The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  Her father had a passing interest in racing but his real love was foxhunting. Her mother loved National Hunt racing – a winter sport, because the horses need softer going for jumping hurdles and running steeplechases. The National Hunt season culminates in the Cheltenham Festival in the middle of March, which was the Queen Mother’s favourite race meeting; the champion two-mile chase is named after her. The Queen’s passion – as it is for a considerable number of her subjects – is flat racing. She is never happier than during the four days of Royal Ascot in the third week of June where she watches some of the finest flat racing in the world. It is without doubt her favourite week of the year. She fills Windsor Castle with friends, all of whom are fellow racing enthusiasts, and every day they lunch in the castle, where the talk is racing. But, like everything else in her life, there is a rigid routine that is followed year after year after year. After lunch, at 1.35 p.m., cars take her and her family and guests to the Ascot Gate of Windsor Great Park. There they transfer into waiting landaus, attended by liveried footmen in red tailcoats, white gloves and top hats, which take them the last two miles to the golden gates at the eastern end of the racecourse. At 2.00 p.m. they begin the royal procession up the straight mile which delivers them to the royal box in time for the first race. Royal Ascot, still a highlight of the social season, has become a hugely popular sporting event in recent years and much more commercial – crowds have doubled in the last six or seven years – but the royal enclosure, for which anyone who wishes to attend has to be sponsored by a royal enclosure badge-holder of at least four years standing (the rule banning divorcees was abandoned in 1955), is still a very grand affair. Men wear uniform or morning dress, women may wear smart trouser suits (since 1970) but are not allowed jeans or shorts, and hats are still obligatory.

  But the Queen is there for the racing. Breeding is her principal fascination. She is one of the most knowledgeable bloodstock owners in the country and racing people say that if she wasn’t Queen she could be a very successful bloodstock breeder. Some of her best friends are also extremely knowledgeable. Henry Porchester, the seventh Earl of Carnarvon, sadly no longer alive, was one. Known as ‘Porchey’ to the Queen, he had been racing with her since the 1940s and her racing manager for thirty-one years. He was one of her very closest friends and they saw one another or spoke most days. He was the only person, Princess Anne once said, who could be sure of being put through to her mother on the telephone at any time without question, and he was with her at every race meeting. His death, sudden and unexpected on 11 September 2001, the same day the Twin Towers were destroyed, was a terrible blow to her. It was with Porchey that she made her first visit to Normandy to look at French studs in 1967. She had been sending mares to French stallions for the past fifteen years but had never been herself and mentioned this to President de Gaulle at Winston Churchill’s funeral. Two years later she went on a private visit with a small party to see how the horses were bred and to meet French owners and breeders. It was the first of regular trips first to France and then America. Porchey introduced her to Will Farish, until recently the US Ambassador in London and a successful Texan racehorse owner and breeder with the farm in Kentucky where she stays often (and where, in fact, she was when she first heard about Monty Roberts). Any official trip thereafter to either country – like her state visit to France in 2004 – would invariably be finished off with a private diversion to one of these studs.

  The Queen has owned several over the years but now has just one stud; breeding horses has been a royal pastime for centuries. She inherited the royal stud at Windsor, which had originally been founded at Hampton Court in the sixteenth century, and two studs established by the future Edward VII at Sandringham – the Sandringham and Wolverton studs, which now operate as one. In 1962 she leased and later bought Polhampton Lodge Stud near Overton in Hampshire for breeding racehorses; now she uses it to hold mature horses before and whilst they undergo full training. She also has jumpers now, having taken over the Queen Mother’s horses after her death in 2002. She visits all her establishments regularly and often in the early morning goes to the stables where her horses are in training to watch them run along the gallops. At one time she was a very big owner breeder in this country, but no longer. Alongside people like the Maktoum brothers and Robert Sangster, who have come into British racing with vast sums of money, the traditional home-grown owner breeders, including the Queen, have found it hard to compete.

  When Porchey died, his son-in-law John Warren, married to his daughter Lady Carolyn, took over as the Queen’s racing manager. ‘Under John Warren’s aegis they run a tight ship,’ says my racing expert.

  Her racing interests are kept on a very cost-effective basis. It’s all carefully budgeted, they don’t waste money, and they take commercial opportunities – last year they sold a filly to the United Arab Emirates. It is always a bit of a surprise when one is told that anything to do with the royal finances is properly managed but this is an example of where it is. John Warren is one of the best bloodstock agents in the world. He has an incredible eye for horses; and he is an outstanding bloke and although he must be thirty-five years younger is close to the Queen. Not just because he runs her racing interests but because he can keep up with her knowledge. Not very many people can.

  At Royal Ascot the Queen is closer to the general public and more relaxed and informal than on any other occasion anywhere else. Security is tight but it is subtle, which is what she likes. Before some races she goes down to the paddock – the grassy area that is open to everyone – and makes her way to the pre-parade ring where the horses are walked round before being saddled up. It’s where the experts, the people who really understand about the conformation of a racehorse, like to go. She has a very good eye for a horse, a great memory about lineage, and will stand there for fifteen or twenty minutes discussing muscle and stride and the pros and cons of the day’s going, before following the horses to watch them parade round the ring prior to the race.

  John Warren will usually be with her, also her Representative at Ascot, Stoker, the new Duke of Devonshire, whose family she has known for years; he is a fellow owner, ex-senior steward of the Jockey Club, ex-chairman of the British Horseracing Board and a very knowledgeable man. He has been her Representative there since 1997 – it is the one appointment she makes entirely on her own – and as such is chairman of the Ascot Board which runs the racecourse. In October 2004 it closed for redevelopment – and for only the second time in the fifty-three years of the Queen’s reign her June routine will be different. The first time was in 1955 when Royal Ascot was cancelled because of a railway strike, and she went privately to the July meeting instead. This year it will still be in June but rather more than a landau journey from Windsor. After much competition, York was the racecourse chosen to stage Royal Ascot in 2005.

  The redevelopment of Ascot is a huge project, the third largest sports scheme of the new millennium after Wembley and Arsenal Football Club – it will cost £185 million – and is being financed, unlike those two, without a penny of taxpayers’ money. Commercializing Ascot and making it more accessible has paid off. Over the last ten years it has built up reserves of £75 million and on the strength of its forecasts for the future has been able to borrow the remainder. Without the royal connection Ascot would be a very different place. Over the five days Royal Ascot gets 5 per cent of the total turnout at British racecourses at 1300-odd fixtures throughout the year and attracts huge television audiences nationally and internationally as well as other media coverage. It is also about fashion and having a good day out, but the absolute core of Ascot is the royal connection and attendance by the Queen and the royal procession and everything to do with it. Without that Royal Ascot would not be the same.

  The Queen does not get involved in the day-to-day business of Ascot – that is the Duke of Devonshire’s job – but she takes a very keen interest and has been closely involved in the redevelopment at every stage, as have the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince
of Wales. The Duke always accompanies the Queen to Ascot, and most members of the Royal Family attend some stage of the meeting – supporting Royal Ascot is expected – but none of them is as enthusiastic about racing as the Queen, and none begins to share her knowledge. However, her husband and eldest son have had plenty to say about the new building. The Duke has been particularly interested in the technical details, while Charles has concerned himself with the architecture and the functionality of the building.

  The main reason for the redevelopment is because the racecourse has become so popular in recent years – a victim of its own marketing success – that crowd circulation has become a real problem; but it was a problem, ironically, that the architect Rod Sheard also had in one particular part of the new design. Sports stadiums are his speciality; he designed the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and the Olympic stadiums in Sydney and Brisbane, so he is not new to the pitfalls, but there was one particular area that looked perfect on the drawings but which he knew wasn’t going to work. He and the rest of the team had looked at it again and again – computer experts using all the latest technology – and on the day when they presented the plans to the Queen, the Duke and the Prince they had still not found the solution. But it was a small detail, one which they would eventually iron out, and not something worth mentioning. The royal group was there to look at the overall scheme.

  At the end of the presentation the Duke of Edinburgh, then eighty-two, stood up, walked across to the diagram and pointing his finger to the precise spot that was under scrutiny said, ‘You’ve got a crowd-circulation problem there.’ Rod Sheard was gobsmacked.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Representing the Nation to Itself

  When King George VI and his ministers heard that Hitler had set August 1940 for his planned invasion of Britain, the Queen immediately commissioned John Piper to paint a series of pictures of Windsor Castle, ‘so that it would be remembered as it was if the worst happened’. The paintings that Piper produced hang in Clarence House to this day. Hitler’s plan was to destroy London and kill or capture the King, and he and Queen Elizabeth were advised to take their two young daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, and evacuate to the safety of Canada or the United States. ‘The children won’t go without me,’ was the Queen’s famous reply. ‘I won’t leave without the King. And the King will never leave.’

  She sent the children to the comparative safety of Windsor Castle but she and the King stayed on in Buckingham Palace for the remainder of the war. There were other, safer houses in London, less obvious from the air, which they could have used but George VI refused to move. Ordinary Londoners didn’t have the option of moving out of their homes; remaining in Buckingham Palace was a visible and potent gesture of solidarity with the people.

  But it wasn’t safe. The Blitz began on 7 September 1940 and during the first night two hundred German planes bombed London, killing four hundred people and seriously wounding 4357. During the following years Buckingham Palace suffered nine direct hits from German bombs and the damage sustained was extensive. The swimming pool was hit, leaving a crater fifteen feet wide, ceilings came down, glass was broken and windows shattered; there was damage to the roof and the ground floor, to a conservatory, the West Front and lawn, the quadrangle, the forecourt and gardens, and the North Lodge was entirely demolished, killing a policeman. An equerry who had fought in the trenches during the First World War described the night when ‘this great house continuously shook like a jelly … for two or three hours it was like a front-line trench under bombardment’.

  In one attack on 13 September the King and Queen had a lucky escape. They had just returned to Buckingham Palace at about 10.45 and had gone to their rooms on the first floor to collect a few odds and ends before going down to the air-raid shelter in the basement. They delayed a moment while the Queen removed an eyelash from the King’s eye, and, as she did so, a German bomber flew under low clouds straight up the Mall in broad daylight and launched a direct attack on the Palace. ‘At this moment we heard the unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German plane,’ said the Queen in a letter to her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, the next day. ‘We said “ah, a German”, and before anything else could be said, there was the noise of an aircraft diving at great speed, and then the scream of a bomb. It all happened so quickly that we had only time to look foolishly at each other, when the scream hurtled past us, and exploded with a tremendous crash in the quadrangle … Then there was another tremendous explosion … Then came a cry for “bandages”. My knees trembled a little bit for a minute or two after the explosions!’ The King and Queen then calmly retreated to the basement for lunch, where the chef, when asked by the Queen if he was all right, said with a broad smile, there had been ‘une petite quelque chose dans le coin, un petit bruit’. The ‘petite quelque chose’ was the bomb demolishing the chapel next door – which today houses the Queen’s Gallery.

  When the all-clear sounded at 1.30 the King and Queen set off to visit the East End of London, where the bombing and the casualties had been heaviest. ‘I’m glad we’ve been bombed,’ said the Queen. ‘It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.’ Her lady-in-waiting remarked, ‘When we saw the devastation there, we were ashamed even of the glass of sherry we had had after the bang.’ Describing the visit to Queen Mary, the Queen wrote:

  The damage there is ghastly. I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city, when we walked down a little empty street. All the houses evacuated and yet through the broken windows one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds just as they were left. At the end of the street is a school which was hit, and collapsed on the top of five hundred people waiting to be evacuated – about two hundred are still under the ruins. It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction. I think that really I mind it much more than being bombed myself. The people are marvellous, and full of fight. One could not imagine that life could become so terrible. We must win in the end.

  Day after day she and the King toured blitzed areas of Britain, travelling by train to those cities and communities that had been bombed, arriving as soon as possible after the air raids to comfort those who had lost relatives, friends and possessions. ‘The war’, in Winston Churchill’s words, was to draw ‘the Throne and the people more closely together than was ever recorded’. From its outbreak the Queen had been quick to visit Civil Defence points, Red Cross centres, hospitals, factories and troops. She made a point of dressing in her most cheerful clothes and went from group to group boosting morale and giving her support to local and national efforts to raise money or set up welfare schemes to help people who were homeless and hungry. The King visited troops; he travelled to France in 1939, to North Africa in 1943 after the victory at El Alamein and he was kept informed about the plans for D-Day. ‘Once more a supreme test has to be faced,’ he said in a broadcast to the nation on 6 June 1944. ‘This time the challenge is not to fight to survive but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause.’ Cornelius Ryan described the extraordinary flotilla that carried the troops on to the Normandy beaches in The Longest Day:

  They came, rank after relentless rank, ten lanes wide, twenty miles across, five thousand ships of every description. There were fast new attack transports, slow rust-scarred freighters, small ocean liners, Channel steamers, hospital ships, weather-beaten tankers, coasters and swarms of fussing tugs. There were endless columns of shallow-draft landing ships – great wallowing vessels, some of them almost 350 feet long … Ahead of the convoys were processions of mine sweepers, Coast Guard cutters, buoy-layers and motor launches. Barrage balloons flew above the ships. Squadrons of fighter planes weaved below the clouds. And surrounding this fantastic cavalcade of ships packed with men, guns, tanks, motor vehicles and supplies … was a formidable array of 702 warships.

  Ten days later King George VI was there, visiting his Army on the Normandy beaches as they fought to liberate Western Europe from Nazi rule.

  Being there, being visible, showing
his support, sharing the danger – and being bombed in his home as others were being bombed – was an important part of sustaining morale during the terrible years of war. As Lord Mountbatten said to the King, ‘If Goering could have realized the depths of feeling which his bombing of Buckingham Palace has aroused throughout the Empire and America, he would have been well advised to instruct his assassins to keep off.’ The King and Queen symbolically held the country together; they supported, encouraged, thanked, praised and commiserated with their subjects. They united the nation under threat from the enemy. The troops felt proud to be fighting for King and country, and the citizens at home were comforted to know that the King and Queen were there for them. As one of the survivors of the devastating air raid on Coventry in November 1940 said, ‘We suddenly felt that if the King was there everything was all right and the rest of England was behind us.’

  Sixty years later, on 6 June 2004, it was the King’s daughter who stood on a dais in the town square at the coastal town of Arromanches-les-Bains, in Normandy, and, with the Duke of Edinburgh beside her, took the salute while eight hundred soldiers, sailors and airmen, a sea of white hair, berets, blazers and regimental badges – the last survivors from that remarkable D-Day operation, proud liberators of Europe – marched past their Queen in a stirring and emotional climax to the 60th anniversary commemorations.

  ‘What for you is a haunting memory of danger and sacrifice one summer long ago,’ she told them, ‘is for your country, and for generations of your countrymen to come, one of the proudest moments in our long national history.