Noël Coward was at both Channon’s party and Westminster Abbey, where he found, to his surprise and pleasure, that he was placed in the fourth row, next to Beatrice Lillie. Coward recorded in his diary: ‘A gala day … The wedding was most moving and beautifully done. English tradition at its best.’ The Coward verdict was the general one. As the young couple left the Abbey, Philip bowing smartly to the King and Queen, Elizabeth dropping a low, slow curtsy to her parents, they looked like figures from a story-book: a princess with her prince from a foreign land, destined to live happily ever after. Jock Colville was one of those who, in the lead-up to the marriage, had been sceptical about its prospects. ‘As the day drew nearer,’ he confessed, ‘I began to think, as I now sincerely do, that the Princess and Philip really are in love.’ That’s what the cheering crowds thought, too, as the Abbey’s bells pealed, and the bride and groom, beaming and waving, were taken back to Buckingham Palace in the Glass Coach.
At the Palace, Baron took the official photographs and luncheon was served. It was billed as an ‘austerity’ wedding breakfast, a modest affair for just 150 guests: family, close friends, and courtiers. Crawfie was excited to be included:
‘It was a gay and merry lunch party. The tables were decorated with smilax and white carnations, and at each of our places there was a little bunch of white heather, sent down from Balmoral. The famous gold-plate and the scarlet-coated footmen gave a fairy-tale atmosphere to it all, and I was in a veritable dream. The skirl of the bagpipes warmed the hearts of those of us who came from north of the Tweed. The French gentleman seated next to me, however, winced from time to time, but he bore it with fortitude.
‘There were no long speeches. The King hates them and has always dreaded having to make one. He was brevity itself. The bridegroom, another sailor, had just as little to say. It was a very large room and there were no microphones, so few people even heard the little that was said. The French gentleman kept hissing in my ear, “Qu’est ce qu’il dit?” I was unable to help him.’
The younger members of the family, and their nannies, had a quiet lunch and ‘a nice lie down’ in another part of the Palace. According to Crawfie, the page boys, Prince William and Prince Michael (the six- and five-year-old sons of Lilibet’s uncles, the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent), were ‘thoroughly overtired’, ‘grew peevish’, and almost came to blows: ‘Shocked nannies enveloped them in those vast white shawls royal nannies always seem to have handy. Like sheltering wings! They were borne off, but not before they had made ceremonious bows to the King and Queen. In royal circles manners are taught young.’
The little ones reappeared to see the bride and groom set off on their honeymoon. Mr Hartnell was especially proud of his going-away outfit for the young Princess: a love-in-the-mist crêpe dress with blue velvet cloth travelling coat, and a blue felt bonnet trimmed with ostrich pompom and curved quills in two tones of blue. It needed to be warm because the November weather was bitter and, for the benefit of the crowds, the newly-weds were to travel from Buckingham Palace to Waterloo Station (en route for Winchester and their first stop at Broadlands, the Mountbattens’ country house in Hampshire) in an unheated open landau. (It was foggy, but at least it wasn’t raining and, under their lap rugs, discreet comfort was provided by hot-water bottles and Lilibet’s favourite corgi, Susan.) As, hand in hand, the newly-weds came down the Palace staircase, the family, cheering, gathered round and threw rose petals. As the couple’s carriage trundled through the Palace gates, the King and Queen stood watching, holding hands. Princess Alice kept waving until the carriage disappeared from view. In some ways, perhaps it was like any cottager’s wedding. All three proud parents had tears in their eyes.
A few days later, back in Athens, Alice wrote to Philip: ‘How wonderfully everything went off & I was so comforted to see the truly happy expression on your face and to feel your decision was right from every point of view.’ And, from London, the King wrote, touchingly, to Lilibet, as she embarked on married life and he contemplated a future without his elder daughter at his side:
I was so proud of you & thrilled at having you so close to me on our long walk in Westminster Abbey, but when I handed your hand to the Archbishop I felt that I had lost something very precious. You were so calm and composed during the Service & said your words with such conviction, that I knew everything was all right.
I am so glad you wrote & told Mummy that you think the long wait before your engagement & the long time before the wedding was for the best. I was rather afraid that you thought I was being hard-hearted about it. I was so anxious for you to come to South Africa as you knew. Our family, us four, the ‘Royal Family’ must remain together with additions of course at suitable moments!! I have watched you grow up all these years with pride under the skilful direction of Mummy, who as you know is the most marvellous person in the World in my eyes, & I can, I know, always count on you, & now Philip, to help us in our work. Your leaving us has left a great blank in our lives but do remember that your old home is still yours & do come back to it as much & as often as possible. I can see that you are sublimely happy with Philip which is right but don’t forget us is the wish of
Your ever loving & devoted
Papa
The newly-weds began their honeymoon at Broadlands, by the River Test and not far from Winchester. They were not alone. As well as Lilibet’s corgi, the young lovers’ entourage included a personal detective, a personal footman, Bobo MacDonald (the Princess’s nursery maid turned dresser and confidante), and John Dean (the Mountbattens’ former London butler, now Prince Philip’s valet). John Dean and Cyril Dickman, the footman, looked after the luggage: the bride had fifteen cases, the groom just two. The detective did his best to keep the public at bay. At Winchester Station there were crowds waiting to cheer the young couple. At Broadlands there were more sightseers, gawping at the gates. Despite the cold, eager rubberneckers (loyal subjects as well as representatives of the press) hovered, day and night, at the edge of the estate hoping for glimpses of the happy pair. On Sunday morning, when the couple went together to a service at nearby Romsey Abbey, frantic royal-watchers scrambled across tombstones to get a better view. Several came equipped with chairs and stepladders to enable them to peer through the windows into the Abbey itself. For the royal newly-weds, life in the goldfish bowl had begun.
A few years ago, when visiting Broadlands as a tourist,61 I recollect there was some sniggering among our party when we were shown the bedroom in which Elizabeth and Philip spent their wedding night. A fellow visitor reached over the security cordon to touch the nuptial bed and announced happily, ‘The Queen is very keen on sex, you know.’ I didn’t know, but I was happy to hear it. And I have heard it said by others, quite often, since. I recall Lord Longford telling me, ‘The Queen enjoys sex, as I do. People who ride tend to. It’s very healthy.’ Lord Longford was a Knight of the Garter, a God-fearing man, wholly honest and utterly devoted to Her Majesty, but I do wonder: how did he know? Sarah Bradford, in her comprehensive and compelling biography of the Queen, states boldly, but without giving us any authority for the assertion: ‘Elizabeth was physically passionate.’ I don’t doubt it, but I do ask myself: who told Miss Bradford? I have not raised the matter with Her Majesty, and I would be very surprised if anyone else has either.
Thanks to servants’ tittle-tattle (reliable in this instance) we do know that Prince Philip, in the early days of his marriage, did not wear pyjamas. We are told, too, by Patricia Mountbatten, that, once, when she remarked on Lilibet’s flawless complexion, Philip laughed and said to his cousin, beaming, ‘Yes, and she’s like that all over.’ One of David Milford Haven’s friends told me that David had told her that Philip had told him that Lilibet was ‘very keen on sex, quite a goer’. Well, for both their sakes, let us hope so – but let us not pretend that we know. I can just about visualise Prince Philip giving a nod and a grin to David Milford Haven in response to a jocular enquiry on the subject, but I do not think he was the sort of man who would �
�� for a moment – discuss the most intimate aspects of his married life with his men friends.
What happened between the sheets on the night of the royal wedding I cannot tell you. I was not there. However, I can report, because there were witnesses, that the evening at Broadlands was not especially peaceful. The telephone rang incessantly; the staff at Broadlands (in the absence of the Mountbattens in India) were not as well organised as they might have been; Bobo and Cyril and John were exhausted. The day had been a long one. The bridal couple retired as soon as supper was over: they looked weary but very happy, Lilibet especially so.
By several accounts, the bride and groom certainly had a jollier evening in Hampshire than the groomsman and bridesmaids had in London. Elizabeth’s cousin, Margaret Rhodes, was one of the bridesmaids and she told me, ‘We didn’t have a girls’ party before the wedding, but, on the day itself, we did have the traditional evening where the best man entertains the bridesmaids. It was not a success. The best man was Milford Haven, not my favourite man. Let’s not talk about him.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
Mrs Rhodes assumed a very pinched look and said, rapidly, stubbing out her cigarette, ‘We went to somewhere like Quaglino’s and he was much keener on some dolly bird at the other table than he was on us. He was not my idea of a gentleman.’
Milford Haven’s girlfriend at the time, Robin Dalton, fears that she was probably the ‘dolly bird at the other table’. (In her memoir of the wedding day, another of the bridesmaids, Pamela Hicks, describes her as ‘a dazzling girl at the next table’.) Looking anything but pinched, Robin Dalton told me, smiling into her Bloody Mary, ‘I think the party was at Ciro’s in Orange Street, not Quaglino’s. I do remember Princess Margaret getting cross because David was spending too much time with me. I wasn’t a bridesmaid, of course. I was only at the wedding because David got me a ticket. I sat at the back with the servants. I had been married, albeit briefly. I was a divorcee, so not a suitable bride for a descendant of Queen Victoria. I couldn’t accompany him into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, even had I wished to. I loved David. He was so sweet and we had five happy years together. Then, understandably, and very suddenly, David got married to someone else, through the mistaken idea that she was very rich, leaving me with his dog, his car, and both of us in tears.62 As a wedding present, I think Philip gave David a pair of cufflinks Philip had been given by the Duke of Gloucester.’
As best man, David gave Philip and Lilibet a present that was both practical and sought after: the most up-to-date (and expensive) record player on the market, the new Deccola. According to Robin Dalton, ‘David and Philip had very little money. They survived on their naval pay, and £5 a week each from Lord Mountbatten. One night at a dinner party, I sat next to a businessman who proudly told me he was manufacturing the Deccola. By the end of dinner, I had procured free for David the very first one off the production line and the manufacturer had procured valuable publicity because all the wedding presents went on prominent display.’
Philip and Elizabeth received around fifteen hundred wedding gifts, ranging from five hundred cases of tinned pineapple from the Government of Queensland to a turkey from a woman in Brooklyn who had heard that ‘they have nothing to eat in England’. ‘The people of Kenya’ generously gave the royal couple a hunting lodge; the people of Britain generously sent Lilibet dozens of pairs of nylon stockings. The Aga Khan pleased Elizabeth with his present of a thoroughbred filly; Mahatma Gandhi impressed Philip with his gift of a personally woven piece of cloth, intended as a cover for a tea tray. As she toured the exhibition of the presents displayed at St James’s Palace, Queen Mary, not an admirer of Gandhi, decided the material was intended as a loincloth and was not amused. Philip protested, but the old Queen did not want to be enlightened. She muttered, ‘What a horrible thing’ and, lips pursed, moved quickly on.
One gift that seems not to have been put on display was that of a tiny gold bicycle, apparently given to Prince Philip by a French friend of his and David’s, a hotelier from the south of France called Félix. During the summer before the wedding Philip joined David at Nada’s holiday home above Cannes. Every day during the holiday (so the story goes), Philip would borrow a bicycle from Félix to ride over to the home of a certain married lady … Félix thought the little gold bicycle would be an amusing souvenir of the bachelor prince’s last summer holiday as a ‘free man’.
After five nights at Broadlands, the honeymooners returned briefly to London for lunch at Buckingham Palace with the King and Queen before setting off by train for Scotland and a further two weeks of honeymoon at Birkhall on the Balmoral Estate.63 Here the young couple had a quieter, cosier, more secluded time. They went for walks in the snow. They warmed themselves by roaring log fires. They got to know each other. They had time alone – or, as much time alone as you get when there are servants always hovering. It is the privilege of princes to be waited on, but the price they pay for that privilege is a heavy one: someone is always close at hand, waiting, watching, listening, standing in silent judgement; sometimes reporting this and that to others in the servants’ hall; occasionally reporting that and this to the world at large. Marion Crawford (governess), John Dean (valet), Paul Burrell (footman turned butler), in their way, in their day, showed real dedication as royal servants. They served their mistresses and masters with devotion, and then repaid the royal trust placed in them by spilling the beans in best-selling books, protesting their continuing loyalty all the way to the bank.
Philip had had an odd childhood, but, at boarding school and in the Royal Navy, he had, to some extent, lived in ‘the real world’, fending for himself. Lilibet, on the other hand, was a girl, born before the era of female emancipation, brought up as a princess, living in palaces and castles, surrounded by servants. She, more than Philip, was wholly accustomed to being fed, and bathed, and dressed, and watched over, by others. At Broadlands, at Birkhall, at Buckingham Palace, the entourage was always there: the detective, the driver, the footman, the valet, and Bobo. Especially Bobo.
Margaret MacDonald was the daughter of an Inverness railway worker. As a child she lived by a railway line in a small railway company cottage. At twenty-two – in 1926, when Princess Elizabeth was born – she joined the Yorks’ household as nursery maid and assistant to Alah Knight, the royal nanny. When Princess Margaret Rose was born in 1930, Alah, naturally, concentrated on the new baby, and Bobo (as Miss MacDonald was soon nicknamed) began what would become a lifetime of single-minded devotion to Princess Elizabeth. When Lilibet was a little girl, Bobo shared her bedroom. When the Princess grew up, Bobo became her dresser, confidante, and friend. John Dean described her as ‘a small, smart, rather peremptory Scotswoman’ whose years with the royal household ‘seemed to be imprinted on her face and stature’. She was formal – ‘We have to keep a certain standing in the house’ was her line – and seemed formidable to some, but, according to Dean, she was ‘quite friendly when thawed’. She was a redhead when young. Dean reported, ‘She was a lovely dancer and very good fun, with a nice sense of humour, but even when we were staying in some village, and were out socially in the local pub, she always addressed me as “Mr Dean”. She always referred to Princess Elizabeth as “My Little Lady”.’ In private, with the Princess, Bobo would call her mistress “Lilibet”, one of the very few outside the royal family to feel comfortable doing so. (Playfully, Princess Margaret occasionally called her sister “Lil”.)’
Officially, Bobo was simply Elizabeth’s dresser. She looked after the royal wardrobe. She dealt with the royal dressmakers: Mr Hartnell, Hardy Amies, and, later, Ian Thomas. She kept them in their place, both by the manner with which she handled them and by not allowing any one of them complete control over Elizabeth’s appearance. ‘You’re here for the clothes not the accessories,’ she would tell the designers, firmly. Bobo was a personally disciplined, conservatively inclined, frugally minded Scotswoman: she saw no virtue in Lilibet being kitted out with expensive handbags. Officially, Bobo l
ooked after Elizabeth’s wardrobe. Unofficially, Bobo looked after Elizabeth. Her devotion was absolute, her commitment total, her access almost unlimited. By the time she died, in 1993, aged eighty-nine, she had become a legendary figure in royal circles: the one person to whom the Queen always listened.
For sixty-seven years, Bobo lived for Elizabeth. She loved her, protected her, respected her. She was wholly loyal and ever-present. I imagine that at times she must have got on Prince Philip’s nerves. Mike Parker said to me, ‘Let’s face it, he had a hell of a time with her. Miss MacDonald was always there. And in charge. Princess Elizabeth was Bobo’s baby and that was that. But I don’t think he ever complained. Anyway, he didn’t to me. He didn’t say a word. Not a word. He just put up with it.’ Patricia Mountbatten told me that Bobo would prepare Lilibet’s bath and then potter in and out of the bathroom while she was having it, effectively keeping Philip at bay: ‘He couldn’t share the bathroom with his wife, because Bobo saw it as her territory and I don’t think Princess Elizabeth had the heart to say, “Bobo, please go away.” I think Philip must have found it quite irritating.’
After two weeks at Birkhall, the honeymoon was over and Elizabeth and Philip (and the detective and the dresser, the footman and the valet, the seventeen cases, and the corgi) returned to London in time for the King’s fifty-second birthday on 14 December. ‘The Edinburghs are back from Scotland,’ Jock Colville noted in his diary. ‘She was looking very happy, and, as a result of three weeks of matrimony, suddenly a woman instead of a girl. He also seemed happy, but a shade querulous, which is, I think, in his character.’
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 24
