There is a wonderful photograph from the 1960s of Elizabeth Taylor at a wedding, standing behind the Queen Mother’s chair, preparing to ask her if she wouldn’t mind having a photograph taken together. Affectionately nicknamed “the Queen Mum” in the British tabloids and by many members of the public, Elizabeth remained one of the Royal Family’s most popular members throughout the decade. Her Private Secretary, Sir Martin Gilliat, noticed “how perfectly poised she always is at public occasions,” although sometimes, knowing that she was only shown what people wanted her to see on official visits, she liked to wander off the pre-approved path, breezing through an unmarked door with the question, “Oh, what’s this room for?”
She trusted Gilliat and enjoyed his company, as shown by the fact that he arrived on a trial basis in 1955 which still had neither technically ended nor been reviewed when he died, unretired, in 1993. He was particularly good at putting her guests at ease. On being greeted by Gilliat, they had “a fortifying drink pressed into their hands. And,” according to Martin Charteris, Elizabeth II’s private secretary from 1972 to 1977, “I may say that dear Martin was as generous in dispensing his own alcohol as he was in pouring Queen Elizabeth’s.”
Both Gilliat and Charteris noticed a marked increase in the Queen Mother’s “ostriching” tendency. Gilliat observed “how she hates being asked to take a decision and will dig in her toes the more she is pressed,” while Charteris thought it was how “she has learned to protect herself. What she doesn’t want to see, she doesn’t look at.” Elizabeth was by then aware of how she was mocked by many in what she called London’s “Smart Set.” Gilliat thought, “She is frightened of clever people and always suspects that they are laughing at her.” There were times when she felt quite low. She told the actor Sir Alec Guinness that she had been struggling with feelings of depression. During those spells, Elizabeth spent her evenings eating alone in front of the television.
She offered significant support and advice to the Queen, who usually spoke with her mother by telephone two or three times a day when they were not together. Throughout her first ten years as monarch, Elizabeth II had won a great deal of applause for her tact, diligence and devotion to duty. The historian and columnist Kenneth Rose wrote in his diary in 1966 that the Queen “misses nothing when ministers discuss their business with her. In twenty years’ time, she will be as formidable as Victoria herself.”
As had her mother Cecilia in the 1920s, the Queen Mother kept private the details of a battle with cancer which, in 1966, seems to have resulted in the temporary fitting of a colostomy. Her daughters spent Christmas Day visiting her in hospital, and the operation was followed by a series of personal donations from the Queen Mother to the Colostomy Welfare Group.1 She pressed ahead with her 1967 tour of Canada even though, a year after, the extent of her illness continued to make itself visible. When the Queen Mother and her granddaughter Princess Anne went to the ballet with the 69-year-old King Frederick IX of Denmark, who was on an official visit to Britain with his Swedish wife, Queen Ingrid, another theatregoer thought that the Queen Mother looked “surprisingly faded.”
In February 1960, Lord Mountbatten’s globetrotting wife Edwina, Countess Mountbatten, passed away and was buried at sea from the warship Wakeful. When told of the funeral arrangements, the Queen Mother mused, “Dear old Edwina, she always did like to make a splash.”
When he heard the news that Princess Margaret was engaged to the London photographer Anthony (“Tony”) Armstrong-Jones, the novelist Kingsley Amis was unimpressed, characterising it as a story in which “a royal princess, famed for her devotion to all that is most vapid and mindless in the world of entertainment, her habit of reminding people of her status whenever they venture to disagree with her in conversation, and her appalling taste in clothes, is united with a dog-faced tight-jeaned fotog [photographer] of fruitarian tastes such as can be found in dozens in any pseudo-arty drinking cellar in fashionable-unfashionable London. They’re made for each other.” A guest at the Princess’s Westminster Abbey wedding in May 1960 described the mother of the bride as “a great golden pussycat, full of sad little smiles.” Tony, with a densely populated romantic past, was ennobled as Earl of Snowdon by the Queen, although Prince Philip allegedly thought it unwise or unnecessary, an elevation by which Margaret became Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret, the Countess of Snowdon.
The relationship between Queen Elizabeth and her youngest daughter was sometimes strained, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the Townsend affair. Both could be quite cutting to each other, and Margaret resented the ways in which her education had been less thorough than her sister’s. Mother and daughter did, however, share a love of singing, mimicry and a drink. Apparently, one Christmas, after a potent number of pre-dinner gins and Dubonnet, the Queen Mother could not easily get the vegetables out of the serving dish and sent two consecutive spoonsful of peas into the air, which caused her and Princess Margaret to dissolve into a fit of giggles.
The six Mitford sisters, born into an aristocratic family between 1904 and 1920, have been described as the “prototype it-girls.” Their mother, Lady Redesdale, complained that every time she saw a scandalous newspaper headline containing the words “peer’s daughter,” she assumed one of hers must be involved.2 Their only brother, Tom, was killed on active service six weeks before the end of the Second World War.3 His sister Jessica, nicknamed “Decca” in the family, had escaped life as a debutante to fight for socialism in the Spanish Civil War, while another sister, Unity, had emigrated to Germany to stalk her idol Adolf Hitler by finding out which cafés in Munich he liked and visiting them, day after day, until he noticed her. She later wrote home to British newspapers boasting of the marvellous activities she was invited to by the Nazi high command, such as dinner parties during which elderly Jewish citizens were herded in front of her and forced to eat grass while Unity and her fascist friends laughed at them. She was so devastated when Britain declared war on Germany that she tried to commit suicide by shooting herself in a Munich public garden. She aimed sharply enough to give herself lifelong brain damage but with insufficient accuracy to end her life. She was repatriated to Britain, where she died several years later.
By the standards of her class and generation, the youngest Mitford, Deborah, had the most conventional life of the sisters, marrying Lord Andrew Cavendish, who succeeded his father as Duke of Devonshire in 1950. She was also the family’s lone defender of the Queen Mother, admitting “I’m ¾ in love with her” and, after accompanying her on an official engagement in 1965, asserting that “She really is superb at her own type of superbry.” She unintentionally gave Elizabeth her codename in the Mitfords’ correspondence, “Cake.” The Duchess and the Queen Mother had attended a wedding at which, when it came time to cut and serve the cake, the Queen Mother exclaimed “Oh! The cake!” with such unfettered glee that Deborah was lastingly impressed by her enthusiasm.
If Deborah gave the nickname affectionately, at least two of her relatives did not use it in the same spirit. Across the Channel in Paris, Deborah’s eldest sister Nancy was one of the Queen Mother’s most strident critics. Nancy, who was author of several best-selling novels about life in the English upper class, disliked the Queen Mother almost as intensely as she did Marie Antoinette, the Austrian-born queen of France beheaded by revolutionaries in 1793, for whom Nancy evinced not the least sign of sympathy, thinking 150 years and a decapitation insufficient reasons to let go of a grudge. Her sisters noted that they dare not even mention an exhibition about Marie Antoinette lest it “set Nancy off.” Nancy shared her dislike of both queens in letters to her friend, the novelist Evelyn Waugh, agreeing with him that, “I’m sure the Queen is awful, everything I hear confirms this impression. Probably you can’t not be if you are a Queen, excellent reason for getting rid of them as they have here. The awfulness of Marie Antoinette surpasses imagination until you know something about her—dying bravely is not enough & anyway most people do as we learnt in the late war.”
After the Second World War, Nancy Mitford was joined in Paris by her sister Diana, who arrived there with her husband Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. The Mosleys, who had married in 1936 at the home of Josef Goebbels, the Nazis’ Minister for Propaganda, had been imprisoned in Britain during the war and had continued to promote fascism after their release.I It was 1989 before Diana Mosley publicly conceded that the Holocaust had indeed happened; even then, she refused to acknowledge that as many as six million Jews had been murdered, nor that Hitler had anything to do with it. As late as 2000, she suggested that a good idea for the European Jewish communities before the Second World War would have been to send them to Uganda, because it has a nice climate and is “very empty.” When the evidence proved Hitler’s complicity in genocide, Diana reluctantly concluded that he must have had a breakdown during the war because the lovely man she knew, with “mesmeric” blue eyes, could never have done something so horrible. According to Diana, prior to 1939, Hitler had apparently been nothing but sweetness and light. The only comment from her Nazi-befriending days that she seemed to genuinely regret was the long-standing rumour that she had referred to Adolf Hitler as “darling Hittles.”
Diana Mosley’s dislike of the Queen Mother stemmed in part from her close friendship with Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, who along with her husband the ex-king, warmly welcomed the Mosleys when they relocated to Paris after the Second World War. In contrast to his new friends, the former king seemed almost remorseful over his sympathy for the Third Reich in the 1930s. Publicly, that is. Privately, the Duke of Windsor eulogised Hitler long after his death. At a Parisian supper party, he defended Nazism’s policies far more vigorously than did Oswald Mosley, by telling a guest, “You just don’t understand. The Jews had Germany in their tentacles. All Hitler tried to do was free the tentacles.” Diana, who in 1980 published The Duchess of Windsor, an admiring biography of Wallis, felt protective of her friends. In 1976, for instance, she wrote to her sister Deborah that she blamed the Queen Mother for the sisters-in-law’s feud. Diana objected strongly to “the time-worn tale that the [Duke and Duchess of Windsor] are blamed because his abdication in 1936 made George VI die in 1953 (or whenever it was) & that being King and Queen not only killed him but half killed Cake… Well, if Cake hated her spell as Queen I’ll eat my hat & coat, & then how about all that Christianity & chat about widows, the dying, & forgiveness of sins, & loving one’s enemy etc. Isn’t it richly hypocritical?”
There was milder criticism of the Queen Mother from British republicans like Willie Hamilton.II Admittedly, he admired Elizabeth—a “remarkable old lady”—more than he did any of her relatives. He characterised Elizabeth II as a constitutional “clockwork doll” and Princess Margaret as “completely useless” and “a floosie.” Of the Queen Mother, Hamilton concluded, “She makes no speeches of consequence. She gets through her public relations by pleasing facial exercises, or by purposely chatting to the ‘the lads in the back row’ and taking a drop of the hard stuff, her native Scotch whisky. Yet, behind the matey tipple and the ever-ready smile, there lurks the mind of a shrewd businessman.”
Another sceptic at the cult of “the Queen Mum” was Stephen Tennant, son of the late Scottish nobleman Lord Glenconner. Stephen was a former lover of the famous First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon and one of the possible inspirations for the character of Lord Sebastian Flyte in Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. In the 1920s, Stephen had been regarded as one of the brightest of the Bright Young Things, the high-living and heavy-partying set at the centre of London Society. From his childhood visits to Glamis, Stephen had known Elizabeth for decades, and he had disliked her for almost as long. Specifically, he had never forgiven her for rejecting the romantic interest of his elder brother Christopher. “She looked everything she was not,” Stephen wrote of the Queen Mother, “gentle, gullible, tenderness mingled with dispassionate serenity… Behind the veil, she schemed and vacillated, hard as nails.” Convinced that Elizabeth must have been to blame for his brother’s heartbreak, Stephen felt that, before her marriage, Lady Elizabeth encouraged men to court her simply because she liked attention and that “she picked her men with the skill of a chess player, snobbish, poised—with a rather charming vagueness. She schooled her intentions like a detective, totting up her chances. I sensed her air of puzzled disdain.”
Increasingly reclusive in later life, Stephen was offended by Elizabeth’s continuing popularity with the British public, sarcastically observing, “Oh, the Queen Mother loves all children & flowers, family love at stifling point. All her days are domestic hours… All that she clutches turns to gold!” He may have been on to something when mocking how she was described by some of her admirers by the 1960s, for example the right-wing pundit who declared, “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, is the supreme mother-figure today in a world tortured by fear, rootless, disillusioned, largely bereft of beliefs. In this bleak era of shaken values, she remains the wise, calm, smiling epitome of motherhood. The national symbol of unselfish love. She typifies Christian values.”
On a clear evening at the right time of year, the Northern Lights can be seen from the Castle of Mey. Queen Elizabeth’s guests would troop outside to see them, sometimes joined by their “inspired hostess.” One of them wrote of Mey, “There is walking and talking (occasionally shouting), swimming and sleeping, eating and feasting—and yes, singing.” Singalongs around the piano at the Castle of Mey were a regular occurrence, as they had been at Glamis decades earlier. Predictable favourites included patriotic numbers like “Land of Hope and Glory,” Scottish ballads such as the Jacobite lament “The Skye Boat Song,” and less predictably, “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain (When She Comes).”
At her Scottish home, the Queen Mother continued to preside over a way of life that had always been rare but which, by the 1960s and 1970s, was hurtling towards extinction everywhere else. The structure and manners of Elizabeth’s household still mirrored the Edwardian manners that she had learned at her mother’s knee. If a guest had ever sent the Queen Mother a gift, it was truffled out and prominently displayed during their visit. For the smooth running of the kitchen and its staff’s convenience, the guests made their choices for breakfast the night before, and it was brought to married women on trays in their bedrooms. The hat that the Queen Mother wore to church would remain in situ throughout Sunday lunch, which was always a traditional roast. She used compliments to forestall awkwardness, or insults, from one guest to another. When a gentleman to her right picked up his bowl to drink from it, she smiled, “Yes, I always think soup tastes much better that way,” before anybody else felt the need to correct him. Since servants sometimes cleared the plates of everybody at the table once the Queen Mother had finished, she tactfully used her salad plate as a delaying tactic. If she noticed a fellow diner who was particularly slow at eating, she would continue to move a fork through her salad until she noticed the last guest had finished, then would set her cutlery down. The salads also came in handy when her temperamental chef went on strike, which he did periodically if colleagues upset him, prompting the Queen Mother to nod, “Oh, well, he’s obviously a bit upset, but I’m sure he’ll come round eventually and get back to work. In the meantime, we shall have to eat salads.” Which they did until the storm in the kitchens abated.
Things that delighted her were greeted with “This is a treasure!” As was a well-made drink, which might also be described as “made to doctor’s orders!” This was code for “just what I wanted,” in the same way that “Oh, do you really think so?” said with her head gently to one side as her hands traced her three-strand pearls, meant “You’re wrong,” and “Do stay for lunch” meant “and leave shortly after.” Her guests understood that, just as they knew that it was in no way an invitation to extend their stay when the Queen Mother bade them farewell with “Do you have to leave so soon?,” “Must you go?” and “So looking forward to seeing you again.”
When she went to Balmoral with the rest of her family, one of the Queen Mother’s favourite traditions was the Ghillies’ Ball,III hosted at the castle by the Queen for staff and the Royal Family. Her love for the event was shared by most of her relatives—Elizabeth taught Princess Marina the traditional Scottish folk dances called reels for the ball, and years later, Princess Diana had so much fun reeling she tore the hem of her dress. Ladies asked gentlemen to dance at the Ghillies’ Ball, and the Queen Mother approached a young soldier who, blushing, said he must decline as the Queen had already asked him. As the Queen Mother reeled past him later, she tapped him on the shoulder, said, “Snob!” and then twirled off, beaming.
In July 1965, the Queen Mother accepted her youngest daughter’s invitation to visit London Zoo for the opening of a new aviary that had been designed by Margaret’s husband, Lord Snowdon. Her erstwhile friend Cecil Beaton was also invited, and according to his diary, he thought the Queen Mother looked “fatter, dumpier, and more Scotch than ever… her head encased in a peasant scarf, [while] Princess Margaret [is] done up like Empress Josephine.” When the Queen Mother laughed, “from the gut,” Beaton noted, “the little fat face crinkled, except for two apples in the centre of the cheeks. These remained as round and perfect as always.”
Beaton at least had the decency to confide these observations to his diary, unlike Snowdon, who decided to give Beaton some face-to-face advice for his upcoming photoshoot with his wife: “If you put a strong light directly on her face, she’ll close up her eyes just out of tiresomeness and, in certain lights, her face looks fat and pulpy.”
Princess Margaret’s marriage ended in divorce in 1978.
Despite attempting to keep the news secret, word of the Queen Mother’s cancer inevitably got out to the Royal Family’s friends and hangers-on. Even those who did not know the precise cause could figure out that she had been seriously unwell, and in the aftermath, their good intentions began to weaken her spirits, in both senses of the word.
She told Princess Margaret that she was having “very bad luck with the drinks! Perhaps because I am considered a frail invalid, I am always given delicious fruit drinks with so little alcohol that one feels quite sick! Then I ask timidly if I might have just a very little gin in it.”
In 1963, the Queen Mother had the first of several holidays as a guest of Charles, Vicomte de Noailles, a French aristocrat who took her on a tour of the Loire Valley châteaux, including the sixteenth-century hunting lodge of King François I at Chambord, with its famous double-helix staircase designed by Leonardo da Vinci, and the river-spanning palace at Chenonceau, which had been given by Henri II to his mistress in the 1540s and requisitioned almost before his body was cold by his widow in the 1550s.
The Queen Mother enjoyed her time with de Noailles as her guide, and she appreciated his expertise on French royal and architectural history, as well as his knowledge of the gardens they visited. Madame de Noailles did not join them, as the Noailles’ marriage had taken a little bit of a tumble when, not long after their honeymoon, she had caught her husband in bed with his beefcake of a personal trainer. It proved a little tough for marital bliss to recover from that. The Vicomtesse was so miffed at her husband’s new royal friendship that she hid in the crowds and tried to start the chant “Down with the Queen of England!” as Elizabeth passed.
Although Elizabeth’s trips to the Loire were supposed to be private, there was a certain number of dinners and parties that she felt she could not politely decline. Noailles tried to limit the running time so that the Queen Mother could still relax. As the two of them left a cocktail party, guests suspected it was less the royal “we” and more a tease of her host when, with de Noailles at her side, she apologised with, “We queens are at the mercy of a very tight schedule.”
“She likes all homosexuals. She likes pansies—queers as such,” concluded Sir Isaiah Berlin, Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford from 1957 to 1967, coincidentally, the year in which homosexuality was decriminalised in the United Kingdom. Many on the Right, although not all, opposed this decriminalisation, and a politician even urged the Queen Mother to send a “moral message” to the nation by firing any homosexuals on her staff. She replied that, if she did that, she would end up having to go self-service.
At the start of the 1960s Elizabeth’s friend Kenneth Rose wondered if decriminalisation would make any practical difference to the discrimination faced by gay people in their everyday lives. He considered it doubtful “whether one can educate public opinion sufficiently fast to diminish the sense of public repugnance to homosexual behaviour.” Roger Booth, whose friend served the Queen Mother for decades, recalled, “Even though homosexuality was illegal until the mid-1960s, the royals took a very lordly view of that kind of illegality. They had always known homosexual men—in service and in their families—and couldn’t really understand what all the fuss was about.” A dinner companion made the mistake of referring to Queen Elizabeth’s absent friend, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, by some slur. The specific word varies in the retellings, whilst remaining consistent on the fact that it was mocking Prince Paul’s youthful affairs with other men. The Queen Mother apparently fixed the speaker with an icy stare before fixing her face into an even colder smile and replying, “Yes, but he is also a gentleman.”
One of her footmen, William Tallon, earned the nickname “Backstairs Billy” in reference to his growing influence in the household hierarchy and for his many male lovers. Tallon had joined Elizabeth’s household when George VI was alive, and barring two years of National Service in the Royal Air Force, he stayed there until her death in 2002. Born in 1935 above his father’s hardware shop in a mining town in the English north-east, joining the Royal Household in his late teens had allowed Tallon to express his personality and sexuality in ways that could have cost him his life elsewhere. In 1950, he was described as “classically tall, dark and handsome,” with a flair for innuendo and for impressions of people. Having once met the Duke of Windsor, Billy delighted the Queen Mother with his impersonation of him. One of the ghillies noticed, “The Queen Mother and William were always waving and smiling at each other even if they were parting company only for a few minutes—in fact, William’s mannerisms and whole demeanour became uncannily like the Queen Mother. One of the footmen used to say, ‘Billy’s the Queen Mother in bloody drag!’ ” She appreciated Tallon’s ironic sense of humour and struggled to hide her laughter when he whispered, “O la di da, here she comes!” as a particularly dull gentleman of her household staff plodded towards them. Other jokes landed less smoothly. After one particularly interminable lunch, the Queen Mother said, “That really did go rather well, don’t you think, William? But perhaps we could have a little more gin next time?”
“Perhaps we should have it delivered by tanker?”
“I don’t think that will be quite necessary, William.”
Toilet paper billowed into the Queen Mother’s path as she walked in procession with Peter Ustinov, who had twice that decade won Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. He had just been made Rector of Durham University where she, for two years thus far, was honorary Chancellor. As they attended a function at the university, student protesters pelted them with toilet paper; they held one end, then threw the other towards the procession. As one roll landed in her path, the Queen Mother stopped, picked it up, trailed the flailing toilet paper back to the protester and smiled, “Was this yours?”
The student nodded, silently.
“Oh, could you take it?” Another nod, as the toilet paper was accepted back from whence it had been thrown. “Thank you,” followed from the Queen Mother before she pivoted back to Ustinov and the procession.
Dotted throughout the Balmoral estate are small wooden chalets, most of them dating from Queen Victoria’s reign, which can be used as bases for picnics or lunches during a day’s shooting. During such events, the Queen Mother liked to hire student beaters from the Scottish universities of Aberdeen and St. Andrew’s. She participated less in the shoots on account of her age, although one of the students remembers her glancing towards the nearby mountains, drink in hand, and enthusing, “Isn’t Lochnagar beautiful today?” Then she would bend down in her seat, flip her head to one side and ask, “Isn’t Lochnagar beautiful, even upside down!”
One rottenly inclement day, the royal party decided to decamp to one of the nearby chalets for lunch. The Queen was confident, though alas incorrect, that the key to said chalet was in her pocket. When they arrived, they found the door bolted and the key nowhere to be found. Fortunately, the Queen could hear somebody moving about inside as rain poured on her mother, her sister, and their assorted guests. She rapped on the door.
“Who the fuck is it?” came a ghillie’s gruff voice from within.
“Don’t worry,” the Queen Mother trilled merrily in the downpour, “it’s only the Queen!”
In 1969, the Queen Mother attended a concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Afterwards, she was cornered by the director’s wife who, according to a similarly trapped Cecil Beaton, “browbeat the Queen Mother into looking at the hall’s dreary museum when we were longing for our supper.” The Queen Mother once observed how much of a person’s life is spent acting, since manners inevitably require a touch of deceit and self-repression. In that regard, she was a better actor than Beaton, who could not believe how hungry they were by the end of the impromptu tour.
When they finally made it to their supper, Beaton was surprised to hear “how well” the Queen Mother was openly discussing her political opinions, something she almost never did in public. (The long-standing—and correct—assumption was that most of her sympathies were right-wing.) She believed that the best government for Britain was a Conservative one, with a strong Labour opposition. “Most surprisingly,” she then proceeded to tell Beaton and Sir David McKenna, Chairman of British Transport Advertising, who was sitting next to her, that she was strongly “for the Trades Unions and thought them jolly clever fellows.”
Impressed with her articulateness and surprised by her candour, Beaton concluded that the supper had been fuelled by “masses of drinks of all sorts” and that the Queen Mother, along with several guests, had acquired a gentle glow that he described as “the Dry Martini flush.”
While her sense of fashion was becoming even more of a punchline in the 1960s than it had been in the mid-1930s, Elizabeth defiantly called her clothes “old friends.” Since “you never get rid of old friends,” she continued to wear, year in year out when she was in Scotland, tartan skirts, a felt hat accented with a feather and jaunty sprig of heather, and a tweed jacket. When outdoors, this Caledonian uniform changed only if she decided to go fishing. One evening, she caused some concern when she did not return home until well after sunset. Suddenly, from the gloom, emerged the Queen Mother, sporting wax jacket and wellington boots and holding aloft an enormous salmon.
“This is what kept me!” she beamed in triumph.