The Queen Mother (8 page)

Next year more domestic interests dominated a letter in which she recounted a typical day at St Paul’s Walden:

Much later she recalled that her early years were spent in ‘a quiet world’ of horses. In St James’s Square ‘the footman would whistle once for a hansom and four times for a Growler’,
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and Hyde Park on Saturdays was filled with ponies and carriages. At St Paul’s Walden the family had dog carts to take them through the lanes to and from the railway station. And at Glamis she remembered all her life a frightening incident when, the coachman by her side, she was driving a pair of horses and they started to run away with her. ‘We were hanging on, making straight for the gates which were shut and I said to our coachman, “What are we going to do?” and he took his bowler hat off and he said, “Trust in the Lord,” with which we hung on and, do you know, as we got nearer the gates, they opened. We flew through them at great speed. Trust in the Lord.’
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The quiet horse-world began to end when her father acquired the first family car – ‘Huge. It made such a noise you really couldn’t hear what the other person was saying.’ It could go uphill only backwards.
‘I remember my father sitting on the back seat tapping on the window with his stick saying to the chauffeur “Take a run at it.” ’ Those early cars were both hazardous and exciting, she said – and grooms did not always make good drivers.
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Life took on a more boisterous note when Elizabeth and David were joined by their elder siblings and parties of friends for weekends at St Paul’s Walden Bury and for the summer holidays in Scotland. Lord Gorell recalled that nothing was as friendly as the pre-war summer house parties at Glamis, when, ‘under the gracious guidance’ of Cecilia Strathmore, ‘the old castle re-echoed with fun and laughter’. The boys played cricket constantly. The games were fun – ‘serious-non-serious’ rather than in deadly earnest. One match at Arbroath depended on the ability of Fergus, ‘a great wag as well as a dear and gallant fellow, but no cricketer, to achieve the unusual and make a run, and amidst cheers for once he managed a fluke shot’.
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Shooting was at the heart of life at Glamis. There were two high points in the year – August-September for grouse and September-October for partridges. Horses and carts took the guns (the shooting party) up to the moor; the keepers would walk. The party would spend most of the day on drives such as Ingliston Bogs, West Dunoon, Tarbrax, Hayston Hill, The Warren. Every male member of the family had his own gamebook; these were meticulously kept and reveal that an average of five guns, sometimes only two and rarely more than seven, went out at a time. Often it was just members of the family who shot, along with the factor and occasionally friends and neighbours. The gamebook of Elizabeth’s brother Fergus shows a good grouse day on 15 August 1913. The guns that day were all family – Pat, Jock, Mike, Fergus and their father. They shot 133 grouse, two woodcock, six hares, twelve rabbits and one ‘various’. On another occasion, when Fergus shot at Glen of Ogilvie by himself, he recorded: ‘ripping day. Most enjoyable I ever had.’
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The evenings were also lively. The Castle was lit by hundreds of candles; there were immense fires; there was dinner in the great dining room, which the twelfth Earl had renovated in ‘Jacobean’ style and which boasted an enormous carved sideboard, family portraits and wooden armorial shields illustrating family alliances. After dinner the family and their guests adjourned to the drawing room, where logs burned constantly in the fireplace to banish the chills as summer died into autumn. The focus of the room was often the piano at which
Lady Strathmore or one of her daughters would play in the evenings while the rest of the party gathered around to sing traditional Scottish ballads or popular songs of the day such as ‘Would You Like Me for a Father, Mary Ann?’, ‘The Little Nipper’ by Albert Chevalier or ‘The Vamp’ from
Bran Pie
.
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If one of the children had a birthday, the older siblings made comic toasts which aroused general laughter. Gorell commented that there was:

A friend and admirer of Elizabeth’s sister Rose, a young naval officer named Frederick Dalrymple Hamilton,
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came for the first time in the summer of 1911; his diaries over the next three years contain vivid glimpses of life in the Strathmore family, and of the young Elizabeth. ‘Very pleased to see Lady Rose again,’ he wrote on arriving at Glamis. ‘Made the acquaintance of her younger sister Elizabeth for 1st time who is a little angel!! After tea Rosie took me up to the gardens & we fed on gooseberries. Played a new gambling game after dinner.’ The next days were filled with cricket matches, shooting, tennis, raids on the fruit garden and picnics. After one ‘enormous lunch’ on the moor, ‘the more energetic ones set out to climb a hill about 3 miles off. Mike & Elizabeth & I thought this quite beyond our strength & so we coiled ourselves down & went to sleep on the top of the first hill!’ In the evening they ‘sang ribald songs in the Billiard room and later on danced in the drawing room’. The next day they all dressed up for dinner, and Rose pinned her friend into a velvet costume with a sword and wig. ‘Rose as Joan of Arc was topping also Elizabeth in an early Georgian kind of rig … After dinner we danced
reels in the middle of which my trousers fell off & I had to make a quick exit!!!’
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Sitting next to Mike in the Castle chapel at the first of two services he attended on Sunday, Freddy ‘had much ado not to laugh’ but was deterred by the presence of Lord Strathmore behind them; in the afternoon he went with the two sisters for ‘a trout tickling expedition & had great fun though the number of trout tickled was exactly nil!’ In the garden later, he recorded, ‘E. nearly killed herself eating green apples!’ He hated leaving next day – ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had such a good time,’ he wrote. He said goodbye sadly at the station to a large party including Elizabeth and that evening he sent her a box of chocolates.
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His later visits both to Glamis and to St Paul’s Walden were equally filled with fun and carefree games – in Freddy’s pre-war diaries there is a sense of eternal play.

But there was grief in the Strathmore family also. Alec, Elizabeth’s third brother, had been badly injured at Eton when a cricket ball hit his head. This seems to have caused a tumour. In July 1911 his brother Jock, who was a year older, wrote to their mother from Boston, Massachusetts, where he was working in a bank, ‘I am so sorry to hear you don’t think Alec is so strong. I wonder why it is? What do the doctors say about the condition of his head? Poor Alec, what an awful long time it has been for him.’
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Alec’s gamebook records that towards the end of his life he often had to stop shooting early because of headaches. In October 1911 Jock wrote to a friend, ‘I am very much afraid that he is not getting any better.’
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Jock took a boat home, but he was too late to see his brother. Alec died in his sleep in the early hours of 19 October 1911, aged twenty-four. Cecilia was devastated. Her mother wrote to her from Bordighera: ‘I am so thankful to feel that you have Jock with you but so grieved for him not getting home in time to see his Companion Brother. With his deep feeling heart it must be hard to bear.’
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I
N EARLY
1912 Elizabeth took up her diary again with a brief entry for the weekend of 17–18 February. She was at St Paul’s Walden Bury with Rose, her father and David; her mother was at Glamis. On Saturday she and Rose went riding from 11 to 3. ‘
Great
fun.
Lovely
day.’
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On Sunday they all went to the parish church of All Saints, which lay at the end of a grassy ride cutting through the woods below the house.

At the beginning of March Freddy Dalrymple Hamilton found both Elizabeth and David ‘down with measles or up rather’ when he lunched with the family at St James’s Square; he was there again the next day to take Mike and Rose to a show at the Coliseum, and noted in his diary that suffragettes, whose campaign to win the vote for women was at its height, were ‘busy smashing windows all day’.
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In April he spent a weekend at St Paul’s Walden, where he joined a young house party: there was tennis and other games, and after church on Sunday ‘we were beautifully idle all the rest of the day lying in various attitudes of repose on the lawn.’ The next morning ‘Mike, Lady Rosie, Elizabeth & David & I went down to the Grotto & had certain adventures with an old Boat which Mike & I succeeded in sinking.’ On the drive back to London that night, he saw billboards announcing ‘the awful news about the Titanic’.
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The great liner, supposedly unsinkable, had sunk on her maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg; more than 1,500 people died.

Elizabeth’s spasmodic diary omits these events, but records that she had a fitting for her bridesmaid’s dress for Violet Anson’s wedding
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– ‘White satin, chiffon & lace’. The family gathered at St James’s Square to say goodbye to Jock, who was returning to America for six months. The following week she had another fitting and returned to Hertfordshire in the middle of a violent thunderstorm. ‘Celler 3 feet deep’. The next day she felt quite unwell and took some ‘Gregory Powder’ (a universal panacea in those days). She feared she might have ‘influenzer’, and was not at first allowed to see Mrs Scott and Aunt Vava,
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who had just arrived. But the doctor told her she just had a chill, so she was able to come downstairs to see the visitors. ‘Grannie gave me a little cup,’ she recorded. With that she finally lost interest in her diary, which ends decisively: ‘Good night.’
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May 1912 found the two Benjamins still at St Paul’s Walden, without their parents and busy with their lessons. David was given a bicycle for his tenth birthday; Elizabeth wrote to her mother, ‘I
cant
help envying him. It is
so
hot today that its uncomfortable, one person
in London has already died of the heat … I simply must fly to lessons, but I will write you a longer letter tomorrow.’ The letter ended with many kisses.
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Two days later she wrote:

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A
LL
E
LIZABETH’S
brothers went to Eton, but, although boarding schools for girls were becoming more fashionable, they were not yet the norm for aristocratic families. Lady Strathmore herself taught Elizabeth and David to write and introduced them to drawing as well as music and dance. But she did not deem her own teaching to be enough. The two children had a series of governesses and teachers at home, and also attended day school when in London. At St Paul’s Walden, where the children spent most of their time, their governess was Miss Mary Wilkie, who remained with them for nine years.
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At Glamis they were taught for a time by Miss Laurel Gray, who later recalled saying to Elizabeth at their first meeting, ‘I expect that you can spell quite long words,’ to which the little girl instantly replied, ‘Oh yes, I can spell capercailzie & ptarmigan.’
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Miss Gray also recounted that Lady Strathmore had asked her to keep an account book of the children’s progress. ‘When they were good, a good mark and a penny. And of course a bad mark, that was shocking. Elizabeth wasn’t too good but she always had a good mark, she was naturally a good scholar. A bad mark made no difference to David. I was as strict as I could be, he was terrible.’
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In London, when they were eight or nine, Elizabeth and David attended a school in Marylebone run by a Frobel-trained teacher, Miss
Constance Goff.
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According to the reminiscences of a fellow pupil, Joan Ackland, Elizabeth and David wore tussore smocks, had very good manners and were inseparable. Years later during the Second World War, Joan, by now Mrs Edgar Woollcombe, met Queen Elizabeth; the Queen recalled the French and German plays they had performed at school, the boxing for the boys and fencing for the girls. She also remembered being called a show-off when she had begun an essay on the sea with the Greek words for ‘The Sea, the Sea!’
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