Читать книгу The Queen - Peter Hennessy, Ben Pimlott - Страница 15

Chapter 4

‘WE NEVER SEEMED to get really settled again after the Canada-America visit of 1939,’ recalled Crawfie.¹ The trip marked the end of the tight family life that had survived the move out of 145 Piccadilly, and the start of intermittent separations and comings-together that lasted until 1945. The Royal Family had a good war – by the standards of almost every other royal house a stupendous one, emerging with its reputation enhanced, and much of the damage done by the Abdication repaired. Yet the psychology of the achievement was complicated. Much depended on the passivity of the Symbol King, and the serenity of his family life. Loyalty to the Monarchy waxed as the nation’s fear grew, and acquired a character of hope and yearning – different from the sentimentalities and social conservatism of peacetime – which, as the end approached, turned to gratitude toward a King who had no way of affecting the outcome. Meanwhile, his children became representatives of what the fighting was about, their pre-war immaturity and innocence frozen in aspic. ‘One felt,’ in the words of a writer of the period, ‘that these engaging little people would never grow up’.² The symbolism was heightened by a mystery. For security reasons, the whereabouts of the girls were kept secret, and the images of them that appeared in the press were set against an unknown, unidentifiable background, adding to a sense of them as magical princesses whose fate was linked to the national destiny.

The Royal Family was at Balmoral until just before the declaration of war on September 3rd. The King returned to London on August 23rd, his wife five days later. The children were despatched to Birkhall, the first of their mysterious locations, where they were cared for and guarded by a retinue headed by an equerry, and including a chauffeur, a police sergeant and several constables.³ Lessons of a sort continued, Crawfie reading newspapers out loud, ‘trying as far as possible to give them some idea of what was happening without too many horrible details.’⁴ Marten posted history papers, and Princess Elizabeth sent him essays for correction. Girl Guide meetings took place in the village hall. So did ‘war-work’, which consisted of a large sewing party mainly made up of women from the royal estate. At Christmas they went to Sandringham, and then to Royal Lodge until May, with the Queen in residence for much of the time. Here there was more Girl Guiding, with the unusual ingredient of evacuees from the East End, bringing the girls into fleeting contact with urban working-class children.

‘Thank you so very much for the books you and Mr Chamberlain sent me for my birthday,’ Princess Elizabeth wrote to the Prime Minister’s wife on 23 April 1940. ‘It was so kind of you and I have always wanted to read them. I hope you are both well and that Mr Chamberlain is not too tired. Thanking you again so much.’⁵ Mr Chamberlain was, however, shortly to be relieved of his responsibilities. On 8 May , following the debate on the Norway campaign, he was forced to resign. Two days later, Winston Churchill drove to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands as his successor. On 12 May, as Hitler invaded the Low Countries, the princesses were moved into the great fortress of Windsor Castle, where they were to live for most of the war. ‘We went there for a weekend,’ as Princess Margaret recalls, ‘and we stayed for five years.’⁶

For a while, they slept in the dungeons. Princess Margaret remembers having to run to get to the shelter under Brunswick Tower. Yet she thought of it as a happy time.⁷ Her sister felt much the same. She later told Harold Nicolson that she would like to make Windsor her home, rather than Buckingham Palace or Sandringham, since all the happiest memories of her childhood were associated with the Castle and the Park.⁸ The girls lived in pampered seclusion, in conditions, as Morrah put it after the war, ‘favourable to the quiet business of the schoolroom, though perhaps less for the enlargement of human contacts.’⁹ There was a shifting band of soldiers, often Grenadier Guards, for company. With an informality hard to imagine in peacetime, they ate with their governesses and one or two officers in the State Dining Room, where a single light bulb hung from the ceiling in place of a chandelier.¹⁰ At first, the King and Queen stayed at Windsor, commuting to Buckingham Palace. Later, after the worst of the bombing, they returned to London, visiting the Castle only at weekends.¹¹

How should the royal children be used in wartime? Some of the best minds in the Ministry of Information addressed the problem with, as usual, contradictory results. On the one hand, it was decided to make much of the princesses’ privations at a ‘place in the country,’ where they bore their loneliness stoically, for the national good. On the other, government propaganda used them as the centre-piece to a tableau of the perfect family hearth, confidently and comfortably immune to the threats of vulgar dictators. To project such an image, they would be shown, in pictures or prose, relaxing on sofas and rugs, surrounded by proud parents and placid pets. These two, separate, ways of imagining the King’s daughters were sometimes combined. Later in the war, when victory was in sight, the second tended to predominate. Initially, when the need for sacrifice was greatest, the emphasis was on the first.

The presentation of the girls as victims of the family-rending impact of war provided the theme of Princess Elizabeth’s first broadcast, delivered in October 1940 when she was fourteen-and-a-half, and directed at British children evacuated to North America, though actually intended to influence adult opinion in the United States, and the US Government, as well.

That the broadcast took place at all was a retreat by Buckingham Palace and a sign of how dire the emergency had become. Pre-war requests for Princess Elizabeth to speak on the air had been met by curt refusals. In 1938, the influential owner of the New York Herald Tribune, Helen Reid, was brusquely rebuffed when she asked if the Princess might make a five-minute broadcast to open National Children’s Week in the United States. Mrs Reid had used the powerful argument that such a gesture would be in keeping with the British Government’s policy of doing everything possible to bring America and Great Britain together. She had added, a little less tactfully, that it would also assuage American bitterness over the treatment of the Duke of Windsor at the time of his marriage.¹² Referring the matter to Buckingham Palace, the British ambassador wrote dismissively of such ‘attempts to enlist the princesses for stunts’.¹³ The Palace strongly agreed, and confirmed ‘that there is, of course, no question of the princesses broadcasting, nor is it likely to be considered for many years to come’.¹⁴ The autumn of 1940, however, was no time to be fastidious, where a chance of influencing American public opinion was concerned. When the Director-General of the BBC, Frederick Ogilvie, approached the King’s private secretary, he immediately received a favourable answer.

The plan was to get Princess Elizabeth to introduce a series of ‘Children in Wartime’ programmes, intended to bring out the part children could play in the nation’s defence. The Princess’s brief statement would go out live in the short-wave service to the United States and Canada, and later be heard in recorded form all over the world. The unofficial aim of pulling adult heartstrings was made clear to the King and Queen. ‘As Her Royal Highness’s first broadcast, delivered at an historic moment,’ Ogilvie explained to the Palace, ‘it would reach the minds of the millions who heard it with a singular poignancy.’¹⁵

The broadcast went out on 13 October. The Princess read a carefully scripted text which linked her own recent life and that of her sister to the lives of displaced British children overseas. ‘Thousands of you in this country have had to leave your homes and be separated from your father and mother,’ she told her listeners, in a high-pitched, precise voice which The Times likened to that of her mother.¹⁶ ‘My sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you, as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all.’ There was an expression of optimism (‘We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well.’) A final exchange with the ten-year-old Princess Margaret was also in the prepared text: ‘My sister is by my side, and we are both going to say good night to you. Come on, Margaret.’ ‘Good night,’ said a smaller voice. ‘Good night and good luck to you all.’¹⁷

Jock Colville, private secretary to the Prime Minister and later to Princess Elizabeth, wrote in his diary that he and Diana Sandys, Winston Churchill’s daughter, who listened to the broadcast with him, ‘were embarrassed by the sloppy sentiment she was made to express, but her voice was most impressive and, if the Monarchy survives, Queen Elizabeth II should be a most successful radio Queen’.¹⁸ Sloppiness was what the occasion seemed to require: the broadcast was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as a propaganda triumph, at a time when triumphs of any kind were sparse. It attracted particularly wide attention in the United States and made the front pages, with a picture in all the New York papers. ‘Princess yesterday huge success here,’ the local BBC representative cabled to Ogilvie. ‘Some stations report telephone exchanges jammed with requests for repeat.’¹⁹ Such was the quantity and enthusiasm of fan mail that the BBC turned the broadcast into a gramophone record for sale in America and throughout the Empire.

The guise of the princesses as typically lonely displaced children reinforced another part of the Ministry of Information’s offensive: a projection of the King and Queen as typical Londoners carrying on regardless in spite of the Blitz. It helped to give the broadcast impact, indeed it might almost have been part of the plot, that Buckingham Palace had received a direct hit a few weeks earlier. Pictures of brave little girls in the country and their brave parents among the rubble mixed together in the public imagination. Mass Observation, the precursor of in-depth polling, recorded a mood of indignation and defiance, in which royalty played a part. ‘If they hurt the King and Queen or the princesses we’d be so mad we’d blast every German out of existence,’ declared a supposedly typical female clerk.²⁰

Sometimes the children were shown on a pony cart with a corgi beside them, without adults, alone in a park. According to one early wartime account, walkers near their home would ‘meet the two girls jogging along hatless, laughing, and talking merrily, taking it in turns to hold the reins, which they do gracefully with ribbons threaded in orthodox fashion over the first finger and under the thumb of the left hand’.²¹ The impression was of free spirits, self-sufficient and unharmed in their own secret world. The contrast between this fairy land and bombed-out cities was stark. But there was also the other guise: children in the perfect family, whose domestic happiness was to be protected by the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Empire as if it were their own. In this version, the children were never alone. Indeed, the presence of the King and Queen was a key ingredient.

It was important, as Simon Schama has observed, that a monarchy should appear as ‘the family of families, at once dynastic and domestic, remote and accessible, magical and mundane’.²² In a total war, the importance of the Windsors’ as the ‘family of families’ increased because conditions on the home front, in addition to the foreign danger, were shaking non-royal family life to its foundations. The same had been true in the First World War. However, there had been a significant shift since 1914–18, partly because of the milder temperament of George VI, compared to his father, and the circumstances of his accession; and partly because his Royal Family, unlike the one he was born into, was conveniently young, nuclear and comprehensible. In the First War, George V had been portrayed as patriarchal, even god-like, a warrior monarch to whom duty was owed. In the Second World War, the whole ‘family of families’ was given prominence as a unit, with the King and Queen frequently shown in the company of their children, underscoring the domestic affections and virtues that the war was about.

Here it is particularly difficult to separate image from reality, because witnesses to royal domesticity were subject to the same media messages as everybody else, and the dutiful Windsors themselves, hounded by the pressures of what was expected of them, were on their best behaviour when being observed. In the context of such necessary and powerful myths, the royal actors had little choice but to play their allotted parts.

Would Edward VIII, had he lasted, have been selfish and truculent in wartime, or would he have risen to the occasion? It is an interesting speculation. As it was, the stammering King whom some had believed could not survive the ordeal of being crowned, seemed able to adapt in war, as in peace, to the requirements of his job. These consisted mainly of being photographed, taking part in public ceremonies, and personally bestowing honours – sometimes, because of the fighting, decorating several hundred servicemen in a single session. It also involved, and this was an especially vital role, making important visitors feel pleased to have had the opportunity of meeting him and his family. Surprisingly, this became something that George VI was particularly good at. The strange combination of his own social ineptitude, the Queen’s ability to make whoever she addressed feel that they were the one person to whom she wished to speak, and their daughters’ lack of affectation, provided a recipe for putting people at their ease.

Were they as genuinely pleased to see an endless flow of visitors as they seemed, or was it all act? Noël Coward asked himself this question after experiencing what he called ‘an exhibition of unqualified “niceness” from all concerned’ during a meeting with the Royal Family in 1942. He concluded that it did not matter. Putting oneself out was part of the job of royalty. ‘I’ll settle for anyone who does their job well, anyhow.’²³ Few others, however, came away feeling that it was just for show. For most who encountered the Family informally, the wonder of being in the presence of Monarchy in an Empire at war was combined with an uplifting sense of inclusion, as if they themselves were family members. The result was a miasma of shared affection, of which the grateful visitor felt both spectator and part. When Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia (herself a refugee) met them in 1944, she immediately decided that ‘this was the sort of home life I wanted, with children and dogs playing at my feet.’²⁴ General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who spent a shooting weekend with them in Norfolk in the same year, came away with a similar feeling – recording his impression of ‘one of the very best examples of family life. A thoroughly close-knit and happy family all wrapped up in each other.’²⁵

Nobody referred, in their descriptions of the King, to his intellectual capacities, his political judgement, or his knowledge of the war. Yet so far from being a handicap, George VI’s limitations – and his awareness of them – were turned into a precious source of strength. One Gentleman Usher fondly described him as ‘a plodder’ – a man of simple ideas, with a strong sense of what he ought to do. Much was made of such decent ordinariness, which meant confronting what others had to face without complaint – and included such self-denials as not seeking to escape the Blitz, or trying to give his daughters a privileged immunity from danger by sending them with other rich children to Canada. It also meant frugality, and strict obedience to government rules – a topic which played a major part in the use of royalty for propaganda. Thus, in April 1940, the public was informed that at the celebration of Princess Elizabeth’s fourteenth birthday, the Queen had decreed that the three-tier anniversary cake should be limited to plain sponge, as an economy.²⁶ There were many tales of economy with clothing coupons, and of how the Queen cut down and altered her own dresses for Elizabeth, adapting these in turn for Margaret, so that ‘with the three of us, we manage in relays’.²⁷ This was not just for public consumption. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited Buckingham Palace late in 1942, she found an adherence to heat, water and food restrictions that was almost a fetish. Broken window panes in her bedroom had been replaced with wood, and her bath had a painted black line above which she was not supposed to run the water.²⁸

Nevertheless, there remained a wide gulf between the life lived by the Royal Family, with their houses, parks and horses, and retinue of servants, and the conditions of their subjects. After a bomb struck the Palace, the Queen was supposed to have said: ‘Now we can look the East End in the face’. The East End, however, was not able to retreat to Windsor to catch up on sleep, or to spend recuperative holidays in Norfolk and Scotland. Nor was the East End able to supplement its diet with pheasants and venison shot on the royal estates.

Indeed some aspects of royal life went on remarkably undisturbed. There was little interruption to the riding lessons given to the princesses by Horace Smith, which continued throughout the war. Training with Smith involved pony carts, which (as he later observed) had the particular advantage in wartime that journeys in them did not require petrol. With future troop-reviewing in mind, Smith also taught Princess Elizabeth to ride side-saddle. Occasions for demonstrating equestrian prowess did not cease, either. In 1943, Smith personally awarded Princess Elizabeth first prize in the Royal Windsor Horse Show for her driving of a ‘utility vehicle,’ harnessed to her own black Fell pony – a trophy she won again the following year, both times in the presence of the King and Queen.²⁹

Watching was a developing interest, as well as riding or driving. In the spring of 1942, the Princess was taken by her parents to the Beckhampton stables on the Wiltshire Downs, where horses bred at the royal studs were trained, to see two royal horses, Big Game and Sun Chariot, which were highly fancied for the Derby and the Oaks. The jockey Sir Gordon Richards later recalled his meeting with the sixteen-year-old girl ‘who took them all in’, and was quizzed about them by her father as they worked, causing the royal trainer Fred Darling to remark loyally ‘that Princess Elizabeth must have a natural eye for a horse’. Visits to see the mares and foals at the royal stud at Hampton Court, and to see the royal horses in training at Newmarket followed.³⁰

Other pursuits also involved opportunities not available to most compatriots. In October 1942, Princess Elizabeth made her contribution to the royal larder by shooting her first stag in the hills at Balmoral – using a rifle she had been taught to handle the previous year.³¹ In the autumn of 1943, she hunted with the Garth Foxhounds, and later with the Duke of Beaufort’s Hounds in Gloucestershire.³² The decision to allow her to go hunting was taken, according to a report, ‘in accord with the general policy of making her life as “normal” as possible’ in the light of her position as Heiress Presumptive.³³

There were also private entertainments. The King, despite his shyness, was a good dancer, and especially enjoyed dancing in the company of his children. He did not allow the war to curtail this particular pastime. A number of royal balls were held. Princess Elizabeth attended her first at Windsor in July 1941, when she was fifteen. A West End dance band played foxtrots, waltzes and rumbas to the Royal Family and their guests, who included Guards officers, until two in the morning, and Elizabeth danced several times with her father.³⁴ Later in the war, before the start of flying bombs in 1944, dances were held fortnightly in the Bow Room on the ground floor at Buckingham Palace. On one occasion the King, oblivious to cares of state, his stammer forgotten, led his family and other guests in a conga line through the corridors and state rooms.³⁵

FOR MAXIMUM BENEFIT to the war effort, the privacy of the Royal Family needed to be less than complete. If life at Windsor and Buckingham Palace had been simply private, its exemplary virtues could scarcely have been known to loyal subjects. For this reason, as The Times observed just after the end of the war, ‘many glimpses’ of the Royal Family’s home life had ‘reached a wide public, through illustrated journals and the cinema’.³⁶ One avid supplier to the illustrated journals, and propagator of royal mythology, was the photographer Lisa Sheridan who, by her own testimony, never failed to come away from a professional visit to the Royal Family without feeling a better person. Her recollections of the princesses in wartime are interesting not only because her pictures of wagging puppy tails, happy children and proud parents became fixed in the Empire’s imagination, but also because she provides a distillation of the ‘family of families’ miasma in its purest form.

In her memoirs, Mrs Sheridan described several wartime trips to see the princesses. Her account of the first, to Royal Lodge in early 1940, reflected the official line of the phoney war period, that the enemy had done little to change the traditional British way of life. The windows ‘showed no signs of criss-cross sticky tape or nasty black-out’. The princesses were intent on their normal recreations. When she arrived, they were dressed for riding and carried crops; they changed into ‘sensible’ tweed skirts and pullovers, in order to be photographed in the garden, suitably equipped with rakes and barrows, digging for victory. The overriding impression, however, was of the Windsors as a household anyone would like to be part of. Apart from the King and Queen and a policeman at the gate, nobody else was visible. ‘I never felt the presence of anyone at all other than the family,’ she recalled. It was clear ‘that home was to the Royal Family the source of life itself and that there was a determination on the part of the King and Queen to maintain a simple, united family life, whatever calls there might be to duty’. Later visits reinforced this picture of self-containment, though the background shifted from the unchanging domesticity of Royal Lodge to the warlike ramparts of the Castle. Here there were parables of life and death: the demise of a pet chameleon, for example (‘Princess Elizabeth could not bring herself to speak of her tiny pet for quite a long time after his death’) and, even more painfully, the death of a favourite corgi. The Queen, however, as always comforting and wise, told her elder daughter to keep things in proportion. It was, after all, the height of a world war.³⁷

Sheridan’s photographs, disseminated among dusty desert rats, weary Bevin boys, homesick land girls and traumatized evacuees, show a precious, sheltered intactness. In Sheridan’s world, the princesses were happily free from the requirement to do anything except obligingly change their outfits, and display an exquisite politeness. Yet they were also shown to be greatly concerned about the worrying state of a world mercifully beyond their comprehension – a concern that helpfully linked the ‘perfect hearth’ portrayal of the photographic image to a view of the girls which provided the regular diet of Ministry of Information handouts: as dutiful models for every other daughter of the Empire too young to serve in the women’s services.

A series of newspaper reports involving Princess Elizabeth, in particular, were designed, not so much to idealize the Heiress Presumptive, as to indicate royal approval for Government-sponsored schemes. Thus, the princesses did not only dig for victory, they knitted for it – the product of their labours being divided, with judicious impartiality, between the men of the army, navy and air force.³⁸ When they ran out of materials, there was a solution: in July 1941 it was announced that the two girls, aged fifteen and eleven, had personally arranged, and performed in, a concert in front of their parents and members of the armed services, from which between £70 and £80 had been raised, ‘to buy wool for knitting for the Forces’. If a Ministry wished to exhort the population to greater efforts, or advertise an achievement, it turned to the Palace for help, and where appropriate, royal children were provided. On one occasion the princesses (to the envy of every school child) were shown over a Fortress bomber, and allowed to play with the controls. On another, orchestrated publicity was given to the Queen’s decision to have both of them immunized against diphtheria. On yet another, the Heiress Presumptive was designated by the Ministry of Works as the donor of a prize open to Welsh schoolchildren ‘for the best essay in English and Welsh on metal salvage.’³⁹ Meanwhile, there was a press story in 1941 about how the fifteen-year-old Princess (despite a Civil List income of £6,000 a year) was only allowed five shillings a week pocket money; and that more than half even of this small sum was generously donated to war-supporting good causes.⁴⁰ The same spring, royal dolls owned by the children were exhibited to raise money for the British War Relief Society,⁴¹ and a special ‘Princess Elizabeth’s Day’ was announced, for collecting for children’s charities.

How could any teenager cope? One answer is that royalty lived its life in compartments: the public sectioned off from the private and, in the case of a young princess, often barely touching her personally at all. Another is that teenagers had not yet been invented – or at any rate, young people in their teens in the early 1940s had very different expectations from those either before or after the war. The Second World War was a time when adolescence was held in suspension. Children who went straight from school into war work or the armed services, enjoyed no intervening period of irresponsibility. In this, Princess Elizabeth was not unusual. The acceptance of a variety of honorific titles or the performance of symbolic acts was not necessarily more stressful than the tasks and ways of life of many contemporaries. Nevertheless, at a stage in life when it is hard enough to keep everyday private events in perspective, such a cacophony of public roles provided a strange accompaniment to growing up.

She was like other girls of her age, yet not like them. Winston Churchill was supposed to have remarked in an unflattering reference to Clement Attlee, that if you feed a grub on royal jelly, it becomes a queen. In the case of a human Heiress Presumptive, the equivalent of royal jelly is the world’s perceptions: the drip feed of curtseys, deference, public recognition, combined with a knowledge of lack of choice, and of inevitability. The strongest instinct of many adolescents is to conform: it was an instinct with which Princess Elizabeth was well equipped. She seems to have dealt with the peculiarity of her position by becoming as unremarkable as possible in everything she could not change, while accepting absolutely what was expected of her. Her actual experience was unique: there was nobody with whom she could compare herself, no peer group to set a standard. Yet few young people could have been more conformist, more amenable, than George VI’s elder daughter.

There remains the difficulty for the rest of humanity – grubs without a destiny – in understanding the mentality of somebody with such extraordinary expectations. A distinctive character, however, was beginning to emerge. Authentic portraits are rare – vignettes by passing visitors are generally coloured by excitement at meeting royalty, and tell more about the witness than the subject. But there are enough thoughtful descriptions to confirm the part-flattering, part-disconcerting impressions provided by Crawfie, of a reserved, strong-willed, narrow-visioned, slightly priggish child, without intellectual or aesthetic interests, taking what she is given as part of the natural order, but with greater mental capacities than any close member of the family cared to appreciate. When she was still thirteen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, noted after ‘a full talk with the little lady alone’ before he conducted her confirmation service, that ‘though naturally not very communicative, she showed real intelligence and understanding’.⁴² More than two years later, Eleanor Roosevelt formed a view of her that was strikingly similar. The wife of one Head of State assessed the daughter of another as ‘quite serious and a child with a great deal of character and personality . . . She asked me a number of questions about life in the United States and they were serious questions.’⁴³

The experience of her as an able, but above all single-minded, young person was shared by Horace Smith, who had more contact with her during the war than any of her other teachers apart from Crawfie, and who taught her in the subject that interested her most. The Princess was not, he considered, ‘a person who takes up interests lightly, only to drop them just as easily a short time later. If and when her interest is aroused, she goes into whatever subject it is with thoroughness and application, nor does her interest wane with the passing of time or the claim of other new matters upon her attention.’ In addition, he noted, she had ‘a keen and retentive mind’.⁴⁴

Such perceptions were combined, however, with a sense that she was young for her age, and remained in appearance and manner still a child until well into her teens. Perhaps there was an element of wishful thinking: the princesses’ childhood was part of the status quo ante bellum which it was hoped to restore. Such a feeling may have been strongest of all in the King and Queen, who liked her to wear the clothes of a child after she had ceased to be one. Nevertheless an uncertainty about whether Princess Elizabeth was precocious or immature, or both, is a recurrent feature of the accounts. Chips Channon observed the princesses in procession at a service at St. Paul’s in May 1943, ‘dressed alike in blue, which made them seem like little girls’.⁴⁵ Peter Townsend, an RAF officer who joined the Royal Family as an equerry to the King nine months later, found that they were not too old to lead him in a ‘hair-raising bicycle race,’ and recalled Princess Elizabeth as ‘charming and totally unsophisticated’.⁴⁶ Alexandra of Yugoslavia’s recollection of meeting her British cousins at Windsor, describes a childish ritual involving the princesses and their dogs. When tea was brought in, they insisted on feeding (with the aid of a footman) their four corgis first.⁴⁷

Preparation for her osmosis from child-princess, locked in a tower with her schoolbooks or playing in the park with her sister, to constitutionally responsible Heiress, was scratchy, like much else in wartime. For some time, the Crawfie and Marten regime had been supplemented with French lessons from the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue. According to one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Helen Graham, Elizabeth had been encouraged to attend closely to the news bulletins of the BBC.⁴⁸ ‘Already the Princess has a first-rate knowledge of State and current affairs,’ a courtier declared in 1943.⁴⁹

Various accounts were given of the level of her knowledge, some of them doubtless exaggerated, in order to demonstrate her fitness for the tasks ahead. It was said that, in addition to French, she was fluent in German. When she was eighteen, The Times claimed she was highly musical and although ‘like some others of her sex, she is no mathematician,’ she was familiar with ‘many classics’ in English and French.⁵⁰ When a magazine editor wrote to the Palace to check a list, supplied by ‘a friend near the Court,’ of books and authors the Princess had allegedly read, a courtier replied firmly that the list could be published as correct. It consisted of ‘many of Shakespeare’s plays,’ Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Coleridge, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Scott, Dickens, Austen, Trollope, Stevenson, Trevelyan’s History of England, Conan Doyle, Buchan and Peter Cheyney.⁵¹ To this remarkably large collection might be added the Brontës: at the end of the war, Lisa Sheridan found the Princess reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and expressing a preference for historical novels and stories about the Highlands.⁵² Was it true? If such accounts were even half accurate, the Princess would have been a strong candidate for a place at university, where she might have extended her intellectual range. Neither university nor even finishing school, however, was considered as a possibility. Instead, like a butcher or a joiner, she apprenticed for the job she would be undertaking for the rest of her life by doing it.

Her first practical experience of the grown-up world of royalty was to head a regiment. In January 1942, following the death of the Duke of Connaught, she was asked to take his place as honorary Colonel of the Grenadier Guards – a natural choice, some felt, in view of her contact with the Grenadiers at Windsor. The offer was accepted, and on her sixteenth birthday she carried out her first engagement as Colonel at Windsor Castle, inspecting the Grenadiers in the company of her father. Thirty reporters and ten photographers were granted press passes to cover the event.⁵³ Cecil Beaton marked it with one of his most famous pictures, which shows the Heiress Presumptive in uniform, fresh-faced and half-smiling, with her jacket unbuttoned and her hat at a coquettish angle. Afterwards, she was hostess to more than six hundred officers and men, entertained by the comedian Tommy Handley.⁵⁴ The Grenadier Guards were delighted by their acquisition, and those who dined with her in the officers’ mess recall her as ‘charming, and very sincere’.⁵⁵ Yet despite this dramatic début, Buckingham Palace kept up the fiction that the Princess was still a child, and American press requests for help with a story about her were met with the incomprehensible denial that she was entering public life.⁵⁶

Adulthood could not be postponed for ever. Princess Elizabeth’s coming-of-age, when she was entitled to succeed to the throne without need for a Regent, took place when she was eighteen, in April 1944. There was no débutante ball to celebrate the occasion. Instead, it was accompanied by the Princess’s graduation from a nursery bedroom to a suite. Here she was pictured by Lisa Sheridan, as if she were part of the interior design. ‘The upholstery is pale pink brocade patterned in cream,’ it was revealed. ‘The walls are cream, hung with peaceful pictures of pastoral scenes. The Princess’s flowered frock harmonized admirably with her room.’⁵⁷ There were other changes, to mark her rise in status. She was assigned her own armorial bearings, and her own standard which flew in whatever residence she happened to be occupying. She also acquired a ‘Household’ of her own, including, in July 1944, a lady-in-waiting. Meanwhile, she had unwittingly stimulated a minor constitutional controversy which engaged the best legal brains for several months.

The 1937 Regency Act, which had been passed following George VI’s accession, had provided for two forms of delegation of royal powers: to a Regent, in the event of a child under eighteen succeeding, or of the total incapacitation of a monarch; and to five Counsellors of State, composed of the Consort and the four next in line of succession, in the event of the Sovereign’s illness or absence abroad. However, the provision disqualified anybody not ‘a British subject of full age,’ which effectively meant that Elizabeth could succeed her father as Monarch with full powers at eighteen, but not deputise for him as a Counsellor until she was twenty-one.⁵⁸

Nobody noticed this anomaly until an eagle-eyed lawyer pointed it out to the King’s private secretary, Sir Alexander Hardinge, in the autumn of 1942. Hardinge at first dismissed it. It was ‘common sense,’ he replied to the lawyer tartly, to regard the Princess as fully of age if she could succeed without a Regent.⁵⁹ The Lord Chancellor, Lord Simon, however, disagreed: due to bad drafting, the law and common sense did not coincide.⁶⁰ There the matter might have rested, had not the King himself indicated his desire to have his daughter as a Counsellor of State. The Lord Chancellor was once again consulted, and recommended to the Prime Minister that the law be changed in order to permit the Heiress Presumptive to become a Counsellor, bearing in mind ‘the qualities of the young lady and the wish of her parents’.⁶¹ As Allied troops invaded Sicily in July 1943, George VI spoke to Winston Churchill on the matter, and secured a promise that it should be brought up at War Cabinet, with a view to a quick Bill. ‘He quite agrees this should be done,’ wrote the King.⁶² Cabinet assented, and in October, the Labour Home Secretary in the wartime Coalition, Herbert Morrison, introduced legislation, arguing that the responsibility would give the Heiress valuable experience.

The new Act received the Royal Assent in time for the eighteen-year-old Princess to become a Counsellor, along with her mother and three others, during her father’s visit to Italy in July 1944. In his absence she performed her first constitutional functions, which included signifying the Royal Assent to Acts which had been passed by Parliament. Yet she was still not ‘a British subject of full age’, or legally old enough to vote in an election.

A further question also arose in connection with the Princess’s eighteenth birthday: the possibility of a change of title. During 1943, letters and articles appeared in the press suggesting that, in view of her unchallenged position as Heiress, it would be appropriate to designate her ‘Princess of Wales,’ an idea first mooted in 1936. In August, Pwllheli Town Council petitioned the Prime Minister on the subject,⁶³ recommending the Princess’s birthday as a suitable moment. At the end of the year, the Carmarthen Journal reported that no project in recent years had been more popular,⁶⁴ and early in 1944, the Welsh Parliamentary Party, composed of Conservative, Liberal and Labour MPs, joined the campaign. It was pointed out, on all sides, that such a gesture would be greeted with enthusiasm in the Principality, with great benefits to Anglo-Welsh relations.

The Palace, however, demurred. While appreciating the sentiment behind such a proposal, it was unwilling to be swept along by a wave of populist fervour. The key issue, it decided, was the precedent for such a bestowal of title, and the lack of one. The title ‘Prince of Wales’ had only ever been given to the Heir Apparent. Princess Elizabeth was merely Heir or Heiress Presumptive. Could the Princess perhaps be promoted from Presumptive to Apparent? The Home Office was asked to investigate. ‘I have looked into your question about HRH Princess Elizabeth’, J. A. R. Pimlott, a Home Office official, wrote to Sir Eric Miéville. ‘Where the heir to the throne is a woman her right of succession is defeasible at any time by the birth of a son to the reigning Sovereign. HRH Princess Elizabeth therefore remains Heir Presumptive till she in fact succeeds.’ This had been true, he pointed out, of Victoria in 1837. Though Queen Adelaide, widow of William IV, had no child for seventeen years, it was thought constitutionally advisable in proclaiming the accession of Queen Victoria to guard against the possibility of a posthumous birth. The new Sovereign was therefore proclaimed Queen ‘saving the rights of any issue of his Late Majesty King William IV which may be born of His Late Majesty’s Consort’.⁶⁵

This, however, was not the end of the matter. Though it dealt with the Presumptive-Apparent problem – by definition, no female could be Apparent – it did not dispose of the issue of whether there was any precedent for calling a female Heir, even though only Presumptive, by the Welsh title. Indeed, an inquiry seemed to show, on the basis of records kept by a sixteenth-century German ambassador, that Henry VIII had considered that whichever of his daughters was Heir to the throne should be known as Princess of Wales.⁶⁶ For a short time, there was consternation, and uncertainty. However, the evidence to support such a claim was shadowy, and when it was put to Sir Gerald Wollaston, Garter Principal King of Arms, he was dismissive. He also pointed out the danger of setting a new precedent, opening the doors to the alarming future possibility, if George VI had a son who then married, of there being two Princesses of Wales.⁶⁷

The Palace view hardened. There remained, of course, the political complication of public opinion, which would be disappointed, especially in Wales, by a negative decision. But the King’s new private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, regarded this as a minor factor. ‘I have no doubt that the matter will be raised in Parliament before long, and of course the Commons have a right to do so,’ he wrote to the King in January 1944, shortly before the Allied forces landed in Anzio. ‘As long ago as 1376, they petitioned Edward III to make his grandson, Richard of Bordeaux, Prince of Wales.’⁶⁸ Not everybody, however, agreed that the views of parliamentarians should be as readily ignored in the twentieth century as in the fourteenth. One objector was Herbert Morrison, who suggested that to make the King’s elder daughter Princess of Wales would deal neatly with any suggestion that the Government was anti-Welsh. It did not matter, Morrison reasonably suggested, if there was no precedent. Moreover, in the unlikely event of a male heir being born, the title could simply lapse.

The Home Secretary’s minute on the subject of 28th January 1944 was sent to the Palace, but Lascelles, no mean politician on issues he regarded as important, deliberately withheld it from the King.⁶⁹ Probably it made no difference. A few days earlier, Jock Colville recorded in his diary that, while the Cabinet approved of the idea of making Elizabeth Princess of Wales, her father did not.⁷⁰ The royal will prevailed. At his weekly audience, Churchill promised the King that he would tell the Minister of Information to ‘damp down all discussion of this question in the Press,’ in order to avoid a row. In February, it was officially announced from Buckingham Palace that there would be no change in the Princess’s title on her eighteenth birthday. ‘This will check the spate of press comment and general chatter,’ Lascelles recorded on 13 February. As a result, the principality was without a Prince or Princess until 1958. The oft-repeated explanation for this vacancy was ‘the very real distinction between heirs apparent and presumptive’.⁷¹

TO CONSOLE the Welsh, the King and Queen took Princess Elizabeth with them on a tour of mining and industrial areas in South Wales early in 1944. The crowds were welcoming and forgiving, and came from all classes and occupations. At Cardiff docks, according to one report, the Queen and Princess ‘mingled with a crowd of coloured Merchant Navy seamen,’ and stood beside ‘an ebony giant from British Honduras’. People from the villages walked for several miles just to see the King’s daughter, who smiled and bowed her head in acknowledgement of greetings.⁷²

It was not just in Wales, however, that there was an upsurge of feeling in favour of Elizabeth. As the war entered its final phase, she found herself an emblematic heroine everywhere. All over the Empire, the health, beauty and emerging womanhood of the Princess were linked to the eagerly anticipated future, in which families would be brought together, sweethearts rejoined, babies born, bellies filled and freedom enjoyed. Encouraged by broadcasters and newsreels, young people took a special interest in her. On the Welsh tour, she caused particular excitement among children. In Valletta, on the island of Malta, a thousand school children assembled a few weeks before the Normandy landings to see and cheer a special film depicting scenes from her life.⁷³

Requests for public appearances by the Princess now became frequent. For the time being the Palace was adamant: there could be no question of ‘independent engagements,’ though she might occasionally accompany her parents, as to South Wales.⁷⁴ Soon, however, this rule was relaxed. On 23 May 1944, Princess Elizabeth spoke publicly for the first time at the annual meeting of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney. In the autumn, she accepted an invitation to launch HMS Vanguard, the largest battleship ever built in the British Isles. The ceremony, in Clyde shipyards, was followed by a luncheon at which she read a short speech. The First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander, wrote to Lascelles afterwards describing ‘the clear and decisive way’ in which she carried out both duties.⁷⁵

There remained the question of whether she would enter one of the women’s services, and if so, which. Early in 1945, it was decided that she would join the Auxiliary Territorial Service. It was not the obvious choice. In view of her family’s naval traditions, the WRNS would have been more natural. The King and Queen were apparently reluctant: there is no reason to doubt Crawfie’s account of an eager and determined young woman wearing down the resistance of her parents.⁷⁶ At the end of February she was registered as No. 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor. The rank was an honorary one, but the training in driving and vehicle-maintenance she underwent at No. 1 Mechanical Transport Training Centre at Aldershot, was genuine. She enjoyed this sole, brief experience of communal education. Several decades later, she told the Labour politician Barbara Castle that it was the only time in her life when she had been able seriously to test her own capabilities against those of others of her age.⁷⁷ After six weeks she qualified as a driver, and at the end of July, a few days before the final end to the war, she was promoted to Junior Commander.

‘The Princess is to be treated in exactly the same way as any other officer learning at the driving training centre,’ maintained the official report at the outset.⁷⁸ To back this up, the Queen requested that photographers should not be given any facilities.⁷⁹ This, however, did not deter the press, and during her short stay at the Centre she was photographed more intensively than at any time since the Coronation. As a result, she was scarcely just one of the girls. If it was not quite true, as a 1957 assessment put it, that ‘the rule of seclusion was maintained and she did not mix with her fellows on the course,’⁸⁰ the extent of mucking in, on equal terms, was limited. She kept to the routine of the ATS mess, took her share of duties, and acquired the basics of driving, car mechanics and maintenance. But she returned to Windsor every night to sleep. She also became an unwitting mannequin for the uniform of the service – pictures of her with a spanner, at the wheel of a lorry, leaning on a bonnet, or peering purposefully and fetchingly under one, appeared in the newspapers and magazines of every Allied nation.

In such matters, it was always impossible to disentangle a private motive from the public effort. Since the enrolment of a royal princess could not be kept secret, her participation in the ATS inevitably became part of the morale-boosting display of the Monarchy. It was a similar story with other initiatives that started spontaneously. A particularly striking and, in its way, sad example of the way Royal Family behaviour spilled over from the personal to the public, so that domestic events were turned into courtly contrivance, was provided by a series of Christmas shows put on during the war by Windsor children, with the aid of adult mentors, and performed in front of parents and other members of the Castle community.

These began modestly in 1940 with a simple play, ‘The Christmas Child,’ in St. George’s Hall, with Elizabeth playing one of the three kings, flanked by two boy evacuees. The occasion was enjoyed by everybody, and the princesses, who had been on stage since birth without knowing it, discovered an interest in, and even a talent for, amateur theatricals. The following Christmas, the stakes were raised slightly, and a pantomime, ‘Cinderella,’ was written for them by a local schoolmaster. Again it was a success, and once again there was a good deal of democratic sharing of tasks and banter in the preparations and rehearsals. The next year, they put on ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ and Lisa Sheridan described how Princess Elizabeth ‘took the arms of the two “sailors” and sang “Mind Your Sisters”’ and brought the house down.⁸¹ The tradition continued, giving pleasure to both performers and audience, which always included the princesses’ parents. Horace Smith, who attended the pantomimes of 1942–4, recalled seeing the elder princess ‘full of confidence and vigour,’ and reducing the King to hearty laughter.⁸² The humour depended a lot on puns. ‘There are three acres in one rood,’ Widow Twankey, an office boy from the Castle, was required to say in the 1943 production of ‘Aladdin’. ‘We don’t want anything improper,’ replied Margaret. ‘There’s a large copper in the kitchen,’ said the Widow. ‘We’ll soon get rid of him,’ declared Elizabeth – and so on.⁸³

Year by year, the performances became more polished, with increasingly elaborate costumes and sets. It was also established, as Court etiquette apparently required, that if the King and Queen were to attend, their daughters should have leading parts, regardless of the acting ability of the evacuees and village children who were also involved. Consequently, attention focused on the royal children and their skills, even more than would have been true in any case. Meanwhile audiences grew, bringing in large numbers of locally-based guardsmen and ATS girls. In 1943, there were three performances, including one specifically for soldiers. The show also became publicly known. Weeks before the 1943 pantomime, advance publicity produced a flood of inquiries, and more than a thousand would-be ticket holders sent in applications containing blank cheques. All were politely refused.⁸⁴ However, those denied entry could still learn about the show second-hand, for reports appeared in the press. Particular interest was aroused by ‘Aladdin’ in 1943, in which the Heiress Presumptive, cast in the title role, and wearing utility shorts and top, performed a tap dance, and in one scene appeared as a charlady, in an apron of sackcloth. ‘From the moment Princess Elizabeth popped out of a laundry basket,’ enthused the Sunday Graphic, ‘the King and Queen and the audience of 400 laughed and thoroughly enjoyed the show.’⁸⁵ After seeing the last of the three performances, Lascelles wrote in his diary that the principals and chorus alike would not have disgraced Drury Lane. ‘P’cess Eliz. was a charming Aladdin’, he noted, ‘and P’cess M. a charming and competent Princess Roxana’.⁸⁶ Altogether the pantomime netted £200.

The final pantomime, at Christmas 1944, starred the Heiress Presumptive as a Victorian seaside belle. It also included a carefully choreographed ‘ballet interlude,’ arranged by the dancing mistress at Buckingham Palace.⁸⁷ By this time, however, it had been transformed into an ambitious, semi-professional extravaganza, widely discussed as an established rite, and, in effect, part of the public relations of royalty.