs and “each afternoon,” Dean tells us, “at four-thirty, a special tray was laid with a cloth, silver spoons and forks, a plate of biscuits, a plate of chopped meat, a plate of vegetables and a jug of rich gravy, so that she could feed them herself.”

  Because the estate was not owned by the Crown, Parliament was unable to delegate a budget for the upkeep and repairs. However modest Windlesham Moor was if compared to Palace life, it did require six resident staff (Dean and Bobo joining them on weekends). After a great squabble in the House of Commons, Parliament had voted an annual income of £40,000 for Lilibet and £10,000 for Philip (on the recommendation of the King), both sums subject to income tax. The Left Wing Journal declared that, austerity or not, in view of the extraordinary demonstration of devotion to the Monarchy aroused by the Royal Wedding, there should be no “cheeseparing” where the newlyweds were concerned. Somehow, seeing the Royal Family begin to regale themselves once again in style gave the British a sense of well-being. And although the Conservatives stressed that the last dollar of America’s postwar loan was spent, the majority of Britons refused to recognize the grim economic landmark as long as there was work, shops had sufficient supplies to cover rations, and “even the most antique Bob Hope movie [was] at the neighborhood cinema.”

  The King’s new son-in-law was recognized by the Government and the public as a member of the Royal Family. But it did not appear that “us four” would be quickly expanded into “us five.” The King remained jealously possessive of Lilibet and somewhat aloof with Philip. Until this time, the King had been the only man in his family. Women dominated his life—his mother (whose affection he had always fought to win), his wife (“the most marvellous person in the World in my eyes ...”) and his daughters. He felt more comfortable with men like Townsend, with “a hint of sensitivity, a touch of rumpled charm,” than with Philip, who was such an authoritative personality. Nor did Philip rapidly win over his mother-in-law, who had many reservations about the Mountbattens and had made pointed comments to at least two close members of her entourage that Lord Mountbatten “advised Prince Philip throughout the courtship.”

  Although Lilibet consulted her mother on ordinary matters—clothes, household affairs and staff relations—it does not seem that she either confided or sought her counsel as to her personal life. Perhaps because Lilibet had always been so close to her father, the Queen had formed a more empathetic relationship with Margaret. Edward Cavendish, 10th Duke of Devonshire and close friend of the King’s, was quoted in 1948 as saying: “[Princess Elizabeth] makes it very plain to the Queen [her mother] that whereas she, the Queen, is a commoner, she, Princess Elizabeth, is of royal blood.” The Queen, following her mother-in-law’s advice when her husband ascended the Throne—to remember always that he was King—applied this same rule to her daughter. Lilibet would one day be Queen, not Queen Consort like herself, and she never allowed herself to forget this fact.

  Lilibet and her mother did not have much in common save for their love of dogs and horses. The Queen preferred the excitement of racing and the fascination of breeding horses to her daughter’s partiality to riding them. She shared Margaret’s loathing for guns and stalking and was an avid fisherwoman. And, like Margaret, she was drawn to the company of men and women interested in the arts, or scientists and scholars who had accomplished unusual things. She loved beautiful clothes, a good joke and gossip. And she possessed a basic gaiety that Lilibet lacked (and at times found “a bit unseemly in a Queen”).

  In Lilibet’s view her mother, always a keen competitor for her father’s love, must have seemed impossible to emulate. Lilibet had many strong qualities. She was loyal, considerate, duty-bound, fastidious and temperate. But she never had possessed Margaret’s joie de vivre or the Queen’s “warm and totally captivating charm.” Townsend wrote that “it radiated from [the Queen’s] smile; you felt it as you took, but never shook, her small, soft hand.”

  When Philip had been courting Lilibet he had appeared to have been won over by Margaret’s charms as well. Once he was married to Lilibet, his attitude to his sister-in-law took an immediate turn. The small episode that Crawfie had noted earlier, when he had pushed Margaret into the lift at Buck House, now repeated itself in similar situations, to Margaret’s growing irritation. When she stayed at Windlesham Moor with them, Philip refused to allow the staff to serve her breakfast in bed, a weekend luxury she enjoyed. Once, when the three of them were at a party and she had insisted on remaining longer than he wished, he had ordered her coat brought.

  The vitality Philip had always exhibited now transformed itself into imperiousness. Within a short time of his marriage, one Royal biographer claims, “he seemed even more royal than the Royals [‘us four’] themselves and had a very proper idea of how they should conduct themselves.” This did not set well with Margaret and a contentiousness developed between them.

  In April 1948, Lilibet confided to her family that she was pregnant and that the child would be born in November. Much concern was generated about the strain of a projected tour to France that had been planned for the newlyweds, but Lilibet insisted on going. This was to be her first solo visit and she was eager to tryout the French she had been practicing and to wear the Norman Hartnell gowns designed for the gala State occasions.

  Jock Colville and Lady Margaret Egerton accompanied them. The crowds were enormous—hundreds of thousands came out to line the streets wherever they went, cheering, “Vive la Princesse!” Colville remembered, “She read one speech at the top of an enormous flight of steps—at the Trocadero—followed by a special thing [the presentation of the Legion of Honor] at the Town Hall. [She handled herself magnificently and] the French were absolutely at her feet.”

  Mindful of her condition, Colville was concerned lest she become overtired by the numbers of people and the heat, which was unprecedented for May. He arranged for the five-day tour to include one private evening. “We went to a most select three-star restaurant; the French had been turned out, so we found a table—just a party of us alone—in this vast restaurant. Prince Philip spotted a round hole in a table just opposite us, through which the lens of a camera was poking. He was naturally in a frightful rage. We went on to a night club, again the French [were] all turned out. One of the most appalling evenings I have ever spent. Everybody dressed up to the nines—nobody in either place—except the lens.”

  Hélène Foufounis was in Paris but did not see the Royal couple except on a television set on display in a store window. Her son, Max, was with her and when he saw Philip he shouted in French. “That’s my godfather!” Foufounis claimed that he was instantly surrounded by grasping people and that his nanny had to pull him to safety, away from the crowd who simply wanted to touch him.

  The trip was a resounding success. Lilibet had seemed visibly affected by the deference with which she had been treated by President Auriol and General De Gaulle’s brother, who was the Préfet of Paris at the time. The State Visit had given her a chance to see what the future held for her and her staff was struck by her cool acceptance, the way she had suddenly seemed to become “majestic.”

  Margaret was intensely solicitous to Lilibet upon her return from France. And certainly she exhibited no trace of envy or resentment about the expected heir who—male or female—would push her farther down the ladder of the succession. On August 21, 1948, she celebrated her eighteenth birthday. With her new maturity came the privilege of having her own Lady-in-Waiting, the attractive and youthful Jennifer Bevan, whose presence gave her the freedom to do things without Lilibet, her mother or their staff in attendance.

  Margaret was a part of the first post–World War II generation, anxious to taste what they had not been served in their youth and living with the new fear of the atom bomb.
War had dominated at least one third of Margaret’s life. For six years it had been “a great simplifier, a source of purpose....” The short period of peace that she and her contemporaries had experienced lacked the excitement and glamour of war, when danger came streaking out of the skies in the form of a V2 bomb and Windsor Castle was fortified with young Grenadier Guards who, not knowing what the next day would bring, were marvellously enthusiastic about such seemingly trivial things as Christmas pantomimes, Castle dances, and a lively, teenaged princess who, despite her Royal position, reminded them of their younger sisters at home.

  Lights had come on again around the world, but they illuminated drab, scarred cities, and London was no exception. The summer of ’48 was marked by extreme austerity, the key word of Britain’s economy. The Cold War was in effect and the Berlin Blockade a reality. Along with this came new fears of a confrontation with Russia. “The Russians have stated that they will be carrying out the training of their fighter aeroplanes across our corridors to Berlin,” Harold Nicolson wrote. “This is very dangerous.... Yet I cannot seriously believe that war is possible. It is so different from previous wars and rumours of wars. It seems to be the final conflict for the mastery of the world. The prizes are so enormous; the losses so terrible [to contemplate].” Vast sums that Britain did not have were being earmarked for the development of its own nuclear bomb.

  The strain was telling on the King, who suddenly had begun to look wrinkled and drawn with great, dark circles beneath his eyes. He suffered painful cramps in his legs, but made no mention of them. There had been many bright spots to balance the difficult times in the past twelve months: Lilibet’s and Philip’s triumphal trip to Paris; the pageantry of the Garter ceremony; the Opening of Parliament in all the splendor of its Royal ritual (disbanded during the war); and on April 26, his and the Queen’s silver wedding anniversary with crowds of cheering celebrants clamoring as the couple drove in brilliant sunshine, in an open car, through twenty miles of London streets.