The Queen Mother (139 page)

Regular engagements included, in March, the annual general meeting of Queen Mary’s London Needlework Guild at St James’s Palace – she attended this every year until 2001. A favourite fixture was dinner with the members of the Garden Society, for an evening of horticultural talk. And every year until she ceased to be chancellor in 1980 there were the University of London graduation ceremonies at the Royal Albert Hall. She attended gala performances of ballet or opera in aid of the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera Benevolent Funds; the Royal Variety Performance was also a regular engagement until 1988. Then there was the Royal College of Music’s annual prize giving and concert which she attended from 1952 till 1992, when she retired as president and was elected president emerita, and the Middle Temple Family Night dinner every December.

The First World War remained always in her consciousness. She made sure that in November she planted her personal Cross of Remembrance in the Field of Remembrance at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, attended the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall and watched the Remembrance Day Ceremony at the Cenotaph from the Home Office balcony. Often, though not annually, she would attend the Royal Tournament at Earl’s Court, until this ended in 1996. Similarly, in early December she liked to visit the Royal Smithfield Show, of which she was annual president in 1983, 1987 and 1989.

Most years she carried out around a hundred official engagements – occasionally more.
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Many more requests – usually about 200 – had
to be refused every year. Most years included at least one official overseas visit.

*

H
ER GREATEST
pleasure throughout was family. She and the Queen talked to each other almost every day on the telephone if not in person. The Buckingham Palace switchboard operator, putting through the call, would say ‘Your Majesty, I have Her Majesty on the line.’ When they were not talking of their shared obsession with horses and racing, family matters dominated their conversations. Queen Elizabeth took a keen interest in her grandchildren, particularly Prince Charles. The bond between them, forged while his parents were on their long Commonwealth tour in 1953–4, grew stronger as the years passed. In 1961, while his parents were in India, Queen Elizabeth visited the twelve-year-old Prince at his preparatory school, Cheam, in Surrey; he was suffering from a bad attack of measles and came home to Royal Lodge to convalesce. He soon recovered, ‘much to his disappointment!’ said his grandmother, and she took him with her to Buckingham Palace for Prince Andrew’s first birthday party. Afterwards, writing to the Queen, she reported that Andrew was ‘looking absolutely angelic … the noise was terrific, & everyone enjoyed themselves very much. The cake was cut, with great difficulty, by Andrew, & the proceedings ended by me escaping at about 5.30.’
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Later that year, when the Queen was on a visit to Ghana, the Queen Mother took Princess Anne to Cheam to see Prince Charles’s school play, and wrote to tell the Queen about it afterwards. She was not allowed to mingle with the other parents, she said, but was firmly segregated in another room, where she was given ‘boiling sherry’. She described the play as an adaptation of
Richard III
:
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‘after a few minutes on to the stage shambled a most horrible looking creature, a leering vulgarian, with a dreadful expression on his twisted mouth; & to my
horror I began to realise that this was my dear grandson! He was the Duke of Gloucester, & acted his part very well, in fact he made the part quite revolting!’ The headmaster told Queen Elizabeth that he was pleased with the young Prince’s progress. Passing on his comments to the Queen, she added a remark reflecting both her general attitude to the upbringing of children and, perhaps, her anxiety for this particular child. ‘So often, in children, they suddenly develop, and gain confidence, & if they are naturally gentle & considerate, they probably become all the stronger in character.’
²

The family was at this moment discussing where Prince Charles should be educated next. Prince Philip argued for his own school, Gordonstoun, in north-eastern Scotland. He thought it would suit the Prince best and that its remoteness would protect him somewhat from the intrusions of the media. Moreover, though far from London, Gordonstoun was within relatively easy reach of Balmoral and Birkhall. The Queen Mother, however, made a strong case for Eton, where her brothers and many of her friends had been educated. Recognizing that her grandson was sensitive, even vulnerable, she thought Eton would be by far the best place for him.
³
Moreover, the school was just across the River Thames from Windsor Castle and many of the sons of his parents’ friends would be there. At Gordonstoun, by contrast, ‘he might as well be at school abroad.’
⁴
It would be ‘an alien world’ in which he would be ‘terribly alone & cut off’.
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Prince Philip’s view prevailed. On family matters the Queen almost always deferred to her husband’s judgement, conscious that although she was queen he was head of the family.

Queen Elizabeth was tactful, but she was dismayed by Prince Philip’s choice. She was right – Prince Charles was unhappy and felt isolated at Gordonstoun. She did all she could to aid and comfort him at what she called in one letter ‘that glorious salubrious bed of roses known as Gordon’s Town’,
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and he visited her often at Birkhall; after one weekend there, he wrote, ‘All the way back in the car I kept wanting to go back and stay longer at Birkhall.’ He listed all the times in the week at which he was allowed to receive telephone calls.
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She urged members of the family to telephone him to cheer him up – he was ‘a brave little boy’, she said.
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The Prince’s dislike of Gordonstoun did not ease as he grew older.

She thoroughly approved of his ultimate educational destination, Trinity College, Cambridge, where the former Conservative politician
Rab Butler was master.
^*
‘I am
delighted
that you are going to Trinity – I am sure that you will enjoy it to the full, & be able to make the most of the opportunity of getting to know that splendid character Lord Butler – I feel sure too, that he is one of the few
wise
men just now, & full of humour as well as being a statesman.’
⁹
She gave him a painting by Edward Seago for his room in the College.

Her complement of grandchildren was completed by the birth of the Queen and Prince Philip’s fourth and last child, Prince Edward (1964), and by the two children of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, Lord (David) Linley (1961) and Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones (1964). The Queen Mother played an important role in the lives of these last two grandchildren – they spent a great deal of time at her homes, particularly in the 1970s – and they too came to love her deeply as they did their aunt, the Queen.

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T
HERE WERE SADNESSES
too. Her 1960s, like each of her decades, were regularly punctuated by the deaths of many people close to her. The first was Arthur Penn, her oldest, most devoted friend and courtier.

His last months of service to her (she still had not released him completely) were marred when in May 1960 the British press picked up a report in an American newspaper that Queen Elizabeth was about to marry him. She was in Northern Rhodesia when the story broke and her office dismissed it as ‘complete and absolute nonsense’.
¹⁰
Her Private Secretary, Martin Gilliat, said she took it ‘in very good part’,
¹¹
but Penn was mortified by what he called ‘this most embarrassing absurdity’. He felt that having successfully avoided any publicity through twenty-five years of royal service, ‘this reversal has been most odious.’
¹²

He became ever more frail and at the end of November 1960 he wrote to Queen Elizabeth in a shaky hand that ‘the medicine men’ could not succeed in stabilizing him. He felt he had to be patient and count his ‘very numerous’ blessings. ‘But I wish I could be with Your Majesty & be of some service to you.’
¹³
He died on 31 December that year. Queen Elizabeth was greatly saddened and wrote to his sister,
saying that ‘to be able to turn to Arthur for wise counsel in so many different situations, to be able to share the pleasure of beautiful things and to laugh, was something that has meant more to me that I can ever say, both in happy days and sad days. How wonderful to have lived a life such as Arthur lived. Spreading gaiety and kindness around him, and goodness and courage as well.’
¹⁴

Penn’s death was followed in February 1961 by that of Queen Elizabeth’s elder sister May Elphinstone, at the age of seventy-seven. Remembered affectionately by her daughter Margaret as ‘permanently in an old tweed coat tied round the waist with a piece of string and gumboots, bent double over something in the garden’,
¹⁵
she had a strong social conscience and had worked in the slums of Edinburgh, and in the Women’s Voluntary Service during the war.

Later in 1961 Queen Elizabeth suffered the sudden death of her younger brother David, who still lived at St Paul’s Walden with his wife Rachel and son Simon. Not everyone found David Bowes Lyon easy, but brother and sister were devoted to each other. Suddenly, at Birkhall on 12 September, he had a heart attack and he died the next day. His funeral took place at the Episcopal church at Ballater on 15 September and that evening the Queen Mother, the Queen, Prince Philip and members of the Bowes Lyon family accompanied the coffin on the night train south. David was buried at the familiar little church at St Paul’s Walden.

The Queen knew what a gap this would leave in her mother’s life and did her best to cherish her in these days – for which Queen Elizabeth wrote to thank her, and to say how devoted David had been to his niece too – ‘he really loved you, & would have done anything for you.’ He was one of the few people upon whom she could rely to tell her the truth and his death was ‘like a light going out in one’s life, we have always been so close, I knew what he was thinking even.’
¹⁶

Soon after the funeral, Queen Elizabeth went up to the Castle of Mey. Relaxing there, she said, made her feel calmer. But she continued to find life bleak without the other ‘Benjamin’. Almost a year after his death she went to stay with his widow Rachel at St Paul’s Walden, and afterwards wrote to say how grateful she was for Rachel’s understanding of her own love of David. She added, ‘He has left something so
strong
, hasn’t he – perhaps that is really the point of human life and living, to give, & to create new goodness all the time.’
¹⁷

This probably represents as good a statement of her view of the purpose of life as any other –
to give and to create new goodness all the time
. But she knew also how hard that was – on a later occasion she told Rachel how much she admired ‘the way you face life & its obligations – & oh what a battle it is sometimes.’
¹⁸

Her last surviving sibling, Rose, Lady Granville, died in November 1967; Queen Elizabeth had visited her twice earlier that year at her home in Scotland. Rose was not only thought to be the great beauty in the family – ‘a lovely person with a slow, gravelly voice’, one of her nieces remembered
¹⁹
– she was much loved for her kindness.

Queen Elizabeth’s old friend D’Arcy Osborne was also beginning to falter; he had continued to live in Rome and worked on behalf of street children in the city. In early 1962 Osborne told her that he had had a hard winter. She sent him her sympathy and expounded her rather sanguine view of international affairs: ‘The world staggers on, from one crisis to another, but I have a feeling that human beings are beginning to become accustomed to these rather bogus upheavals, & take them more philosophically than the slightly hysterical reporters & newscasters!’
²⁰

Osborne was well enough to come and stay with her at Birkhall that autumn.
²¹
She was worried about his finances, which had always been precarious, and she did something about it – a few months later she told him, ‘D’Arcy, one or two of your old & loving friends have sent a small sum to your banking account in Rome, in case it might come in handy some time. They hope you won’t mind, it is just to show their true affection.’
²²
He replied at once, ‘Madam, Dear Ma’am, How KIND!’ Her generosity would, he wrote, enable him to take taxis when tired and would give him ‘the invaluable benefit of peace of mind and freedom from fussing over small and ignoble matters’.
²³

In 1963 D’Arcy Osborne became the duke of Leeds,
^*
on the death of his distant cousin the eleventh Duke, brother of Queen Elizabeth’s sister-in-law Dorothy. It was too late for him to enjoy this transition; he died in Rome in April 1964. One of his friends wrote to the Queen
Mother that they had held a ‘goodbye’ ceremony around his bed, and his ashes were buried, with emotion, ‘on a golden Roman spring day’ in the English cemetery.
²⁴

Next it was her girlhood governess and friend Beryl Poignand who died. In early 1963, Queen Elizabeth, knowing that she was unwell, had helped arrange for her admission first into the London Homeopathic Hospital and then into the Parkfield Nursing Home in Kingston, run by the Friends of the Poor and Gentlefolk’s Help, of which she was patron.
²⁵
In December 1964 Queen Elizabeth visited her – it was the last time she saw the woman to whom she had been so close when they were both young. A month later Beryl fell and broke her hip; she died after a few days, aged seventy-seven. The Queen Mother wrote to Mrs Leone Poignand Hall, Beryl’s cousin, ‘She shared our joys & sorrows to the full, & I have nothing but happy and loving thoughts in my mind when I think of her.’
²⁶

In 1964 Edith Sitwell died, and Queen Elizabeth wrote sympathetically to Osbert, to whom his sister’s loss was a real blow; he himself was ill, and spending much time at his house at Montegufoni, in Italy. Their mutual friend Hannah Gubbay, hostess at many luncheons which both had enjoyed, died in 1968; ‘there will never be anyone like her again,’ Queen Elizabeth wrote to Sitwell. ‘The last time I lunched with her, she seemed desperately frail & crippled, but just as funny & crisp as ever. We all spoke of you, & wished that you could have been there.’
²⁷
Sitwell invited her to visit him in Italy; but he died in May 1969. She grieved, and sent a telegram expressing her ‘truly heartfelt sympathy in this moment of great sorrow’ to his brother Sacheverell.
²⁸