Bertie proposed to Elizabeth three times. Twice she refused him. He would not go away. He did not give up. Eventually, he secured his prize. On a Sunday walk in the woods at St Paul’s Walden Bury, in January 1923, she said ‘yes’, and did so wholeheartedly. She belonged to a class and generation where every woman’s destiny was to be a wife and a mother – and nothing more. To secure the ideal husband was everything. Elizabeth sensed that in Bertie she had found a good man and that theirs would be a happy match. She was right.
The Strathmores were not besotted with royalty. ‘As far as I can see,’ Lady Strathmore is said once to have remarked, ‘some people have to be fed royalty like sea-lions fish.’ She was not one of them, but nonetheless to be the mother of the first ‘commoner’ to marry legitimately into the Royal Family was undoubtedly ‘something’. Bertie’s mother, Queen Mary, was equally delighted. ‘Elizabeth is charming,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘so pretty & engaging and natural. Bertie is supremely happy.’
The Duke of York and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon were married in Westminster Abbey on 26 April 1923. The political situation was uncertain and the economy fragile. The King declared that ‘the arrangements should be of as simple a character as possible and that no unnecessary expense shall be incurred’. The wedding – the Abbey’s first royal wedding since 1382, when Richard II married Anne of Bohemia – was grand, but not ostentatious. The bride wore a dress of machine-made Nottingham lace, designed in medieval style by Queen Mary’s dressmaker, with a veil of Flanders lace lent by the Queen. The groom wore the uniform of a group captain of the recently created Royal Air Force. The ceremony was filmed – in long-shot – for the cinema newsreels, but not broadcast on the fledgling BBC wireless. The Archbishop of Canterbury was concerned that ‘disrespectful people might hear the service, perhaps some of them sitting in public houses with their hats on’.
As the wedding drew near, Elizabeth made what seems to have been the only unforced error of her public life. An enterprising reporter from the Star newspaper turned up at her parents’ Mayfair front door and asked Lady Elizabeth for a brief interview. He was granted one. The King was not amused. ‘Those filthy rags of newspapers,’ was how His Majesty regarded the press. Elizabeth never spoke on the record to a journalist again – and the coverage she received over the next eight decades was extraordinary and, almost always, adulatory. She had an instinct for doing what was right and doing it in a way that would be well received. On her wedding day, as she entered Westminster Abbey, spontaneously she placed her bouquet of white heather and York roses on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The guests at the wedding included a raft of royals, the cream of the aristocracy, a smattering of the great and the good, and thirty boys chosen by the Industrial Welfare Society to represent the ordinary youth of Britain. The Duke of York was President of the IWS and properly interested in giving sporting, recreational, and training opportunities to young people. He founded – and attended – an annual summer camp where two hundred working-class lads and two hundred young chaps from public schools came together for an integrated adventure holiday. He pioneered ‘social inclusion’ seventy years before it became government policy. He undertook good works both because he believed in them and because that was what was expected of a king’s second son in the aftermath of the Great War. He and his young duchess did their duty as required – he shyly, she gaily – but, once the excitement of the wedding was over, they neither sought, nor received, undue press or public attention. He was not the king and not ever expected to be. The Prince of Wales was not yet thirty. He was the glamorous one who was in the front line and in the spotlight. His younger brother could – and did – lead a relatively private life.
The Yorks honeymooned at Polesden Lacey in Surrey27 and at Glamis. The weather in Scotland was atrocious and the new duchess contracted whooping cough, ‘not’, she conceded, ‘a very romantic disease’. This dampener behind them, the young couple settled into the life of near-unparalleled privilege – and occasional duty – that was to be their lot. Everybody was utterly enchanted by the Duchess. Most found the Duke a touch awkward. His equerry, James Stuart, who had also been, of course, his rival in love, said of the young Duke, ‘He was not an easy man to know or to handle.’ The Prince remained capable of sudden, unpleasant, bursts of anger, his notorious ‘gnashes’. Margaret Rhodes remembered him ‘for his totally schoolboy sense of humour’. She told me, ‘He laughed like a drain at ridiculous things, but he had an explosive temper. I saw him once grouse-shooting in a butt. He hadn’t shot very well. In fact, he’d shot badly. He threw his guns into the heather in his rage and frustration.’
Elizabeth did her best to tease him out of his ill-humour by taking his pulse and quietly counting: ‘Tick, tick, tick, one, two, three.’ She also did all she could to help him conquer the speech impediment that was the blight of his life. She went with him on his regular visits to Harley Street to see his speech therapist, Lionel Logue. She lay beside him on the floor as he practised his breathing and relaxation exercises. She repeated after him the assorted tongue-twisters designed to help him jump the hurdles of especially challenging consonants. (‘Let’s go gathering heathy heather with the gay brigade of grand dragoons’ was a particular favourite, apparently.) She checked the drafts of speeches he was due to deliver to eliminate the worst stumbling blocks – and, when he came to deliver those speeches, she was on hand, with an encouraging smile, willing him to succeed. He never wholly conquered his impediment, but, over time, managed to contain it. Lionel Logue said, ‘He was the pluckiest and most determined patient I ever had.’
That Elizabeth was good for Bertie, everyone agreed. She was altogether, as Sellar and Yeatman (two of her favourite historians) would have it, A Good Thing.28 Naturally, she was not without flaws. Her time-keeping was terrible. More than once, her husband was seen, impatiently pacing the hallway, checking the clock, muttering to himself, ‘Where is that damned woman?’ But such was her charm, and her lightness of touch, that, it seems, everyone forgave her everything. Even the King – perhaps especially the King – would indulge her. When once, famously, she arrived late for dinner with His Majesty, she, of course, apologised. ‘Not at all,’ said the King, to everybody else’s amazement. ‘You are not late, my dear. I think we must have sat down early.’
Elizabeth was not over-awed by her father-in-law. ‘Unlike his own children,’ she said, after his death, ‘I was never afraid of him.’ George V and Queen Mary enjoyed Elizabeth’s company. She was easy with them in a way that very few others were. Beady-eyed Virginia Woolf – one of the shrewdest and sharpest observers of the period – was at the theatre one evening (at a performance of an Edgar Wallace thriller) and saw the royal party on display: ‘There was a cheer, and behold a great golden Queen bowing in a very small bow windowed box. Also, when the lights went up, the King, red, grumpy, fidgeting with his hands; well groomed, bluff; heavy-looking, with one white flower in his buttonhole, resenting the need, perhaps, of sitting to be looked at between one of the acts – his duty to be done. Once the Duchess of York sat with the Queen; a simple, chattering, sweethearted little roundfaced young woman in pink; but her wrists twinkling with diamonds, her dress held on the shoulder with diamonds. An odd feeling came to me of the shop window decorated for the public: these our exhibits, our show pieces. Not very impressive – no romance or mystery – the very best goods.’29
The young Duchess of York delivered in full measure. In due course, at 2.40 a.m. on Wednesday, 21 April 1926, after a difficult labour, and by Caesarean section, she gave birth to her first child, a baby girl, ‘a little darling’, according to Queen Mary’s diary, ‘with a lovely complexion and pretty fair hair’. The new Princess was named Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, after her mother (at Bertie’s insistence: there was no thought of Elizabeth I), her grandmother (Queen Mary) and her great-grandmother (Queen Alexandra, who had died of a heart attack, aged eighty, the previous November). She was born in Mayfair, at 17 Bruton Street, a tall, hand
some, eighteenth-century town house that had recently become the Strathmores’ London home. She was christened five weeks later, on 29 May, in the chapel at Buckingham Palace. Her godparents included the King and Queen; her other grandmother, Lady Strathmore; her royal aunt, Mary, the Princess Royal; a non-royal aunt, Lady Elphinstone (mother of Margaret Rhodes); and Arthur, Duke of Connaught (1850–1942), Queen Victoria’s last surviving son.
Princess Elizabeth was born as the General Strike was reaching its climax. Nineteen twenty-six was a year of political, social, and industrial unrest. It was also the year in which A.A. Milne wrote and published Winnie-the-Pooh. The tone of Elizabeth’s childhood reflected the latter rather than the former. She was brought up in a golden cocoon: her nursery world, like Christopher Robin’s, was cosy, Christian, safe, certain, utterly secure. There were differences, of course. Christopher Robin was a middle-class boy. Elizabeth was a princess and third in line to the throne.
The Yorks never liked the house assigned to them on their marriage. White Lodge in Richmond Park (now the home of the Royal Ballet School) was huge and unappealing, unwieldy and uncomfortable. Soon after Elizabeth’s first birthday the family moved to 145 Piccadilly, overlooking Green Park, an impressive town house running to five floors (with electric lift) and featuring assorted reception rooms, a fine dining room, a proper ballroom, a good library, twenty-five bedrooms (including several fit for a king), and an impeccably appointed nursery floor. The indoor staff included a housekeeper, a cook, three kitchen maids, a butler, an under-butler, two footmen, a valet for the Duke, a dresser for the Duchess, an orderly, a handyman, a night watchman, and a couple of lads: one to wait on the senior servants, one to operate the in-house telephone exchange. Up on the nursery floor, the little Princess had her own retinue. In command was Clara Cooper Knight, known as ‘Alah’ (to rhyme with Clara), a traditional English nanny, originally from Hertfordshire, who had looked after Lady Elizabeth when she was a baby. Alah, now in her late forties (but looking older in the photographs), was assisted by a young Scots nursery maid, aged twenty-two, the daughter of a railway worker from Inverness, Margaret MacDonald, known as ‘Bobo’. Quite soon little Elizabeth would come to be known by her own diminutive: Lilibet – King George’s pet name for his favourite grandchild.
The King gave Lilibet the time, attention, and affection he had denied his own children. He played with her – properly, down on all fours. He indulged her, sitting her at his side at breakfast and tea and feeding her titbits from his own plate. He took her with him on holiday, to Sandringham and Balmoral – even to Bognor, in 1929, where he was recuperating from a near-fatal illness.30 Most significantly, perhaps, he shared with her his love of dogs and horses. He had a passion for racing and racehorses and loved nothing better than to take little Lilibet around the stud at Sandringham. For her fourth birthday, in April 1930, he gave her her first pony, a Shetland called Peggy.
Margaret Rhodes – then Margaret Elphinstone – was ten months older than her cousin, and, when Lilibet was staying in Scotland, at Glamis or Balmoral, a natural playmate. ‘What did we play? We endlessly played at horses. That was her idea. We galloped round and round the field. We were horses of every kind. Carthorses, racehorses, circus horses. We spent a lot of time as circus horses.’
Mrs Rhodes laughed and lit another cigarette and gazed into the middle distance. ‘We played “Catching happy days”. Do you know it? It’s a game you play in the autumn. You just run around trying to catch the leaves as they fall from the trees before they hit the ground. It’s a wonderful game.
‘I remember, too, we invented a play. We put it on in Scotland and then again at St George’s Hall at Windsor Castle. It was the story of one family through the ages. I remember carrying the Queen across the threshold. I was the young man in the play. Anyway, I dropped her. Of course, in those days, there wasn’t the faintest idea she might be Queen.’
In fact, by the end of 1930, the possibility that Princess Elizabeth might indeed one day be Queen was being openly discussed. In August the Yorks had produced a second child, but it was a girl. Rumour was rife: as adolescent naval cadets both Bertie and David had contracted mumps, which might have affected their fertility. The Prince of Wales was thirty-six and still unmarried. Even if he found a wife in the foreseeable future, would he be able to father an heir? Producing Lilibet and her sister – Princess Margaret Rose – had taken the Yorks all of seven years. Were they now likely to have a third child, and, if they did, would it be a boy?
The public, the press, even her parents, were speculating as to little Lilibet’s destiny. Queen Victoria had succeeded her uncle. Would Princess Elizabeth succeed hers? Did she, even as a toddler, have the makings of a monarch? Osbert Sitwell recalled the Duke of York telling him, ‘From the first moment of talking she showed so much character that it was impossible not to wonder that history would not repeat itself.’ In September 1928 Winston Churchill – who would, one day, be Elizabeth II’s first Prime Minister – stayed at Balmoral as a guest of King George and Queen Mary. He wrote to his wife: ‘There is no one here at all, except the family, the household and Princess Elizabeth – aged two. The latter is a character. She has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.’
Margaret Rhodes remembered her as ‘a jolly little girl, but fundamentally sensible and well behaved. Princess Margaret was the naughty one. She was always more larky. She used to tease the servants. There was a wonderful old page and, as he carried the plates around the dining room, Margaret used to stare at him, trying to make him laugh. But she never got herself reprimanded. She got away with everything. She made her father laugh.’
When she was a little girl, Lilibet’s closest friend outside the family was Sonia Graham-Hodgson, who became Sonia Berry. Sonia was the daughter of Sir Harold Graham-Hodgson, radiographer to the Royal Family, and a Mayfair neighbour of the Yorks. Sonia and Lilibet met in 1931, playing in Hamilton Gardens, behind Piccadilly. ‘I was five and she was four,’ Sonia recalled. ‘I had no idea who she was, but I can see her now in a pink or red dress. She says I was wearing a blue coat, but we always argue over what we were wearing. I was the bossy one then – I rather rubbed in that I was eight months older. I was tall and she was rather small.’
Sonia and Lilibet played together in the gardens in Mayfair, in the nursery at 145 Piccadilly, in the thatched Wendy House at Royal Lodge, Windsor. Sonia kept evocative photographs of the pair of them (uniformed nannies in attendance) walking hand in hand in the park. Another picture showed them out cycling together: Lilibet, on her tricycle, looking very determined. ‘We quarrelled like normal children,’ said Sonia, ‘but she was a thoughtful and sensitive child, and naturally well behaved. She never seemed aware of her position and paid no attention to the people who stood by the railings to watch her play.’ And the Yorks as parents, by the standards of their time and class, were noticeably hands-on. ‘The Duchess, having had a very happy childhood herself, was all the more determined that, because the children were royal, they should have an ordinary childhood. The Duke never seemed shy, he didn’t stutter, and he played games, like Sardines. I remember my starchy nanny saying that she found it very undignified having to hide in a bush with him.’
When I went to visit Sonia Berry at her home in Bath she showed me some of the letters Lilibet had sent to her when they were little girls. They give a good flavour of the child and the childhood: ‘Please excuse blots, messes etc as I am just going to bed because we’ve just come back from Royal Lodge where there is about four inches of snow. We made an igloo, an armchair and an ice cake. Really I have no other time to write here because we’re living in a whirl of excitement. I hope your mother is well. Longing to see you again. With lots of love from Lilibet xxxxxooooo.’
The following spring – in March 1936, when young Princess Elizabeth was not quite ten – in a clear hand (and without any spelling mistakes) she wrote to Sonia from Compton Place in Eastbourne, one of the homes of the Duke and Duchess of Devon
shire: ‘I’m so sorry not to write sooner but we have done such a lot that I couldn’t find time. We’ve had such fun here. We went to Beachy Head where the cliffs fall sheer down to the sea. Then we went to Birling Gap and played on the beach. We went to Seaford and saw a waiting steamer coming in to harbour. Then went to Cooden Beach where it was lovely. Papa and all of us, except Mummy who had a cold, went to a place called High and Over where the name suited it very well because you went high and then you went over. The next day we went to Cooden Beach again and we picked up a lot of shells and then we had tea in a hotel – wasn’t that lovely? Tarts with cream and jam. It was lovely and I wished you were there. We’ve got a little chalet on the beach and it’s perfectly lovely. Two big lounge chairs and two little basket chairs. I hope you are quite well and Woolly [Sonia’s governess] I hope is better. Not having any more colliwobbles! Love from Lilibet.’
It’s clear: the Yorks were a happy family. They had reason to be. These were the years of the Great Depression, but – though the King ordered a general tightening of the royal belt – his family was mostly cushioned from the harshness of reality. The Yorks led comfortable, ordered lives. They already had a fine house in Mayfair and, in September 1931, the King had given them, in addition, a handsome weekend retreat in the mock-Gothic shape of the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park. They spent Easter at Windsor Castle; Christmas and the New Year at Sandringham; August and September in Scotland. There was nothing rackety about their lives. The Prince of Wales might disport himself on the Continent with one or other of his mistresses, but the Yorks only ever went abroad on duty. They took their duties seriously. They took their role as parents seriously as well.
Yes, they would travel to foreign parts when they had to (in January 1927, when Lilibet was only nine months old, they went without her on an official visit to Australia and New Zealand that kept them away for six months), but when they were at home – and they were mostly at home – they were much more intimately involved in the care and upbringing of their children than many aristocratic parents of their generation. The Yorks gave time and attention to their daughters: they played with them, they bathed them, they read to them, they gathered round the piano after tea and sang songs together. Prince Philip barely saw his parents throughout his adolescence. Lilibet saw hers every day.
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 11
