On Monday, 31 October 1955, the BBC announcer John Snagge interrupted regular broadcasting to read a brief statement from HRH the Princess Margaret:
I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage.
But, mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others.
I have reached this decision entirely alone, and in doing so I have been strengthened by the unfailing support and devotion of Group Captain Townsend.
When the statement emerged from his wireless, Philip Larkin was in the middle of writing another downbeat letter to his girlfriend, Monica Jones. ‘Very cold here – large frosty moon, spilling chill light over the lifeless leaves. Mrs S. very poorly again – she appears to have been retching all day & is quite broken down by it – she is still coherent but very feeble. I tried to sit with her tonight, but she dismissed me in order to retch better. She gave me her right hand to shake. I do not like the look of her at all.’
He had, he added, turned on the wireless ‘to drown the sound of retching from below, which is really upsetting, groaning & noises similar to those utilised by persons in the article of death’. ‘As I write this I’m listening to one of the best Just Fancy programmes I’ve ever heard … Now it’s over, & I’ll have to switch off. Can I write any – Whoops! Just heard Princess M. isn’t going to marry Group Captain Fiddlesticks – well, what a frost! And at 6.15pm tonight I was saying that any announcement wd be bound to be of an engagement, since you couldn’t announce nothing. Well, apparently you can. How curious & strange. Well, well. What a romantic incident. Christian marriage. Well, well …’
On Alderney, the irascible author T.H. White was writing an awkward letter to his old friend David Garnett, who had posted him an advance copy of his new novel, Aspects of Love. Unfortunately, White had not liked the book, and was determined to let Garnett know:
Dearest Bunny, this is a hateful and stupid letter but I must face it and write it, otherwise I shall never be able to look you in the face again.
First of all, the letter you sent me with Aspects of Love filled me with such pride and pleasure that I could hardly sleep all night, I was so happy. But second, as you predicted, I DON’T like Aspects of Love. I kept fidgeting about and putting it down and starting again, it was only at the bottom of page 144 that light suddenly dawned on me like an atomic flash. You like cats and I loathe them. This is not a rational criticism, and God knows I don’t claim to be right in loathing cats or that you are wrong in loving them …
… I hate Rose, like a cat, for going to bed with Alexis first, then tossing him over for Sir George, and then taking him and other lovers. Surely women are dependable people as well as men? My adored grandfather on my mother’s side was a judge, but not a hanging judge. He would have simply … have answered your various dilemmas in two ways. He would have said … if a woman cannot behave herself according to the laws I have given all my career to, as an Indian Civil Servant – the laws of honour – then take down her crenellated, lace, Victorian pants, and give her one resounding blow with the flat of the hand on the buttocks. In short, I think your Rose is a selfish, short sighted, self-admirer and a bore. Obviously you don’t think so, and neither of us is right. It is the dog and the cat.
Perhaps to sweeten the pill of this forthright letter, White added this short paragraph:
Before I end this letter – which is bound to wound you – I must make one other confession. I was truly delighted a week or two ago to learn that Princess Margaret had decided not to marry Group Captain Townsend.
In London, Lady Violet Bonham Carter was far from delighted. She had spent the evening of the announcement with her brother, the film director Anthony Asquith, at a Royal Command Performance screening in Leicester Square of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘very bad and slow’ movie To Catch a Thief, followed by dinner at the Savoy Hotel. As they left the Savoy in the early hours, Asquith ‘overheard someone saying something about Princess Margaret which sounded like “off”’. He immediately went back and bought early editions of two different newspapers. ‘They had banner headlines, “Princess Margaret decides not to marry Group Captain Townsend”. Underneath was a most poignant statement, perfectly expressed. It is a heroic decision and rends one’s heart. She is so vital, human, warm and gay – made for happiness. And what she must be suffering doesn’t bear thinking of.’
‘Thank goodness that’s over!’ was the verdict of Nella Last’s husband in Barrow-in-Furness. Mass-Observation charted the reactions of its predominantly middle-class panel of ordinary men and women. There was a sharp division of opinion between the sexes: the men largely indifferent or unsympathetic, the women more emotionally engaged. ‘It is a pity she did not marry Townsend and thereby leave the country,’ said a thirty-six-year-old man, a married bank cashier. ‘I am no lover of Princess Margaret and the National Press does not help by its continuous publicity of this so called glamour girl. Princess Alexandra beats her hands down.’ A twenty-five-year-old bachelor told Mass-Observation, ‘My interest in this matter has not been raised above the “luke warm” stage and I have no opinions on this very personal subject.’
A forty-seven-year-old commercial traveller was among those men who came down hard on Townsend. ‘Had Group Captain Townsend been a Gentleman he would not have put the Princess to the necessity of making such a decision. He would have gone off to Darkest Africa to shoot elephants or something.’
‘Now perhaps we’ll hear a little less of that over-publicised little lady,’ observed Anthony Heap, a forty-six-year-old local government officer from St Pancras.
The women panellists of Mass-Observation were, on the whole, more sympathetic. A retired teacher aged sixty-five said, ‘I am very sorry for Princess Margaret – as I feel their decision has been a hard one. At the same time, she realises that Great Privileges imply Great Responsibilities, which the Duke of Windsor was too selfish to do!’
A thirty-four-year-old secretary, a spinster, was less equivocal: ‘I really do think that a man of his age & experience need not have allowed the equivalent of a schoolgirl crush to develop into a grand passion. The man’s a Cad.’
A librarian aged fifty was profoundly upset: ‘I’m deeply distressed by her decision. It came as almost a physical shock. It was as if we had suddenly started to move back towards the darkness of some primitive jungle – as if a beautiful young girl had been sacrificed to its gods.’
On hearing the news, the author and politician Harold Nicolson felt nothing but admiration for the Princess. ‘This is a great act of self-sacrifice, and the country will admire and love her for it. I feel rather moved,’ he wrote in his diary. But, like so many other people, he was soon focusing on how the news might affect his own social arrangements: ‘It will be awkward meeting the Duke of Windsor at dinner after this.’
On Wednesday, 2 November 1955, the Daily Mirror ran the headline across half its front page: ‘THIS MUST NOT WRECK TWO LIVES’, trumpeting an opinion piece by Keith Waterhouse, soon to become famous as the author of Billy Liar.
Today, as the self-satisfied chorus dies down, I would like to say something about the future of these two people who reached for happiness and found only a stone … Without doubt the magnifying glasses are out in Whitehall today as the bureaucrats search for unlikely places at the end of the earth where Peter Townsend could be banished.
This must not happen.
The stiff-collar classes are already crowing in their clubs that Peter Townsend has been shown the door.
THESE ARE THE PEOPLE who would have bowed the lowest if he had married Princess Margaret.
THESE ARE THE PEOPLE who will want Peter Townsend plucked up and removed by jet plane whenever there is the slightest chance that Princess Margaret may come within a hundred miles of him.
THESE ARE THE PEOPLE who, from now on, will watch Princess Margaret like hawks crossed with vultures …
That these two lives have not been wrecked already is due to the courage and immense strength of character of them both …
LET THEM LIVE IN PEACE AND, IF THEY CAN FIND IT APART, HAPPINESS.*
Two days later, on Friday, 4 November, the Daily Express printed a ‘We, the Undersigned’ letter about the recent announcement from a mixed bag of figures from the arts world, including Lindsay Anderson, Humphrey Lyttelton, Wolf Mankowitz, Ronald Searle and Kenneth Tynan:
First, it has revived the old issue of class distinctions in public life.
Second, it has shown us ‘The Establishment’ in full cry, that pious group of potentates who so loudly applauded the Princess’s decision.
Third, it has exposed the true extent of our national hypocrisy.
But above all the Townsend affair brings up the general question of ‘national dignity’, and its encroachments on personal freedom.
The final name on the list of the undersigned was that of Sandy Wilson, the writer and composer of the 1953 hit musical The Boy Friend. Princess Margaret had attended its original production. Among the show’s catchiest numbers was ‘I Could Be Happy With You’:
I could be happy with you
If you could be happy with me.
I’d be contented to live anywhere
What would I care –
As long as you were there?
These anti-Establishment types got on the nerves of the Princess’s lifelong though not wholly uncritical supporter, Noël Coward. A week before the announcement, he had affected boredom with the whole affair: ‘I have noticed in the Press certain references to Princess Margaret wishing to marry someone or other,’ he wrote in his diary on 24 October. ‘I really must try to control this yawning.’ But within a fortnight his interest had revived: ‘Poor Princess Margaret has made a sorrowful, touching statement that she will not marry Peter Townsend. This is a fine slap in the chops for the bloody Press which has been persecuting her for so long. I am really glad that she has at last made the decision but I do wish there hadn’t been such a hideous hullabaloo about it.’
Coward complained that ‘It has all been a silly, mismanaged lash-up and I cannot imagine how the Queen and the Queen Mother and Prince Philip allowed it to get into such a tangle. At least she hasn’t betrayed her position and her responsibilities, but that is arid comfort for her with half the world religiously exulting and the other half pouring out a spate of treacly sentimentality.’ He looked to the future, though with trepidation: ‘I hope she will not take to religion in a big way and become a frustrated maiden princess. I also hope that they had the sense to hop into bed a couple of times at least, but this I doubt.’
Despite it all, he felt the Princess had come to the right decision. ‘Apart from church and royal considerations, it would have been an unsuitable marriage anyway. She cannot know, poor girl, being young and in love, that love dies soon and that a future with two strapping stepsons and a man eighteen years older than herself would not really be very rosy.’
Jessica Mitford was staying with her sister Nancy in Paris. ‘On the Margaret thing,’ she wrote to her husband Bob Treuhaft, who was back in America, ‘the general consensus seemed to be that she is now one-up on the Windsors.* The Fr. papers were full of the incroyable attitude of the Anglais towards l’amour.’ In the same letter she told her husband that, just before Princess Margaret’s statement, she had heard that ‘the Windsors have a new dog named Peter Townsend, my dear quel mauvais gout’.*
Three years later, the Duchess of Windsor was talking to James Pope-Hennessy, who was busy researching his authorised biography of her late mother-in-law, Queen Mary. While they chatted, the Duchess’s three pugs gambolled about. Their names, she said, were Disraeli, Trooper and Davey Crockett. ‘We did have a fourth called Peter Townsend,’ she added with what Pope-Hennessy describes as ‘her least nice grin’, ‘but we gave the Group Captain away.’
* Waterhouse’s valiant deed was never reciprocated. At a reception thirty years later, he noticed Princess Margaret’s ash growing longer and longer, so he reached across her to grab an ashtray. ‘She simply flicked her ash into my open palm as it passed,’ he recalled. ‘Thank God she hadn’t decided to stub it out.’
* i.e. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
* ‘What bad taste.’