The Queen

70 Chapters in the Life of Elizabeth II

Ian Lloyd

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781803992747
  9780750998567
• eBook ISBN:
  9781803990835
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

At the time of Elizabeth II's accession, Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Harry S. Truman was President of the United States and Joseph Stalin still governed the Soviet Union. It has often been said that she never put a foot wrong during her seven decades as monarch, and even those ideologically opposed to Britain and its governments have lauded her. Remarkably, she retained her relevance as sovereign well into her nineties, remaining a reassuring constant in an ever-changing world.
Royal biographer Ian Lloyd reveals the woman behind the legend over seventy themed chapters. Drawing on interviews with relatives, friends and courtiers, he explores her relationship with seven generations of the royal family, from the children of Queen Victoria to Elizabeth's own great-grandchildren. He also sheds light on some lesser-known aspects of her character, such as her frugality and her gift for mimicry. In addition, we see her encounters with A-listers, from Marilyn Monroe to Madonna, and her adept handling of several of the twentieth century's most difficult leaders.
Above all, Lloyd examines how the Queen stayed true to the promise she made to the nation at the age of 21, 'that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service'.

1

MAYFAIR BABY

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor arrived in this world at 2.40 a.m. on Wednesday, 21 April 1926. She had been expected at the end of the month and her mother, the Duchess of York, was out and about enjoying the first night of a West End play the previous week. It had been decided the baby should be induced and, as the difficult labour progressed, the doctors in attendance – Sir Henry Simson, Dr Walter Jagger and Sir George Blacker – decided a caesarean section would be advisable. In the first bulletin released after the birth, the Palace coyly referred to the operation: ‘a certain line of treatment was successfully adopted.’

Also present, in an adjacent room, was the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks. The convention of having a senior minister present to witness the birth was established after the birth of James Stuart in the summer of 1688. When Mary of Modena, queen to the unpopular James II, gave birth to this Roman Catholic heir, pamphleteers declared the baby to be an imposter, smuggled into the queen’s bedchamber in a warming pan. The practice was abandoned in 1948 prior to the birth of Prince Charles.

In retrospect, it seems a peculiarly British practice for the Home Secretary of the day to stay up until the middle of the night for such arcane reasons. After all, with the escalating dispute between the coalmine owners who wanted to reduce their employees’ wages and the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) who supported the miners, Joynson-Hicks and his colleagues had their hands full. Two weeks after the Princess’s birth, the TUC called a general strike and some 1.5 million workers came out in support of the miners.

Marriage to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon gave the shy and insecure Prince Albert, Duke of York, the security he craved. The birth of their daughter Elizabeth was the icing on the cake. ‘We always wanted a child to make our happiness complete,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘& now that it has happened it seems so wonderful & strange.’(© Classic Image/Alamy)

Born third in line to the throne, Elizabeth’s arrival was global news. The Dundee Courier subheading ‘World-Wide Chorus of Congratulation’ was typical of the media coverage. The Daily Sketch pointed out presciently, ‘A possible Queen of England was born yesterday.’ It went on to explain that the last Queen regnant, Victoria, was the daughter of the King’s fourth son, so ‘it cannot be forgotten that our new Princess is a possible Queen-Empress’.

Elizabeth II is the only British monarch to have been born in a private house – and one with a door number to boot. No. 17 Bruton Street, London was no ordinary house, but a substantial mansion leased by her grandfather, the 14th Earl of Strathmore, from late 1921 until the end of the decade. It has had an eventful history as the residence of several earls, an occasional base for charities and latterly as the site of various businesses.

In 1859 Ivo Bligh, later the 8th Earl of Darnley, was born at the house. He is best remembered as the captain of the victorious English cricket eleven on the 1882–83 tour of Australia. A group of women in Melbourne presented him with a small terracotta urn reputedly containing the ashes of a bail, symbolising ‘the ashes of English cricket’ following the team’s defeat by the Aussies at the Oval earlier in 1882. The cricket-mad aristocrat gave the ashes to the Marylebone Cricket Club, where it remains in its museum at Lord’s. Bligh and his teammates are referenced in a poem etched on to the urn:

When Ivo goes back with the urn, the urn;

Studds, Steel, Read and Tylecote return, return;

From the 1860s, No. 17 Bruton Street was the London residence of Hallyburton Campbell, the 3rd Baron Stratheden of Cupar and Campbell of St Andrews. Following his death in 1918, it was the temporary address for the Liberty League, a liberal political organisation whose founder members included the writers Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard. The aim of the short-lived league was to combat the threat of Bolshevism spreading from revolutionary Russia and instead to promote classical liberal ideas throughout Britain and its empire.

No. 17 was the focus of attention on 23 April 1923 when Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon left here with her father for her wedding to Prince Albert, Duke of York, at Westminster Abbey. Three years later, still searching for a permanent London home, Elizabeth and ‘Bertie’ moved back to the Strathmores’ residence on 6 April 1926 to await the birth of their baby, which arrived at 2.40 a.m. on the 21st. Huge crowds gathered in Bruton Street throughout the day as various visitors, including the King and Queen and their daughter Princess Mary, came and went.

After the Strathmores left, the lease was taken by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company (CPR). The house was transformed into offices, though the room Elizabeth was born in was kept intact and, according to the CPR, would be open to reasonable public access.

A new eight-floor office building called Berkeley Square House, which included No. 17, was completed on the site in 1939 and leased to the UK Government. We next hear of it in 1944 when it was bought for £1.25 million by Queen Anne’s Bounty, which administered the fund for helping poor clergymen.

In the 1970s, No. 17 Bruton Street was the offices for the finance company Lombard North Central Ltd, a subsidiary of National Westminster Bank. Today it is the home of Hakkasan, a Cantonese restaurant. The venue boasts two plaques marking the birthplace of Elizabeth II, one unveiled in the Silver Jubilee year of 1977 and the other to mark the Diamond Jubilee in 2012. The Queen is unlikely to be impressed with these tributes, since in 1953 she gave her approval for a similar plaque to be added to Berkeley Square House but asked that it should be removed following her coronation on 2 June of that year. The reason is unclear but perhaps she felt it was lesè-majesté to be permanently associated with an office block.

2

‘MY BELOVED PAPA’

‘You can do a lot if you are trained and I hope I have been,’ declared the Queen, forty years into her reign. Her training was largely at the hands of her father, Prince Albert, Duke of York, who acceded to the throne as George VI following his brother’s abdication, and had no experience in the duties of kingship.

In preparing Elizabeth for her eventual destiny, he also forged a close bond with his eldest daughter. She, in return, idolised her father, admiring what she called his ‘steadfastness’. ‘She and the King were very close,’ said Lady Pamela Hicks, née Mountbatten, who was with Elizabeth when she became Queen in 1952. ‘They were “we four” with Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) and Princess Margaret.’

The abdication catapulted Elizabeth’s father onto the world’s stage from a life of relative obscurity, but happy domesticity. He was a man of limited intelligence – his biographer Sarah Bradford considers his academic record as a naval cadet ‘disastrous’ and he came bottom out of a class of sixty-eight at the Royal Naval College, Osborne. Nevertheless, as King, he strove hard to learn the essential skills that would enable him to emulate his own father, George V.

‘We four’, as the King referred to his family, were a tight-knit group. For the first ten years of her life, Elizabeth II was a Princess of York, as we see in her signature from a visitors’ book of the early 1930s. (Author’s collection)

The assiduous way Elizabeth has tackled her daily government boxes, helped by her ability to skim-read as well as her keenness to learn facts, has been likened to her father’s approach to paperwork. Both were in marked contrast to Edward VIII, who left unread documents on his desk for all to see and returned some with stains from spilled cocktails on them.

The King found confidence and happiness in marriage and fatherhood. Historian Robert Lacey noted, ‘He had been brought up in an environment where the human emotion was suppressed, where raw love, anger, pain or exultation were not regarded as topics of polite conversation.’

George was certainly more hands on with his children than his own parents had been with theirs. He took part in bath time with the girls and later on in pillow fights in their bedrooms. He and Queen Elizabeth played card games with the girls – Snap, Happy Families, Racing Demon, Rummy – as well joining in charades, word games and family jokes. The enforced lockdown of life at Windsor during the Second World War, where the princesses spent the duration while many of their cousins went to the safety of the USA or Canada, brought the family even closer.

After the war, Queen Mary’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Airlie, recalled the relaxed family atmosphere at Sandringham with the princesses and their friends doing jigsaws together in the hall while ‘the radio, worked by Princess Elizabeth, blared incessantly’.

When it came to lessons for his daughters, the King made sure, first and foremost, that they should be taught in an environment conducive to learning. He visited his old schoolroom at the top of Buckingham Palace with Marion Crawford, the royal governess, and declared, ‘That won’t do’, and found a larger room with better light. He passed on his copy of Punch to Elizabeth as a way of making her aware of political issues and drew her attention to articles in The Times, which he was given specially printed on rag (a copy went to the monarch as well as the copyright libraries). He also arranged for Elizabeth to have lessons in constitutional history from the vice provost of Eton, Henry Marten, a bashful and eccentric figure who nervously addressed the Princess as ‘gentlemen’, the usual way he addressed a classroom of boys.

Elizabeth and her father had much in common. Both remained fundamentally shy. The Princess’s cousin, Margaret Rhodes (née Elphinstone), told the author in 2006, ‘It was always very difficult sitting next to him at dinner, as he so obviously wanted to talk, but found it awkward, so I used to get round by having some questions ready to ask him, and that worked.’ Elizabeth’s first private secretary, John Colville, noted, ‘Princess Elizabeth has the sweetest of characters, but she is not easy to talk to.’ This shyness was something that strongly concerned the King.

Quite often, of course, it depended upon who she was talking to, with both the Princess and her father very confident within the family group. Artist Rex Whistler recorded his impressions of sitting next to Princess Elizabeth, aged 17, at a Windsor Castle dinner. He found her ‘gentle and a little demure from shyness but not too shy, and a delicious way of gazing – very serious and solemn – into your eyes while talking, but all breaking up into enchanting laughter if we came to anything funny’.

Elizabeth, like her father, is conscientious and dogged in her approach to her role. She admired the way her father dealt with the challenge of public speaking despite his stammer. Princess Margaret recalled, ‘It was a worry when he made a speech. I had vicarious nerves for him.’ The tension was one of several reasons for his ‘gnashes’, outbursts of temper that Queen Elizabeth could jolly him out of. Princess Elizabeth had a temper in her schoolroom days, once pouring a bottle of ink over herself, but was successful in masking the trait later on.

Elizabeth was a more confident speaker. When she performed her first solo duty, opening a dock, during the royal tour of South Africa in 1947, the King listened to the broadcast on the radio aboard the White Train and had tears of pride pouring down his cheeks.

She inherited her love of the outdoors from her parents. She enjoyed riding with her father in Windsor Great Park at the weekend and they also took long walks during which he gave her advice on politics and government.

Both of them had a straightforward and sincere faith, nothing like the questioning approach to religion that Prince Philip developed. Each morning, the King listened to Lift up Your Hearts, an uncomplicated mixture of Bible readings and hymns on the BBC’s Home Service, and would test his daughters’ knowledge by querying, ‘What were the Ten Commandments?’, and so on. Queen Victoria did the same with her children and grandchildren. Clambering out of her carriage she once barked, ‘What were the Epistles?’ to Princess Victoria Eugénie of Battenberg. The terrified girl squeaked, ‘Were they the wives of the apostles?’ Even in old age, she could recall the breeze moving Victoria’s veil and the look of incredulity on her face!

King George was a possessive father. Initially, he refused to allow Elizabeth to do some form of war work, unlike Margaret Rhodes, who was a secretary with MI6, and Lady Mary Cambridge, another cousin, who was a volunteer nurse. It was a source of friction until Elizabeth was allowed to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in the closing months of the war.

He was also reluctant to see her leave the family unit to marry Prince Philip of Greece and insisted she didn’t make any formal announcement of a betrothal until the royal family had returned from their tour of South Africa. Partly, it was to ensure Elizabeth was committed to her relationship but also because he couldn’t face losing her.

When Elizabeth did marry in November 1947 it was, according to the King’s authorised biographer, ‘a day of mixed emotions’. Mingled with his pleasure for her was ‘a deep sorrow at losing her from his own home’. In a poignant letter, he wrote to her, ‘I was so proud and thrilled at having you by my side on our long walk through Westminster Abbey but when I handed your hand to the Archbishop I felt that I had lost something very precious.’

Princess Elizabeth taking out the plugs of a car while training as a second subaltern in the Auxiliary Territorial Army (ATS). (© Pump Park Vintage Photography/Alamy)

The final few years of the King’s life saw him dogged by ill health. Decades of heavy smoking caused him to develop arteriosclerosis (a potentially serious condition where arteries become clogge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Mayfair Baby
• 2 ‘My Beloved Papa’
• 3 Elizabeth and a Flying Ace
• 4 Grandpapa England
• 5 A Terrifying Grandmama
• 6 A Best Friend
• 7 Granny and Grandpa, Non-Royal
• 8 Pilgrim’s Progress
• 9 Vic’s Chicks
• 10 ‘The Most Famous Little Girl in the World’
• 11 Bobo
• 12 Crawfie
• 13 Heir and Spare
• 14 Manners Maketh the Monarch
• 15 Phoney Times
• 16 VE and VJ
• 17 Sisterly Love
• 18 Dancing Queen
• 19 Handbags and Gladrags
• 20 Traditionally Speaking
• 21 First Meeting
• 22 Courting Cousins
• 23 Tour de Force
• 24 Elizabeth’s Austerity Wedding
• 25 What Are We Going to Do with all These?
• 26 A Longed-for Brother
• 27 ‘Your Majesty, Mummy’: The Queen and Prince Charles
• 28 Malta and a Normal Life
• 29 Princess Anne: The Son they Never Had
• 30 Well-Endowed
• 31 The Special Relationship
• 32 Accession
• 33 The Other Queen Elizabeth
• 34 And to Crown it All
• 35 Forever Faithful: The Queen and Religion
• 36 The Queen and Churchill
• 37 Dropping the Curtsies
• 38 TV Queen
• 39 Four-Legged Friends
• 40 ‘It Gives Me Great Pleasure to Declare Open …’
• 41 Picking a Winner: Two Controversial Elections
• 42 The Human Side
• 43 One’s Hand-One-Downs
• 44 The Admirable Perkins
• 45 Monarch of the Glen
• 46 Royal Variety – Not Always the Spice of Life
• 47 A Room with a View
• 48 Awkward Customers: The Queen and Idi Amin
• 49 Lights, Camera, Action: Royal Film Performance
• 50 Regina vs Celebrities
• 51 Looking after the Pennies
• 52 ‘I Name This Ship …’
• 53 Queen on Screen
• 54 We Are Amused: The Queen’s Sense of Humour
• 55 Daughters-in-Law
• 56 Coo, What a Hobby!
• 57 Jam and Jerusalem: The Queen and the WI
• 58 The Royal Stamp of Approval
• 59 Handbags at Dawn: The Queen and Mrs Thatcher
• 60 The Royal Family on the Queen
• 61 Two Awkward State Visits
• 62 Death of a Princess
• 63 Her Godchildren
• 64 How the Queen was Hoaxed
• 65 Elizabeth and the Other Windsors
• 66 Techno-Queen
• 67 My Husband and I
• 68 Anni Horribiles
• 69 On Being Queen, in Her Own Words
• 70 A Credit to the Nation
• Bibliography