The Queen Mother (58 page)

The Duchess too was very distressed. ‘It was a terrible thing to happen, and even now I can hardly believe that it’s true,’ she wrote to Nannie B.
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To D’Arcy Osborne she observed that although Jock could be ‘sarcastic & a little difficult to please, he was intensely affectionate, and a
really
good friend. If I needed good advice I always asked Jock, because though it might not be as palatable as one could wish, it was always right.’ She concluded that none of her brothers should live in town – they all loved the countryside too much. ‘It kills people in the end if they are parted from the land. It’s too strong a thing to understand.’
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Queen Mary was sympathetic. ‘Your poor Mother, my heart aches for her, knowing her love for all her children, & what a devoted family you are, a rare occurrence in these days.’
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*

B
Y
A
PRIL
THE
Duchess could no longer put off announcing that she would not be carrying out any more engagements that summer. Like most women of the time, pregnancy made her modest. ‘My
instinct
is to hide away in a corner when in this condition, which I know is silly, but I suppose it is a feeling handed down from many generations back,’ she told Queen Mary. ‘I should really like to live quietly in the country for the last few months, and then reappear afterwards as if nothing had happened!’
⁷⁷
The Queen agreed.
⁷⁸

The Duchess had spent the first three months of the year quietly at Naseby, telling Nannie B in early April that she felt very well indeed, ‘touch wood. It is such a long time, nearly 4 years, since little Elizabeth arrived, that I have quite forgotten what it’s like!’
⁷⁹
She and the Duke decided that their second child should be born at Glamis and so, in mid-July, a few weeks before the baby was due, they repaired there. The weather was fine and at first the Duchess enjoyed sitting in the sun, awaiting her time. She seems to have suspected that the baby would be another girl, for she wrote to the Queen on 21 July, ‘I will write again soon, and only hope that our new daughter (?) will not delay
too
long after August 8th.’
⁸⁰

By the end of July the weather had turned wet. The Duchess was, she said herself, getting ‘slightly irritable’ waiting, and longing for ‘the whole business’ to be over. By now Scotland’s remoteness seemed a disadvantage; she thought that the next time she had a baby, she would try to have it in London, in winter, ‘as it is much
more agreeable for both of us I think, as when one is in the country one misses all the lovely flowers and cadeaux for the baby, & little excitements like that!!’ The royal gynaecologist, Sir Henry Simson, was now in attendance, ‘and the more he hovers the slower it all seems!’
⁸¹

Simson was assisted by Frank Neon Reynolds, a thirty-five-year-old obstetrician and gynaecologist. He was conscious of the honour of attending upon the Duchess, but, as the waiting extended, he became nervous about all his own patients in London. Invited to lunch at Glamis on Sunday the 27th, he sat next to Lady Strathmore, ‘a dear old thing with white hair who absolutely fitted into the picture, even to her Elizabethan collar standing up round the back of her neck’. He liked the Duchess and her ‘lovely expression’; she showed him around the Castle. The Duke he found rather shy, ‘and it makes one wonder if one is being backward and gauche, but it seems it is the same with everybody.’
⁸²
The following Sunday Sir Henry and Dr Reynolds moved into the Castle so as to be there when labour began. Princess Elizabeth showed Reynolds the stables and her pony, and asked about his own daughter, Petronelle, who was three. The days were long but the evenings were cheerier – they all dined together, talked and played bridge.

The weather on the Duchess’s thirtieth birthday was wretched. Queen Mary sent her a clock. Princess Elizabeth gave her a large pot of white heather. The Duchess was sure that the baby would not arrive for another week. But Dr Simson thought it might be earlier and, on his advice, the Home Secretary, John Robert Clynes, former President of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, was sent for and arrived in Scotland promptly on 5 August. The Strathmores gratefully accepted Lady Airlie’s offer to put him up at Airlie Castle, not far from Glamis.

The Duchess was beginning to feel oppressed, writing to Queen Mary that she was sure that everyone had come ‘very previous’. She supposed that she would be given ‘all sorts of horrid drinks, so as not to keep these foolish people waiting … and here they all are waiting & hovering like vultures! I
shall
be glad when they are gone.’
⁸³
The Duke felt the same. ‘I shall be very thankful when this is all over, as I find I get very nervous & anxious about everything,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘I know it is unnecessary & silly but I can’t help it.’
⁸⁴
To add
to the tension, the village was swarming with newspapermen all desperately speculating on what was happening, although they were being told absolutely nothing. Frank Reynolds described them as ‘sort of waiting with their mouths open for something to drop into them!’
⁸⁵
The Duke went shooting as much as he could to kill time, his nerves and a few snipe, duck and rabbits. He celebrated the opening of the grouse-shooting season on 12 August by bagging enough for the Castle’s dinner that night.

Finally, after about six hours’ labour on the night of 21 August, the Duchess was delivered of her second daughter. It was a far easier birth than that of Princess Elizabeth. Frank Reynolds wrote to his wife: ‘A very nice baby and everything went smoothly without any trouble.’
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Lady Strathmore was delighted to tell her son David that this time his sister felt ‘
wonderfully
well; in fact, she can hardly believe she is herself, she feels so different to last time … Now she is perky & well & interested in everything.’
⁸⁷

The news was immediately telephoned to the King and Queen. The Queen’s immediate reaction was to be sorry it was not a boy, but the King said he was glad it was a girl; one could play with girls longer than with boys, and the parents were young and had plenty of time to have a son.
⁸⁸
Queen Mary was relieved by this response, and sent congratulations to her son.
⁸⁹
She wondered how Lilibet had taken the arrival of her sister; she need not have worried – the Princess was said to be ‘enchanted’.
⁹⁰
David Bowes Lyon’s father-in-law Colonel Spender-Clay, who was staying at Glamis, wrote, ‘That wonderful child Elizabeth is very excited & thought first of all that it was a wonderful Dolly & then discovered it was alive. She then took each of the three Doctors by the hand & said “I want to introduce you to my baby sister.” ’
⁹¹

The doctors in attendance issued an official bulletin stating that ‘The Infant Princess is doing fine’ – ‘doing fine’ was a Scottish colloquialism and was used to emphasize the fact that the Princess had been born north of the Tweed.
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In London the bells of St Paul’s pealed in salute and at the Tower of London forty-one guns were fired – twenty-one for the Royal Salute and another twenty on behalf of the Lord Mayor and Corporation. At Glamis itself, the arrival of ‘the lassie’s bairn’ was greeted by an enormous bonfire of larch, spruce and oak branches on Hunter’s Hill. It was lit by four small girls with the same torches as had been used to light the fire that had celebrated the
wedding of the baby’s mother seven years before.
⁹³
According to Lady Strathmore, more than a thousand motor cars full of people came, and as many motorcycles, with people from Edinburgh, Glasgow and even further afield. ‘It was most extraordinary.’
⁹⁴

The press managed to upset the family by reporting that ‘twilight sleep’
^*
was used for the birth. Patrick Hodgson, the Duke’s Private Secretary, wrote to the editor of the
Sunday Express
‘to protest emphatically’ that such stories were ‘absolutely without foundation and have caused Their Royal Highnesses the greatest possible annoyance’. Simson also issued a statement declaring, ‘I desire to emphasise the fact, which has been noted in all the Bulletins, namely, that everything was and continues to be absolutely normal.’
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Anxious to be closer to their new grandchild, the King and Queen travelled from Sandringham to Balmoral. Rather against his wishes, the Duke left his wife, daughter and new baby to visit them. His mother thought he looked ‘pleased & relieved’.
⁹⁶
He found the discussions at Balmoral a little frustrating and wrote at once to his wife:

He said that he had been irritated by his father telling him that he should have dealt differently with the press, the doctors and everyone concerned. ‘The dear man does not & never will understand the present day Press & I told him so. 30 years ago when we were born things were very different, but he cannot grasp that.’
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The reporters outside the Castle gates would have been delighted to learn that the naming of the King’s new granddaughter was proving
contentious within the family. The Duke and Duchess wanted to call her Ann but, for reasons which were not clear, the King did not like that name. From the start he and the Queen wanted Margaret, ‘after Margaret of Scotland, our ancestress’.
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Without acknowledging that she knew that the King and Queen had this preference, the Duchess wrote to the Queen to thank her for two little pill boxes she had sent her as a present. She went on to report that her baby was ‘nice & round & neat I am glad to say. I do hope you will be pleased with her.’ Then she broached the name. ‘I am very anxious to call her Ann Margaret, as I think that Ann of York sounds pretty, & Elizabeth & Ann go so well together. I wonder what you think? Lots of people have suggested Margaret, but it has no family links really on either side, & besides she will always be getting mixed up with Margaret the nurserymaid.’
⁹⁹

The King and Queen were not swayed even by this argument, and the Yorks reluctantly bowed to parental will and decided to call their daughter Margaret Rose instead of Margaret Ann. ‘I hope that you will like it,’ the Duchess wrote to the Queen.
¹⁰⁰
The Duke took Princess Elizabeth to Balmoral and reported to his wife that his parents liked the names. He included a letter which he said Lilibet had dictated:

The Duke added that she was ‘very proud of her bed. She is terribly sweet & was in my room the whole evening.’ In her own hand the child sent a page of pencilled kisses – half ‘For Mummy’ and the rest ‘For our new baby’.
¹⁰¹

The Duchess, sitting in a chair in the sunlight at Glamis, wrote back to her husband, ‘It’s such a lovely day, I do wish you were here duckie.’ She told him that she had thought of a new exercise for him – when he returned to Glamis he could ‘lug’ her around the garden in a bath chair. ‘I miss you horribly.’
¹⁰²
The Duke sent her another letter from Lilibet:

There was still the question of where the new baby should be christened. The Duchess was keen for the new Archbishop of Canterbury, her friend Cosmo Lang, who was coming to stay at Balmoral, to perform the ceremony in the family chapel at Glamis. She wanted her daughter to be received into the Church as soon as possible; she worried about taking her on the long journey back to London while still ‘a pagan’.
¹⁰⁴
Sadly, the official advice was that the established (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland might not view with enthusiasm the senior Anglican prelate performing the christening in Scotland.
^*
The Duchess was upset and she also felt that too much fuss was being made of her second daughter. ‘After all,’ she explained to Queen Mary, ‘the little angel is not of supreme importance at the moment, and I do hate the way that the papers make it of such moment. I always hope & pray that David will marry someone suitable – he ought to have some nice children.’
¹⁰⁵

She wrote to Cosmo Lang to say how disappointed she was that he could not conduct the service quietly at Glamis.
¹⁰⁶
Perhaps realizing the Duchess’s nervousness about the delay in administering the sacrament, he suggested that when he came to lunch at Glamis, ‘if I see the little Princess … may I be allowed to give her my Blessing – anticipating the Christening which will come later’.
¹⁰⁷
The Archbishop did come to lunch at Glamis to bless the new Princess; they agreed
that the christening should be at the end of October in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace. The Duchess was still quite weak and she did not move much outside her room until the end of September.
¹⁰⁸
When she finally came back south with Margaret Rose she told the Queen, ‘It really does take a whole year to have a baby, and I cannot manage much standing yet.’
¹⁰⁹