The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

In any case, there was much to take the minds of the Duke and Duchess off their baby daughter. Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George, known as ‘Bertie’ to his family, had been made Duke of York in 1920, at the age of twenty-five. Yet he had not at that time sought a prominent royal role, and no exacting royal responsibilities had so far been asked of him. Shy and slow as a child, and the victim of a stammer since the age of seven or eight, he disliked and avoided occasions when he might be required to speak – so much so, that some had regarded him as not only reclusive, but intellectually backward. There had been some recent improvement. His marriage to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923 had increased his confidence. So too, during the months before the voyage, had a course of instruction from an Australian speech therapist. But his appearances before large audiences had been infrequent, and – except over events like weddings and births – the public had taken less interest in him and his wife than in other members of the Royal Family. ‘The news-reels didn’t bother them very much,’ noted one commentator, a few years later, ‘and the press left them pretty much alone.’24 Australia, where the Duke was to represent his father before the people of an intensely loyal dominion, was his first major testing ground.

The tour was exacting, psychologically as well as physically, for it aroused huge public curiosity. The Yorks’ itinerary involved going, via Panama, to Fiji and New Zealand before they reached Sydney. In Australia, a programme of visits took them to cities around the country, culminating in their arrival at Canberra for Bertie’s painfully rehearsed, much feared speech at the opening ceremony. During the ominous build-up, the Duke and Duchess were fêted at each stop. The local press eagerly examined every available detail of the lives of the previously little-known couple, who seemed to embody the mother country, for which sentimental and nostalgic feelings remained strong. As the tour progressed, fascination increased, especially for the most humanizing detail of all: the distant and as yet inarticulate Princess. ‘Wherever we go cheers are given for her as well,’ Bertie wrote to his mother, ‘& the children write to us about her.’25 The newspapers dubbed her ‘Betty,’ and she became the tour’s unofficial mascot. The Duke and Duchess were soon besieged with questions about ‘the World’s Best Known Baby’. They were also loaded with gifts for her, each locality or association vying with its rivals to produce the most loving, ingenious and appropriate present. The Brownies of Auckland delivered a large doll, the children of Fremantle gave a miniature bed, together with a box of miniature clothes, the National Council of Women sent a gold porringer, and the Melbourne Arts and Crafts Society proudly proffered an Australian Noah’s Ark, complete with kangaroos, wallabies and other antipodean survivors of the Flood. In May 1927, it was estimated that three tons of toys had so far been presented for Betty, in absentia. The soldier who guarded them reputedly said there were more dolls in the collection than there were men in his regiment.

At home, however, Alla’s one-toy-at-a-time regime did not alter. The Princess’s first day without her parents was reported by the newspapers to be just like any other. Though it was the depth of winter, her nanny took her in a pram on a two-hour walk through Mayfair into Hyde Park, where she appeared perfectly content, fast asleep, and (suitably, for the granddaughter of a King-Emperor) clutching a golliwog under the covers. Supposedly, she ‘seemed to miss her mother’s regular morning visit to the nursery,’ though how anyone could tell was not revealed.26

In February, the Alla establishment joined George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace, and in April they followed the Court to Windsor, where the Princess spent her first birthday. The King and Queen enjoyed the idea of being in loco parentis (although it involved little contact with the child) and the Queen, particularly, took it very seriously. There was a daily ritual. Every afternoon, Alla would bring Princess Elizabeth down to her grandparents, ‘and the appearance at the door of a very little person in a white gown and fringed sash would be greeted by the Queen’s delighted cry of “Here comes the Bambino!”’27 Photographs and written reports of the baby’s progress were sent to her parents. ‘She has 4 teeth now,’ the King told them in March, ‘which is quite good at eleven months, she is very happy and drives in a carriage every afternoon, which amuses her’.28 The Strathmores were able to tell of other accomplishments. During the last two months of the Yorks’ absence, the Princess stayed at St Paul’s Walden Bury. Here, Alla patiently taught her to enunciate the word ‘Mummy’. Since, however, there was nobody to whom the word could be accurately applied, she greeted everybody she came across, including family portraits, ‘with the salutation “Mummy, Mummy!”’29

As one writer observed later in the Princess’s childhood, ‘the parents who came back to her from the other end of the earth were strangers’.30 The Duke and Duchess returned in June after six months away, laden with toys, to greet a child they barely recognized, who was almost twice the age she had been when they departed. The reunion involved a poignant little ceremony in the Grand Hall at Buckingham Palace where the King and Queen and the Earl and Countess of Strathmore had assembled with the Household staff to provide a welcoming party. The Duchess, seeing the baby in its nurse’s arms, rushed forward, exclaiming ‘Oh you little darling’, and kissed and hugged it repeatedly.31

Glad to be home, flushed with the unexpected triumph of their tour, and delighted to see their daughter, the Yorks were happy to relax for a while in London after such an arduous journey. However, they did not stay still for long. Within a few weeks, they had left the capital for the shooting season – the Duke to join the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, the Duchess to visit her parents at Glamis. At first, Princess Elizabeth stayed in London, but after another short separation, she was dispatched to Scotland, where a mother-daughter relationship was re-established. ‘Elizabeth is learning to walk – very dangerous!’ wrote the Duchess of York at Glamis. In September 1927, the whole family joined the King and Queen at Balmoral. Then they returned south for the autumn months, in order to settle properly into their house in Piccadilly.

IN ALL ACCOUNTS of Princess Elizabeth as a child, legend and reality are inseparable. The observations of those with direct knowledge were fed, not just by what they saw, but also by popular beliefs and idealizations, colouring the way they treated her, and shaping the stories they passed on which, in turn, fed the myths. Two themes stand out in the early tales. According to the first, the Princess was an unusually bright and interesting child, as well as an exceptionally pleasing, generous, and sunny-natured one. According to the second, she was the essence of normality, and of a typically balanced yet fallible British girlhood. These contradictory versions – the ideal and the archetype – were held simultaneously and provided the frame on which every narrative of the Princess’s childhood was built, including the anecdotes of those close to her. They also shaped the way the world came to see her as an adult and as a monarch.

The manufacture of a publicly known personality for the Princess began with her appearance. The world, peering into the royal perambulator, detected an ethereal quality. After a visit to the Bruton Street nursery, one early eulogizer wrote that the infant Elizabeth had ‘the sweetest air of complete serenity about her. While we were talking, her nurse came in to fetch her, and the Duchess threw round her daughter’s head . . . a filmy veil of gossamer, from which she looked down out of her nurse’s arms smiling angelically at her mother, like a cherub out of a cloud’.32

Yet if the Princess’s blond Botticelli curls, blue eyes and plump cheeks made it easy to cast her as an angel, it was important that she should also be seen as a mischievous one. After a Christmas party in 1927 for four hundred tenants on the Sandringham Estate, the press reported that the twenty-one-month-old apparition, wearing a white dress, silk socks and white shoes, suddenly materialized, standing upright on the table, ‘chattering and bombarding the guests with crackers handed to her by her mother.’33 There was also another version of the image of a small person bombarding big ones with harmless objects. At 145 Piccadilly, the Princess would allegedly get a small toy, such as a teddy bear or a ball, and drop it from the nursery landing down the stairwell onto visitors as they arrived at the house.34 Other stories also emphasized that, for all the other-worldliness, the child was cheeringly imperfect. Ruth St Mawr, a friend of Lady Strathmore, told a story about taking tea at Glamis Castle when Princess Elizabeth, by then three, bounded in. ‘You can’t think how naughty I’ve been,’ declared the child. ‘Oh, so naughty, you don’t know.’ ‘Well then tell me,’ said Lady Strathmore, ‘and I shall know.’ ‘No,’ said Princess Elizabeth – and that was that.35

Normality required a pet-name and this, the press was delighted to discover, Princess Elizabeth herself provided early on. At two and a half, she was reported to be calling herself ‘Tillabet’.36 Later, this became ‘Lisabet’ or ‘Lilliebeth,’ before settling down as ‘Lilibet,’ the name her close family have continued to call her all her life. Normality also required a passion, and this, too, the Princess obligingly furnished in her lifelong love of horses and dogs, which could be dated to the autumn of 1928, when the Duke of York took Naseby Hall in Northamptonshire for the hunting season, and Elizabeth accompanied her parents there for much of the winter. According to one inter-war chronicler, it was at Naseby ‘that Lisabet really fell in love with beautiful horses’. She enjoyed patting her father’s animals, and her nurse had to watch her closely, because of her habit of running off to the stables at the slightest excuse at any time of day.37 In addition, apparently, ‘she especially loved the hounds with their nervous erect tails and their elemental eagerness to be off’.38

Horses and dogs had to be trained, and from a tender age, Princess Elizabeth was often portrayed in appropriate roles of command and authority in relation to them. But royal children required training too, and it was made clear, in every tale, that the Princess’s mischief was never allowed to get out of hand. If Elizabeth had a sense of fun, it was also (commentators took care to point out) kept in check. ‘Uncurbed without being spoilt’ was how the Sunday Dispatch described the barely walking child in an article entitled ‘The Roguish Princess’.39 ‘Roguish’ was a favourite term in such accounts: it implied misbehaviour within acceptable and endearing limits. According to Alice Ring’s royally sanctioned description of the Princess, published in 1930, on one occasion Elizabeth said ‘My Goodness!’ in the hearing of her mother. She was ‘at once told that this was not pretty and mustn’t be repeated’. However, if she heard an adult use the unseemly expression, ‘up go her small arms in a gesture of mock amazement, and she presses her palms tightly over her mouth while her blue eyes are full of roguish laughter’.40

Uncurbed was never allowed to mean over-indulged. ‘I don’t think any child could be more sensibly bought up,’ Queen Mary remarked. ‘She leads such a simple life and she’s always punished when she’s naughty.’41 Here was a useful moral tale, for the edification of millions. ‘Once Lisbet had been naughty, for even princesses can be naughty, you know,’ wrote Captain Eric Acland, author of a particularly cloying biography published when Elizabeth was twelve, ‘and her mother, to punish her, refused to tell the usual bedtime story.’42 According to another writer, if the Duchess of York was asked what her main duty was, ‘she would reply, “Bringing up my children”. She brings them up as she herself was brought up, with unremitting care and great practical intelligence.’43 It was the accepted view. ‘No child of Queen Elizabeth’s will ever be spoilt,’ the writer Stephen King-Hall summed up, at the time of George VI’s Coronation.44

But how could any child receive so much attention, and be the object of so many admiring glances, yet not be spoilt, even allowing for parental firmness? Here was an even deeper paradox in the iconography, never satisfactorily resolved. The usual answer – and the one that dominated characterizations of the Princess until her adolescence – was that her innocence was protected, as if by wall and moat, from the corrupting effects of vulgar fame and even of excessive loyal adoration. Chocolates, china sets and children’s hospital wards, even a territory in Antarctica, were named after her; the people of Newfoundland had her image on their postage stamps; songs were written in her honour, and sung by large assemblies of her contemporaries; while Madame Tussaud’s displayed a wax model of her astride a pony. However, according to one chronicler in the early 1930s, ‘of all this she is unconscious, it passes her completely by – and she remains just a little girl, like any other little girl . . . and passionately fond of her parents’.45 There was also the idea of a fairy-tale insulation from the projected thoughts and fantasies of the outside world – a ‘normal’ childhood preserved, by an abnormal caesura, from public wonder. ‘In those days we lived in an ivory tower’ wrote Elizabeth’s governess, many years later, ‘removed from the real world’.46

Yet the very protection of the Princess, the notion of her as an innocent, unknowing, unsophisticated child who, but for her royal status, might be anybody’s daughter, niece or little sister, helped to sustain the popular idea of her as a ray of sunshine in a troubled world, a talisman of health and happiness. This particular quality was often illustrated by tales of her special, even curative, relationship with the King, which juxtaposed youth and old age, gaiety and wisdom, the future and the past, in a heavily symbolic manner. From the time of the Yorks’ Australian tour, when the Princess was fostered at Buckingham Palace, it had been observed that the ailing Monarch, whose health was becoming a matter of concern throughout the Empire, derived a special pleasure from the company of his granddaughter.

There were many accounts which brought this out. ‘He was fond of his two grandsons, Princess Mary’s sons,’ the Countess of Airlie recalled, ‘but Lilibet always came first in his affections. He used to play with her – a thing I never saw him do with his own children – and loved to have her with him’.47 Others observed the same curious phenomenon: on one occasion, the Archbishop of Canterbury was startled to encounter the elderly Monarch acting the part of a horse, with the Princess as his groom, ‘the King-Emperor shuffling on hands and knees along the floor, while the little Princess led him by the beard’.48 When she was scarcely out of her pram, a visitor to Sandringham reported watching the King ‘chortling with little jokes with her – she just struggling with a few words, “Grandpa” and “Granny”’.49 The Princess’s governess recalled seeing them together, near the end of the King’s life, ‘the bearded old man and the polite little girl holding on to one of his fingers’. Later, it was claimed that the King was ‘almost as devoted a slave to her as her favourite uncle, the Prince of Wales’.50

Yet it was also stressed that she was taught to know her place. Deferential manners were an ingredient of the anecdotes, alongside the spontaneity. One guest noted that after a game of toy bricks on the floor with an equerry, she was fetched by her nurse, ‘and made a perfectly sweet little curtsey to the King and Queen and then to the company as she departed’. This vital piece of royal etiquette had been perfected before her third birthday. When it was time to bid her grandfather goodnight, she would retreat backwards to the door, curtsey and say, ‘I trust your Majesty will sleep well’.51 Some accounts took the Princess’s concern beyond mere politeness. For example, it was said that when the King was sick, she asked after him, and, on seeing her grandmother, ‘flung herself into the Queen’s arms and cried: “Lillybet to see Grandpar today?”’52 There were also reports that when the royal landau passed down Piccadilly a shrill cry was heard from the balcony at No. 145: ‘Here comes Grandpa!’ – causing the crowd to roar with loyal delight.53 There was much approval, too, for her name for the King: ‘Grandpa England’.54

But the most celebrated aspect of the relationship concerned the Princess’s prophylactic powers during the King’s convalescence from a near-fatal illness in the winter of 1928–9. During this anxious time, the little girl ‘acted as a useful emollient to jaded nerves,’55 a kind of harp-playing David to the troubled Monarch’s Saul.

In March 1929, the Empire learnt that the Princess, not yet three, was being encouraged to spend much of the morning with the recuperating King in his room at Craigweil House in Bognor, in order to raise his spirits. For an hour or so, she would sit with him by his chair at the window, making ‘the most amusing and original comments on people and events’.56 The King recovered, and his granddaughter was popularly believed to have played a part in bringing this about. Many years later, Princess Elizabeth told a courtier that the old Monarch’s manner ‘was very abrupt, some people thought he was being rude’.57 The fact that he terrified his sons, and barked at his staff, gave the stories of the little girl’s fearless enchantments an even sharper significance.

For her fourth birthday in 1930, the doting old man made Elizabeth the special gift of a pony. At this news public adoration, both of the giver and the recipient, literally overflowed. The same day, the Princess, in a yellow coat trimmed with fur, was seen walking across the square at Windsor Castle, with a band of the Scots Guards providing an accompaniment. Women waved their handkerchiefs and threw kisses. The Princess waved back, and ‘her curly locks fluttered in the breeze’. The sight was too much for the crowd. People outside the Castle gate suddenly pressed forward, and swept the police officer on duty off his feet.58

Chapter 2

THE DUCHESS OF YORK gave birth to a second child at Glamis Castle in August 1930. Although a Labour Government was now in office, traditional proprieties were once again observed – this time at even greater inconvenience to the new Home Secretary, J. R. Clynes, than to his predecessor. Summoned north for the expected event, Clynes was kept waiting for five days as a guest of the Countess of Airlie, at Cortachy Castle. He made no complaint, and seems to have enjoyed his part in the ritual. Later he described how, after the announcement, ‘the countryside was made vivid with the red glow of a hundred bonfires, while sturdy kilted men with flaming torches ran like gnomes from place to place through the darkness’.1

The arrival of Princess Margaret Rose had several effects. One was to reinforce public awareness of her sister. The child was not a boy, the King’s health remained uncertain, and the Prince of Wales showed no sign of taking a wife. A minor constitutional controversy, following the birth, helped to remind the public that Elizabeth’s position was an increasingly interesting one. Although common sense indicated that, after the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, she remained next in line, doubts were raised about whether this was really the case. Some experts argued that legally the two sisters enjoyed equal rights to the succession: there was nothing, in law, to say that they did not, and the precedence of an elder sister over a younger had never been tested. The King ordered a special investigation. The matter was soon settled, to the satisfaction of the Court, and as the Sovereign himself no doubt wished.2

Another effect was to give Elizabeth a companion, and the public an additional character on which to build an ever-evolving fantasy. The Yorks were now a neatly symmetrical family, the inter-war ideal. There were no more children to spoil the balance, or dilute the cast. After the birth of Margaret Rose, 145 Piccadilly acquired a settled, tranquil, comforting air, and the image of it became a fixed point in the national and imperial psyche. When people imagined getting married and setting up a home, they thought of the Yorks. The modest, reserved, quietly proud father, the practical, child-centred mother, the well-mannered, well-groomed daughters; the ponies, dogs and open air; the servants dealing with the chores, tactfully out of sight; the lack of vanity, ambition, or doubt – all represented, for Middle England and its agents overseas, a distillation of British wholesomeness.

It did not matter that the Yorks were not ‘the Royal Family’ – that the Duke was not the King, or ever likely to be. Indeed, it helped that they were sufficiently removed from the ceremonial and servility of the Court to lead comprehensible lives, and for their daughters to have the kind of fancy-filled yet soundly based childhood that every boy and girl, and many adults, yearned for. At a time of poverty and uncertainty for millions, the York princesses in their J. M. Barrie-like London home and country castles stood for safety and permanence. The picture magazines showed them laughing, relaxed, perpetually hugging or stroking pets, always apart from their peers, doll-like mascots to adorn school and bedroom walls. Children often wrote to them, as if they were playmates, or sisters: little girls they already knew. Story books spun homely little tales around their lives, helping to incorporate them as imaginary friends in ordinary families.

The most dramatic attempt to appropriate them for ordinariness occurred in 1932, with the erection of a thatched cottage, two-thirds natural size, by ‘the people of Wales,’ as a present for Princess Elizabeth on her sixth birthday. This remarkable object made an implicit point, for no part of the United Kingdom had suffered more terrible unemployment than the mining valleys of the principality. Built exclusively by Welsh labour out of Welsh materials, it provided a stirring demonstration of the ingenuity of a workforce whose skills were tragically wasted. At the same time – loyally and movingly – its creators sought to connect the lives of the little Princess and her baby sister to those of thousands of children who inhabited real cottages. The point, however, could not be too political, and an abode, even an imitation one, intended for a princess had to be filled with greater luxuries than average families ever experienced.

Great efforts were made to ensure that it conformed to the specifications of a real home. Electric lights were installed, and the contents included a tiny radio, a little oak dresser and tiny china set, linen with the initial ‘E’, and a portrait of the Duchess of York over the dining-room mantelpiece. The house also contained little books, pots and pans, food cans, brooms, and a packet of Epsom salts, a radio licence and an insurance policy, all made to scale. The bathroom had a heated towel rail. In the kitchen, the reduced-size gas cooker, copper and refrigerator worked, and hot water came out of the tap in the sink.

It was scarcely a surprise present. Months of publicity preceded its completion. There was also a near-disastrous mishap. When the house was finished and in transit, the tarpaulin protecting it caught fire, and the thatched roof and many of the timbers were destroyed. Though some felt it lucky that the incendiary nature of the materials had been discovered before, and not after, the Princess was inside, the project was not abandoned. Instead, indefatigable craftsmen worked day and night to repair the damage and apply a fire-resistant coating, in time to display the renovated house at the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia.3 Then it was reconstructed in Windsor Great Park for the birthday girl, and became a favourite plaything.

Whatever Elizabeth may have made of the house’s message, she and her sister were soon using it for the purpose for which it was intended: to exercise and display their ordinariness. Elizabeth was ‘a very neat child,’ according to her governess, and the Welsh house provided an excellent opportunity to show it. The two girls spent happy hours cleaning, dusting and tidying their special home.4 Thousands of people who had experienced a vicarious contact with royalty by inspecting the cottage when it was on public show, were later able to enjoy a series of photographs of the elfin princesses, filling the doorway of ‘Y Bwthyn Bach’ – the Little House – not just as children but as Peter Pan adults, miniaturized in a securely diminutive world, the perfect setting for the fantasy of ‘royal simplicity’. The contrast between the oriental extravagance of the structure – fabulously costly in design, equipment, production and delivery – and the games that were to be played in it, highlighted the triumphant paradox.