The Queen Mother (56 page)

On 13 December the Duke and Duchess attended a performance of
A Message from Mars
given by the Lena Ashwell Players in Notting Hill Gate, in support of a movement to take drama to the urban poor. ‘We actually made a profit for a change, such is the magic wrought by their interest,’ declared the organizers afterwards.
¹⁸
Two days later the Duchess was in Aldershot visiting the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, the first of the regiments of which she became colonel-in-chief. She had been appointed on 12 August 1927 and maintained a lifelong association with the regiment.
¹⁹

That Christmas, as usual, the family travelled by train to Sandringham. Princess Elizabeth was now attracting increasing press attention; this could be irritating but it enhanced the Yorks’ popularity as an ideal
young family. On this occasion she was reported to have worn pink velvet and fur on the journey and white silk for a Christmas party for the Sandringham estate workers. The
Westminster Gazette
described the Princess at the party as ‘chattering and laughing and bombarding the guests with crackers handed to her by her mother’. This story seems to have been accurate. ‘Baby was too sweet & threw crackers & joined in the fun,’ wrote Queen Mary in her diary.
²⁰

After Christmas, the Princess’s parents acceded to the King and Queen’s constant requests for more time with their grandchild – she stayed on with her grandparents at Sandringham, where she loved playing with Snip, the King’s dog.
²¹
After she returned home in late January 1928, the King wrote to the Duke, ‘I miss your sweet baby more than I can say, breakfast & tea are quite different without her … I think the air here agreed with her & she has come on a lot.’
²²
The Queen was equally devoted and told her son, ‘I don’t think you & Elizabeth realize what a great joy your child is to us & how we love having her with us now & again in the house, she is so sweet & natural & so amusing.’
²³

The year was filled with both official and private events, but that autumn there was pleasure as well as work. The Yorks had taken Naseby Hall in Northamptonshire so that the Duke could enjoy the hunting season. The Duchess loved being there, although she thought the countryside ugly and bleak. She liked the wind and the rain tearing at the house. ‘Hi! A slate has fallen. And another! Hooray, a large piece of lead now. The whole roof is coming off,’ she wrote to D’Arcy Osborne.
²⁴

The end of 1928 brought a real crisis for the family, and the country. On 11 November the Duke and Duchess accompanied the King and Queen at the Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph. The King caught a chill and by 21 November he had become unwell. He had to dictate that day’s entry in his diary to the Queen. ‘I was taken ill this evening. Feverish cold they called it, and retired to bed.’
²⁵
There were no more diary entries, except a few written by the Queen, for the next five months. Penicillin had not yet been developed and the King very nearly died.
²⁶
His physician Lord Dawson understood at once that his patient was seriously ill. Tests showed that he had a streptococcal infection of the chest, and he developed septicaemia over the next few days. He began to suffer serious bronchial pain and became delirious. The Palace did not reveal this grim news to the
public but by early December the medical bulletin did acknowledge ‘a decline in the strength of the heart’.

The King’s children were summoned. The Duke of York had only to come from Naseby; the Duchess was in London. She came at once ‘and was a great comfort to us’, her sister-in-law Princess Mary wrote.
²⁷
The Prince of Wales had to make a longer journey. He was on safari in Kenya with Denys Finch Hatton, the celebrated white hunter. On 27 November he received a coded telegram from the Prime Minister informing him that the King was seriously ill. Baldwin thought that the British people would be profoundly shocked if the Prince did not come home.
²⁸

The Prince did not react well, according to the subsequent account of his Private Secretary, Alan Lascelles. His immediate response was apparently to dismiss the telegram. ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ he declared. ‘It’s just some election dodge of old Baldwin’s.’
²⁹
Lascelles wrote that at this he lost his temper. ‘Sir, the King of England is dying, and if that means nothing to you, it means a great deal to us.’ At which the Prince apparently looked at him, said nothing, left the room and spent the rest of the evening getting to bed the wife of a local British official. He told a friend it was the best thing to do after a shock. Once he was convinced of the gravity of his father’s condition – and the fact that he might soon become king himself – the Prince made his way home as swiftly as possible by land and by sea. He was borne on a British cruiser through the Suez Canal to Brindisi where the Italian government had laid on a special train to speed him across the continent.
³⁰

London was rife with rumours – such as that the King had died but that news of this was being delayed until the return of the Prince of Wales. Other gossip had it that the Duke of York planned to usurp the throne in his elder brother’s absence. Amused, the Duke wrote to tell his brother that there was a story going about that the reason for his rushing home was that ‘in the event of anything happening to Papa I am going to bag the Throne in your absence!!! Just like the Middle Ages.’
³¹

By the time the Prince of Wales finally arrived home on the evening of 11 December, the King’s condition was critical. The Duke met his brother at Victoria station and, on the short drive to the Palace, warned him how shocked he would be by his father’s changed appearance. Dawson, he said, felt he would have to perform an
operation very soon.
³²
The Duke also told the Prince how calm and strong their mother had been. But he was concerned for her. ‘She keeps too much locked up inside of her. I fear a breakdown if anything awful happens. She has been wonderful.’
³³

Next day the end seemed near – the King’s gifted nurse, Sister Black, wrote, ‘The doctors had done everything that could be done. Human skill ended there.’
³⁴
But Dawson, watching his unconscious patient, decided that he really must make one more attempt to locate the source of the fatal poison – an abscess just behind the diaphragm.
³⁵
With great dexterity, he managed to find the site, plunged in a needle and drew off over a pint of pus. That night the King had a rib removed and the draining of the abscess was completed.
³⁶

Over the next few days constant medical bulletins were issued and churches all over England were kept open day and night so that people could come to offer prayers for their monarch. Gradually it seemed that such prayers were being heard. The King’s decline had been arrested. But he was by now so frail that it was some weeks before his doctors could be confident that he would actually recover.
³⁷
The Royal Family remained in London over Christmas; on 6 January 1929 Queen Mary recorded in her diary that for the first time in nearly six weeks the King had been able to hold a conversation with her, which cheered her greatly. There was relief and gratitude throughout the country.

At the beginning of February the King was able to travel with the Queen to the south-coast resort of Bognor to convalesce. They hoped to have their granddaughter to stay with them, but both the Duchess and the Princess were ill with chest infections at the time.
³⁸
The Princess’s trip to the seaside was finally arranged for the middle of March. ‘She is looking forward wildly to digging in the sand, and talks knowingly of pails & spades!’ the Duchess wrote, adding a warning: ‘She is very sensible really & understanding, but like a piece of quicksilver nowadays!’
³⁹
The Queen recorded in her diary how delighted the King was to have his granddaughter close to him again. The gardener made a sandpit for her and the King watched her playing while the Queen sometimes joined her making sand pies; the Princess’s sunny personality was said to have helped her grandfather’s recovery.

While the Princess stayed beside the English Channel, her parents crossed it en route to Oslo for the wedding of Crown Prince Olav of Norway to Princess Märtha of Sweden; the Duke, who was the Crown
Prince’s first cousin, was to be best man.
^*
They had hoped that the Royal Navy might make a ship available to them, but the King was concerned that the expense of this might lead to questions in Parliament and so the Duke and Duchess travelled by train and ferry via Berlin.
⁴⁰

They arrived in the German capital on the morning of 15 March. After breakfasting at the British Embassy they looked around the Schloss where Kaiser Wilhelm II had lived, which the Duchess found ‘most interesting & rather sad’. The Kaiser’s own rooms were bereft of his furniture (he had taken it into exile in Holland), but she coveted Hoppner’s portrait of Frederick, Duke of York, which she spotted in his dressing room. They went to Potsdam and saw Frederick the Great’s rococo palace of Sans Souci; the Duchess was very much taken with the collection of Watteau paintings there. ‘Then, just to see a little of modern Germany, we had tea at a tea & dance place in Berlin. It was most amusing.’
⁴¹
She told Queen Mary she had enjoyed her day in Berlin, but writing to her friend D’Arcy Osborne she allowed herself to be a little more mischievous, saying, ‘I will reserve my opinions (if you care to hear them) of our late enemies until I meet you again.’
⁴²

The night train and ferry of 15/16 March carried them to Malmö. The Duchess instantly preferred Sweden to Germany, marvelling at the exquisitely clean and magnificently appointed hotel to which they were taken. They were invited to tea in a beautiful pink-brick castle where everyone behaved with great courtesy and friendliness. ‘We arrived with dozens of other guests all bearing flowers & clicking their heels. A birthday party! & such a deliciously old fashioned atmosphere of compliments and clicks, & tea handed in boiling hot rooms by Rectors of neighbouring Universities. I enjoyed it so much, and they all talked such good English.’ She was impressed with Swedish efficiency – ‘So well educated and every cottage with electric light and telephone’. But their journey was beginning to seem endless – ‘our train, which started in such a businesslike way from Calais, every second being of importance, has now deteriorated into a kind of
Oriental timeless affair, & I feel that we may be days before we reach our destination.’
⁴³

They did reach Oslo in good time for the wedding on 21 March. At the pre-wedding ball at the Royal Palace on 19 March, the
Daily Telegraph
’s reporter recorded that the Duchess ‘looked lovely in a silver beaded frock and a diadem of diamonds’; the ‘gay party of 600 – Kings, Princes, Dukes, Counts, dignitaries, and their wives’ danced until 2 a.m.; the Duchess, it was noted, danced mostly with her husband. Oslo was brilliantly illuminated for the occasion, with ‘flaming ice pillars’ and dance floors laid down in the streets, where the crowds whirled the night away. For the wedding, the Duke of York, in naval full-dress uniform, accompanied the bridegroom to the Church of Our Saviour, while the Duchess, wearing a white fur coat and the ‘new pinky gold dress’ she had had made for the wedding,
⁴⁴
was escorted by Prince George of Greece. ‘We loved having dear Bertie and darling Elizabeth,’ Queen Maud wrote to Queen Mary. ‘
Everyone
of course lost their hearts to Elizabeth, she was so sweet to all.’
⁴⁵

When they returned to London, Queen Mary brought Princess Elizabeth back to them. They spent the next few weeks between London and Naseby, where the Duchess had now made friends with local farmers and the parson, ‘a tall heavenly man with an immense white collar who catches moths!’
⁴⁶
In London they gave a number of dinner parties at 145 Piccadilly and considered giving a ball at St James’s Palace but abandoned the idea after a warning from the Queen: ‘Papa hates the thought of those new dances being danced in his Palaces, old fashioned no doubt but difficult to combat!’
⁴⁷

Immediately after their return it was announced that the King had decided to nominate the Duke to the post of lord high commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The holder, appointed annually, was the King’s representative at the Assembly. It was an important compliment to the Duke and the first time that a member of the Royal Family had held this ancient office. Moreover, 1929 marked the Reunion of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church after more than eighty years of schism.
⁴⁸

The Duke and Duchess took up residence in the Palace of Holyroodhouse on 20 May, and the next day they were driven, with great pageantry, through large and enthusiastic crowds to St Giles’s Cathedral and then to the Tolbooth Church where the Assembly met. There the Duke delivered the King’s commendation on the reunion of
the churches, and he and the Duchess were greeted with tremendous applause. Alongside the official ceremonies there was a great deal of socializing. They were both seen to enjoy themselves; the Duchess was described in one newspaper as ‘a winsome Scotswoman, before whose smile the whole capital fell enchanted’.
⁴⁹
She was moved by the Assembly itself, writing to Queen Mary: ‘They, the Assembly, are, I think, really pleased at us being here, and their feeling for you & Papa makes tears come to one’s eyes. They are so delightfully sincere in Scotland!’
⁵⁰
Basil Brooke, the Duke’s Comptroller, wrote: ‘The Duke and Duchess had the most terrific reception. They could hardly get through Princes Street on their way to the Station on Wednesday night and the Edinburgh crowd let themselves go properly and cheered like a Londoner.’
⁵¹
The
Scotsman
even went so far as to declare that ‘it may well be that the frail ghost of Mary Queen of Scots revisiting the Castle felt the stirrings of jealousy.’
⁵²