The Queen Mother (134 page)

One of the features of the University which she particularly liked was its association with the Commonwealth through the universities with which it was linked. One of these was the University of Rhodesia: in 1957 she had opened the University College of Rhodesia at Salisbury and she was its president until it became a university in its own right in 1971. In 1963 she agreed to be president of the Golden Jubilee Congress of the Association of Universities of the Commonwealth, a great gathering of distinguished academics. She attended the Congress’s ceremonies for three days in July.

As chancellor she was able to put forward names for honorary degrees each year until 1975; her nominees included her childhood friend Professor Lord David Cecil, as well as Field Marshal the Earl Alexander of Tunis, Sir John Barbirolli, Benjamin Britten, Yehudi Menuhin, Sir Frederick Ashton, Sir Isaiah Berlin and Lord Goodman, the prominent solicitor. She was pleased when Princess Margaret was awarded an honorary doctorate of music in 1957; this she conferred on her daughter at a special ceremony at the Senate House.

Lord Annan recorded that, although she would never interfere in
matters of policy, Queen Elizabeth might well express regret at changes. She did not like it when colleges had to be amalgamated and she was unhappy when the University sold the Athlone Press, named after her predecessor. Annan knew when she wanted something done. ‘She would just lift her eyebrows slightly and give you a quizzical look as if to say: “I wonder if you could do that.” And you knew you ought to do it!’ It was equally clear when she did not like something. ‘She simply had a way of slightly indicating if things could be done this way rather than that way.’ He recalled one occasion in which a member of the House of Commons became rather ‘tired and over-emotional’ and ‘to see the Queen Mother disentangle herself from his advances was really a lesson in courtly and firm behaviour’.
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She maintained her interest in the University to the end of her life. She was admitted to honorary fellowships of several colleges, and in September 1999 she approved the proposal that a chair of British History at the Institute of Historical Research should bear her name. David Cannadine was the first to be appointed Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Professor of British History, and the subject he chose for his inaugural lecture in 2003 was, appropriately, the historiography of the modern British monarchy. In it he touched upon the themes of this chapter: welfare and warfare, as he put it – royal links with charitable organizations and with the armed services.
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In fact, thanks to her popularity and longevity, Queen Elizabeth provided the historian with a striking and unprecedented case study in successful royal patronage, in the form of her ninetieth- and hundredth-birthday parades, which brought together on public display the evidence of her involvement with an extraordinary variety of charitable organizations, educational, medical and learned institutions and elements of the armed services.

In her long life the first patronage Queen Elizabeth had accepted, and retained for almost eighty years, was, appropriately, of Scottish origin. She agreed to become patron of the Girls’ Guildry, a Church of Scotland Sunday School organization, just before her marriage in April 1923. She went to her first engagement with the Guildry in Glasgow in September 1924, noting in her diary, ‘B. went off to do industrial things & I went to a rally of the Girls’ Guildry – about 4000 girls. Very good thing.’
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In the 1930s she gave them the ‘Duchess of York trophy’ for an annual needlework competition. Two weeks after the war began in 1939 one of her ladies in waiting wrote to the General Secretary to
say that the Queen now felt it was more important ‘that quantities of knitted and other garments’ should be made by the girls, rather than that they should compete with each other.
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When the Guildry amalgamated with its English and Irish counterparts in 1965 to become the Girls’ Brigade, she became joint patron with the Duchess of Gloucester, who had been patron of the English organization (the Girls’ Life Brigade).

Another natural leitmotif of her early patronages was the First World War. She became president of the Royal British Legion Women’s Section in 1924. The Legion, formed in 1921 by bringing together the four previous ex-servicemen’s organizations, was intended both to perpetuate the memory of those who died in the service of their country and to educate public opinion to the view that support for disabled ex-servicemen and their dependants was a public duty. The emblem of the Legion became the poppy, which had grown so abundantly in the fields of Flanders. Within just a few years of the First World War, the Legion had become one of the most important organizations in British society. Poppy Day was fixed for the Saturday before Remembrance Sunday, which is always the second Sunday in November, close to Armistice Day, 11 November. Every year the Royal British Legion organizes a Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall, in the presence of senior members of the Royal Family; the ex-servicemen march to the Cenotaph in Whitehall the following day. Each year the Legion also lays out a Field of Remembrance of poppies on wooden crosses in the churchyard of St Margaret’s, Westminster. From its beginning the Duchess and then Queen felt a special affinity with the organization.

In April 1934 she attended the annual conference of the Women’s Section. Her handwritten speech commended the work of the section in providing country and seaside holidays for children in ‘distressed areas’, and praised a new scheme to provide special training for widows and dependants of ex-servicemen who were in a poor state of health but were obliged, ‘through their dire need’, to seek employment. ‘Schemes such as these, which show permanent results in securing the health & happiness of our children, & a means of livelihood & a future free from care, for the women, are worthy of our very best efforts.’
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She continued to support them for the next six decades. In May 1991 she attended the national conference in Bournemouth, and in 1999, to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of her presidency, there
was a parade of standards through the garden at Clarence House. Three hundred and forty standards from branches all over the country and 120 marchers led by the Band of the Irish Guards marched past Queen Elizabeth, who took the salute from the steps of the Garden Room. It was an astonishing spectacle which lasted some fifteen minutes, with a sea of blue and gold standards carried by women of all ages and sizes. Queen Elizabeth loved it, as she did the Legion.
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It seems to have been her mother’s involvement with the Church of England Children’s Society which led the Duchess of York to accept its patronage in 1924. In 1947, she sent a message on the Society’s Diamond Jubilee in which she said, ‘The care of children is near to my heart, and is all the more dear to me because my Mother for so many years took such a deep interest in the Society.’
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Over the years she attended Founders’ Day Festivals at the Royal Albert Hall and in 1986 she opened the Society’s new headquarters in Margery Street, in the Finsbury district of London. She supported many appeals to raise funds to help the children, dispatching another member of the Royal Family if she was unable to go.

Other children’s charities looked to her for support: one was the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, which Queen Elizabeth first took on as Duchess of York after the death of Queen Alexandra in 1925. The Fund organized holidays for underprivileged city children, and the Duchess’s visit to a holiday camp in Epping Forest for a thousand slum children in 1923, one of her first public engagements after her marriage, may have sparked her lifelong interest in this organization. Even in the late 1990s there were plenty of children who needed the Fund’s help.

Another long-lasting patronage had its origins in the First World War. This was Toc H, a worldwide movement which began as a club for soldiers opened in 1915 in Belgium by the Rev. Philip ‘Tubby’ Clayton. The club was intended to allow all ranks to mix freely, an unusual concept at the time. It was at first called Talbot House after a friend of Clayton, the Rev. Gilbert Talbot, who was killed in battle. But the name Talbot House soon became known to the soldiers of the Ypres Salient as Toc H, Toc being the army signaller’s code for ‘T’.

The club became an invaluable home from home for thousands of young soldiers whose morale had been damaged, if not destroyed, on the battlefield. After the Great War, Clayton transformed Toc H into
an international Christian organization, designed to express ideals of co-operation and friendship across the barriers that often divide communities. Much of its work came to involve the improvement of children’s lives. Each branch of Toc H had a little lamp similar to that used by Tubby Clayton which members lit for their ‘ceremony of light’ at meetings. Toc H was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1922.

Queen Elizabeth’s involvement with Toc H seems to have begun during her Australian tour as Duchess of York in 1927, when she was given a banner by the Australian League of Toc H. On her return this was presented to Tubby Clayton at a short ceremony at his church in London, All Hallows Berkyngechirche by the Tower. Soon after that she became patron of the Toc H League of Women Helpers.

In July 1939, when she and the King visited the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, she surprised and gratified a college servant by immediately noticing his Toc H badge and speaking to him about the movement.
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(This was one of many examples of her sharp eye for badges and other insignia, military or civilian.) In 1948, as we have seen, at the request of Tubby Clayton she laid the foundation stone for the rebuilding of his church, which had been bombed during the war, and she regularly accepted Clayton’s requests for messages thereafter. When Tubby Clayton died in 1972 Martin Gilliat wrote warmly to the Director of Toc H of Queen Elizabeth’s long and close association with his work.
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St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, one of the great London teaching hospitals, asked the Duchess of York to be its president in 1930. She accepted the invitation. Her first official visit to the hospital was in 1934 and in 1936 she opened the first phase of the new Nurses’ Home, and then a new wing for paying patients. In 1945 she granted her patronage to the 5,000th performance of
Me and My Gal
, the proceeds of which went to the hospital.
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When the National Health Service was introduced, the Queen made it clear that she had no wish to give up her role. Sir Arthur Penn wrote to the House Governor of St Mary’s saying, ‘I do not suppose that there would be a desire on the part of any authority to suggest the termination of Her Majesty’s Presidency of St Mary’s Hospital, which I am sure she will never contemplate readily.’
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The Minister of Health, however, decreed that the position of president of an NHS hospital could no longer exist, and so the Queen became honorary president.
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Throughout the decades to come she continued to pay visits to the hospital; she presented
prizes to nurses, attended the centenary celebrations at the medical school, and opened the east wing of the medical school and the new nurses’ training school. She laid the foundation stone of the new paediatric Accident and Emergency wing of the hospital and opened the completed building, which was called the Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Wing.
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The Queen Mother’s links with another institution to which she gave her name, Queen Elizabeth’s Foundation for Disabled People, went back to 1934 when she launched the fundraising drive for what was then called the Cripples’ Training College, at a public meeting at Mansion House. The project was the brainchild of the formidable Georgiana Buller, who had been made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her hospital work in the First World War and afterwards devoted herself to the rehabilitation of the disabled. In 1935 the Duchess opened the College at Leatherhead Court in Surrey. Her handwritten speech extolling its work survives in her papers.
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In 1942 she agreed to the College’s name being changed to Queen Elizabeth’s Training College for the Disabled, and still later to its renaming as a foundation. She became its patron in 1953. In 1960 she visited it for its silver jubilee, and over the years opened various new buildings and supported fundraising efforts.
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Not surprisingly, national women’s organizations often sought her patronage, but some she enjoyed supporting on a small and local scale. One of the domestic organizations near to both her home and her heart was the Sandringham Women’s Institute, whose meetings she appears to have first attended in 1924. After she became queen she was appointed joint president with Queen Mary and every year she wrote out her own speech for the annual general meeting. In 1943 she praised the women for all the ‘splendid’ war work they had been doing: ‘The collections of rose-hips, of horse-chestnuts, of rags & bones, the jam making, the savings group, the knitting, & the 90 per cent wartime supper dishes are some of the ways in which you here are helping to win the war.’
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In January 1945, with victory in sight, she reported the King’s praise of all their work. In the final effort to beat the Germans, she knew, Sandringham Women’s Institute ‘will do their bit’.
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In 1951 she quoted poignant words from the King’s 1950 Christmas broadcast: ‘Our motto must be, whatever comes, or does not come, I
will not be afraid, for it is on each individual effort that the safety and happiness of the whole depends. And what counts is the spirit in which each one of us fulfils his or her appointed task.’
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These were sentiments which informed her own approach to life. In 1954, after the devastating east-coast floods of the previous year, she praised the Sandringham WI for all the help they had given their neighbours in distress. ‘It is encouraging to think that when disaster strikes, self is forgotten, & the uplifting thought, “Love thy neighbour” is uppermost in people’s minds.’
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