REFERENCES

Author’s Note

1. “Queen Mother” was used for queens Alexandra and Mary in the prayer books and as the title for Marion Crawford’s 1951 biography of Mary.

1: East or West, Home Is Best

1. They were made Lords Glamis in 1445 by Scotland’s James II, James VI made a Patrick Lyon Earl of Kinghorne in 1606, and Strathmore was added by King Charles II in 1667.
2. J. Wentworth-Day, The Queen Mother’s Family Story (London: Robert Hale, 1967), p. 15.
3. Lady Cynthia Asquith, Queen Elizabeth (London: Hutchinson, 1937), p. 44.
4. It has since been merged with its next-door neighbour to become business offices.
5. Streatlam had belonged to the family before it was gifted to John Bowes, illegitimate son of the 10th Earl. After his death, in 1885, it reverted to Elizabeth’s side of the family.
6. Elizabeth later told one of her footmen, Billy Tallon, that she might have been born in a horse-drawn ambulance, a fact that her parents may have omitted since giving birth outside the home, even in a hospital, was considered faintly déclassé by the aristocracy in 1900.
7. For a good summary of the debate, see Grania Forbes, My Darling Buffy: The Early Years of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1997), pp. 2–9; Hugo Vickers, Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (London: Arrow, 2006), pp. 1–2; Jane Dismore, Princess: The Early Life of Elizabeth II (London: The Lyons Press, 2018), p. 40; and cf. Lady Colin Campbell, The Untold Life of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (London: Dynasty Press, 2012), pp. 11–22.
8. Interestingly, 1921 was also specified in the private correspondence of the Bowes-Lyons’ guest Sir Shane Leslie as the year when the business of the Monster “was officially brought to a close.”

2: War Wounds

1. He may also have been wounded in a game played several years later. My thanks to Dr. Hannah McCormick for discussing the medical evidence with me.
2. Even years later, Elizabeth could spot the Glamis war-time alumni in crowds waiting to greet her, and she kept in touch with many of the veterans via letter. She sent help to them where and when she could, and she employed some of those who had fallen on hard times in the years since 1918. She had first met Ernest Pearce as a patient at Glamis during the First World War, when he was a 23-year-old corporal of the Durham Light Infantry and sent to Glamis after his right shoulder was shattered at the Battle of Ypres. Although he preferred life in the countryside, after the army Pearce had worked in a shipyard, a job he lost during the Great Depression. Elizabeth sent money for groceries and new clothes for his children and she then offered him a job as one of her gardeners at Royal Lodge, along with accommodation in a small cottage for him and his family. Pearce kept the job until his death in 1969, by which point his niece Mary Ann had also been working for Elizabeth, for twenty-three years, in her kitchens, becoming head cook until her retirement in 1981.
3. Homeland of George V’s grandfather and Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1819–61).

3: The Delightful Duchess

1. Bertie’s sister, Princess Mary, married the heir to the English earldom of Harewood in 1922, and their cousin Princess Maud married Lord Carnegie, heir to the Scottish earldom of Southesk, in 1923. Marriages with British subjects had hitherto been slightly more common for princesses than for princes. Two princesses, both called Louise, one of whom was Queen Victoria’s daughter and the other King Edward VII’s, had married Scottish dukes. The three British princes who had attempted to flout the practice—two sons and a grandson of King George III—were either pressured into annulments or denied the right to share their titles with their wives.
2. When the relationship became sexual is debated; it seems to have ended in 1928. Three fascinating and longer volumes of Channon’s diaries, edited by Simon Heffer, have been published between 2021 and 2022, and the quote here is taken from Channon’s diary entry for February 22, 1928, in Simon Heffer (ed.), Henry “Chips” Channon, The Diaries: 1918–38 (London: Hutchinson, 2021), p. 312.
3. This was later confirmed by Prince Paul’s eldest son in conversation with Elizabeth’s biographer Grania Forbes.
4. Mary, along with her unlikely allies Kaiser Wilhelm II and Queen Victoria, believed that the relationship had been non-consensual, see James Pope-Hennessy, Hugo Vickers (ed.), The Quest for Queen Mary (London: Zuleika, 2018), pp. 36–37 and Pope-Hennessy’s meeting with the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort, November 22, 1958, cit. p. 301n.

4: Queen

1. There was also a crypto-fascist government in Austria, headed by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, from 1932 until he was assassinated by Nazis in 1934. Four years later, Austria was absorbed into Nazi Germany.
2. Seidler initially shelved the George VI project to concentrate on his next movie, Malice in Wonderland, a luxuriously camp drama inspired by the rivalry between two gossip columnists, played by Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Alexander, during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
3. The King’s Speech was the second production about the couple the release of which was delayed until after the Queen Mother’s passing. The other, Bertie and Elizabeth, was a British television movie, in which they are played very well by James Wilby and Juliet Aubrey, with Dame Eileen Atkins as Queen Mary, a role she reprised for the first season of the Netflix series, The Crown.
4. James Pope-Hennessy, “A General Note Upon the Duke of Gloucester (May 1957),” in Pope-Hennessy and Vickers, p. 175.
5. Greece had officially been neutral during the war until it joined the Allies in 1917. Its royal family were, however, dogged by rumours of divided loyalties, particularly in light of the King’s marriage to the Kaiser’s sister.
6. While writing this book, a friend from Mississippi joked with me that Wallis would have been able to spot Elizabeth’s politesse—“Wallis was from the South, believe me, she knew a bless your heart lady a mile away.”
7. The Queen softened on Emerald Cunard when Princess Olga of Yugoslavia, Prince Paul’s wife, spoke to her on Emerald’s behalf, after which Lady Cunard was invited to the Palace for tea.
8. Leaving aside the likelihood or otherwise of the Hohenzollerns re-gaining their throne, Friedrich-Georg seemed an unlikely future emperor, as he was the fourth son of the last Crown Prince. Many German monarchists believed the Crown Prince had been disgraced by his alleged cowardice at the end of the Great War and that the monarchist cause would be best served by keeping him as far away from it as possible. Friedrich-Georg’s eldest brother had renounced his rights in order to marry a commoner, the second brother had spent a great deal of time living in America and (wrongly, as it transpired) was expected to mimic his eldest brother, and the third, Prince Hubertus, had joined the Nazi armies in 1934. By quite a stretch, this allegedly left Friedrich-Georg as the most “natural” candidate to become Kaiser after Nazism’s anticipated implosion.

5: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe

1. The future Lord Elphinstone was later joined in captivity at Colditz by the King’s 21-year-old nephew George, Lord Lascelles.
2. There was a second attack on Buckingham Palace, during which the King and Queen came far closer to death than the government was prepared to admit at the time. The windows imploded into the room as the King and Queen were flung against the walls.
3. Propagandists in both Britain and America wanted to capitalise on the friendship between the Queen and the First Lady, which presented problems as both women were averse to being manipulated into doing anything with which they felt uncomfortable. Both declined a suggestion from the Ladies’ Home Journal to publish an imagined conversation between them, in which they extolled the virtues of hard work in the factories to help the war effort. Elizabeth expressed her discomfiture with the idea in conference with Tommy Lascelles, who agreed with her concerns that “the UK will dislike their Queen being involved in such an obvious bit of machine-made propaganda.”
4. Even there, other rationing laws were in place, right down to the amount of bathwater allowed, and fireplaces were abandoned in favour of small electric heaters.

6: Widow

1. In the year he joined the Queen’s service, 31-year-old Dawnay attracted the press’s attention when he jumped into the River Blackwater to help five people trapped in an overturned car. He rescued Mrs. Ann Cameron-Know and her three children, although sadly the driver had been killed on impact.
2. The circumstances surrounding the purchase of Mey were sensitively portrayed in the eighth episode of the first season of the Netflix series The Crown, in which the grieving Queen Mother is brilliantly played by Victoria Hamilton, the Vyners by Caroline Goodall and David Yelland, and Captain Imbert-Terry by John Standing.
3. These were Queen Mary, George V’s widow from 1936 to 1953; Queen Alexandra, Edward VII’s widow from 1910 to 1923; and Queen Adelaide, William IV’s widow from 1837 to 1849. All three were less visible than they had been as consorts, but it is not true, as is often stated, that British dowager queens retired from public life until the custom was changed for Elizabeth in the 1950s.
4. This was a mistake on Coward’s part. The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret were in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
5. Massey was instead succeeded by Georges Vanier, the first Quebecois citizen to serve as Governor General.

7: Queen Mum

1. They were joined by Prince Charles and Princess Anne.
2. It was either them or the “Golden Guinness” sisters.
3. Tom Mitford was a guest of the Astors at Hever Castle in May 1929, when Elizabeth returned there for the first time since her marriage. Along with Bertie, other guests included Elizabeth’s brother David, their cousins Rachel Bowes-Lyon and Alice Cavendish-Bentinck, and J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan.

8: Steel Marshmallows

1. Sir Michael Oswald to Hugo Vickers, in Vickers, Elizabeth the Queen Mother, p. 453.
2. This is one of my favourite stories about the Queen Mother. It has also been told about a guest staying at Royal Lodge. On the balance of probabilities, it seems more likely that it took place at Mey. I have compiled it from three different sets of recollections, which happily all agreed on the main details.
3. This anecdote has been told to me over the years by four different people, but with significant deviations. Three of them identified the lady involved as the Queen Mother, while another thought that it was the Queen. The story told by the three-to-one majority was that it was the Queen Mother—this was the version told to me by David Anderson, head of the Household at Hillsborough Castle from 1984 to 2009.
4. The article, by Roya Nikkhah, was published in The Sunday Times on October 10, 2021.
5. This story was recounted twice, with no significant variations, by two former employees—in conversation between the author and David Anderson, October 18, 2014, and in Major Colin Burgess, Behind Palace Doors: My Service as the Queen Mother’s Equerry (London: John Blake, 2006), pp. 162–63.
6. Their friendship is included in the BBC mini-series The Cambridge Spies (2003), in which the Queen Mother is played wonderfully by Imelda Staunton, in one of the few dramatisations to depict her sense of humour, and Blunt by Samuel West.

9: Glasses Filled with Dubonnet, Gin and Pimm’s

1. This story has been told many times, and it is perhaps one of the most famous anecdotes about Queen Elizabeth. An equerry who worked for the Queen Mother is fairly confident that it is apocryphal, although he is at pains to point out that he cannot be certain.
2. This version of events was dramatised in the seventh episode of Season 4 of the Netflix series The Crown, in which the Queen Mother was played by Marion Bailey, Princess Margaret by Helena Bonham Carter, Nerissa Bowes-Lyon by Pauline Hendrickson, and Katherine Bowes-Lyon by Trudie Emery.
3. Bertie’s younger brother, Prince John, who died in 1919, also had developmental concerns as well as epilepsy, and it says much for the positive changes in attitudes to mental health that, today, the isolation of Prince John, “the lost prince” kept away from public view, is regarded as cruel, tragic and unnecessary; whereas, at the time, some doctors thought Queen Mary was soft for having him live on the estate in a cottage rather than sending him to an institution.
4. It was Fenella who later described her daughters as dead when submitting information to a new edition of the social dictionary, Burke’s Peerage, although there is some evidence that, by that stage in the 1950s, she too was struggling with her mental health.
5. There has been one claim from a former staff member at the hospital that the Queen Mother did privately visit the sisters in the 1980s, but I have not been able to confirm this.
6. From 1986 until his death in 2009, Lord Moore of Wolvercote.
7. A full picture of the negotiations has only recently become clear thanks to the research of Helen Rappaport in her 2018 book The Race to Save the Romanovs.
8. This arrangement of portraits was changed with the renovations conducted by Historic Royal Palaces after 2014.
9. Recorded by the MP for Antrim North, Hansard, July 11, 2000.
10. A similar story is told about a dinner party, this time in England, although it seems quite possible that it happened more than once. David Anderson, in conversation with the author, remarked that he heard “Queen Elizabeth regularly did things like that to help cover up mistakes.”

10: I Shall Miss Those Laughs

1. This meant that Queen Elizabeth was mirroring her late father’s morning reading routine. The Telegraph had merged with Claude’s staple Morning Post in 1937.
2. From its founding in 1986 until the late nineties, The Independent avoided royal stories, feeling that the rest of the British press covered them in sufficient, or excessive, detail.
3. The title has changed several times; however, it can be traced back to the constables of Dover Castle.
4. John van der Kiste and Coryne Hall, Once a Grand Duchess: Xenia, Sister of Nicholas II (Stroud: The History Press, 2004).
5. Theo Aronson was friend and biographer of Princess Margaret (1997) and Hugo Vickers, since his biography of Cecil Beaton mentioned in Chapter 9 of this book, had authored lives of Vivien Leigh (1988), Greta Garbo (1994) and Prince Philip’s mother (2000). His biography of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was published in 2006, and was followed five years later by his life of the Duchess of Windsor.
6. After his father’s death, the 2nd Earl of Snowdon.

Epilogue

1. Perhaps in response to the criticism in 2002, black was worn to announce the death of Prince Philip in 2021.