The Queen Mother (90 page)
Authors: William Shawcross
Last-minute appeals for peace were sent to Berlin and Warsaw by Pope Pius XII, by President Roosevelt and by many others. Mackenzie King argued that the King and Queen could save the situation by making a direct appeal to Hitler. And he urged that the Queen’s name should be associated ‘in an appeal on behalf of women and children who would become innocent victims in any world conflict’.
146
Such suggestions fell on fertile soil: the King and Queen were still deeply anxious to try to prevent another war. On 27 August the King again suggested to the Prime Minister, as he had a year before, that he write a personal letter to Hitler. Once again Chamberlain demurred, arguing that the right psychological moment had not yet come.
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The problem of what to do with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the event of war now loomed. The King wrote to tell Queen Mary that he had provisionally arranged for them to return to England. The Duke would be given ‘a civilian job under the Regional Commissioner for Wales. They would both stay in Wales.’
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Neither his mother nor his wife wished to see the Duchess of Windsor; Queen Mary told the Queen that she thought she was dangerous.
149
On the night of 28 August the Queen kissed her children goodbye and took the night train to London. She hated being parted from them, but wanted to wait on events before risking their coming back to the capital. If war did break out they would go to Birkhall, in case Balmoral was targeted by bombers. She also wrote to her eldest sister Rose asking her to look after the Princesses in the event that something befell her and the King. Rose replied promising that in such circumstances, ‘I would give up everything to try & make the two darlings happy, & try my very best to smooth their lives … I have always loved them.’
150
In London the Queen found her husband ‘very calm and cheerful’ despite all the anxieties. She wrote to Queen Mary, ‘It is indeed terrible that the world should be faced with a War, just because of the wickedness and sheer stupidity of the Nazis. One can only go on hoping & praying, that a solution will be found.’
151
On the last day of August, the evacuation of three million mothers and children was announced. Railway stations were thronged with families, labels tied around the necks of the children; parents were
weeping. Sandbags were piled around government buildings and Buckingham Palace. The most valuable paintings in the National Gallery were packed up for distribution to secret hiding places around the country. People finally began to realize that the unimaginable was happening – in this beautiful summer weather the world that they loved was about to come to an end.
Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle began their own sombre preparations. The King and the Prime Minister had decided that both should be kept open, but the Palace with only a skeleton staff.
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Many in the Royal Household departed for military service; most of the remaining staff started to move out of London to Windsor. Beds and bunk beds had to be brought into the Castle and rooms found for scores of people. The Castle windows were sandbagged, lights on the Long Walk were extinguished, visitors were barred, steel shelters were erected for the sentries, everyone was rehearsed in air-raid drill. The carriage horses in the Buckingham Palace Mews were sent to Windsor and put to work on the farms. The finest pictures and other works of art in both Palace and Castle were removed and stored underground at Windsor. Display cases were emptied of miniatures, gems, porcelain and glass; furniture was turned to face the wall. The great cut-glass chandeliers which illuminated the state rooms at Windsor were lowered to three feet from the floor so as to diminish the impact of any fall. Blackout restrictions were severe; all the skylights were covered in black paint, turning into gloom the splendour of the Waterloo Chamber, King Charles II’s dining room and the Grand Staircase. The windows of the rooms still being used were covered with a lacework of glue and wire netting.
All hopes evaporated on 1 September 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland. The following day Britain issued an ultimatum: if Hitler withdrew his troops, the British government would endeavour to broker peace between Germany and Poland. On the morning of Sunday 3 September the British Ambassador to Berlin delivered a final note to the German government stating that unless Germany undertook to withdraw her troops from Poland by 11 a.m., Britain would declare war.
At 11.15 that morning Neville Chamberlain announced to the nation that no such undertaking had been given and Britain was at war with Germany. France declared war a few hours later. Next day,
the Queen sat down at her writing table in Buckingham Palace; her four-page note deserves to be quoted in its entirety:
I wish to try & set down on paper some of the impressions that remain from that ghastly day – Sunday September 3rd 1939. And yet when one tries to find words, how impossible, & how inadequate they are to convey even an idea of the torture of mind that we went through.
Having tried by every means in our power to turn Hitler from his purpose of wantonly attacking the Poles, and having warned him of the consequences if he did so, and having been practically ignored by the Nazis, we knew on the night of Sept 2nd, that our request for a withdrawal of German troops from Poland would be refused, so that we went to bed with sad hearts.
I woke early the next morning – at about 5.30. I said to myself – we have only a few hours of Peace left, and from then until 11 o’clock, every moment was an agony.
My last cup of tea in peace! My last bath at leisure; and all the time one’s mind working on many thoughts. Chiefly of the people of this Country – their courage, their sense of humour, their sense of right & wrong – how will they come through the wicked things that War lets loose. One thing is, that they are at their best when things are bad, and the spirit is wonderful.
At 10.30 I went to the King’s sitting room, and we sat quietly talking, until at 11.15 the Prime Minister broadcast his message from Downing Street, that as the Germans had ignored our communications, we were at War. He spoke so quietly, so sincerely, & was evidently deeply moved & unhappy.
I could not help tears running down my face, but we both realized that it was inevitable, if there was to be any freedom left in our world, that we must face the cruel Nazi creed, & rid ourselves of this continual nightmare of force & material standards. Hitler knew quite surely that when he invaded Poland, he started a terrible war. What kind of a mentality could he have?
As we were thinking these things, suddenly from outside the window came the ghastly, horrible wailing of the air raid siren. The King & I looked at each other, and said ‘it
can’t
be’, but there it was, and with beating hearts we went down to our shelter in the basement. We felt stunned & horrified, and sat waiting for bombs to fall.
After half an hour the all clear went, & we returned to our rooms, & then had prayers in the 44 room.
*
We prayed with all our hearts that Peace would come soon – real peace, not a Nazi peace.
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*
Adolf Hitler published the two volumes of
Mein Kampf
(My Struggle) in 1925 and 1926. The book, part autobiography and part political treatise, outlined his hatred of Judaism and communism and expressed his belief that Germany must abandon democracy, rearm and acquire new European territories to fulfil her destiny. An expurgated English-language edition, omitting much of the anti-Semitism, was published in 1933. An unexpurgated English version, translated by James Murphy, was published in London in 1939.
†
First Baron Tweedsmuir (1875–1940), Governor General of Canada 1935–40, and better known as the author John Buchan.
*
The most comprehensive account is that given in
The Roosevelts and the Royals
by Will Swift, John Wiley & Sons, 2004.
*
This was the EP Ranch in Alberta, which the Prince bought after visiting Canada for the first time in 1919, and in which he took great interest. He kept it until the early 1960s.
*
Alec Hardinge had been left behind to keep watch on the international situation, and it was Lascelles who had done the preparatory ‘recce’ for the tour earlier in the year.
*
The Black Watch (the Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada also provided streetliners: so long was the processional route that there were not enough men, and the streetliners had to ‘leapfrog’ along the route. (Information from Tom Bourne, son of Colonel John Bourne of the Black Watch of Canada)
*
Her triumph was only temporary, however. Camillien Houde was interned in 1940 for urging men to refuse conscription.
*
This dress she later presented to Canada and it was put on display in the Public Archives in Ottawa.
*
Georges Vanier (1888–1967). After a distinguished military and diplomatic career he became the first French Canadian governor general of Canada in 1959.
*
David Williamson, the shepherd’s son, told the press afterwards that she had recalled playing with him when they were children. Also there to meet the Queen was a former member of the Girl Guides troop which she had organized at Glamis, Mrs Francis MacAndrew French, whose father was a tenant farmer there. (Toronto press report, 23 May 1939, RA F&V/VISOV/CAN/1939/Press cuttings/Vol. I, p. 114)
*
Another unofficial but much publicized presentation took place in the Lieutenant Governor’s offices that day: that of the Dionne quintuplets from Callander. The little girls, aged not quite five, curtsied and presented bouquets to the Queen, putting their arms round her neck and kissing her when it was time to leave. Mackenzie King found this episode particularly heart warming, and reported that the Queen ‘was very nice about it, and seemed rather to enjoy it’.
*
It was probably Lieutenant Governor McNab of Saskatchewan. The Regina press reported that a gift box of prairie fowl had been sent to the royal train. (RA F&V/VISOV/CAN/1939/Press cuttings/Vol. I, p. 211)
*
The Work Projects Administration was an agency set up under Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1935, to provide jobs for the unemployed in public works projects.
*
Through Colonel Augustine Warner who settled in Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century, Queen Elizabeth shared a common ancestry with George Washington and General Robert E. Lee. Her paternal grandmother, Frances Dora Smith, was the great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Colonel Warner, while George Washington was his great-great-grandson. George Washington was therefore Queen Elizabeth’s second cousin six times removed. General Lee was descended from Colonel Warner’s daughter, Sarah.
*
The Queen had lent her Wilson Steer painting,
Chepstow
, to the British Pavilion’s exhibition of modern British painting. (Kenneth Clark to Queen Elizabeth, 17 December 1938; 2, 13 February 1939, n.d. [postmark 20 February 1939], RA QEQM/PRIV/HH; RA QEQM/PRIV/PIC)
†
At the lunch given for them in the Federal Buildings at the World’s Fair, according to the
New York Times
, among the waiters serving the King and Queen was a former steward to the Strathmore family, Joseph Lewis, who had worked at Glamis, St James’s Square and St Paul’s Walden and had served meals to Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon as a girl. He had subsequently worked for Henry Clay Frick (of the Frick Collection), and was now captain of waiters at the Waldorf Astoria.
*
The 1844 Room – a drawing room on the ground floor of Buckingham Palace, so named because it was occupied by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia in 1844.
THE QUEEN AT WAR
1939–1941
‘Dear old BP is
still standing
’
I
N THE DAPPLED
end of a lovely summer, it was hard to understand what lay ahead. The Queen was outwardly calm but she found it difficult to adjust to the fact that she and her husband were now reigning over a country at war. It was true, as her friend Arthur Penn put it to her, that, unspeakable though war was, at least the long suspense was over. ‘Looking back on the past year or more,’ he wrote, ‘I realise that this shadow was behind one’s shoulder at every turn: pleasures had a bitter taste, laughter a hollow ring & nothing seemed
quite
in tune. Now it is as if one had at last braced oneself for a long deferred but inevitable operation, & we can only pray for an early & complete recovery.’
1
But the Queen really had hoped that war could be avoided. She would have been appalled if she could have known that this looming struggle in Europe would spread throughout the world over the next six years and cause death and destruction on a terrible scale.
At first, she felt ‘so miserable & disappointed & exhausted that life was almost horrible’.
2
But she knew that she had to pull herself together, summon her faith and stand up for what was right. She thought that ‘After the first ghastly shock’, the country ‘has settled down grimly, quietly, and with the utmost determination, to try and rid the world of this evil thing that has been let loose by those idiotic Germans’.
3
In similar vein, she wrote to Queen Mary, ‘Oh the Germans! If
only
they would choose decent leaders, then perhaps we would not need to go through the agony of War every 20 years.’
4
She had no more illusions about Hitler’s intentions; she sent a copy of
Mein Kampf
to Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, but advised him not to read it through ‘or you might go mad, and that would be a pity. Even a skip through gives one a good idea of his mentality, ignorance and obvious sincerity.’
5
She and the King took comfort in the fact that the Empire rallied to Britain at once. Australia was proud to declare war within seventy-five minutes of hearing the announcement that Britain was at war. New Zealand followed swiftly and in Canada the motion to declare war was approved without a division. Thanks to the passionate and cogent intervention of General Smuts, who subsequently became prime minister, the South African Parliament also voted for war. In the entire Commonwealth, only the Republic of Ireland insisted on being neutral.
*
