Backstairs Billy (13 page)
Authors: Tom Quinn
Well before lunch Billy would start what the other servants saw as his ‘theatricals’. It is a word that finds an echo in almost everyone’s memories of Billy at work, and indeed at play. He was intensely theatrical, a director
manqué
. His stage was Clarence House and his actors the royals, their advisers and friends. Luncheon, being no exception, was a carefully stage-managed theatrical event.
It had to be so, because it was something the Queen Mother loved. ‘In many ways – compared at least to the lives of ordinary people – her life was rather empty,’ remembered one former footman.
Her luncheon parties were vital to her good temper – if nothing was planned I think she panicked a little at the prospect of an otherwise empty day stretching ahead of her. If you think about it you can see why – she couldn’t go shopping or to the library; couldn’t go out for a stroll round the block, or stop at a little café for a cup of coffee. All these ordinary things were entirely closed to her. The lunches were her lifeline.
Curiously, although the food was always very good at these lunches, there was a sense that it was not important, at least not to the Queen Mother. Indeed, the royal family has long had a curious attitude to food, which combines frugality with extravagance in a unique way. It has often been observed that members of the royal
family barely touch a thing at official dinners. The Queen Mother ate little at her own luncheons and famously once said she only liked lettuce because she could hide her food underneath it.
Various commentators have noted the royals’ passion for eggs and the Queen Mother was no exception. She was particularly fond of a dish known as Oeufs Drumkilbo, a rich mix based on eggs and mayonnaise and named after the next estate along the river from Balmoral. For pudding she enjoyed After Eight ice-cream, an extraordinary concoction involving, among other ingredients, two boxes of After Eight mints and six egg yolks. Another favourite was Soufflé Rothschild, a dish requiring large quantities of eggs and, originally, real gold leaf.
The food, however, was always just a means to an end – it was company and conversation the Queen Mother really relished. As she grew older and lunch parties became a less frequent occurrence she relied increasingly on Billy to amuse her.
She knew that when Billy was in charge, any luncheon party was bound to go well. She expected her guests to entertain her, which is why she hated it if they sat tongue tied and too awkward to begin to talk. If they were amusing, they were sure to be invited again. She must have realised that if her guests were reluctant to speak it was because they were nervous about saying the wrong thing in her presence, but Billy was the solution to all forms of nerves and awkwardness.
He would first check the invitation list to see who was invited to lunch or, less often, dinner, and then work out the best way to place the guests at the table to make them feel comfortable.
Sometimes the Queen Mother would insist that a particular person should sit next to her. When the guests arrived, Billy moved swiftly into action. As one friend remembered, Billy was ‘the last word in meeting and greeting’.
After twenty or thirty years in the job, Billy sounded, as we have seen, almost as aristocratic as the Queen Mother herself. He was also immensely confident in his abilities. He employed little tricks to make the guests feel flattered, that their interests or importance had been taken into account. If a Russian princess happened to be on a luncheon list Billy made sure that a genuine Fabergé egg – carefully selected from the royal collection – was placed in front of her place setting. If a painter had been invited, a small sketch from the royal collection might be added to the place setting; for an actor, a rare theatre programme.
According to Billy, careful preparation was absolutely vital if these lunches were to go well. He was under a great deal of pressure in this respect because although she felt he was incomparably good at this sort of thing, the Queen Mother would be cross – and would certainly blame Billy – if things did not go well.
Once the table was ready and the room had been filled with vases of flowers, Billy would prepare to meet the guests in the hall where they entered Clarence House before escorting them to the dining room.
Once in the dining room the guests might be surprised to discover that the Queen Mother was absent. She always waited until Billy had dispensed a few drinks before entering – members of the royal family always arrive last and leave first.
Billy was always very careful with the drinks. The wine cellar at Clarence House was very much his domain, and over the years he learned a great deal about both it and its contents. He made sure that the royal household drank only the finest wines and they were ordered from Britain’s oldest wine importer – Berry Bros & Rudd in nearby St James’s. The firm, which has been trading from the same premises since the late seventeenth century, is run today by the eighth generation of the same family. Anyone who has visited the shop will immediately appreciate how and why it delighted Billy. The shop fittings appear to have been unchanged for centuries and the assistants have an air of patrician gravitas more in keeping with the sellers of expensive pictures or antiques.
Armed with numerous bottles of irresistible wine, as well as the Queen Mother’s favourite Tanqueray gin and Dubonnet, Billy then poured and encouraged, encouraged and poured. We’ve seen how he occasionally spiked someone’s drink but Billy had another tactic when someone asked for water or a non-alcoholic drink. He would gravely incline his head, turn on his heel and then ignore the request unless it was repeated – several times.
One guest recalled asking for water and being given an almost savage look by Billy, who responded by giving him a glass of water
and
a glass of wine. Later during lunch itself this particular guest noticed that his glass of water was quickly removed by Billy, even though he had hardly touched it, and meanwhile his wine glass was carefully re-filled even after the tiniest sip.
When the Queen Mother finally entered – Billy having magnificently opened the relevant door – everyone would be ‘significantly
under the influence’, as one lunch guest recalled. With the Queen Mother seated, conversation – rather subdued and over-cautious – would begin.
Inevitably the Queen Mother was obliged by the rules of etiquette to say something relatively bland. ‘She really did ask me if I had come far,’ recalled one luncheon guest. But precisely because she had to make trite comments, she hated it if her guests responded too much in kind. She was once asked by a luncheon guest how old the corgis were. She could barely supply a civil answer and complained bitterly that she had been ‘reduced to discussing the age of the dogs’.
Billy knew that the only way to get the Queen Mother’s guests to really relax and talk in the light-hearted way they would talk at any other party – which is what the Queen Mother really wanted – was to make them tipsy, hence his legendary manipulation of the bottle.
Despite Billy’s attempts to control all aspects of the Queen Mother’s social schedule, there were times when events got away from even him. On one widely publicised occasion after lunch he had to stand and bite his lip while a TV presenter, the late Desmond Wilcox, pushed a microphone into the Queen Mother’s face and asked a series of questions for which she had been given no warning. It was a huge breach of etiquette and would have left Billy incensed, but he knew it was not his place to intervene. The nightmare ended when the Queen Mother simply smiled, turned on her heel and left the room – without answering Wilcox’s questions.
And if there happened to be no lunch on a particular day her consumption of gin might increase significantly, but she was never out of control. She liked to be relatively sober at her luncheon parties because she enjoyed seeing her guests become less inhibited as they gradually became more inebriated. Since she drank pretty much the same amount every day – ‘throughout her life she drank almost continually,’ recalled one adviser – she knew precisely how much to drink to make sure she was always slightly less inebriated than her guests.
‘We got to the stage’, one guest remembered, ‘at which we were vying with each other to say increasingly risqué things that might amuse the Queen Mother. Every bit of the table’s conversation was directed at her even though we vaguely pretended at times that we were really talking to each other.’
I remember saying about a well-known actor that he was a complete arse and then freezing in horror for perhaps half a second. But then I noticed the Queen Mother was smiling broadly and she said, ‘Did you say complete?’ The whole table was visibly delighted – and probably relieved that I hadn’t been chucked out on my ear.
It was like a medieval court where we competed to be witty so she would hear and approve and perhaps invite us again. We knew that bores were never given a second chance. So a very odd atmosphere prevailed that was slightly artificial. It may have been different for others, I don’t know, but for me it seemed very eccentric. The Queen Mother herself said very little – the result of a lifetime’s habit of reticence, I think – but she felt she was part of something more relaxed,
more expansive, if people around her did what she could not easily do herself and told funny, even ribald stories.
Another guest, one of a long line of painters, commissioned at various times to produce the Queen Mother’s portrait, explained how she liked these parties to go:
She wanted above all to be entertained and to escape for a while the restrictions that are inevitable if you are a very prominent member of the royal family. I remember telling a story that I would not have dared to tell if I had been sober. I was telling my neighbour, but as I was placed just two from the Queen Mother herself I knew she would be listening.
I was explaining that an old Etonian friend of mine, who was a very senior director of an old banking firm in the City – a banking firm that still retained many of the traditions of its seventeenth-century founders – had told me how, one night, he had had to return to the office to collect some papers he had forgotten and needed to work on at the weekend. Having reached his floor – and remember this was a bank – he found a large, very tough-looking skinhead asleep on the floor behind his desk. He was about to call security when in a moment of madness he decided to deal with the situation himself. He prodded the sleeping skinhead, who was wearing huge vicious-looking boots and was covered in tattoos. The young tough woke up and in order to cow him the banker asked what the hell he thought he was doing. He followed this with a string of expletives and was astonished when, in a highly educated voice, the skinhead replied,
‘How dare you speak to me in that fashion. There is no need to use such foul language.’ He then hopped up on to the window ledge, opened the window and disappeared across the rooftops. The Queen Mother was delighted by this story and seemed disappointed that I was unable to tell her more. But that’s how she saw her lunches: they were a way to get people to talk about the real world outside her gilded cage.
At a pre-arranged and very subtle signal, the Queen Mother would indicate that luncheon was over. Billy would appear behind her chair, easing it out from under her. She would stand up and move towards the door where Billy would already be waiting to open it. The Queen Mother would wave airily and tell everyone to carry on as long as they liked. Billy would see her out of the room before returning to ensure the guests were given a short time to collect their thoughts (and their things) before being politely told it was time to go. They would then be escorted out of the building.
Having supervised the clearing of the table and restored order to the dining room, Billy would have some time to himself. Though he might be called to the Queen Mother’s private rooms at any point in the afternoon and evening – it rarely occurred to her that he might be tired or need some time off.
Occasionally, after these luncheons, Billy would spend a short while with the Queen Mother going over the details of the lunch. Sometimes she would ask Billy to put a record on and insist that he waltz around her private sitting room. Billy always claimed she could waltz him off his feet even into her eighties, and she
liked to make jokes about their dancing together. She would say ‘We really are a sprightly pair of old girls, aren’t we, William?’ or ‘Shall we dance out into the Mall? Wouldn’t that surprise everyone? One’s relatives would not be amused.’
The truth is that the Queen Mother liked to blur the distinction between William her page and William her friend, which is why if no lunch had been organised she would invite William to lunch with her tête à tête. On another occasion after a particularly successful evening party, Billy accompanied the Queen Mother to one of the sitting rooms where records were played and in a remarkable moment of spontaneity the Queen Mother insisted Billy sit next to her.
But if the Queen Mother went to lie down after lunch Billy might help himself to bottles of unfinished (and frequently unopened) wine and head off slightly unsteadily to his rooms (and later to Gate Lodge), where he would sleep for an hour or two. There was nothing irregular about his taking wine – it was accepted that he would do so and the last person who might have objected was the Queen Mother.
