The Queen Mother (11 page)

At the turn of the century European states might have congratulated themselves that they had avoided war between the major powers since 1870, when Germany had defeated France and seized Alsace and Lorraine. But Germany and Italy were both newly united powers, and their leaders encouraged nationalist enthusiasms. Meanwhile the two great European empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary faced massive internal problems of their own. Austria-Hungary seemed stretched almost beyond endurance and here too the demands of industrialization were creating new tensions. In Russia, economic progress coincided with a political revolution after the introduction in 1905 of a parliament, the Duma, albeit with very limited powers. Russia remained dependent on her foreign suppliers, in particular her closest ally, France. The French, after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, knew that they must have allies against any further threat from the German army.

Since 1870 the balance of power had preserved peace in Europe but through the early years of the twentieth century the likelihood of war increased. Austria-Hungary was prepared to resort to local wars to eliminate threats to her position from nationalism in the Balkans, while Germany was willing to risk war – even a European war – to extend her own imperial reach. Europe began to divide into two camps, and Germany used commercial and colonial issues to exacerbate tensions with France. The German General Staff made plans to fight a two-front war – first to inflict a quick defeat on France and then to deal with her slower-moving ally, Russia.

In Britain, patriotism was allied to a sense of pride both in the achievements of empire and in the supremacy of the British navy. The continued expansion of German ambitions convinced the British that they would have to involve themselves more directly in the continental balance of power unless they wished to see Germany dominate all of Europe. When Germany began to develop her navy, this could only be seen as a threat to British domination of the seas. By 1911 the race for naval superiority had led to a marked increase in tensions between the two powers. Britain’s Liberal government reluctantly allied the country to France.

In the event the catalyst came not in the North Sea but in the southern Slav lands. On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir
to the Austrian throne, and his wife were assassinated by a Bosnian Serb at Sarajevo, in Bosnia Herzegovina, which was under Austrian rule. The Austrians, with German support, blamed Serbia and declared war on her; a week later the mesh of alliances across Europe had begun to drag the rest of the continent into war.

Few people immediately understood the implications of the Archduke’s assassination. It was three weeks before
The Times
considered its consequences on its main page.
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Until then, summer sunshine, holidays, pageantry were greater preoccupations. But power was also on display. On 17 and 18 July King George V made an ‘informal’ visit to the Royal Navy and reviewed the fleet at Spithead. He saw before him forty miles of ships – 260 vessels in all, including twenty-four of the new Dreadnought battleships – which resembled, in Winston Churchill’s words, ‘scores of gigantic castles of steel, wending their way across the sea like giants bowed in anxious thought’.
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Even while the King was inspecting his kingdom’s apparently impregnable defences, the war machinery of Europe was engaging gear. Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia aroused Serbia’s ally Russia; Austria in turn called upon Germany. Russia appealed for French support and Germany was thus given the rationale for the first phase of her battle plan – a quick assault upon France through Belgium to destroy the threat from the west before she dealt with the massive Slav menace from the east. The principal uncertainty was whether the British would actually fulfil their recent assurances to come to the assistance of their new friend and traditional enemy across the Channel.

London hesitated. It seemed to some that if Britain refused to be drawn in, a war would have disastrous consequences but it just might remain limited. On the other hand, if Britain entered, the chances of a widespread conflagration were much greater. Moreover the British government had serious domestic concerns. That spring, Britain had been closer to civil war than at any time in the previous hundred years – because of the demand for Home Rule in Catholic Ireland and the absolute refusal of the Protestant north to be governed by the Catholic south. The crisis had split the British army and had divided the parties in Parliament more bitterly than any issue in living memory.

On 28 July the British fleet moved to face Germany in the North Sea. The next day the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, rejected a German request for a guarantee of British neutrality, Russia ordered
partial mobilization, Belgrade was shelled. On 1 August France, Germany and Belgium mobilized; Germany declared war on Russia, demanded unlimited passage through Belgium and sent her troops into Russia and Luxembourg. Next day her troops were in France as well. And on 3 August France and Germany declared war on one another.

Huge patriotic crowds appeared outside Buckingham Palace. That evening King George V and Queen Mary had to show themselves on the balcony three times, to tremendous cheering. In his diary the King recorded that public opinion agreed that the German fleet should not be allowed into the English Channel to attack France, nor German troops permitted to march through Belgium. ‘Everyone is for war & our helping our friends,’ he wrote.
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The German war plan demanded the overthrow of France within forty days. Berlin launched thirty-four infantry and five cavalry divisions westwards. The Belgians resisted bravely and managed to check the overwhelming German advance, but only for a time. Within a fortnight the fighting had displayed the terrible destructive force of modern industrial weapons, massed machine guns and gigantic artillery pieces.

In London Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum was appointed secretary of state for war on 5 August; he alarmed some of his colleagues in the War Cabinet when, contrary to the conventional wisdom, he warned that the war could be a long one. He insisted on keeping two divisions in Britain, against the threat of invasion.
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On 7 August Kitchener called for 100,000 volunteers. The response was instant.
The Times
reported, ‘The crowd of applicants was so large and so persistent that mounted police were necessary to hold them in check, and the gates were only opened to admit six at a time.’ Some 2,500 men a day were volunteering and in London a hundred men were sworn in every hour.
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When reports came back of Austrian atrocities in Serbia and of German atrocities in Belgium and France, opinion hardened.

The enthusiasm and eagerness to get to the Front were widely shared. One young aristocrat was ‘afraid of missing anything before the war was over’. Lord Tennyson, grandson of the poet, dressed and packed in feverish haste to get there on time.
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Many of those who were stationed around the Empire with their regiments felt they were missing the most important moment in their country’s – and their own – life. Families with landed estates sent their sons off to war and
did everything they could to help their staff and their tenants do the same. Many landowners kept jobs open for men who volunteered, and allowed families to live rent free until their menfolk returned.

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F
OR
E
LIZABETH’S
four surviving elder brothers – Patrick, Jock, Fergus and Michael – there was simply no alternative. Patrick was already in the Scots Guards, Jock and Fergus were in the Black Watch and Michael, who had just completed his first year reading agriculture at Magdalen College, Oxford, volunteered for the Royal Scots at once. He wrote to his mother, ‘It’s rather funny thinking of me as a soldier, I don’t quite feel one yet and I’m afraid I’ll never look the soldier Fergie looks.’
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Wars – even those expected to be short – add a sense of urgency. Marriages took place quickly all over the country. On 9 September Fergus wrote to his mother that he and his fiancée Lady Christian Dawson-Damer
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had decided to get married the following week.
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Almost immediately afterwards there was a second family wedding – Jock married Fenella Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis.
^†
Both bridegrooms then went off to join their regiments.

Elizabeth later recalled the thrill of those first days of anticipation and upheaval. Schoolroom routine collapsed and she remembered ‘the bustle of hurried visits to chemists for outfits of every sort of medicine and to gunsmiths to buy all the things that people thought they wanted for a war and then found they didn’t’.
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A week after her birthday and the declaration of war, she travelled up to Scotland as the family did every year in early August, to prepare for the Glorious Twelfth and the opening of the grouse season. This year was different. Gone were the convivial gatherings of the house party, the candlelit dinners, the songs around the piano, the hearty breakfasts, the assembly for shooting every day, the fierce but friendly cricket matches.

Like many great country homes, Glamis was at once converted for hospital use, receiving wounded or sick soldiers sent to convalesce after treatment at Dundee Infirmary. The great table was taken out of the dining room and beds were moved in. A nurse, Helen Anderson, was appointed to supervise medical care. Casualties were dispatched from Southampton to Dundee by train – a thirteen-hour journey – often wrapped only in blankets, their uniform cut away around their wounds.
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Many of the men had never seen such a place as Glamis, and they gazed at the great castle and grounds in astonishment. They were shown around and each given a white bed along the panelled walls of the dining room, as well as a nightshirt and a set of warm clothes.
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The billiard room became a collecting depot for winter clothing for soldiers and the billiard table was stacked with thick shirts and socks, mufflers, belts and sheepskins to be made into coats and painted with a waterproofing varnish. Official supplies, not least of greatcoats, lagged behind demand, and the Strathmores aimed to provide every man in the thousand-strong local Black Watch battalion with a sheepskin. Socks were packed with presents of cigarettes, tobacco, pipes or peppermints in the toe.
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As Elizabeth recalled, ‘during these first few months we were so busy knitting, knitting, knitting and making shirts for the local battalion – the 5th Black Watch. My chief occupation was crumpling up tissue paper until it was so soft that it no longer crackled, to put into the lining of sleeping bags.’
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Lord Strathmore too was involved in war preparations: as lord lieutenant of Forfarshire he chaired the local territorial defence associations, and was also charged with instructing farmers and landowners in the county what to do with their crops and livestock in case of invasion. This required caution, so as not to alarm people; there was already an atmosphere approaching paranoia, as reported by his daughter’s governess: ‘Mysterious lights have been seen all along this coast at night & cannot be traced. Forfar is supposed to be a hotbed of spies. Lady S is very funny. She heard that 2 Dundee butchers (I think it was) were willing to supply sheepskins for the famous coats at a reduced rate – one of them named Miller she said she would not employ as she suspected him of being a spy & wishing to ingratiate himself – & also that his name was in reality Müller!’
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W
HILE
E
LIZABETH
Bowes Lyon’s relations were each doing what they could for the war effort, one of the most significant events for her personally at this time was the arrival in the family of a new governess. Beryl Poignand was to be a friend, almost a co-conspirator, throughout Elizabeth’s teenage years and an important confidante thereafter.
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Elizabeth’s letters to Beryl give not only a glimpse of the world in which she grew up, but also a unique insight into her character. She was a fine letter writer all her life and her personality – lively, kind, mischievous – sparkles across the folded pages in their small blue envelopes. Beryl’s own letters home provide further valuable information and a vivid picture of the family in wartime.

Miss Poignand’s appointment seems to have come about through a French ‘holiday governess’, Madeleine Girardot de Villers, whom Lady Strathmore had engaged to take over – temporarily, as they all thought – from Käthe Kübler in July 1914. Elizabeth evidently got on well with Mademoiselle Girardot. A sheaf of
dictées
in the Glamis Archives dating from August and September 1914 shows a diminishing number of mistakes, with increasingly pleased comments by the governess. To one of these Elizabeth added cheekily, ‘elle est la meilleure pupille que j’ai eue’.
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Madeleine Girardot had been a trainee teacher at the Maison d’Education de la Legion d’Honneur, the school founded by Napoleon for the daughters of members of the order, at Saint-Denis on the outskirts of Paris. There she had made friends with Beryl Poignand, a young Englishwoman who also taught at the school. Beryl, who was born in India in 1887, was the daughter of an Indian Army officer; the Poignand family claimed descent from a physician at the Court of Louis XVI who had fled to England. She had had a good education and, having returned from France in the summer of 1914, was now
living with her recently widowed mother in Farnham in Surrey. It was probably at Madeleine Girardot’s suggestion that she wrote to Lady Strathmore offering her services as governess.

Lady Strathmore, struggling to balance the demands of two convalescent hospitals (she had set up another at St Paul’s Walden), four sons at the Front or about to set off, and a husband and two daughters for whom she had to maintain a home, was relieved. She replied to Beryl Poignand that she sounded very much like what she was looking for, ‘a lady who can teach and speak French and also able to teach English’, and asked if she would be prepared to come for a few months.
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The offer was accepted; Lady Strathmore wrote again promising to order the necessary books from the Army & Navy Stores and added: ‘I do hope you will be happy here. Elizabeth is really a delightful companion – very old for her age – and very sensible. So that you will not have a
child
with you always.’
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