The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

The Home Secretary’s minute on the subject of 28th January 1944 was sent to the Palace, but Lascelles, no mean politician on issues he regarded as important, deliberately withheld it from the King.69 Probably it made no difference. A few days earlier, Jock Colville recorded in his diary that, while the Cabinet approved of the idea of making Elizabeth Princess of Wales, her father did not.70 The royal will prevailed. At his weekly audience, Churchill promised the King that he would tell the Minister of Information to ‘damp down all discussion of this question in the Press,’ in order to avoid a row. In February, it was officially announced from Buckingham Palace that there would be no change in the Princess’s title on her eighteenth birthday. ‘This will check the spate of press comment and general chatter,’ Lascelles recorded on 13 February. As a result, the principality was without a Prince or Princess until 1958. The oft-repeated explanation for this vacancy was ‘the very real distinction between heirs apparent and presumptive’.71

TO CONSOLE the Welsh, the King and Queen took Princess Elizabeth with them on a tour of mining and industrial areas in South Wales early in 1944. The crowds were welcoming and forgiving, and came from all classes and occupations. At Cardiff docks, according to one report, the Queen and Princess ‘mingled with a crowd of coloured Merchant Navy seamen,’ and stood beside ‘an ebony giant from British Honduras’. People from the villages walked for several miles just to see the King’s daughter, who smiled and bowed her head in acknowledgement of greetings.72

It was not just in Wales, however, that there was an upsurge of feeling in favour of Elizabeth. As the war entered its final phase, she found herself an emblematic heroine everywhere. All over the Empire, the health, beauty and emerging womanhood of the Princess were linked to the eagerly anticipated future, in which families would be brought together, sweethearts rejoined, babies born, bellies filled and freedom enjoyed. Encouraged by broadcasters and newsreels, young people took a special interest in her. On the Welsh tour, she caused particular excitement among children. In Valletta, on the island of Malta, a thousand school children assembled a few weeks before the Normandy landings to see and cheer a special film depicting scenes from her life.73

Requests for public appearances by the Princess now became frequent. For the time being the Palace was adamant: there could be no question of ‘independent engagements,’ though she might occasionally accompany her parents, as to South Wales.74 Soon, however, this rule was relaxed. On 23 May 1944, Princess Elizabeth spoke publicly for the first time at the annual meeting of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney. In the autumn, she accepted an invitation to launch HMS Vanguard, the largest battleship ever built in the British Isles. The ceremony, in Clyde shipyards, was followed by a luncheon at which she read a short speech. The First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander, wrote to Lascelles afterwards describing ‘the clear and decisive way’ in which she carried out both duties.75

There remained the question of whether she would enter one of the women’s services, and if so, which. Early in 1945, it was decided that she would join the Auxiliary Territorial Service. It was not the obvious choice. In view of her family’s naval traditions, the WRNS would have been more natural. The King and Queen were apparently reluctant: there is no reason to doubt Crawfie’s account of an eager and determined young woman wearing down the resistance of her parents.76 At the end of February she was registered as No. 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor. The rank was an honorary one, but the training in driving and vehicle-maintenance she underwent at No. 1 Mechanical Transport Training Centre at Aldershot, was genuine. She enjoyed this sole, brief experience of communal education. Several decades later, she told the Labour politician Barbara Castle that it was the only time in her life when she had been able seriously to test her own capabilities against those of others of her age.77 After six weeks she qualified as a driver, and at the end of July, a few days before the final end to the war, she was promoted to Junior Commander.

‘The Princess is to be treated in exactly the same way as any other officer learning at the driving training centre,’ maintained the official report at the outset.78 To back this up, the Queen requested that photographers should not be given any facilities.79 This, however, did not deter the press, and during her short stay at the Centre she was photographed more intensively than at any time since the Coronation. As a result, she was scarcely just one of the girls. If it was not quite true, as a 1957 assessment put it, that ‘the rule of seclusion was maintained and she did not mix with her fellows on the course,’80 the extent of mucking in, on equal terms, was limited. She kept to the routine of the ATS mess, took her share of duties, and acquired the basics of driving, car mechanics and maintenance. But she returned to Windsor every night to sleep. She also became an unwitting mannequin for the uniform of the service – pictures of her with a spanner, at the wheel of a lorry, leaning on a bonnet, or peering purposefully and fetchingly under one, appeared in the newspapers and magazines of every Allied nation.

In such matters, it was always impossible to disentangle a private motive from the public effort. Since the enrolment of a royal princess could not be kept secret, her participation in the ATS inevitably became part of the morale-boosting display of the Monarchy. It was a similar story with other initiatives that started spontaneously. A particularly striking and, in its way, sad example of the way Royal Family behaviour spilled over from the personal to the public, so that domestic events were turned into courtly contrivance, was provided by a series of Christmas shows put on during the war by Windsor children, with the aid of adult mentors, and performed in front of parents and other members of the Castle community.

These began modestly in 1940 with a simple play, ‘The Christmas Child,’ in St. George’s Hall, with Elizabeth playing one of the three kings, flanked by two boy evacuees. The occasion was enjoyed by everybody, and the princesses, who had been on stage since birth without knowing it, discovered an interest in, and even a talent for, amateur theatricals. The following Christmas, the stakes were raised slightly, and a pantomime, ‘Cinderella,’ was written for them by a local schoolmaster. Again it was a success, and once again there was a good deal of democratic sharing of tasks and banter in the preparations and rehearsals. The next year, they put on ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ and Lisa Sheridan described how Princess Elizabeth ‘took the arms of the two “sailors” and sang “Mind Your Sisters”’ and brought the house down.81 The tradition continued, giving pleasure to both performers and audience, which always included the princesses’ parents. Horace Smith, who attended the pantomimes of 1942–4, recalled seeing the elder princess ‘full of confidence and vigour,’ and reducing the King to hearty laughter.82 The humour depended a lot on puns. ‘There are three acres in one rood,’ Widow Twankey, an office boy from the Castle, was required to say in the 1943 production of ‘Aladdin’. ‘We don’t want anything improper,’ replied Margaret. ‘There’s a large copper in the kitchen,’ said the Widow. ‘We’ll soon get rid of him,’ declared Elizabeth – and so on.83

Year by year, the performances became more polished, with increasingly elaborate costumes and sets. It was also established, as Court etiquette apparently required, that if the King and Queen were to attend, their daughters should have leading parts, regardless of the acting ability of the evacuees and village children who were also involved. Consequently, attention focused on the royal children and their skills, even more than would have been true in any case. Meanwhile audiences grew, bringing in large numbers of locally-based guardsmen and ATS girls. In 1943, there were three performances, including one specifically for soldiers. The show also became publicly known. Weeks before the 1943 pantomime, advance publicity produced a flood of inquiries, and more than a thousand would-be ticket holders sent in applications containing blank cheques. All were politely refused.84 However, those denied entry could still learn about the show second-hand, for reports appeared in the press. Particular interest was aroused by ‘Aladdin’ in 1943, in which the Heiress Presumptive, cast in the title role, and wearing utility shorts and top, performed a tap dance, and in one scene appeared as a charlady, in an apron of sackcloth. ‘From the moment Princess Elizabeth popped out of a laundry basket,’ enthused the Sunday Graphic, ‘the King and Queen and the audience of 400 laughed and thoroughly enjoyed the show.’85 After seeing the last of the three performances, Lascelles wrote in his diary that the principals and chorus alike would not have disgraced Drury Lane. ‘P’cess Eliz. was a charming Aladdin’, he noted, ‘and P’cess M. a charming and competent Princess Roxana’.86 Altogether the pantomime netted £200.

The final pantomime, at Christmas 1944, starred the Heiress Presumptive as a Victorian seaside belle. It also included a carefully choreographed ‘ballet interlude,’ arranged by the dancing mistress at Buckingham Palace.87 By this time, however, it had been transformed into an ambitious, semi-professional extravaganza, widely discussed as an established rite, and, in effect, part of the public relations of royalty.

Chapter 5

BEING ON STAGE was, of course, an inescapable part of a royal childhood. Indeed, the last of the Windsor shows was followed by a royal performance as theatrical as anything the princesses had yet experienced. In contrast to the run-up to the 1918 Armistice which was brought about by a sudden German collapse, the early months of 1945 provided a crescendo of victories and liberations. At home, faith in the cause, pride at survival, and the justice of the outcome, created a patriotic mood quite different from the nationalist frenzy of twenty-seven years before. As a result the celebrations marking the defeat first of Germany and then of Japan contained a communal spirit which expressed itself in the festival nature of the rejoicing, and also in an inclusive and grateful attitude to the Royal Family. On both VE and VJ-Days it was the crowds, as much as the Government, that placed the King, Queen and two princesses centre-stage.

Officially, Victory-in-Europe Day was 8 May. In practice, the celebrations lasted at least three days, with attention directed at Buckingham Palace, and with the Royal Family in starring roles throughout. By mid-afternoon on VE-Day itself, the number of people gathered in the hot sunshine round the Queen Victoria Memorial in front of the Palace exceeded that at the Coronation. It was, according to The Times, ‘a red, white and blue crowd,’ with every other woman wearing a multi-coloured ribbon or rosette in her hair. Winston Churchill arrived in an open car and spoke briefly, before disappearing for lunch with the King and Queen. A lull followed. Then the call ‘We want the King’ rose from the crowd. Responding to it, the royal couple and the two princesses came out onto the balcony, the King in naval, and Princess Elizabeth in ATS uniform, to be met by prolonged cheering and singing of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. Only later did the Prime Minister appear with them, giving the ‘V for Victory’ sign. In the evening after Churchill had left, the Royal Family appeared for yet another encore, producing fresh waves of applause and community singing.1

That night, they were joined for dinner by a group of Guards officers who were friends of the princesses. After the meal, as the noise continued beyond the railings, Princess Margaret suggested that the younger members of the party should go outside, so that she and her sister could become, for an evening, part of the chorus. It was a frivolous idea which would have been dismissed as absurd on any other day. However, the exhilaration was such that the King and Queen agreed. Accompanied by a police sergeant, a small party left the Palace and went into the street.

They wandered among the chanting, cheering merry-makers. According to Lascelles, ‘the Princesses, under escort, went out and walked unrecognized about St. James’s Street and Piccadilly’.2 One member of the group remembers a much more extensive itinerary – from Buckingham Palace to Parliament Square, then to Piccadilly, St. James’s Street, Bennet Street, Berkeley Square, Park Lane, and into the Ritz and Dorchester Hotels, before crossing Green Park, and ending up, once again, outside the Palace. ‘It was such a happy atmosphere,’ he recalls. ‘Such a tremendous feeling of being alive.’3 Apart from Margaret, all were in uniform, making them barely distinguishable from thousands of others also moving almost aimlessly in the no-longer blacked-out city centre.

To be invisible in a crowd! For an instant, the fantasy of being ordinary and unknown became real. After five years of incarceration at Windsor, and a life sentence of the public spotlight, the nation’s liberation gave them an exceptional moment of personal freedom. Many years later, Elizabeth recalled that they were terrified of being recognized, ‘so I pulled my uniform cap well down over my eyes’. She remembered ‘lines of people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, and all of us were swept along by tides of happiness and relief’.4 One of the party snatched a Dutch sailor’s cap as a joke, and the sailor kept chasing after them, not knowing and probably not caring who they had in their midst. In the atmosphere of carefree hysteria, they did the Lambeth Walk and the hokey-cokey. When they got back to the Palace, they stood close to the railings, and helped to orchestrate a new wave of ‘We want the King’ cries. Unlike most people, however, they were able to supply the King. One of them was sent inside, and shortly afterwards, the King and Queen reappeared on the balcony.5

Next day, the holiday continued with street parties and bonfires. During the afternoon, the princesses went with their parents on a tour of bombed-out districts in East London, including a council estate in Stepney, where two blocks of flats, and one hundred and thirty people, had been wiped out by a V2 rocket two months before. The King and Queen and their daughters appeared again on the Palace balcony in the evening, as a military band entertained the crowds from the forecourt.

Similar celebrations followed the Japanese surrender in August, with the important difference that, though the royal participants were the same, a Labour Government was in office, and a Labour Prime Minister now acknowledged the cheers and addressed the crowd. In place of the romantic Churchillian rhetoric, there was a clipped Attleean homily. ‘We are right to rejoice at the victory of the people,’ declared the new premier, from the balcony of the Ministry of Health, ‘and it is right for a short time that we should relax. But I want to remind you that we have a great deal of work to do to win the peace as we won the war.’ A speech read by the King, loyally described in the press as ‘firm, resonant and strong,’ was broadcast through loudspeakers. The Royal Family spent the rest of the day taking curtain calls on the balcony, waving to the multitude, and acknowledging the roars of approval.

That night, the princesses repeated the escapade of 8 May. This time, however, the attempt to behave like anonymous citizens – masked princesses at the ball – did not quite succeed. Perhaps the mood was less euphoric than on VE-Day; perhaps because Princess Elizabeth was not in uniform, she was easier to identify. At any rate, they were spotted. ‘Big Crowds at the Palace,’ headlined The Times. ‘Royal Family on the Balcony. Princesses Join the Throng.’ The paper revealed that the King’s daughters had left the Palace shortly before eleven o’clock, and that they ‘were here and there recognised and quickly surrounded by cheering men and women’. But police had told the crowds that ‘the princesses wished to be treated as private individuals, and they were allowed to go on their way’.6

IN ITSELF, the coming of peace in August did not greatly affect the everyday lives of the Royal Family, who had been re-united at Buckingham Palace earlier in the year. There had already been various symptoms of the post VE-Day phoney peace. Early in August, Elizabeth was taken to Ascot. It was a doubly memorable day. Gordon Richards won five races, carrying the royal colours to victory in the Burghclere Stakes for the first time; and, during lunch at Windsor, the King received the news from President Truman that an atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.7 Despite such excursions, and weekend trips to Windsor, it took time to re-adjust to the cratered capital and bomb-damaged royal mansion. ‘It was a nasty shock to live in a town again,’ says Princess Margaret.8 The King found himself as busy as at the height of the war: the exhortatory use made of the Monarchy, if anything, increased. Peacetime austerity had its own moralising. So did the newly elected Labour Government.

In 1940 the King had favoured Lord Halifax for the premiership. During the war, however, he had grown to like and depend on Churchill, who behaved towards him with extravagant courtesy, and he was distressed by the outcome of the general election in July 1945. Apart from his familiarity with the war leader, and his dislike of change per se, he was alarmed about the implications for his family, and his kind. ‘Thank God for the Civil Service,’ he is supposed to have remarked on hearing of the huge majority for a party committed to a programme of nationalization, redistribution and social reform. In private, he was unapologetically right-wing (his wife even more so), and was often moved to explosions of anger at the latest socialist outrage, especially if he felt he had not been consulted.

He need not have worried. Though he remained much more uneasy about the Attlee governments of 1945 and 1950 than his father had been about the MacDonald ones of 1924 and 1929, there was little in reality that the Labour Cabinet wished or dared to do to discomfort him. Indeed, the new Prime Minister went out of his way to provide reassurance. At Attlee’s first audience, George VI expressed disquiet at the news that Hugh Dalton, the renegade son of George V’s old tutor Canon Dalton, might be made Foreign Secretary. The Labour premier immediately bowed to the King’s wishes, or at least allowed the Palace to think he was doing so. Ernest Bevin became Foreign Secretary, and Dalton was sent to the Treasury instead. Thereafter, Attlee treated the Sovereign with perfect correctness, and there turned out to be as little republicanism in the Labour Party after the Second World War as there had been before it. Soon, what some saw as the incongruity of a King-Emperor presiding over a social revolution – and over the granting of self-rule to the Indian sub-continent, jewel in the imperial crown – became accepted as natural and even valuable. Whereas, in the reign of George V, Buckingham Palace had stood at the pinnacle of a confident Establishment unshaken by the arrival of a Labour Government, in the late 1940s the Royal Family managed to avoid any outward appearance of discomfiture, as the Establishment took some knocks.

Indeed, George VI’s passivity arguably became even more of an asset after the war than during it. On the one hand the Royal Family could be seen as a typically British piece of camouflage, disguising and making acceptable the Government’s radicalism; on the other, its existence stood as a guarantee that pragmatic caution would prevail, and radicalism kept within bounds. Thus, when Labour took major industries into public ownership (but compensated owners generously) or made adjustments to the powers of the House of Lords (but only modest ones), both left and right thanked God for the Monarchy.

For Elizabeth, peace brought to an end her brief, token excursion into ATS ‘normality’. It also produced an increase in the number of her solo engagements. She was nineteen, Honorary Colonel, occasional Counsellor of State, and a performer of royal duties: cast, it was increasingly clear, in the mould of her father and grandfather, though more self-assured than George VI, and cleverer than both of them. Was there ever a moment, in her early adulthood, when she questioned what she did, or wondered, in the prevailing atmosphere of equality, and fashion for the abandoning of pomp and circumstance, whether it was worth it? If she ever indulged in such a dissident speculation, she kept her thoughts to herself. There was no visible hint of rebellion, or suggestion that her own values and those of her parents and mentors ever clashed. She was now the almost certain future Queen, who, if she did succeed, would become the third monarch of the century who had not been born to such a fate but had had it thrust upon them. As the position became clearer with the passage of time, she accepted it, knowing that the possibility of an alternative did not exist.

She did as she was told in an enclosed world where loyal and experienced advice could be taken for granted. She became used to the ritual of the royal speech, consisting of a few platitudes crafted by courtiers skilled at the job. Her itineraries just after the war reflected the priorities of Buckingham Palace, and also of the Government. Thus, in the summer of 1945, she opened a new library of the Royal College of Nursing, presented prizes and certificates to students of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women, inspected the Fifth Battalion and Training Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, and addressed (in her recently acquired capacity of Sea Ranger Commodore) three thousand Welsh Girl Guides. She also accompanied her parents on a visit to Ulster, travelling by air for the first time, in a flight from Northolt to Long Kesh.9

Some apparently promising requests, however, were refused. Lascelles turned down, on her behalf, an invitation to become the first woman ever to be awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University – despite pressure from the Chancellor, Lord Baldwin.10 Occasionally, the proposals of Labour politicians were considered excessive. In 1947, Lascelles rejected a request from Hugh Gaitskell, the Minister of Fuel and Power, for her to attend ‘The Miner Comes to Town’ exhibition at Marble Arch which had recently been opened by the Prime Minister, on the grounds that she was too busy.11

Generally, her visits expressed support for an officially approved, but non-controversial, good cause – though sometimes what the Palace saw as non-controversial turned out to be political dynamite. This was true of a tour of Northern Ireland without her parents in March 1946, for what was described as ‘the most ambitious mission undertaken by the young Heir Presumptive’. The tour gave the Princess her first experience of being used, not as a symbol above domestic politics, but as a blatant political tool by one faction.

It was a mission to underline the Union, something which a visit from British royalty, personifying United Kingdom ties, achieved more eloquently than anything. The result was a welcome both vehement and purposeful. This was a Protestant tour and the groups and institutions she met and addressed reflected it. Sometimes the message remained implicit. At Dungannon High School 1,200 girls sang ‘Come back to Ulster, dear Princess’ to the tune of ‘Come back to Erin’. On other occasions, it was crudely and disagreeably partisan. At Enniskillen, the Royal Ulster Constabulary put on a display that included an illegal still, camouflaged with peat and foliage. The producers of illicit ‘poteen’ were acted by local workers, heavily made up with rouge, and wearing paddy-hats and green three-cornered scarves. An almost hysterical atmosphere of loyalism lasted until the Princess’s departure from Belfast on 21 March, when a mob of schoolchildren broke flag-bedecked stands and ran to the edge of the quay. As her cruiser left the harbour, the whole crowd sang ‘Will ye no’ come back again?’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.12

In Northern Ireland, enthusiasm was a symptom of sectarian anxiety. Elsewhere and on other occasions, the excitement the Heiress caused is less easily explicable, especially so soon after the election of a Government committed to dispossessing the better off. At the beginning of 1946, support for socialism was at its zenith: Gallup put Labour twenty per cent ahead in the polls, as the Cabinet prepared to introduce its most radical measures.13 Yet, such popularity – and apparent popular support for levelling down – was not accompanied by any decline in pro-royal sentiment. In April, a gigantic crowd came to watch the bands of the Royal Horse and Grenadier Guards playing on the East Terrace of Windsor Castle, to mark Princess Elizabeth’s twentieth birthday. The Times estimated it at 40,000, a figure three times as large as for any such event in the 1930s.14 Perhaps the austerity and restrictions, as great after the war as during it, sparked a reaction. Such gatherings, and the carnival mood that infused them, may have been a form of escape, a release from drabness. But there was also a deep personal interest in the Princess: in her beauty, her clothes, her shy smile, and, increasingly, her prospects.