The Queen Mother (12 page)

Miss Poignand arrived at Glamis station from London one evening in late November 1914, and was shown to a spacious tower bedroom, with a fire burning brightly and supper awaiting her in the comfortably furnished schoolroom. ‘No electric light here – chiefly lamps everywhere & gas in the corridors,’ she reported to her mother. ‘It is an old place, you would love it, all nooks & corners & stairs up & down & long passages – many floors of stone of course.’
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Bathing arrangements were a matter of wonder after the more modest comforts of a villa in Farnham.

With her pupil there was an instant rapport. ‘I like Elizabeth very much & I think we shall be great friends,’ Beryl wrote. Their daily routine was quickly established: chapel – wearing the prescribed lace cap – and piano practice for Elizabeth, breakfast at 8.45, two hours of lessons followed by three-quarters of an hour out of doors and a further hour’s lesson before lunch. Then they were free to go out
again until the last lesson from 4 to 5. There was family tea around a large table at 5, Elizabeth’s last meal – except for the occasional apple – until her bedtime at 8 p.m., after which Beryl was served her supper in the schoolroom. This was a mere four hours of lessons a day, and three on Saturday: it was probably at least an hour a day shorter than Fraulein Kübler’s timetable. Even so, it was a challenge for the new governess. Despite her immediate affection for Elizabeth, she worried that ‘it is not too easy teaching her. I have to make things as interesting as possible or she would easily get bored I think. She is intelligent – it is a wonder to me that she knows all she does – her education has been rather quaint.’
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Moreover, Lady Strathmore’s enthusiasm for a more rigorous academic education for her daughter was lukewarm. ‘I don’t know if very advanced mathematics are required for Elizabeth’s exam,’ she said to Beryl; ‘but I do not wish her to take anything very advanced. I am not a believer in very high mathematics for girls.’ Beryl was amused and relieved, since maths was not her own strong point. She reassured her employer that ‘ordinary Arithmetic’ was all that was required.
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Elizabeth enjoyed the new regime: three years later, looking back on ‘those happy days’, she described a typical day. The timetable has evolved a little, starting at 8 a.m. with a history lesson which is interrupted by the breakfast gong. Afterwards she and Beryl do some arithmetic, also interrupted, this time by Nurse Anderson, who comes rustling and panting up the stairs for a chat. This is followed by a trip down to the Oak Room for hot chocolate, biscuits and jokes, ‘the first & last manufactured by the Lady Rose Lyon’, and a walk through the pinetum. At lunch they ‘eat an ’orrid amount’, and go for another walk afterwards. Then ‘back to the schoolroom for a bit. Eat enormous quantities of Vida bread, at tea, & a few “plaisanteries” with Mike.’ After tea, she added innocently, ‘I sleep before the fire while Medusa [her nickname for Beryl] reads about Queens of England.’ Then they would visit the soldiers’ ward for a lively game of whist before supper, and eventually ‘wander bedwards, tired, but let us hope happy!!!’
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Beryl Poignand noted her pupil’s liveliness and quick interest in the world about her. When the newspapers arrived in the morning, Elizabeth ‘simply pounced’ on the
Daily Mail
, provided for her personally. Her loving relationship with her parents was plain to see: they were devoted to her, and she was very attentive to both of them. The governess’s letters home paint an appealing portrait of Lord Strathmore
as a gentle, humorous man who was immensely fond of his children and grandchildren, ‘especially of E. who is very sweet with him, always looking round to see if he wants anything – & lighting his cigarettes etc’. He was occasionally querulous, a characteristic which Beryl observed that his family ignored; but like many fathers of the less domineering sort, he was used to that. ‘No one
ever
communicates with me unless they want to be paid something,’ he was once heard to say. There was nothing stiff or pompous about him or his wife. ‘He always arrives late for meals, & consequently is miles behind everyone else – if the footmen have left the room he sometimes asks Lady S. to throw him some pudding & if the sweet is a “dry” one she throws it across the table & he catches it in his hands or on his plate or sometimes doesn’t catch it at all.’
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Lady Strathmore emerges from Beryl’s letters as the hub of the family, energetic and admirably generous in her provision for the convalescent soldiers. She and her daughters dressed very simply, Lady Strathmore mostly in black ‘with lace ruffles’, while Rose wore a white silk blouse and a tweed walking skirt with a golf jacket. Elizabeth’s usual garb was a navy-blue dress with a white yoke and cuffs, often with a jacket like her sister’s. There was no need, Beryl assured her mother, for smart clothes at Glamis.
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Letters arrived sporadically from the two Bowes Lyon sons at the Front. One beautiful November morning when the sun sparkled on a thick frost at Glamis, Beryl recorded that Lady Strathmore had heard from Patrick and Jock in northern France, where the 5th Battalion The Black Watch had just come under fire. They had taken German trenches but had not advanced. A fortnight later Jock wrote again: they usually spent three days and nights in the trenches, or longer if the firing was lively, before being relieved, which meant walking nine miles back out of enemy artillery range before they could have any rest. He had not seen a mattress since leaving Dundee, he said. Sleep was impossible at the Front: as an officer he had to remain alert, for they were barely 200 yards from the German lines. Another letter spoke of the intense cold, of the slimy mud in the trenches, and of Jock’s bitter disappointment to find that some of the cooked pheasants his mother had sent him had been badly packed and had rotted before arrival. The Glamis cook at once set to work preparing more.
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Fergus, by now a captain, was still at Aldershot, where he had been sent at the beginning of the war to train new recruits in the 8th
Battalion The Black Watch; it was not until the spring of 1915 that he went with the battalion to France. Michael’s reserve battalion of the Royal Scots had at first been sent to Weymouth; in November they were suddenly moved to Sunderland and ordered to dig trenches. At Glamis the family could only suppose there was an invasion scare. In December he was sent to France, not to the Front but to Rouen, whence he dispatched cheerful letters home. It was a beautiful city full of fine churches, he wrote; but he had no intention of entering any of them, having had far too much sightseeing forced on him by his mother and sister Rosie in the past. He had been given the task of censoring soldiers’ letters home, and quoted some of them: ‘P.S. please excuse writing but I am rather drunk’; ‘What is Tom a’doin’ – ’as ’e ’listed or is ’e a coward – or is ’e after Nell – ’cos if so tell ’im I’ll break ’is d— neck when I come back.’
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Elizabeth was still in touch with Fraulein Kübler. Her former governess sent her a long letter from Belgium, where she was nursing German soldiers. She was convinced that her country’s cause was a righteous one and that the Kaiser had done all he could to stop the war.
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Elizabeth seems not to have been impressed; her new governess recorded that she wanted to give up her German lessons and learn Russian instead, a wish frustrated by Beryl’s ignorance of that language.
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It was now clear that the war would not be over by Christmas. Young British women also wanted to play their part, and Elizabeth’s sister Rose decided to train as a nurse. She enrolled at the London Hospital, which was offering three-month courses, and left Glamis in early January 1915 to join several of her friends training in the capital.

At the end of its first year, the convalescent hospital at Glamis was commended for its good work, especially with men suffering from shattered nerves. It was run with the minimum of regulations – ‘this hospital treated its inmates neither as prisoners nor as children, but as privileged guests.’
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Several were Highlanders, young and shy; one who had barely spoken a word had a visit from his sister: ‘the nurse said he was so pleased & his eyes filled with tears when he knew she
was coming,’ Beryl wrote to her mother.
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Those members of the family who were there ‘contended with one another to make the wounded soldiers feel at home’. One of their patients told a visitor, ‘my three weeks at Glamis have been the happiest I ever struck. I love Lady Strathmore so very much on account of her being so very like my dear mother, as was; and as for Lady Elizabeth, why, she and my fiancay are as like as two peas!’
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Lord Strathmore found it harder to make contact with the soldiers: ‘he is terribly shy,’ Beryl Poignand commented; but after a few days he was talking animatedly to those with whom he had a cavalry background in common. ‘Today he very politely (Elizabeth says) introduced himself to the 5th Dragoon … Elizabeth is very funny about him & takes him off sometimes – quite nicely of course – she is devoted to her parents.’
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In this environment most of the soldiers quickly relaxed; they explored the Castle and its grounds, they were taken for outings in the motors, attended the chapel, played billiards and gathered around the piano singing heartily. Until she departed, Rose played such favourites as ‘We Don’t Want to Lose You’ or ‘The Sunshine of Your Smile’.
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One evening Rose dressed David up in her own clothes, with a hat and a thick veil, and introduced him to the soldiers as her cousin. He played the gracious lady so successfully that the deception was complete. When the soldiers discovered their mistake there was much mirth, and serious danger that future lady visitors would be greeted with guffaws of ‘I know
you
!’ After Rose left for London a gramophone was acquired for the men, but it was considered a poor substitute for her piano playing.
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Elizabeth was too young to train as a nurse; her task was generally to make the soldiers feel at home. She did rounds of the ward, talked to them all, made friends with many and went to the village shop to arrange large quantities of vital purchases – Woodbines, Gold Flake and Navy Cut tobacco.
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She was intrigued by the soldiers and tried to draw them out: one, a Canadian named Baker who had been as far afield as Nepal, Egypt and South Africa, she discovered had been educated at Malvern; Beryl suspected him of being a wandering black sheep. They gave nicknames to their favourites: one sprightly Cockney named Bill became ‘Twinkly Eyes’.
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The irony was that the better the care the soldiers received at Glamis, the sooner they were sent back to the Front. There were noisy
farewells in the Castle crypt, with crackers and group photographs; next morning the soldiers signed the Visitors’ Book
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and were driven to Dundee. The motors that took them brought back ten more invalids, who came with harrowing tales and dreadful wounds from the Front; one was an eighteen-year-old shot in the stomach at Ypres, another had been shot through the lungs, and a third had a damaged spine and was likely to remain disabled for life. There was a ‘London Scottie’ (the London Scottish Regiment), of whom Nurse Anderson reported in awestruck tones that he had beautiful shaving things and pyjamas with a silk stripe.
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He was the author of some suitably polished lines in Elizabeth’s autograph book:

This year, 1914, was the first time for twenty years that the Strathmores had spent December at Glamis. Beryl reported to her mother that Lady Strathmore had come into the schoolroom and said, ‘At last I have got out of Father that we are staying here for Xmas.’ At this, Elizabeth ‘jumped up in delight & kissed her Mother exuberantly, as for some reason or other she wanted much to spend Xmas here’.
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It was a depleted family party: of Elizabeth’s siblings only Rose and David were there. Rose wrote to her friend Delia Peel that she hoped that ‘this horrible time’ would be over soon. ‘Pat, Jock & Mike are all out now, & I suppose Fergus will be going out soon.’
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Despite all the anxieties, family and staff at Glamis did their best to bring good cheer to the soldiers, setting up an immense tree in the crypt and distributing presents. ‘The fun was fast and furious,’ according to Elizabeth. Everyone ate too much, and she and David danced wildly with the soldiers in the ward. All in all, she said, it was ‘a dandy Xmas, you bet your bottom dollar’.
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Freddy Dalrymple Hamilton, on leave from his ship, came for the New Year and recorded that there were twenty wounded soldiers at Glamis. ‘We played various doubtful card games etc. with them in the evening which was very amusing and after a bit, quite heating! It was a most
cheerful
evening. Heard several new & wonderful trench
stories & I can’t say I envy the soldiers much!’ He could not help recalling his previous visit, playing cricket with the Bowes Lyon brothers, who were now away on active service. ‘I never dreamt then the conditions under which I should be there next! We none of us sat up for the New Year.’
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Next day he left by train with Rose.