Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Rhodes, lighting another cigarette and putting her head gently to one side, ‘we were educated at home. The Queen and I were really the last generation of gels who didn’t go to school. We thought school would be ghastly. You’d have to play hockey. We didn’t want to play hockey. I had a French governess. The Queen and Princess Margaret had Crawfie.’ Mrs Rhodes smoothed out her skirt with an anxious hand. ‘I knew Crawfie. She was very nice really, but then she wrote the book. I haven’t read it.’

  A silence fell. ‘It’s rather good,’ I said.

  ‘It probably is,’ said Mrs Rhodes, stubbing out her cigarette and laughing. ‘I still haven’t read it. I don’t think I shall.’

  ‘Crawfie’ was Marion Crawford, the young Scotswoman who joined the York household as Lilibet’s governess in the spring of 1932. ‘The book’ is The Little Princesses, Crawfie’s account of the childhoods of Lilibet and Margaret Rose based on her sixteen years of royal service and published – to the dismay and astonishment of the House of Windsor – in 1950. Crawfie was tall, trim, intelligent, ambitious. She had trained as a teacher at Moray House in Edinburgh, working with young children from difficult backgrounds. She had plans to go on to train as a child psychologist. She was introduced to the Yorks by another of the Duchess’s elder sisters, not Lady Elphinstone (Margaret Rhodes’s mother), but Lady Rose Leveson-Gower, whose daughter, Mary, had been taking lessons with her. Crawfie was an excellent governess and a good friend to Lilibet and Margaret Rose, until, by publishing her book, she betrayed their trust – and became, overnight, a ‘non-person’.

  There is nothing shocking in The Little Princesses. Far from it. The tone is altogether deferential, the literary style overly sweet and sentimental, but the observation is often shrewd and the details revealing. Here is Crawfie’s account of her entry into the nursery world of Royal Lodge and her first encounter with Alah Knight, the formidable nanny, ‘a tall, noble-looking woman’, and little Princess Elizabeth, the heroine of her story, and ours:

  ‘Alah awaited me with that mixture of reserve and apprehension felt by all nannies when the governess is introduced. I like to remember that in all my years at 145 Piccadilly, London, and later at Buckingham Palace, Alah and I remained good friends; and if on her side the neutrality was sometimes armed to the teeth, I was always very careful not to tread on her toes.

  ‘Alah had entire charge in those days of the children’s out-of-school lives – their health, their baths, their clothes – while I had them from nine to six. She had to help her an under-nurse and a nursemaid. These two girls are there still – Margaret MacDonald and Ruby MacDonald, two sisters, who have become the personal maids and friends of the two sisters.

  ‘The night nursery was decorated in pink and fawn, the Duchess’s favourite colour scheme. A small figure with a mop of curls sat up on the bed. She wore a nightie with a design of small pink roses on it. She had tied the cords of her dressing gown to the knobs of the old-fashioned bed, and was busy driving her team.

  ‘That was my first glimpse of Princess Elizabeth.

  ‘“This is Miss Crawford,” said Alah, in her stern way.

  ‘The little girl said, “How do you do.” She then gave me a long, comprehensive look I had seen once before, and went on, “Why have you no hair?”

  ‘I pulled off my hat to show her. “I have enough to go on with,” I said. “It’s an Eton crop.”

  ‘She picked up her reins again.

  ‘“Do you usually drive in bed?” I asked.

  ‘“I mostly go once or twice round the park before I go to sleep, you know,” she said. “It exercises my horses.” She navigated a dangerous and difficult corner, and went on, “Are you going to stay with us?”

  ‘“For a little while, anyway,” I replied.

  The account has the feel of a novella, but also the ring of truth. We are introduced immediately both to Lilibet’s discriminating, observant eye and to her passion for horses. We can picture the child, the nanny and the governess quite clearly. While friends of the Queen who have read the book tell me that much of it is fanciful and not to be relied upon, I reckon that, overall, Crawfie’s portrait of the little Princesses is both accurate and telling. Lilibet comes across as an intelligent child, a dutiful daughter, and a responsible elder sister. Her love of dogs and horses – practical as well as passionate – is essential to her happiness. ‘Lilibet’s first love of all was undoubtedly Owen the groom, who taught her to ride.’ She was not yet six. ‘What Owen did or said was right in her sight for many years.’ In 1933, when Lilibet was seven, her father gave her her first corgi.

  Because Crawfie had reservations about some of Alah’s methods – Alah was a wholly traditional nanny: she believed in order, discipline, routine, calmness at all times, the virtues of emotional constraint – Crawfie, in her book, may have exaggerated the degree of Lilibet’s obsession with orderliness. Alah believed in the regimented life and, from the earliest age, Lilibet was a stickler for domestic order. Crawfie tells us how carefully Lilibet lined up her toy horses, how neatly she folded her clothes, how – night after night – she took care to position her shoes exactly parallel underneath her chair. After a family lunch one day, when their parents allowed the Princesses a spoonful each of sugar crystals, Margaret Rose ate all hers at once: before eating them, Lilibet arranged hers meticulously, one by one, in a straight line according to size.

  Crawfie comes back, time and again, to her charges’ contrasting personalities:

  ‘Of the two children, Lilibet was the one with the temper, but it was under control. Margaret was often naughty, but she had a gay bouncing way with her which was hard to deal with. She would often defy me with a sidelong look, make a scene and kiss and be friends and all forgiven and forgotten. Lilibet took longer to recover, but she had always the more dignity of the two.

  ‘The Duke was immensely proud of her. He had a way of looking at her that was touching. But Margaret brought delight into his life. She was a plaything. She was warm and demonstrative, made to be cuddled and played with. At one time he would be almost embarrassed, yet at the same time touched and pleased, when she wound her arms round his neck, nestled against him and cuddled and caressed him. He was not a demonstrative man.

  ‘Lilibet took after him. She, too, was reserved and quiet about her feelings. If you once gained her love and affection you had it for ever, but she never gave it easily.’

  In January 1936, aged seventy-one, George V died. His favourite grandchild was not quite ten. Crawfie recalls:

  ‘Lilibet in her sensitive fashion felt it all deeply. It was very touching to see how hard she tried to do what she felt was expected of her. I remember her pausing doubtfully as she groomed one of her toy horses and looking up at me for a moment.

  ‘“Oh, Crawfie … ought we to play?”’

  The old King was much mourned. His face was red, his manner was gruff, his voice was loud, but he had done his duty with dignity and some skill. His reign encompassed the Great War, the Russian Revolution, civil war in Ireland, the Great Depression, the advent of Britain’s first Labour government. He had risen to the challenges. He had dropped few catches. He had survived. He would be missed. ‘The people of America are mourning, as if for their own King,’ Virginia Woolf noted in her diary, ‘and the Japanese are in tears.’ The BBC suspended normal service and simply broadcast the sound of the ticking of a clock. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, addressed the nation and Virginia Woolf reckoned Baldwin hit the right note: ‘He gave out the impression that he was a tired country gentleman; the King another; both enjoyed Christmas at home; and the Queen is very lonely; one left the other taken, as must happen to married couples; and the King had seemed to him tired lately, but very kind, and quiet as if ready for a long journey; and had woken once or twice on the last day and had said something Kind (“Kind” was the adjective always) and had said to his Secretary “How is the Empire?” – an odd expression. “The Empire, Sir, is well”; whereupon he fe
ll asleep … The shops are all black. Mourning is to outlast the London season. A black Ascot.’

  ‘Kind’ was not necessarily the word his elder sons would have used to encapsulate the essence of their father. His relationship with each of them – which became very different – was never easy. He was much more comfortable with the women in his family. Perhaps they had the measure of him. The Duchess of York teased him. Playing horse and groom, little Lilibet led him around the drawing room by his beard. Until her death (a few weeks before his own) the old King and his unmarried younger sister Victoria chatted daily on the telephone. Once – Elizabeth Longford told me this story and assured me she had it on good authority – Princess Victoria telephoned the King at Buckingham Palace and said, ‘Is that you, you old fool?’ The operator interrupted: ‘Beg pardon, your Royal Highness, His Majesty is not yet on the line.’31

  The reign of George V lasted more than a quarter of a century. The reign of Edward VIII came to an abrupt end after eleven months and twenty-one days. As Prince of Wales, David had been popular with public and press alike. He was good-looking, charming, socially adept; he appeared articulate, energetic, and able; he came over as unstuffy and contemporary, both human and humane. Those who saw him at closer quarters got a different picture. Beatrice Webb, socialist pioneer and co-founder of the New Statesman magazine, met him at dinner in the summer of 1930 and recorded in her diary: ‘He is neurotic and takes too much alcohol for health of body or mind. If I were his mother or grandmother I should be very nervous about his future … his expression was unhappy – there was a horrid dissipated look as if he had no settled home either for his intellect or his emotions … He must be a problem to the conventional courtiers who surround him.’ He was.

  In January 1931, at Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, at the country house of one mistress, Thelma Furness (the second wife of the first Viscount Furness), David met his next mistress, his last, the non-negotiable love of his life: Wallis Simpson. Mrs Simpson was thirty-five, American, chic rather than beautiful, the Baltimore-born second wife of a New York businessman, Ernest Simpson, who had an English-born father and had come to London to run the British end of the family firm. David’s interest in Wallis developed gradually. It began as a flirtatious friendship. The affair blossomed in the spring of 1934. By 1935 the Prince was wholly infatuated. Within court circles the affair was an open secret, but it was not a matter that was discussed within the Windsor family. As one of David’s nephews, George Harewood, the Princess Royal’s son, pointed out: it was a different world, a world in which ‘anything awkward’ was best avoided. ‘People kept much more private and much more quiet about things like that and were much more able to bottle up their feelings. I think the whole of my mother’s family tended to bottle up their feelings very much.’

  The crisis reached its climax in the autumn of 1936. In August the new King – not yet crowned: his Coronation was set for the following May – holidayed at Balmoral, with his mistress installed in the rooms that, a year before, had been occupied by Queen Mary. In September he asked the Yorks to take his place at the official opening of a hospital in Aberdeen, so that he could meet Mrs Simpson, secretly, at the railway station. In October Mrs Simpson secured her second divorce and became free to marry for a third time. In November the King – Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which did not then recognise divorce – told his mother, his brother, and the Prime Minister that he had decided to marry his American divorcee and, if necessary, to give up his throne in order to be able to do so. ‘Oh,’ stammered Bertie, ‘that’s a dreadful thing to hear. None of us wants that, I least of all.’

  Of all this, until the beginning of December, the majority of the British public knew nothing. Around the world, especially in the United States, reports of the King’s relationship with Mrs Simpson had been widespread. In the United Kingdom, a deferential press had breathed not a word of scandal. Up on the nursery floor at 145 Piccadilly, Crawfie and Alah and the little Princesses sensed something ominous in the air, but no one told them anything. Evidently something was about to happen, but what was it? ‘It was impossible not to notice the change in Uncle David,’ said Crawfie, in retrospect. ‘He had been so youthful and gay. Now he looked distraught, and seemed not to be listening to what was said to him. He made plans with the children, and then forgot them.’

  On Thursday, 3 December, Crawfie went out and bought an evening paper. Standing on the doorstep, ‘I remember I read the headline while I waited for the front door to open … THE KING AND HIS MINISTERS. GREAT CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS … I do not know what we would have done at that time without the swimming lessons. They were a great diversion and took our minds off other matters.’

  At Buckingham Palace and in Downing Street, as the drama of the Abdication unfolded, down at the Bath Club, Lilibet and Margaret Rose, aged ten and six, were learning to swim. (‘I remember the Bath Club well,’ Gina Kennard told me. ‘Princess Elizabeth was always so nicely behaved. I remember she used to have a bag of sweets and, after swimming, would take the bag round, offering everybody a sweet.’) The King could not marry Mrs Simpson and make her his Queen. A morganatic marriage, allowing her the position of wife but not the status of Queen, might be possible, but would require legislation. The government advised against it. The King agonised. The press fulminated. The Church pontificated. Mrs Simpson left the country to escape the furore. Queen Mary shook her head in sorrow and in anger. Bertie wept on his mother’s shoulder, overwhelmed by the prospect of what was to come. Elizabeth retreated to her bed with a bout of influenza. At the poolside, Crawfie and Alah wrapped Lilibet and Margaret Rose in huge bath towels and, as each was awarded her Life Saving Certificate, rewarded the girls with hugs and a small box of chocolates.

  The King was ready to sign the Instrument of Abdication. Edward VIII was about to become Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor. Prince Albert, Duke of York, was about to become King George VI. At 145 Piccadilly, Crawfie was standing in an alcove on the landing outside the Duchess of York’s bedroom. The door opened:

  ‘Queen Mary came out of the Duchess’s room. She who was always so upright, so alert, looked suddenly old and tired. The Duchess was lying in bed, propped up among pillows. She held out her hand to me. “I’m afraid there are going to be great changes in our lives, Crawfie,” she said … When I broke the news to Margaret and Lilibet that they were going to live in Buckingham Palace they looked at me in horror. “What!” Lilibet said. “You mean for ever?” …

  ‘I had to explain to them that when Papa came home to lunch at one o’clock he would be King of England, and they would have to curtsy to him. The Royal children from their earliest years had always curtsied to their grandparents.

  ‘“And now you mean we must do it to Papa and Mummie?” Lilibet asked. “Margaret too?”

  ‘“Margaret also,” I told her, “and try not to topple over.”

  ‘When the King returned, both little girls swept him a beautiful curtsy. I think perhaps nothing that had occurred had brought the change in his condition to him as clearly as this did. He stood for a moment touched and taken aback. Then he stooped and kissed both warmly. After this we had a hilarious lunch.’

  ‘Of course, when the Yorks became King and Queen, the family had to move to Buckingham Palace,’ Sonia Berry explained to me. ‘That was quite a wrench. Lilibet had so many toy horses – dozens of them – she kept them all neatly lined up on the landing outside her bedroom – she groomed them so beautifully – and they had to be packed up. She left her favourite horse, Ben, with me, because she didn’t want him to be packed up by the removal people. I didn’t hear from her for a week or two, but then she wrote to me.’

  The letter was dated Monday, 1 March 1937: ‘Thank you very much for keeping Ben whilst we moved into Buckingham Palace. We’re quite settled in now and we would like you to come to tea one day next week. We’ve been very busy and we could not find time for out-teas, but now we’ll be able to find some. Crawfie will ring up next week and wou
ld you please come to the Privy Purse door – that is the one next to Constitution Hill. I hope you will find it. Please do you think you could bring Ben with you. Could you bear it? I’m sure he enjoyed staying with you.’

  PHILIP & LILIBET

  Chapter Five

  ‘Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood – for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.’

  Graham Greene (1904–91), The Ministry of Fear

  ‘Dickie, this is absolutely terrible.’ As Edward VIII prepared to sign the Instrument of Abdication, his younger brother Bertie turned to their cousin Louis Mountbatten –now thirty-six and a rising star in the Admiralty, where, of course, his own father, Louis of Battenberg, had once been First Sea Lord – and shared his sense of desperation, bordering on panic. ‘I never wanted this to happen,’ he bleated. ‘I’m quite unprepared for it. David has been trained for this all his life. I’ve never even seen a State paper. I’m only a Naval Officer. It’s the only thing I know about.’