Elizabeth- the Queen and the Crown

by Sarah Gristwood

  In fact, the first few months of ‘phoney war’ lulled everyone into a false sense of security. While Princess Elizabeth conscientiously practised wearing her gas mask, and studied Jane’s Fighting Ships with her sister, nothing seemed to be happening. The girls came south to Sandringham for Christmas. In February they moved to their old Windsor home of Royal Lodge, described merely in official news as ‘somewhere in the country’.

  Sandringham Park was turned over to agricultural production during the war years. ‘We four’, as the King called them, inspect the ripening crops.

  As food rationing was introduced, their father decreed that the girls’ diet should follow the same rules as the rest of the nation, albeit that they had access to unrationed game and produce from the estate. They joined the local Girl Guide company – where fellow patrol members included a number of East End evacuees, who treated the princesses with less than the deference they were used to.

  They were, however, powerful propaganda symbols for the nation at large. Much was made of the fact that they were remaining in Britain, rather than being sent abroad for safety – just as their parents were lauded for remaining in London even after Buckingham Palace was bombed while they were there. As the spring of 1940 wore on, and the ‘phoney war’ became a reality, the princesses were moved to Windsor Castle, where they would remain for the rest of the War. Windsor was, after all, a fortress – and there were plans for how to remove them to another, secret, location in case of invasion.

  The castle had been stripped of its treasures (although, ironically, the Crown Jewels had been taken from the Tower of London and hidden in old newspaper in the underground vaults) and the girls, like everyone else, spent their evenings in blackout conditions and took their baths a mere three inches deep. They also slept in ‘siren suits’ in preparation for nights spent in an air raid shelter.

  A welcome liveliness came in the shape of a company of Grenadier Guards sent for their protection. There were weekend visits from their parents – and, of course, the ever-present dogs and horses. But Britain was ‘all in it together’, and the princesses, too, dug for victory, and donated the miniature teapots and kettles from the Welsh cottage when the nation was asked to hand over its aluminium to make aeroplanes. A major part of their propaganda value was the idea that they were suffering like everybody else. As London was battered by the Blitz they feared for their parents, who were often driven back to Windsor at night. (Their uncle the Duke of Kent would be killed in a plane crash while in service with the RAF.)

  On 13 October 1940, the voice of Princess Elizabeth was heard for the first time during the BBC’s Children’s Hour. ‘Thousands of you in this country have had to leave your homes and be separated from your father and mother. My sister, Margaret Rose, and I feel so much for you, as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all.’ The speech – written for the fourteen-year-old and carefully rehearsed – may sound a little stagy. ‘My sister is by my side and we are both going to say goodnight to you. Come on, Margaret.’ But the reception, on both sides of the Atlantic, was wildly enthusiastic.

  Princess Elizabeth, with her sister by her side, makes her first radio broadcast.

  It was not the only performance in which the princesses took part. The pantomimes they staged raised some £800 for the war effort. In 1942, as she turned sixteen, Princess Elizabeth was photographed signing on at the Labour Exchange as – under the national pressure to find workers – every girl was expected to do. Needless to say, no job in farm or factory was ever found for her – though in the same year she was invited to be Honorary Colonel of the Grenadier Guards.

  The 1941 performance of Cinderella at Windsor soon turned into an annual fundraising event. The Princesses took starring parts, with Princess Elizabeth often cast as Principal Boy.

  Elizabeth was only sixteen when, in 1942, she was made Honorary Colonel of the Grenadier Guards. A company of the guards were stationed at Windsor during the War.

  As she turned eighteen, in April 1944, Princess Elizabeth was still in some ways treated as a child, and dressed identically to her younger sister. She was, however, given her own suite of rooms and a lady-in-waiting. She was now of an age where, if anything happened to her father, she would rule without a regent and, on his insistence, was made a Counsellor of State, able to deputize for him in case of his absence or incapacity. She gave her first speech in public when she launched her first ship.

  Prime Minister Winston Churchill joined the Royal Family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to celebrate victory in Europe on VE Day, 8 May 1945.

  Early in 1945 the Princess also joined the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, learning how to drive and maintain army vehicles.

  Early in 1945 – declaring that ‘I ought to do as other girls of my age do’ – she persuaded her father to let her join the Auxiliary Territorial Service. No. 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor learned to drive and maintain a car, take an engine apart and put it together again. She recalled afterwards that she had never worked so hard in her life.

  But she had been allowed to join the ATS only in the knowledge it would not be for long. The War was drawing to a close. On 7 May the BBC was able to announce that the following day would be Victory in Europe Day. The princesses celebrated VE Day with their parents on the balcony of Buckingham Palace – and also with the huge crowds below.

  It was Margaret who begged that they might be allowed to go out into the ecstatic throng and, in the euphoria of the moment, their parents agreed. They were accompanied by a safe group of more than a dozen, including their governesses and a handful of Guards officers. Elizabeth, who was in her ATS uniform, pulled her cap down over her eyes in an attempt not to be recognized, but one of the Guards declared he could not be seen out with another officer improperly dressed . . .

  Carried along by the laughing, crying, dancing crowd they went down Piccadilly, ‘swept along’ as she later said, ‘by tides of happiness and relief’. They danced the Lambeth Walk and the Hokey-Cokey, sang ‘Run Rabbit Run’ as they linked arms in the street. They relished standing outside Buckingham Palace and yelling ‘We want the King!’ with the rest. They did the same the next day, and again three months later on VJ (Victory over Japan) Day.

  The euphoria would not last. As the War ended, half the the British people expected a brave new world. The other half expected a return to the comfort they had enjoyed in the old pre-war world. Both groups were disappointed. Rationing was more stringent than ever. As even the King noted: ‘Food, fuel and clothes are the main topics with us all.’

  As the 1945 election swept Labour to power, and Churchill out of office, it was said that divisions between the different classes of society had never been more acute. But, ironically, the very discontent seemed to make the monarchy stronger – the one constant in a changing world; and an institution more closely identified with the people than with the aristocracy.

  And for Elizabeth, nineteen as the War ended, this was a time of opportunity. A series of new adventures were about to begin.

  Not the least telling change in her life is that she finally began choosing her own clothes, instead of simply accepting her mother’s style. She was given a second lady-in-waiting, and also a male secretary and offices in Buckingham Palace and Windsor. She was opening buildings and awarding prizes, attending to her charities.

  On Empire Day 1946, aged twenty, she broadcast an address to the youth of the dwindling Empire, poised on the edge of its transformation into the ‘Commonwealth’, which she compared to a free-growing and natural garden – ‘what used to be known around the world as an “English Garden”’. The idea was to suggest a new freedom for the future – another year would see India’s independence. But if the Empire had been built on conquest, a Commonwealth united for peace would remain a cause very close to Elizabeth’s heart.

  Princess Elizabeth was seen as the monarchy’s, and the nation’s, future, and interest focussed on one aspe
ct of that future in particular – whom the nation’s heiress would marry. ‘That the Heiress to the Throne would remain unmarried was unthinkable,’ noted Elizabeth’s old governess, Crawfie (though the same had, of course, been said of Elizabeth I!).

  She was by no means living in a nunnery. There were what a friend described as ‘a whole battalion of lively young men’ with whom she was happy to dance the night away. But it was a case of safety in numbers – she was allowed to go out in a group, never with one young man on his own. She now had her own car, with the numberplate HRH 1, but there was always a detective with her and a bodyguard close behind.

  There was a small handful of aristocrats speculated as possible husbands for her – Charles Manners, the Duke of Rutland; Charles Fitzroy and Johnny Dalkeith, respectively sons of the Dukes of Grafton and of Buccleuch. But the same rules applied to them.

  And, in any case, Princess Elizabeth’s eyes were already turned in another direction.

  Love and Marriage

  It was in childhood, at various family occasions, that Princess Elizabeth had first encountered her distant cousin Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. He, like she, was a great-great-grandchild of Queen Victoria. But Philip’s dramatic and difficult family history was in stark contrast to the cosy domesticity of ‘we four’.

  Philip was the impoverished offspring of a discredited monarchy. His Danish grandfather had been chosen by the Greeks as their king at the age of seventeen, but was assassinated fifty years later. His uncle King Constantine had been deposed, and his father, Prince Andrew, exiled along with most of the family. Philip had been born, on 10 June 1921, on a kitchen table in a villa on Corfu, during his Uncle Constantine’s brief return to power, but in 1922 Constantine had been forced to abdicate, and public hostility was such that Prince Andrew’s family had to be evacuated from Corfu aboard a British warship, with the baby Philip carried in a cot made from a fruit crate.

  His parents’ marriage did not survive the strain of exile. Initially settling in Paris, Philip’s father moved to Monte Carlo, while his mother was placed in a mental institution, suffering from what the conventions of the day described as a nervous breakdown, though more recent diagnoses suggest schizophrenia.

  Philip was sent to school in England and raised there in the care of his mother’s Mountbatten (or, as they had been in Germany, Battenberg) family. Under the aegis of his uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten, he prepared to enter the Royal Navy. And when in 1939, the thirteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth accompanied her parents to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where Philip was a cadet, the eighteen-year-old helped to entertain the royal party.

  The two exchanged letters from then on – and from that moment the idea of a match appears to have been in currency. In 1941 the diarist Chips Channon had heard gossip that Philip ‘is to be our Prince Consort’, and that that was why he was serving in the British Navy.

  Curiously, Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, had also been the candidate of a favourite uncle; in his case, Victoria’s Uncle Leopold. Victoria’s, like Elizabeth’s, was to be a love match in which love nonetheless came by order, a personal choice made from a very limited gene pool. But in both cases there were concerns.

  The question of consort to a queen regnant had always been a vexed one – the vexations that kept the first Queen Elizabeth a Virgin Queen. If Elizabeth I had married one of her own nobles there would have been the danger of faction; if she married a foreign prince, her country risked being subordinated to the interests of his. In either case, the popular assumption was that he would take over control not only of her, but of her realm.

  Four centuries on the risks were smaller, in that Elizabeth II would not exercise the same powers as her predecessor. But in the 1940s (as in the 1840s, when concerns were raised over Albert’s Germanic foreignness) the fears expressed in the sixteenth century had not entirely gone away.

  Nonetheless, Philip was invited to spend Christmas 1943 with the Royal Family at Windsor, where he watched a zestful seventeen-year-old Elizabeth sing and dance through the annual family pantomime, after which the young people rolled back the carpets, turned on the gramophone, and danced till 1 a.m. It may – suggested Crawfie – have been then that her real interest in Philip began.

  Philip in his twenties was as able (if abrasive) as he was attractive. He had an impressive war record, seeing active service and being mentioned in dispatches, and seemed set for a high-flying naval career. Elizabeth was obviously fascinated by a young man her cousin Margaret Rhodes described as looking like ‘a Viking god’. And Philip – even at this surprisingly early point – told his naval commander that he might marry the future queen. It was, as he described it, the notion of his ‘Uncle Dickie’, Lord Mountbatten, who was fostering the idea every step of the way.

  However, Philip was not part of the English aristocratic club, whose members were far from convinced of his suitability. Courtiers called him ‘Phil the Greek’; some complained he was ‘no gentleman’, and claimed to see in him ‘a Teutonic strain’. All four of his sisters had married Germans, several of whom had been active in the Nazi cause. And he was moreover like ‘a dog without a basket’, arriving for weekend visits to the British Royal Family in a third-class train compartment, without spare clothes, and writing ‘of no fixed abode’ when it came to signing his name in visitors’ books.

  None of which, to the Princess Elizabeth, mattered a jot. By the time Philip was invited to Balmoral in the summer of 1946, it was clear Elizabeth was in love. When she was a bridesmaid, and he an usher, at the wedding of Lord Mountbatten’s daughter Patricia to Lord Brabourne, the looks they exchanged told the world what those closest to them already knew.

  The Palace, that autumn, was forced to issue a denial of press stories that the couple were engaged and it was true – officially. In fact, some time that summer Elizabeth accepted Philip’s proposal, though the King’s consent had still to be obtained. George VI had doubts about Philip – about the young man’s raffish reputation and rough edges, as well as about the over-active role the ambitious Mountbatten seemed to be playing in the affair.

  Mountbatten had for several years been attempting to arrange Philip’s naturalization as a British subject. That winter, he made sure that it went ahead. In the interests of becoming a less controversial consort for Britain’s heiress, Philip would renounce his name, royal rank, his nationality, and in the end also his Greek Orthodox faith.

  Still, however, there was no announcement. Indeed, the couple took care to be seen about together rather less. The Princess continued to dine and dance with a series of Guardsmen. Her parents asked her to wait until after her twenty-first birthday – and took her away on a long South African tour.

  There was of course a political purpose behind the trip. Though for some years an independent nation, South Africa still acknowledged George VI as king. The British Government hoped the Royal Family’s visit would strengthen Prime Minister Jan Smuts, and the English-speaking population of South Africa, against the Afrikaner National Party, which was pressing for greater racial segregation. Already, the royal party was distressed often to find black and white South Africans waving flags from opposite sides of the street.

  But the trip was also in some sense a holiday, at least for the two princesses, who were filmed on the outward journey playing deck games with the ship’s officers, with obvious delight. Because of the War, they had never been abroad and were thrilled by the vast open spaces, the animals, the Victoria Falls, the five thousand Zulu warriors who turned out to greet them – and, recalled Princess Margaret, the ‘amazing opulence and a great deal to eat’. They had left Britain in the grip of a terrible winter and Princess Elizabeth, characteristically, wrote to her grandmother Queen Mary that she felt ‘guilty we had got away to the sun while everyone else was freezing’.

  Princess Elizabeth looked relaxed and happy playing deck games with the officers of HMS Vanguard on the voyage to South Africa in 1947.

  The schedule of
the royal tour was however gruelling – thirty-five nights aboard the specially fitted White Train. The King and Queen certainly found it exhausting but Elizabeth, noted the King’s private secretary Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, displayed ‘not a great sense of humour, but a healthy sense of fun’. Fun and duty: Elizabeth, wrote Lascelles approvingly to his wife, had formed the habit of prodding her mother with the point of her umbrella when she showed signs of running behind schedule. Though both princesses must have found parts of the tour very dull, he wrote, they had both been ‘as good as gold’:

  ‘From the inside, the most satisfactory feature of the whole business is the remarkable development of P’cess [sic] E. She has all P’cess Marg’s solid and endearing qualities plus a perfectly natural power of enjoying herself. For a child of her years, she has got an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort; such unselfishness is not a normal characteristic of that family.’

  Princess Elizabeth celebrated her 21st birthday while in South Africa, and marked the occasion with a famous radio broadcast. ‘I declare’ – she told the peoples of Britain’s ‘great imperial family’ – ‘that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service . . .’

  It was in South Africa, three days before the end of the visit, that Princess Elizabeth turned twenty-one. The South African authorities were never going to miss the chance for a public celebration, and she spent the previous day reviewing everything from cadet battalions to women’s corps and civil defence workers, and taking the salute at a great march past.