The Queen Mother (164 page)

T
HE YEAR
2000 was marked throughout the world by celebrations of the millennium and, in Britain, of the hundredth birthday of Queen Elizabeth. The year began with an event fashioned by the New Labour government: the opening of the Dome, a purpose-built stage on the Thames at Greenwich. It was intended to be a symbol of a new Britain and so it turned out to be, if not quite in the way which its creators had intended.

The occasion echoed an earlier celebration on the south bank of the Thames by an earlier Labour government. In 1951, a time of postwar austerity and rationing, the administration of Clement Attlee had staged the Festival of Britain. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had opened the Festival together. Although neither of them felt entirely at ease with the political ambitions of the post-war Labour government, they admired many of its leaders and the sentiments of the Festival, conceived during Labour years, were ones which they could accept with pleasure.

The Festival’s proclaimed intention was to display British achievements in ‘one united act of national reassessment and one corporate reaffirmation of faith in the nation’s future’. Fifty years on, the official statement of intent read like a guide to another planet – its proud purpose was to extol Britain’s ‘contributions to civilization’ and it celebrated, among many historic events, St Augustine bringing ‘a new infusion of Christianity to Britain’. The Festival acclaimed the British people whose ‘native genius’ was displayed in a pavilion called ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’. These great creatures were thought to symbolize ‘two of the main qualities of the national character: on the one hand, realism and strength, on the other fantasy, independence and imagination’. The spread of the English language around the world
was celebrated and the King James Bible was described as ‘still the great beacon for the language’; it had ‘a resonance and radiance which have suffused all our later literature and speech’. Queen Elizabeth would certainly have agreed with that.

In the pavilion there were tributes to Shakespeare – ‘who took the language in his hand and made words do things that had never been dreamed of’ – and, among others, to Chaucer, Defoe, Swift, Sterne, Carlyle, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, T. S. Eliot, Gainsborough and Constable. The British were praised not just for their artistic achievements but also for their ‘continuing impulse’ to develop and enlarge basic freedoms. The examples given were Magna Carta, the struggle of the House of Commons with King Charles I, Milton’s pamphlet
Areopagitica
(‘a spearhead for the breakthrough into freedom of the press’), freedom for Catholic worship, freedom for labour, and the suffragettes.

The Festival’s unashamed celebration of the British character and achievement was one with which Queen Elizabeth could have great sympathy. She believed absolutely in the spirit and resilience of the British people, in the strength of their constitutional system and in the benefits that British rule had brought to millions of people throughout the world. The fifty years of her widowhood had brought many benefits to the country at large. By the year 2000 Britain was more prosperous than at any time in her history. People had wider opportunities for individual happiness than ever before. Many of the taboos and the social stigmas that existed in the 1950s had gone. Women had greater power and freedom. Society was more fluid and in many ways more tolerant. There was more diversity – London was a cosmopolitan city. Wealth was spread more equally between classes. There was better housing, and much better food. Educational opportunities had widened – tertiary education was no longer the privilege of the few, as in the 1950s, but was now within the grasp of almost everyone.

But if education was broader, it was also sometimes shallower. More and more children were emerging from school without basic skills. In the early 1950s people’s sexual behaviour was often unhappily restricted; by 2000 there appeared to be almost no restraints. Popular culture had become ever more explicit; discretion was unusual. Drugs posed a serious threat to the lives of young people. There was less respect for public service, tradition and authority than fifty years before. The concept of duty, central to Queen Elizabeth,
seemed quite outdated to many of the young. Habits and beliefs that had held British society together had disappeared. Immigration had changed the face of many cities. Islam was now the fastest-growing religion in Britain. By contrast, Christian congregations were constantly diminishing; the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, himself a Christian, said, ‘We enjoy a thousand material advantages over any previous generation and yet we suffer a depth of insecurity and spiritual doubt they never knew.’

British towns and much of the countryside had been completely changed. Motorways had been cut harshly through beautiful areas; the hearts of many towns had been ruined by insensitive developers, architects and planners. Suburbanization had destroyed local communities. Towns became cloned suburbs and the quirky or the original features of different places were often razed in the name of profits and efficiency. The English landscape was also losing character; orchards were cut down, small family farms were sold to make holiday homes; the landscapes (and the townscapes) celebrated by Queen Elizabeth’s friend John Betjeman and, before him, by Thomas Gray, Constable and Turner, were vanishing. Independent shops were closing while green fields became shopping malls where security guards, closed-circuit cameras, piped music and the latest consumer temptations defined modern life.

Philip Larkin had expressed his dismay in his poem ‘Going, Going’:

In a way, the Millennium Dome reflected the intellectual and moral tenor of its time. It was built on the occasion of the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ, the defining event of Western civilization, but Christ was a sideshow in the Dome, relegated to a few bland sentences in one small exhibit. The £800 million construction was the product of committees and its content was at best jolly, at worst vacuous. The names of commercial sponsors were more important than any enduring message – let alone any pride in the history and achievements of
Britain. In fact, the contrast between the Festival and the Dome illustrated one way in which Britain had changed in the previous half-century. The Festival displayed a poor but self-confident Britain, rejoicing in her singular accomplishments. The Dome represented a richer but far less self-assured nation.

On the Dome’s opening night, 31 December 1999, the organizers paid lip-service to the Christian origins of the Millennium. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, was allowed to read prayers just before midnight. The prelate tried to remind people that Christ had been born 2,000 years before, but he was surrounded by drunks and chivvied by impatient officials who wished to begin the real, secular celebrations. These included an appearance by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh who were required to join hands with the Prime Minister and his wife to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

Queen Elizabeth had a quieter evening – she dined at Sandringham with Princess Margaret and her racing manager, Sir Michael Oswald, and his wife Lady Angela. The celebrations of her birthday later in the year provided a remarkable contrast with those at the Dome.

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Q
UEEN
E
LIZABETH
was, by any measure, well into what one member of her Household called her ‘running down’ years. But running down did not mean giving up. In 1999 she had undertaken thirty-eight public engagements – only one was cancelled, because she had a chill. At Sandringham in January 2000 she had to miss one of her hardy annuals – attending the annual general meeting of the Sandringham Women’s Institute – but managed the other – presenting a prize to a pupil of Springwood High School.
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She also planted an oak tree at Sandringham to mark the 350th anniversary of the formation of the Coldstream Guards. Back in London she received various colonels of her regiments on changeover of command and gave sittings for portraits. She entertained the Eton Beagles at Royal Lodge. In March she went to Cheltenham and Sandown Park to attend the National Hunt, the Grand Military and the Royal Artillery race meetings – treasured fixtures every year.

She still entertained generously, with her lunches, her weekend parties and more intimate invitations to tea. In early 1999 she and Princess Margaret invited the Director of the Royal Collection,
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Hugh Roberts, and his wife Jane, then Curator of the Print Room, to look through a trunk of Strathmore papers that had ‘turned up’. Greeted by Royal Lodge’s longtime, sophisticated steward, Ron Wellbelove, Hugh Roberts thought he had stepped into a reincarnation of the famous James Gunn portrait of the Royal Family at tea in the same room in 1950: ‘a tea-table was laid in the centre of the room, in front of the fireplace. Queen Elizabeth in cornflower blue dress with blue hat and veil, beautiful sapphire and diamond flower brooch; Princess Margaret in pale blue silk suit and diamond brooch, both just returned from Ascot where QE had had a winner.’

There were delicious, tiny sandwiches, toasted hot cross buns and little cakes to eat – and two teapots. Queen Elizabeth asked her guests, ‘Would you like Margaret’s special tea, or my ordinary?’ The Princess’s tea was served in a pretty yellow teapot, Queen Elizabeth’s was still in the basic brown pot she had been given by the train steward on the way to Warwick races.
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When the Princess and the Robertses delved into the trunk, Queen Elizabeth studied the photographs with a magnifying glass. She was able to identify and provide a running commentary on almost everything and everyone. She thought some of the portrait studies of her as a young woman were too serious or ‘yearning’. After an hour of sorting, she offered them all a drink; Princess Margaret mixed a stiff martini for her mother and the rest of them had whisky. Queen Elizabeth and Hugh Roberts had a Trollopean discussion about St George’s Chapel – she was glad to hear that the new dean was much liked and that the canons were not at each other’s throats. She spoke wistfully of Ted Hughes. ‘He knew about
everything
, it didn’t matter what – and wrote some charming things for me – birthdays and whatnot.’

One of her staff then came in to announce, in something of a
solecism, that ‘Queen Elizabeth’ was on the telephone. ‘Who?’ asked Queen Elizabeth. ‘Oh, you mean the Queen.’ The Curator and the Director took their leave, their car laden with plastic bags filled with photographs which were then incorporated in the Royal Photographic Collection at Windsor, while others were sent to Glamis by Queen Elizabeth.
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That year Queen Elizabeth looked forward to the annual lunch with Charles and Kitty Farrell in May even more than usual because it marked her friends’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. ‘How blissful and how wonderful,’ she wrote. ‘I expect that the HEDGE will be many feet higher.’
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After the lunch party she told Lady Kitty what joy she had had seeing ‘all those delightful people chatting and boozing outside the salle de glace’.
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The turf retained its unchanging allure as a world of its own in which she could be totally absorbed and in some ways the equal of others. Almost every day in their telephone conversations she and the Queen still discussed the breeding, the naming, the successes (and failures) of their horses and their jockeys. Her racing reputation still stretched across the world. Sir Michael Oswald received a cable from a North Queensland Drinking Club called Liars’ Lounge. Eighty-five of them had won a filly in a lottery and they offered Queen Elizabeth a 1/86th share as a hundredth birthday present. She accepted with alacrity and the message came back, ‘Tell the Queen that the next time she is here to drop in for a Cold One, and the shout’s on me.’
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There were happy family events that year, including the wedding of her grandson Prince Edward to Sophie Rhys-Jones, and the christening in the Royal Chapel at Royal Lodge of her great-grandson Arthur, second son of Lady Sarah Chatto. The playwright Tom Stoppard was a guest and he wrote Queen Elizabeth a letter of thanks for a day which he would treasure. ‘When I think of the long arc of life-and-times that connects you and Arthur, all that history, it brings a lump to the throat.’
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But there were family sorrows, too. In November Queen Elizabeth gave a lunch party at Clarence House after the memorial service for Lord Dalhousie, her Lord Chamberlain. Towards the end of the meal, her niece Jean Wills (her sister May Elphinstone’s second daughter) had a heart attack. The Queen Mother quietly led her guests from the room; Mrs Wills was given immediate medical attention but she died
several days later in hospital. It was a great shock, made easier for the Queen Mother only by her belief in the afterlife.
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In his annual letter to her on the anniversary of the King’s death Anthony Harbottle expressed her own view well. ‘There is no separation but an abiding oneness with our loved ones who have gone on ahead & are ever with us, giving us already a foot in heaven. It is a great & glorious thought, as Your Majesty knows so well.’ She replied, ‘I was so touched to receive your most thoughtful & beautiful letter, which arrived at exactly the right time. We were a little depleted at the service as John & Jean Wills have died, but it was all lovely & peaceful.’
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C
ELEBRATIONS HONOURING
Queen Elizabeth’s centenary tumbled one after another, through the spring and summer. She enjoyed them all. On 27 June she was given a luncheon at the Guildhall; her neighbour, the Archbishop of Canterbury, absent-mindedly picked up her wine glass rather than his own. ‘Hey, that’s mine!’ she said quickly.
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On 21 June the Queen gave a reception and dance at Windsor Castle to mark the major birthdays of Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret (seventy), the Princess Royal (fifty) and the Duke of York (forty).