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Mountbatten took this as a carte blanche. Replying that ‘nothing would suit him better,’ he asked to see the King. Then he moved, striking hard and fast, making good use of his standing with the Labour Government. On 14 November, he saw the Home Secretary, and then the Prime Minister, and secured the agreement of both to the naturalization, and also that Philip would be known, in his new British persona, as ‘HRH Prince Philip’ – an extra bit of varnish to his nation-swapping nephew’s image. Next day he wrote triumphantly to the Prince, sending him a form to fill, instructing him on what to put in it, and promising path-smoothing letters.
The politics remained delicate. Backbench Labour MPs, many of whom took a keen interest both in foreign affairs and immigration policy, were liable to object not just that Philip was linked to an unpleasant dynasty but also that his naturalization, at a time when many aliens were clamouring for it, constituted favourable treatment. Mountbatten anticipated this danger by showering the press with detailed information designed to show that, in everything that mattered, Philip was already British.
In August, the Labour MP and journalist Tom Driberg, who was friendly with Mountbatten, took Philip on an educational trip round Parliament. Afterwards, he offered to help with newspaper articles. Mountbatten had replied with an urgent request that Driberg should not allow ‘any form of pre-publicity to break, which I feel would be fatal’ – while also sending the MP a biographical information pack for use later, which would show that his nephew ‘really is more English than any other nationality.’
Now he asked Driberg to use this material, which recounted that Philip was the son of ‘the late General Prince Andrew of Greece and of Denmark, GCVO,’ that he had spent no more than three months in Greece since the age of one, and that he spoke no Greek. Mountbatten also asked Driberg to persuade his ‘Left Wing friends’ – that is, Labour MPs who might ask awkward questions – that Philip had ‘nothing whatever to do with the political set-up in Greece, or any of our reactionaries.’ Finally, he briefed the Press Association that ‘the Prince’s desire to be British dated back several years before the rumours about the engagement,’ and somewhat disingenuously, had ‘no possible connection with such rumours’.
To his great relief – as, no doubt, to that of Philip and Elizabeth – the press rose to the occasion. Most newspapers printed the Mountbatten memorandum almost verbatim, but without attribution, and as if it were news. The Times even obligingly suggested that, but for the war, Philip might have become a British subject on passing out from Dartmouth in 1939.
Philip turned down the offer of ‘HRH,’ which was anomalous once he stopped being Greek, preferring to stick to his naval rank. There remained the question of his surname. On this, Dickie received his reward. Philip’s Danish-derived dynastic name, Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, did little to assist the desired transformation. The ex-prince therefore turned to his mother’s and uncle’s family, adopting the appellation ‘Mountbatten’, itself the anglicized version of a foreign name changed during an earlier bout of xenophobia. Lord Mountbatten took the name change back to the King and Home Secretary, and fixed that too,
and on 18th March 1947 the change of nationality of Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten of 16 Chester Street appeared in the London Gazette.
There was a sequel to the saga of Philip’s rushed naturalization. In November 1972 Lord Dilhorne, the former Lord Chancellor, replied to an inquiry from Lord Mountbatten with a remarkable piece of information. It was undeniably the case, he wrote, that under a 1705 Act of Parliament all descendants of the Electress Sophie of Hanover were British subjects. The point had, indeed, been tested in a 1956 case involving Prince Ernst August of Hanover, which concluded with a decision in the House of Lords that the Prince was a British subject by virtue of the same Act. Philip was, of course, a descendant of the Electress, through Queen Victoria. ‘. . . [S]o it appears,’ wrote Dilhorne, ‘that the naturalization of Prince Philip was quite unnecessary and of no effect for you cannot naturalize someone who is already a British subject . . .’ The law was quite clear: the Queen’s consort had had British nationality since the date of his birth.
Chapter 6
IF UNCLE DICKIE and his nephew believed that Buckingham Palace was dragging its feet over procedures which, when complete, would remove the major political objection to a marriage, they were probably right. Buffeted by his daughter, the King made enquiries. A few days before the Japanese surrender, Sir Alan Lascelles even wrote that George VI was ‘interesting himself keenly’ in the question of Philip’s naturalization.
But the King did not press his advisers to speed things along, and his advisers did not press ministers. It took the energetic intervention of Lord Mountbatten to bring the matter to a conclusion. Indeed, a profound ambivalence seems to have characterized the attitude of the entire Court, almost until the engagement was announced.
The Windsors were a harmonious family, and Elizabeth’s views were usually respected. It is interesting, therefore, that on something so important there should have been a difference of opinion. The explanation, common enough in royal romances through the centuries, seems to have been that the qualities that made the suitor lovable to the Heiress, did not have the same effect on those who guarded over the inheritance.
There were good grounds for approving of Prince Philip. In looks, public manner, war record, even in his choice of the Royal Navy, he fitted the part of ‘crown consort’ to perfection. The reasons for objecting to him were more complex. Some were obvious – in particular, the fact that, as Crawfie unerringly put it, he was a ‘prince without a home or kingdom,’ and hence, in seeking the hand of a British princess who had both, was aiming too high.
But there were other factors. In particular, ambivalence towards Philip reflected ambivalence towards his uncle. Though Mountbatten was close to the King, he was also known for his politicking and intrigue, and for his intimacy with the Labour Government. There seems to have been a dislike of conceding yet another round to Uncle Dickie’s apparently ungovernable ambitions, and a fear that in doing so a fifth columnist might be introduced who would give Mountbatten the chance to exert a reforming influence on the style and traditions of Buckingham Palace.
As far as the King and Queen themselves were concerned, there were personal reasons for not being rushed into a precipitate match. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had been twenty-two when she accepted the proposal of the Duke of York in 1923. Her daughter was a mere seventeen at the time of Prince Philip’s first formal request to be considered as a suitor. Queen Mary’s belief, as related to Lady Airlie, that Elizabeth’s parents simply considered her too young for marriage, may well be right. So too may Lady Airlie’s own theory that the King was miserable about the prospect of letting her go, that his elder daughter ‘was his constant companion in shooting, walking, riding – in fact in everything,’ and he dreaded losing her.
Both views are also compatible with Wheeler-Bennett’s suggestion that the King regarded Elizabeth as not only too young but too inexperienced, and found it hard to believe that she had fallen in love with the first young man she had ever met.
In addition, there was the Prince himself – and here there was a contradiction that has continued to dog him all his life. Philip had a capacity to attract admiration and to cause irritation in equal measure. At the time, he was a man with enthusiastic supporters, but also with angry detractors. On the one hand, friends extolled his energy, directness, and ability to lead, attributes that brought him success at school and Dartmouth and in the Navy, and helped to win the hearts of many an English débutante and émigré countess. On the other, his forthright manner made some older people suspicious. What worked with naval ratings and princesses – abruptness, a democratic style, intolerance of humbug – grated at Court, and in the grander houses of the aristocracy. A courtier once told Harold Nicolson that both the King and the Queen ‘felt he was rough, ill-tempered, uneducated and would probably not be faithful.’
According to a former adviser to the King: ‘Some of the people who were guests at Balmoral thought him rather unpolished’.
There was also something else, alluded to in the last chapter: Philip’s supposed (and actual) connections with the nation which, at the time of his first overtures, Britain was engaged in fighting. For all his acquired Englishness, there was something in Philip’s character, in his tendency to put backs up, and in his mixture of rootlessness and dubious roots, that stirred in the previous generation of high aristocrats a mixture of snobbery and xenophobia. ‘The kind of people who didn’t like Prince Philip were the kind who didn’t like Mountbatten,’ suggests an ex-courtier. ‘It was all bound up in the single word: “German”.’
In view of the Germanic links of the British Royal Family over the preceding two centuries, this was scarcely a rational prejudice, but it was undoubtedly there. The strongest evidence of its existence is provided by unpublished sections of the diary of Jock (later Sir John) Colville, who had been a private secretary to Neville Chamberlain and then to Winston Churchill, and became Princess Elizabeth’s private secretary in the summer of 1947. During his first stay at Balmoral in the same year, Colville noted with fascination the prevailing atmosphere of bitterness towards the ex-Greek prince. ‘Lords Salisbury, Eldon and Stanley think him no gentleman,’ he recorded; ‘and in a sense they are right. They also profess to see in him a Teutonic strain.’
‘People in the generation which had fought in the First World War were not very much in favour of what they called “the Hun”,’ says a former adviser to George VI.
An aristocrat linked to the Conservative Party used privately to refer to Philip as ‘Charlie Kraut’.
One of the fiercest of Philip’s opponents was the Queen’s brother, David Bowes-Lyon, who did his best to influence his sister against the match.
What exactly did being ‘no gentleman’ mean? There were several, generally unspoken elements. ‘He wasn’t part of the aristocracy’, suggests a former courtier meaning that he did not share British aristocratic assumptions.
This point was linked to the unfortunate matter of his schooling. The problem was not its extent – if high scholastic attainment had been a requirement for joining the Windsor family, few twentiethcentury consorts (let alone the royals they married) would have passed muster – but its location. It was a significant disadvantage that he was not a member of the freemasonry of old Etonians to which virtually everybody in the inner circle who was not actually a Royal Highness, almost by definition, belonged.
Philip’s unusual academy, regarded by the world at large as an interesting variation, contributed to the sense of him as an outsider – even possibly, like his uncle, as a kind of socialist. ‘He had been at Gordonstoun,’ points out a former royal aide. ‘So he had very few friends. Eton engenders friendships. The more severe ethos at Gordonstoun leaves you without friends.’ (Being ‘without friends’ should not, of course, be taken literally: what it meant was friends of an appropriate type. The same source acknowledges that, though Philip did have friends, they tended to be ‘Falstaffian’ ones.
) In addition, Gordonstoun’s ‘progressive’ ethos could give rise to disturbing ideas. Thus, one member of the Royal Family apparently complained that the would-be consort ‘had been to a crank school with theories of complete social equality where the boys were taught to mix with all and sundry.’
There was no single, or over-riding, objection: just the raised eyebrow, the closing of ranks at which royalty and the landed classes were peculiarly adept. If there was a unifying theme, it was a kind of jealous, chauvinistic protectiveness – based on a belief that so precious an asset should not be lightly handed over, least of all to the penniless scion of a disreputable house who, in the nostrils of his critics, had about him the whiff of a fortune-hunter. Contemplating the presence of ‘Philip of Greece’ and his cousin the Marquess of Milford Haven at the Boxing Day party at Windsor Castle in 1943, Sir Alan Lascelles laconically observed: ‘I prefer the latter’.
Whatever the full reason, a courtly and aristocratic distaste for the young suitor, and suspicion about his motives, hindered his full acceptance into courtly and aristocratic circles for years to come.
ONE PERSON had no doubts: Princess Elizabeth herself. ‘She was a stunning girl’, a close friend fondly remembers, ‘longing to be a young wife without too many problems.’
In this ambition she was supported by most public opinion, apart from a sliver of the Labour Party on the pro-Communist left, which continued to associate Philip not with the Hun, but with the Greek right. In general, however, press and public took what they saw: a handsome, eligible naval officer, who happened to be a prince. So far from objecting, most early commentators found his combination of royal status, a British naval commission, and lack of celebrity, entirely appropriate for the back-seat but decorative role that would be required. Yet for the time being, Philip remained a shadowy figure.
Elizabeth, by contrast, was ever more visible in the popular magazines – with interest enhanced by speculation about the developing but unannounced romance. The American press, always ahead of the British, anticipated an engagement early in 1947 by turning her into a cover girl, a newsreel star, and – highest compliment – the ultimately desirable girl-next-door. In January 1947, the International Artists’ Committee in New York voted her one of the most glamorous women in the world. In March, Time declared her ‘the Woman of the Week’, and praised her for her ‘Pin-Up Charm’. Devoting four pages to her life story, it revealed her as a princess the magazine’s readers could take to their hearts. She was practical, down-to-earth, human – the essence of suburban middle America. As well as being an excellent horsewoman she was, the article declared, a tireless dancer and an enthusiastic lover of swing music, night clubs, and ‘having her own way’. She enjoyed reading best-sellers, knitting and gossipy teas with her sister and a few girlfriends in front of the fire at Buckingham Palace.
According to Crawfie, she was an indifferent knitter.
However, the picture was not entirely false. Whatever she may have read in her teens, her adult tastes in literature and drama were, as a British observer put it delicately in the 1950s, ‘those of the many rather than the few’.
In this respect, as in others, efforts to nip any blue-stocking tendency in the bud had succeeded.
It was also true that she enjoyed music, especially if it was not too demanding. She took a keen interest in the ‘musicals’ currently in vogue on the London stage. She liked the satirical entertainment 1066 and All That so much that she obtained a copy of the song ‘Going Home to Rome’ from the management.
Jean Woodroffe (then Gibbs), who became her lady-in-waiting early in 1945, remembers that the two of them would while away the time on long car journeys to and from official engagements by singing popular songs.
After the war ended, weekly madrigal sessions were held at the Palace – either Margaret or a professional musician played the piano and both girls sang, together with some officers in the Palace guard.
One madrigal singer was Lord Porchester (now the seventh Earl of Carnarvon) who had known Princess Elizabeth when he was in the Royal Horse Guards at the end of the war, and had taken part in the Buckingham Palace VE-Night escapade. Porchester (‘Porchey’)* also shared the Princess’s interest in riding, breeding and racing horses. During the war, they had seen each other at the Beckhampton stables on the Wiltshire Downs, where horses bred at the royal studs were trained. Porchester was the grandson of the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who, as well as being the joint discoverer of the tomb of Tutenkhamun, had been the leading racehorse owner-breeder at the beginning of the century, and had set up the Highclere Stud at his Hampshire home. His father, the sixth Earl, had bred the 1930 Derby winner Blenheim. ‘The King thought I was a suitable racing companion of her age group,’ says Lord Carnarvon. ‘There were not many people then who could accompany her to the races.’ Since the 1940s, he says, ‘We have developed our interest together, and it has got sharper.’
He was beside her at Newmarket in October 1945, and at almost every Derby since.
Before the war, horses had been Elizabeth’s childhood fantasy. During it, her confidence as a rider had been built up with the help of Horace Smith. After 1945, the horse world became her chief relaxation and escape. She read widely on the subject, extending her knowledge of horse management, welfare and veterinary needs, and she developed a sixth sense as a trainer. ‘She has an ability to get horses psychologically attuned to what she wants,’ says Sir John Miller, for many years Crown Equerry and responsible for all the Queen’s non-race horses, ‘and then to persuade them to enjoy it.’
What started as a hobby later became a serious enterprise, and an area for her own independent professionalism. ‘Prince Philip shrewdly kept out of it all,’ says a former royal employee. ‘Otherwise he would have dominated the discussion.’
For Elizabeth, horse breeding was a family interest. The royal studs had been founded at Hampton Court in the sixteenth century, later moving to Windsor. In the late nineteenth century, the then Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, had re-confirmed the royal hobby by establishing the Sandringham stud. Royal interest seemed curiously, though perhaps not surprisingly, to mirror the royal fascination with dynastic genealogy. The result had been an exclusive attitude to bloodlines. ‘Royal managers had avoided sending to some of the best stallions, often because they did not like the owner,’ Carnarvon recalls. On one occasion, an otherwise ideal candidate for covering a royal mare was rejected by Captain Charles Moore, George VI’s (and later his daughter’s) Manager of the Royal Studs, on the grounds that it belonged to a bookmaker. In much the same way, the King – who took a mild interest in racing – had a patriotic approach to the sport. Not only did he prefer to send to British-based stallions, it upset him if French horses too often won British races.
Lord Porchester, who had studied at Cirencester Agricultural College and had acquired a knowledge of the principles of ‘hybrid vigour,’ tried to advance royal practice by encouraging the family to be less fussy about equestrian social backgrounds. As Porchey and Elizabeth became more expert together, a quiet revolution came eventually to overtake royal breeding methods. After Elizabeth became Queen, her interest increased, and in 1962 she leased Polhampton Lodge Stud, near Overton in Hampshire, for breeding race horses – adding to the studs (Sandringham and Wolverton) at Sandringham. In 1970, Lord Porchester took over as the Queen’s racing manager. Over the years their shared passion for horses became the basis for a close friendship. ‘With Henry Porchester, racing and horses bring them continually together,’ says a former royal adviser. ‘Henry tells her a lot of gossip. She’s very fond of him and he’s devoted to her.’
Princess Elizabeth’s other recreations were also uncompromisingly those of royalty and the landed aristocracy. Like her grandfather, father and mother, she was relentless in her pursuit of the fauna on the Sandringham and Balmoral estates. She did not use a shotgun, but she became skilled with a rifle, and in stalking deer during Scottish holidays. One report described how, while staying on the Invernesshire estate of Lord Elphinstone, the Queen’s brother-in-law, in October 1946, the twenty-year-old Princess followed a stag through the forest, ‘aimed with steadiness and brought down the animal,’ which turned out to be a twelve-pointer.
It was a sport for which she was well-equipped. After visiting Balmoral during the war, King Peter of Yugoslavia, Alexandra’s husband, expressed admiration at the quality of the rifle she lent him.
Later, Porchey gave her a .22 rifle as a present.
The pace quickened at the end of the war, in shooting as in everything else. Aubrey (now Lord) Buxton, a Norfolk neighbour who became a close friend of the royal couple – and who later helped to inspire Philip’s interest in wildlife and conservation – described one extraordinary day’s shooting at Balmoral, a fortnight after the Japanese surrender. A royal house party, headed by the Monarch, set itself the task of killing as wide a range of different birds and animals as possible. The King set out in search of ptarmigan, somebody else had to catch a salmon and a trout, and so on. After a hard day, the final bag in the game book was 1 pheasant, 12 partridges, 1 mountain hare, 1 brown hare, 3 rabbits, 1 woodcock, 1 snipe, 1 wild duck, 1 stag, 1 roe deer, 2 pigeons, 2 black game, 17 grouse, 2 capercailzie, 6 ptarmigan, 2 salmon, 1 trout, 1 heron and a sparrow hawk. Princess Elizabeth was the proud dispatcher of the stag.
Margaret did not share Elizabeth’s sporting enthusiasms – one of the factors which led to the growth of different and contrasting circles of friends. To some extent, despite the age gap, their circles overlapped. Weekend parties in the mid-1940s included the heirs to great titles, who were regarded as potential husbands for either of them. Names like Blandford, Dalkeith, Rutland, Euston, Westmorland tended to crop up. ‘There was a good deal of speculation,’ an ex-courtier remembers, ‘about whether any of them would do.’ When Philip became a fixture, the circles diverged. Margaret began to attract a smarter set: her friends thought of themselves as gaier, wilder, wittier, and regarded Elizabeth’s as grand, conventional and dull.
As well as the gap in interests, the distinction reflected a difference in temperament. ‘Princess Margaret loved being amused,’ suggests one of her friends, ‘in a way that her sister didn’t.’ It was also a product of the princesses’ contrasting relationship with the King. Elizabeth, the introvert, had been brought up to be responsible; Margaret, the extrovert, to be pretty, entertaining and fun. ‘George VI had a strong concern for Princess Elizabeth,’ says the same source, ‘but he had a more fatherly attitude towards her sister. I remember him leaning on a piano when she was singing light-hearted songs, with an adoring look, thinking it was frightfully funny.’ While Margaret reached out to people, Elizabeth seemed never to give much away. A lady-in-waiting recalls her, in the mid–1940s, as ‘very charming, but very quiet and shy – much more shy than later.’
Colville formed a similar impression. ‘Princess Elizabeth has the sweetest of characters,’ he recorded, shortly after joining her, ‘but she is not easy to talk to, except when one sits next to her at dinner, and her worth, which I take to be very real, is not on the surface.’
The impression of Princess Elizabeth is of a strangely poised young person used to going her own way, which tended to be the way of her class rather than of her age group, and making few concessions to fashion. Yet the sense of her as highly conventional – in contrast to her sister – depends partly on the vantage-point and the generation of the observer. Simon Phipps, friendly with Margaret when he was a theological student and young clergyman, and who later became Bishop of Lincoln, remembers the stiffness of royal protocol, including having to change twice in the evening (once for tea, and again for dinner), and turning at table when the Monarch turned. But he also recalls happy games of charades, including an anarchic one in which he was cast as a bishop, and the King as his chaplain.
When Lady Airlie, Queen Mary’s friend and lady-in-waiting, visited Sandringham in January 1946, what shocked her was the extent of change since before the war. She found youth in control, with jig-saw puzzles set out on a baize-covered table in the entrance hall. ‘The younger members of the party – the princesses, Lady Mary Cambridge, Mrs Gibbs and several young guardsmen congregated round them from morning to night,’ she noted. ‘The radio, worked by Princess Elizabeth, blared incessantly.’ No orders or medals were worn at dinner, as they had been in the old days, and the girls related to their parents with – to Lady Airlie – startling informality. Modernity was also visible ‘in the way both sisters teased, and were teased by, the young Guardsmen.’
Teasing and teased Guards Officers were, however, only one aspect of their lives. The chasm that divided the King’s daughters from the young men and women they were able to meet socially, widened early in 1947 when they accompanied their parents on a major tour of southern Africa which attracted world attention, and set the stage for Princess Elizabeth’s début as a fully-fledged royal performer.
The end of the war had given a brief, almost paradoxical, boost to the imperial ideal. Partly, it was an effect of sheer survival – defending the Empire had been one of the causes for which the war had been fought. Britain’s near-bankruptcy had made the vision of a shared, transoceanic loyalty all the more necessary to national self-esteem: a necessity which the granting of self-government to India seemed, if anything, to increase. At the same time, the British Government was aware that the bonds that tied together the Commonwealth were in need of repair. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of Pretoria, capital of a Union still bitterly divided between English-speakers and Afrikaners.
Officially, the tour – which involved a total of four months’ travel – was supposed to be a chance for the King and Queen to rest after the ordeal of war. In practice, the schedule prepared for the Royal Family was strenuous, and the objectives highly political. Wheeler-Bennett later called it a ‘great imperial mission’
. That was one way of describing it. From the South African point of view, the visit was (in the words of another historian) ‘essentially a mission to save Smuts and the Crown of South Africa’.
English-speakers were enthusiastic about it, Afrikaners on the other hand, were cynical – seeing George VI (according to the High Commissioner, in a telegram to the Palace) ‘as the symbol of the “Empire-bond” which they had pledged themselves to break.’ General Smuts was accused of having arranged the trip in order to rally the English section round him for the coming general election.
But there was also something else, which in one sense made nationalist Boers right to be suspicious: the royal trip had an ‘imperial’ aspect that went beyond the attempt to improve relations with the Union. South Africa was important in a new ‘multi-cultural’ definition of the Commonwealth – in the light of Indian independence – because it was the only ‘white’ dominion that was in reality predominantly black. The royal visit was to be a way of showing Windsor and Westminster interest in what one (pro-British) Natal paper described as ‘the complex problems of race relationships – problems which are certain to assume an increasing importance in the years ahead,’ in the many countries which owed allegiance to the Crown.
These factors, however, were not the ones that got the most publicity. In the eyes of the world, the tour also had a personal and dynastic interest: Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would be apart for four months. Since the invitation was accepted by the King on behalf of the whole Royal Family in the first half of 1946, the trip could hardly be seen as an attempt to break up the friendship. Yet the visit took place as speculation was at its height; and the irony did not escape the gossip-writers that the first major tour on which the King and Queen proposed to take their elder daughter was also one on which she had reason to be reluctant to accompany them.
Why was there no engagement announcement before they set out? A belief that all was not going smoothly added to the press excitement. One former courtier suggests that – whatever the original intention – the King and Queen saw the visit as an opportunity for reflection. ‘Undoubtedly there was hesitation on the part of her parents,’ he says. ‘They weren’t saying “You must or mustn’t marry Prince Philip,” but rather, “Do you think you should marry him?” It wasn’t forced. The King and Queen basically said: “Come with us to South Africa and then decide”.’
With Philip’s naturalization due to be gazetted in a few weeks, however, any pretence that the relationship did not exist was abandoned. A couple of nights before the departure of the Royal Family, Elizabeth accompanied both her parents to dinner with the Mountbattens, including the about-to-be Philip Mountbatten, at 16 Chester Street – serenaded by Noël Coward. ‘The royal engagement was clearly in the air that night,’ recalled John Dean, Mountbatten’s butler and later valet to Philip.
It was a farewell meal in two senses. While the King prepared to inspect one of his domains, Uncle Dickie was about to negotiate the transfer of power, as George VI’s Viceroy of India, in another.
MUCH OF THE journey to Cape Town, aboard the battleship HMS Vanguard, was uncomfortably rough, confining the Royal Family to their cabins. When she returned to South Africa as Queen several decades later, Elizabeth recounted how sea-sick they had been. However, as they travelled south they left Europe’s worst winter weather of the century behind them. ‘Our party seems to be enjoying themselves, especially the princesses,’ Lascelles wrote to his wife, describing ‘crossing the line’ festivities, and a treasure hunt involving the King’s daughters and the midshipmen. ‘Peter T[ownsend],’ he added, referring to an equerry who was a member of the party, ‘tries hard and is doing well.’
For the two young women, the experience was breathtaking – not least because it was the first time either of them had been abroad. In the 1930s, they had been considered too young to accompany their parents on foreign visits, and during the war it had been too dangerous, or impracticable, to do so. Thus, Princess Elizabeth had reached the age of twenty before setting foot outside the United Kingdom. The impact of the voyage and then of the journey around a very different kind of country was therefore all the greater. South Africa – with its varieties of terrain, race, wealth and culture – was a powerful reminder to Elizabeth of the Commonwealth duties that lay ahead. Both girls were struck by the open spaces: Princess Margaret recalls her sense of the vastness of the country and the contrasts with austerity Britain. ‘There was an amazing opulence, and a great deal to eat,’ she says. She remembers the change from a country still restricted by food rationing, and her delight at the endless series of meals with their abundance of delicacies, including an enticing array of complicated Dutch pastries. Huge fir cones seemed to symbolize the outsize scale of everything they encountered. The South Africans lent them horses, and they rode on the beaches, wearing double felt hats.
The royal party arrived in Cape Town on 17 February to a tumultuous welcome that banished fears of republican hostility. There was a glittering state banquet the same night. Next day, Lascelles wrote home that while he had never attended a more dreary and miserable dinner in thirty years of attending public functions, the Royal Family seemed to enjoy it, especially the princesses. ‘Princess E[lizabeth] is delightfully enthusiastic and interested,’ he noted; ‘she has her grandmother’s passion for punctuality, and, to my delight, goes bounding furiously up the stairs to bolt her parents, when they are more than usually late.’
The plan was to bring the British Monarchy into direct contact with every part of the Union – in the words of the tour’s official souvenir – from the seaboard of the Cape and Natal ‘to areas where African tribes live in peace and security under conditions which still suggest the Africa of history.’
The royal party slept in a special ‘White Train’ for a total of thirty-five nights, travelling to the Orange Free State, Basutoland, Natal and the Transvaal, and then to Northern Rhodesia and Bechuanaland. South Africa was a society rigidly divided on racial grounds: but it did not yet have strict apartheid laws, and the royal party met people from different communities, even attending a ‘Coloured Ball’. The King’s daughter attracted particular attention. Africans shouted from the crowds ‘Stay with us!’ and ‘Leave the Princess behind!’
The presence of British royalty also aroused keen interest in the small, enclosed white South African world, dominating popular entertainment. At a huge civic ball held in Cape Town the night following their arrival, five thousand guests danced to a fox-trot composed in honour of Elizabeth, called ‘Princess’. The tune accompanied a song which became the catch of the season. ‘Princess, in our opinion,’ went its loyal refrain, ‘You’ll find in our Dominion/Greetings that surely take your breath,/For you have a corner in every heart,/Princess Elizabeth’.
Elsewhere, there were other musical tributes. At Eshowe, Zulu warriors pounded out the ‘Ngoma Umkosi,’ the Royal Dance before the King. One verse was omitted at the last minute: ‘We hear, O King, your eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, is about to give her heart in marriage, and we would like to hear from you who is the man, and when this will be.’
On 1st April, close to the end of the tour, the not unwelcome or unhelpful news came through of the death of King George of Greece. Lascelles reported home that while there would be a week’s court mourning in London, no notice at all would be taken ‘by anybody out here because we haven’t any becoming mourning with us – a typical Royal Family compromise!’
At East London, the second city of Cape Province, Elizabeth had to open a graving dock – it was a windy day, and she had to struggle to keep her hat on, her dress down, and her speech from blowing away.
For much of the trip, however, the princesses’ most demanding duty was to walk behind their parents at ceremonies or sit beside them at displays. It was a long time to be away, on holiday yet constantly on show – and out of touch with ice-bound Britain, where Philip, at his naval base, lectured his students in his naval greatcoat and by candlelight, because of the fuel crisis. According to below-stairs gossip, spread by Bobo MacDonald, who had graduated from children’s nursemaid to become the Princess’s maid and dresser, ‘Elizabeth was very eager for mail throughout the tour, and so was Philip.’
She also wrote to other friends. Lord Porchester, for instance, received letters from her wherever she went. She wrote vividly, about the tour and meeting Smuts, but also about home. In one letter she asked about her horse, Maple Leaf.
The passivity, however, did not last until the end of the tour. The Royal Family’s departure date was fixed for 24 April. Princess Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday fell three days earlier – a happy coincidence of timing which enabled the South African government to make it the climax of the visit. It could scarcely have been celebrated on a more elaborate, and extravagant, scale. As a token of the importance Smuts attached to the royal tour, 21 April was declared a public holiday throughout the Union. In addition, the royal birthday was marked by a ceremony, attended by the entire Cabinet, at which the Princess reviewed a large contingent of soldiers, sailors, women’s services, cadets and veterans; by a speech given by the Princess to a ‘youth rally of all races’; by a reception at City Hall in Cape Town; and by yet another ball in the Princess’s honour at which General Smuts presented her with a twenty-one-stone gemstone necklace and a gold key to the city.
The Royal Family made its own most dramatic contribution to the day’s events in the form of a broadcast to the Empire and Commonwealth by Princess Elizabeth, which became the most celebrated of her life. The author was not the Princess, but Sir Alan Lascelles, a straight-backed, hard-bitten courtier, not given to emotionalism – though with a sense of occasion and (as his memoranda and diaries reveal) a lucid, if somewhat old-fashioned, literary style. The speech was both a culmination to the tour, and a prologue for the Princess.
When Princess Elizabeth was consulted in the White Train near Bloemfontein during the preparation of a draft, according to one account, she told her father’s private secretary, ‘It has made me cry’. The effect on many listeners and cinema-goers was much the same as they heard or later watched the solemn young woman making her commitment, like a confirmation or a marriage vow. That her message came from a problematic dominion added to the impact of words which already sounded archaic, and a few years later might have seemed kitsch, yet which seemed strangely to capture the moment. The effect was the more surprising because Lascelles had made no concessions to populism, and had not attempted to write the kind of speech a young woman might have delivered, if the thoughts had been her own.
Punch, 23rd April 1947
‘Although there is none of my father’s subjects, from the oldest to the youngest, whom I do not wish to greet,’ the Princess read from her script, ‘I am thinking especially today of all the young men and women who were born about the same time as myself and have grown up like me in the terrible and glorious years of the Second World War. Will you, the youth of the British family of nations, let me speak on my birthday as your representative?’ She quoted Rupert Brooke. She spoke of the British Empire which had saved the world, and ‘has now to save itself,’ and of making the Commonwealth more full, prosperous and happy. Thus far, her speech belonged alongside other truistic utterances forgettably spoken by royalty when required to address the public. It was the next part that took listeners by surprise. Unexpectedly, she changed tack, launching into what amounted to a personal manifesto, that combined two themes of Sir Henry Marten in his tutorials – the Commonwealth, and the importance of broadcasting:
There is a motto which has been borne by many of my ancestors – a noble motto, “I serve”. Those words were an inspiration to many bygone heirs to the throne when they made their knightly dedication as they came to manhood. I cannot do quite as they did, but through the inventions of science I can do what was not possible for any of them. I can make my solemn act of dedication with a whole Empire listening. I should like to make that dedication now. It is very simple.
I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial family to which we all belong, but I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in with me, as I now invite you to do. I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.
What was it in this nun-like promise – about a crumbling Empire that in a few years would cease to exist – that captured the imagination of those who heard it? It was partly the youth of the speaker, the cadences of the delivery, and the confidence of the performance; partly the knowledge that a royal betrothal was imminent; partly the earnestness of the sentiment in an earnest decade.
In fact, though the Princess may not have known it, the message was highly political – directed at several distinct audiences. One of its aims was to help Smuts and the cause of English-speakers in South Africa. It was designed to help Uncle Dickie, as Viceroy, in his task of seeking to retain Indian friendship within a Commonwealth that would no longer be able to differentiate between self-governing white dominions, and imperially ruled black colonies. At the same time, the speech was for domestic consumption in Britain – it offered a population that was exasperated by restrictions, and worn out after the added hardships of a terrible winter, the bromide of Commonwealth and imperial ideals. Finally, it was a royal speech, written by a courtier for a royal anniversary: it reaffirmed the British Monarchy as the one reliable link in an association of nations and territories whose ties had become tenuous, because of war, British economic weakness, and nascent nationalism.
But it was the Princess herself, and the feeling she conveyed as an individual, which, as it was said, brought ‘a lump into millions of throats’.
For a moment, the Empire seemed as one. In South Africa, the English-speakers could not have felt prouder, and even the Afrikaners acknowledged the effect. ‘I feel . . . a bit exhausted by the tremendous success of the whole thing,’ Lascelles wrote to his wife, as he packed his bags in Cape Town, ‘and for Princess Elizabeth’s speech, on which I had lavished much care.’
A few days later, as the Vanguard sailed for home, the King’s private secretary was able to reflect a little more on his handiwork. The tour, he concluded, had amply achieved its most important objective, as far as the Court was concerned, of demonstrating the value to South Africa of the British Monarchy. The biggest revelation had been the blossoming of the King’s elder daughter:
From the inside, the most satisfactory feature of the whole business is the remarkable development of P’cess E. She has got all P’cess Marg’s solid and endearing qualities plus a perfectly natural power of enjoying herself . . . Not a great sense of humour, but a healthy sense of fun. Moreover, when necessary, she can take on the old bores with much of her mother’s skill, and never spares herself in that exhausting part of royal duty. For a child of her years, she has got an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort; such unselfishness is not a normal characteristic of that family.
In addition, he noted with approval, the Princess had become extremely business-like: she had developed the ‘admirable technique,’ if they were running late, ‘of going up behind her mother and prodding her in the Achilles tendon with the point of her umbrella when time is being wasted in unnecessary conversation’. When circumstances required, she also ‘tells her father off . . .’ Both princesses must have found moments in the tour very dull, Lascelles concluded. But, on the whole, both had been ‘as good as gold’.
Lascelles’s optimism about the impact of the tour turned out to be misplaced. Indeed, if the aim had been to save both Smuts and the Crown in South Africa, it was a double failure. The following year, Smuts was ousted by Malan and the isolationists, and a new government adopted a programme of racial laws that weakened still further the Commonwealth links of the Union, and led eventually to South Africa’s withdrawal from the association thirteen years later. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss the trip as politically negligible. In a way it was a marker: remembered, with nostalgia and also hope, for the affirmation it had provided of more elevated values than those later imposed. The memory was still there when, nearly half a century later, Nelson Mandela’s democratic republic re-applied for Commonwealth membership. There was also a directly personal effect. Elizabeth’s first tour, which was also one of her longest, profoundly affected her outlook, helping to establish a Commonwealth interest and loyalty that became a consistent theme of her reign.
AT HOME, every paper carried a birthday profile of the Heiress Presumptive, in each case seeking to meet a public desire for as happy and as rosy a picture of the Princess as the meagre details available about her short life permitted. Descriptions highlighted the qualities an idealized princess ought to have, alongside those she actually did. Since it was an egalitarian, democratic era, much ingenuity was exercised in presenting her as a people’s princess.
The Prime Minister set the tone. The simple dignity and wise understanding of the King’s elder daughter, he declared, had endeared her to all classes.
The sentiment was echoed, universally. The News Chronicle helpfully noted that, unlike a male heir, who would have been created Prince of Wales and a member of the House of Lords, she was technically a commoner, and had appropriately simple tastes in personal adornment.
The Times saw the point as more than technical. Elizabeth belonged to a Monarchy that had become ‘social and unpretentious,’ it declared, acting as ‘the mirror in which the people may see their own ideals of life’. From this firm base, the Princess would provide the rising generation with a model that was progressive in the widest sense, ‘standing for the aspirations of the men and women of her own age, for everything that is forward-looking, for all the effort that seeks to build afresh.’
Such a ‘representative’ view of royalty, of course, begged a few questions: did being ‘representative’ mean representing the interests and ideals of ordinary young people in a symbolic sense, or actually being like them? Dermot Morrah, always ready with a loyal argument, claimed that the Princess was as representative in the second sense as in the first – and that her representative status came from the happy chance of her intellectual and cultural limitations. Like her father and grandfather, he pointed out, she was ‘normal’ – that is, average – in capacity, taste and training. The result was an Heiress Presumptive with normal, average values. That she was ‘simple, warm-hearted, hard-working, painstaking, cultivated, humorous and above all friendly’ helped to make her ‘a typical daughter of the Britain of her time’.
Like the trumpeted ‘simplicity’ of the Princess’s pre-war upbringing, however, the reality was somewhat different. Most of the ‘normality’ of her early adulthood was a product of the ambition of observers to present her as somebody with whom genuinely simple and normal people could identify. The only hard, publicly available evidence was that she was untypical – in particular that she was rich and about to become richer, with a Civil List income rising from £6,000 per annum to £15,000 on her majority, a sum over which she would have full control. She was also untypically, even uniquely, famous: one newspaper suggested that the twenty-one-year-old Princess was ‘unquestionably the most publicized young woman in the world,’ easily out-distancing Shirley Temple, her nearest rival.
Privately, the Princess felt no particular need to pretend to be what she was not. Indeed, her reluctance to step outside her own class in her social relations caused her royal grandmother, who continued to watch her progress carefully, some disquiet. At the beginning of July, Jock Colville recorded a conversation with Queen Mary in the garden at Marlborough House, in the course of which the elderly lady, nearing eighty, ‘said many wise things’ about her grand-daughter, ‘including the necessity of travel, of mixing with all the classes (H.R.H. is inclined to associate with young Guards officers to the exclusion of more representative strata of the community) and of learning to know young members of the Labour Party.’
Yet there was also, perhaps, a quality that did not entirely belong to the categories of cliché or necessary myth. Unremarkable in capacity, abnormal in experience, wealth and friends, the Princess nevertheless possessed an attribute which radio listeners and filmgoers believed they could hear and see for themselves. This could best be described as ‘wholesomeness’ and stood in unremarked contrast to the decadence associated with the former Heir Apparent to George V. The Princess’s involvement in the Guides and ATS, her outdoor interests and pursuits, and her supposedly happy upbringing, had already been the stuff of wartime propaganda. After 1945, a belief in the Princess’s decency, straightforwardness, honesty, rather than in any visible talent, did much to elevate the idea of Monarchy during anxious years when – against ideological trends, or pre-war expectations – its psychic power seemed to soar. When Lord Templewood, who as Sir Samuel Hoare had been a Cabinet minister at the time of the Abdication, wrote of the ‘growing influence of the Crown,’ and of its ‘moral power,’ which was now ‘so firmly established that we can look forward with undoubted confidence to the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Second,’
he expressed a common feeling, for which the Cape Town broadcast had provided confirmation, that the institution would remain in clean hands.
The future of the Monarchy, however, was also linked to the question of who the Princess would marry. By now, an engagement to Prince Philip was assumed. During the South African tour, the BBC – planning ahead – began to consider a talk on the Princess ‘by someone who had known her since childhood’ to follow a betrothal announcement, and a similar one on the Prince.
But no announcement was made, either on Princess Elizabeth’s birthday, or on the Royal Family’s return. To damp down speculation, the couple tried to be seen less together – thereby sparking rumours that the relationship had been broken off.
