We Are Family

The wife of the foreign secretary of the day, Susan Crosland tells of the Queens robust qualities on a 1970s State Visit. They were aboard Britannia during a fierce storm. The Queen had to fight her way into the drawing room, because the door kept sliding shut in her face. Once in, she announced, ‘Philip’s not at all well…I’m glad to say.’

It was chicken Kiev for lunch one day at Buckingham Palace. The Queen sensed an opportunity for bad behaviour. She whispered to Michael Foot, ‘If you’re clever how you put the knife in, you might be able to squirt Philip.’

As a boy, Prince Charles once fell into a sheep dip. As a result he turned red and Princess Anne has made him blush about it ever since.

In the mid-1980s, a passer-by saw Princess Diana examining some postcards outside a shop in Kensington High Street. Nothing very remarkable about that. But when she called her detective over and together they began to point and giggle, the onlooker naturally wanted to know what was so funny. When they had gone, he went to investigate. What he found were postcards of the Queen wearing a tiara, another of her mounted on a horse with her corgis and ones of Prince Charles in various uniforms and also in gumboots, leaning on an alpenstock.

The Queens idea of appropriate dress for cuddling her babies? Nothing at all. It seemed perfectly natural to her, she explained while she was sitting for a sculptor and they were discussing the shape and texture of the human body. But when the newspapers got to hear of it, it was, of course: ‘Queen’s nude romps with her children.’

People always say that the Duke of Edinburgh needs an outlet, but is he really so very different from other men? He always has to have the latest gadget and on one occasion it was an electric fryer. This had the additional advantage of indulging the passion more peculiar to royalty for doing your own cooking. But the Queen did not care to find the smell of fried sausages still in the dining room at lunchtime and that was the end of the electric fryer.

Devotedly the Duke of Edinburgh set about converting a Victorian silver teapot into an electric kettle for the Queen. The idea was that she could enjoy the thrill, student-style, of making her own tea in her room. But when the Duke wheeled a portable forge into the drawing room after dinner and sparks began to fly all over the upholstery, the Queen had to banish him to more suitable premises.

During a demure Lenten visit to the Deanery at Windsor, the Queen sipped tomato juice and soon made her excuses. Half an hour later Princess Margaret appeared. Following precedent, she was offered some more of the seasonal tomato juice. ‘Good God no!’ she said. ‘Get out the whisky.’ She did not leave for some time.

Somebody once complained to Princess Margaret that the Queen had been hard work at a state dinner. ‘That’s what she’s there for,’ she replied.

Princess Margaret had her doubts about her paternal grandmother. She considered Queen Mary’s slavish devotion to the ideal of monarchy rather vulgar and a somewhat pathetic attempt to make up for not really being Royal herself, which she wasn’t – quite – by birth.

The Queen Mother was always concerned that her daughter, the Queen, should never find out that she used tea bags.

The Queen Mother is only known to have made one faintly bitchy remark. She didn’t really like Edwina Mountbatten, Lord Mountbatten’s ritzy and somewhat wide-ranging wife. When she heard that Edwina had been buried at sea, she said, ‘Poor Edwina, she did always like to make a splash.’

Visiting your family tombs may seem like an odd way to entertain visitors, but this is how things are done in the Royal Family. During an amble around St George’s Chapel, Windsor, a collection of guests passed by the side-chapel where George VI is buried. ‘The King, you know,’ the Queen Mother remarked conversationally, ‘he’s in there.’ Then she added, ‘And I shall be too, one day.’ Later the Queen was heard to say, ‘She doesn’t mind, you see, she really doesn’t mind at all.’

The Duchess of Windsor and the Queen Mother were supposed to have been daggers drawn for years, so there was some curiosity when, at the funeral of her husband, the two met face to face. But the duchess merely inquired, ‘Is your kitchen upstairs or downstairs?’ If the Queen Mother was confused, she didn’t show it. The duchess continued for some time to explain the virtues of an upstairs kitchen before the Queen Mother could deftly extract herself. It was only towards the end of the wake that the Queen Mother once again found the rather terrifying, stick-thin, improbably youthful figure of the duchess at her side. Evidently her first reply had been unsatisfactory because the duchess asked again, ‘Is your kitchen upstairs or downstairs?’

At a ball the Queen Mother was dancing with a young subaltern when she was called away. Upon her return she discovered her partner was now dancing with the Queen. Biding her time, she found, or had found for her, a new partner and relaunched herself on to the dance floor. Round and round they went, until at last the pattern of the dance brought her near the rival couple. ‘Snob!’ she whispered in the ear of the original partner.

A curious exchange was overheard by waiting celebrities as the Queen and the Queen Mother arrived at a West End theatre. ‘Who do you think you are?’ the Queen Mother was saying. ‘The Queen, Mummy, the Queen.’

When the Queen was about to open Sandringham to the public, she confided to guests at Badminton during pre-lunch drinks, ‘Mummy is simply furious with me for doing it.’

At Epsom, the Queen remarked that she hadn’t watched a race through binoculars for years and that doing so now had caused tears to stream down her face. The Queen Mother said dryly, ‘Perhaps it’s all the emotion,’ whereupon the Queen became rather shrill: ‘No, Mummy, you know perfectly well…when you’re standing in the wind…’

One day, contemplating her mother’s limitless wardrobe, the Queen said, ‘I’ll never know why she wants all these dresses. They’re all the same.’

Arriving at a picnic hut on the Balmoral estate, the Queen found herself unable to gain entrance. She hadn’t got the right key. Returning to the castle to fetch it, she came across her mother, who was less than sympathetic. ‘How very odd! Darling, I thought, if it was you, all you had to say was “Open Sesame”.’

Climbing one of the Matopo Hills in South Africa in order to reach the grave of Cecil Rhodes, the then Princess Elizabeth had to surrender her sandals to her mother and continue barefoot. The Queen’s high heels were hopeless for mountain climbing. ‘So like Mummy,’ Princess Elizabeth remarked, ‘to set out in those shoes.’