“Is it just me or are the pensioners getting younger these days?” the Queen Mother asked as she sailed into her tenth decade. “Only the kind of person who kicks kittens, snarls at babies and denies the existence of Santa Claus,” concluded one of her admirers, “can resist her jolly face, her utter femininity, her guileless way of steam-rollering through any situation.”
She needed those steam-rollering skills in the Nineties. The period was difficult for the monarchy. The Queen, who had consulted her mother throughout her reign, relied on her particularly in the first half of the decade. Tabloid intrusion into the lives of the younger royals reached such intensity that it contributed to the Princess of Wales’s untimely death, two years after her divorce and five years after her separation from Prince Charles. Prince Andrew and his wife Sarah divorced in 1996. Their phone lines hacked, private conversations recorded and photographers hiding in the bushes to snap them poolside became occupational hazards for the younger generation. Press intrusion was not helped by some of the younger royals’ own actions, as they flitted between complaining about the media and arranging sit-down interviews or tipping off photographers about where to find them. A sotto voce “Oh gosh, not this again” from the Queen Mother as she saw yet another headline about her grandchildren or their spouses became a frequent morning occurrence at Clarence House. To avoid the unpleasant, she cut back her regular newspaper reading to the conservative Daily Telegraph.1 Staff would place it at the top of the morning newspapers in Clarence House, along with The Times and The Independent, the latter of which ironically provided less-distressing headlines for her due to its anti-monarchist editorial stance, meaning it never ran stories, sensationalist or otherwise, about the royals.2
The Queen Mother did not like any of these family matters to be brought up in conversation, and she had different tactics for killing the topic. For staff, it was froideur, as an equerry learned when he asked her if she had seen Prince Charles’s “tell-all” interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, broadcast the night before.
“The look she gave me could have frozen fire,” he recalls. A second later, she smiled coldly to tell him, very firmly, “Some things are best not discussed.” If however a guest brought up the latest royal scandal, the Queen Mother chose alcohol and flattery by selecting a topic that she knew interested the questioner, no matter how stultifying she found it personally, and gesturing subtly to a footman as she asked, “Do let’s have another drink, I’m longing to hear about x” or “You must have another glass of wine, and won’t you tell me all about y?”
One of the pleasures of growing older can be found in nostalgic reunions of friends and animated conversations beginning “Do you remember…” By the 1990s, there were few to whom the Queen Mother could say this. Excepting her sister-in-law Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, who died aged 102 in 2004, Elizabeth had outlasted nearly all her contemporaries. She outlived her last sibling by thirty-five years, her husband by fifty. Looking exhausted, she surprised fellow dinner guests at a London party in 1995 with the quite heartbreaking remark, “I have done my duty all my life and I shall soon be with my husband again.” Her son-in-law Prince Philip thought it must be horrible to live so long and face a catalogue of bereavements. These led to moments in which the elderly Queen Mother could appear heartless. There was a sharp decrease in her visits to sick friends, even the terminally ill, along with cryptic comments that she “couldn’t bear” to think of them like that and preferred to remember them “as they were.”
Prince Charles was in Scotland, visiting his grandmother, when his dog, a Jack Russell named Pooh, went missing. Pooh had been running on ahead, capered off, then disappeared. Given the terrain, the fear was that Pooh had fallen down a rabbit hole. A member of the party recalls that they waited for about ten minutes, calling for the dog, before organising a proper search. After a few hours, Prince Charles felt bad for the staff helping him. He was struggling to hold back tears when he said to his grandmother’s equerry, “Look, you go on back and take the staff with you. I’m going to carry on the search alone.”
According to somebody who was there that weekend, Prince Charles stayed out most of the night looking for Pooh, even digging around on his hands and knees trying to find the rabbit hole where he might have fallen and injured himself. At sunrise, the Prince gave up the search, although for days to come he looked distressed as “he thought of his dog trapped in a hole, slowly starving to death.” There were further searches, none of them successful. Some present thought that the Queen Mother did not handle the situation well. When Prince Charles told her what had happened, her response was, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. Do have some tea.” Her equerry at the time feels, “You have to bear in mind that all her friends and most of her family had died, so a dog didn’t really register with her.”
It would be wrong to characterise Elizabeth’s final twelve years as solely defined by loss and unhappiness. There were still plenty of occasions when she greatly enjoyed life. Spotting her equerry Colin Burgess riding a motorcycle, she called out, “I think perhaps it’s a little too big for me!” or, as she was being driven through the Highlands in a Land Rover, “Come on, Colin, let’s open her up a bit! Come on, Colin, put your foot down!” This might be followed by a firm order to halt if she spotted an open gate—“Stop the car! We must close that gate or the cows will escape.” “We” lacked accuracy. She smiled encouragingly from inside the warm car as her driver or equerry got out to bolt the gates and save the local farmer’s herd from wandering onto the road. At her 101st birthday, she greeted well-wishers from a motorised buggy, beginning with a toddler who handed her a bunch of flowers and who introduced himself as “Aged Two.” Forty-five minutes later, as the buggy trundled past the child again, the Queen Mother spotted him and waved, “Goodbye, Aged Two!” as she and her staff beetled back behind the gates of Clarence House.
One of her favourite guests was Nelson Mandela, the President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. In 1996, President Mandela visited London and came to Clarence House for tea with the Queen Mother, where they chatted for hours longer than scheduled, before she attended a state banquet in his honour.
Her appetite and her sense of humour remained strong to the end. (“People say it’s not good to eat butter. People say butter is bad for your heart. Well, I have eaten butter all my life and look at me.”) When a group of children were throwing rocks at cars on the Mall, the Queen Mother had her driver stop as she rolled down the window to chide the culprits. “Whatever will the American tourists think?” she asked them, before waving as she drove on.
Given her age, there was an assumption that she must have gone into cognitive decline, something that is firmly rejected by many people who knew her in the 1990s. Prince Michael of Kent, Sir Rocco Forte, the Household Manager at Hillsborough Castle David Anderson, Major Colin Burgess and the historians Hugo Vickers and Coryne Hall are all consistent on how well informed she was and that there was no sign—even in 2001 when Hall interviewed her—that her powers of recall had diminished. Hall describes her as “absolutely razor sharp.” However, there were more and more frequent troubles with physical ill health, during which the Queen waged one uphill battle after another to get her mother to acknowledge her growing frailty. Round One, the walking stick push of ’93, ended with Elizabeth II giving her mother a special walking stick with the accompanying note, “Darling Mummy, Your daughters and your nieces would very much like you to TRY this walking stick!… Just at this moment, it would make the two Margarets, Jean and meI very happy and relieved if you would rely on its support!” This was followed by an initial refusal to use the stairlift the Queen had installed for her at Sandringham in 1995. She glared in silent loathing at the handrails thoughtfully installed at the Castle of Mey; the staff waited until she went to church to do it, otherwise they knew she would have vetoed the procedure at the first sign of a hammer. She tried to hide how bad her eyesight was before a cataract operation in 1996 and only yielded the point when the Queen spotted her mother reading a menu upside down whilst enthusing about how delicious everything looked. She broke her hip in 1998 and underwent hip replacement surgery, during a decade that saw her nearly choke to death and break several bones.
She was uncomfortable with the direction in which British society was moving, the values of someone born in 1900 inevitably clashing with those growing to maturity in the 1990s. “She had many gay friends, whom she adored and protected. She thought the persecution of gay people, especially when she was younger, was ‘horrible,’ ” a gentleman who knew her told me whilst I was researching this book, “but be under absolutely no illusion that she would have been vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage.” The age of sexual consent in Britain for an opposite-sex couple is sixteen, while for a same-sex couple it was eighteen. In 1998, the government under Prime Minister Tony Blair decided to make the age consistently sixteen regardless of gender, which the Queen Mother opposed so strongly that she allegedly urged the Queen to speak to the Prime Minister about it. She also felt alienated by what she sometimes characterised as a weak and selfish generation. She waxed nostalgic in 1995 on the fiftieth anniversary of victory in the Second World War, when “at the moment, the events leading up to the anniversary of VE Day bring back many memories of those now far-off days, though sometimes they seem very close, and how close we all were to each other then in this dear old country.”
“Embarrassing?” the Queen Mother asked, upon hearing there was a nudist enclave near her beach hut. “For whom? I’m longing to see them. Perhaps the corgis will nip their bottoms.”
Her security guards had tried to warn her of the naked seaside enthusiasts enjoying the bracing delights of the Norfolk coastline, near a beach hut occasionally used by the Queen Mother and built on the orders of the late Thomas Coke, 5th Earl of Leicester. Lord Leicester’s daughter Anne Tennant, Lady Glenconner, had been a lifelong friend of Princess Margaret, who in adulthood had often used Lady Glenconner’s role as her lady-in-waiting as a cover to rescue her from the frequently erratic behaviour of her husband, Lord Glenconner.
After tea in the beach hut, the Queen Mother, hat brim flapping in the Norfolk wind, would often walk the corgis in the direction of the nudist beach, to the despair of her protection officers. Fortunately for all the relevant bottoms, there is no record of her ever unleashing the corgis as threatened. Years later, when Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, went swimming at the same beach with her friend, the actress Dame Judi Dench, Lady Glenconner told them about the Queen Mother’s walks near the nudist beach, whereupon the Duchess and the Dame apparently went off to catch a peek and have a giggle.
From childhood, Elizabeth had been a keen angler, a hobby that she pursued in Scotland well into old age. Manners are even more impressive when they are inconvenient, which a redoubtable river-wading royalist proved one afternoon when she spotted a fellow fisherwoman opposite. Belatedly realising that said woman in a wax jacket was Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, the lady decided, cascading water be damned, that she was going to curtsey. Rod aloft, one wellington-booted ankle behind another, she dipped into the water before dunking herself into it. The current began filling her boots and the pockets of her Barbour, until she swayed under the excess weight of the water.
The Queen Mother, one hand briefly separated from her fishing rod, beamed, “Good morning, aren’t you very kind? What a lovely day. Have you had any bites?”
Sodden, but with her loyalty, and balance, reaffirmed, the lady righted herself to chat about the salmon, the trout and the impromptu tailgating from the back of the Queen Mother’s Land Rover from which she could see bottles of gin, Dubonnet and Pimm’s.
Eating what she caught nearly killed the Queen Mother, who had to be hospitalised after a salmon bone was lodged in her throat. Emerging from hospital, she thanked well-wishers and asked them not to worry, as “The salmon have got their own back!”
“Colin, what did you do to the dogs, they’re so exhausted!” the Queen Mother asked her equerry in front of a party of about thirty people, including various Members of Parliament.
“Ma’am, I tied them to the bumper of a car and took them for a drive,” he explained.
A hushed silence ensued among the guests, before Queen Elizabeth’s whoop of laughter with, “Oh, Colin, you are wicked!”
She had tasked Major Colin Burgess with taking the corgis for a walk. They, as ever, were supremely disinclined to move. He threw a stick to encourage them to trot, for which he was rewarded with a stare as if he had taken leave of his senses. So he tied their leads to a car and went for a very slow drive around the grounds. Slow for him, of course; an Olympic sprint for the enraged corgis.
Burgess had joined the Queen Mother’s service aged twenty-six in 1994, beating out two fellow comrades from the forces who, unlike him, had gone to private schools. Burgess’s final interview, so to speak, consisted of lunch with the Queen Mother at Clarence House. A starter serving of eggs florentine yielded to meat with boiled potatoes and vegetables, followed by a chocolate fondant, accompanied by a bottle and a half of claret. He soon learned that his employer’s refrain of “do let’s have another drink” could make lunches last for hours and one conversation run into the next.
“Ma’am,” he said as she suggested another glass over a midweek lunch, “I can’t, I must do some work this afternoon. I have a busy schedule to get through.”
The Queen Mother looked at the Major, her blue eyes conveying mild concern at this strange reply. “Colin, you must have some wine. How can you not have wine with your meal?”
Colin again, if less confidently, cited his meetings, even as the likelihood of their happening dimmed before his eyes.
“Colin, don’t bother about all that. I’m sure they’ll understand if you can’t meet them or ring them. Now have some wine.”
“I really can’t, Ma’am,” he repeated as the wine was poured by Billy Tallon, of whom a regular guest had warned a newbie, “No use putting your hand over the glass, he pours it through the fingers!”
Burgess entered a household where he was by far the youngest member of staff, since the Queen Mother refused to let anybody go. A footman grappling with a hangover might be stationed on duty in Clarence House’s seldom-used lift, where he could sit until he felt like a human being again. Her Comptroller Sir Ralph Anstruther dealt with the early stages of dementia in the Queen Mother’s service, turning up every day, immaculately dressed as always, going through a routine as he had since 1961, with longer and longer spells of exhaustion, which he was allowed to sleep through in his office. After a series of strokes, and the advance of cognitive decline, the Queen Mother gently asked him if he might like to spend some more time in Scotland. Billy Tallon recalled, “I can remember meeting several ladies with walking sticks who claimed they were still maids but it was clear that they were far too frail to do any work at all. It was part of Elizabeth’s kindness that she couldn’t bear to treat any former servants harshly, especially if they had nowhere else to go.”
The Queen Mother’s ladies-in-waiting, companions who also answered the letters, cards and queries sent by members of the public, have been described as a group of nice old ladies, who weren’t too snobbish to take the bus and were kind to their servants. The team included Dame Frances Campbell-Preston, who volunteered on eight-hour shifts manning the Samaritans’ helpline, from where she emerged to share stories of true problems which put everything in perspective. For instance, “I had this chap on last night. He was terribly upset. His boyfriend had tried to commit suicide after finding out that most of his heroin had been stolen and this poor chap just didn’t know how to handle it. Life’s a strange place, isn’t it?”
Early on in his time in the Queen Mother’s household, Burgess earned the ire of a general who spotted him rollerblading to keep fit, and crisply informed him, “I don’t think it’s very appropriate for a Guards officer to be rollerblading.”
The Queen Mother approached with a hello. “Oh, General! Colin rollerblades in the park. Don’t you think it’s wonderful?”
In response to this instruction disguised as a question, the General replied, “Oh, yes, ma’am, I think it’s tremendous.”
In June 1997, the Queen Mother joined most of the Royal Family for a party to celebrate the Queen and Prince Philip’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was hosted by members of the Order of the Garter at Spencer House in London, where, seven decades earlier, Elizabeth had met her future husband at a tea organised by her friend Lavinia. Among the guests in 1997 were Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, and the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who, the Duchess thought, looked suspiciously well-rested.
“Oh!” the Duchess said, aiming a compliment to unearth information. “You do look wonderful.”
“It’s America,” Baroness Thatcher replied. “I like them and they like me and that is never the case in Europe.”
The Duchess was not entirely convinced that this rejuvenation could be attributed solely to American friendliness. She wrote in a letter to her one of her sisters that “Mrs. Thatcher [sic] looked 18. I wonder if she’s had her face lifted, really incredible.” In contrast, she was shocked by the Queen Mother’s frailty, who “had to ask for a cushion, she has become so TINY.”
“His grandmother is always looking at me with a strange look in her eyes,” Princess Diana told a friend, via a telephone conversation that was being secretly taped and was later sold to a tabloid. “It’s not hatred; it’s sort of interest and pity mixed in one. I am not quite sure. I don’t understand it. Every time I look, she’s looking at me, then looks away and smiles.”
The Princess continued, “It’s affection. Affection. It’s definitely affection. It’s sort of, it’s definitely not hostile in any way. She’s sort of fascinated by me, but doesn’t quite know how to unravel it.”
It had unravelled between the time the conversation was made, on New Year’s Eve 1989, and when it was plastered all over the front pages in 1992. Diana did not enjoy herself at the Queen Mother’s ninetieth birthday party in August 1990, calling it “grim and stilted. They are all anti-me. My grandmother has done another good hatchet job on me.” Diana’s grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy, had been one of the Queen Mother’s ladies-in-waiting since 1956 and, initially, Diana seems to have blamed her for turning the Queen Mother against her. She also apparently felt that sometimes the Queen Mother, to an extent she made obvious, preferred William to Harry, until Diana confronted her about it.
The Queen Mother allegedly referred to Diana as “a liar,” while Diana called her “the chief leper in the leper colony.” The Princess was particularly irritated by the longstanding theory that the Queen Mother had arranged her marriage in conjunction with Lady Fermoy. She tried to correct the record over coffee with Ingrid Seward, a royal expert who subsequently authored biographies of Diana, the Queen Mother, Prince Philip, Diana’s brother-in-law Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, and their sister-in-law Sarah, Duchess of York. Diana told her, “The Queen Mother was not instrumental in arranging the marriage with Lady Fermoy. Charles and I arranged it. It is a myth it was the Queen Mother. She didn’t do anything.” She added, “She is not as she appears to be at all. She is tough and interfering and she has few feelings.” Diana’s once warm relationship with Princess Margaret had also fallen apart, with Margaret referring to Diana, when she had to, as “the girl who married my nephew.”
Relations had not improved when Diana was tragically killed in a car accident in Paris a few weeks after the Queen Mother’s ninety-seventh birthday. The Queen Mother was baffled by the outpouring of grief at the Princess’s death, which she thought more effusive than anything she had seen when the city was being pummelled nightly by Nazi bombs during the Blitz. The events of that week have been discussed elsewhere and well; here it is sufficient to say that the Queen Mother was uncomfortable with a lot of what she saw, and felt that her daughter the Queen was unfairly criticised by newspapers keen to distract from the fact that some of them had been paying the paparazzi who harassed Diana into the tunnel where she lost her life. Princess Margaret felt desperately sorry for Diana’s sons, especially the youngest, since it is “terrible to lose your mother at that age, and with little Harry’s birthday only a few days away.” However, she had no sympathy for the public’s mood. She told a friend that the reaction was unhinged, “rather like Diana herself. When she died, everyone got as hysterical as she was.” She complained about the smell of the mountains of decomposing flowers left at the palaces across London, referring to them as “floral fascism.” Later, both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret thought there was no need for a permanent memorial to Diana inside the grounds of Kensington Palace; Margaret acidly suggested, “It will be quite enough of a memorial to restore the grass in front which all these people trampled the week she died.”
The Queen Mother, in Scotland, had eleven guests for dinner, for which she still dressed. After their meal, they decamped into the Sitting Room, where the Queen Mother suggested they relax by watching an episode of Keeping Up Appearances, a hugely popular BBC sitcom about pretentious middle-class housewife Hyacinth Bucket, who insists her surname is pronounced “Bouquet” and schemes to make her way into the local elite through a series of inevitably comic errors. It, along with the Second World War–set sitcom Dad’s Army, The Golden Girls and the BBC soap opera EastEnders, were the Queen Mother’s favourite television shows.
“Certainly, Ma’am,” said her equerry, Colin.
He put the video into the player, hit rewind and turned the television on, whereupon he and the guests were confronted by a boxing match. Cauliflower ears, cut lips and a blood-stained faced were not, he assumed, appropriate viewing for Her Majesty after dinner. Colin apologised and, flustered, tried to change the channel until the video had finished rewinding—until the Queen Mother interjected with, “No, no. Leave this on, Colin, you must leave this on,” as she settled into her armchair to watch the entire bout. Bit by bit, she edged forward. Her diamond bracelet glinted in the light as she began punching the air with her fists, mimicking her favourite boxer’s parries. To the astonishment of Colin and the ten others, the 96-year-old Queen Mother shouted, “Go on!” at the television. “Hit him again! No, no—look! He’s going to get up from that one. Go on, PUNCH HIM!” When the opponent was battered to the floor of the ring, she clasped her hands together in glee as she said, “Oh, he’s not going to get up from that one, is he?”
After Sunday service in the Royal Chapel at Windsor Great Park, the Queen Mother liked to invite her chaplain, the Reverend Canon John Ovenden, and his wife back to her house at Royal Lodge for lunch. Pre-lunch drinks began with a generous gin and tonic. Once the Reverend had finished, the Queen Mother suggested her steward refill Ovenden’s glass.
The Reverend demurred: “I can’t possibly have a further drink, Ma’am, as I have to take a baptism this afternoon and need to be reasonably in charge of my senses.”
“Oh, well!” the Queen Mother replied merrily. “If that is the case, then you most certainly should have another drink—as it will help.”
Ovenden surrendered and imbibed a second drink so potent that, in 2022 he joked, “To this day, I do not know whether I baptised the child with the correct names or not!”
As at Balmoral, Mey had smaller houses in its grounds. One of which, called the Captain’s House, is situated on the opposite side of the road to the castle itself. On a summer’s afternoon, the Queen Mother was lunching outside the Captain’s House with her lady-in-waiting the Countess of Scarborough and Colonel Alastair Bruce,II whose cousin Lord Elgin—when he was the young Lord Bruce—had served as Queen Elizabeth’s Page of Honour in the 1930s.III Security was lax at Mey. Nobody really knew where one boundary line ended and the next began. A bus full of tourists appeared. Spotting the Queen Mother’s flag flying above the castle, signifying that she was in residence, they began eagerly taking photos while their tour guide told them the story of the Queen Mother’s relocation there after the King’s death.
Meanwhile, from the Captain’s House, the Queen Mother, the Countess and the Colonel stared up at a bus full of backs. Every single person faced away from them and towards the castle. The Queen Mother’s eyesight was deteriorating again, so she gamely waved until Colonel Bruce said, “To be perfectly honest, ma’am, they’re not looking this way. They’re all looking towards the castle.”
“Oh, how amusing!”
There is always one person on a tour who’s not interested in the stately home or the guide’s ruminations. And on this tour, that disaffected soul was rewarded by turning away to look out the window towards the sea and spotting the Queen Mother at lunch al fresco. From within, the cry went up. It was the Queen Mother! The tourists turned almost en masse, and the Queen Mother asked to be helped to her feet to wave at them as they waved at her. The tour guide didn’t have a single thing prepared in their script for this eventuality.
In 2020, footage surfaced on the internet of the Queen Mother being asked an impromptu question in the 1990s by a journalist. She had not given such an interview since her engagement in 1923, which had earned her a swift reprimand from her father-in-law. The author and socialite Basia Briggs was in the room when the microphone suddenly appeared in front of the Queen Mother, who was asked what advice she would give to her great-grandchildren William and Harry.
Basia, who describes the journalist as “a grovelling little worm [with] no manners,” fortunately released the video decades later for the historical record. You can watch it on her Instagram account, where you can also spot the nanosecond described by Briggs when the Queen Mother’s “good nature turned to steely-eyed irritation.” The smile is back almost before you notice, but her eyes could freeze mercury as the Queen Mother says, “Oh, I never give advice.” The journalist pressed. The Queen Mother said, “Well, I hope they will all be brought up to put their country first. Whatever happens. It is one’s duty to one’s country, isn’t it?” She then extended her arm to distance herself from the microphone as she turned away with a courtier, saying, “I’m sure they will be brought up that way.” The journalist was never invited back to Clarence House, and Basia recalls, “We all wanted to dive under the furniture. I had strong words with him later and said if he had ambushed my Granny like that I would have punched him in the face.”
Prince William’s favourite photograph of himself and his great-grandmother “is a picture of me aged about nine or ten, helping the Queen Mother up the steps of Windsor Castle. I remember the moment because she said to me, ‘Keep doing that for people and you will go a long way in life.’ ” There are also adorable photographs of a young Prince Harry, in his suit and coat, holding an umbrella over his great-grandmother as they left church together.
She was apparently a dab hand at impressions of characters from the comedy series Blackadder, including of Baldrick, a lugubriously unlucky servant played by Tony Robinson who was always concocting another disastrous “cunning plan,” and Miranda Richardson’s Queenie, a send-up of the Tudor monarch Elizabeth I, in which she is reimagined as a ditzy yet terrifying tyrant. She also learnt catchphrases from the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen after walking in to find princes William and Harry laughing at his show on television. She tried the catchphrases out on the Queen at Christmas lunch.
In 2001, she threw a farewell lunch at Birkhall for Prince William before he started at St. Andrew’s, the oldest university in Scotland. As the 101-year-old waved him off, she said, “Any good parties, invite me!”
“There was no way,” Prince William said later. “I knew full well that if I invited her down, she would dance me under the table.”
After lunch with His Eminence Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster and the Pope’s deputy as leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, the Queen Mother joined the Cardinal for a singsong. “He’s a very good pianist,” she told Lord NorwichIV a few days later, at another lunch, “and all afternoon we played the piano and we sang the old musical hall songs. And I found I remember all the words and I haven’t sung them for sixty years!” They started with songs popular during the Second World War, until the Queen Mother tickled the ivories with an unfamiliar tune.
“I have never heard that one,” the Cardinal said.
“You wouldn’t,” the Queen Mother trilled. “It was a hit tune in 1910!”
When her equerry went in search of them at about four o’clock, quite some time after the Queen Mother was due to have departed, he found the pair singing Lonnie Donegan’s 1960 hit, “My Old Man’s a Dustman,” belting through the lyrics: “Oh, my old man’s a dustman, He wears a dustman’s hat.”
“Most extraordinary afternoon,” the Queen Mother continued to Lord Norwich a few days later. “And, do you know, I like a little Dubonnet before lunch…” (“Putting it rather mildly,” Norwich thought.) “Do you think it might have been spiked?”
Lord Norwich considered it a tad unlikely that someone in the Cardinal-Archbishop’s household had spiked the Queen Mother’s afternoon drinky-poo.
“I think it must have been spiked,” the Queen Mother concluded.
Since 1978, Queen Elizabeth had been Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a ceremonial honour the origins of which date back to the eleventh century; the first incumbent being an Earl of Wessex who was appointed in 1045.3 In 1999, Colonel Alastair Bruce had published his book Keepers of the Kingdom: The Ancient Offices of Britain, a first edition of which he presented to the Queen Mother. Her eyesight was once again giving her difficulty—she perused most of the book while holding it upside down—but it was still sharp enough to spot her absence from the section on the Lords Warden of the Cinque Ports.
“Why am I not in your book?” she asked.
Bruce, who had been told by the Palace before he started writing that no member of the Royal Family would be collaborating with the book, answered, “Well, to be perfectly honest, ma’am, we weren’t allowed to have you in the book.”
“Well, I should be in your book. I have one of the greatest appointments of all—Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.”
This needed to be rectified. She did not like being managed, or excluded. For the next edition, she would go down to have her photograph taken at the Lord Warden’s official residence, Walmer Castle, a sixteenth-century fort built in Kent on Henry VIII’s orders. Bruce and his photographer went to scout possible locations at the castle; his first choice was the magnificent castle terrace overlooking the sea, with the cannons still pointed out towards France as they had ever since the invasion scare of 1539. Since Elizabeth was 100 years old, they offered two other locations at Walmer, one of which was inside. Bruce then wrote to the Queen Mother to ask which of the three settings she would prefer.
Her handwritten reply was, “My dear Alastair, between the cannon pointing at France, of course!” She then offered them choices of her wearing pink, blue or yellow, depending on which would be best for their photograph. She insisted the author appear in some of the photographs with her. It was a beautiful day. She wore blue. And indeed the only being who proved difficult was Minnie the corgi who, no matter which way she was positioned, would ostentatiously shuffle round to present nothing but her back and bottom.
“Hello, Coryne! Look—no dogs!” beamed “Backstairs Billy” Tallon as he welcomed historian Coryne Hall to Clarence House in December 2001. Hall, then working on the first biography of the last Tsar’s eldest sister Grand Duchess Xenia,4 had nearly cancelled her meeting with the Queen Mother thanks to her phobia of dogs. Two fellow biographers, Theo Aronson and Hugo Vickers, encouraged her to let the Queen Mother’s staff know of her fears.5 The Household wrote back to assure her it was not a problem: the rambunctious corgis would go into a courtier’s office until Hall had left. “I’ve been asked to do a lot of things in my life,” the Queen Mother said, “but I’ve never been asked to put my dogs away.”
Hall was touched and surprised by the gesture, as she was by the fact that the audience was offered in the first place. She had not expected to be invited to Clarence House when she wrote to the Queen Mother, again on the advice of a friend. Grand Duchess Xenia was born in St. Petersburg in 1875 and died in England in 1960, having been evacuated from revolutionary Russia by her British relatives in 1919. She spent the rest of her life in Britain, where, during the Second World War, she was nearly killed when her new home was narrowly missed during the Nazi air raids. After the near-miss, Xenia was invited north to a house in the grounds of Balmoral, and while Hall was researching that part of her biography, a colleague suggested she write to the Queen Mother, who might have some memories of Xenia from her own wartime sojourns at Balmoral. Hall hoped for a letter back from Clarence House, perhaps with a Queen Motherly quote on Xenia that would go nicely in the biography. Instead, there arrived an invitation to meet Elizabeth in person.
Hall had known Billy Tallon for years, hence his ribbing over the dog embargo, and he escorted her through Clarence House for a how-do-you-do with the Queen Mother’s Private Secretary Sir Alastair Aird, an equerry and one of her ladies-in-waiting. The Queen Mother, true to form, was running late and so Hall had time to chat. She thought the team were “absolute past masters at putting you at your ease.” The lady-in-waiting asked, “Can you do a decent curtsey?” and would have offered to show Hall, who had no need since she had sixteen years of ballet training under her belt. As the Queen Mother’s first meeting ended, the jollity stopped as Hall thought, “Hang on, I’m just about to meet the Queen Mother!”
She was escorted by equerry Ashe Windham into the Morning Room, where the Queen Mother was standing with the aid of two walking sticks. Hall recalls that her first thought was, “She’s so tiny that I’m going to have to make a really low curtsey here to make it count. Thank God for the ballet training.”
A rumour doing the rounds at the time was that the Queen Mother had excised any photographs of Diana, Princess of Wales, from her rooms. However, as she curtseyed, Hall spotted a prominently displayed photo of Diana, holding her eldest son.
“I hope I can remember something useful about Grand Duchess Xenia for you,” the Queen Mother said, inviting Hall to sit. She recalled going for carriage rides through the Balmoral grounds in the 1940s and stopping to sing as they passed Xenia’s house. “My daughters and I used to sing ‘The Volga Boat Song’V in tribute to the Russians! Do you know it?”
Hall did not, so the Queen Mother burst into a rousing chorus of the Tsarist-era river song. She hoped that, when it came to writing her book, Coryne would include the mushroom-picking trips they had all gone on together at Balmoral during the war. Then Elizabeth’s mind went back even further to those meetings at Sandringham in 1923 with Xenia’s mother, the Dowager Empress Marie, and with Bertie’s grandmother Queen Alexandra. “She was anxious to say what she could remember, while she was still there,” Hall feels. “That was the impression I got. I think it was the fact that nobody had ever asked her about this. She was asked questions all the time but never about Xenia or about that time in her life.” The Queen Mother offered to speak to the Factor at Balmoral on Hall’s behalf, to see if he could find anything that would help with her research. It was a biographer’s dream, as Hall put it. “She was ever so nice. It was very fun, to be honest.”
Their audience, too, ran late, which meant the Queen Mother was very tardy to lunch. Hall curtseyed and exited through the Morning Room door, which had been kept open throughout their interview. That was not standard practice at Clarence House and it reflected the household’s growing concerns about the Queen Mother’s health. More audiences were due in a few weeks’ time when the Queen Mother went to Sandringham for Christmas, but as events would have it, they were cancelled. Coryne Hall’s was thus the last audience of the Queen Mother’s career, during which Elizabeth had been able to look back to one of the first, seventy-eight years earlier.
“Hard luck having to exercise the dogs on a day like this,” a guard said to his two companions as they trudged out of Windsor Castle with the corgis in the pouring rain. The two were a heavily wrapped-up Queen Mother and Princess Margaret.
Mother and daughter, despite many moments of tension, remained close. They liked to go out in the afternoon, disguised in sunglasses and headscarves, for a spin in the sports car owned by Margaret’s son David, Lord Linley.6 On at least three occasions in that final decade, there appeared the unlikely sight of a Marigold-wearing Princess Margaret as she went through hundreds of her mother’s letters, put them into black bin bags and burned them. We know this from the testimony of one of the staff members she asked to help her and because the Princess told her friend Kenneth Rose, “I have already filled two big sacks, and the servants are so pleased at my cleaning up the mess.” Rose felt his soul as a historian shrivel at Margaret’s claim that she had burned every letter her mother had ever received. Fortunately it turned out to be a wild exaggeration.
Rose voiced his concerns to one of the Queen Mother’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Prudence Penn, who “realises how much more valuable it would be for the QM’s ultimate biographer to read both sides of the correspondence.” Lady Penn confirmed that among the victims of Princess Margaret’s deep clean was every single letter ever written to the Queen Mother by the late Diana, Princess of Wales, along with many innocuous ones spanning nearly a century.
Margaret attended her mother’s 101st birthday in August 2001, by which time Margaret’s health had disintegrated after a series of strokes and operations. Rose wrote in his diary of his pain at seeing her that day: “In a wheelchair, she is scarcely recognisable, wrapped in a rug, her arm in a sling, wearing huge dark spectacles against the sun and, worst of all, a face grotesquely swollen. Oh, the pity of it.” The Queen Mother prayed that Margaret would not have to endure the trauma of another stroke, and in the end, that prayer was granted as the last one ended the Princess’s life, with her two children by her hospital bedside, on February 9, 2002. Prince Charles went to Sandringham to comfort the Queen Mother. Despite her own infirmities, the Queen Mother, in black with a small veil suspended from her hat, insisted on walking at her daughter’s funeral at Windsor. Fifty years before to the day, Margaret’s father had been buried in the same place. Her ashes were later laid next to him.
“Have I died again?” was the Queen Mother’s wryly amused query every time a news outlet misreported news of her departure. Mock broadcasts were practised at the BBC in preparation for the inevitable day, and members of her household went to regular meetings to co-ordinate her state funeral. Guessing where they were, the Queen Mother got a bit of a kick out of asking them what they had been up to that day and then watching their hibiscus-tinged embarrassment.
She had gone over the preparations herself and once visited a rehearsal at Westminster Abbey to thank the seamstresses and the abbey staff for their work. As she was shown the candles selected for the ceremony, though, she smiled, shook her head and asked, “Oh, do you mind very much if I bring my own?”
The codename for the Queen Mother’s funeral was Operation Tay Bridge, while in conversation with the Earl of Airlie she euphemistically referred to dying as passing on to “greener pastures.” Still devoutly Christian, she read the Bible and prayed daily, as her mother had taught her to do a century earlier and as she, in her turn, had taught her daughters. She went to the Castle of Mey in August 2001, from where she wrote to Prince Charles, “Here the sun is shining, the sea is shining, and lovely white clouds are floating about. Of course in five minutes the whole scene can change, angry waves, leaden sky, and a howling wind, not to mention the sea birds and growling of seals. I do hope that Birkhall is being its own dear self, and with endless gratitude for your wonderful present,VI From your always loving, Granny.”
That November, in a purple dress and hat, with two walking sticks, she attended the recommissioning of the Ark Royal, a light aircraft carrier that she had launched twenty years earlier. She was frail and would have toppled over had the ship’s captain and an admiral not been on either side of her. She said, “Thank you,” then kept on going. She stood to give her speech in a clear and firm voice, which ended with the joke, “Captain, splice the mainbrace!”—a discontinued Navy term once indicating that the captain should give each crew member a portion of rum. She sang the hymns and the National Anthem and stopped to talk to an officer’s daughter, who gave her a bouquet of flowers: “What age are you?… Aren’t these lovely?… Thank you so much.” She was introduced to the youngest member of the crew; she asked him questions about where he was from, what he hoped to achieve with his life, and told him about the first time she had flown in a military plane, six decades earlier.
That was her last official public engagement.
Towards the end of her life, she said to Billy Tallon, the footman who had been in her service for half a century: “We’re two old dears, really, aren’t we, William? But we have had some fun.”