The Queen Mother (135 page)

Twenty-two years later, at a time of advances in feminist legislation, she insisted that ‘the WI were pioneers in many of the moves towards a fairer society, and for the equal treatment of women in that society. And talking of that, what about the new Sex Discrimination Act? What are we going to do if the husbands & fathers demand to join, & win the competition for a covered coat hanger or knitted bootees?’
³²
In her 1987 speech she praised the caring nature of the WI. ‘The Annual Report tells of countless acts of kindness to the elderly, the lonely and the sick – and to be cherished & knowing that someone cares, must be of infinite comfort to the recipients. This is an important side of community life.’
³³
Her message was always one of positive action and determined optimism.

Queen Elizabeth became president of the British Red Cross Society in January 1937 when King George VI became patron. (She had been elected to the governing council in 1923.) The Society, incorporated by Royal Charter in 1908, was part of the International Red Cross organization. By the middle of the twentieth century the British Red Cross was one of the largest and most effective charities in the country.

During the Second World War, the British Red Cross worked closely with the St John Ambulance Brigade and played a vital role in helping civilian victims of German bombing. Queen Elizabeth’s childhood home, St Paul’s Walden Bury, was used as a Red Cross convalescent home, as it had been in the First World War. Throughout the war the Queen identified herself with Red Cross work, attended its services in Westminster Abbey, visited Red Cross depots and exhibitions and sales to raise money for its work. After the death of the King she became vice-president of the Society and her daughter the Queen became patron and president. For the rest of her life Queen Elizabeth remained involved with it and after her death the Society launched the
Queen Mother Appeal which by June 2002 had raised some £250,000 to be used specifically for the expansion and modernization of their vital tracing and messaging services.
³⁴

One of the charities to which she gave most financial assistance was the Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Airmen’s Families’ Association. She became patron in 1937 but was much more closely involved after 1946, when Mrs Constance Cooke, widow of the Captain of HMS
Barham
, a ship which was sunk during the war with heavy loss of life, sought help to set up a rest home for bereaved widows and children. The Queen thought there was a genuine need for such a home but, after much discussion, felt that a fund would be more useful, so that money from it could be used by
Barham
widows as they pleased. In 1948 the Queen’s Fund was set up and the initial sum raised was £10,000. The Queen contributed generously to it, using at first some money from the Queen’s Canadian Fund.
^*
She continued to take an active interest in how the Fund’s money was spent (she often called it ‘her’ fund), and raised her own contributions from £2,500 a year in 1960 to £15,000 a year from 1993 onwards.
³⁵

A patronage which reflected a personal passion was the Aberdeen Angus Cattle Society, of which King George VI became patron and she patroness in 1937. There had been royal patrons since the time of Queen Victoria, and Glamis lay in one of the principal districts from which the breed took its name. The Strathmores kept a herd of the cattle and the King and Queen began their own small herd on the farm at Abergeldie, near Balmoral. After the King’s death Queen Elizabeth became patron, and started her own herd at the Castle of Mey in 1964. She was increasingly involved with the society, and in later years regularly invited the Society’s President and its long-serving secretary, Captain Ben Coutts, to Mey. In October 1970 she opened the new headquarters of the Society in Perth and watched the final judging of the supreme championship at the bull sale, presenting the
Balfour Trophy to the winning owner. The Society gave her a heifer calf for her herd, called Queen Mother of Clackmae.

Her interest in the breed was noted in farming communities far and wide, and over the years she attended meetings of national Aberdeen Angus Associations and sent messages of support to those in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It was an entirely happy connection; she delighted in both the cattle and the people who bred them, and the breeders rejoiced in her support. An Aberdeen Angus bull took part in both her ninetieth- and her hundredth-birthday parades.

In 1938 she joined the King as a patron of the Royal College of Music and from 1946 an award given to young British-born performers was named the Queen’s Prize in her honour. After the death of the King she became president of the College, with the responsibility of approving the nominations of honorary fellows and Council members. The date of the annual concert and prize giving was always fixed to suit her diary. In 1981 she was pleased to be asked to confer an honorary doctorate of music on Prince Charles, to whom she handed on the presidency in 1993, when she became president emerita and gave £60,000 to fund a scholarship.
³⁶

Her pleasure on becoming a master of the Bench of the Middle Temple in 1944 has already been noted. In 1957 she opened the Queen Elizabeth Building and the following year she attended a service for the rededication of the Temple Church and also opened the new library. In the early 1960s the Middle Temple arranged for some of its overseas students to spend a weekend at Cumberland Lodge; this proved so successful that arrangements were made for two weekends a year to be reserved for them. Whenever possible she invited a number of the students to drinks at Royal Lodge after morning service at the Royal Chapel. She often attended Grand Night in the summer and she made a point of dining every year (except for a few occasions when she was unwell) with the Benchers on Family Night. Her last such dinner took place on 5 December 2001.
³⁷

A musical fixture close to her heart was the King’s Lynn Festival, of which she had been patron since her friend and lady in waiting Ruth Fermoy launched it in 1950. The tradition developed that she would hold a house party at Sandringham during the Festival at the end of July. Every year at this time the Queen gave over the house to her mother, and thus sometimes became a guest in her own home.
Lady Fermoy died in 1993 but Queen Elizabeth continued her patronage every year until the end of her life.
³⁸

The Friends of St Paul’s Cathedral sprang from members of the St Paul’s Watch who had helped to save the Cathedral from fire and destruction in the war, and Queen Elizabeth was happy to give them her patronage in 1952. She loved the Cathedral and its Friends and she attended their Festival Service every year from 1953 to 2001, missing only five years in the 1960s and 1970s.
³⁹

Just as she had done after Queen Alexandra’s death in 1926, she took on extra patronages after the death of Queen Mary in 1953. One such was Queen Mary’s Clothing Guild, which had been created by Queen Mary to provide clothing for needy people. Members had their own groups of workers who either made or bought articles of clothing for the Guild. Each member was expected to provide two articles a year; these were all collected in the autumn and unpacked and displayed in November at the Imperial Institute, and later at St James’s Palace. Queen Elizabeth always attended the Guild’s AGM and would invite a guest speaker, who lunched with her at Clarence House beforehand. Her choices were typically unpredictable, ranging from the female comedians Elsie and Doris Waters (who starred as Gert and Daisy), and their brother the actor Jack Warner (who played the reassuring policeman Dixon of Dock Green in one of the earliest TV soap operas), to Clement Freud, the broadcaster, politician and humorist, and Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames. She was fond of Jack Profumo who, since his political downfall in 1963, had redeemed himself by good works in London’s East End, and she invited him three times. She also took the Guild’s Scottish branch, run by Clare Russell at Ballindalloch Castle, under her wing and attended its viewing day. When a proposal was made to expand the Guild and put it on a more commercial footing, she resisted, arguing that its personal scale was what made it so appreciated.
⁴⁰
By the end of her life the Guild’s finances had improved markedly – subscriptions and donations reached £10,000 and it had received two large legacies.
⁴¹

Another of Queen Mary’s patronages had been the National Trust, of which she was president, and this too Queen Elizabeth took over in 1953. Given her love of history, tradition and culture it was an appropriate appointment – she was already patron of the National Trust for Scotland. Over the years she visited a large number of the Trust’s properties throughout the country. After the hurricane which
uprooted thousands of trees across south-east England in October 1987 Angus Stirling, the Director General of the Trust, wrote Queen Elizabeth a long report setting out the damage to its properties. She annotated his letter: ‘Please thank him for his excellent letter. Perhaps you could tell him what the Queen said yesterday. “We must stop sobbing and start planting.” ’
⁴²

In 1966 she took on another university chancellorship – at Dundee, a town she had known since childhood. She was installed in October 1967, reminding students that their ‘rights’ brought with them obligations.
⁴³
The following year she attended the installation as rector of the University of the actor Peter Ustinov, who later recalled that it was at the height of the student revolts across Europe and the United States. As the solemn procession arrived, the students pelted it with rolls of lavatory paper like streamers. Ustinov recalled, ‘The Queen Mother stopped and picked these up as though somebody had misplaced them. “Was this yours? Oh, could you take it?” And it was her sang froid and her absolute refusal to be shocked by this, which immediately silenced all the students.’ Ustinov, a good judge of character as well as of comic timing, admired her greatly. ‘She is capable of riding any sort of wave that comes along and coming out the other side looking exactly as she did when she went in … an extraordinary pool of calmness seems to spread around her.’
⁴⁴

Smaller charities held her attention too, and one of these was, for obvious reasons, the Injured Jockeys Fund, though she did not grant it her patronage until 1973. If she were asked for a charity which could benefit from fundraising events, she often suggested this one. From time to time she lunched with the trustees; her lunch with them at the Goring Hotel on 6 December 2001 was her last public engagement.
⁴⁵

Her enjoyment of music, as we have seen, was often reflected in her patronage. She was fond of Benjamin Britten and his companion the singer Peter Pears; they were her guests at Sandringham in 1968 and 1970, and to their delight she agreed in 1974 to become president of their Aldeburgh Festival.
⁴⁶
The following year she visited Britten and Pears at home in Aldeburgh and attended a ‘Patron’s Choice’ concert of music she had suggested, beginning with Britten’s Prelude and Fugue for strings and ending with Berlioz’s
Nuits d’Eté
sung by Janet Baker.
^47
*
In later years she went to concerts and receptions in aid
of the Festival held in London, and at the 2002 Festival a special performance was given in her memory.
⁴⁸

Some tiny organizations gave her particular amusement. Close to Sandringham, in a small house called Stores Bungalow, lived an enthusiast called Arthur Hammond Browne who had founded what he called the Sandringham Fur and Feather Show. This was for farmyard birds and small animals, and was to be held each year in conjunction with the Sandringham Flower Show. At the age of eighty in January 1977 Arthur Browne wrote to ask the Queen Mother if she would be patron for this year of the Silver Jubilee. She had no doubts – ‘I would LOVE to be Patron of the S F & F Society for 1977!’ she noted for her Treasurer. ‘I do love enthusiasts, don’t you?’
⁴⁹

Browne offered her a pair of Buff Orpington chickens, which she accepted, agreeing that he should look after and exhibit the birds on her behalf. The pair won many prizes and became quite famous; she loved getting Browne’s letters describing the shows to which he took them. Of one letter she commented, ‘He’s quite right. The Olympics are
nothing
compared with F & F!’
⁵⁰
In 1988 Browne wrote to say he was too old to look after her birds any longer; they were taken on by Will Burdett, the President of the Poultry Club, of which the Queen Mother was also patron from 1977 onwards. Her interest continued. When she heard of a young boy who lost his Buff Orpingtons to a fox, she asked Burdett to send him some eggs, which he did. The twelve-year-old Tom Clarke hatched the eggs successfully, became a junior member of the Buff Orpington Club and some years later went on to win Supreme Championship at the Poultry Show at Alexandra Palace.
⁵¹

Queen Elizabeth found any requests involving the military hard to resist and in 1983 she agreed to a personal appeal that she become president of the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association. This held special significance for her because the George Cross had been instituted by King George VI in September 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, to honour acts of heroism, primarily by civilians. She had always looked on holders of these two medals with admiration. Most years thereafter she attended their service at St Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square and she gave the President’s Tea Party
at St James’s Palace. In the last year of her life she attended both events.
⁵²

Age did not deter her from accepting new patronages and taking a lively interest in them – in February 2000 she agreed to become patron of the Clan Sinclair Trust, set up by her neighbour at Mey, the Earl of Caithness. With her characteristic flair for the picturesque phrase, she altered the last words of the message drafted for her for the Trust’s brochure from ‘the edge of the North Sea’ to ‘the wild shores of the North Sea’.
⁵³
In September 2001 she agreed to become patron of the Longhope Lifeboat Museum Trust.
⁵⁴
And in January 2002 Sir Peter O’Sullevan, the horseracing commentator, asked her to be patron of his charitable trust which raised money for racing and animal charities. She agreed.
⁵⁵