The Queen Mother (7 page)

She gave wonderful parties. Raymond Asquith, the eldest son of the future Prime Minister, described a ball at Glamis in September 1905: ‘The place is an enormous 10th century dungeon. It was full of torches and wild men in kilts and pretty women pattering on the stone stairs with satin slippers … I was glad to find I had enough illusibility left to fancy myself in a distant century.’
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A lively and imaginative storyteller, Cecilia entertained her children with tales of life at Glamis in centuries gone by. Gradually, she inculcated in them a sense of history and romance, a love of tradition and a sense of duty. She was strict but not harsh; her children were brought up according to firm principles, but they recalled that these were never enforced unkindly. ‘Work is the rent you pay for life’ was one of her maxims; another was ‘Life is for living and working at. If anything or anyone bores you, then the fault is in yourself.’
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She was artistic and creative, and her embroidery, especially crewel-work, was outstanding in its design and execution. She also had a good ear for music and was an accomplished pianist. Another of her loves was gardening, and at Glamis between 1907 and 1910 she designed and created what is now called the Italian Garden. A major project, it involved felling about four acres of trees and levelling and draining the ground, all carried out by men from the estate.
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Christianity was fundamental to both Cecilia and Claude; they instilled a strong sense of religion in their children. The family said prayers daily at St Paul’s Walden Bury and in the Glamis chapel. Lady Strathmore considered that women’s hair should be covered for worship and provided white lace caps for guests. On Sundays she played the harmonium to accompany the hymns. She taught each of her children to kneel and pray beside their beds every night. Elizabeth continued to do this until the end of her life. The Strathmore children were brought up – like so many other British children from different backgrounds – with a love of nation as well as a love of God. Loyalty to King and Country were imbibed early on, along with decent behaviour. Their generation, like their parents’, was proud of the spread of Christianity, law and technical progress throughout the British Empire.

It was a happy household and, according to contemporary accounts, Elizabeth was a vivacious child who, from an early age, loved the company of adults as well as children. Her grandmother found her ‘quite a companion’, even at the age of three, and enjoyed ‘her coaxy little ways’.
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Her mother once found the three-year-old pouring tea (which she had ordered herself) and talking to neighbours who had arrived early. On another occasion, according to Cynthia Asquith, she approached a distinguished visitor with the words ‘Shall us sit and talk?’ As Lady Cynthia commented, ‘The sentence was a command rather than an invitation,’ and the man was gently detached from the rest of the party and led away for a long conversation.
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Being ninth of ten children had its benefits: adults took a more indulgent view of one’s behaviour. Elizabeth was mischievous as well as precocious, although her first biographer found no reports of ‘sensational naughtiness’ beyond the occasion when, aged about six, she used a pair of scissors to cut up her sheets. When she confided this to a visitor, she was asked, ‘What will Mother say when you tell her?’ ‘Oh! Elizabeth,’ she replied – and she was correct.
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Lord David Cecil, who was introduced to Elizabeth in London when they were both children, later wrote: ‘I turned and looked and was aware of a small, charming rosy face around which twined and strayed rings and tendrils of silken hair, and a pair of dewy grey eyes … From that moment my small damp hand clutched at hers and I never left her side … Forgotten were all the pretenders to my heart. Here was the true heroine. She had come. I had seen and she had conquered.’
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Another admirer, Lord Gorell,
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whom she used as a child to call ‘old boy’, remembered later that she had said to him, when aged eight, that she was sure she had ‘bothered’ him when she was only six. On the contrary, he recalled: ‘there are children, of course, who bother grown ups; but Lady Elizabeth was never one of them … She had, even then, that blend of kindliness and dignity that is the peculiar characteristic of her family. She was small for her age, responsive as a harp, wistful and appealing one moment, bright-eyed and eager the next, with a flashing smile of appreciative delight.’
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One of the many photographs of Elizabeth and David as children shows them at Glamis with their dancing master, Mr Neill of Forfar. It is almost like a painting by Rembrandt; the bearded old man, standing
with his fiddle, watches as Elizabeth poses in a long Jacobean dress said to be of rose pink and silver, while David wears the multi-coloured jerkin, tights, cap and bells of a court jester. Mr Neill took his job as teacher seriously; though he used to skip around the room after his pupils as he played, he maintained a solemn mien so that David and Elizabeth knew that they must learn their steps. Only when the dance was complete and any audience present clapped them could they relax.
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On one occasion they danced for the minister of Glamis, Dr John Stirton, who was later appointed chaplain to King George V at Balmoral. He recalled that when Cecilia Strathmore sat at the piano and played a few bars of a ‘quaint old minuet’, suddenly ‘as if by a magician’s touch, two little figures seemed to rise from the floor and dance, with admirable precision and grace, the stately measure so characteristic of the eighteenth century.’ When the dancers bowed and curtsied, ‘little choruses of praise were heard on every side, and Lady Elizabeth, on being asked the name of the character she had adopted, said with great
empressement:
“I call myself the Princess Elizabeth.” ’
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Among Elizabeth’s abiding childhood memories were her trips to Italy with her mother, to stay with her grandmother Mrs Scott in her various villas in Florence, San Remo and Bordighera. These visits are not well documented, but the first was probably to San Remo in February 1907, when she was six years old. On 14 February, Claude wrote to his mother at the Strathmores’ villa in Bordighera: ‘Cecilia and my darling Elizabeth are starting from Charing X tomorrow morning and you will see her soon I hope.’
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Eight days later Elizabeth wrote to her father, with some assistance, for the spelling is faultless: ‘This is a most lovely place and there is an orange tree in the garden and lots of flowers I pick them before breakfast.’
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There were several more trips over the next few years and they made a deep impression on the young girl. Later she spoke to her first biographer of ‘the thrill of night travel and restaurant-car meals, and at the end of the journey the glamour of being “abroad”, the gabble and gesticulations of foreigners, and all the colour and beauty of this Italian home’. Mrs Scott’s Villa Capponi in Florence had a wonderful garden, ‘with magnificent cypresses standing out against the blue distant mountains behind Fiesole’ and views over the city of Florence; the house itself was filled with beautiful furniture, pictures and flowers.
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On another trip, this time to Bordighera, Elizabeth reported back to her father that she had been playing on the rocks on the sea shore.
‘There is a dear little donky here called Marguarita and we put it in a little carriage and I drive it is so quiet have got nothing more to say exept it is a lovly garden my best love to yourself good by from your very loving Elizabeth.’
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In November 1908 Elizabeth’s eldest brother Patrick, Lord Glamis, married Lady Dorothy Osborne, daughter of the Duke of Leeds. ‘Me and Dorothy’s little brother are going to be bridesmaids,’ she wrote.
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It was to prove a problematic marriage for the family: none of them found Dorothy Glamis easy.
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In early 1910, the birth of John, the eldest son of Patrick and Dorothy, made Elizabeth an aunt for the first time, at the age of nine. She proudly recorded the event in the first of her surviving diaries, which she began on the first day of 1910.

The diary is a red morocco leather book about the size of a large postcard, perhaps given to her as a Christmas present in 1909. Her handwriting is strong and even, in black ink. On the flyleaf she wrote: ‘Written by Elizabeth Lyon, begun Jan 1 1910, at St Paul’s Walden.’

The diary was kept well for January 1910 but, in the way of diaries, tailed off thereafter. It recounted her lessons, a ‘not very nice’ fancy-dress party, enjoying
Aladdin
in London, lessons, rain, more lessons, tobogganing and church, and on the 21st she went for a long walk and ‘met people going to vote. David and I wore the right color. Vote for Hillier.’
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Alfred Hillier was the Conservative candidate for Hitchin, and his victory gave Elizabeth some happy news to send to her French governess: ‘Le conservatives a allee dedans ici n’est e pas ces gentil.’
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It was a time of political change. In 1906 the Conservatives had been swept away at Westminster by a landslide Liberal victory, and twenty-nine of the new Members represented the Labour Party. The January 1910 election was called after the unprecedented rejection by the House of Lords of a Finance Bill – Lloyd George’s controversial ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909. He had proposed to raise income tax and
other taxes. Land taxes, in particular, aroused the fury of the Conservative majority in the Lords.

The election resulted in a hung Parliament. The Liberals lost their large majority and were returned with a majority of just two. They now had to rely on the support of Labour and Irish MPs. King Edward VII was not pleased. He complained to his son that ‘our great Empire’ was now being ruled by Irish nationalists, ‘aided and abetted by Messrs Asquith, L. George and W. Churchill’.
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And indeed the new government was compelled to bring in an Irish Home Rule bill in return for Irish nationalist support for Lloyd George’s budget. But the Conservative majority in the House of Lords rejected the proposals of the Liberal government to reduce the powers of the Lords and this brought about a constitutional crisis which eventually did lead to a reduction in those powers.

The crisis was unresolved when, on 6 May 1910, Edward VII died. His son, King George V, wrote in his diary, ‘At 11.45 [p.m.], beloved Papa passed peacefully away & I have lost my best friend and the best of fathers.’
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Lady Strathmore noted that all the shops were ‘crammed’ when she went out to buy mourning clothes. On 20 May, a beautiful day, she and her two elder daughters watched the funeral procession from Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner.
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Nine European monarchs came to bury the King, including his nephew Kaiser William II of Germany; none could foresee that four years later their nations would all be engulfed in war.

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I
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J
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1910 Elizabeth’s eldest sister May married Sidney Herbert, sixteenth Baron Elphinstone, at St Margaret’s, Westminster. He had an exciting personality: formerly a big-game hunter and an explorer, in 1900 he had travelled to the Ta Hingan Shan mountains on the Sino-Russian border. Elizabeth loved being a bridesmaid at the wedding.
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She was by now well into her lifetime habit of writing chatty letters and wrote several to May as soon as her sister had departed on her honeymoon.

May replied to her promptly from her honeymoon, for three days later Elizabeth wrote again, apologizing that ‘I cant help writing so often because I have got such a lot to tell you, so please don’t answer all my letters unless you like.’
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For her birthday on 4 August, she told May, her father had given her ten shillings ‘because I was ten’, her mother gave her a ring, her grandmother a tennis racket and some cut coral. Her brother Michael teased her by refusing to go and buy her a present, then handed her a penny which he increased to four shillings – ‘so I am very rich’. May and Sidney sent her a present too. ‘I absolutely don’t know how to thank you and Sidney for the lovely
beautiful
[underlined often] clock it will be so usefull, I thank you and Sidney a thousand times.’
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When Cecilia Strathmore had to go to London or to Streatlam without her, Elizabeth wrote a stream of affectionate letters to her ‘Darling Sweetie Lovie Mother’, telling her that they had been to look for wild hyacinth bulbs in the wood, or that one of the dogs was lame, or that she was doing her lessons – ‘essays, music, Geografy and sums’.
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After Christmas 1910 she wrote, ‘I
am
[underlined seven times] so longing to see you lovie. Rosie said that
perhaps
you are going to let us go to Jack and the Beanstalk. Do write or telephone and tell us if we are going to any parties.’
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The telephone was part of the exhilarating technological revolution of the time. It was still a marvel but, like the motor car, was becoming more and more widely used. In 1900 there were 36,000 horses pulling trams in Britain. Over the next fourteen years, the internal combustion engine caused their number to fall to fewer than a thousand.
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Even more astonishing were adventures in the air. The ten-year-old Elizabeth wrote an essay entitled ‘A recent invention, Aeroplanes’: ‘An aeroplane, to look at, is like a big, great bird. They are very clever inventions. An aeroplane is usualy shaped like a cigar, and has a propeller at one end, and on each side the great white wings, which
makes it look so like a bird. An aeroplane can fly very high and it makes a great noise. They are not quite safe, yet, and many, many axidents have happened.’
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