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In her speech, she spoke scathingly of the ‘current age of growing self-indulgence, of hardening materialism, of falling moral standards’. She also praised her audience’s emphasis on the sanctity of marriage.
The young wives applauded warmly when she declared that broken homes caused havoc among children, and that ‘we can have no doubt that divorce and separation are responsible for some of the darkest evils in our society today’. Children, she said, learnt by example, and would not be expected to do what parents were too lazy to do themselves. ‘I believe there is a great fear in our generation of being labelled priggish’, she added – indicating that the fear should not prevent responsible people from doing or saying what they believed to be right.
The speech plunged her into unexpected controversy. Advocates of changing the divorce laws reacted strongly. The Mothers’ Union, they claimed, was notorious for its conservatism on the subject, and they complained that royal sanction should not have been given for a standpoint that was increasingly contested. ‘The harm to children can be greater in a home where both parents are at loggerheads than if divorce ensues’, protested the chairman of the Marriage Law Reform Committee. Of course, the Princess had not written the words she had spoken, but – having allowed her personal image and reputation to be used in order to bolster a contentious point of view – she could not entirely escape responsibility for the sentiment. However, according to one member of the Royal Household, writing a few years later, there was no reason for the Princess to distance herself from her script. ‘King George and Queen Elizabeth were completely satisfied that their daughter had been right, for their views on marriage and family life were the same.’
Princess Elizabeth flew to Malta to join her husband on November 20th, accompanied by a party that included a lady-in-waiting, Lady Alice Egerton, Mike Parker, her maid Bobo, and Philip’s valet John Dean.
Prince Charles was left in the charge of nursery staff, much as Princess Elizabeth herself had been left in 1927, when her own parents, as Duke and Duchess of York, had embarked on their antipodean tour.
According to Dean, the Princess’s life in Malta was not markedly different from that of anybody else similarly placed. However, normality and ordinariness were only relative. Most service wives did not have a retinue of devoted helpers. There was also something else that singled her out: the presence and hospitality of Uncle Dickie. It added greatly to the convenience and comfort of the Princess that the ever-solicitous Lord Mountbatten happened to be based at Malta in his current role in command of the 1st Cruiser Squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet, and that he was more than happy to make his house, Villa Guardamangia, available to the royal couple.
The Princess’s party stayed till the end of December, when Chequers was sent with six other warships to patrol the Red Sea, following disorders in Eritrea. Dean recalled later that Princess Elizabeth had been very excited about her first Malta trip, ‘although she was probably a little sad at leaving Prince Charles behind’.
She did not, however, display any obvious consternation or – as some mothers might, after five weeks’ separation – find it necessary to rush back to him as soon as she returned to England. Instead, she spent four days at Clarence House attending to engagements and dealing (according to the press) with ‘a backlog of correspondence,’ before attending Hurst Park races, where she saw Monaveen, a horse she owned jointly with her mother, win at 10–1. Only then was she reunited with her son, who had been staying with her parents at Sandringham.
Yet the Princess could be forgiven for enjoying the novelty of her visits to Malta – a haven of comparative privacy, and freedom from official duties. ‘They were so relaxed and free, coming and going as they pleased . . .’ recalled Dean. ‘I think it was their happiest time.’
Philip was delighted to have returned to the life he knew and loved, and which depended on his abilities, not on his marriage. What for him, however, was a restoration of the status quo ante was a revelation for her. Though she lived in greater luxury than others, she did many of the same things as them, and in a similar way. Parker recalls that she would go down to the ship at the bottom of the road which led from the villa and ‘generally mucked in with the other wives’. There was a lot of social visiting, having tea and dining with other couples. ‘She spent only ten per cent of the time being a Princess,’ he says. The ten per cent was mainly accounted for by Uncle Dickie who ‘tried to get her into the admirals’ strata’.
There were some necessary courtesy calls. She was required to visit Archbishop Bonzi, and admire the views from his hilltop residence. Otherwise, to a degree that was barely imaginable in Britain, she was left alone. When Philip was busy, she drove her own Daimler, either solo or with a female companion, around the island. When he was free, she accompanied him on swimming expeditions with the Mountbattens, who would take a launch to the creeks and bays around Malta and Gozo, and they would sometimes sleep on board. She would watch her husband at some sporting event, or dine and dance with him at the local hotel – protected by the management and unharassed by the press. If she missed Charles, helping with a party given by Lady Mountbatten for a hundred children on board ship may have provided some consolation.
In April, Princess Elizabeth’s second pregnancy was announced. She spent her twenty-fourth birthday on Malta, watching her husband and uncle playing polo. Then she returned to England. The baby was due to be born in August, this time at Clarence House. As her time approached, thousands of people gathered outside, many of them hoping for a glimpse of the heavily pregnant Princess.
Bobo MacDonald responded to the tension by whipping herself up into a frenzy of work.
On August 15th, her mistress gave birth to a baby girl. Afterwards, Prince Charles, aged twenty-one months, was held up to the window to wave back at the onlookers.
The Princess took some time fully to recover. She had been expected to resume her public duties in October, but – on doctor’s orders – had to postpone or cancel all engagements for another month. There were further cancellations in November because of a ‘severe cold’. Later the same month – shortly after Charles’s second birthday – she flew to Malta to spend Christmas with her husband, while the children were taken to Sandringham to stay with their grandparents. Meanwhile, Philip had been promoted to Lieutenant-Commander, and at the beginning of September 1950 he was given command of the frigate HMS Magpie. The Magpie had been ordered to provide an escort for the Commander-in-Chief’s despatch vessel, HMS Surprise, for a visit to Philip’s relatives King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece, in Athens. Princess Elizabeth accompanied her husband on the trip – and together they were warmly welcomed in the Greek capital.
Not everybody shared the devotion of a Bobo MacDonald. In January, the whole Royal Family’s education was dramatically advanced by the unexpected treachery – as they saw it – of Crawfie, now Mrs Buthlay, who had decided to cash in on her royal experiences. A letter from Princess Margaret to her former governess in March 1949 indicated concern at the Palace at the preparation of a revelatory book.
There may have been an element of misunderstanding. After the book was written, the Queen was approached for permission, and even saw proofs.
However, there was no doubt about the royal displeasure when the book was serialized, against the Royal Family’s express wishes, in the American Ladies’ Home Journal.
In March – spurred by the excitement caused in the United States – Woman’s Own ran it in Britain, advertising extracts as ‘The Loving, Human, Authentic Story of The Little Princesses’. The Palace tried to throw doubt on the accuracy of the account at every opportunity. ‘The Princess is not a bad sailor’ insisted the Comptroller of the Household in reply to a well-wisher who, on reading that the Heiress suffered from sea-sickness, had helpfully donated a patent remedy, ‘and to show how facts can be distorted, the voyage to the Channel Islands – on which occasion Miss Crawford reports that Her Royal Highness was prostrate – was in fact so calm that it was impossible to tell one was at sea, except for the subdued hum of the engines’.
Undeterred, Mrs Buthlay wrote a stream of additional books and articles over the next few years, drawing on the same store of knowledge, though ever thinner and more repetitive as the store ran out.
Eventually, to the great satisfaction of Buckingham Palace, she over-reached herself by writing in imaginative detail about a royal event as if she had witnessed it, before it had taken place, and then finding herself unable to prevent publication of the article after the event had been cancelled. Her literary career ended forthwith. Mrs Buthlay died in 1986, unmourned at Buckingham Palace. According to a royal aide who went to the Palace a few years after the rumpus, ‘the only thing I was told was that letters signed Bongo or Biffo should not be put in the bin because they were probably from cousins. Letters from Marion Crawford should be handled with a very long pair of forceps.’
Her name is still taboo: mention Crawfie to older royalty, and they stiffen. Yet there remains a little tragedy about the lack of a reconciliation. For the princesses, and especially Princess Elizabeth, were closer to Crawfie than almost anybody during their most formative years, and the bonds of understanding and affection had been strong.
Today it is difficult to appreciate an age of innocence in which Crawfie’s recollections caused such a sense of outrage. As A. N. Wilson puts it in his introduction to the 1993 reprint of Marion Crawford’s The Little Princesses, ‘though few books were written so mawkishly, few can have been written with such obvious love’.
Kenneth Rose suggests that the Royal Family was angry because ‘their privacy had been purloined and sold for gain’.
Yet there had been earlier accounts of the princesses’ childhood, almost as mawkish, and also for gain. Perhaps it was the disobedience that caused most fury, rather than either the content or the motive.
The Little Princesses marked a watershed. For the former governess had stumbled on a discovery that was to blight the Royal Family for the rest of the century: the market in intimate details of royal lives was a rising one. The financial value of revelations was already known, and had been remarked upon within the Palace before the war. What had changed, and would henceforth grow with increasing rapidity, was the voracity of the public appetite, and the profits-led crumbling of inhibitions about feeding it.
There was an irony: Crawfie’s writings caused a frisson because of the tightness with which royal privacy had been guarded, and the refusal to treat even the most modest press request for personal information as legitimate. The instrument of this policy was the King’s press secretary, Commander Richard Colville – an unbending ex-naval officer with no knowledge of the press, which he treated with a combination of distrust and lordly contempt. There was also a grundyish aspect: former colleagues fondly recall his countenance when, confronted by the latest newspaper lèse-majesté, the corners of his mouth would turn down in horror.
Journalists called him ‘the Abominable No Man’, fellow courtiers dubbed him ‘Sunshine’. At the time of Crawfie’s offence, he had been in post for three years. The affair seemed to have a traumatic effect on him. So far from encouraging him to liberalize, it produced secrecy, greater hauteur, and greater prudery.
Commander Colville stayed at the Palace until 1968, a source of continuing aggravation to those on the press side who had to deal with him. His legacy – a belief that any titbit of above or below-stairs royal gossip was inherently interesting, because of the irritation its publication would cause to the Palace – still has its baleful effect. The Commander, however, was not alone in his attitude to the media. While George VI lived, his views received active support from Sir Alan Lascelles, who to some extent shared – even helped to inspire – the view that the Palace owed the press nothing, and that it would be better if the newspapers confined themselves to publishing official handouts.
Though author of the Princess’s Cape Town BBC speech, Lascelles regarded the technology of radio with a special wariness. Over-exposure, he believed, through such a direct medium as broadcasting, was one of the biggest potential dangers to the Royal Family – and a temptation to be resisted strongly.
At the height of the Crawfie furore, it was proposed that Princess Elizabeth should accept an invitation to broadcast to the Youth of the Empire on Empire Day. She herself was keen. Lascelles’s reaction, however, was unhesitatingly negative. ‘The world, as a whole,’ the courtier wrote in an internal Palace minute, ‘is pretty surfeited with broadcasts, and the last thing we want is for the world to feel that way about royal broadcasts.’ Christmas broadcasts, together with the occasional VE-Day or Silver Wedding, were quite enough. He therefore strongly advised against the Princess undertaking ‘an “out of the blue” broadcast this summer – or indeed at any time’.
No Empire Day broadcast took place; and Princess Elizabeth remained – Crawfie outpourings apart – tantalizingly visible yet inaccessible, until many years after her accession as Queen.
Chapter 9
PHILIP RETURNED FROM MALTA in the summer of 1951 and bowed to the inevitable: that it was impossible to combine an active naval career with the role of active partner to the Heiress Presumptive – especially one who, because of the King’s illness, was expected to take on an increasing share of royal duties. It was a major sacrifice. He was barely thirty and, but for his marriage, his prospects of promotion to a high rank within the Navy of his adopted country were reckoned to be good. But he could not simultaneously accompany his wife, and command ships; his wife could not adapt her royal functions to suit his career; and he could not repeatedly take sabbaticals. When he left Malta, it was announced that he would not take up any further active naval appointments until after the return of the King and Queen from a Commonwealth tour now scheduled for the autumn. In fact, the break was a permanent one.
The result was a painful period of transition, which expressed itself in bursts of undirected energy and dismissive intolerance. According to his manservant, ‘he loved the sea and adored the Navy, and some of my gayest times with him were when he was serving’. After his return from the sea, he was ‘inclined to be moody and impatient’, and it was some time before he settled down to public engagements.
One of the butts of his impatience was the royal establishment, which he regarded as stuffy and old-fashioned. ‘Prince Philip was very hostile to Buckingham Palace – he didn’t like it, and he wanted his own show’, recalls a former courtier. ‘The gap between the Palace and Clarence House was very big.’
It was some compensation that, by 1951, the much smaller households of the Princess and Duke at Clarence House did constitute a quite distinct show – and one that worked with a degree of efficiency and harmony that would have been impossible if they had stayed longer in the same building as the King and the Queen. It may have helped that at the beginning of 1950 the suavely intelligent Jock Colville returned to the Foreign Office. In some ways, Colville had been a progressive influence, with an ambition to make the Heiress and her husband more socially aware. On one occasion he even made the suggestion to the Duke that he should work as a coal miner for a month – a proposal which was rejected on the grounds that ‘it would be playing to the gallery’.
Colville’s frequently possessive devotion to the Princess, however, had not made him the easiest of advisers for her husband to work with, and the atmosphere at Clarence House was more relaxed without him. His place was taken by Major Martin (later Lord) Charteris, a professional soldier who had spent much of the war in the Middle East, eventually running Military Intelligence in Palestine. Charteris worked for Elizabeth at Clarence House and then at Buckingham Palace for the next twenty-seven years. With the exception of her later Deputy Master of the Household, Lord Plunket, he came to know her as well as any courtier. His particular blend of wisdom, dry humour, friendliness, conservatism and selfless loyalty fitted her needs well.
Those who worked at Clarence House in the short period of its occupancy by the royal couple recall a happy, close-knit group of helpers, over which the influence of the busy and contented Princess, enjoying her duties and her pleasures, shone benignly. ‘Martin and I both loved to bask in her light’, says Mike Parker. ‘She was very good at making you feel part of her team and family.’
The mornings would be filled with letters and other business, the afternoons with visits. She and her husband would often lunch with the staff in the dining-room, in conditions that were less formal and much more intimate than anything possible at the Palace.
‘When we were planning daytime journeys, she was very good at making suggestions’, Parker recalls. ‘She showed an early maturity in discussing things and making decisions.’
Her responsibilities were widening. As yet, however, she had little knowledge of the conduct of Government business. Jock Colville had made his own contribution, by persuading the Foreign Secretary to let her see Foreign Office telegrams. In the summer of 1950, Charteris took a leaf out of Colville’s book, and raised with the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, the possibility of letting her see Cabinet papers as well. Brook consulted the Prime Minister, suggesting that the Princess should see minutes as well as memoranda, apart from any Confidential Annexes, as ‘a temporary experiment forming part of the general plan for giving Her Royal Highness a wider experience of public affairs’.
Attlee spoke to the King. Then he scribbled a note to Brook: ‘I think it should be permanent’, and it became so.
The Princess’s experience of public affairs extended in other, more traditional ways over the next eighteen months. In 1951 – year of the Festival of Britain – the Royal Family was in exceptional demand for ceremonial duties, and Elizabeth had to deputize for her father, because of his illness, on many occasions. In June, she hosted a dinner for her uncle, King Haakon of Norway. This time her father was too ill to attend the King’s Birthday Parade of the Brigade of Guards, with the ceremony of Trooping the Colour, on Horse Guards Parade. It was a vivid début. The tiny, compact figure, riding side-saddle in the scarlet tunic of Colonel of the Grenadiers – ‘a woman alone’, as The Times put it, at the centre of an all-male military event – was a telling reminder of her significance, not just as under-study, but as successor to the sick Monarch.
In the summer, the medical suspicion that George VI had cancer became stronger. In September, exploratory surgery confirmed it, and the King underwent the removal of his left lung. Once the severity of the illness was established, a variety of arrangements had to be made. To ensure that the constitutional functions of the Monarchy should continue without interruption, Lascelles took the necessary steps to have the Queen, the two princesses, the Duke of Gloucester and the Princess Royal designated Counsellors of State. Princess Elizabeth wrote to her father’s private secretary agreeing that this was the best thing to do, ‘for it will relieve the King of so much of the ordinary routine things’.
One routine thing was the general election. Before the operation, the King had asked the Prime Minister to make a decision about a poll before the start of his Commonwealth tour, planned for January. After it, Lascelles wrote to Attlee explaining that when this request had been made, the King had had no inkling that the trip would have to be put off.
The decision was now taken to hold an election on October 15th. On October 4th, Princess Elizabeth presided over the Privy Council preceding the Dissolution. Meanwhile she had been making her own preparations. ‘In view of the unfortunate turn in the King’s health,’ she wrote to her young dress designer Hardy Amies on September 24th, and ‘in the strictest confidence . . . I have strong reason to believe that he will be unable to undertake the tour of Australia and New Zealand. I would very much like you to prepare some sketches for me to see . . . as a precaution against any sudden decision for us to go in the King’s place.’
On October 9th, the King’s already postponed South Sea tour was cancelled.
It was to be a busy winter – the busiest, indeed, of the Princess’s life so far. Despite anxiety about the King, she and her husband decided to go ahead with a long-projected tour of Canada. This particular venture had first been mooted three years earlier. Elizabeth had been keen, but – as over the French trip – Philip had initially been opposed, saying that he wanted to settle down and start a family.
Their family was now well started and they had, at Clarence House, a settled home. With the other obstacle – Philip’s naval duties – also removed, the trip was scheduled for October 1951. Meanwhile, the proposed tour had expanded in ambition. The visit had at first been envisaged as a purely Commonwealth undertaking. However, in July, Lord Halifax – a former ambassador in Washington – had suggested that it would be impolite for the royal couple not to include in their itinerary a brief detour south of the border. So what Lascelles called a ‘pop-over’ holiday visit to the United States was tacked on, as an extra.
The royal party flew out to Newfoundland on October 7th, for a tour that was overshadowed by fears for the King’s health. To guard against the possibility of his death, Charteris kept papers about the holding of an Accession Council under his bed throughout the trip.
They had a mixed reception. A few days after their arrival, the Canadian Governor-General wrote soothingly to the King that the Quebecois had been impressed by the Princess’s French, and that the crowds in Ottawa were bigger than those during the state visits of either President Truman or President Auriol of France.
However the press – unaware of the seriousness of the King’s illness and looking for an angle – quickly decided that the Princess looked distracted, and even bored. ‘At the end of some of the long trying days,’ declared one Canadian broadcaster, ‘you’d hear people worrying about how tired the Princess is.’
The royal party had an uncomfortable feeling of the trip having got off to a poor start. ‘There was a lot of comment about Princess Elizabeth not smiling,’ according to Lord Charteris. It was to become a common complaint. ‘My face is aching with smiling,’ he recalled her saying in exasperation.
Yet there was no lack of interest. Such was the crush of photographers wanting to get a picture of her face, smiling or blank, that splinters of glass from exploding flash bulbs were found on her coat.
As in South Africa in 1947, much of the tour was spent cooped up in a special train. The mood in the royal car varied. To relieve the monotony as they travelled into every province of the dominion, Philip developed a line in practical jokes. On one occasion he left a booby-trapped tin of nuts for his wife to open, on another he chased her down the corridor wearing a set of joke false teeth.
At other times, tempers frayed. One member of the party remembers the Duke loudly denouncing the Heiress Presumptive as a ‘bloody fool’ in the breakfast room.
Meanwhile, as they chugged across the vast open spaces, from the industrial lowlands of St Lawrence to the west coast, the nation’s enthusiasm – dormant at first – grew into an extraordinary excitement, focusing on the Governor-General’s train. People travelled colossal distances to gather at each stop. There were vivid incidents. Dean particularly remembered the arrival of the royal train at a small settlement deep in the Rockies, late at night in falling snow. As the couple dismounted, they were greeted by the town band and the entire population singing ‘The Loveliest Night of the Year’.
The high point was the hastily-added pop-over. On October 31st, they flew to Washington, where – to ensure a fitting welcome – President Truman had ordered that all Federal employees should be given time off.
What guaranteed the success of the visit was partly the Canadian preamble, which gave the American press time to get used to the idea; partly the brevity of the trip, which gave no time for boredom; and partly that Truman decided to make it the climactic celebration of his own presidency. ‘He fell in love with her’, according to Charteris.
The British ambassador, Sir Oliver Franks, wrote to the King that when the President appeared with Princess Elizabeth in public he conveyed ‘the impression of a very proud uncle presenting his favourite niece to his friends’.
As Federal workers lined the streets to cheer, the President behaved as if the Princess and her husband had been responsible for some magnificent achievement. ‘We have many distinguished visitors here in this city,’ he declared in a speech in the Rose Garden, ‘but never before have we had such a wonderful couple, that so completely captured the hearts of all of us.’
The Washington papers wrote of ‘little Lilibet’ – recently made familiar to the American public through the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal – who had ‘suddenly matured into the lovely young mother who one day is to be the ruling Queen of England’.
At a big British embassy reception, the Princess and the Duke had to shake the hands of 1,500 guests.
There were matters of protocol. One, which caused a flurry of diplomatic telegrams, was the question of where the Princess should return the President’s hospitality. As the pop-over took place during a tour of Canada, she came to the United States not as future Queen of England but as future Queen of Canada, and consequently was required to entertain President Truman at the Canadian, not the British, embassy.
Afterwards, there was the question of thank-you letters. When the royal couple had returned to Canada, Philip wrote to Mrs Truman – as one consort to another – thanking her for her kindness, and describing his ‘rather blurred memory of our rush round Washington’. It was the job of the Princess to write to the President. She did so after talking to her father on the telephone. ‘He sounded much better,’ she wrote, hopefully.
Across the Atlantic, the King was shown glowing extracts from the Washington Evening Star, and read the famous remark of Harry Truman: ‘When I was little boy, I read about a fairy princess, and there she is.’
IN MID-NOVEMBER, the Princess and Duke returned to England, and to a new political landscape. A few years earlier, Labour had seemed so firmly entrenched that many people believed it would retain office for a generation. The 1950 election, however, had cut its majority to a handful. In the general election of October 1951, a tired Labour Government – depleted by retirements and resignations – faced a re-invigorated Conservative Party campaigning for a bigger conflagration of controls. The result was tight. Labour polled more votes, but the Tories obtained a small working majority. At seventy-seven, Winston Churchill was called to the Palace and asked by the convalescing King to form the first purely Conservative Government since Baldwin left office in 1929. The Monarch was not sorry. Although Attlee had treated him with civility and respect, the King and Queen made little secret – in private – of their High Tory opinions.
During the war the King had come to depend personally on Churchill, whose exaggerated shows of deference he found reassuring and flattering, and he welcomed the return of a Prime Minister who took an almost child-like pleasure in the pageantry and show of Monarchy.
Elizabeth and Philip did not have long, however, to adjust to the change. Following the cancellation of the tour of the King and Queen, arrangements had been put in train for the Princess and her husband to undertake it instead – including, in their itinerary, a few days in East Africa en route. There were two reasons for such an excursion. The Kenyan colonial government, which had given the Princess and Duke a farm, Sagana Lodge, as a wedding present, had been keenly asking for a royal visit. Furthermore, such a pause in the journey gave an excuse for not stopping in Egypt, currently in the throes of a political crisis. ‘Going to Kenya is a good way of skipping the Mediterranean,’ the King pencilled in a tremulous note to his private secretary.
The intention was to make the Kenya leg of the journey largely a holiday, before they went on from Mombasa, aboard HMS Gothic, to Ceylon.
The Kenyan settler community was delighted at the news. The East African Standard spoke for the colony when it welcomed the visit of two young people whose charm, devotion to duty and ‘personal example of homemaking family life’ had endeared them to the Commonwealth: it hoped that they would enjoy what Kenya had to offer in terms of fishing, riding, shooting and travelling on safari. As with the South African tour, the fiction was preserved that the royal visit – intended to provide symbolic reassurance to the white settlers in increasingly uncertain times – was purely recreational.
The couple’s example of homemaking did not include bringing their children with them. Though they expected to be away for six months, longer even than the Yorks’ 1927 trip, the question did not arise. ‘It was absolutely taken for granted that they would be left behind,’ says an ex-courtier. ‘It was simply what one did in those days.’
As soon as he knew they were coming, the Governor of Kenya, Sir Philip Mitchell, made an imaginative suggestion. ‘. . . [P]lease try to get them here so that their visit includes the period of three days on either side of the full moon,’ he wrote to the Colonial Office on October 13th. ‘In that case I would reserve Treetops for them for a night, that is the hotel in the branches of a giant fig tree overlooking a salt lick about ten miles from their Lodge in the Aberdares . . . I am sure that H.R.H. would enjoy it enormously; it really is something not to be missed and it does require, for its full enjoyment, as much moonlight as possible.’ The moonlight was for viewing the big game that came to the water-hole under the tree.
In his Christmas broadcast, the King expressed his pleasure that ‘our daughter, Princess Elizabeth’ and her husband would be taking his and the Queen’s place on the tour. It was the first and last time that he ever referred to his heir on such an occasion by name.
After recording the programme – piece by piece, as his strength allowed – the King spent Christmas with his family in Norfolk. ‘I am progressing well since my operation, I am glad to say’, he wrote to General Eisenhower from Sandringham on January 7th.
On January 30th, he returned to London for a visit to the American musical South Pacific in Drury Lane. The following day he accompanied his elder daughter and his son-in-law to London airport and said good-bye to them on the tarmac as they boarded their plane for Nairobi.
The royal couple were greeted on arrival next morning by Sir Philip Mitchell, in plumed hat, and whisked off for a series of engagements. Then the royal party set out for Sagana Lodge in Nyeri, a hundred miles north of the capital, where they spent a couple of days elephant-watching, fishing and filming – before driving to Treetops. The hotel, as Mitchell had indicated, was an outpost only for the sturdiest of tourists. Getting to it was regarded as hazardous, because of wild animals at the foot of the tree. There may also have been another hazard, because it was in the heart of Mau Mau territory – during the rebellion which erupted shortly afterwards, it was burnt down. At the time, however, the Princess and the Duke were able to spend a safe and peaceful evening watching Kenya’s most imposing fauna from the hotel’s observation balcony.
On February 4th, Lascelles wrote to Mitchell from England thanking him, on behalf of the King and Queen, for helping to make the visit a success.
Next day, in Downing Street, the Cabinet discussed a Labour motion complaining about a planned royal visit to South Africa, in the course of which the King was due to stay in Dr Malan’s official residence as his guest. Ministers agreed that the matter was one for the Union Government to decide, and that it would be ‘constitutionally inappropriate’ to offer advice.
In Sandringham, the King went out shooting, and returned for dinner with his wife and younger daughter. ‘There were jolly jokes,’ Princess Margaret recalls, ‘and he went to bed early because he was convalescing. Then he wasn’t there any more.’
That night, he died in his sleep.
When did Elizabeth succeed? ‘She became Queen,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, ‘while perched in a tree in Africa watching the rhinoceros come down to the pool to drink.’
This became the legend, and it was not far from the truth. When the King’s fatal heart attack occurred in the early hours of the morning, the Princess was either asleep or eating breakfast (watching, not rhinoceros, but baboons) or taking pictures of the sunrise. Mike Parker, a member of the royal party, believes he was with her at the precise moment when her reign began. He had invited her to climb up to a look-out point at the top of the tree to watch the dawn coming up over the jungle. While they looked at the iridescent light that preceded the sunrise, they saw an eagle hovering just above their heads. For a moment, he was frightened that it would dive onto them. ‘I never thought about it until later’, he recalled, ‘but that was roughly the time when the King died.’
Although for several months his death had been a medical inevitability, the news of it came as a surprise both to the public and to the Royal Family. ‘He died as he was getting better,’ says Princess Margaret.
Remarkably, the ground had not been prepared and the arrangements for telling key people had rapidly to be improvised. The Queen had been the first to know, after the King’s valet had discovered his body, at 7.30 a.m. An hour or more elapsed before Edward Ford, the assistant private secretary, was sent by Sir Alan Lascelles to tell the Prime Minister and the King’s mother. Ford drove to Downing Street, and was shown up to Churchill’s bedroom. The premier was propped up in bed writing, surrounded by paperwork and a candle for his cigar. ‘I’ve got bad news,’ Ford recalls saying, ‘– the King died this morning.’ Churchill seemed shaken. ‘Bad news?’ he exclaimed. ‘The worst!’ He flung aside the papers. ‘How unimportant these matters seem. Get me Anthony Eden.’ Then, according to Ford, ‘he got onto the phone and said, in an absurd attempt at security, “Anthony, can we scramble?” But they couldn’t scramble. He went on in a kind of code, “Our big chief has gone – we must have a Cabinet.”’
The Prime Minister’s distress was more than momentary. Jock Colville – who, with the change of Government, had been brought back into No 10 as Churchill’s joint private secretary – found him in tears. When he tried to cheer the premier by saying how well he would get on with the new Queen, ‘all he could say was that he did not know her and that she was only a child’.
Getting hold of the Prime Minister was a great deal easier than finding the new Monarch, who had returned from Treetops to Sagana Lodge. It was more than four hours before the Queen knew that she had succeeded. ‘Because of where we were,’ says Pamela Hicks, who was in the party as a lady-in-waiting, ‘we were almost the last people in the world to know.’ Another lady-in-waiting – aboard the Gothic at Mombasa in anticipation of the royal party – only learnt of the King’s death when she asked why people were taking down the decorations.
Eventually the story was picked up from the radio by Martin Charteris, a few miles away at the Outspan Hotel. He telephoned Sagana Lodge and spoke to Parker. There was no way to check officially. It was confirmed, however, when Mike Parker switched on his own radio, and heard the announcement on the overseas wavelength of the BBC.
Parker told Philip who – at about 2.45 p.m., 11.45 a.m. London time – told his wife.
‘He took her up to the garden,’ according to Parker, ‘and they walked slowly up and down the lawn while he talked and talked and talked to her.’
THE DEATH of a British monarch changes little in practical terms. It does not shift a Prime Minister, alter the party of Government, reverse its policies, or influence the economy. Yet – in a way that is hard to define – it affects the mood. This is because the British public relates to its kings and queens, who it regards with a variety of emotions, but always with interest. It even imagines that the relationship works both ways: the question in A. A. Milne’s rhyme about changing the guard at Buckingham Palace – ‘Do you think the King knows about me?’ – is an adult fancy, as well as a childhood one. Hence such an event is often experienced with genuine grief, as a family loss. But there is also a wider, social relationship, which makes a change of reign more than a nominal transition. It is not just for convenience that the culture, mores, architecture, style of dress of a period have often been identified by the name of the monarch – ‘Victorian’, ‘Edwardian’ and so on. A link is made between the supposed character of the titular ruler, and some facet of the age. Even in the mid-twentieth century, after the abandonment of this kind of epochal labelling, monarchs still give a flavour to the attitudes and outlook of the episode over which they formally preside.
Politically, there was little to bind the reign of George VI together. Spanning a turbulent fifteen and a half years from the Depression and the rise of fascism, through a world war, to post-war austerity, the building of the welfare state, Indian independence, the Cold War, and the beginnings of consumer affluence, it had no single theme. Yet its very instability gave the King’s nervous courage and mule-like conservatism an historical role. Indeed, his lack of imagination was seen by many as an advantage, placing him below statesmen and closer to the bewildered common man. In private, prime ministers found him almost intolerably slow, yet they respected his honesty and decency, and his desire to do his best, and they felt protective towards him. There was also relief, and gratitude, that he should have provided the most domestically admirable ‘Royal Family’ since the days of Prince Albert.
The press became filled with images of black drapery, coffins, tombs and catafalques. Even the New Statesman – whose editor, Kingsley Martin, was a rare critic of Monarchy – became convulsed by an argument about whether the front page should have a black band around it. However, the mourning was not just a media indulgence. Affection for George VI was felt everywhere. A few days after the death, Richard Crossman, a left-wing MP and iconoclast, recorded his impression of a ‘hard-boiled’ attitude in Parliament, but ‘directly you got outside, you certainly realised that the newspapers were not sentimentalizing when they described the nation’s feeling of personal loss’.
The feeling was intensified by the King’s relatively young age, and by sympathy for his widow; and by a mixture of concern and excited, expectant curiosity towards his elder daughter, who had been so closely watched since childhood, who had recently become an almost mythic being, but about whom very little was yet known. It was around this small and mysterious person that the national sentiment rapidly became – in the unironic phrase of the Annual Register for 1952 – ‘a religion of royalism’.
A variety of procedures automatically followed the King’s death, even before Elizabeth – now the Queen – knew of it. An emergency Cabinet met at 11 a.m., and decided to hold an Accession Council the same afternoon. There was a discussion of the wording of the Proclamation, which had important long-term effects. It was also decided to extend the Council’s composition. ‘Representatives of other members of the Commonwealth’ were now to join the ‘Lords Spiritual and Temporal, members of the Privy Council, and other Principal Gentlemen of Quality, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Citizens of London’.
At the Council later in the day, the Lord President, Lord Woolton, read the draft declaration proclaiming the new Monarch as Queen Elizabeth the Second – the first to have been proclaimed in absentia since the accession of George I.
Proclamations echoed around the world, as never before – and never again, for the phenomenon of one individual as hereditary Head of State in so many different colonies and self-governing states is unlikely to be repeated. There was a plethora of invented traditions. In Australia, for example, the proclamation of George VI in 1936 had been read by a secretary in the Prime Minister’s department to a handful of people assembled in the King’s Hall at Parliament House. His daughter’s proclamation was read by the Governor-General from the steps of Parliament House, and similar ceremonies were conducted before large crowds in state capitals around the country.
In some places, the implications of what was proclaimed caused local difficulties. A particular complaint was made in Scotland, where the National Committee of the Scottish Covenant Association pointed out that, north of the border, she was Elizabeth I. There was a fierce legal argument. On February 20th the Edinburgh Court of Sessions resolved the matter by announcing that, as far as official documents and declarations were concerned, she would be styled ‘the Second’. The result was a grievance against the British Monarchy that was not forgotten.
In Kenya, it was difficult for ‘the lady we must now call the Queen’ – as Charteris began to refer to her – to come to terms, simultaneously, with the loss of a father and becoming Head of State for the rest of her life. It was also hard for her husband. After they got the news, the royal party rapidly prepared for the return journey to London. ‘I have this picture in my mind,’ according to Lord Charteris, ‘of going into the Lodge on 6th February 1952 and the Queen sitting at her desk, pencil in hand, and Prince Philip lying back on a sofa and holding open The Times over his face. And I felt then that something had changed, and it had.’ He recalls her ‘sitting erect, no tears, colour up a little, fully accepting her destiny’. He asked what she wanted to be called as Queen. ‘My own name, Elizabeth, of course,’ she said.
