We Are Amused

In order to relieve the tedium of sitting for her portrait, the Queen commandeers a room at the front of Buckingham Palace overlooking the Mall. Sneakily she arranges to sit near the window. ‘Isn’t the light better?’ she inquires innocently of the painter. But her object is really to be diverted by the tourists below. The real fun comes when they think they’ve seen her. Often she keeps up a running commentary. ‘No, they can’t believe it.’ ‘They’re coming back for another look.’ ‘Their jaws have absolutely dropped a mile.’

The Queen Mother was sitting alone in regal splendour (she was never informally dressed, even in bed), waiting for a repeat of Dad’s Army to begin. But her gin and Dubonnet had not arrived, so she telephoned down to the servants’ quarters. ‘I don’t know what you old queens are doing down there,’ she said, ‘but this old queen is getting rather thirsty.’

Joining the Queen Mother on a bench in Diana Cooper’s drawing room, Lady Freda Berkeley was alarmed to find that the effect of her sitting down was to send the Queen Mother soaring into the air. Dismounting proved impossible and the two ladies spent nearly five minutes see-sawing up and down, whooping with girlish yet gracious delight.

The catering staff at Cheltenham Race Course were doing their best to manage in a tiny kitchen. One of them, sensing the door open behind her, said forthrightly, ‘You can’t come in here. There isn’t room to swing a cat.’ It was only at this point that she chose to look round – to find the Queen Mother, blinking in the doorway. She thought to herself, ‘This is a Tower job, at the very least.’ But the Queen Mother was unperturbed. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I can see that you are rather cosy,’ and was gone.

During the First World War an officer was busy with paperwork in his room not far behind the front line. When someone opened his door and appeared to hang about indecisively, the officer snapped, ‘Come in or go out, but shut the bloody door.’ This produced no effect so, too preoccupied to look up, he tried again, ‘Come in or go out, but shut the bloody door.’ Still no reaction. He tried a third time, and only then did he think to look up, to find His Majesty George V, rather nonplussed, gazing down on him. Years later, when this officer was given an honour, the King remembered him well. ‘Come in or go out, but shut the bloody door,’ was his opening remark at the investiture.

A stable girl at Windsor saw out of the corner of her eye somebody apparently at a loose end in the stable yard. ‘Go and fetch some water!’ she commanded. A few moments later she turned round to see the Queen trotting up obediently bearing a full pail.

As the Investiture of the Prince of Wales was about to begin, the Queen cried out at a sudden jabbing pain in her side. For a moment it was feared Charles would become King rather sooner than he had bargained for. Upon investigation, it turned out that a pin had been left in her frock.

At a grand reception at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Princess Margaret’s right arm swung up, it swung down, and up it swung again. Onlookers began to wonder if the rumours that Royalty are sometimes asleep and being worked mechanically were in fact true. Then someone noticed that the hand on the end of the agitated arm held an empty glass. The Princess was expressing her desire for more whisky. This was all very well but sadly she had had her meagre ration and there was none.

After a film premiere Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, John Betjeman, Princess Margaret, Prince Charles and Lord Snowdon convened in a private room at Rules Restaurant in Covent Garden. When Prince Charles had to leave early, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, as the hostess, accompanied him to the street door, going barefoot because she had kicked off her shoes during dinner. While she was out of the room, Princess Margaret retrieved the shoes from under the table and placed them on Lady Elizabeth’s plate.

Alan Clark watched the Queen Mother’s 90th Birthday Parade from a balcony with Princess Margaret and Prince Charles. It struck him as odd that Prince Charles should block his aunt’s view and that she should not protest. Only when the Prince moved suddenly and was sharply told by the Princess to resume his previous position, did Clark work out what she was up to. In order that she should be able to smoke throughout the parade, her first priority was to be screened from the photographers, even if that meant that she could see nothing herself. Bad Princess Margaret.

Antonio Carluccio once got into a slight muddle in the presence of Princess Margaret. He explained that he had been picking mushrooms with ‘your brother’. What he meant was ‘your nephew’, Prince Charles. But Princess Margaret was not at all put out. ‘You’ve made my day,’ she said, patting her hair becomingly.

When Lord Woodrow Wyatt was propounding his interesting theory that the reason so many spies emanated from Cambridge rather than Oxford was because Cambridge was a dead-end town and not even the train went on anywhere after it, Princess Margaret soon put him in his place. ‘Yes, it does,’ she said. ‘It goes to Sandringham.’

At the laying of the foundation stone of the National Theatre, it was noticed that the Queen Mother held her bouquet at some distance from her nose. Enchantingly it contained specimens of all the flora mentioned in Shakespeare, including a leek, a dock leaf, bogwort and rank fumitory.

In extreme old age, the Queen Mother teamed up with Sir Stephen Runciman, who was also magnificently ancient. She used to like dining at his club, the Athenaeum and her absolutely favourite moment came, when, on the way to the loo, she would say to her escort, ‘Come on, do let’s.’ Then, blazing with naughtiness, she would open the door of the men-only sitting room, pop her head in for just long enough to observe the rumbling discomfiture of the grandees within, before flitting away.

Coming together into the auditorium at Covent Garden, Sir Frederick Ashton and the Queen Mother received a rapturous reception. ‘Don’t they just love us old queens!’ the Queen Mother whispered to Ashton.

When the Queen Mother came to lunch, Diana Cooper would often assemble a collection of unmarried and uninhibited clergy for drinks beforehand. On one occasion, as she was leaving, the Queen Mother remarked to her hostess, ‘I did enjoy your bouquet of clergy.’