The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  The Foundation, which he set up in 1979, gives money to a wide range of other charitable causes and projects – in 2001, for example, during the foot and mouth crisis, the Foundation gave £400,000 to support farmers. It is funded by profits from the shop, royalties from the sale of the Prince’s lithographs (made from his watercolours) and royalties from books he has written or contributed to, but the bulk of the money comes from Duchy Originals, the food business the Prince launched in 1992. The original idea was to sell organic produce from Duchy farms, thus promoting the organic message as well as making money for charity. It had a very inauspicious start, was derailed early on by a sequence of unprincipled or hopeless characters, exposed on the BBC’s The Food Programme for passing bog-standard food off as organic and came very close to hitting the buffers. However, in 1998 it underwent a resurrection. The Prince recruited a new managing director and since then the company has taken off, becoming a major brand and making profits last year of £1 million.

  Belinda Gooding saw the Duchy job advertised in the Sunday Times – it simply said MD required for organic company – she applied and soon found herself in front of the Prince of Wales, feeling totally overwhelmed but not lost for words. She had spent ten years with Mars and was then group marketing director of Dairy Crest where she had introduced an organic range; she knew her subject. She and one helper then shut themselves away in ‘a horrid little room in the Palace’ and analysed the business, put a plan to the board and watched it grow. In five years turnover has gone from £6 million to almost £40 million, staffing levels from two to fourteen and, as well as supplying the Highgrove shop, products are in just about every shop and supermarket that stocks premium brands. She inherited a limited product range – mostly bread, biscuits, sausages, bacon, preserves, a couple of drinks and chocolates. Today it is extensive, no longer exclusively organic (sausages and bacon – the difference is that now it says so on the label) and no longer all edible – there are Duchy shampoos and even furniture from Duchy woodlands. The Prince takes a very personal interest in his shop and in the business and tries to find ways of marrying up his various interests. The fish pâtés are made with sustainably fished fish, for example; the vegetable crisps are made from ancient varieties of vegetables, which preserves the gene pool. He tests every new product idea and if it is something of which he is not particularly fond, he gives it to friends. Pork pies and Cornish pasties recently went to Joanna Lumley. Camilla gets chocolates and anything with ginger. He’s fascinated by the business world and retail margins, likes meeting retailers and is constantly on the phone. ‘Why doesn’t anyone know about my ice cream, Belinda?’

  More to the point, why didn’t his mother know about his biscuits? A visitor taking afternoon tea at Sandringham some years ago complimented the Queen on the Prince’s delicious biscuits. She was apparently quite unaware that he made biscuits.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Maundy Thursday and Fixtures in the Calendar

  It was Thursday, the day before Good Friday, with the Easter weekend looming. The Queen was on her way to Liverpool Cathedral for the Royal Maundy service. It was a bitterly cold day, an icy north wind drove straight through every layer of clothing and there was a forecast of rain – April showers. But the city had a carnival atmosphere about it. Good-natured crowds held flags and flowers and chatted to the policemen manning the barriers. A band played and a procession of Life Guards mounted on immaculate black horses rode, as though choreographed, in perfect formation down the wide empty road. Outside the cathedral people wrapped up in anoraks and woollen scarves were taking up their pitches behind the barriers, and greeting one another as they unpacked their thermoses and sandwiches. It was before eight o’clock when the first ones arrived. The Queen was not due for nearly three hours.

  She and the Duke of Edinburgh were on the royal train. They left London late the previous night and slept en route. I was in a jam on the M6. A lorry had overturned and shed its load, two lanes were closed in both directions, and by seven o’clock in the morning the motorway had ground to a stand-still. Royal schedules take just such eventualities into account. For short distances, the Queen will often use a helicopter although the weather sometimes means she is forced to rely on the traffic. But on a long journey the most secure and comfortable way for her to travel is by royal train. It is the safest place for the Queen to sleep away from home; she’s in familiar surroundings, it’s well equipped and, barring some kind of rail disaster, delivers her to her destination bang on time – important when the Lord Mayor, the Lady Mayoress, the Lord-Lieutenant, the High Sheriff and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all – collectively known in royal circles as ‘the chain gang’ – are waiting to greet her.

  By the time I arrived in Liverpool at 9.30 the police had closed the streets around the cathedral and were out in force. They were dressed in bright yellowy-green fluorescent jackets and carried walkie-talkies. Uncertain of the way, I stopped at some lights and asked directions from one of them. She started to explain, the lights changed and a kid on a superbike revved his engine so aggressively that we both jumped. ‘Watch it, sonny,’ she said, and carried on directing me while he was forced to wait. Maybe she was always friendly to strangers in town, or maybe, as all her colleagues seemed to be, she was excited. Never have I met such universally good-humoured policemen – and never have I seen so many. It was a month after the Madrid bombings, large quantities of explosives had been discovered in the suburbs of London and several al-Qaeda suspects had been arrested. While the Queen was on their patch, West Mercia police were taking no chances.

  As I passed the Roman Catholic cathedral – not the one I was looking for – which stands out like a giant tubular cooling tower, I spotted a man who looked as though he belonged in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta chatting idly to a policeman. It was surreal. There we were in 2004 at 9.30 in the morning and this man was dressed in a scarlet Tudor doublet and hose, with a ruff round his neck. It was only when I saw a whole lot more like him that I realized they were the genuine article – they were the Yeomen of the Guard – and part of the proceedings. They are the sovereign’s official bodyguard. They had been bussed up from London and had spent the night at the Marriott Hotel, causing more than a little consternation at breakfast when they arrived downstairs for their bacon and eggs in all the kit.

  The cathedral stands on a hill, a huge pink stone building, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (among his other great designs was the red telephone box – and there is one inside the cathedral), and last year this great edifice celebrated its centenary, the reason, no doubt, why it was chosen to host the annual Maundy service. Every year during her reign the service has been held in a different cathedral – another of Prince Philip’s ideas. (Before that they were always held in London.) But this is a date, like Trooping the Colour and the service at the Cenotaph, which has been in the Queen’s diary every year for the last fifty-two years and will be there every year for as long as she is physically able to be there.

  It is a wonderful piece of pageantry dating back centuries. What happens today is a shortened version of a ceremony that has been known in England since about AD 600, when it was referred to by St Augustine. It has its origins in the Last Supper, and it was only in the Tudor period that it became associated with the sovereign. As St John recorded in his Gospel, Jesus rose from the table, laid aside his garments, girded himself with a towel, poured water into a basin and proceeded to wash the feet of his disciples. Afterwards he gave them a command, or mandatum (the Latin word from which Maundy is derived), to love one another as he had loved them. The Queen neither girds herself with a towel nor washes any feet, but every Maundy service opens with the words of this ‘new commandment’, and it is this new commandment that is commemorated by the service.

  There is a broad stone seat in the East Cloister of Westminster Abbey, known as the Maundy Bench, where the ceremonial foot washing used to take place. King John is recorded as having taken part in the ceremony at Knaresborough in Yorkshire in
1210 and at Rochester in 1213. And by the early fourteenth century it had become customary for the sovereign to provide recipients – the number of which, since 1363, has corresponded with the sovereign’s age – with a meal as well as gifts of food and clothing, and female sovereigns gave up their gown, too. Elizabeth I put a stop to that. She carried out the ceremony at Greenwich in 1572 and washed the feet of the poor once they had already been washed by the Sub-Almoner and the High Almoner; she then gave them cloth, salmon, herrings, bread and claret, the towels and aprons used in the ceremony, and rather than her gown she substituted a red purse containing additional money.

  It would seem than none of the Queen’s predecessors was that keen on washing poor people’s feet. Charles I skipped it in 1639 at York Minster because of the plague. Charles II at Whitehall in 1667 left the feet washing to the Bishop of London, the High Almoner of the day. In 1685 James II wiped and kissed the feet of fifty-two poor men; at that time the recipients had to be the same sex as the sovereign, but that changed in the eighteenth century. William III delegated the task of the feet to his Almoner and gave women money instead of clothing. A hundred years later the men were given cash instead of clothing, too; but by the time William IV was seventy-two, the whole thing was becoming too expensive and the House of Commons suggested a change. Thus in the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1838, when she was only nineteen, so that there were comparatively few recipients, a new pattern was set for the future. Thereafter the distribution of Maundy money became symbolic and a means of recognizing service faithfully given by ordinary men and women. From the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century the sovereign was no longer personally conducting the service at all but delegated it to the Lord High Almoner or the Sub-Almoner. In 1932 King George V was persuaded to give out the Maundy money himself; Edward VIII did it once and George VI did it seven times during his reign. Queen Elizabeth II, however, has made it an important fixture in the royal calendar and in fifty-two years there have only been four occasions when the Queen has not handed out the Maundy in person. On two of those she was away on a Commonwealth tour and on the other two she had just given birth – to Andrew in 1960 and Edward four years later.

  And in the Queen’s seventy-eighth year it was quite a large gathering of ordinary men and women – seventy-eight of each – that waited nervously in their side-facing seats for their sovereign to arrive in Liverpool that bitter April morning. The Royal Maundy is often seen as nothing more significant than one of the fixed state ceremonials of the year, but it’s more than mere ceremony: it is very much a Christian event, a commemoration on the eve of Good Friday – and only a matter of time perhaps before it is deemed as unacceptable in our multicultural, multi-faith society as hot cross buns. The recipients are pensioners of all denominations who have been selected by their clergy and ministers for their good works in either the church or the community – they no longer have to be the poorest – and it was a joy to see the delight on their faces as 1400 years of history settled around their shoulders. The oldest amongst them that day was Alice Fagan of Widnes who was ninety-eight and in a wheelchair; she had devoted her life to good works in the church and had fostered children when her own had grown up. The oldest man was ninety-three-year-old Leslie Roberts of Thornton, who had been involved in the local youth club and a drop-in centre to support families in difficulty. There were eleven nonagenarians last year, four fewer than in Gloucester Cathedral the year before, but the average age was the same – eighty.

  They had been arriving at the cathedral since 9.45 along with their families and carers, and for the next hour and a quarter sat listening to soothing organ music while various grand processions made their way from doors to the east and west: the Ecumenical Procession – leaders from other faith communities in Merseyside; the Choir Procession, including the Children and Gentlemen of Her Majesty’s Chapels Royal and the Organist Choirmaster and Composer of HM’s Chapels Royal; the Procession of the College of Canons – Fellows, Canons, Archdeacons and Bishops; the Royal Almonry Procession including the Yeomen of the Guard who had so surprised the Marriott guests at their muesli earlier that morning; the Wandsmen, the Almoners and the Keeper of the Closet; and the County and Civic Procession – Mayors, Mayoresses and the High Sheriff.

  Suddenly the calm was shattered by the sound of great fanfares from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. It was eleven o’clock. The sovereign had arrived at the West Door in her specially converted Bentley with the royal standard flying on the roof. While the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had let the train take the strain overnight, the car had been driven down from London without her and was ready and waiting at the station along with a great reception committee to welcome her to the city when the royal train pulled in. She and the Duke had then driven through streets lined with flag-waving, cheering Liverpudlians, past the Roman Catholic cooling tower and up the hill to what John Betjeman called ‘one of the great buildings of the world’. It is the largest Anglican cathedral in Britain and Europe and the fifth largest in the world, and it is an inspiring and awesome sight – 104,275 square feet in all, 619 feet long and its bells have the highest and heaviest peal in the world. A great cheer went up as she stepped from the car, waving at the crowds of friendly, smiling, flag-waving spectators, many of whom had now been there in the freezing wind for three hours and would be there for nearly another two before they felt any kind of warmth in their bones.

  At the West Door the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were presented with the traditional nosegays of sweet herbs, originally a guard against infection, which all the principal players in the ceremony carry. Then the Queen’s Procession – all of Liverpool’s finest who were not yet seated – including the Beadle, the Bishop and the Lord-Lieutenant – made its way down the aisle past all the pensioners and their guests, past the dignitaries, all the way to the eastern transept, their progress projected on large screens (a nice mix of ancient and modern) so that those seated behind pillars could see what was going on. And while they walked, with the Royal Almonry Procession that had been waiting in the wings bringing up the rear, the organ began the first hymn, and all those able to rose to their feet and sang ‘Praise to the Holiest’. The music and the singing were glorious. The sovereign’s own choir, choirmaster, composer and organist all travel with her. Originally called the Gentlemen of the Chapels Royal, they are very much a part of the royal establishment and have been for centuries – they sang at Agincourt and were present at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520. Nowadays they are six Gentlemen and ten Children (educated at the City of London School as the Queen’s Scholars, and when singing they wear scarlet and gold state coats that date back to 1661). They sing at every Royal Maundy and Remembrance Sunday service, and every Sunday for the morning service at St James’s Palace in either the Chapel Royal or the Queen’s Chapel, except when the Queen is at Balmoral in the summer.

  By the time the last chords of the organ had died away, everyone was in their places and the Lord High Almoner, standing at the High Altar, began the service with the words from St John, chapter 13, verse 34, which have been used every year for the last 1400 years:

  Jesus said: ‘I give you a new commandment: Love one another: As I have loved you, so you are to love one another.’

  After a psalm, some prayers, another hymn and the First Lesson, read by the Duke of Edinburgh – also from St John, chapter 13 – the distribution of the Maundy money began, during which the choir sang a succession of anthems. The Queen, who was the only one of those officiating not in fancy dress, walked slowly down the line of pensioners on the south side of the aisle handing each one two purses, one red, one white, which she took from one of the five alms dishes that the Yeomen of the Guard carried, which date from the reign of Charles II. The red purse traditionally contains £5.50 – on this occasion it was a special £5 coin to commemorate the Centenary of the Entente Cordiale (which the Queen had been celebrating in France the previous three days) and a 50p coin marking the 50th ann
iversary of Dr Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile. This money is traditionally an allowance for clothing and provisions – not that £5.50 would buy many of either these days. The white purse had 78p in the special silver Maundy coins, freshly minted – the only silver coins still minted and the only coins minted which always bear the young head of the sovereign – as opposed to normal coins which reflect the sovereign growing older. The coins are silver pennies, twopences, threepences and fourpences. They are legal tender, so after decimalization in 1971 they became new pennies. Originally twelve coins were given, symbolic of the Apostles, or thirteen, of the Apostles plus Jesus, but in 1363 Edward III changed it and thereafter the number of coins reflected the age of the sovereign.

  The end of the Second Lesson, from St Matthew, was the cue for the Queen to distribute the second half of the Maundy to those on the north side of the cathedral, then, after prayers, another hymn and the National Anthem – an hour in all – the frozen souls outside caught another glimpse of the Queen before she disappeared into a reception in the Lady Chapel for a further half-hour before finally coming to walk along the length of the police barrier collecting flowers and tributes and talking to her loyal and doting subjects.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Pressing the Flesh

  There must have been several hundred people in the crowd immediately outside the cathedral that Thursday in Liverpool. Most of them were local and there were big groups of schoolchildren, but about thirty of them were royal groupies, who travel hundreds of miles from their homes to watch the Queen carry out her public engagements. After the Queen had left I was chatting to Peter Wilkinson, an ITN cameraman who is on permanent secondment to the Palace to film the Queen’s activities. She knows him and likes him and is comfortable with him hovering over her shoulder or rapidly walking backwards just a few feet in front of her. He shares an office at Buckingham Palace with Peter Archer, the court reporter for the Press Association; one Peter provides film footage for all the TV networks, the other puts news stories out on the wires. As I turned to go, I heard my name called and turned to see four or five people left behind the barriers. The whole area was emptying fast; the show was over and all that remained was the odd crisp packet and flag lying in the street. I went across to talk to them; they were curious about what I was doing. They had seen me in Cheltenham two weeks before and in Surrey the week before that. Was I writing a new book?