At Home

Royal staff often take advantage of the facilities. On one occasion two artistic young footmen took over the Queen’s private sitting room at Sandringham. They became very excited and set about playing show tunes on the piano, singing and eating the Queen’s Bendick’s mints. But suddenly they were aware of a presence in the doorway. It was Her Majesty. She stood there for some moments, then went away. The incident was never referred to subsequently.

A well-known male ballet dancer once dined with Princess Margaret. After dinner she announced that she wished to dance and it turned out that what she really wanted was to be lifted high in the air. The task would not have been difficult to accomplish were it not for the complication of the Royal corset. Try as he might, it was impossible to get a grip.

When at last the police arrived to relieve the Queen after she had held out alone against Michael Fagan for the best part of ten minutes, quite naturally, on seeing Her Majesty and before doing anything else, they began to adjust their ties. For the Queen, this was the last straw. ‘For goodness sake, get a bloody move on,’ she hissed.

The actor Tom Courtenay played a revolutionary in Doctor Zhivago and at the time of the film’s release was invited to lunch at Buckingham Palace. So nervous was he, he rolled up into a ball and tried to hide behind a sofa. ‘Oh, dear,’ said the Queen, ‘to look at him now, you wouldn’t think he wanted to overthrow society, would you?’

When homophobia was raging in the press in the early 1980s, the Queen Mother whispered to a friend before a Palace dinner, ‘We think they’re marvellous. And besides, if we didn’t have any here, we’d have to go self-service.’

Visitors at Clarence House were often mystified by a school-like bell that would ring all over the house at a certain point in the evening. ‘Oh, it means the Queen Mother is going to bed,’ staff would explain nonchalantly.

Princess Diana invited a little disabled boy, whom she had met through one of her charities, and his parents to tea at Kensington Palace. As small children do, he wandered off and returned some time later laden with armfuls of soft toys – fluffy cats with pink ears, stripy tigers, a polar bear and so on. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I see you’ve found my bedroom.’

One afternoon the Queen Mother asked one of her senior servants what she was supposed to be doing. It seemed that she wasn’t doing anything. ‘Well, we’ll get the car out. I want to see your garden.’ ‘You mean now?’ said the servant, thinking that, apart from anything else, the other inmates of his house in Tooting might be enjoying their afternoon snooze. But the Queen Mother was adamant and off they went. On arrival an elderly neighbour was leaning against the garden fence. ‘Your Majesty, may I present Mrs–?’ said the servant as the woman’s jaw dropped. The next day another inhabitant approached the Queen Mother’s attendant. ‘I must have been dreaming,’ he said, ‘but I could swear I saw the Queen Mother in the street yesterday.’

A nervous young officer became even more so when he found himself sitting next to the Queen at lunch. When bread sticks were offered, the Queen took six. In desperation, he did the same. The Queen ate one of her bread sticks. The officer followed suit. The lunch proceeded; the Queen’s other bread sticks remained untouched. The officer rearranged his a few times. By the end of the main course, with the whole bread stick situation unresolved, the officer was at his wits’ end. Then, with the pudding, the corgis came in. The Queen took up her spare bread sticks and distributed them amongst her dogs. When she had done that and every last crumb had been hoovered up by the animals, she turned to the officer and asked, ‘Now, what are you going to do with yours?’

Before a State Dinner at Buckingham Palace, the Queen Mother, the Queen and Princess Margaret prepared to ascend by lift to the bedroom floor in order to put on their evening gowns and jewels. The lift came up from below and the doors opened. Within was an unusual sight. Two footmen were wearing all the jewels that had been ordered for the evening – tiaras, necklaces, brooches, the lot. ‘I think they might suit us rather better than you,’ the Queen Mother remarked.

A young woman was just beginning to enjoy talking to the Queen at a Buckingham Palace garden party when her mobile phone went off. She was covered in confusion. ‘You’d better answer that,’ the Queen said. ‘It might be someone important.’

In the 1970s a well-meaning but possibly hysterical friend told the Queen Mother that Harrods were going to sack all their homosexual staff. ‘What and go self-service?’ she replied simply.

Instructed by Palace press secretaries, at Prince Charles’s 50th birthday party at Buckingham Palace, not to speak to any member of the Royal Family and not to hover trying to pick up titbits, Jennie Bond thought her only friend would be fellow Royal Correspondent, Nick Owen. Until, that is, she heard a familiar voice nearby. ‘Oh look, Mummy. There are those two. They’re always on television. Let’s go and say hello.’ The Queen and Queen Mother weren’t doing as they were told.

In the 1960s, a footman of the Queen Mother’s got into trouble for some misdemeanour involving another man and had to leave her service. In the car, as he left Clarence House, he found a bunch of flowers to which was attached a message. ‘Who’s been a naughty boy, then?’