The six years of the Second World War, from 1939 to 1945, were the most important of Elizabeth’s time as queen. The King sought her advice on most matters pertaining to the war; as she put it later, “The King told me everything. Well one had to, you see, because you couldn’t not, in a way. There was only us there. So obviously he had to tell one things. But one was so dreadfully discreet, that even now I feel nervous sometimes, about talking about things. You know, you knew something and you couldn’t say a word about it, [even] when you heard people talking absolute nonsense.” The Queen’s popularity, and her refusal to evacuate during the Nazi bombardment, proved such a significant boost to British morale that Hitler paid Elizabeth the compliment of her life by dubbing her “the most dangerous woman in Europe.”
Most of the men on Elizabeth’s side of the family were involved in this war effort as they had been in the last, which caused her a shudder during a visit to the Black Watch regiment, where she was shocked to see her eldest nephew, John Bowes-Lyon, in uniform.I “He suddenly looked exactly like my brother Fergus who was killed at [the Battle of] Loos, & in the same regiment,” she wrote to Queen Mary. “It was uncanny in a way, & desperately sad to feel that all that ghastly waste was starting again at the bidding of a lunatic.” John was killed fighting against a joint Italian-German force in Egypt. Another nephew—her sister Mary’s eldest—was captured by the Nazis and sent to the notorious Colditz prison.1
Back in England, the Queen’s youngest brother David helped lead what he called “one of Britain’s secret armies.” David, who turned forty in 1942, had helped found a secret department called the Political Warfare Executive, whose acronym prompted its nickname, “Pee-Wee.” Although politically David Bowes-Lyon was slightly to the right of Cleopatra, he partnered in leadership with a Labour politician, Hugh Dalton, who proudly described himself an anti-monarchist “in every country but my own.” Together, they worked to set up nineteen pirate radio stations for “a group of German socialists who are calling on other German socialists to join them in their fight.” Pee-Wee requisitioned the Duke of Beaufort’s country estate, from which they broadcast these messages into the heart of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Elizabeth’s father Claude passed away at Glamis on November 7, 1944, a few months before his ninetieth birthday. Princess Elizabeth was particularly upset at her grandfather’s death. The 1940s were times of transition for the family, as the princesses became teenagers and then adults. The King referred to his wife and daughters as “We Four” or “Us Four,” a happy unit, and he struggled as the princesses matured. The Queen, the more pragmatic of the two parents, reminded her husband, “They grow up and leave us, and we must make the best of it.” Princess Elizabeth wanted to volunteer for the war effort on the grounds that “I ought to do as other girls of my own age do.” The Queen supported her request—and the Princess eventually trained as a mechanic—but not before the King dragged his feet and urged her to enjoy what was left of her childhood. The Queen also set up a Girl Guide troop based at Buckingham Palace so that Princess Margaret could have regular contact with friends her own age.
In the first two decades of her marriage, Elizabeth had frequently met European royalty. The onslaught of the Nazi armies in the early 1940s sent many more crowned heads into her company. Several exiled monarchs fled to London, including Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, arriving at Paddington Station with nothing more than a shopping bag and a tin hat. Young King Peter II of Yugoslavia was welcomed by the British royals, though they were less fond of his Romanian mother, the Queen Mother Maria; Princess Marina asked Elizabeth not to invite Queen Maria to a weekend at Windsor Castle because she was “a bore, a lesbian, and an intriguante [schemer].” There was a great deal of sympathy in Britain for the Dutch and Norwegian royals but almost none for Greece’s King George II, whom Tommy Lascelles thought would be happy enough to lose his throne permanently if it meant he could spend the rest of his life at London’s beautiful Brown’s Hotel—“his spiritual home,” as Lascelles put it.
A private memorandum to the British Prime Minister noted, “I observe that the Nazis both in Norway and in Holland made a desperate attempt to capture the Royal Family; no doubt they will do the same in this country if they can.” The Nazis’ seizure of the Belgian, and later Danish, royal families was a worry for the Allies, since the imprisoned figureheads might be used as a tool to manipulate the local resistance, whereas the Dutch and Norwegian monarchs proved effective in galvanising anti-Nazi organisations. Sir Winston Churchill, who became Prime Minister in 1940, was determined that the British royals would become neither prisoners nor pawns.
Despite his concerns for her safety, Elizabeth did not initially have much affection for Churchill. (Tommy Lascelles described her as “very anti-Winston.”) She distrusted his ambition and his love of the limelight, and she resented the support he had given to Edward VIII, before and after the Abdication. Nonetheless, by the time she, the King and Churchill stood on the Buckingham Palace balcony to celebrate Allied victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, she had come to respect Churchill’s skills as a wartime leader and as an orator. She was as surprised as anybody when, on July 5, 1945, two months after victory, he lost the General Election by a landslide, in favour of a Labour government with Clement Attlee as the new Prime Minister. The British electorate saw Churchill as a man better suited to lead in war than in peace. Attlee hiked taxation on the upper classes, particularly the aristocracy, which did not prevent him forming a friendship with the King, although the pro-aristocracy Elizabeth was appalled. Attlee defended his fiscal policy by saying that “a juster distribution of wealth was not a policy to soak the rich or to take revenge, but because a society with gross inequalities of wealth and opportunity is fundamentally unhealthy.” The coalmines, the railways, the gas, the electricity, then later the iron and steel industries were all nationalised, while the Labour government also helped preside over British imperial withdrawal from India and created a National Health Service, whereby British taxes were used to fund a “cradle to grave” service of free and universal healthcare.
By 1940, the Wehrmacht had swept through most of western Europe, and Britain seemed set to be next. In preparation for the expected Nazi invasion, Elizabeth took shooting lessons with pistols and rifles in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, sometimes using as her targets the scurrying rats who were representatives of the large rodent community set loose on London’s streets as buildings collapsed in the air raids. Elizabeth was intent on putting up a good fight and she said that she planned to take as many Nazis as possible out with her before she was killed or captured. “I shall not go down like the others,” she declared, in a rather unsympathetic take on the other royal refugees flocking to London at the time.
The government wanted the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret sent abroad as soon as possible to remove two possible targets for the Nazis. The Queen refused, famously saying, “The children will not go without me. I won’t leave the King. And the King will never leave.” Nonetheless, Churchill continued to plan for evacuation in the event of an invasion. A Tudor-style mansion on Vancouver Island was secretly purchased as a Canadian Buckingham Palace to serve if Britain fell and a government in exile had to be established to continue the fight. Five officers, leading 124 men from the Household Cavalry and Brigade of Guards, were ordered to smuggle the royals out of London the moment the Nazis landed. Four obscure safe houses were picked along the route between London and Liverpool, where the royals would be put on a ship for Canada—forcibly, if need be. The Coats Mission, named after its commander, Major James Coats, were warned to expect hefty resistance from the Queen, who in several conversations had stressed, “I should die if I had to leave.” She told an equerry, “The King had no intention of abandoning Britain. We would have seen it out to the bitter end. You do not abandon your country.”
In the end, the German invasion of Britain never materialised. And thus, neither did the final image of Queen Elizabeth charging down the Mall, firing off her gun like a suicidal yet regal Annie Oakley.
When their cities were bombed, thousands of British children were evacuated to surrogate homes in the countryside. The princesses went to Windsor Castle, an eleventh-century fortress on the outskirts of London, substantially renovated in the nineteenth century, and subsequently one of the British Royal Family’s favourite homes. During the war, the King and Queen spent their nights there and their days at Buckingham Palace, which kept them safer after the bombing attacks shifted predominantly to night-time. In the early stages of the aerial raids on British cities, known then and afterwards as the Blitz, it had made little or no difference; in the summer and autumn of 1940 in particular, bombs were dropped by German aircraft during the day as often as they were by night.
At the start of the Blitz, when the bombs had hit nowhere in London save the East End of the city with its factories, industries and predominantly working-class neighbourhoods, the King and Queen had been booed and jeered during their visits to attacked areas. An angry resident explained, “It’s all very well for them traipsing around saying how their hearts bleed for us and they share our suffering, and then going home to a roaring fire in one of their six houses.” Class tensions were at an all-time high at that stage of the war, not helped by disgusting stories of luxury hotels in the West End installing air raid shelters complete with dancefloors so their upper-class patrons could keep enjoying their night as the city burned above them. As a precaution, rather less plush air raid shelters were also installed in Buckingham Palace.
On the morning of September 13, shortly after they had arrived in London from Windsor, the Queen heard the air raid sirens and went to find the King to walk down to the shelter together. Before they went, he asked her to help him take out an eyelash, when they heard the whirring propellers of a Luftwaffe bomber.
They looked at each other and said, “Ah, a German.”
Elizabeth wrote later that day that there followed “the noise of an aircraft diving at great speed, that we had only time to look foolishly at each other, when the scream hurtled past us, and exploded with a tremendous crash in the quadrangle. I saw a great column of smoke & earth thrown up into the air, and then dashed like lightning into the corridor.” A second bomb exploded nearby. “It is curious how one’s instinct works at these moments of great danger,” she continued, “as quite without thinking, the urge was to get away from the windows. Everybody remained wonderfully calm, and we went down to the shelter. I went along to see if the housemaids were all right.”
Someone nearby shouted for bandages for three labourers who had been strengthening the foundations beneath the chapel when the bomb went “through the floor above them. My knees trembled a little bit for a minute or two after the explosions! But we both feel quite well today, tho’ just a bit tired. I was so pleased with the behaviour of our servants.” Remembering that the palace kitchens had a glass ceiling, the Queen went to check on the staff, where she found a chef still carrying on as if nothing had happened. When she asked if he was all right, the chef dismissively referred to the bomb in French as “a little something in the corner, a little noise.” He “took the opportunity to tell me of his unshakeable conviction that France will rise again!”II
The King, the Queen and the other occupants had lunch in the palace air raid shelter. The all-clear sounded at about 1:30, which meant they did not have to cancel their trip to the East End. “The damage there is ghastly,” the Queen told Queen Mary. “I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city, when we walked down a little empty street. All the houses evacuated and yet through the broken windows one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left. At the end of the street was a school which was hit, and collapsed on top of 500 people waiting to be evacuated—about 200 [bodies] are still under the ruins. It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction. I think that really I mind it much more than being bombed myself. The people are marvellous… We must win in the end.”2
Elizabeth was preparing for a visit to Northern Ireland in June 1942 when her eighteen-year-old goddaughter, Elizabeth Vyner, died of meningitis while serving with the Women’s Royal Naval Service (popularly nicknamed the “Wrens”).
The news arrived in a letter from Elizabeth Vyner’s grieving mother, Doris. The Queen called it:
your wonderfully brave and beautiful letter… [I] can only say how I am thinking of you all the time, and praying with all my heart that your great courage will take you through these terrible days… As you say, it is wonderful that Elizabeth had her heart’s desire, and happiness and laughter, and that she will not know sorrow or despair… I pray God that I may be allowed to share in the inspiration of your tremendous courage and hope and faith. Your letter was like a shining light in a dark world, and I feel absolutely confident that your great spirit will take you through all this. Darling Doris, if only loving thoughts could help. I am thinking of you & Clare & the boys all the time. Later on, let me know when you feel like seeing me & I will come so gladly.
With all my love & everything I have, Elizabeth.
The visit to Northern Ireland went ahead as scheduled. Unlike the other parts of the United Kingdom, from 1922 until 1972 Northern Ireland had its own prime minister, who dealt with local matters of government. In 1942 the post was held by John Andrews, whose brother Thomas had helped design—and drowned on—the Titanic thirty years earlier. Prime Minister Andrews, with his whole cabinet, was waiting on the quay as the King and Queen arrived; a royal official described Andrews as “inflexible as granite” against the idea of Irish reunification.
This was the first visit to Northern Ireland for the King’s Private Secretary Tommy Lascelles, who was surprised by the extent of the Royal Family’s popularity in the region. It is worth noting by way of historical context that, this time, the King and Queen were taken only to areas that strongly supported Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom. They began with the industrialised quarter of east Belfast, where they visited shipyards and military aircraft manufacturers. From there, to the governor’s residence at Hillsborough Castle, then to the Parliament buildings at Stormont in Belfast and to the port town of Bangor. Here Lascelles witnessed “a really remarkable demonstration of loyal enthusiasm, which I have never seen surpassed in my twenty years’ experience. We were mobbed by a boisterous but thoroughly well-mannered crowd… Considering the strict secrecy that had necessarily been observed about the visit until that morning, the streets were remarkably crowded, and always deafeningly vociferous.”
One of those cheering on the Belfast streets in 1942 remembers, “We sort of suspected they were coming or somebody was coming. The men in the factories could just tell from the way their bosses were carrying on in the days leading up to it. And sure, you could never hide anything from an east Belfast housewife, they knew everything. Anyway, when we heard the Queen was coming, the streets were bunged to cheer them. Oh, we loved her! The King was such a good man, of course, I wouldn’t say a word against him, but—the Queen. I adored her. I still adore her. Belfast had been flattened by the Nazis, but we were still standing—and there they were. And she, the Queen I mean, didn’t stop smiling that whole day. She respected the people of Belfast enough to turn up and show them she was enjoying her time there. Doesn’t matter if you’re tired or miserable sometimes; you put a smile on your face and your best foot forward!” A pause, then, “But do you know one of the reasons I always had such a soft spot for her? You just knew she had a wee touch of the imp to her. You could tell she’d be a great laugh with a couple of whiskeys in her. Great woman. Tough as nails. I still love her.”
While Winston Churchill’s affection for the former Edward VIII survived the Abdication crisis, it did not survive the war. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor had been in Paris when the German army invaded France. There were fears in London that Hitler hoped to capture the Duke of Windsor and use him as a Nazi puppet, parading him as a rival king to his brother George VI, then put him on the British throne to legitimise a Nazi occupation. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former German ambassador to the United Kingdom, was explicit about this: “Germany is determined to force England to peace by every means of power and, upon this happening, would be prepared to accommodate any desire expressed by the Duke, especially with a view to the assumption of the English Throne by the Duke and Duchess.” Hitler offered to put 50 million francs into a Swiss bank account for the Duke and Duchess’s use, if they would publicly distance themselves from the British Royal Family. The Duke then gave an interview to an American magazine in which he strongly implied that Britain could not win the war against Germany; this infuriated Churchill, whose goal was to convince America to join the war as Britain’s ally. He wrote to the Duke of Windsor to tell him in no uncertain terms that his “language, whatever was meant, will certainly be interpreted as defeatist and pro-Nazi… I would wish, indeed, that your Royal Highness would seek advice before making public statements of this kind.”
As the Nazis closed in on Paris, the Duke of Windsor disobeyed a direct order from his brother to return to Britain. For the former king’s growing number of sceptics, it looked like he wanted to be “captured” by the Nazis. Since the roads north towards England were blocked by the Wehrmacht, the British government decided to evacuate the Duke and Duchess south to Spain, which, although then ruled by the crypto-fascist dictator General Francisco Franco, remained officially neutral. The couple finally left France, only to again reject orders in Spain, sent via the British embassy in Madrid. As bombs rained down on British cities and children were being evacuated in their thousands, the Duke refused to co-operate until Wallis was recognised as Her Royal Highness. “My wife and I must not risk finding ourselves once more regarded by the British public as in different status to other members of my family,” he informed Churchill.
Churchill replied, “Your Royal Highness has taken active military rank and [so] refusal to obey direct orders of competent military authority would create a serious situation. I hope it will not be necessary for such orders to be sent. I most strongly urge immediate compliance with the wishes of the Government.” The King approved this telegram to the Duke, who not only dug in his heels but upped his conditions with the demand that both he and his wife be received at an audience at Buckingham Palace by the King and Queen, an event that should be included in the Court Circular, the daily printed record of the Royal Household’s engagements. While the Duke and Duchess have many admirers even today, it is hard to find anything admirable in the Duke’s priorities in 1940. He stood like a Windsor Nero in a Huntsman suit, fiddling as Europe burned in front of him, obsessing over trivialities and his creature comforts as millions were displaced and armies mobilised.
The British had to get him out of the Nazis’ way. There was already a great deal of suspicion about his meandering “escape” from Paris, and Madrid was too easily accessible for kidnappers, especially since the Duke was unlikely to resist. He gave the impression that he would rather be in Berlin with his wife treated as an HRH than in London where she wasn’t. Churchill felt they had to give the former king something to do. The governorship of the Bahamas was suggested, an idea that Elizabeth strongly but unsuccessfully opposed. She argued with justification that her brother-in-law had shown himself beyond unreliable throughout the war. With far less justification, she also claimed that “the Duchess of Windsor is looked upon as the lowest of the low.” Churchill, armed with reports from the British intelligence services, agreed with the Queen on the former point and wrote, “The activities of the Duke of Windsor on the Continent in recent months have caused [His Majesty] and myself grave uneasiness as his inclinations are well known to be pro-Nazi.”
Despite Elizabeth’s preference that the Duke be left to twiddle his thumbs or play golf in Spain, the Bahamas was far enough from the major theatre of the war to keep him out of trouble, and so the Duke was appointed governor. He moved to Portugal in preparation for boarding a British warship to the Caribbean. Here too, however, he delayed by refusing to embark until he received “many of our things that we shall need in the Bahamas and which we are trying to recover from France.” Given that Paris had just fallen to the Nazis, shipping the Duke and Duchess’s furniture was likely to prove a little tricky.
The Duke and Duchess were eventually persuaded by their friends to board the warship, and they spent most of the war years living in the governor’s mansion in the Bahamas. They complained; everybody else was envious. In October 1945, five months after the end of the war, the Duke asked for a new position, one that strikes a chill. He wanted to be made Britain’s ambassador to Argentina. The Queen and Tommy Lascelles swooped in to veto this; Lascelles gave a three-point rebuttal, the second item of which was a study in understatement: “The Duke has certain disagreeable personal skeletons in his cupboard… all proven German agents,” many of whom were fleeing to Argentina in the aftermath of Nazi defeat or seeking papers to help them do so. It is worth noting that the King told everything to his wife in those years, including the content of intelligence reports; when discussing Edward VIII later with the historian Kenneth Rose, Elizabeth said, “I wonder whether he really liked England. I am certain, however, that he did want to come back as King.”
Due to the war, the Duke of Windsor had not been able to return from the Bahamas for the funeral of his younger brother, the Duke of Kent, who was killed in a military air crash on August 25, 1942. Only seven weeks earlier, Princess Marina had given birth to their third child and second son, Prince Michael. At the funeral, the Queen had to help Marina to her feet after prayers, during which the King and his brother Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, wept. Afterwards, as the mourners filed out, the Dowager Countess of Oxford and Asquith spotted the playwright Noël Coward, to whom she said, “Very well done, wasn’t it?” Which Coward thought sounded “as though she had been at a successful first night. I thought this offensive and unforgivable.”
As mentioned in the previous chapter, there were long-standing rumours in London theatre circles that Coward and the Duke of Kent had been romantically involved with one another. It was believed by people who knew one, or both, well, and it was never denied by Coward, although London’s rumour mill is a thing of its own, so a dose of caution should be maintained with most of its offerings. Chips Channon, who himself seems to have been in unrequited love with the Duke of Kent for years, cryptically referred to Kent’s sexuality in his diaries: “Of course he had a secret of which he rarely talked and was ashamed.” Channon thought that Kent and Marina “must have been the most beautiful and dazzling couple in the world.” He remembered the days just before the Abdication, when he memorably heard of the scandal while standing bare-legged in lederhosen as the Duke arrived in distress at his apartment just as Channon was about to leave for a costume ball at the Austrian Legation. That night, the Duke had told Channon that both he and Marina had decided they would prefer to see Wallis as queen, or princess consort, rather than Elizabeth, “as they both like her better.” Mediatisation suddenly mattered less for Princess Marina.
The relationship had somewhat improved in the six years between the Abdication and the Duke of Kent’s tragic death—Elizabeth greatly admired Marina’s care for her three children—and the King wanted to help the widowed Princess with her finances by asking the government to exempt her from inheritance tax. War widows were, generally, excused from death duties, but Tommy Lascelles persuaded the King not to lobby on Marina’s behalf, since to do so in wartime would be disastrous in terms of public relations given the Princess’s unique privileges and wealth. “Taxation no doubts leans as heavily on his widow as it does on the rest of us,” Lascelles concluded, “she surely ought to be able to jog along with what she’s got; and if she can’t, she has a number of very rich in-laws who could quite well help her without any embarrassment to themselves.”
Shortly after the Duke of Kent’s funeral, Elizabeth was floored for two weeks by another bout of the flu. Thus commenced her lifelong belief in homeopathy, as she was treated at Balmoral by Sir John Weir, first President of the British Faculty of Homeopathy. Tommy Lascelles was also unwell, though for very different reasons, after drawing a card that read “a St. Bernard” during a game of charades at Buckingham Palace. The barking he had embarked upon to win the point had exacted a hefty toll on his vocal cords. The Queen played on the same charades team as Eleanor Roosevelt, who was visiting London after America’s entry to the war in late 1941; Churchill attended the party but declined to join the game. Lascelles, quite unnecessarily, summarised in his diary that the First Lady “looks like a she-camel, and is tough; but I like her, and see dignity, and even greatness, in her.” Roosevelt was surprised by the strictness of the rationing and the meagre standard of the food offered even at the royal table.3 This was the situation only in London. In the countryside, the King, the Queen, and their entourage ate better, since there was no rationing of game or fish, both of which were plentiful on their estates.4
In October 1940, before America joined the war, Elizabeth had written despondently, “There is not a bright spot anywhere.” The tide seemed to have turned by 1943 when, during the King’s visit to the armed forces in Malta, the Queen and the Duke of Gloucester carried out the monarch’s functions on his behalf. There were fewer bombed-out sites for the Queen to visit as the Luftwaffe’s capabilities had begun to falter. At the worst stage of the Blitz, Elizabeth had found each visit profoundly moving and privately told her elderly mother-in-law, who had been evacuated to live with a niece in the countryside, that “I feel quite exhausted after seeing and hearing so much sadness, sorrow, heroism and magnificent spirit.”
When the first bomb hit Buckingham Palace, Elizabeth was almost relieved, remarking that she finally felt she could look the people of the East End in the face. It certainly seems to have marked a change in attitudes to the royals when they visited affected areas. This quote however, famous in the 1940s, has since been sharply critiqued as an example of privileged cluelessness, since even with the bomb attack on “dear old BP” Elizabeth had been able to recuperate that night in the luxury and comparative safety of Windsor Castle. Elizabeth was not stupid, and elsewhere in her letters she makes it clear that her troubles could not compare to those of working-class communities. She also strongly resented those in the upper class who continued to dance the night away throughout the Blitz. Her comment articulated that she did not feel her family should remain unscathed, rather than any mistaken belief that her sufferings were now equal to those of the people she met in the East End. It is not, however, a quote that has necessarily dated well.
In terms of what to wear to the bombed neighbourhoods, the Queen’s wardrobe was again devoid of black. As with the French visit of 1938, it was felt to send too depressing a message. Instead, she wore lilacs, pinks and blues, usually one colour, even one hue. None of these colours were traditionally associated with despair, and they would not show the dust from the bomb sites. Churchill’s government stipulated that her clothes should neither look too shabby, as it suggested defeatism, nor too ostentatious, which suggested her being out of touch.
The relationship between Elizabeth and the East End came to be one of the most special to her from her time as Queen. Every year on her birthday until the end of her life, a residents’ group representing East End survivors of the Blitz sent a birthday cake to the Queen Mother’s residence. Aged eighty-seven, she visited the Queen’s Head pub on Flamborough Street, where she asked the landlord, Vic Jones, if he would teach her how to pour her own pint. “I was told three months before that it was happening,” Jones said about the 1987 visit, “and I was warned not to tell anyone until ten days beforehand. My family had been in the trade since 1881—they ran the Bull’s Head in Duckett Street. But the Blitz hit us badly. We lost twenty-two members of the family—grandfather, uncles, cousins. So it did feel relevant when the Palace approached me about her visit. The Palace bloke said: ‘Don’t worry. She will make you feel at ease.’ I didn’t believe him. But he was right. She was terrific. You have to remember she was an old lady. I shook her hand and she felt like a sparrow and I was so scared I might crush her. I asked her what she wanted to drink and she asked for a pint of Special. She poured it herself and she knocked back at least three-quarters of it. I have to say I was impressed.”
Charles Friend, who as an adult became famous in the East End for his local charity work, remembered when Elizabeth visited his street after it was hit by the Luftwaffe: “I was about thirteen, and it is a day I will never forget. She had a word for everybody. She came and chatted as if she had known them all her life. It was a real morale booster to the East End. My mother and her friends were in tears, something I had never seen before. She was fabulous. We never forgot her and she never forgot us. She was the greatest royal favourite there has ever been, and she would always be Number One.”
During these visits, Elizabeth broke with protocol and held babies while their mothers showed them around their homes. She put her arms round people as they sobbed, and said, “Perhaps I can try. I’m rather good with dogs,” as she coaxed a family’s pet out of a half-collapsed house, from which the terrified pup refused to budge. Bill Bartley, who also met Elizabeth at the East End bomb sites, recalled, “There was still an air raid on when she walked through the rubble. I always thought the world of her. She doesn’t sit back pompous-like. I remember her putting her arm round people covered in blood and grime and consoling them.” Elizabeth repeated this behaviour whenever she visited other cities targeted by the Luftwaffe. Lord Harlech, the Civil Defence Commissioner for the North-East of England, told a friend, “When the car stops, the Queen nips out into the snow and goes straight into the middle of the crowd and starts talking to them. For a moment or two they just gaze and gape in astonishment. But then they all start talking at once. ‘Hi! Your Majesty! Look here!’ ”
Around the dinner party tables of the capital, the Queen’s popularity with the middle and working class counted against her. In the sepulchral gloom of dining rooms with their windows resentfully blacked out to confuse the Luftwaffe, a diner sensed a mood of “eighteenth-century malice” when the Queen’s name came up in conversation. Eyebrows arched and lips curled in a milieu where Elizabeth’s weight gain was judged a more damning indictment than her in-laws’ fascism. As the port was passed, you might hear the views of the Welsh newspaper tycoon, Lord Kemsley, who thought the King and Queen reeked of “ineptitude, incompetence and lack of all imagination,” although he dared not attack them in his newspapers for fear of a public backlash. To the discontented remnants of the Appeasement brigade and their friends, the King “sounds almost idiotic” because of his speech impediment. At a similar party, you might find Bertie’s youngest sibling, the Duke of Kent, laughing with Chips Channon at his brother’s middle-class financial habits: “Do you know what Bertie does with his money?” the Duke asked Channon. “Why, he invests it!” At another, one might have heard the exiled Crown Prince of Greece sneering to his friends about Queen Elizabeth’s manners. Did you know, she hadn’t kissed him or his brother on the cheek by way of greeting? Maybe she had not learned how to be truly royal yet, mused the Crown Prince.
Seeing only each other, talking to nobody who thought any differently to themselves, this group distracted themselves from their own dwindling relevance by predicting that it was only a matter of time before the King and Queen, perhaps even the monarchy itself, lost its appeal. After all, Elizabeth was “treacherous and snobbish for all her charm.” Being called snobbish by this set was hypocrisy on the scale of being called prejudiced by Mussolini. Elizabeth’s smiles while visiting people were mocked by baroquely named nonentities such as the Vicomtesse de Janzé, a British socialite married to a French aristocrat, who gave the Queen the derisive nickname “Grinning Liz.” It stuck. Even the Duke of Kent started using it, behind her back.
Two years after the Second World War ended, and just before dinner, the Queen handed a Bible to Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa. The Bible had once belonged to Paul Kruger, Afrikaner President of South Africa until he was defeated by the British during the Second Boer War in 1902. A British soldier had stolen the Krugers’ family Bible as a spoil of victory. Forty-four years later, his widow heard that the Royal Family were going on a state visit to South Africa, so she wrote to the Queen with the request that she bring the Bible back to its homeland.
On the tour, the royals met a surviving veteran of the Boer War, who told Elizabeth that they would never forgive the English for what they had done. To which the Queen smoothly replied, “I understand perfectly. We feel very much the same in Scotland, too.” She shocked her hosts by walking over to talk to inmates from a local leper colony and quickly recovered her balance seconds before becoming airborne when the red carpet she was walking upon was found regrettably to be still attached to the train slowly easing away behind her. During an expedition to an ostrich farm, the King was invited to clip the tail of one of the birds. There was a moment’s awkwardness when everyone could see he had performed the task incorrectly, whereupon the Queen swooped in to spare him any embarrassment and whacked the right amount off in one go. “We do a lot of gardening at home,” she beamed, scissors aloft. “The King is good at digging and weeding. It is I who concentrate on the secateurs.”
The King initially seemed to be on excellent form. A gentleman in the crowd had slathered a huge amount of brilliantine gel into his hair. On the positive side of things, this holds the hair intact like a slab of marble, but it also suffers the somewhat negative side-effect of attracting bees, quite a few of whom emerged as he doffed his cap to bow to the King. George VI told him not to worry because it is better to have bees in the bonnet than ants in the pants.
Behind the scenes, the King was struggling. He lost a stone in weight over the course of the South African tour and, onboard their train, he seemed exhausted. Before he left Britain, the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had emphasised to the King how important it was that the visit be a success. Since 1910, in the aftermath of British victory in the Second Boer War, South Africa had technically been a monarchy, operating as a self-governing protectorate of the British Empire. Many in the Boer community, which consisted mostly of the white Afrikaans-speaking descendants of Dutch colonists, were still strongly anti-British and anti-monarchy. The royals’ visit came just before a general election in South Africa at which the Afrikaans-led National Party was expected to make major gains. The National Party’s two principal aims were to create an independent South African republic and to introduce a system of rigid racial segregation: Apartheid.
Before sailing to South Africa with her parents, Princess Margaret, then sixteen, told her grandmother Queen Mary that she had never met anybody who was not white before. Upon arrival, Margaret wrote, with some surprise, that the white people did not seem very nice in South Africa. This view was shared by the Prime Minister’s representative to the royal party, who described “disgusting behaviour” from “a large percent of the so-called top-notchers of either Cape Town or Port Elizabeth.” Adding to the opposition from the Afrikaans community to the royals visiting in the first place, there was almost a diplomatic incident over the King’s insistence on personally pinning medals on black war veterans; the pro-Apartheid movement claimed that white people had to be kept completely separated from other races, even invoking absurd “medical” conspiracy theories to promote their claims. Neither, when the King and Queen were overheard referring to the South African police as “the Gestapo,” were their comments well received by white South African nationalists.
The constant supervision, interference and criticism, as well as the dawning realisation that the tour was not going to do enough to bolster support for the pro-British faction in South Africa, contributed to the King’s depression. Although they had flown to Belfast for the victory celebrations at the end of the war in 1945, the Queen remained nervous about aeroplanes, which perhaps explains why all their travel within South Africa was by rail or road. During their drive to Johannesburg, the King snapped: he launched himself into a confused and confusing tirade, shouting directions at his baffled chauffeur. The Queen tried to soothe her husband, while his daughters attempted to cover up their father’s panic by making good-natured jokes. As the chauffeur became more and more unsure, the King’s equerry, a war hero named Group Captain Peter Townsend, turned round from the front passenger seat to shout at the King, “For Heaven’s sake, shut up, or there’s going to be an accident!” That evening, the King came to Townsend to apologise: “I am sorry about today. I was very tired.”
Two high-profile public royal murders in Elizabeth’s lifetime had taken place in motorcades—those of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914 and of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in 1934—and she worried over her husband’s safety. As they were being driven through cheering crowds in Pretoria, Elizabeth saw a man from the Zulu community slip past the police lining the royal route. They began chasing after him as he ran towards the car, shouting something they could not hear over the crowd and the cars’ engines. When he reached the door of the slow-moving royal automobile, its top down, Elizabeth threw herself in front of her husband, raised her parasol and smacked the man with it. He stumbled back and was caught by the police, who took him away. Days later, Elizabeth was horrified to hear that the man had been shouting, “My Princess!” (some sources say it was “My King!”), and he was carrying a card that he wanted to give to the Princess Elizabeth for her twenty-first birthday. The South African police had dragged him away as the motorcade drove on, and they then beat, punched and kicked him until he lost consciousness. Decades later and in old age, Elizabeth still referred to the events of that day as “the worst mistake of my life.”
After the National Party’s victory, Elizabeth would not meet a South African head of state until she had tea with President Nelson Mandela in 1996. In the years between, Mandela had spent twenty-seven years in prison as the most famous opponent of the Apartheid that Elizabeth’s 1947 visit had so spectacularly failed to prevent.
Elizabeth might have liked to see her eldest daughter marry a British aristocrat. The younger Elizabeth was set on one candidate, and one only—Philip, a prince who had been born on a kitchen table in Corfu as his parents fled the political turmoil that swept his uncle King Constantine I from the throne of Greece. The exiled Philip had been educated initially in Germany and then in the United Kingdom, where he joined the Royal Navy and served in the Second World War. There had been a great deal of tragedy in Philip’s early life. His mother was institutionalised for years as the result of a nervous breakdown, culminating in a possible misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. Philip left Germany when his Jewish headmaster, Kurt Hahn, was forced to flee and set up a new school in Scotland; Philip was among its pupils, to the discomfiture of several of his German brothers-in-law who joined the Nazi Party. One of them, travelling with Philip’s pregnant sister Grand Duchess Cecilie, was en route to a family wedding in England when their aeroplane crashed in fog. Cecilie had apparently gone into labour as the aeroplane plummeted, for her remains and those of the baby were found in the wreckage with those of her husband, her mother-in-law and Cecilie’s two sons, aged six and four at the time of their deaths. Initially, Cecilie’s only surviving child was her infant daughter Princess Johanna, too young to fly with the family in 1937, but who then died of meningitis two years later.
Love and support for Philip were offered by his mother’s Mountbatten relatives, including his cousins Patricia and Pamela, who adored him, and by his uncle “Dickie,” Lord Mountbatten, who was Supreme Allied Commander of the South-Asia Theatre during the Second World War. Stability was provided by Gordonstoun, the Scottish boarding school founded by Philip’s exiled German headmaster. Philip and Princess Elizabeth met briefly on several occasions in the 1930s, and by the tail end of the war, romantic feelings had developed. Lord Mountbatten was thrilled, so much so that Philip had to ask him to take a step back from meddling.
Neither the King nor the Queen were quite so enthusiastic. The King did not want to see the family unit break up just yet, while the Queen harboured reservations about Philip’s suitability and Mountbatten’s enthusiasm. She worried that Philip leaned left in his politics and that Lord Mountbatten was a little too fond of publicity—and far too fond of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Princess Elizabeth held her ground, and after Philip was invited to join the Royal Family at Balmoral, he reassured his putative mother-in-law with a letter in which he reflected, “I am sure I do not deserve all the good things which have happened to me. To have been spared [death in] the war and seen victory, to have been given the chance to rest and re-adjust myself, to have fallen in love completely and unreservedly.” The night before the Westminster Abbey wedding, the King created Philip His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich; from his honeymoon, the new Duke wrote to his mother-in-law, “Lilibet is the only ‘thing’ in the world which is absolutely real to me and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will have a positive existence for the good… Very humbly, I thank God for Lilibet.”
In the King’s letter to his eldest daughter after her wedding, he wrote, “I have watched you grow up all these years with pride under the skilful direction of Mummy, who as you know is the most wonderful person in the World in my eyes, & I can, I know, always count on you, & now Philip, to help us in our work. Your leaving us has left a great blank in our lives but do remember that your old home is still yours & do come back to it as much & as often as possible. I can see that you are sublimely happy with Philip, which is right.”
The Queen’s nickname of “Grinning Liz” flourished, as shown by a guest’s account of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding when he spotted the mother of the bride in her orange dress—“Grinners herself looked like an inflated tangerine… She looked IMMENSE, and even her grin dampened to the minimum by the gigantic contours of her face, it was like the sun trying to shine through clouds.” A year later, on a royal visit to Paris, a spectator described the Queen’s appearance as that of a “balloon about to take off, covered in two-way stretch dove-grey with very padded-shouldered box jacket… The Queen gets very pink in the face. They say she puts a lot back.”
Elizabeth’s fondness for food and drink augmented her penchant for a good time, especially now that the war was over. At parties in Buckingham Palace, she persuaded her husband, and even Queen Mary, to join her and their guests in a conga line. Elizabeth and the King celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in 1948, and the crowds outside Buckingham Palace called for them so intensely that the King and Queen went out eight times to acknowledge their cheers. For her critics, this was yet another example of Grinners’s love of the limelight.
After balcony call number seven, the King sighed, “Why can’t they leave us alone?”
Elizabeth looked at him and replied, “One day they might not want us.” Grin in place, waving arm aloft, she went back out to the crowds.