Backstairs Billy

A
T THE TIME
of his death in 2007, William John Stephenson Tallon, or ‘Backstairs Billy’ as he was known, was familiar to a relatively small circle that included the members of the royal family, but especially Prince Charles and Lord Snowdon, and a long list of former homosexual lovers, many of whom had also been in royal service. Outside that circle Billy was not at that time widely known, but in the years since his death a picture has emerged of a man whose life was extraordinary by any standards.

It was extraordinary because Tallon was always an unlikely candidate to be part of the intimate royal circle.

William Tallon spent more than half a century working for the royal family at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. Nominally, he was a servant; in reality, he was a uniquely trusted friend and confidant to the Queen Mother. Other friends and advisers came and went but Billy was a man the Queen Mother could never quite do without. The history of their remarkable relationship is the subject of this book.

Though intensely loyal, Billy was also a dangerous risk taker; though charming he could also be vicious; though considerate and amusing he could also be ruthless and predatory.

This is the story of a curiously contradictory man and it is a story that has never before been told. For the first time since Billy’s death, many of those who knew him have agreed to talk about Billy and their memories add up to a picture of a complex man who, with none of the usual qualifications of birth and privilege, became a central figure in one of the world’s most admired institutions.

I met William Tallon a number of times during the last years of his life. I met some of his friends and a number of his former colleagues. Most of his friends were people he met socially; his few enemies tended to be those with whom he had worked.

There is no doubt that if William Tallon took to someone he was wonderfully good company – he was funny, talkative and very witty. And he loved gossip. He could make a story come to life as no one else could. He could also be very kind. But occasionally
he would take against someone and then he could be very unkind indeed.

He was a creature of extremes: he was immensely loyal to his friends, but very spiteful to his enemies. For much of his life he was driven by two demons: a powerful sex drive and an intense, almost pathological love for the Queen Mother.

I’ve spoken to and corresponded with more of Billy’s enemies and former colleagues than his friends. His friends understandably remember only the witty storyteller, the generous host, the performer, so their memories tend to cast a rosy glow. Billy’s colleagues and subordinates, not all of whom disliked him, add the shadows and most of the deeper complexities, and so their memories, perhaps inevitably, make up a greater part of this book.

One difficulty with a book such as this – one that portrays someone only very recently dead – is that the subject’s contemporaries are wary of upsetting others still alive. But, even allowing for that, I was still surprised at quite how many of those who talked to me were willing to help only if they were not identified. Some are still working in service and feared they would be dismissed if they were quoted in anything controversial. Others felt their memories were still too raw to be acknowledged openly. For good or ill, I agreed to these requests for anonymity, or for a change of name, for without them this book could not have been written.

As the years go by, memories of this fascinating – some would say wholly remarkable – character will inevitably fade, especially as he was someone whose life was not, as it were, part of official record. He was not in any real sense a public figure; yet he was
often the subject of public, especially media, speculation. He cannot, however, be described as an entirely private figure either.

William Tallon was in truth that rarest of all rare creatures, a very ordinary person who carved out an extraordinary role for himself in one of the world’s most secretive institutions: the British royal family. On the face of it, he was the last person one would have expected to reach a position of influence among the royals. He had very little formal education and came from a working-class background, yet, relying entirely on personality and force of character, he became, in many ways, one of the most significant characters in a world where education and social class meant everything.

But if it is hard to write about a royal servant, it is even more difficult to write about a member of the royal family.

The sensitivities involved in any discussion of the Queen Mother and other members of the royal family are legion. Any and every book published about the Windsors is either derided as sycophantic or attacked for denigrating the members of one of our most cherished institutions.

The newspapers’ usual technique is to track down an elderly, distant relative of the royal family who then denounces the book as a tissue of lies and insults. This kind of automatic reaction is largely based on a desire to preserve an image of the royal family as symbols rather than real people. Critics of books about the royals would have us believe that members of the royal family do not have flesh-and-blood lives with faults and foibles like the rest of us. The case is particularly acute with the Queen Mother, who
was by any standards a remarkable and in many ways admirable woman. But are we really to believe she never lost her temper, never became confused or embarrassed, never drank a little too much? And we are forced to ask the question: does it really damage the Queen Mother’s reputation to report that she liked jokes and gossip, that she enjoyed dancing and games and horseplay? Backstairs Billy once said that the great thing about the Queen Mother was that she liked to have fun and didn’t care who knew it and in this, as in many other ways, he was almost certainly right.

T
WO HUNDRED GUESTS
, including HM the Queen’s cousin Lord Snowdon and actors Patricia Routledge and Sir Derek Jacobi, gathered at the Queen’s Chapel in St James’s Palace on a cold winter’s day in 2007. Hundreds more had applied for tickets for a most unusual funeral service.

A casual observer might have assumed some great dignitary had passed on.

In fact the service was for a working-class boy born above a hardware shop in a run-down town in Co. Durham during the Great Depression; a boy who grew to become one of the late Queen Mother’s most trusted aides.

One of the difficulties of writing about Billy was that he was himself naturally inclined to secrecy and this tendency was intensified by a lifetime’s devotion to a job where discretion, loyalty and secrecy were vital. But Billy also liked to embellish and to
some extent he was a master of evasion and fantasy. Sometimes his exaggerations were entirely unnecessary. If he
was
so very close to the Queen Mother, why was he at pains to over-state the case?

It is difficult to separate truth from fiction in many areas of his life because all those who have written about him – including friends and journalists – have had an agenda according to whether they liked or loathed him. Some say, for example, that Billy was the only male member of staff permitted to enter the Queen Mother’s bedroom without knocking. Others say this is nonsense and that although he carried the breakfast tray to her room he always left it outside for her personal maid to carry in. Some insist that Billy was so manipulative that the Queen Mother was almost afraid of him. Others insist this is nonsense and that the Queen Mother delighted in keeping her sometimes-wayward page in check. In these and in so many other ways there is something mysterious about Billy and his life. He and others embellished almost everything to do with his role in the royal household. It was as if during his long life in service he became a character in a play, a play directed largely by himself.

M
ILLIONS OF PEOPLE
around the world are fascinated by the British royal family. The children of Her Majesty the Queen may have had messy divorces and given embarrassing interviews to the press at various times, but the Queen herself famously never complains and never explains.

On royal tours and the endless series of visits and events that make up the royal calendar, we watch as the royal presence conjures
a magical world of ritual through the State Opening of Parliament, Trooping the Colour, Changing of the Guard, not to mention processions down the Mall with various foreign heads of state.

The Queen is a familiar figure, yet she seems both well known and, at the same time, profoundly unknowable. There is no chink in her armour; no hint at a genuinely private life behind the facade.

Until her death in 2002, there was only one figure who rivalled the Queen in terms of the world’s interest and the nation’s affection, and that was her mother. Like her daughter, Elizabeth the Queen Mother never gave interviews; never explained, never complained. She seemed to float – cynics would say on a tide of gin – above criticism.

But, unlike her daughter, the Queen Mother
was
occasionally indiscreet and frequently off-message. This was perhaps because she had married rather than been born into the royal family. Indeed, when the prospect first appeared on the horizon, she had been horrified at the idea of being a member of the royal family for precisely the reason that she knew her life would never be normal again.

T
HE BOWES-LYON FAMILY
were certainly aristocratic, but when Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon married Albert, Duke of York in 1923, the more conservative elements of the British establishment were aghast that the young prince had not been persuaded to marry a foreign princess. Elizabeth’s father, it is
true, was the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, but, despite this, it was thought by some that a minor German princess might have been preferable to a mere aristocrat. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century such things may seem ridiculous, but in the early part of the twentieth century they were considered of the first importance.

However, there was less to worry about than might at first appear. As the more conservative members of the royal family’s advisers pointed out, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon’s young husband Albert, the second son of King George V and Queen Mary, was never going to become king. In fact, it was only the shocking abdication of her husband’s brother in 1936 that led to a change in Elizabeth’s fortunes that no one could have predicted. She might otherwise have lived out her life in wealth and relative obscurity, able to do and say more or less as she pleased.

But, for all the complaints about a lack of royal blood, Elizabeth had no doubts about her position. She grew up in the decade before the Great War when the British aristocracy simply assumed that their vast landed fortunes – untaxed and unencumbered by death duties – would last forever. The taste for the high life that those fortunes created never left Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who, to the end of her life, spent money as if it really did grow on trees.

Too polite to speculate about royal extravagance during her lifetime, the public did begin to speculate – and with a vengeance – once the Queen Mother died.

Despite the criticisms, however, it must have been difficult for Elizabeth to imagine a world where servants did not provide every
possible creature comfort, where tradesmen did not deliver the finest food and wine at the back door and where, having made their deliveries, they were not paid by a housekeeper or butler so that the head of the family need never be bothered by anything so sordid as money.

Elizabeth’s lifestyle was fundamentally the same in 2000 as it had been in 1930. It reflected precisely an earlier era when the aristocracy and the royal family could simply do as they pleased and the taxpayer must uncomplainingly foot the bill.

Some idea of the world in which Elizabeth grew up can be gleaned from the fact that only a few decades before her birth, an official in the Government tax office (as it then was) pointed out that it was rather undignified for the royal family to pay any tax at all. They
had
paid tax without complaint for as long as anyone could remember, but quietly, and without a word of dissent from Parliament or the press, the royal family was immediately made exempt from all income tax – a situation that remained unchanged until the 1990s.

The fact is that the Queen Mother famously spent money as she pleased and was hugely in debt at the time of her death. According to various newspaper reports, which admittedly it is difficult to verify, she owed her bankers, Coutts, more than £7 million and the joke in Clarence House, her home for more than fifty years, was that nobody could be found who had the courage to tell her that the money would have to be paid back. Again unconfirmed reports suggest that the Queen Mother’s daughter Queen Elizabeth, in order to avoid the inevitable scandal, quietly repaid the huge debt.

Living a life that was rather like a fairy-tale fantasy was the only life Elizabeth ever knew and it was this fairy-tale life that was to draw William Tallon into royal service for more than five decades. As he also would have no doubt been aware, not telling the royals embarrassing truths has a long history.

When the Labouchere Amendment was passed in England in 1881 (replacing the earlier crime of buggery) all homosexual acts between men became known, for the purposes of the law, as ‘gross indecency’. At the time it was thought wise to include a clause banning female homosexuality also, but when it was realised that this clause would have to be seen by Queen Victoria when she signed the Bill into law, Parliament reacted with horror. Someone would actually have to explain to Her Majesty what lesbianism involved. This was unthinkable. The clause was hastily removed and female homosexuality was never made illegal as a result.

The terror of bringing bad or awkward and embarrassing news to the royals continued more or less unchanged until the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Her passion for complaining and explaining to the press, and to anyone else who would listen, exposed the royal family to unprecedented criticism and even the Queen temporarily lost some of her allure. Yet even at this difficult time – a time when it is generally agreed the monarchy came close to collapse – the Queen Mother sailed through relatively unscathed.

The cracks really only appeared after she had died because memories of royal criticism following Diana’s death were fresh in people’s minds. It was permissible to criticise where abuses
were rampant because a new precedent had been set. When the royal family gathered in black at the gates of Buckingham Palace to watch Diana’s funeral cortege, many claimed, perhaps unfairly, that they were there not because they wanted to be but because they wanted to head off the risk of a huge public backlash.

Surprise at the state of the Queen Mother’s finances led inevitably to speculation about her entourage. To the end of her life, she is rumoured to have employed around sixty personal attendants at any one time. This seemed an almost medieval extravagance to some commentators and the low pay that these servants – for that is what they were – often received only increased their indignation.

As one newspaper columnist put it, average pay below stairs in the royal household was sometimes on a par with that of a road sweeper, and yet servants were routinely expected to work extraordinarily long hours.

S
ERVANTS HAVE ALWAYS
been the one weak spot in the royal defences. They are relatively badly paid so they are always a risk as the newspapers are inevitably keen to pay for stories about Britain’s most secretive and famous family.

The late Princess of Wales’s butler Paul Burrell is a good example. His book about life as a servant with the royals caused a scandal, not because he revealed embarrassing secrets but because he claimed an intimacy with Diana that many questioned.

Back in the 1940s Marion Crawford – nanny to Princess
Elizabeth and her sister Margaret – had also famously written a book about her experiences. This shone a relatively innocuous light on the hidden world of the royals but despite the fact that the book gave very little away and simply served, as it were, to polish the reputations of the royals, poor Nanny Crawford was never forgiven and was never again contacted by the children she had cherished through their early years.

Despite their so-called revelations, Marion Crawford and Paul Burrell were benign interpreters of life behind the royal facade. Far more dangerous, potentially, was the man who became the most famous ex-royal servant of all: Backstairs Billy.

Billy never wrote a book, although at the time of his death his friends were convinced he was at work on his memoirs. But even without written evidence from Billy himself, his love–hate relationship with the royals can be pieced together from a wide range of sources, but especially former fellow servants, as well as friends and lovers.

A
NYONE WHO HAS
ever watched any public event that involved the Queen Mother at its centre will have noticed a distinguished-looking man always in close attendance, but lagging behind the Queen Mother at a discreet distance. This was William Tallon, or Backstairs Billy.

He always looked the same, hardly seeming to age as the years passed and almost always in charge of the corgis or helping collect
spontaneous gifts from the public. With his long, brushed-back hair which apparently remained dark well into middle age, his elegant, perfectly worn morning suit and medals, Tallon seemed to embody all that we think we know about the royals’ upper-class attendants.

In fact Billy always looked far too grand, too much the commanding presence, to be described as a servant; his regal air extended to smiling and waving to the crowd, even, on occasion, stopping to engage in small talk, as if he really were a member of the royal family.

Indeed, Billy was thought by many unsuspecting members of the public to be a relative or personal friend of the Queen Mother. Certainly he was seen as coming from a similar social stratum.

Most people thought Billy was at the very least a public-school-educated equerry much like the other equerries in the royal household, who were and are still largely drawn from the middle and upper classes. But Billy was nothing of the kind. As we have seen, he was a shopkeeper’s son from the north of England. Yet, despite his humble origins, he was to beat the equerries at their own game.