The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

It was also, of course, a female artefact, a point made by Lisa Sheridan, when the children proudly took her on a tour in 1936:

In the delightful panelled living-room everything was in its proper place. Not a speck of dust anywhere! Brass and silver shone brilliantly. Everything which could be folded was neatly put away. The household brushes and the pots and pans all hung in their places. Surely this inspired toy provided an ideal domestic training for children in an enchanted world . . . Everything in the elegantly furnished house had been reduced, as if by magic, to those enchanting proportions so endearing to the heart of a woman. How much more so to those young princesses whose status fitted so perfectly the surroundings?5

Y Bwthyn Bach gave Elizabeth a Welsh dimension. A Scottish one was provided shortly afterwards by the appointment, early in 1933, of a governess from north of the border, Marion Crawford. In a sense, of course, Elizabeth was already half-Scottish, and it was the Scottish networks of the Duchess of York that had led to the appointment. However Miss Crawford belonged to a different kind of Scotland from the one known to the Bowes-Lyons, or – for that matter – to the kilt-wearing Windsor dynasty. A twenty-two-year-old recent graduate of the Moray House Training College in Edinburgh, she came from a formidable stratum: the presbyterian lower middle class.

Miss Crawford stayed with the Yorks, later the Royal Family, teaching, guiding and providing companionship to both girls for fourteen years, until she married in 1947, shortly before the wedding of Princess Elizabeth. Three years later, she published a detailed account of her experiences in the royal service, against the express wishes of the Palace. ‘She snaked,’ is how a member of the Royal Family describes her behaviour today.6 Perhaps it was the incongruity of a woman from such a background betraying, for financial gain, the trust that had been placed in her (as her employers came to see it) which accounted for the anger that was felt. She was not the last to snake, but she was the pioneer. Marion Crawford was soon known as ‘Crawfie’ to the princesses: ‘doing a Crawfie’ became an expression for selling family secrets, especially royal ones, acquired during a period of personal service. To the modern reader, however, Miss Crawford’s Little Princesses is a singularly inoffensive work. Composed with the help of a ghost writer in a gushing Enid Blyton, or possibly Beverley Nichols, style, it does not destroy the Never-Never-Land mythology of 145 Piccadilly, but embraces it. Love, duty and sacrifice are the currency of daily life, and everybody always acts from the best of motives. Yet the book also has perceptiveness – and the ring of authenticity. Although effusively loyal in tone, it reveals a sharp and sometimes critical eye, and opinions which were not always official ones.

It shows a character with just enough of a rebellious edge to make the subsequent ‘betrayal’ explicable. Until she became notorious, Crawfie and her presence at the Yorks’ hearth were regarded in the press (perhaps rightly) as evidence of the Bowes-Lyon belief in no-nonsense training for young girls. According to The Times on the occasion of Princess Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday, Miss Crawford ‘upheld through the years of tutelage the standards of simple living and honest thinking that Scotland peculiarly respects’.7 When the Duke of York became King, she was also felt to provide a politically useful bond between the kingdoms. The most important point about Crawfie, however, which escaped public attention at the time, was that she had aspirations, both for her charges and for herself.

She was no scholar, and seemed to share the Royal Family’s indifference to academic and aesthetic values. Yet she did not share its lack of curiosity, and she had a strong, indignant sense of the Court as old-fashioned and remote. She deplored what she saw as the children’s ignorance of the world, and her book – perhaps this was the most infuriating thing about it – describes her personal crusade to widen the little girls’ horizons. There was a Jean Brodie, charismatic aspect to Miss Crawford, both in the power of her passionate yet selfishly demanding personality (sometimes she seemed to forget who was the princess) and in her evangelical determination to make contact with life outside. Although for part of the time she had Queen Mary as an ally, it was an uphill struggle. She did, however, take the children on educational trips, and conspired to satisfy their desire to travel on the London tube; and her greatest triumph was to persuade her employers, by then King and Queen, to allow a Girl Guide Company to be set up at Buckingham Palace. She was also a woman of her age: her other ambition was to get married, something which was incompatible with her employment and – if her own account is to be believed – one which her employers could never understand.

Crawfie was not a contented person. Indeed, the self-portrait unwittingly contained in her book suggests a rather lonely and restless one, an immigrant to England and an outsider to a strange tribe whose members, though friendly, persisted in their unusual and disturbing customs. She was a taker as much as a giver. But she was interesting, intelligent and forceful. Patricia (now Lady) Mountbatten – daughter of Louis and Edwina, and a second cousin of the princesses – remembers her from Guide meetings in the Buckingham Palace gardens as a tall, attractive, highly competent woman, ‘with a good personality for bringing out somebody like Princess Elizabeth, who had a stiff upper lip ingrained from birth.’8 There seems to have developed a mutual dependence, as she became, during critical years, the princesses’ confidante and friend.

PRINCESS ELIZABETH’S earliest years had been spent at 145 Piccadilly with her parents, at Glamis Castle and St. Paul’s Walden Bury with one set of grandparents, or at Balmoral and Sandringham with the other. In 1931, the Yorks were granted Royal Lodge, in Windsor Great Park, by the King, and in the following year they took it over as their private country residence. Thereafter, the adapted remnant of George IV’s cottage orné designed by John Nash, with its large, circular garden, screening of trees, and air of rustic simplicity, became one of Princess Elizabeth’s most familiar homes. More than anywhere, Royal Lodge provided the setting for the Yorks’ domestic idyll. Summers were spent there with a minimum of staff.

From the point of view of family life, it was an advantage (not mentioned in the newspaper profiles) that the Duke had little to do. He went on the occasional overseas visit, though never again, as Duke of York, on the scale of the 1927 Australian tour; he exchanged hospitality with relatives and friends; he gardened, he rode, and he shot. With time on his hands, he was often at home during the day and able to take luncheon with his family, and to play tag or hide-and-seek with his daughters in Hamilton Gardens. Until 1936 he and his wife seemed perfectly content with the undemanding routines of a minor member of the Royal Family, of whom little was required or expected. The Duchess had been a society beauty, fêted and wooed in her youth. After contracting a surprising if elevated marriage, however, she appeared to have no ambitions beyond the settled rhythms of an unremarkable aristocratic life, and the enjoyment of her children. Though her wit and charm made her friends wherever she went, and endeared her to other members of the Royal Family, she and her husband were not a fashionable couple, and they had little contact with the café society which held such a fascination for the Prince of Wales.

Crawfie, who disapproved of some of the grander and crustier aspects of the royal way of life, repeatedly stressed in her book that the York establishment concentrated on the children. ‘It was a home-like and unpretentious household I found myself in,’ she wrote. Life at 145 Piccadilly, at least as seen from the perspective of the governess, revolved around the nursery landing, or around the sleeping quarters of the Duke and Duchess. ‘No matter how busy the day, how early the start that had to be made,’ according to Crawfie, ‘each morning began with high jinks in their parents’ bedroom.’ This was a daily ritual which continued up to the morning of Princess Elizabeth’s marriage. The day ended with a bath and a bedtime ritual, also involving parental high jinks. ‘Nothing was ever allowed to stand in the way of these family sessions.’9

Sandwiched between morning and evening high jinks came the Princess’s education – or, as many observers have wryly observed – the lack of it. After breakfast with Alla in the nursery, Elizabeth would start lessons in a little boudoir off the main drawing-room, under the supervision of her governess. Later, she would make remarks (sometimes to put nervous, successful people at their ease) about her lack of proper schooling; and it is true that, even for a princess born out of direct line of succession to the throne, her curriculum was far from exacting.10 According to a tactfully understated assessment in the 1950s, it was ‘wide rather than deep’ without any forcing, or subjection to a classical discipline.11 It was, perhaps, a misfortune that there were no peers to offer competition, or examinations to provide an incentive. Most time was spent on English, French and history.12 Elizabeth’s dependence on a single instructor for a range of subjects was a limitation, especially as the instructor’s own education went no further than a training college diploma. Other future Queens of England, also born out of the direct line, had been better served. Nevertheless, in the first half of the twentieth century a home-based education for upper class girls was normal rather than exceptional – the British equivalent of binding feet.

There were two rival versions of the Yorks’ approach to the education of their daughters, and we may dismiss one of them, at least in its simple form. According to the first, semi-official, account the Duchess herself closely supervised her daughters’ lessons, and personally devised a timetable which concentrated on relevant subjects, such as foreign languages, scripture, geography, imperial and constitutional history. This account was the one given to the press, especially after the Abdication. According to the second, the Duchess was quite properly concerned that Elizabeth and Margaret should not regard themselves as different from any other children of their background. ‘She never aimed at bringing her daughters up to be more than nicely behaved young ladies,’ reflected Randolph Churchill, after the war.13 Sometimes the two versions were combined: the best training for a royal life, it was suggested, was a non-fussy, practical education.

Both, however, agreed on one point: the Duke and Duchess were determined, in the best traditions of the British Royal Family and aristocracy, that their children should not be intellectual. According to a newspaper report, when Elizabeth was ten, a regime which involved only seven and a half hours per week in the schoolroom had been designed with a purpose: to ensure that the elder Princess should avoid becoming a ‘blue-stocking’, with all the terrible consequences that that term of derision implied. With the avoidance of such a fate in mind, her studies had been planned ‘in consultation with the leading educationalists in the country,’ and after consideration by the Cabinet.14

If Crawfie is to be believed, the truth was actually more mundane. Whether or not the topic was ever seriously discussed in the Cabinet Room, it caused little anxiety at 145 Piccadilly. The attitude in the York household towards education seems, in general, to have been one of genial casualness, undisturbed in the early years by any premonition of what lay ahead. Crawfie stressed this last point: perhaps seeking a justification for the lack of pedagogic rigour. Nothing seemed less likely, she insisted, than that the two girls would ever have to play an important role in their adult lives, and consequently their parents’ main concern was to give them ‘a happy childhood, with lots of pleasant memories stored up against the days that might come and, later, happy marriages.’15

If the governess had little choice but to accept the relaxed view of her employers, the same was not true of the children’s formidable royal grandmother. Queen Mary – the most serious member of the Royal Family – made purposeful forays into the Piccadilly schoolroom, and was perturbed by what she found. In an attempt to improve matters, she demanded to see a schedule of lessons, urged that Princess Elizabeth should read ‘the best type of children’s books,’ and often chose them for her. She also thought up ‘instructive amusements’ for the children, like a visit to the Tower of London. ‘It would have been impossible for anyone so devoted to the Monarchy as Queen Mary to lose sight of the future Queen in this favourite grandchild,’ recalled the Countess of Airlie.16 This, however, was after the Abdication. Until then, the impact of the Queen’s concern was limited, partly because the Duke took as little active interest in his daughters’ book-learning as the Duchess.

The Duke’s relaxed attitude to female education did not mean, however, that he lacked a social conscience, or sense of royal responsibility. On the contrary: a willingness to keep his own daughters socially cocooned was combined with a strong, even progressive, interest in the plight of children from the urban slums. Before becoming King, as President of the Industrial Welfare (formerly Boys’ Welfare) Association, he was involved in schemes to benefit working-class youth, and he lent his name to the pioneering Duke of York’s Camp – a part paternalist, part egalitarian experiment much in the spirit of the East End universities’ and public schools’ settlements. Each year a hundred public schools and a hundred industrial concerns were invited to send two boys each to a summer holiday camp ‘where all would be on equal terms’.17 The aim, in the words of the organizer, Robert Hyde, was to ‘tame young Bolshevists,’18 by social mingling: each side of the divide would get to know the other and appreciate its qualities. The Duke made a practice of coming for a day or two and, appropriately clad in shorts and open-necked shirt, joining in the games and singsongs. ‘Class distinction was left outside the camp boundaries,’ observed an admiring journalist.19 At the last of the camps, at Abergeldie near Balmoral in 1939, the princesses came daily to take part. One of the happiest and most natural of pre-war royal film clips shows the four of them, parents and daughters, sitting in a throng of laughing, chanting adolescents. It was the kind of educational activity – boisterous, slapstick, communitarian, classless – that appealed to the Duke and he was proud to show it off to his daughters.

This was as close as the princesses ever got, before the war, to any proper contact with ordinary children, middle or working class, of their own age. The question of whether a wider experience might be desirable was discussed, but discarded. For several years, there was whimsical newspaper speculation that Elizabeth might be sent to a girls’ boarding school. When she was seven, the press reported a rumour that – in a daring break with royal precedent – the Princess was about to be enrolled at a preparatory establishment near London, and, furthermore, that ‘one of our larger public schools’ would be her eventual destination.20 There was nothing in the story, though it is conceivable that the Duchess, who had spent two terms in her own adolescence at a day school in Chelsea, may have been behind it. A few weeks after the initial report, the Sunday Express announced under the headline ‘Will Never Go to School: Too Embarrassing,’ that the Duchess of York had asked that her elder daughter should go to school, so that she would be ‘brought up like any normal girl’. But after discussion with the King, Queen and Prince of Wales, and consultation with Cabinet ministers – according to the paper – she had been forced to back down.21

Such an account is supported by the recollection of Lisa Sheridan, who remembered the Duchess telling her, just before the Abdication, that ‘she regretted her own daughters would not be able to go to school,’ and was concerned that they should grow up naturally and unspoilt.22 This conversation, which took place during the brief reign of Edward VIII, coincided with fresh reports of a regal veto. The new King, it was stated, had decided against a school for Elizabeth, in accordance with the wishes of his father who had always been opposed. In addition to deference to a dead Monarch, three other arguments were reckoned to have weighed with the Princess’s uncle: the jealousy the choice of any particular school would cause among schools not so favoured, ‘the question of who would be her schoolmates’ – that is, whether she could be protected from bad influences – and, even more spuriously, her need to study different subjects from those taken by most other girls.23 However, neither George V nor his eldest son deserve exclusive blame for the denial to the Princess of the mixed benefits of 1930s boarding school normality. Indeed, their attitude may have been an excuse. Although it would have been difficult for the Duke and Duchess to defy the Head of State, there is no reason why, after his own accession, George VI and his wife could not have reversed the earlier decision, either for their ten-year-old daughter or their six-year-old one, if they had wished to do so.

But there was one aspect of the Princess’s education that was not neglected: in view of the sporting pursuits of her parents, it would have been remarkable if it had been. Surrounded from earliest childhood by horses, and by servants who trained, fed and groomed, and relatives who owned, rode and talked about them, Elizabeth, like many aristocratic little girls, became a keen equestrian. Every account of her infancy suggests that an interest in horses and ponies was almost innate. George V, player of nursery equestrian games, was one influence: it may not be coincidence that Elizabeth’s early interest in horses and ponies followed her grandfather’s greatest racing success, when his filly Scuttle won the 1,000 Guineas in 1928. Her first reported riding ‘lesson’ took place in the private riding school in Buckingham Palace Mews in January 1930, when she was three and a half, under the supervision of the Crown Equerry, Colonel A. E. Erskine.24 It was her parents, however, who became her first serious teachers. When she was five, the Duchess led her on Peggy, the Shetland pony given by the King, to a meet of the Pytchley Hounds at Boughton Cover. For a time the stud groom at the Royal Mews took charge of the children’s riding. ‘The Princess will undoubtedly be a keen horse-woman when she grows up,’ it was accurately predicted when she was ten.25

In 1938, the royal riding instructor, Horace Smith, took over and began giving the two girls twice-weekly lessons at the Palace, accompanied by his own daughter. Training included mounting exercises, like touching their toes and leaning backwards until they were lying down on their ponies’ backs, to improve their balance and confidence. Smith found Elizabeth, in particular, a good and eager pupil – a conscientious listener, and keen to improve her skills. He also noticed something else: she was as interested in the business of looking after horses as in riding them; and she would ply him with questions about their feeding and management. ‘I think that in those days, when she was twelve years old, her chief interest in life lay in horses,’ Smith later recalled. On one occasion she told him, a sentiment often later repeated, that ‘had she not been who she was, she would like to be a lady living in the country with lots of horses and dogs’.26

Dogs mattered almost as much as horses: a point which also did not escape royal observers of the day. As ordinary children more often owned dogs than horses, the princesses’ canine interest provided, in some ways, a stronger bond. It quickly became established that not only did Elizabeth and Margaret Rose like dogs, they had a special feeling, and even an empathy, for them. Articles and books about royal caninism became a genre. ‘. . . [F]ew people realise the marked similarity between the unaffected sincerity that so delightfully characterizes these royal but very human children, and the cheerful contentment of their dogs,’ reflected an especially liquid work called Our Princesses and their Dogs in 1936. ‘I doubt if I have ever encountered dogs who shared with their owners a quieter or serener companionship.’27 Photographs of the children mercilessly mothering plump corgis – the family’s favourite breed – filled the picture papers.

But it was the horse world that always took precedence. With Princess Elizabeth, horses were more than an interest: they became a passion, even an obsession. Rooms and corridors, first at 145 Piccadilly, then at Buckingham Palace, were filled with an expanding collection of toy and ornamental horses, of every material and size. Not just the indulgent old King but the governess as well were cajoled into the performance of equine role-play. A favourite game was to harness Crawfie with reins, as if she were pulling a grocery cart. Then she would be patted, given a nosebag, jerked to a standstill, or instructed to paw the ground. If the weather was cold enough for her nostrils to steam, so much the better. Sometimes, however, Elizabeth would weary of this ritual. She herself would become the horse, and make ‘convincing little whinnying noises’. At other times, she and her sister would sit for hours at the window at 145 Piccadilly, watching for horses in the street.28

Were animals a substitute for other children? Her governess, in describing such pursuits, clearly implied that they were – indeed the idea of a ‘poor little rich girl’ who lived a well-ordered, comfortable, but isolated life is central to her account. The two images of simplicity and loneliness are juxtaposed. On the one hand, there is a stress on the gap between the luxury people imagined royalty to enjoy, and their disciplined real lives; on the other, Crawfie often describes the yearning of the girls to be just like other children, with the same kind of fun. In her version of the princesses’ childhood, bedtimes were early, treats were few, seaside holidays rare, pantomimes visited only once a year. Other children seldom came to tea. For a time, Elizabeth made ‘rather special friends’ with the daughter of an eminent radiologist who happened to be a neighbour, but this unusual relationship ended when the child was sent away to school. It was, according to Crawfie, difficult for the children to gain other companions. The Duke of York was a private and unassuming man who, although he did not shun social life, did not seek it either. He and his wife rarely dined out or went to the cinema or theatre, and he was perfectly content to spend the evening at the family hearth, with his wife and daughters, indulging his hobby of needlework, pursued with such diligence that, during one burst of embroidering activity, he made a dozen chair covers in petit point for Royal Lodge. The impression is of cosiness, but also of domestic claustrophobia.

Perhaps such a picture of seclusion was exaggerated, and related as much to Miss Crawford’s home-sickness for Scotland as to the actual feelings of her charges. Meetings with the offspring of suitable parents, mostly relatives and courtiers, did occur. Elizabeth seemed to mix with them happily and naturally. Yet there seems always to have been a gulf, unavoidably imposed by convention, which stood in the way of equality. Patricia Mountbatten remembers Elizabeth coming to tea as a little girl of five or six with curly blonde hair, at her parents’ London home. She recalls a child like any other – except that she attracted special interest among the adults. There was a buzz of excitement among the nannies and governesses. ‘She wasn’t just another child of friends of my parents. She created a little flutter.’29 An aristocratic contemporary remembers meeting Elizabeth for the first time at his birthday party when they were both three. He had received a pedal car as a present, and his father insisted that he should let her ride in it. ‘She was a princess,’ he says. ‘You knew she was different.’30