The Queen Mother (137 page)
Authors: William Shawcross
Another 1947 appointment was that of colonel-in-chief of the Manchester Regiment, which in 1958 was merged with the King’s Regiment (Liverpool). Like all other mergers this one caused unhappiness, but Brigadier R. N. M. Jones, the Colonel of the King’s Regiment, wrote to Queen Elizabeth to say how delighted they were that she was to be colonel-in-chief of the new combined King’s Regiment (Manchester and Liverpool). ‘There is nothing else that could go such a long way towards softening the blow of the loss of our separate identity.’
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Over the next four decades, she was always in touch, sending messages of congratulation or of sympathy, as when Kingsmen lost their lives in terrorist attacks in Londonderry in October 1990.
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In July 1993 she presented new colours to the 1st Battalion, congratulating them on their bearing and on the way in which they had upheld the high traditions of the regiment on operations in Northern Ireland.
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In 1998, after receiving the Colonel’s report, she commented on the envelope, ‘This is a wonderful record. I do hope that the 2 Territorial Companies survive. It is
so
important.’
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In 1953, in honour of her Coronation, the Queen appointed her mother colonel-in-chief of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers. During the next few years the regiment was serving in Germany and she was unable to visit them there; but in 1960 she presented a guidon to the regiment at Tidworth and attended a regimental dinner and ball in London. Later that year the regiment was amalgamated with the 12th Royal Lancers to form the 9th/12th Royal Lancers (Prince of Wales’s), and Queen Elizabeth was appointed colonel-in-chief of the new regiment. She
visited them in Northern Ireland and in Germany, and, in keeping with her practice of finding homes for all her retired racehorses, in 1969 she gave them Bel Ambre and later Barometer.
Queen Elizabeth was always nostalgic about her home county of Hertfordshire, and in 1949 she had become colonel-in-chief of the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, retaining the appointment when the regiment amalgamated with the Essex Regiment to form the 3rd East Anglian Regiment in 1958. In 1964 there was a further series of mergers and the Royal Anglian Regiment was formed; the Queen Mother was appointed colonel-in-chief, with Princess Margaret and Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester becoming deputy colonels-in-chief; all three royal ladies attended a reception at St James’s Palace to celebrate the formation of the new regiment in November that year. Over the ensuing years Queen Elizabeth followed the fortunes of the regiment, always regretting mergers which reduced its strength and its territorial links, and doing all she could to ensure that at least cap badges and regimental buttons were maintained where possible.
In February 1988 the Queen Mother received a representative group from the Royal Anglian Regiment at Clarence House to mark the fiftieth anniversary of her becoming honorary colonel of the Hertfordshire Regiment, part of the Territorial Army. In the Territorials the appointment of honorary colonel is the equivalent of that of colonel-in-chief in the regular army. This was one of several honorary colonelcies which she accepted over the years. The Hertfordshire Regiment (TA) had a distinguished war and took part in the Normandy landings in June 1944. Queen Elizabeth had been once more upset when in 1960 she learned that the new order of battle for the Territorial Army did not contain the name of the regiment after its proposed amalgamation with the 5th Battalion The Bedfordshire Regiment. ‘The lack of imagination shown by the War Office is too depressing,’ she remarked privately.
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There was much correspondence between Clarence House, the War Office, David Bowes Lyon (who was now lord lieutenant of Hertfordshire) and various generals over the thorny question; at one point the Queen Mother commented, ‘What a very irritating letter!’
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But she and her brother eventually won this particular battle: in July 1961, the War Office finally agreed that the regiment’s new name should be the 1st Battalion the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment (TA). Eventually, when the regiment was incorporated into the 3rd East Anglian Regiment,
of which she was colonel-in-chief, she relinquished the honorary colonelcy.
Even earlier than the Hertfordshire Regiment, the 14th London Regiment (London Scottish) had claimed her as honorary colonel in 1935. As has already been mentioned,
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she had used all her powers of persuasion with King George V to allow her to take it on:
You know that they consist of Scottish business people, clerks, and city workers who give up hard earned leisure to doing a little soldiering, and for years now, they have been pining and panting for you to make me their Colonel … I would like it very much, as I have taken an interest in the London Scots for some time now, and as it is really rather like being President of something, I could perhaps help them in some ways. Lord Haig was their Colonel for years, and you know how sentimental my countrymen are, so they won’t have anybody else, unless it is your loving and dutiful daughter in law, who hates troubling you about the matter, but who thinks it better really to put the facts as clearly as possible.
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No doubt she also remembered the ‘London Scotties’ who had been among her favourite convalescent soldiers at Glamis in the First World War. In later years the regiment repaid her interest by providing her with a piper in London, who piped at Clarence House on her birthdays.
As a master bencher of the Middle Temple, Queen Elizabeth took a special interest in the Inns of Court Regiment, and in November 1949 – the year in which she served as treasurer of the Middle Temple – she visited the regiment at Lincoln’s Inn. In 1954 she presented colours to it and in 1957 she agreed to become joint honorary colonel with the Marquess of Reading. She became honorary colonel of the City of London Yeomanry (Rough Riders) soon after the death of the King in 1952. The Rough Riders were linked to another of her regiments, the Queen’s Bays, and she was saddened when, because of government-imposed changes in 1956, this association had to end.
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Only four years later the Rough Riders were subject to another amalgamation – with the Inns of Court and City Regiment. She exclaimed, ‘my goodness what traditions & feeling of service they are
destroying in the Territorials’, but she took some comfort in the fact that since she was honorary colonel of both regiments, the officers and men of each would ‘remain under her care’.
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The new regiment was known as the Inns of Court and City Yeomanry.
Queen Elizabeth’s association with the women’s services began in August 1939 with her appointment as commandant-in-chief of all three branches – the Women’s Royal Naval Service (later Women in the Royal Navy), the Auxiliary Territorial Service (later the Women’s Royal Army Corps), and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (later the Women’s Royal Air Force, then Women in the Royal Air Force). During the war she visited units of all the services (and gave the ATS permission to play tennis in the garden at Buckingham Palace, although she decided against hockey on the lawn).
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In later years she attended many receptions and reunions, received the heads of the three services on their appointment and departure, and took an active interest in changes of design of badges and uniform. ‘Very difficult to look nice in this’ was one comment, on a new uniform for WRNS personnel in 1991 when they were to serve at sea in Royal Navy ships.
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She was always keen that they retain their individuality as women’s services, and thus was unenthusiastic about the idea, adopted in 1968, that the titles of officers in the WRAF should become identical to those of the RAF.
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Later she stated her disagreement with plans to incorporate the women’s services fully into the navy, army and air force respectively, but felt she had to bow to the ‘inevitable’.
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In a special category of its own was Queen Elizabeth’s informal, but important, link with the Irish Guards. In 1965 the Colonel of the regiment, Lord Alexander of Tunis,
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asked whether she would consider taking on the annual task of presenting shamrock
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to the regiment at its St Patrick’s Day parade. It was a tradition instituted by Queen
Alexandra in 1905, after whose death in 1926 Princess Mary (later Countess of Harewood and Princess Royal) had continued the tradition until she herself died in 1965. Queen Elizabeth agreed to keep up this royal link, of which the Irish Guards were very proud, although because St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, fell at a busy time in her annual racing programme she feared she might not always be able to attend the presentation.
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In the event she became so fond of the Irish Guards that she rarely missed it from 1968 until the late 1990s, often flying out to Germany for the ceremony when the regiment was stationed there. Because every serving member of the regiment received a sprig, this sometimes meant deliveries of shamrock, on the Queen Mother’s behalf, to out-of-the-way places – once to a jungle airfield and a beach in Belize, another time to a camp near Mount Kenya, where the ceremony was watched by ‘two giraffe, several baboons and a group of local Samburu warriors’.
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From 1972 a further link with the Irish Guards was formed when Captain Charles Baker was appointed equerry to Queen Elizabeth for two years. This was a break from the tradition by which the regiments of which she was colonel-in-chief supplied her equerries. Captain Baker was followed by a captain from the Black Watch, but from 1976 all her equerries – thirteen more, each serving for two years – came from the Irish Guards. This was because the appointment, which was not full time, could easily be combined with a post at the regimental headquarters at Wellington Barracks in Birdcage Walk, not far from Clarence House. The officer would spend the morning at Clarence House and the afternoon at Wellington Barracks, unless he was needed for specific engagements with the Queen Mother.
Outside Great Britain, Queen Elizabeth had other military relationships which she treasured, with Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. She became colonel-in-chief of the Toronto Scottish Regiment in 1937, and presented the regiment with new colours during her tour of Canada with the King in 1939. During the war the regiment served with the Canadian forces in Europe, and in April 1940 the Queen visited them at Aldershot; they mounted the guard at Buckingham Palace later that month. When the regiment returned to Canada at the end of the war, she sent a farewell message congratulating them on their ‘splendid achievements on the field of battle’ and hoping to see them again ‘in your own dear land’.
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She did indeed see them again, on almost all of her many visits to
Canada over the next forty-five years. She always included a walkabout among the ordinary soldiers, often attending garden parties and receptions for her three Canadian regiments. She also received visiting officers or members of the regimental association at Clarence House on many occasions, and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hilborn, a former commanding officer of the regiment, became her honorary Canadian equerry. In November 2000 ‘Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother’s Own’ was added to the title of the regiment.
The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada was affiliated with its namesake in Scotland, and it was natural that Queen Elizabeth should be asked to be colonel-in-chief, an appointment she took on in 1947. She often received visiting officers of the Black Watch at Clarence House; one of her most frequent visitors was Colonel John Bourne, who had witnessed the 1939 royal tour as a junior officer and rose to become honorary colonel in 1970. Queen Elizabeth’s last contact with the regiment was in January 2002, when she sent a message of congratulation on its 140th anniversary.
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Her third Canadian regiment was the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, which later became the Canadian Forces Medical Services. All three regiments took part in her birthday tributes on Horse Guards Parade in 1990 and 2000.
Military medicine interested Queen Elizabeth. In Australia she was colonel-in-chief of the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps, a post to which the Queen appointed her in honour of her own Coronation in 1953. In 1977, in honour of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, she was appointed colonel-in-chief of the Royal New Zealand Army Medical Corps. ‘Good old loyal N.Z.’, she remarked when she heard that the corps was to serve in the Gulf War in 1991.
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Following her visit to Australia in 1958 Queen Elizabeth had become honorary air chief commandant of the Women’s Royal Australian Air Force, and she sent a message to the Director of the WRAAF on its twenty-first anniversary in 1972. The appointment came to an end when the women’s services were integrated into the Royal Australian Air Force in 1977.
Her relationships with regiments in South Africa became more problematic as the South African government’s commitment to apartheid grew. In 1947, after the Royal Family’s visit, the government submitted a list, for the King’s approval, of regiments which desired to have a member of the Royal Family as colonel-in-chief. The government
recommended that the Queen should become colonel-in-chief of the Cape Town Highlanders and of the Witwatersrand Rifles.
In 1948 the Commandant of the Cape Town Highlanders asked if they could be named the Queen’s Own Cape Town Highlanders. Permission was granted. The Witwatersrand Rifles were affiliated to the Cameronians. In November 1956 Queen Elizabeth was also appointed colonel-in-chief of the Transvaal Scottish Regiment, which was affiliated to the Black Watch. She liked all these connections but they had to end when South Africa left the Commonwealth to pursue its apartheid policies in May 1961. She accepted the inevitable: that all her South African colonelcies-in-chief had to lapse. But she did not consider herself bound to break off all contact with her regiments. Martin Gilliat wrote to Commandant Loveland of the Cape Town Highlanders (which dropped the prefix ‘Queen’s Own’), ‘Queen Elizabeth will always continue to take the closest interest in the achievements and welfare of her Regiment.’
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And so she did. In October 1961 a letter was sent from Clarence House to Commandant Hone who was to succeed Commandant Loveland, assuring him of Queen Elizabeth’s continuing interest.
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When Commandant Loveland visited London in March 1970, he was received (unofficially) by the Queen Mother, as were officers of her other South African regiments in later years. All three regiments sent contingents to her ninetieth- and hundredth-birthday parades.
