The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (17 page)

Maintaining the Royal Collection is incredibly expensive – last year it cost about £4 million.

You can’t give the finest works of art in the world to just anyone to clean and restore, so everyone we employ is at the very top of the tree. We have the painting conservation team based at Windsor, the paper conservation team, also at Windsor, which looks after books, drawings, watercolours and prints; the furniture conservation workshops in London, which looks after furniture, ceramics, metalwork, arms and armour and gilt-wood. We do all of that in-house. The Forth Bridge has nothing on a collection like this. We’re dealing with a collection that’s getting older by the day, canvas gets weaker, paint gets thinner, gilt-wood gets chipped, joints get weak, veneer falls off, porcelain chips; it all requires constant maintenance. What sets this collection apart from a museum collection is it is very much a collection in use. The Queen likes to use eighteenth-century services for decorating tables for state visits. In a museum these would be behind glass all the time and never touched. This adds a completely different dimension to it; it’s continuously in use. Paintings cannot be under microclimatic conditions at all times, as in a museum, and part of our job is to make sure things are kept in as good conditions as possible.

That these treasures are not kept in museums is good news for the people who visit Buckingham Palace, either as guests or paying visitors. They see breathtaking art and a building steeped in history yet one still inhabited by the most famous family in the world. However, the boast that the Royal Collection is entirely independent and self-financing comes at a price. They have stepped irrevocably into the grubby world of
retailing, and any shortcomings by Royal Collection Enterprises staff in dealing with suppliers – not unknown although inevitable, perhaps, in such a competitive and price-sensitive business – become a talking point and, because of the brand, it is the monarchy’s name that suffers.

Early in the 1990s a middle-aged Californian cowboy with an extraordinary talent for handling horses found himself on the verge of bankruptcy. He had worked with horses all his life. At the age of eight he was a Hollywood stunt rider and doubled for Elizabeth Taylor in
National Velvet.
He had bred, trained and ridden horses. He had produced champions but now he was
persona non grata
in the horse world because he had had the temerity to suggest that it was unnecessary to hurt and frighten horses in order to get them to do what you wanted.

His father was a trainer who had hurt and frightened horses; he had also hurt and frightened his son. He had endeavoured to break the child with the same brutality as he broke his young horses. By the age of twelve the boy had seventy-one broken bones in his body. As a result, he grew up with a passionate belief that there was another, kinder, way to treat both horses and human beings.

His name was Monty Roberts; he was the real life ‘Horse Whisperer’. Now nearly seventy, his methods for starting horses have been adopted by forward-thinking, enlightened people all over the world, his books on the subject have sold in their millions and he no longer has to worry that he might be forced to sell the farm.

‘The person who did all of this was Her Majesty,’ he says.

She was the one who found me and believed in me and she said, ‘There must be a book.’ And she didn’t let it go.

Sheik Mohammed could have endorsed it, but he wanted it for his horses, not for anyone else’s, Walter Jacobs wanted it to be exclusive to Germany, Ronald Reagan said, ‘You just keep that under your hat, we’ll have some real nice racehorses’, and Her Majesty’s first words were ‘We’ve got to get this out to the rest of the world’. She’s the only one who came at it with a generous attitude. Her primary motivation I think is it’s a better way, a kinder way, and we’ve been making a lot of mistakes. I also believe in the time she has watched and worked with me that she believes there will be better racehorses and horses and carriage and Household Cavalry horses as a result.

The Queen read about Monty’s methods in a magazine when she was staying with horseracing friends in Kentucky. She was intrigued. A few days later she saw a second magazine with another piece about Monty. As soon as she arrived home she asked one of her trainers his opinion. ‘It’s a load of rubbish,’ he said. She asked Sir John Miller, as Crown Equerry responsible for all the Queen’s non-racing horses, what he thought. ‘Rubbish,’ he echoed. That was the standard view at the time. For centuries man had been dominating horses by inflicting pain on them if they didn’t obey him. Monty’s methods were revolutionary: he used no violence; he doesn’t even raise his voice. He uses the language that horses use in the herd.

The Queen persisted. Knowing he had a friend in California, she bought Sir John Miller an airline ticket and asked him to go and visit the friend and check out this Monty Roberts. ‘If
you still think it’s rubbish when you’ve watched him, fine; but if you think there’s anything to it, I want to see him.’ The friend lived six miles from Monty and knew him well; and when he said he was bringing the Queen of England’s Crown Equerry to see him, Monty was convinced it was a prank.

‘Sir John got out of the car and he looked like something out of Central Casting,’ says Monty, a big man, gentle, generous and amused. ‘Tweeds, waistcoat, white moustache, cane, perfect English accent. He watched me do several horses, got back to the house and said, “What are you doing on 1 April? I think the Queen will want you to come to Windsor Castle.” Ten days later I had an invitation.’

The first of April fell during a very busy week for the Queen. The Russian President Gorbachev and his wife Raisa were in Britain on a state visit and they were due to have lunch at Windsor Castle the day Monty arrived. He was told he might not get to meet her at all, that she might only be able to watch his demonstration on video. Then he was told he would meet her; she would watch him for an hour in the morning before her lunch. He was nervous. At home he trained his horses behind a wooden fence; no good if people were to see, so he found a metal cage, which they erected inside the schooling ring at Windsor. The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen Mother all came to watch that first morning, as did the Queen’s stud groom, Terry Pembury, and a number of female grooms. The Queen had selected twenty-three young horses with which to test him, including a filly belonging to the Queen Mother. Apart from the Queen, who had an open mind, the audience was deeply sceptical.

The morning went well but at lunch he couldn’t help noticing Sir John Miller and the grooms speaking into walkie-talkies out of earshot. Exactly why became clear as they got up to leave. The girls thought he had in some way hypnotized the
horses he had handled that morning. ‘Her Majesty’s very upset with what these girls are saying,’ said Sir John, ‘and she has sent a truck off to Hampton Court to get two three-year-old piebald stallions that are due to be drum horses some day.’

‘These little babies were Suffolks, huge and raw as can be,’ says Monty.

They weighed a ton. The two of them were in this little horsebox, there is steam pouring out of it and the truck is rocking from side to side, and they bring one of them out and bring him into the cage. There’s a bigger audience in the afternoon, so Sir John goes into the cage to introduce me, and the horse runs him out of it. So he introduces me from the outside. I go in, and the other horse outside is screaming at the one inside and I think, I’ve just got to block everything out. You can’t do my job when your adrenalin level is going through the roof; it was nothing to do with the horses, but with all those people there. So I blocked it all out like never before, and knew immediately he was going to be okay. In thirty minutes I had a rider on him and had him trotting around. The Queen was jubilant; the girls were sliding out and going back to the stables not saying a word. I said, ‘No, no, there’s another one outside.’ They said, no they had things to do, and the Queen knew they did but she wanted them to watch, so they did, and the second horse was just as good.

The Queen was profoundly affected by what she had seen and had plenty of questions about why the horses had behaved as they had. The Duke of Edinburgh was predictably curt – ‘I’ve got a whole lot of ponies out there that I don’t think you could do that with’ (during the next few days he was proved wrong) – but the Queen Mother, who had great difficulty
walking at that time and was leaning heavily on two of her staff, had tears streaming down her face. ‘That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ she said, stiffening only slightly when, without thinking, Monty put a pair of comforting arms around her.

The Queen watched him work with her horses all day, every day of that week – Monty is convinced she told her Private Secretary to clear her diary. On one day the editor of
Horse and Hound
, Michael Clayton, came to watch and asked the Queen whether he could write an article about Monty’s method and use a photograph of her to accompany it; she agreed. ‘There was the door-opening of all time,’ says Monty. And at the end of the week she lent him a car – a Ford Scorpio, armour-plated underneath – and sent him off to give demonstrations in twenty-one cities around the country, telling Sir John Miller to set the cage up, get some horses for Monty to work on and organize everything. ‘I want the people of Great Britain to know about this,’ she said. ‘Her Majesty was my first tour guide,’ says Monty, grinning.

Since that week Monty Roberts has been a guest at Windsor Castle on more than twenty occasions. He stays in South Lodge or with Sir Richard Johns, governor of Windsor Castle, and his wife in the Norman Tower, but always sees the Queen for a private lunch or tea, and she is always fascinated to hear what he has been doing. All her horses are now started and trained using his methods; so too are the Duke of Edinburgh’s ponies and driving horses, and he has been called in by the Household Cavalry on innumerable occasions. They normally take ten years to train a horse to take the lead; he had one ready within six months.

The Queen’s patronage has been fantastic but it is Monty’s books that have spread the word worldwide. ‘And that was all Her Majesty’s idea too. “You know there must be a book,”
she said. I told her I wasn’t a book-writing type so I said couldn’t we just do some more videos. “No,” she said. “Videos go away, they are not for ever; the written word is for ever. There must be a book.”’

Monty looks, sounds and dresses like the Californian cowboy he is and has, I suspect, spent more time on the back of a horse than he ever did in a classroom. The idea of a book was daunting and so he quietly forgot about it and hoped the Queen would, too. That autumn she asked him back to do some teach-ins with
Horse and Hound.

Her first words when I saw her were, ‘How are we coming on with the book?’ I knew then that there was going to be a book, I didn’t know how, but I knew she wasn’t going to let it go. And so next time I brought her some pages and she was shocked at how badly I wrote. I thought it was going to be a How To book. She was very kind, she read them and did not throw them at me and say they’re rubbish, but her body language did and she said, ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t tell a How To story of a discipline that no one’s ever heard of before until you know the person and how they came to these conclusions, so you must give us a more autobiographical look at this and then maybe do the How To bit.’ So I was sent away with my homework under my arm again, totally lacking in any talent.

After the Queen had read the next attempt she said, ‘I don’t think you should write a book. Get one of these little tape recorders and tell your story, because when you tell me your story I understand it; when you start to write it becomes very stiff and it isn’t you, it isn’t in your voice.’ So Monty went back to the drawing board.

The Man Who Listens to Horses
was published in 1996 in
14 countries and sold over three million copies. Monty Roberts has now written five books – one of them describing how his method of handling horses can be translated into the human world – and it is currently being practised with remarkable success at a failing junior school in Birmingham that was on the verge of being shut down.

Monty had just been visiting the school the day I met him. ‘It’s amazing what’s going on there,’ he says. ‘My methods have been moving into the human field for thirty-five years now but it was all behind closed doors until Her Majesty made the doors open. They now want me to go to Australia and free the aboriginal people and help them to get violence and drugs out of their lives.’

It is not surprising that the Queen should have been so taken with Monty Roberts and his methods. He is the most charismatic man and she has always adored horses; they have been her escape from the unreal world in which she lives and they respond well to her. As Sir John Miller says, ‘She has an ability to get horses psychologically attuned to what she wants, and then to persuade them to enjoy it.’

Horses are the Queen’s one indulgence, the one interest in her life on which she spends serious money. She has ridden since she was a small child, having been introduced to racing by her grandfather, King George V, who liked nothing more than to take his young granddaughter to visit the royal stud at Sandringham. It was he who gave her her first pony when she was six. He also loved dogs, the Queen’s other great love in life. She breeds and trains gun dogs – all registered at the Kennel Club with the prefix Sandringham, which is where she has kennels. Her grandfather bred Labradors and reintroduced the Clumber breed of spaniels (particularly good for rough shooting) which were originally started by Edward VII. Edward VII was an avid breeder, he built kennels at Sandringham designed to house up to 100 dogs – which Edward VIII during his short reign closed down. George VI re-established them with Labradors and the Queen has continued the breeding programme, although in 1968 she demolished the old kennels and built a smaller complex. The breeding and training of gun dogs is one of her great passions, and as with horses, something about which she is a genuine expert. She has produced many Field Trial Champions over the years and Sandringham dogs are recognized in shooting circles as one of the top of the breed in the country.

But it is her corgis for which she is better known. It was her father who introduced the family to corgis, and who gave the Queen her first on her eighteenth birthday, from which most of her subsequent corgis are descended. She currently has a fleet of five corgis (one inherited from her mother) and two dorgies (a cross between a corgi and a dachshund) and was devastated in 2003 when one of Princess Anne’s bull terriers attacked and killed one of them. The only thing that makes her cross is when a visitor treads on one of her dogs.

Her father had a passing interest in racing but his real love was foxhunting. Her mother loved National Hunt racing – a winter sport, because the horses need softer going for jumping hurdles and running steeplechases. The National Hunt season culminates in the Cheltenham Festival in the middle of March, which was the Queen Mother’s favourite race meeting; the champion two-mile chase is named after her. The Queen’s passion – as it is for a considerable number of her subjects – is flat racing. She is never happier than during the four days of Royal Ascot in the third week of June where she watches some of the finest flat racing in the world. It is without doubt her favourite week of the year. She fills Windsor Castle with friends, all of whom are fellow racing enthusiasts, and every day they lunch in the castle, where the talk is racing. But, like everything else in her life, there is a rigid routine that is followed year after year after year. After lunch, at 1.35 p.m., cars take her and her family and guests to the Ascot Gate of Windsor Great Park. There they transfer into waiting landaus, attended by liveried footmen in red tailcoats, white gloves and top hats, which take them the last two miles to the golden gates at the eastern end of the racecourse. At 2.00 p.m. they begin the royal procession up the straight mile which delivers them to the royal box in time for the first race. Royal Ascot, still a highlight of the social season, has become a hugely
popular sporting event in recent years and much more commercial – crowds have doubled in the last six or seven years – but the royal enclosure, for which anyone who wishes to attend has to be sponsored by a royal enclosure badge-holder of at least four years standing (the rule banning divorcees was abandoned in 1955), is still a very grand affair. Men wear uniform or morning dress, women may wear smart trouser suits (since 1970) but are not allowed jeans or shorts, and hats are still obligatory.

But the Queen is there for the racing. Breeding is her principal fascination. She is one of the most knowledgeable bloodstock owners in the country and racing people say that if she wasn’t Queen she could be a very successful bloodstock breeder. Some of her best friends are also extremely knowledgeable. Henry Porchester, the seventh Earl of Carnarvon, sadly no longer alive, was one. Known as ‘Porchey’ to the Queen, he had been racing with her since the 1940s and her racing manager for thirty-one years. He was one of her very closest friends and they saw one another or spoke most days. He was the only person, Princess Anne once said, who could be sure of being put through to her mother on the telephone at any time without question, and he was with her at every race meeting. His death, sudden and unexpected on 11 September 2001, the same day the Twin Towers were destroyed, was a terrible blow to her. It was with Porchey that she made her first visit to Normandy to look at French studs in 1967. She had been sending mares to French stallions for the past fifteen years but had never been herself and mentioned this to President de Gaulle at Winston Churchill’s funeral. Two years later she went on a private visit with a small party to see how the horses were bred and to meet French owners and breeders. It was the first of regular trips first to France and then America. Porchey introduced her to Will Farish, until recently the US
Ambassador in London and a successful Texan racehorse owner and breeder with the farm in Kentucky where she stays often (and where, in fact, she was when she first heard about Monty Roberts). Any official trip thereafter to either country – like her state visit to France in 2004 – would invariably be finished off with a private diversion to one of these studs.

The Queen has owned several over the years but now has just one stud; breeding horses has been a royal pastime for centuries. She inherited the royal stud at Windsor, which had originally been founded at Hampton Court in the sixteenth century, and two studs established by the future Edward VII at Sandringham – the Sandringham and Wolverton studs, which now operate as one. In 1962 she leased and later bought Polhampton Lodge Stud near Overton in Hampshire for breeding racehorses; now she uses it to hold mature horses before and whilst they undergo full training. She also has jumpers now, having taken over the Queen Mother’s horses after her death in 2002. She visits all her establishments regularly and often in the early morning goes to the stables where her horses are in training to watch them run along the gallops. At one time she was a very big owner breeder in this country, but no longer. Alongside people like the Maktoum brothers and Robert Sangster, who have come into British racing with vast sums of money, the traditional home-grown owner breeders, including the Queen, have found it hard to compete.

When Porchey died, his son-in-law John Warren, married to his daughter Lady Carolyn, took over as the Queen’s racing manager. ‘Under John Warren’s aegis they run a tight ship,’ says my racing expert.

Her racing interests are kept on a very cost-effective basis. It’s all carefully budgeted, they don’t waste money, and they take commercial opportunities – last year they sold a filly
to the United Arab Emirates. It is always a bit of a surprise when one is told that anything to do with the royal finances is properly managed but this is an example of where it is. John Warren is one of the best bloodstock agents in the world. He has an incredible eye for horses; and he is an outstanding bloke and although he must be thirty-five years younger is close to the Queen. Not just because he runs her racing interests but because he can keep up with her knowledge. Not very many people can.

At Royal Ascot the Queen is closer to the general public and more relaxed and informal than on any other occasion anywhere else. Security is tight but it is subtle, which is what she likes. Before some races she goes down to the paddock – the grassy area that is open to everyone – and makes her way to the pre-parade ring where the horses are walked round before being saddled up. It’s where the experts, the people who really understand about the conformation of a racehorse, like to go. She has a very good eye for a horse, a great memory about lineage, and will stand there for fifteen or twenty minutes discussing muscle and stride and the pros and cons of the day’s going, before following the horses to watch them parade round the ring prior to the race.

John Warren will usually be with her, also her Representative at Ascot, Stoker, the new Duke of Devonshire, whose family she has known for years; he is a fellow owner, ex-senior steward of the Jockey Club, ex-chairman of the British Horseracing Board and a very knowledgeable man. He has been her Representative there since 1997 – it is the one appointment she makes entirely on her own – and as such is chairman of the Ascot Board which runs the racecourse. In October 2004 it closed for redevelopment – and for only the second time in the fifty-three years of the Queen’s reign her
June routine will be different. The first time was in 1955 when Royal Ascot was cancelled because of a railway strike, and she went privately to the July meeting instead. This year it will still be in June but rather more than a landau journey from Windsor. After much competition, York was the racecourse chosen to stage Royal Ascot in 2005.

The redevelopment of Ascot is a huge project, the third largest sports scheme of the new millennium after Wembley and Arsenal Football Club – it will cost £185 million – and is being financed, unlike those two, without a penny of taxpayers’ money. Commercializing Ascot and making it more accessible has paid off. Over the last ten years it has built up reserves of £75 million and on the strength of its forecasts for the future has been able to borrow the remainder. Without the royal connection Ascot would be a very different place. Over the five days Royal Ascot gets 5 per cent of the total turnout at British racecourses at 1300-odd fixtures throughout the year and attracts huge television audiences nationally and internationally as well as other media coverage. It is also about fashion and having a good day out, but the absolute core of Ascot is the royal connection and attendance by the Queen and the royal procession and everything to do with it. Without that Royal Ascot would not be the same.

The Queen does not get involved in the day-to-day business of Ascot – that is the Duke of Devonshire’s job – but she takes a very keen interest and has been closely involved in the redevelopment at every stage, as have the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales. The Duke always accompanies the Queen to Ascot, and most members of the Royal Family attend some stage of the meeting – supporting Royal Ascot is expected – but none of them is as enthusiastic about racing as the Queen, and none begins to share her knowledge. However, her husband and eldest son have had plenty to say about the
new building. The Duke has been particularly interested in the technical details, while Charles has concerned himself with the architecture and the functionality of the building.

The main reason for the redevelopment is because the racecourse has become so popular in recent years – a victim of its own marketing success – that crowd circulation has become a real problem; but it was a problem, ironically, that the architect Rod Sheard also had in one particular part of the new design. Sports stadiums are his speciality; he designed the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and the Olympic stadiums in Sydney and Brisbane, so he is not new to the pitfalls, but there was one particular area that looked perfect on the drawings but which he knew wasn’t going to work. He and the rest of the team had looked at it again and again – computer experts using all the latest technology – and on the day when they presented the plans to the Queen, the Duke and the Prince they had still not found the solution. But it was a small detail, one which they would eventually iron out, and not something worth mentioning. The royal group was there to look at the overall scheme.

At the end of the presentation the Duke of Edinburgh, then eighty-two, stood up, walked across to the diagram and pointing his finger to the precise spot that was under scrutiny said, ‘You’ve got a crowd-circulation problem there.’ Rod Sheard was gobsmacked.