On the morning of 21 April 1956, an up-and-coming young photographer arrived at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, charged with taking the photographs of the wedding of Lady Anne Coke to the Hon. Colin Tennant. Throughout the day, the bride’s father, the Earl of Leicester, referred to the photographer as Tony Snapshot, though he knew full well that his real name was Antony Armstrong-Jones. For the rest of his life, the photographer would blanch at the memory of this snub. Furthermore, he had been treated as a tradesman, obliged to use the servants’ entrance, even though he had overlapped with the groom at Eton. Nor had he been invited to join the wedding guests for champagne in the state rooms; instead, he had to make do with a cup of tea in the servants’ hall.
At that time, the social status of a photographer was roughly on a par with that of a tailor – above a hairdresser, but below a governess. Over the course of the 1960s the poor old governess was to find herself overtaken by the other three. The rapid social ascent of Armstrong-Jones, whose persona had a hint of both the tailor and the hairdresser, served as a beacon for this social upheaval.
Yet neither time nor status could soften the rebuff Armstrong-Jones had suffered at the hands of Colin Tennant. Up to Tennant’s death, and beyond, he felt unable to mention Tennant’s name without appending the epithet ‘that shit’. His loyal biographer Anne de Courcy records that, soon after his humiliation, Armstrong-Jones threatened Tennant, saying, ‘I’ll get even with you for that!’ He then added, perversely but prophetically, ‘I’ll marry your best friend!’
De Courcy interviewed both men for her biography – Armstrong-Jones at great length – so the memory of that perverse threat must have come from one or the other, or both. Or had there been a scullery maid or a court dwarf hidden behind the curtain, who tearfully confessed what she had overheard on that fateful day, half a century before?
Tennant’s equally loyal biographer, Nicholas Courtney, confirmed de Courcy’s evidence. ‘There was always bad blood between Colin and Tony, which Colin believed stemmed from that unintentional slight at his wedding … Tony always referred to Colin as “that shit”.’ When Courtney phoned him to request an interview, Tony exploded, ‘I loathed the man. I want nothing to do with his biography!’ And with that, he slammed down the receiver.
Was there a degree of sexual jealousy in the feud between Colin Tennant and Antony Armstrong-Jones? In the mid-1950s, Tennant had been widely tipped in the press as the front-runner for the Princess’s hand in marriage. Some in her inner circle thought it a strong possibility too. ‘I believe that Colin is serious and would enjoy being a Prince Consort,’ wrote Ann Fleming to Patrick Leigh Fermor. Others were not so sure. ‘The sudden arrival of Princess Margaret into our lives in the Fifties brought unfriendly reactions from some of the family,’ wrote his sister Emma Tennant after his death in 2010. ‘It was thought that we’d never find any privacy again, and, worst of all, if an engagement was announced between the Princess and Colin, then Colin was likely to become a pompous bore and all our fun and games would be over. That this didn’t happen we might have guessed. Colin remained as irrepressibly funny and unimpressed by people who thought highly of themselves as he had ever been. Princess Margaret, as is well known, could be offensively sure of her superior status.’
Half a century on, Colin Tennant claimed that marriage had never been on the cards. Though he and the Princess had indulged in ‘heavy petting’, they had certainly never embarked upon what he called ‘a serious affair’. Or so he told his biographer.
Like many euphemisms, ‘heavy petting’ is frustratingly opaque. Where does light end and heavy begin? The Cambridge English Dictionary defines heavy petting as ‘an occasion [sic] when two people kiss, hold, and touch each other in a sexual way, but do not have sex’. The Oxford English Dictionary goes a little further: ‘Erotic contact between two people involving stimulation of the genitals but falling short of intercourse.’ But what do Oxbridge lexicographers know of heavy petting? Only the more worldly Urban Dictionary goes the whole hog: ‘Foreplay ranging from breast massage to masturbating one’s partner, yet no coital contact.’
Was it Tennant who decided that things could only go so far, but no further? Or was it Margaret? The evidence suggests it was Margaret who pulled up the drawbridge. Tennant always found the Princess ‘ravishing, terribly funny, and such good company’, but he confessed to Courtney that, for her part, the Princess had never found him all that attractive. ‘I was not at all her type, unlike Peter Townsend, and then Tony and then Roddy. They were smaller, foxy, talkative men.’* He then added, sportingly, that, all in all, he was glad not to have fitted the bill: ‘If I had actually been more of a lover and less of a companion, we would not have remained such friends.’
In other circles, a youthful stint of heavy petting, however circumscribed, might have licensed the use of Christian names; but not in this case. A private letter penned from Mustique two decades later by Tennant to Princess Margaret begins ‘Madam’, and ends with the complaint that though ‘all is by no means gloom’, things are ‘rather flat without Your Royal Highness’.*
* In fact, Townsend was neither foxy nor talkative, and six foot two inches tall. A photograph of him standing immediately behind the Princess shows the top of her hair only just reaching the bottom of the knot on his tie, and her hair was always artificially puffed-up, lending it added height and volume. Incidentally, might her desire to be addressed as ‘Highness’ have been a form of wish-fulfilment, a subliminal reaction to her lack of inches?
* Beyond her family, her old dresser, Ruby Gordon, was the only person allowed to call her ‘Margaret’. Her insistence on being addressed as ‘Ma’am’, ‘Madam’ and ‘Your Royal Highness’, even by old friends and lovers, is a thread that runs through the life of the Princess. There was always an element of Hyacinth Bucket about her, a tendency to keep her high horse tethered for use at all times, even in the company of old friends. Clearly, the Princess felt that being called ‘Margaret’ involved crossing an invisible line which heavy petting did not. Or might she and her beaux have found a Chatterleyesque charge in the anomaly of maintaining social niceties while engaged in a steamy sexual encounter?