Episode 8 of The Crown opens with the depression and mourning of the widowed Queen Mother. “Loss has followed loss,” she confides sadly to her friends Commander Clare and Lady Doris “Fasty” Vyner, on whose Caithness estate in the northeastern corner of Scotland she has taken refuge in the autumn of 1953. “I don’t want to sound self-piteous, but…the loss of a husband, then the loss of a home. Having to leave the Palace…” Her voice tails off. “Imagine, 17 years’ experience as Queen and being head of the family. Bertie was a wonderful husband and father, but he needed a great deal of help as King…” The Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech rightly gives credit to Lionel Logue, the Australian speech therapist who helped George VI overcome the worst of his stutter. But the real secret of the King’s success — the person who continuously gave Bertie the love and strength to persist in his battle — was his wife Elizabeth, first as Duchess of York, then as Queen. Long before Peter Townsend entered the service of George VI, or had any idea that he would one day serve as the King’s equerry, he was one of an audience of Haileybury schoolboys gathered to witness the then Duke of York open the school’s new dining hall in 1932. Scarcely had the Duke started speaking than he froze, unable to say another word, and the whole assemblage froze with him, tensing with embarrassment. But the Duchess kept smiling as if nothing had happened. She seemed to whisper to her husband, recalled Townsend, “willing him over the wall of silence and into the next sentence. Her sense of partnership was sublime.”
A dozen years later, now working in the Palace at the side of the King, Townsend was to witness the technique at first hand, and he learned to imitate the shrewd good humour with which the Queen could sense the squalls of ill temper blowing up and defuse them with a smile or change of subject. Elizabeth knew how to divert her husband, heading him off from confrontation, and when he did explode she was quite unflustered. “Oh Bertie,” she would say, feeling for his pulse and pretending to count like a clock — “tick, tick, tick.” The anger would just drain away.
Bertie’s fits of bad temper were known as his “gnashes,” and his prickly temperament was one of the reasons why Elizabeth Bowes Lyon turned down his suits when Prince Albert, Duke of York, first came courting her in the early 1920s. It was new ground for Bertie, the first occasion in modern times that a senior member of the royal family had gone out into the domestic marketplace in search of a bride. Until 1914, the British royal family had negotiated its matches with foreign royalties privately, via family channels — Queen Victoria had been a maestro in the marital game of thrones. But the Great War had left few royal families standing in Europe, and George V decided that the next generation of the recently minted House of Windsor should find nice young British folk with whom to bond and marry.
They hardly came nicer than Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the ninth child and fourth daughter of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, born 4th August 1900 and one of the most eligible catches in London. In the capital’s frantic lifestyle of the post-war years, there was something vulnerable and old-fashioned about her. She was pretty and sensual in a wistful way, with big round eyes and her dark hair pulled back into the bun she wore for the rest of her life. She was not stuffy. The Lady Elizabeth was rather good fun, in fact — flirtatious even. But you would not dream of presuming on the invitation. “Holding hands in a boat, that was her idea of courting” were the famous words of her friend in those days, Lady Helen Cecil. Lord Strathmore’s playful daughter was different from the close-cropped and brittle young ladies of the “flapper” generation. She was the sort of partner you could visualise as a soothing companion and home-maker, a marvellous mother — exactly the qualities that appealed to the shy and stuttering Prince Albert.
The couple had met as children at a tea party, when the five-year-old Elizabeth was said to have given the 10-year-old Prince the cherry off her cake. They met again casually in their teens at Spencer House, but it was not until the Royal Air Force Ball at the Ritz in July 1920 that they made an impression on each other. “I danced with Prince Albert who I hadn’t known before,” wrote Elizabeth to Beryl Poignand, her former governess and friend, “he is quite a nice youth.” For his part, the besotted Prince Albert later said that he fell in love with Elizabeth that evening.
The young Prince was just recovering from a liaison that had earned the disapproval of his parents — a flirtation with Sheila, Lady Loughborough, née Chisholm, the famously attractive Australian said to have been the origin of the expression “a good-looking Sheila.” Later a lover of Rudolph Valentino and of at least two Russian princes, Sheila had been unhappily married for some years to the alcoholic Lord Loughborough and was a close friend of Freda Dudley Ward, the mistress of the Prince of Wales. The sight of the two princes dancing openly at balls with their married lady friends had been the scandal of London in the winter season of 1919, and the following April George V confronted his second son sternly. “He is going to make me Duke of York on his birthday provided he hears nothing more about Sheila & me!!!!” wrote Bertie to his elder brother, then touring New Zealand and Australia, adding passionately to David that Sheila was “the one & only person in this world who means anything to me.”
On reflection — and unlike his elder brother — Bertie decided to yield to his father’s wishes, explaining the situation to the understanding Sheila, and accepting the royal terms. “I can tell you that I fulfilled your conditions to the letter,” he wrote to his father on 6th June 1920, “and that nothing more will come of it” — provoking a rare letter of approval from the normally gruff King: “Dearest Bertie, I was delighted to get your letter this morning…I know that you behaved very well, in a difficult situation for a young man…I feel that this splendid old title will be safe in your hands.” So it was as Duke of York that Bertie invited himself over from Balmoral in the autumn of 1920 to Glamis Castle, the historic home of the Strathmores, 12 miles north of Dundee. “P.S. Prince Albert is coming to stay here on Saturday,” wrote Elizabeth to Beryl on 20th September 1920. “Ghastly!” The P.S. was written across the top of a letter discussing the news of the second proposal of marriage that Elizabeth had recently received in a matter of months. “People were rather inclined to propose to you in those days,” the Queen Mother recalled many years later.
Already sensing the possibility of a royal proposal, perhaps, Elizabeth asked her closest friends to rally round — Helen Cecil, Diamond Hardinge and Lady Doris Gordon-Lennox, nicknamed “Fasty” — and together they cooked up a weekend of boisterous entertainment for the Prince and his younger sister, Princess Mary. Under the jovial aegis of the Strathmore clan, Glamis Castle was anything but the sinister site where Shakespeare wrongly had Macbeth murder King Duncan (the real Macbeth killed Duncan in open battle near Elgin in 1040, and never lived at Glamis). The Bowes Lyon house parties featured charades and parlour games and eightsome reels, to which Elizabeth and her friend “Fasty” added raucous sing-songs and apple-pie beds. “Elizabeth is playing ‘Oh Hell’ on the piano on purpose for me…” wrote Helen Cecil as they waited for the Prince and his sister to arrive. “We are to have reels & all sorts of strange wild things tonight.” Elizabeth showed the royals round the castle “& terrified them with ghost stories,” she wrote to Beryl. “We also played ridiculous games of hide & seek, they really are babies!” Bertie and Mary were enchanted by the Strathmores’ boisterous teasing, so much more relaxed than the formality of Balmoral, where cocktails were banned and the guest list was heavy on bishops. When the Glamis party went out for a walk, “Elizabeth & Prince A. were allowed to go on miles ahead,” remembered Helen Cecil, “which agitated the former rather.” Behind their backs the other guests played hide and seek in the bushes, the men pelting the girls with mud to get revenge for their apple-pie beds. Elizabeth had to retire to her own bed “utterly exhausted” once her royal guests had left, writing to Beryl that Prince Albert had “kept us pretty busy! He was very nice, tho’, & very much improved in every way.”
Prince Albert, for his part, now had no doubt that Elizabeth was the girl whom he must marry, and he set about courting her in earnest when the winter season resumed in London. “Our Bert stayed till 7, talking 100 to 20, or even 200 to the dozen,” wrote Elizabeth to Beryl after one unexpected visit. The couple met at balls and parties and exchanged letters, and at the end of February 1921, after five months of courtship, the Prince screwed up his courage to make his proposal after Sunday lunch at St. Paul’s Walden Bury, the Strathmores’ country home near Welwyn, north-west of London — only for the lady to reject him. “Dear Prince Bertie, I must write one line to say how dreadfully sorry I am about yesterday,” wrote Elizabeth on Monday, 28th February 1921. “It makes me miserable to think of it — you have been so very nice about it all — please do forgive me…I do understand so well what you feel, and sympathize so much, & I hate to think that I am the cause of it. I honestly can’t explain to you how terribly sorry I am — it worries me so much to think that you may be unhappy — I do hope you won’t be.” Having said that she would only write one line, the 20-year-old Elizabeth went on to write nearly a dozen. “Anyway,” she continued, liberally cluttering her text with underlinings, “we can be good friends, can’t we? Please do look on me as one. I shall never say anything about our talks I promise you — and nobody need ever know. I thought I must just write this short letter to try and tell you how sorry I am. Very sincerely yours, Elizabeth.” In this letter of apparent rejection, Elizabeth signed off with her Christian name alone for the very first time.
We owe sight of this intimate missive, and dozens more like it, to William Shawcross’s magisterial biography of the Queen Mother published in 2009, with its companion volume of personal letters, Counting One’s Blessings, published in 2012. Seldom can a courtship have been so intimately logged. The correspondence ebbs to and fro for more than two and a half years, concluding with Elizabeth resorting to “back-slang” or “mirror-writing” in her diary to conceal — or maybe was it to emphasise? — her deepest thoughts: “I ma tsom dexelprep,” she wrote backwards in her diary on 4th January 1923 (“I am most perplexed”), following that up the next morning with “Ma gnikniht oot hcum. I hsiw I wenk” (“Am thinking too much. I wish I knew”).
Prince Bertie had just made his third proposal of marriage since February 1921 — though with his technique of multiple beseechings it could easily have counted as his thirty-third — and after nearly two years of prevaricating, Elizabeth knew that she could not delay much longer. “I ma yrev deirrow oot,” she noted on 11th January (“I am very worried too”). The following weekend she motored down to St. Paul’s Walden with Bertie for an afternoon with her eccentric father whose hobby was sawing wood. “Prince Bertie sawed hard,” she noted. “Talked after tea for hours — dediced ot tiaw a elttil — epoh I ma ton gnivaheb yldab.” (“Decided to wait a little — hope I am not behaving badly.”)
The wood-sawing may have done the trick. Lord Strathmore had an aristocratic disdain for the middle-class monarchy — he had strictly warned his sons away from equerry-like positions at court — and his wife shared his suspicions: “As far as I can see,” Lady Strathmore once remarked, “some people have to be fed royalty like sea-lions fish.” An endless round of royal chores and ceaseless public scrutiny seemed a cruel life sentence for their charming daughter, who had the pick of any duke in the country, with all the comfort and freedom that entailed. According to Mabell Airlie, a confidante of both Lady Strathmore and Queen Mary, “She was frankly doubtful, uncertain of her feelings, and afraid of the public life which would lie ahead of her as the King’s daughter-in-law.”
But Elizabeth had come to love and admire her persistent suitor. Her supportive letters to him about his speech handicap show she was fully signed up for the Bertie project — she had encouraged his attempts at therapy from the start — and on that weekend early in 1923, the young Prince pulled out all the stops. “He came down to St. P.W. suddenly on Friday, & proposed continuously until Sunday night, when she said Yes at 11.30!” wrote an excited Lady Strathmore. “My head is completely bewildered, as all these days E was hesitating & miserable, but now she is absolutely happy — & he is radiant.” “There’s not a man in England today who doesn’t envy him,” recorded “Chips” Channon in his diary for 16th January 1923, the day the engagement was announced. “The clubs are in gloom.” The House of Windsor loved her. Elizabeth had such a capacity for smiling, bringing out the spritely side of Queen Mary — and not even the King’s passion for timekeeping was proof against his future daughter-in-law. All her life Elizabeth was an unpunctual person, but when she arrived late at the royal dinner table, she was invariably forgiven. “You are not late, my dear,” the King would declare. “We must have sat down two minutes too early.”
Her children, born in 1926 and 1930, made her even more beloved. Motherliness became a component of her appeal from quite an early date. Until the arrival of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, the royal family had been comparatively childless — a gap in their own lives and also in their public persona, and the young Duchess presided ably over the cult of the little princesses, welcoming carefully vetted journalists and authors into the Yorks’ family home, a town house facing Buckingham Palace across Green Park at 145 Piccadilly. Readers were taken upstairs to the nursery floor, saw the rocking horse on the landing, could almost touch the little scarlet brushes and dustpans “with which every morning the little princesses sweep the thick pile carpet,” and heard the screams and splashes through the bathroom door where the Duke, a man, was actually bathing his daughters.
Here at 145 Piccadilly, just a few yards away from a bus stop, was the first small, royal, nuclear family unit, a model of dreamlike domesticity — for all the world, as the biographer John Pearson has remarked, like the characters in an Ovaltine advertisement.
These cleverly supervised revelations displayed another side to the smiling Duchess — her shrewd grasp of public relations. Nothing quite so graphic and intimate had ever been published about living members of the royal family with royal approval — which was why, 20 years later, Queen Elizabeth would come to feel so wounded by the non-approved disclosures of the governess, Marion Crawford. As his reign approached its close, George V voiced his praise of the cosy, domestic example that Bertie and his wife had been able to create — “so different,” as the old King wrote, “to dear David” — and the confidence with which government and nation looked to the Yorks after the crisis of abdication that ended the brief reign of Edward VIII owed much to the evident solidity of the Duchess.
The new Queen Elizabeth took to her new job like a duck to water — in particular in support of her husband as he faced up to the challenge of becoming King George VI. According to Dermot Morrah, the constitutional expert who was in the royal couple’s confidence in these years, the new Queen made a deliberate decision, knowing the power of her own theatricality, never to upstage the King. She saw something in Bertie that so many other people did not, and, in seeing it, she helped make it come true. Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, wooed three times and finally won, had been George VI’s first great triumph in a life not greatly noted for its successes. She believed in him, and under the warming influence of her faith, a delicate and rather fine persona found better ways than “gnashes” to assert itself. She transferred her strength to him in quite an old-fashioned, sacrificial sort of way, and he repaid her with softness and devotion — a total, almost slavish adoration. Their partnership flourished most strongly during the war.
One day in the summer of 1940, when the Battle of Britain was at its height, the diarist Harold Nicolson, then working at the Ministry of Information, lunched at Buckingham Palace. The year had seen a succession of catastrophes — the surrender of Belgium, the fall of France, the seemingly inexorable advance of the German armies that now stood on the other side of the Channel. Nicolson felt demoralised and under strain. The terrible emergency was keeping him up in town, night after night, away from his beloved Kent retreat at Sissinghurst, and he confided to the Queen how he sometimes felt homesick. “But that is right,” she said. “That is personal patriotism. That is what keeps us going. I should die if I had to leave.” She told Nicolson that she was taking revolver lessons for self-defence every morning. “I shall not go down like the others,” she said — the others being the assorted European royal relatives who had pitched up in London with their suitcases, turning Buckingham Palace into something of a rooming house. “I cannot tell you how superb she was,” wrote Nicolson that night to his wife, Vita Sackville-West. Nicolson was also impressed by the transformation that kingship and a creative wife had wrought in George VI, whom he had once thought of as “rather a foolish loutish boy.” The King had, somehow, taken on some of the lightness and charm of his elder brother, the Duke of Windsor — and Nicolson walked out of the Palace feeling elated. “He was so gay and she was so calm,” he told his wife. “They did me all the good in the world…WE SHALL WIN. I know that. I have no doubts at all.”
“They will not leave me. I will not leave the King — and the King will never leave.” These famous words of Queen Elizabeth in response to the suggestion, in the darkest days of the war, that she might send her daughters out of the country for safekeeping, have often been repeated. Their fortitude went with her revolver practice on the Palace lawn. It was like her response to the bombing of Buckingham Palace in September 1940: “I’m glad we’ve been bombed,” she said. “It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”
The firm little figure picking her way through the rubble in a Norman Hartnell suit — “very sweet and soignée,” as Mrs. Winston Churchill put it, “like a plump turtle dove” — became one of the vignettes that encapsulated people’s wartime experience. “The Queen nips out into the snow and goes straight into the middle of the crowd and starts talking to them,” said Lord Harlech, who accompanied her on one of her visits, this one to Sheffield in 1941. “For a moment or two they just gaze and gape in astonishment. But then they all start talking at once.”
(1901–79)
Royal Fashion Designer and Couturier
PLAYED BY RICHARD CLIFFORD
Never noted as a fashion plate, the shy and stocky Elizabeth Bowes Lyon was transformed into shimmering elegance by the dresses that Norman Hartnell designed for her state visit to France in 1938. Inspired (at the suggestion of her loving husband) by the gauzy crinolines depicted in the countless paintings by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805–73) lining the corridors of Buckingham Palace, the Bruton Street frock-maker created a vision of gleaming lace cobwebs that helped raise national morale in the tense pre-war years. When in a July 1939 photo session the photographer Cecil Beaton, with his nose for glamour to match Hartnell’s, etched the modern Winterhalter Queen into the soft greys of his silver nitrate plates, he completed the process that made her a national emblem. A few months later, Hartnell went back to the drawing board to sketch the everyday coats and hats appropriate for his patron’s bombsite appearances, coming up with a second successful formula that Elizabeth wore for the rest of her life – part Women’s Institute, part Pearly Queen.
“She really does manage to convey to each individual in the crowd that he or she has had a personal greeting,” wrote Harold Nicolson on another of her personal appearances that left him with a lump in his throat. “It is due, I think, to the brilliance of her eyes…She is in truth one of the most amazing Queens since Cleopatra.”
The death of her husband a mere seven years after victory was a cruel and early deprivation — too early in so many respects. They had celebrated their Silver Wedding only a few years before he died, they were just about grandparents. But they had never really had a proper run at anything — pitchforked into Buckingham Palace, rushing through the tensions of the pre-war period and then coping with all the dangers and challenges of the conflict. In the tense years since the war, it had been one sickness and worry after another. “I was sent a message that his servant couldn’t wake him,” wrote Queen Elizabeth to her mother-in-law Queen Mary, on 6th February 1952. “I flew to his room, & thought that he was in a deep sleep, he looked so peaceful — and then I realised what had happened…Last night he was in wonderful form & looking so well.” Suddenly there was so much to attend to — the new Queen and her husband to be welcomed back home, the funeral to think of, telegrams to send, new living arrangements to be made. “Poor lady,” said Kemp, one of her pages, remembering all the bustle of those days. “She never had time to cry.” A few days after her husband’s funeral, she announced that she wished in future to be known as “Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother,” though she made clear to friends and family that she disliked the title intensely — “horrible name,” she sniffed more than once: “Queen Mum” was definitely for the newspapers. Taking their cue from this, her staff were at pains to refer to her simply as “Queen Elizabeth” for the rest of her life. “He loved you all, every one of you, most truly,” she declared on 18th February in a tribute to her husband that she prepared with the help of Tommy Lascelles “…My only wish now is that I may be allowed to continue the work we sought to do together.” A month or so after the funeral, old Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, complimented her on the fortitude with which she was bearing her loss — putting such a very brave face on things. “Not in private,” the widow quietly replied. She went back to the woods at St. Paul’s Walden Bury where Bertie had proposed to her while sawing wood. She kept a little sitting room at Glamis Castle as a sort of shrine, its photographs and mementoes all dating from their long-drawn courtship and the first, simple years of their marriage. “One cannot yet believe that it has all happened,” she wrote in one letter. “One feels rather dazed.” A beautiful day, she wrote to Lascelles, “is almost unbearable, & seems to make everything a thousand times worse. I suppose it will get better someday.”
ELIZABETH BOWES LYON
(1900–2002)
Duchess of York (1923–36)
Queen Elizabeth (1936–52)
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother
(1952–2002)
PLAYED BY VICTORIA HAMILTON
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was sustained through her half-century of widowhood by the knowledge – of this she had no doubt – that she would be reunited with her beloved Bertie in heaven. Hers was a deep and literal faith stemming from daily worship as a child in the Glamis chapel where her mother played the harmonium and all the women prayed in white lace caps. She experienced the Second World War as a battle against godlessness – Fascism showed what could happen when a nation abandoned the teachings of Christ – and after the war she welcomed Billy Graham, the American evangelist, when he brought his crusades to Britain, switching to tomato juice when she met him instead of her favoured gin and Dubonnet. “As I walked in…” wrote Rev. Graham, recalling one of his visits to preach at Windsor, “she deliberately caught my eye and gestured slightly to me to let me know she was supporting me and praying for me.” As a child, Elizabeth was taught by her mother to kneel at her bedside every night to say her prayers, and she continued this devotion for the rest of her life. So far as is known, her daughter Queen Elizabeth II does the same to this day.
There are several theories as to what coaxed her out of the darkness. Winston Churchill went for a long, serious talk with her at Balmoral, speaking of duty and joy, it is thought. Then there was the abandoned home she found in the very north-east tip of Scotland, the Castle of Mey, which she resolved to bring back to life, as a parable for the rebuilding she now had to do for herself. In the summer of 1952, she went up to Scotland to stay with her old friends Clare and Doris Vyner — “Fasty,” who had organised the apple-pie beds the first time that Bertie had come to stay at Glamis — and went out with them on an excursion towards John O’Groats. Looking out between the road and the waves, as she later described it, she caught sight of “this romantic looking castle down by the sea.” They drove down the track, to find it was deserted. “And then the next day we discovered it was going to be pulled down and I thought this would be a terrible pity. One had seen so much destruction in one’s life.”
When he heard of the royal interest, the owner, Captain Frederic Bouhier Imbert-Terry, wanted to make Queen Elizabeth a present of the ruin. He was embarrassed by its run-down state. Commandeered for military accommodation during the war, Barrogill, as it was then known, had been devastated by a violent storm that spring, and the only sniff of a purchase had been from scrap-metal merchants who wanted the lead from the demolished roof. The captain was delighted when Queen Elizabeth accepted his suggestion of £100 as a nominal price, and when she also decided to restore not only the building, but its original and evocative title, the Castle of Mey. “It is near the sea,” wrote the Queen Mother to Queen Mary, “with lovely views, & might be nice for a change sometimes, and perhaps one could lend it to tired people for a rest.”
The revival had begun. Going private had always been one option for her widowhood — Queen Victoria did it quite spectacularly, Queen Alexandra to a lesser degree. But for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother that was never a possibility. “That is no age to give up your job,” sniffed Queen Mary on hearing that Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, then 68, was planning to retire, and the older Queen Elizabeth had always been of the same mind. Royalty, in her opinion, was a job for life, a pleasure and a duty to be continued to the very end. There was a suggestion, in the early years following the death of her husband, that she might be dispatched for two or three years on a tour of duty to one of the dominions — Canada, perhaps, or Australia — as a governor-general or some form of semi-permanent royal ambassador. But Queen Elizabeth II would not hear of that. “Oh no,” she said, “we could not possibly do without Mummy.”
Miss World
One hundred dresses, 36 hats, 50 pairs of shoes…“Couldn’t we try to economise?” asks Elizabeth II at the start of Episode 8, “Pride and Joy,” as Norman Hartnell, one of her two principal dressmakers, reels off the huge collection of clothes to be designed, cut and sewn from scratch for her forthcoming tour of the Commonwealth through the winter of 1953–54. “Isn’t this all a bit much?”
“It is,” agrees Hartnell, clearly himself daunted by the scale of the task as his mannequins parade their costumes in front of the Queen and “Bobo” MacDonald, the nursery-nurse-turned-dresser who is now in charge of the royal wardrobe. But, as Hartnell explains, the request for a top-notch array of touring costumes “was a directive from the government itself, from the very top of the government. To put our best foot forward…our very best foot.”
It does not seem likely that Winston Churchill himself (“the very top of the government”) spoke directly to Norman Hartnell about how to dress the Queen on her great post-coronation Commonwealth tour. But it was certainly the British prime minister’s intention that the newly crowned Elizabeth II should carry the coronation spirit around the world with her, projecting the prestige of the mother country to an empire that he refused to see in decline. “It may well be,” declared Churchill sentimentally before her departure, “that the journey the Queen is about to take will be no less auspicious, and the treasure she brings back no less bright, than when [Francis] Drake first sailed an English ship around the world.” The prime minister wanted to demonstrate to the leaders of America and Russia, with whom he had worked during the Second World War on equal terms, that the power of the British Crown to command loyalty around the globe made for international heft that still entitled the United Kingdom – and Churchill himself – to a full place at the top table. “And, if I may, ma’am,” he confides to the Queen as he bids her godspeed at London airport, “never let them see the real Elizabeth Windsor…The cameras, the television. Never let them see that carrying the crown is often a burden. Let them look at you, but let them see only the eternal.”
These were heavy loads to lay upon a mere collection of hats and frocks, but, having designed outfits for royal occasions since the 1930s, Norman Hartnell was well up to the challenge. Royal fashion is not the height of fashion, since the dressing of a queen is a game played by rules that are all its own. Queenly fabrics and styling may bear a surface resemblance to the clothes that the rest of the world is wearing, but actually they indicate the total “otherness” of the person who is draped in them: the hat, the gloves, the stand-out, bright colours that are only worn by ordinary ladies when dressing up for a wedding – plus the overlarge handbag resolutely carried everywhere, despite the spare hands of a lady-in-waiting. As Hartnell once put it, the Queen’s public costume has to be “totally conspicuous, without being vulgar.” Hartnell had designed Elizabeth’s wedding dress in 1947, as well as her grand coronation robes, and they provided a theme for the dozen Commonwealth destinations she would be visiting that winter. Elizabeth had suggested that her coronation dress be embroidered with the emblem of every realm of which she was Queen – among them the wattle for Australia, the fern for New Zealand and the lotus for Ceylon. So, the quasi-religious dress from the abbey was brought along to be worn at the Opening of Parliament ceremonies in those three countries, while Hartnell – noted for his opulent embroidery – extended the concept to stitch a local wild-flower emblem into at least one costume for every country she would visit: Bermuda, Jamaica, Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, the Cocos Islands, Ceylon, Aden, Uganda, Malta and Gibraltar. The designer also had to cope discreetly with the practical challenges of so many warm-weather destinations – the hazard of lightweight dresses that might blow upwards in the wind. That meant a separate slip for modesty, with small lead weights sewed into the hems of both slip and skirt.
“Her hat has to be off her face so her picture can be taken,” explained Hartnell in a later interview with the New York Times, “and it can’t be so big that she has to hold it to keep it from blowing away. After all, a Queen needs one hand for accepting bouquets and another for shaking hands….The Queen and the Queen Mother do not want to be fashion setters. That’s left to people with less important work to do.”
The essential un-fashionability of royal dressing was a favourite theme of the up-and-coming Hardy Amies, chosen by Elizabeth to share and compete with Hartnell in the task of designing much of her daywear for the tour (introducing some healthy price competition as well). “I don’t think she feels that chic clothes are friendly,” Amies liked to say. “There’s always something cold and cruel about chic clothes which she wants to avoid.” Eight years younger than Hartnell, Amies was a self-proclaimed snob. “I’m for elitism and its survival,” he explained, saying that when he reached heaven he was hoping to encounter God in a five-buttoned suit.
But he was deeply respectful when it came to his principal patron. “I do not dress the Queen,” he once declared. “The Queen dresses herself. We supply her with clothes – there is a difference.” Amies was credited with livening up Elizabeth’s daywear to make the most of her tiny 23-inch waist. His proposals for Australia (some of which were unworn hangovers from the aborted tour of 1952 that had got no further than Kenya) included some sprightly, off-the-peg frocks from Horrockses, the historic Lancashire cotton producer – and Elizabeth herself seemed to enjoy her visits to the Amies workshop. “The sketches were put all over the floor and the rolls of fabric,” recalled Valerie Rouse, a Hardy Amies vendeuse. “She used to crawl around the floor saying, ‘Well, I’ll have this with that.’ She absolutely knew she didn’t want too many shoulder pads. She didn’t want it too short. She did a lot of sitting down and waving.” Never let it be said that Queen Elizabeth II did not thoroughly enjoy the process of choosing – and wearing – her clothes.
Amies did not find favour, however, when he inspired a battle of the couturiers against “Bobo” MacDonald’s mass-market taste in handbags and hats. While the dour Scottish dresser yielded dress design to the designers, she insisted that accessories – shoes, hats and handbags – were strictly her preserve, provoking cries of pain whenever she matched some elegantly tailored outfit with a discordant and boxy handbag of her choice. Amies made no secret of his unhappiness, and he started giving the Queen tasteful handbags for Christmas in the hope that she might decide to use one of them. “Bobo will give me hell for this,” remarked Her Majesty drily when she knighted her loyal couturier in 1989 (Hartnell had received his knighthood in 1977). Unsurprisingly, Hartnell and Amies saw each other in competitive terms. “Hardly Amiable” was Hartnell’s nickname for his young rival. But together the two designers helped their mistress achieve a signal triumph in her six-month public service marathon around the world through the winter of 1953–54. Royal tours and visits were invented in the nineteenth century to help make the Crown “truly imperial,” in the words of historian Sir David Cannadine, “and the empire authentically royal,” and the success of Elizabeth II’s grandiose Commonwealth odyssey could be said to have achieved both goals – if, probably, for the very last time. Churchill could retain Britain’s seat at the top table for just a year or so more.
“I want to show,” Elizabeth declared in New Zealand on 25th December 1953, in the first Christmas Day broadcast ever made from outside Britain, “that the Crown is not merely an abstract symbol of our unity, but a personal and living bond between you and me.” The Queen deeply believed what she said, and the Commonwealth believed her as well. Still, sometime later when she was discussing outfits with Hardy Amies and was congratulating him on a particularly stylish woollen dress that he had made for her, Her Majesty called for a fur coat to round off the ensemble. “Very good,” she said, standing in front of the mirror and studying the effect with some satisfaction. “Now, if only someone would ask us somewhere smart.”
“We are not amused”
It was the Duke of Edinburgh who came speeding out of the chalet first, followed by his tennis racquet and shoes. Then came the Queen in hot pursuit of her husband and shouting furiously at him to come back inside, as if she had already realised that someone might be watching. The royal tantrum depicted in Episode 8 of The Crown actually happened – on Sunday 7th March 1954 at the O’Shannassy Reservoir near the small town of Warburton in the Yarra Ranges of Victoria, 50 miles east of Melbourne. It was captured on film by Frank Bagnall, an Australian cameraman who was waiting to shoot a routine sequence of the royal couple relaxing with the local wildlife community of koala bears, but who instead found himself filming a sequence of flying sports equipment and ill-tempered hollering.
We know of the incident thanks to Jane Connors, an Australian broadcaster who wrote her doctoral thesis, The Glittering Thread, on Queen Elizabeth II’s post-coronation tour of Australia in the early months of 1954, and who interviewed Loch Townsend, the distinguished film director and head of the camera crew who were recording the eight-week odyssey in glorious Ferraniacolor, a new Italian cine film stock. The Queen in Australia was Australia’s first full-length colour feature film, and it would play to packed cinemas for months to come – sadly, if not surprisingly, without the sequence of the airborne tennis racquet.
Townsend had arrived outside the royal chalet that Sunday afternoon with Bagnall and sound recordist Don Kennedy to take up their positions as instructed by Commander Colville, the formidable royal press secretary whom the British press knew as “The Abominable ‘No’ Man.” The Australian press contingent had nicknamed him “Sunshine.” The brief was to film the royal couple at the halfway stage of their tour “relaxing” in the scrubby bush around the reservoir, where extra koala bears had been imported to enhance the photo opportunities. But the scheduled appearance time came and went. The minutes ticked by, and the crew started to get agitated about the light (“Christ,” Townsend remembered them complaining, “when are they bloody well coming?”). The camera was in position and focused on the door ready to film the emergence of the royal couple – when the tennis racquet and the speeding Duke came flying out instead.
Frank Bagnall was looking through the viewfinder when the door opened, and his old Fox Movietone instincts took over. He pressed the button and before anyone knew what was going on, he had the whole incident on film, complete with the indignant Queen grabbing hold of her husband and dragging him back inside the chalet. There followed a moment of stunned silence while Townsend, Bagnall and Kennedy tried to take in what they had just seen – do anointed queens really fling shoes at their husbands?
At this point in Episode 8, “Pride and Joy,” Elizabeth emerges meekly from the chalet to make her personal peace with the camera crew. But as events actually unrolled beside the O’Shannassy Reservoir that Sunday afternoon in March 1954, it was Commander Colville, the Abominable “No” Man, who next appeared, charging down the lawn and threatening to have the entire camera crew arrested for their impertinence.
Loch Townsend was a Second World War veteran, a man not easily intimidated. “I said, ‘Calm down,’ ” he later related to Jane Connors, “and I went up to Frank [Bagnall].” As supervising director and producer, Townsend started to unscrew the magazine at the back of the film camera. “What are you doing?” asked Bagnall. “ ‘Exposing the film, Frank,’ I said. ‘You may have finished using your balls, but I’ve still got work for mine, and I’d like to keep them’…I’ll never forget saying that. And anyway, I unscrewed it and I took it. There was about three hundred feet of film…and I said, ‘Commander, I have a present for you. You might like to give it to Her Majesty.’ ”
Loch Townsend’s main worry, he explained to Jane Connors some 40 years later, was that Colville would withdraw royal cooperation from his ambitious film project. The producer felt uncomfortable that privacy had been invaded, and there was no market in those deferential times for footage which would today be flashed around the world on social media. Even the raucous Australian tabloid press would not have touched the story. So, Commander Colville was able to take the film indoors, and a few minutes later one of the royal aides appeared with beer and sandwiches for the crew – followed shortly by the Queen herself who came out to thank them personally for the gesture. “I said who I was and introduced Don and Frank,” recalled Townsend, “and she said, ‘Oh, thank you very much. I’m sorry for that little interlude, but as you know, it happens in every marriage. Now, what would you like me to do?’ ”
In Episode 8 Peter Morgan imagines it was the strains of non-stop touring that had produced the spectacular royal bust-up – “This whole thing is a circus,” Philip complains. “It is a miserable circus. Trudging from town to town, and we are the dancing bears.” In their two months of travelling through Australia, the royal couple covered 2,500 miles by rail, according to one accounting, 900 miles by car, and 10,000 by plane, listened to 200 speeches (Elizabeth herself delivered a further 102) and stood to attention through at least 162 recitals of the National Anthem. With less than a day’s rest per week, they did their valiant bit for the “glittering thread” that kept Australian hearts loyal and true to the mother country. But it was small wonder, perhaps, that when Loch Townsend led the Queen and her husband from their chalet to pose with the waiting koalas, the couple found it hard to raise a smile.