The Queen Mother (5 page)

The family’s financial situation continued to improve as the new generation grew. John Bowes died in 1885 and, as he was childless, his houses returned to the main branch of the family. But in 1893 the family was struck by tragedy when Violet, Claude and Cecilia’s eldest
child, contracted diphtheria. She died of heart failure on 17 October, just two weeks after the birth of her brother Michael. She was only eleven, and was always said in the family to have been a beautiful child – there is a portrait of her at Glamis which would seem to bear this out. Lady Glamis bore her daughter’s loss with as much courage as she could muster.

After Michael’s birth in 1893 there was an interlude in the nursery at St Paul’s Walden Bury until Elizabeth was born seven years later in August 1900. Her mother was thirty-eight. There is a small mystery surrounding the actual place of her birth.

The birth certificate filed at the register office in Hitchin by her father, Lord Glamis, states that she was born at St Paul’s Walden Bury. The 1901 census return for the house, which Lord Glamis as head of the household was responsible for completing, also states that Elizabeth (by then eight months old) was born there.
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Her first biography, published in 1927, for which she gave the author Lady Cynthia Asquith some assistance, says the same. There is a plaque in the parish church of All Saints at St Paul’s Walden, unveiled by Queen Elizabeth herself in 1937, which commemorates her birth in the parish and baptism at the church.

She therefore caused some surprise when, close to her eightieth birthday, she said that she had been born in London.
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In fact various records in her archives show that this was nothing new. The passport issued to her in 1921, despite the evidence of her birth certificate, showed her place of birth as London.
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In the early 1950s the press office at Buckingham Palace repeatedly confirmed that the Queen had been born in London.
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In 1978 the President of the British Astrological and Psychic Society wrote to Queen Elizabeth in a quandary because he had just read that she had been born in Hertfordshire, whereas the astrological chart he had lately presented to her was calculated on Edinburgh as her place of birth. Which was correct? She wrote at the top of his letter: ‘I was born in London & christened in Hertfordshire.’
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Unfortunately no comment by her seems to have survived as to why St Paul’s Walden was officially recorded as her birthplace, or why she willingly unveiled a plaque containing wrong information.

The birth of a ninth child is unlikely to attract as much attention as the first, and Elizabeth Bowes Lyon’s birth was no exception. Her grandfather’s diary does not even mention it, although he does record her father’s delayed arrival at Glamis on 22 August, causing him to miss the start of the grouse season by ten days.
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Nor has any correspondence about it come to light among the Strathmore papers. If the birth took place in London it was perhaps at the flat in Belgrave Mansions, Grosvenor Gardens, which Elizabeth’s paternal grandparents rented, and where Lord and Lady Glamis lived when they were in London.
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Or it could have been at Mrs Scott’s home, Forbes House, where the couple’s third daughter, Rose, was born in 1890.

In her account of Queen Elizabeth’s early years,
My Darling Buffy
(1997), the writer Grania Forbes investigated the problem with diligence. She speculated that Elizabeth could have been born in a London hospital and then driven straight to Hertfordshire, or even that she was born en route between London and St Paul’s Walden. Either is no doubt possible, but the hospital hypothesis is unconvincing, because women of Lady Glamis’s station normally had their babies at home and also because it is likely that some record of a hospital birth would subsequently have emerged. Another possibility advanced by Forbes was that Elizabeth’s father, an absent-minded man, actually made a mistake when he registered his daughter’s birth, more than six weeks after the event.
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In his 2005 biography Hugo Vickers points out that Dorothy Laird – who received authorization and help from the Queen Mother for her 1966 biography – does not mention a place of birth.
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Vickers suggests that she might have wished to draw a veil over the whole subject.
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Perhaps she preferred not to discuss the matter both because she was uncertain of the truth and because she thought it of purely private interest. At least in her youth, details of births would have been considered too delicate an issue to be discussed even within the family.

The belief persists in some quarters, nevertheless, that her birth did indeed take place in Hertfordshire. Canon Dendle French, chaplain of Glamis Castle and formerly vicar at St Paul’s Walden, has done what he can to resolve the mystery.

Canon French traced Miss Margaret Valentine, daughter of the
Rev. Henry Tristan Valentine, the vicar of St Paul’s Walden who baptized the baby Elizabeth in September 1900. Miss Valentine was ‘a very sprightly 91 year old, very lucid, and said she remembered very clearly August 4th 1900. “I was practising the piano at the Vicarage, and a maid came over from the Bury to say that Lady Glamis had given birth to a baby girl.” I asked her if this had been at the Bury and she said that it was. She did not seem to have any doubt about this at all.’ Moreover, among the letters Canon French received was one from a man who said that his father-in-law, Dr Bernard Thomas, a GP in Welwyn, always insisted that he was present at the birth. He was the family doctor, but it seems unlikely that a Hertfordshire doctor would be called to attend a birth in London.

Canon French also discovered that there had been a certain amount of gossip in the village, including the rumour that Lady Glamis had actually been en route from London when the contractions began and that the birth took place in or near Welwyn. One story passed down, but acknowledged as only hearsay, was that the baby started to arrive en route from London and that Lady Glamis was taken to Dr Thomas’s home, Bridge House, Welwyn, where the infant was delivered. At the same time, one of Canon French’s elderly parishioners told him that her aunt had been in charge of the laundry at the Bury and her work made her certain that the birth had taken place there. ‘So there you are!’ concluded the Canon. ‘Conflicting stories – and perhaps we shall never know – but I have to say that London is the least likely place, given the evidence, and I still think it was in (or near) the Bury!’
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W
HEREVER
HER
birth took place, the new century into which Elizabeth Bowes Lyon was born seemed to many to be a dawn of optimism. Europeans could look back on at least 200 years of growth and most of them would have assumed that it was progress. European industrialization in the nineteenth century had brought the greatest expansion of wealth the world had ever seen. There was no reason to expect this to end.

As John Roberts pointed out in his magisterial
History of the World
, the flow of commodities had increased exponentially: oil, gas and electricity had joined coal, wood, wind and water as sources of energy. Railways, electric trams, steamships, motor cars, even bicycles, brought remarkable changes to communications – indeed it was the greatest
revolution in transport since animals had been tied to carts thousands of years before. Industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century was more than enough to keep pace with population growth. Those Europeans who considered such matters had reason to believe that their history since the Middle Ages showed a continual advance towards goals which were so evidently worth while that few of them were ever questioned. Since European civilization had spread across the globe, the entire world seemed set fair on a progressive course.

There were of course pessimists; some of them felt that civilization was drifting away from its moorings in religion and absolute morality, ‘carried along by the tides of materialism and barbarity probably to complete disaster’.
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Distribution of the newly created wealth was uneven and most Europeans were still poor. More and more of them lived in cities and towns, for the most part in wretched conditions which seemed to many to breed the inevitable conditions for revolution. Socialists stoked the rhetoric which sustained the notion of revolution – in Britain socialism was a moral creed rather than a materialistic one. It meant not Marxism but trade unionism and parliamentary methods. Yet in 1896 the Second International, an organization of socialist parties, had confirmed the supremacy of Marxism and the dogma of the class struggle.

This was frightening for the middle classes throughout the continent, but Marxist rhetoric tended to ignore the reality that, although the majority was still poor, the capitalist system had improved the lives of huge numbers of people in recent decades. It had also, in many places, advanced democracy. The suffrage was spreading inexorably, at least among males, and the discussion of women’s rights had grown ever fiercer in the late nineteenth century. Henrik Ibsen had intended his play
A Doll’s House
to be a plea for the individual, but it was taken as a call for the liberation of women. The development of advanced capitalist economies created massive opportunities for employment for women as typists, telephonists, shop assistants and factory workers. The accretion of such jobs changed domestic economics and family life for ever.

Another force was the ever faster march of technological progress. Together with piped water, clean sources of energy for both light and heat began to spread in the new century. These developments, and others such as electricity, preserved food, cookers, washing machines with mangles, helped to start the transformation of domestic life, at
least for the middle classes. Later, the gradual spread of knowledge about contraception began to enable women to think that they could try to control the demands of procreation in ways which had been unimaginable to their mothers and to all their ancestors before them.

As we look back over the horrors of the twentieth century it is easy to say that the pessimists won the argument. In fact neither optimists nor pessimists were wholly right.
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Hindsight can be a disadvantage – sometimes today it is difficult to see how the optimists could have been so certain. But they included men and women of great intelligence and wisdom.

It is also true that, although the end of the nineteenth century really did have an ominously decadent
fin de siècle
feeling for some people, they were a minority, even among artists and intellectuals. Revolutionaries like to see history as a state in which, after long periods of nothing happening, cataclysm occurs. An alternative view is that progress (or any change) tends to be slow and is often almost unnoticed. Thus electric light is invented and is indeed revolutionary, but its adoption is gradual, spread over many decades. The changes, intellectual and technological, which were so much to affect the life of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon and all others born on the cusp of the century at first did little to disturb the traditional rhythms of her world.

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O
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22 J
ANUARY
1901, almost six months after Elizabeth’s birth, Queen Victoria died at Osborne, her home in the Isle of Wight. It was a momentous event. Her funeral took place amid unprecedented pomp and ceremony and was attended by representatives of over forty nations. There are nineteen stout volumes in the Royal Archives containing the outpourings of the British press alone on the passing of the Queen Empress, who had reigned for nearly sixty-four years.

She was succeeded by her son, King Edward VII. Although it is tempting to see a new reign and a new century as marking a distinct change, these were but artificial breaks in a continuous process. The new monarch differed in style but not much in substance from the old; the monarchy itself remained firmly grounded in a society in which aristocratic families like the Strathmores could still be confident of the privileges, but also conscious of the responsibilities, which their place in the social order brought them.

King Edward VII’s reign was to be short, less than ten years. He
was seen much more in public than his revered mother and he mixed more freely with his subjects. Enthusiastic for lavish spending and for pageantry, he resumed the tradition, only occasionally followed by Queen Victoria in her widowhood, of attending the state opening of Parliament in person.

King Edward visited the watering places of Europe frequently, sometimes to the detriment of communications with his ministers. He was a genial extrovert who enjoyed meeting people and made them feel at ease. By his friendships he did a great deal to help secure the social acceptance of Jews. He sought, also, to achieve good relations with other countries, and his visit to France in 1904 created the atmosphere which helped to bring about the Entente Cordiale with Britain’s hitherto hereditary enemy. In his personal life, he enjoyed the company of attractive and amusing women and acquired the reputation of a philanderer. But he treated his wife Queen Alexandra with affection and respect, and loved his children, three daughters, Princesses Louise, Victoria and Maud, and two sons, Prince Albert Victor (‘Eddy’) who died in 1892, and Prince George (later King George V) on whom he lavished affection after his elder brother’s death.

The Edwardian years have been described as the Indian summer of the country-house way of life.
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Despite the agricultural depression which set in after 1875 and which to a great extent broke the old reliance of the landed classes on land as a source of income, the mystique of ownership of a country property lived on. White tablecloths were still spread and the silver teapot still set out for tea on spacious lawns. Much had changed, however, and the families who weathered the changes best were those with resources beyond their broad acres – property in London, for example, or coalmining interests. Thanks to the arrival of the railways and then the motor car, travel to and between country properties was faster than ever before. Industrialization brought wealth and the newly rich wanted the highest status symbol of all – a stake in the land, but for purposes of recreation and display rather than income. Field sports, especially shooting, were the great pastime of the aristocracy of the age. According to the official history of Purdey’s, the gun makers, the Edwardian years were some of the busiest and most profitable the firm has ever known. ‘Individual cartridge orders of 10,000 per season are commonplace in the books of the time, and the cartridge-loading shop was busy far into the night. The orders for guns never slackened and profits boomed.’
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