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Much depended on the central actor, who made little secret of his deep anxiety about the whole proceeding. Afterwards the King told the former Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, that he had been so dazed by fear for much of the ceremony that he was unaware of what was happening.
However, the Westminster Abbey service went without a hitch, and the Monarch performed his part in it with appropriate gravitas. ‘He carried himself well,’ judged Chips Channon, who witnessed the ceremony as one of several thousand MPs, peers and other dignitaries in the congregation.
A more privileged position among the spectators was given to the two princesses, who sat in the royal box with Queen Mary. For Elizabeth, particularly, the day was an important part of her education. Her governess prepared her for it by reading her Queen Victoria’s account of her own Coronation, written exactly a century before, which began, ‘I was awoke by the guns in the Park and could not get much sleep afterwards on account of the people, bands etc.’ According to Crawfie, the elder princess took such a deep interest that she became ‘one of the greatest living experts on Coronations’.
The girls rode to the Abbey in a glass coach. Chips Channon looked on as they ‘whipped their robes on to their left arms as they had been shown, pushing up their frocks with the same movement and showing bare legs above socks’.
During the three-hour ceremony, Elizabeth watched intently as the Archbishop of Canterbury performed the complex rites, and her father, with the utmost difficulty, repeated the words ‘All this – I promise to do’.
For any child to view the Coronation at close quarters was a memorable experience: only a handful had the opportunity. For the Heiress Presumptive to see her own parents crowned, and to take part in the procession, must have been awesome. What did she think and feel? The Royal Library contains her own answer – an essay, both vivid and prosaic, written in pencil on lined paper just after the event, and carefully tied with pink ribbon. On the cover is inscribed, in neat red crayon, the words:
The Coronation
12th May; 1937
To Mummy and Papa
In Memory of Their Coronation
From Lilibet
By Herself
An Account of the Coronation
It describes how she was woken at five in the morning by the band of the Royal Marines outside her window (much as her great-great grandmother had been woken by the guns in the Park), and how, draped in an eiderdown and accompanied by her nurse-maid Bobo MacDonald, ‘we crouched in the window looking onto a cold, misty morning’. After breakfast (‘we did not eat very much as we were too excited’) they got dressed and
showed ourselves to the visitors and housemaids. Now I shall try and give you a description of our dresses. They were white silk with old cream lace and had little gold bows all the way down the middle. They had puffed sleeves with one little bow in the centre. Then there were the robes of purple velvet with gold on the edge.
We went along to Mummy’s bedroom and we found her putting on her dress. Papa was dressed in a white shirt, breeches and stockings, and over this he wore a crimson satin coat. Then a page came and said it was time to go down, so we kissed Mummy, and wished her good luck and went down. There we said Goodmorning to Aunt Alice, Aunt Marina and Aunt Mary with whom we were to drive to the Abbey. We were then told to get into the carriage . . . At first it was very jolty but we soon got used to it.
Princess Elizabeth describes the procession down the Mall, along Whitehall, to Westminster Abbey, and the walk up the aisle with her family, before she went up into the royal box with Queen Mary:
Then the service began.
I thought it all very, very wonderful and I expect the Abbey did, too. The arches and beams at the top were covered with a sort of haze of wonder as Papa was crowned, at least I thought so.
When Mummy was crowned and all the peeresses put on their coronets it looked wonderful to see arms and coronets hovering in the air and then the arms disappear as if by magic. Also the music was lovely and the band, the orchestra and the new organ all played beautifully.
What struck me as being rather odd was that Grannie did not remember much of her own Coronation. I should have thought that it would have stayed in her mind for ever.
At the end the service got rather boring as it was all prayers. Grannie and I were looking to see how many more pages to the end, and we turned one more and then I pointed to the word at the bottom of the page and it said “Finis”. We both smiled at each other and turned back to the service.
. . . When we got back to our dressing-room we had some sandwiches, stuffed rolls, orangeade and lemonade. Then we left for our long drive.
On leaving the Abbey we went along the Embankment, Northumberland Avenue, through Trafalgar Square, St. James’s St. Piccadilly, Regent St. Oxford St. with Selfridge’s lovely figures, through Marble Arch, through Hyde Park, Hyde Park Corner, Constitution Hill, round the Memorial and into the courtyard.
Then we went up to the corridor to see the Coach coming in. Then Mummy and Papa came up and said “Goodmorning” and were congratulated. Then we all went on to the Balcony where millions of people were waiting below. After that we all went to be photographed in front of those awful lights.
When we sat down to tea it was nearly six o’clock! When I got into bed my legs ached terribly. As my head touched the pillow I was asleep and I did not wake up till nearly eight o’clock the next morning.
PRINCESS ELIZABETH was eleven at the time of the Coronation, and it was an initiation for her, as well as for her parents. The day was not far off, as one writer put it in the royalty idiom of the time, when she would move out of childhood ‘into a swifter current of life.’
Pretty and pubescent, she attracted nearly as much attention as the King and Queen during the two months of state drives, official tours and youth displays that followed. Although she continued to be dressed as a little girl, there was an increase in the number of grand occasions in which she was involved. There was also a sudden seriousness about equipping her for future duties.
One new initiative was the establishment of a Girl Guide company at the Palace, to which a Brownie pack was attached, with the specific purpose of providing the two princesses with a training ground. Based on a romantic myth of imperial kinship, the Scouts and Guides were at their zenith, and several members of the Royal Family had honorific titles within the movement. The Buckingham Palace Company met on Wednesday afternoons and gathered together about twenty children of friends and vetted acquaintances – some, like the royal princesses, taught at home by governesses, others attending London day schools. The Guides were grouped in three patrols. Princess Elizabeth was second-in-command to Patricia Mountbatten, who was a few years older, in the Kingfisher patrol. In winter they met in one of the vast rooms in Buckingham Palace, in the summer in the gardens. There were also trips to Windsor, involving the normal activities of Girl Guides everywhere, though in an abnormal setting: tracking, bird watching, trekking with a hand-cart, cooking sausages and ‘dampers’ (flour balls on sticks) over a campfire. At the Palace, the long corridors were used for signalling practice.
Princess Elizabeth received no special treatment, and mixed in well with the other girls. According to Lady Mountbatten, she was ‘a very efficient and capable deputy,’ already with an air of authority, and popular in the Company, ‘nice, easy to deal with, you’d want her as your best friend’.
Another member of the Company, Elizabeth Cavendish, confirms the impression of the Heiress Presumptive as a highly competent Girl Guide, who took the various activities and rituals seriously, and did well at them.
When a Scottish dancer came to give them special instruction, Princess Elizabeth showed a particular proficiency at dancing Highland reels.
The picture is of a conventional, unquestioning child, making the most of what was presented to her. Yet if Princess Elizabeth was not singled out, there was something different about her. ‘She was very aware that how she behaved in public was very important,’ says Lady Mountbatten. ‘For instance, she couldn’t burst into tears. If she hurt her knee she knew she must try not to cry.’
The Company Captain was a Miss Synge, held in awe by the girls, with Miss Crawford assisting. Some of the Guides, Patricia Mountbatten and Camilla Wallop (later Lady Rupert Nevill), for instance, became lifelong friends.
Punch, 28th April 1937
It was not just cut knees. Incidents in the Kingfisher patrol were not, in general, leaked or reported. However, other events in Princess Elizabeth’s life now were – as the press, less intrusive than later but no less curious, sought to cater for a huge public appetite for details about the royal children’s lives. The princesses might not be able to cry over a minor mishap, but grazes and slight colds often got into the papers just the same. Even before their teens, public appearances had become performances. If the royal children were taken to the theatre, the newspapers automatically treated them as the main attraction – reporting every movement or gesture next day. Sometimes the theatre management, delighted by the privilege of entertaining royalty, would shower honours on them, and the spotlight would be turned in their direction. When the Heiress Presumptive attended the 1937 Christmas production of ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’ at the Holborn Empire, along with fifteen hundred other children, everybody was asked to stand and sing a specially composed children’s verse of the National Anthem.
‘Normal’ expeditions and natural behaviour were difficult.
The birthday of Princess Elizabeth, meanwhile, became a national event. Birthday presents were listed even in the serious newspapers, together with details of the guests and of how the anniversary was being celebrated. Stimulated by these public announcements, well-wishers would gather wherever the Princess happened to be, to cheer her and convey greetings, and she would be required to appear, and politely acknowledge them.
She also became the recipient of a flow of unsolicited mail, often from children in disaster areas, like Chinese orphans fleeing from the Japanese.
Some aspects of the princesses’ lives did not greatly alter. The family continued to come together for weekends at Royal Lodge, where their existence remained much as it had been before. The press made much of the ‘simplicity’ of life at the Lodge, although actually the Royal Family enjoyed every luxury, opportunity for recreation, and service that anybody could wish for. Still, it was possible to enjoy a degree of informality. Here they could enjoy, if not simple living, then the kind of rustic domesticity which had been the greatest pleasure of the Duke and Duchess of York before the upheaval, in the company of horses and dogs unconscious of rank, with grooms, stable boys and kennel hands to look after, handle and talk about them. Princess Elizabeth’s ponies had names like Peggy and Comet; the dogs included corgis, labradors and a Tibetan lion dog, and had names like Dookie, Spark, Flash, Scruffy, Mimsey and Stiffy. The public took a keen interest in these animals. ‘Dookie is unquestionably the “character” of the princesses’ delightful canine family,’ declared one authority in 1942.
On Sundays, the girls and their parents attended services at St George’s Chapel or the Chapel Royal in the grounds of Royal Lodge; on Saturdays, and other days during holidays, the princesses went riding in the morning. Sometimes they walked in Windsor Forest, cycled in the royal gardens at Frogmore or swam in an outdoor pool at the Lodge. All that was lacking was the company of other children of whom they saw as little, or less, than at Buckingham Palace.
Juvenile guests were rare. However, the King and Queen had to entertain official, and especially foreign, visitors who were invited to stay with increasing frequency as fears about the international crisis grew. According to Crawfie, Princess Elizabeth began to take an interest in politics at about this time, ‘and knew quite a bit of what was going on in the world outside’.
She certainly had a unique vantage point compared with most other children of her age. In one month in 1938, four kings, a regent and a crown prince called on her parents, mainly on trips to London to rally support in defence of their countries. Visitors to Windsor early in the reign included the newly appointed American Ambassador, Joe Kennedy, and his wife Rose, who stayed for a weekend in April 1938. Rose Kennedy was moved by her brief contact with British royalty, especially its younger members. She recorded in her diary that she ‘found it a great conversational convenience’ that her own large brood included two children, Teddy and Jean, who were about the same ages as the princesses. During her stay, she watched out for the royal daughters, much as one might look out for rare and exotic birds when visiting their habitat, and she was not disappointed. While walking in the park surrounding the Castle, she and Joe ‘ran into Princess Elizabeth hiding behind the shrubs. She had on a pink coat and was hatless and she smiled at us’. The Kennedys saw her again over luncheon, when Elizabeth and Margaret appeared together, clad identically in rose dresses with checked blouses, red shoes with silver-coloured buckles, white socks and necklaces of coral and pearl. Elizabeth, not quite twelve, was placed next to the wicked old envoy, to his saturnine delight. After the meal, the princesses were required to accompany their parents and the ambassadorial couple as they walked ‘very informally’ over to Frogmore.
Learning how to handle distinguished guests was one important part of an Heiress’s education, and was soon extended. Shortly after the Kennedy visit, Princess Elizabeth was promoted from white socks to silk stockings, receiving a box from her mother as a birthday present.
She started to attend the huge, thousands-strong, garden parties held annually at Buckingham Palace. She also began occasionally to take a leading role at small-scale semi-public events, presenting rosettes at children’s pony shows, and cups and shields to children at the Bath Club. When she was thirteen, she was allowed to accept the presidency of the Children’s League of the Princess Elizabeth of York Hospital, which had been named after her.
There remained the question, both practical and philosophical, of what an Heiress Presumptive and future Queen should be educated to be like – a conundrum that had not faced the Court or Government since the 1830s, when Princess Victoria’s education had been entrusted to the remarkable Baroness Lehzen. Marion Crawford had been employed to help the princesses become lady-like, not monarchical. After George VI’s accession, there was a hesitant appreciation that being lady-like was not enough, but there remained a tension between the training felt suitable for a Head of State, and the needs of an idealized princess. The result was an incongruous mix. If the notion, as an authorized account claimed, that the Princess was subjected to ‘a strenuous tutelage increasing in measure with the passing years’,
was simply a pious invention, there was at least some expansion of the curriculum. Princess Elizabeth began to take twice weekly lessons in constitutional history at Eton College, close to Windsor Castle and Royal Lodge, given by the Vice-Provost, Henry (later Sir Henry) Marten. Later this tuition was supplemented by that of the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue, who taught both princesses French, French literature and European history.
Yet there was also a deep concern to avoid the taint of an ‘intellectual’ as opposed to ‘practical’ princess. It was therefore announced that she was taking cooking lessons in the Royal Lodge kitchens, that she sometimes baked cakes in her little Welsh cottage which were sent to children in hospitals or to unemployed areas, that she had learnt to sweep and scrub and to polish furniture, and that Queen Mary, ‘a keen housewife,’ had admired her efforts.
Marten did his best. The theme of his tutelage combined the traditional and the modern, reminding the Princess of where she came from, but also of the changes wrought by modern conditions. Later, he recalled teaching her that the British Monarchy was exceeded in antiquity only by the papacy, that it went back more than a millennium to King Egbert, ‘the first to unite all England,’ and that the secret of its survival was its ability to adapt. He also taught her what he considered the two great events affecting the Monarchy in their own time, the 1931 Statute of Westminster and the advent of broadcasting. The Statute, he explained, had founded the modern British Commonwealth by making a common allegiance to the Crown the sole surviving link between Great Britain and the Dominions; while broadcasting enabled the Royal Family, by talking personally on the air, to sustain that link.
How much his pupil retained is hard to say, though he may have fired her interest in the past a little. When Princess Marie Louise apologized over dinner at Windsor during the Second World War for indulging in an old lady’s reminiscences, the teenage Princess replied: ‘But Cousin Louise, it’s history, and therefore so thrilling.’
But perhaps she was just being polite.
Yet if the Princess began to build up an academic knowledge from her tutor, as well as an extraordinary acquaintanceship with some of the major players on the world stage, if she was known to millions of young people all over the world and occasionally seen by a few thousand of them – she nevertheless remained separate from all but a handful of carefully selected contemporaries, with few of whom she could ever be close. There is always a sense of the goldfish bowl, and the lack of any direct contact through the glass.
In some ways, she was very mature for her age. Physically, she developed early, with ‘big bosoms just like her mother’, as a member of a courtier family, who played kick-the-tin with her at Balmoral in the late 1930s, fondly recalls.
In other ways, silk stockings notwithstanding, she was held back in childhood. Marten remembered teaching ‘a somewhat shy girl of thirteen who when asked a question would look for confidence and support to her beloved governess, Miss Crawford.’
Crawfie herself suggests a lonely, yet self-sufficient, child, and one with her own private world of perplexity. She recalled seeing her stand for hours at the window at Buckingham Palace, looking down the Mall towards Admiralty Arch, and that she would ask her questions ‘about the world outside’.
The picture of a young princess who lacked nothing except social intercourse with people who did not think of her, first and always, as a princess, is confirmed by Elizabeth’s own recollections. When she was having her portrait painted in the Yellow Drawing-Room by Pietro Annigoni shortly after her own Accession, she told the artist that she had spent hours as a child in the same huge, magnificent room, looking out of the windows. ‘I loved watching the people and the cars there in the Mall,’ she said. ‘They all seemed so busy. I used to wonder what they were doing and where they were all going, and what they thought about outside the Palace.’
WAR, AND THE threat of war, ups the value of Monarchy. As the danger from Hitler grew, and the rearmament programme gathered pace, the King and Queen became increasingly busy as hosts, ambassadors and patriotic symbols. Two days before the signing of the Munich agreement in the autumn of 1938, the twelve-year-old Princess Elizabeth travelled with her mother to Clydebank for the launch of the giant Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth, destined to be used both for civilian passengers and as a troop ship. Usually, however, the royal couple did their visiting and travelling unaccompanied by their children who, it was felt, were better off at home. In the case of the foreign trips which the King and Queen were now required to make, there was no sense that, quite apart from the advantages of keeping the family together, seeing other countries would be educational.
The most important royal visit of the decade took place in 1939. Following a brief and apparently successful trip to France in July 1938 to strengthen the Entente Cordiale, it was decided to send the royal couple to North America, to strengthen the special relationship. Before the journey, President Roosevelt invited ‘either or both’ the princesses, genially observing in his letter that ‘I shall try to have one or two Roosevelts of approximately the same age to play with them!’ It was an exciting offer, but the King declined it, on the grounds that they were too young for the rigours of the Canadian part of the tour.
By the time of embarkation in May 1939, Franco had taken Madrid, Hitler had marched into Prague, and a full-scale European conflict seemed imminent. Interest in the tour on both sides of the Atlantic was intense. Perhaps the wild excitement that greeted the King and Queen from the moment they landed in Canada on 17 May would have been even greater if their daughters had been with them. As it was, the visitors had to content themselves with the first-ever royal transatlantic telephone call, taken by the princesses at the Bowes-Lyon house at St. Paul’s Walden Bury.
The King and Queen spoke through hand microphones; the children finished their end of the conversation by holding the Queen’s corgi and making him bark by pinching him.
After three weeks in Canada, the King and Queen were fêted in the United States by the President (‘He is so easy to get to know,’ wrote a grateful Monarch, ‘& never makes one feel shy’), before reembarking from Canada on 15 June. Deeply moved by his reception, and relieved that it was over, the King ‘nearly cried’ – as he later confessed – at the end of his final speech before departing. It was, wrote his biographer, ‘a climacture in the King’s life,’ while at the same time ‘an undeniable wrench to leave homeland and family under such uncertain conditions’.
Presumably it was also a wrench for his children, despite the telephone call. In the press, the six-week parting was widely discussed as an example of the high level of sacrifice the royal couple were prepared to make for the public good. Some interest was also taken in the feelings of their daughters, and the leave-taking at Portsmouth at the beginning of the trip became a moment of sentimental drama.
Keen attention was paid to the princesses as they were taken aboard their parents’ ship before she sailed. Elizabeth at thirteen, it was observed, was nearly as tall as her mother. There was a change in the way she dressed – no longer in ‘babyish, bonnet-shaped hats,’ wearing instead a tilted cap, with the hem-line of her coat and dress lowered to below her knees.
The faces of both girls were scrutinized for signs of emotion. According to one witness, ‘they looked somewhat forlorn when, at length, amid tremendous cheering, the hooting of sirens, and the God-speed of thousands of onlookers, the mighty liner, bearing their Majesties, slowly glided out of the harbour.’
According to another, when the princesses returned to the jetty, ‘Margaret’s face puckered up, Elizabeth looked tearful . . . ,’ while the King and Queen could be seen gazing after them, ‘until the two little figures merged into the blue of thronged quays’.
During the tour, Elizabeth sent her mother photographs, and made a film of Margaret and the pets with a cine-camera. Various diversions of an educational sort were arranged by Queen Mary. One was a visit to the Bank of England to see the gold in the vaults. Naturally, the Governor, Montagu Norman, accompanied them. The old Queen was sincere in her didactic aims. However, in the prevailing mood such excursions almost inevitably became public events as well as private ones, despite strenuous efforts by Buckingham Palace to prevent, or at any rate contain, publicity. ‘I think that the question of the press and press photographers in connection with the outings of T.R.H.s Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret will have to be seriously considered,’ Sir Eric Miéville, the courtier responsible for press relations, wrote to the King’s private secretary following a trip to London Zoo which was widely covered in the picture papers. ‘What happens now is that by some extraordinary means, unknown to me, whenever they are due to visit an institution, news always leaks out ahead to certain members of the press . . . One has to remember that in these days such information given to the newspapers is worth money.’
The homecoming of the King and Queen was almost as dramatic as the departure. The princesses prepared for it by spring-cleaning the ‘Little House’.
The press did so by sending every available reporter to Southampton, where a destroyer, the Kempenfelt, had been ordered to carry the children to the liner Empress of Britain for a family reunion. ‘Blue eyes sparkling, hair blowing,’ the girls were piped on board the Kempenfelt.
Solemnly, they shook hands with each of the ship’s officers, before sailing out to meet their parents in the Solent. After they had been brought together and returned to shore, the whole royal party proceeded by train to Waterloo, whence they rode in state to Buckingham Palace, the two princesses beside the King and Queen in the leading carriage.
Chapter 4
‘WE NEVER SEEMED to get really settled again after the Canada-America visit of 1939,’ recalled Crawfie.
The trip marked the end of the tight family life that had survived the move out of 145 Piccadilly, and the start of intermittent separations and comings-together that lasted until 1945. The Royal Family had a good war – by the standards of almost every other royal house a stupendous one, emerging with its reputation enhanced, and much of the damage done by the Abdication repaired. Yet the psychology of the achievement was complicated. Much depended on the passivity of the Symbol King, and the serenity of his family life. Loyalty to the Monarchy waxed as the nation’s fear grew, and acquired a character of hope and yearning – different from the sentimentalities and social conservatism of peacetime – which, as the end approached, turned to gratitude toward a King who had no way of affecting the outcome. Meanwhile, his children became representatives of what the fighting was about, their pre-war immaturity and innocence frozen in aspic. ‘One felt,’ in the words of a writer of the period, ‘that these engaging little people would never grow up’.
The symbolism was heightened by a mystery. For security reasons, the whereabouts of the girls were kept secret, and the images of them that appeared in the press were set against an unknown, unidentifiable background, adding to a sense of them as magical princesses whose fate was linked to the national destiny.
The Royal Family was at Balmoral until just before the declaration of war on September 3rd. The King returned to London on August 23rd, his wife five days later. The children were despatched to Birkhall, the first of their mysterious locations, where they were cared for and guarded by a retinue headed by an equerry, and including a chauffeur, a police sergeant and several constables.
Lessons of a sort continued, Crawfie reading newspapers out loud, ‘trying as far as possible to give them some idea of what was happening without too many horrible details.’
Marten posted history papers, and Princess Elizabeth sent him essays for correction. Girl Guide meetings took place in the village hall. So did ‘war-work’, which consisted of a large sewing party mainly made up of women from the royal estate. At Christmas they went to Sandringham, and then to Royal Lodge until May, with the Queen in residence for much of the time. Here there was more Girl Guiding, with the unusual ingredient of evacuees from the East End, bringing the girls into fleeting contact with urban working-class children.
‘Thank you so very much for the books you and Mr Chamberlain sent me for my birthday,’ Princess Elizabeth wrote to the Prime Minister’s wife on 23 April 1940. ‘It was so kind of you and I have always wanted to read them. I hope you are both well and that Mr Chamberlain is not too tired. Thanking you again so much.’
Mr Chamberlain was, however, shortly to be relieved of his responsibilities. On 8 May , following the debate on the Norway campaign, he was forced to resign. Two days later, Winston Churchill drove to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands as his successor. On 12 May, as Hitler invaded the Low Countries, the princesses were moved into the great fortress of Windsor Castle, where they were to live for most of the war. ‘We went there for a weekend,’ as Princess Margaret recalls, ‘and we stayed for five years.’
For a while, they slept in the dungeons. Princess Margaret remembers having to run to get to the shelter under Brunswick Tower. Yet she thought of it as a happy time.
Her sister felt much the same. She later told Harold Nicolson that she would like to make Windsor her home, rather than Buckingham Palace or Sandringham, since all the happiest memories of her childhood were associated with the Castle and the Park.
The girls lived in pampered seclusion, in conditions, as Morrah put it after the war, ‘favourable to the quiet business of the schoolroom, though perhaps less for the enlargement of human contacts.’
There was a shifting band of soldiers, often Grenadier Guards, for company. With an informality hard to imagine in peacetime, they ate with their governesses and one or two officers in the State Dining Room, where a single light bulb hung from the ceiling in place of a chandelier.
At first, the King and Queen stayed at Windsor, commuting to Buckingham Palace. Later, after the worst of the bombing, they returned to London, visiting the Castle only at weekends.
How should the royal children be used in wartime? Some of the best minds in the Ministry of Information addressed the problem with, as usual, contradictory results. On the one hand, it was decided to make much of the princesses’ privations at a ‘place in the country,’ where they bore their loneliness stoically, for the national good. On the other, government propaganda used them as the centre-piece to a tableau of the perfect family hearth, confidently and comfortably immune to the threats of vulgar dictators. To project such an image, they would be shown, in pictures or prose, relaxing on sofas and rugs, surrounded by proud parents and placid pets. These two, separate, ways of imagining the King’s daughters were sometimes combined. Later in the war, when victory was in sight, the second tended to predominate. Initially, when the need for sacrifice was greatest, the emphasis was on the first.
The presentation of the girls as victims of the family-rending impact of war provided the theme of Princess Elizabeth’s first broadcast, delivered in October 1940 when she was fourteen-and-a-half, and directed at British children evacuated to North America, though actually intended to influence adult opinion in the United States, and the US Government, as well.
That the broadcast took place at all was a retreat by Buckingham Palace and a sign of how dire the emergency had become. Pre-war requests for Princess Elizabeth to speak on the air had been met by curt refusals. In 1938, the influential owner of the New York Herald Tribune, Helen Reid, was brusquely rebuffed when she asked if the Princess might make a five-minute broadcast to open National Children’s Week in the United States. Mrs Reid had used the powerful argument that such a gesture would be in keeping with the British Government’s policy of doing everything possible to bring America and Great Britain together. She had added, a little less tactfully, that it would also assuage American bitterness over the treatment of the Duke of Windsor at the time of his marriage.
Referring the matter to Buckingham Palace, the British ambassador wrote dismissively of such ‘attempts to enlist the princesses for stunts’.
The Palace strongly agreed, and confirmed ‘that there is, of course, no question of the princesses broadcasting, nor is it likely to be considered for many years to come’.
The autumn of 1940, however, was no time to be fastidious, where a chance of influencing American public opinion was concerned. When the Director-General of the BBC, Frederick Ogilvie, approached the King’s private secretary, he immediately received a favourable answer.
The plan was to get Princess Elizabeth to introduce a series of ‘Children in Wartime’ programmes, intended to bring out the part children could play in the nation’s defence. The Princess’s brief statement would go out live in the short-wave service to the United States and Canada, and later be heard in recorded form all over the world. The unofficial aim of pulling adult heartstrings was made clear to the King and Queen. ‘As Her Royal Highness’s first broadcast, delivered at an historic moment,’ Ogilvie explained to the Palace, ‘it would reach the minds of the millions who heard it with a singular poignancy.’
The broadcast went out on 13 October. The Princess read a carefully scripted text which linked her own recent life and that of her sister to the lives of displaced British children overseas. ‘Thousands of you in this country have had to leave your homes and be separated from your father and mother,’ she told her listeners, in a high-pitched, precise voice which The Times likened to that of her mother.
‘My sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you, as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all.’ There was an expression of optimism (‘We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well.’) A final exchange with the ten-year-old Princess Margaret was also in the prepared text: ‘My sister is by my side, and we are both going to say good night to you. Come on, Margaret.’ ‘Good night,’ said a smaller voice. ‘Good night and good luck to you all.’
Jock Colville, private secretary to the Prime Minister and later to Princess Elizabeth, wrote in his diary that he and Diana Sandys, Winston Churchill’s daughter, who listened to the broadcast with him, ‘were embarrassed by the sloppy sentiment she was made to express, but her voice was most impressive and, if the Monarchy survives, Queen Elizabeth II should be a most successful radio Queen’.
Sloppiness was what the occasion seemed to require: the broadcast was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as a propaganda triumph, at a time when triumphs of any kind were sparse. It attracted particularly wide attention in the United States and made the front pages, with a picture in all the New York papers. ‘Princess yesterday huge success here,’ the local BBC representative cabled to Ogilvie. ‘Some stations report telephone exchanges jammed with requests for repeat.’
Such was the quantity and enthusiasm of fan mail that the BBC turned the broadcast into a gramophone record for sale in America and throughout the Empire.
The guise of the princesses as typically lonely displaced children reinforced another part of the Ministry of Information’s offensive: a projection of the King and Queen as typical Londoners carrying on regardless in spite of the Blitz. It helped to give the broadcast impact, indeed it might almost have been part of the plot, that Buckingham Palace had received a direct hit a few weeks earlier. Pictures of brave little girls in the country and their brave parents among the rubble mixed together in the public imagination. Mass Observation, the precursor of in-depth polling, recorded a mood of indignation and defiance, in which royalty played a part. ‘If they hurt the King and Queen or the princesses we’d be so mad we’d blast every German out of existence,’ declared a supposedly typical female clerk.
Sometimes the children were shown on a pony cart with a corgi beside them, without adults, alone in a park. According to one early wartime account, walkers near their home would ‘meet the two girls jogging along hatless, laughing, and talking merrily, taking it in turns to hold the reins, which they do gracefully with ribbons threaded in orthodox fashion over the first finger and under the thumb of the left hand’.
The impression was of free spirits, self-sufficient and unharmed in their own secret world. The contrast between this fairy land and bombed-out cities was stark. But there was also the other guise: children in the perfect family, whose domestic happiness was to be protected by the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Empire as if it were their own. In this version, the children were never alone. Indeed, the presence of the King and Queen was a key ingredient.
It was important, as Simon Schama has observed, that a monarchy should appear as ‘the family of families, at once dynastic and domestic, remote and accessible, magical and mundane’.
In a total war, the importance of the Windsors’ as the ‘family of families’ increased because conditions on the home front, in addition to the foreign danger, were shaking non-royal family life to its foundations. The same had been true in the First World War. However, there had been a significant shift since 1914–18, partly because of the milder temperament of George VI, compared to his father, and the circumstances of his accession; and partly because his Royal Family, unlike the one he was born into, was conveniently young, nuclear and comprehensible. In the First War, George V had been portrayed as patriarchal, even god-like, a warrior monarch to whom duty was owed. In the Second World War, the whole ‘family of families’ was given prominence as a unit, with the King and Queen frequently shown in the company of their children, underscoring the domestic affections and virtues that the war was about.
