Backstairs Billy (11 page)

‘He was so proud of his job and his life,’ recalled one friend, ‘that he always had to have an audience. He would sweep along the corridors explaining in his slightly camp drawl what went on in each part of the house. The idea that he had sex with all the young men he brought back to the house is nonsense.’

When the Queen Mother was away he certainly continued to entertain but not always with the prime aim of seduction. He liked always to have people around him and he didn’t mind a bit if other servants gossiped about what he got up to so long as he didn’t actually overhear them.

It was the same with boys who stayed the night. The other servants would all know that ‘Billy had someone upstairs’ and Billy knew they knew, but he just didn’t care. After a night of
entertaining dubious young men, he would stride along the corridors the next morning ‘like the most buttoned-up confidential character you could imagine’. Hiding his hangover, he would check the appearance of each room in the morning with an almost obsessive attention to detail.

It was only later in his career that he took more risks during the daytime, but by then he was at the height of his power.

T
HE ROUTINE OF
the royal year was well established and Billy had decided by the mid-1950s that this was his job for life. He had begun to collect what some called the Queen Mother’s cast-offs and others called personal gifts. Certainly his room began to be filled – to overflowing it sometimes seemed – with small, attractive objects and signed photographs. He had acquired some expensive eighteenth-century porcelain and was also gradually acquiring a delicate Victorian tea service. Each year the Queen Mother gave him a new piece as a Christmas present and Billy had nearly completed the service by the time he left Clarence House. He regularly received other gifts from the Queen Mother, and various members of the royal family also sent him things.

Some of his colleagues were amazed that Billy accepted what were widely seen among the servants as royal cast-offs. One said:

In fact, Billy delighted in the fact that he was regularly singled out for presents of various kinds. He didn’t care that they had not been bought specially for him. He felt that he was being given special treatment, which was hardly surprising given his devotion to the Queen Mother and the fact that, apart from sex, he had no focus at all outside his employment. A colleague remarked perhaps rather unkindly, ‘If she had given him a used handkerchief he’d have added it to his collection.’

The 1950s and 1960s were perhaps Billy’s happiest time. He was gradually becoming a central figure of importance at Clarence House and with his partner Reg he was able to enjoy a measure of personal domestic life. And Reg never tried to control Billy’s sexual promiscuity. He had freedom and security, pleasure and status.

V
ARIOUS COMMENTATORS HAVE
given different dates for the start of Reg Wilcox’s relationship with Billy. By 1960 he had certainly joined the staff at Clarence House, and his route there was remarkably similar to that taken by Billy a decade
earlier. Former equerry Major Colin Burgess says that Reg started work at Buckingham Palace in 1954 as a junior footman and then moved to Clarence House in 1960.

Basia Briggs, a close friend of Billy’s for more than a decade, thought Reg began working at Clarence House as early as 1957. But, whatever the date, there is no doubt that once they were working together they operated very much as a team. Reg eventually became Deputy Steward and the Queen Mother’s Page of the Presence, both titles of course largely meaningless but providing a wonderful echo of the days when well-born children went into royal service. The poet Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, became page – at the age of eight – to one of Edward III’s sons (later the Duke of Clarence) in the early 1350s.

Reg was by all accounts very different from Billy. He was always gentle, charming and unflustered. His absolute refusal to lose his temper was legendary. It is difficult to find anyone with a bad word to say about him. But then, he was far less flamboyant and less ambitious than Billy. He was also far less concerned to be close to the centre of the royal family – he had great respect for the Queen Mother but he did not adore her in quite the way Billy did. He was content to remain in the shadow, both of the family and indeed of Billy.

But it was known almost from the outset, and certainly by 1962, that Billy and Reg were an inseparable couple. When Billy died, a signed photograph was found among his possessions. It may have been taken by a member of the royal family and it shows Billy and Reg embracing in the open countryside.

Reg was a calmer, more stable version of Billy and they hit it off from the day they met. Apparently it took Billy just a few days to get Reg into bed. But the relationship developed over a number of years and was definitely about far more than sex.

‘They just perfectly suited each other,’ recalled one friend.

And though Reg was the quiet one, he could let go occasionally. There is a remarkable photograph of him enjoying himself at a party at Clarence House with Billy in which they are dancing together, each wearing one of the Queen Mother’s hats.

The Queen Mother certainly knew about their relationship and their exploits and would make occasional quips about it. As William wandered around her sitting room one morning tending the flowers she reportedly said, ‘William, I quite understand if you want to wear my hats and other things, but do try to put them back where you found them.’

A number of Billy’s friends recall the benign influence Reg had on Billy’s character. ‘It was a sort of calming influence. Apart from anything else it made him a nicer person,’ recalled one. ‘He was bitchy far less often and I think the Queen Mother noticed the change. She preferred the slightly mellow version of her favourite servant.’

One of the things that the Queen Mother liked best about Billy was his dry wit and his ability to chatter entertainingly and seemingly endlessly about almost anything. As we have seen, she especially enjoyed it when he mimicked one or other of her more formal friends and others who sometimes came to lunch. But what the Queen Mother probably didn’t know was that Billy – and to some extent Reg – also turned their gentle, but slightly mocking laughter on the Queen Mother and the other royals when they had the chance.

Gentle mockery was a good way for servants in general to let off steam, to ease the frustrations of dealing with demanding people who had been trained from birth to consider only their own needs. One of Billy’s contemporaries at Clarence House explained:

And this attitude extended to other members of the royal family, especially the Prince of Wales, who was often referred to in private by Billy and Reg as ‘she’.

The mockery and laughter might be far harsher if it was directed at one of the equerries or advisers whom Billy really disliked. If Sir Alastair Aird, an equerry who was often uncomfortable with
Billy and Reg, had been talking down to either of them, they would say, ‘She’s been sticking her oar in and a right bitch she is too. Very hoity-toity, I’m sure.’

The difficulty for Billy and Reg was that they had learned how to dominate and perhaps even cow the other servants, but the senior advisers were a far tougher nut to crack.

A
LASTAIR AIRD
(1931–2009) was the Queen Mother’s Private Secretary during the last decade of her life, but had worked in the royal household since 1964. Like many of the grandees employed by the royal family, he disliked the idea that he should be ‘employed’ in the sense of being paid. He had the rather old-fashioned view that gentlemen did not work for money. It was as if he was afraid people might think his
relationship with the Queen Mother was in any way comparable to that of the other servants. It was part of the gentlemen-and-commons mentality that was, and is, unquestioned in royal service.

Aird’s predecessor as Private Secretary, Sir Martin Gilliat, who died in 1993, had been a far more popular figure, even with the overly sensitive Billy.

Indeed, Gilliat was so liked by the Queen Mother that rumour has it he was forbidden by her to retire. Instead, increasingly ill and infirm, he lingered on until the end.

Aird, on the other hand, was respected by the Queen Mother but never much liked; he was perhaps too stuffy and serious a character for a woman who liked her attendants to kick over the traces and leave protocol and decorum behind.

There is no doubt, however, that Aird was as diligent, efficient and just as loyal as Billy. He moved effortlessly from Assistant Private Secretary (where he checked the Queen Mother’s arrangements) to Private Secretary, where he double-checked them, as well as looking after travel arrangements, country houses and staffing.

It was no secret that Aird disliked Billy, whom he considered a rather dangerous character who was over-familiar with the Queen Mother, but Aird also had to deal with the Queen Mother’s Treasurer, Sir Ralph Anstruther, who, like Gilliat, stayed in post long after a series of strokes had effectively disabled him. Like Gilliat, Anstruther stayed on simply because the Queen Mother hated the idea of him retiring.

So, for many years the Queen Mother’s life was run by two eccentric men – Anstruther and Aird – who found it difficult to
agree on anything. For a time they refused even to speak to each other. Eventually the situation became impossible and Anstruther was eased out, despite the Queen Mother’s objections. It is said that Anstruther cursed Aird as the former left for his ancestral home in Scotland.

The clutter of what Billy sometimes referred to as the ‘old buffers’ being made to stay on was hardly ideal. No sooner had Anstruther finally retired than Royal Press Secretary Sir John Griffin suffered a series of strokes. And while all this was going on Aird briefed continually against Billy in a desperate attempt to get him sacked. But the Queen Mother would not hear of it. The situation echoes attempts by Queen Victoria’s equerries a century earlier to persuade her to dismiss John Brown. Like the Queen Mother, Victoria refused.

In response to hints that Billy really was a bit of a liability, the Queen Mother would say, ‘Oh I really think he is quite harmless, and where would poor Reginald be without his dancing partner?’

Aird had been a temporary equerry when he arrived at Clarence House in 1964. After his stints as Assistant Private Secretary he finally became Comptroller in 1974. If Aird was humourless and curmudgeonly he was at least extremely protective of the Queen Mother. He hated the constant press enquiries during her last years – ‘What do the guttersnipes want now?’ he would ask – but struggled on despite ill health and was still bringing her news during the last week of her life. He later assisted in the arrangements for her funeral.

Aird, who married one of Princess Elizabeth’s ladies in waiting,
had no experience at all of the real world and thought servants and press people were absolutely beneath him. His biggest problem – and it was a problem that afflicted many of the equerries and private secretaries with a military background – was that he was always sure he was right. If the other advisers and equerries disagreed with him it was simply because they were too stupid to see what he plainly could.

But, ironically, it may well have been his long years working in Clarence House that cost him his life. His former apartment at St James’s Palace had been lined with asbestos and he personally supervised its removal without bothering to wear protective clothing. It was soon after this that his health began to deteriorate.

Billy and his partner Reg disliked Ralph Anstruther largely because he had a terrible habit of picking people up on the way their ties were tied or their shoes were polished. It was somehow typical of a world cut off from reality and controlled by people who would have preferred to live in Victorian or Edwardian times.

The wonderfully named Major Sir Ralph Anstruther of that Ilk, 7th Baronet of Balcaskie and 12th Baronet of Anstruther, was Treasurer to the Queen Mother from 1961 to 1998.

Born in London in 1921, Anstruther succeeded his grandfather, the 6th Baronet of Balcaskie, at the age of thirteen following the death of his father when Ralph was just a month old.

In addition to his baronetcy, created in 1694, Anstruther inherited the title Hereditary Carver to the Sovereign and when, in 1980, his cousin Sir Windham Carmichael-Anstruther, 11th Baronet of Anstruther, died, Ralph became a double baronet. ‘He was
so burdened with titles that Clarence House was probably the only place that would have him,’ joked one former junior footman.

Anstruther was part of a small group of ex-army old Etonians who ran the royal household after the death of George VI. For reasons that baffle outsiders, the royal family only ever seem to appoint upper-class men to these positions.

Anstruther’s official duties ranged from administering the financial affairs of Clarence House to laying the Queen Mother’s wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday and organising the Queen Mother’s private holidays each year in France and Italy. Anstruther’s perception of the royal sensitivities could lead to delightful absurdities.

For example, the Queen Mother regularly stayed at Maurice Hennessy’s estate near Cognac in France and during the 1980s dispute between England and France over lamb exports, Anstruther went to Cognac two weeks before the Queen Mother was due to arrive to make sure that every single sheep she might conceivably lay eyes on had been removed. He also made sure a plentiful supply of the Queen Mother’s favourite Tanqueray gin was sent on to Cognac ahead of her arrival. ‘Billy poured the gin and Anstruther delivered it on time,’ was how one contemporary remembered it.

After Eton and Cambridge, Anstruther had been commissioned in the Coldstream Guards. He fought in Italy and north Africa and was awarded the Military Cross. His army career continued in Malaya where, in 1948, he was saved from drowning by one of his soldiers. After leaving the army in 1959, Anstruther joined Clarence House as equerry and Assistant Private Secretary under
Sir Martin Gilliat. Two years later he was appointed Treasurer to the Queen Mother. He was, among other things, responsible for his employer’s private finances and the funding of her household, but appears to have seen his role as keeping Coutts, the Queen Mother’s bankers, happy, while allowing the Queen Mother to spend whatever she wanted to spend.

But, if Anstruther saw the Queen Mother as beyond reproach or criticism, which he certainly did, he could be highly critical of the domestic staff – which is where he came into conflict with Billy. Many of their run-ins had more to do with petty rows over precedence and tone rather than anything of real substance. Anstruther felt that Billy treated him with a lack of respect and Billy felt Anstruther was always trying to tell him what to do. Both men knew that Billy was likely to win any dispute by getting the Queen Mother on his side, to the intense irritation of the older man.

Despite their disagreements, even Billy would have accepted that Anstruther could occasionally be a more human character than some of the other advisers. Anstruther was also, and more frequently, delightfully eccentric. He was often spotted in Piccadilly carrying shopping baskets piled high with jars of instant coffee – he was bulk buying for the royal household in person to save money. He also arranged for the Queen Mother to stay at the houses of his grand friends in an attempt to reduce the cost to her finances, which, by the 1990s, were in a parlous state.

Like Billy, Anstruther accompanied the Queen Mother all over the world – on one memorable trip to Italy he stepped out of a
Rolls-Royce in a heavy three-piece suit with rolled umbrella. The temperature was approaching 40 degrees centigrade.

Whatever his eccentricities, however, Anstruther was popular with the Queen Mother because he was from precisely the same social class. If she had a castle in Scotland, then so did he. She was his annual guest at Watten Mains, his shooting lodge in Caithness, and at Balcaskie, his castle overlooking the Firth of Forth. With her love of all things Scottish, the Queen Mother enjoyed enormously her visits to Anstruther’s ancestral home, especially as dinners at Balcaskie were always accompanied by Anstruther’s personal piper.

Anstruther was also immensely wealthy and is rumoured to have helped the Queen Mother financially on a number of occasions. His London house was on Pratt Walk, a short street of pretty Georgian houses that the Queen Mother was so concerned would be demolished, she is rumoured to have persuaded Anstruther to buy every single house on the street.

Though Billy sometimes disliked Anstruther’s fussy ways, other members of staff found him charming. This was partly because he was an unassuming and rather paternalistic man who liked to wander into the kitchens and sometimes even help with the cooking. It was common knowledge in the kitchens at Clarence House that he was an enthusiastic and skilful jam maker, who, when he stayed at his house on Pratt Walk, lived almost entirely on tinned baked beans. Word also got around about the extraordinarily considerate way he treated his elderly housekeeper at Balcaskie.

Margaret had been with him since he was a child and during
her last years she remained in the kitchen, nominally in charge and still able to prepare the food, but too infirm to serve dinner to his guests. Anstruther hated the idea of upsetting her by disturbing her routine, so when his guests were seated at the table he would shout ‘We are ready, Margaret,’ and then he would leap out of his chair, dash into the kitchen, put the food on the plates and carry it in to his guests. At the end of the meal he would shout ‘Thank you, Margaret,’ before leaping up once again and clearing the table himself.

I
F BILLY HAD
mixed feelings about Anstruther, Aird and the other advisers and equerries, his admiration for Prince Charles was unqualified. Charles always made a point of talking to Billy, and he had long ago given Billy a signed photograph of himself. Billy also had a specially inscribed photograph of Charles and Diana. He had been particularly close to Diana, who liked the fact that Billy could combine deference and loyalty with an impish sense of fun.

‘She loved his funny stories,’ recalled one friend of Diana’s, ‘especially if they involved gentle mockery of the firm.’

William liked both Charles and Diana but worried from the outset that they would not make a go of their marriage. ‘Utterly, utterly different from each other,’ he would later say, but he was a staunch defender of Diana, who he teasingly liked to point out was just as well born as Charles, who was descended to a large extent from minor German princes, whereas the Spencers had intermarried for centuries exclusively with the English nobility.

But, despite their affection and respect for Charles, Billy and Reg couldn’t help laughing at some of his enthusiasms, his ‘Queenly ways’ as they put it. Stories about Charles talking to plants, for example, made them hoot with laughter, though they only ever partly believed them. Reg would run through Charles’s more extravagant habits using his favourite epithet.