Backstairs Billy (2 page)

T
HE ROYAL FAMILY’S
advisers are usually, though not always, drawn from what used to be called ‘the top drawer’. They are often old Etonians or old Harrovians who have formerly been officers in the ‘best’ regiments – typically the Household Cavalry.

No one ever seems to notice that the royals vary rarely employ what we might describe as ordinary people in these roles. The public schools supply the advisers while state schools provide
the staff for jobs in the kitchens, the gardens and the stables; ordinary mortals work as maids and cleaners, hall boys, junior footmen and butlers. You might be forgiven, while in the royal household, for thinking you were in a medieval court of some kind. When it comes to working for the royals, the lines of social demarcation are pretty strict.

Backstairs Billy was different. He was rather like a private in the army who becomes a field marshal. Despite his origins, he rose to become unusually powerful in the royal household. Formally, his job defined him as not from the top drawer. Yet in his role as both servant and intimate adviser he blurred those strict lines of demarcation.

Much has been said about the veracity of Billy’s claims concerning his closeness to the Queen Mother, and the power he claimed to have over her, but whatever his pretentions, it is highly likely that the Queen Mother’s affection for Billy was largely a result of genuine sympathy and trust, but also her way of teasing the well-born advisers. Certainly Billy seems to have been disliked by the rather grand advisers who, then and now, inhabit the royal corridors above stairs. In Billy’s day, they simply could not understand why the Queen Mother seemed so fond of what they may have seen as a ‘rather common’ man.

The truth is almost certainly that the Queen Mother’s affection for Billy was genuine. She liked Billy because he was amusing, devoted and discreet in those areas that mattered to her. But she never thought of him in the way she thought of her advisers. She had been born at a time when such distinctions were
automatic and if someone from the lower ranks happened to be given particular notice of favour this was always combined with a sense that that favour could be withdrawn at any time. One’s friends, on the other hand, were one’s friends precisely because they came from the same social stratum.

Remarkably, Billy’s relationship with the Queen Mother echoes Queen Victoria’s relationship with her gillie John Brown. Although a servant, Brown was treated with enormous respect and affection by the Queen. It has been said that Victoria’s passion for all things Scottish was really a reflection of her passion for Brown. Certainly, until his death in 1883 Queen Victoria spent every moment when she was at Balmoral with a man who, by all accounts, treated her with a shocking disregard for convention. He made jokes and teased her at one moment and spoke sharply the next.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this over-familiarity, Brown was adored by Victoria, so far as we can tell from reports made at the time. But she would never have thought of Brown as a friend outside the confines of her Scottish holidays. If anyone doubts Victoria’s genuine affection for Brown, however, we need only remind ourselves that in her instructions for what should happen after her death she insisted – to the scandalised outrage of her advisers – that Brown’s photograph, rather than that of her late husband Prince Albert, should be buried with her. There is also some evidence, including the deathbed confession of a Presbyterian minister, that Victoria actually married Brown in a secret ceremony towards the end of the gillie’s life.

Nothing quite like this happened with Backstairs Billy but
the story of his rise and fall provides a fascinating insight into a world where the power of personality may sometimes outweigh the power of convention.

B
ACKSTAIRS BILLY WAS
a complex man who, in truth, both loved and occasionally loathed the royals; he was addicted to being part of their glamorous world and he revelled in the theatre that life as a royal servant provided. Billy was somehow vulnerable and yet also supremely manipulative; he was at times an immensely serious man and at others obsessed with trivia and the outward display of his own importance. But to the last he loved, perhaps more than anything, what might best be called the high camp of royal service.

I knew Billy only when his life had begun to spiral downwards. In his small flat in Kennington, south London, he seemed a forlorn figure, but perhaps no more so than many men without family, who, finding themselves retired from a job they once loved, feel that life is empty and largely meaningless.

But there was always an edge to Billy’s tone when he talked about the royal family in general and the Queen Mother in particular. Many of those who knew him towards the end of his life have argued that his love for the Queen Mother refused to admit the least hint of criticism of her, but this seems in many ways to be an attempt to protect him from the bitterness of his own decline.

Indirectly and by implication he was in fact occasionally critical
of her. He felt she should perhaps have done more to protect him from what he called the ‘royal wolves’.

Several of his friends knew that he would like to be remembered only as a loyal servant and they assumed that his bitter attacks on those he felt had ousted him from the royal household were simply the result of old age and illness and not of real feeling. This seems to me to be a misreading for the sake of posthumous reputation. Billy did feel let down at the end of his life. He felt he had been harshly treated, but his unhappiness was compounded by the knowledge that to some extent he had brought disaster upon himself; he had made enemies where he should have made friends and he had been blind to the realities of his position. In fact, Billy’s life might be seen as an almost perfect exemplar of the ancient warning that hubris leads inevitably to nemesis.

B
IRTLEY IS
A
small town centred on the now-vanished Durham coalfield and a few miles south of Gateshead, the town on the south bank of the River Tyne with Newcastle a little to the north. Northumberland and Durham are economically depressed areas with high levels of social deprivation, high unemployment and, for the majority of ordinary people, few prospects. In the 1930s it was far worse.

The biggest employers today are the Royal Ordnance Factory and the Japanese engineering firm Komatsu, who make high-tech mining equipment. When William John Stephenson Tallon was born here at home on 12 November 1935, the town’s Victorian terraced houses and municipal buildings would have been black with the soot of thousands of domestic coal fires, the pollution-filled air alive with talk of what went on in the mines and factories. Billy was born above his father’s hardware shop at 27 Durham Road and, despite high levels of infant mortality in solidly working-class districts such as this, Billy was a robust, lively baby – ‘a strong ’un’ – who was hardly ever ill.

Birtley was a dark, forbidding place and people rarely risked showing their neighbours they aspired to anything out of the ordinary. In this respect and others, the town was very much like Hunslet, described in Richard Hoggart’s famous book
The Uses of Literacy
on working-class life in the north of England. Birtley was a place where, as Hoggart memorably puts it, the local and the personal counted for everything. Abstract discussions about life in general, aspirations to get on, any kind of ambition beyond the local were all frowned upon and children were expected to go into the local factories just as their fathers and grandfathers had done. Girls could expect to marry in their late teens or early twenties, have children and run a home on what was usually a pitifully small income.

Alfred Gill, who was born in Birtley in 1940, recalled the narrowness of this industrial world:

Another near contemporary of Billy’s, who was born a few years later and just a few streets from his birthplace, recalled, ‘You didn’t expect much out of life in Birtley, but it was the same across much of the old industrial north east. Life revolved around the pub, the pit and the factory gates.’

But if life really did match the cliché of the north before the Second World War – a mix of pub, pit, whippets and ferrets – it was at least a close-knit community where families had often lived side by side for several generations. And there was always work in the mines and factories as well as trips to the seaside and even occasionally to the early cinema.

But by all accounts Billy’s parents felt – like most shopkeepers at the time – that they were very slightly a cut above the rest. They didn’t work in the mines or the factories and though they only sold hardware they felt they were business people with a degree of financial independence. It was true that, like all shopkeepers of the time in northern industrial towns, they had to sell goods ‘on tick’ – if they hadn’t business would have soon dried up – but as
Alfred Gill recalled, ‘shopkeepers definitely had more money than the rest of us and they looked down slightly on their customers. They felt that they were lower middle class if you like, rather than obviously working class.’

This sense of slight otherness would have been very similar to that felt by the late Margaret Thatcher – another shopkeeper’s child from the provinces. It was a vague sense of superiority but one tinged with uncertainty about one’s place in society. Margaret Thatcher’s father compensated by becoming an ardent Tory; it was his way of nailing his colours to the middle-class mast. But for Margaret Thatcher and Billy Tallon this early social uncertainty led them to want to escape into a different world; a world that represented everything their home towns could not give them.

B
IRTLEY
OWED ITS
origins to the demand for coal to fuel the Industrial Revolution. Few of the houses, factories and municipal buildings in the town had been built earlier than 1850 when the main Anglican church was constructed. Rows of dingy back-to-back terraced houses stretched in every direction.

The whole family, Billy’s parents, grandparents and his sister Jennie, lived above the shop, but conditions at home were far better than those for many of the town’s children who lived in tiny damp houses with outside lavatories and tin baths hanging on shed walls. These vermin-infested terraces were largely demolished during the 1960s and 1970s, but in the 1930s they were the only houses available.

So far as anyone can tell, the Tallons had lived in the area since at least the mid-nineteenth century, but it is almost certain the family originally came from Cornwall or Ireland. Certainly the name ‘Tallon’ is of Celtic origin.

Billy’s paternal grandparents arrived as part of a wave of migration from the countryside to the north east of England and other mining and industrial centres during the boom years of the mid-nineteenth century when Durham and Yorkshire pits provided a seemingly endless supply of the cheap, high-quality coal that helped make Britain the manufacturing hub of the world.

Somehow, Billy’s grandparents saved enough money during the final decades of the 1800s to buy the shop and the rooms above. They chose to sell hardware – everyday stuff that people would always need to buy and replace regularly: pots and pans, nails, brooms, dustbins, tools, lamps and even bicycles.

Billy rarely talked about his early days but he once confided to a friend:

This sense of being different was even reflected in the name the Tallons gave their son. He was given the same name as his father – William – but his extra middle name ‘Stephenson’ was his mother Mabel’s maiden name and she believed it was important that her son should have this name because she believed – probably correctly – that she was distantly related to the north-east’s most famous son: the George Stephenson who built the first public railway in 1830. Railway Stephenson was born just thirty miles from Birtley in the village of Wylam on the banks of the River Tyne. Mabel, unlike William Senior, was a local girl and proud of it.

Adding this name to their son’s other names suggested they had high hopes for him, but it also reveals his mother’s powerful influence in the family. Billy revered his mother and though he loved his amiable father it was Mabel who dominated his early years and gave him a vague yearning for a more glamorous life. Mabel was always at pains to remind Billy that his family was well connected; they were not working class, they were middle class and she had a taste for the finer things that William undoubtedly inherited.

‘She loved coloured glass and knick-knacks,’ he recalled years later. ‘And china. She had a very good eye.’

John Robson, who lived in Birtley during the 1940s, remembered that the shopkeepers’ sense that they were different made them unpopular in some quarters:

Billy’s mother would have risen above these concerns. Neighbours and friends remember her as ‘a nice woman but a bit aloof’. She was a serious woman who gave customers in the hardware shop credit but disliked doing it. She would complain that if people managed their money better and stayed out of the pub they would not need her to provide credit all the time. This undiplomatic attitude created a certain distance between the Tallons and the people among whom they lived. As one neighbour put it:

The golden rule among the factory workers and the miners was that people should not ‘get above themselves’, but Mabel was determined to be seen as a cut above the rest.

By the time Billy was born, the boom years in the north-east
were over. The steady decline that was to lead to the closure of every mine in Durham during the 1970s and 1980s had begun. Birtley, like much of the north-east, was in the grip of the worst recession in history.

Like many families the Tallons were badly hit. With layoffs and falling demand for the industrial products of the town, the hardware business virtually collapsed. Try as the family did to scrimp and save to keep the business afloat until better times came along, it was impossible. In 1937 the business failed and the family sold up and moved south to Coventry where there was more work and therefore better prospects.

Details of Billy’s early life are hard to come by but according to Coventry records and those whose recollections of him go back to childhood it seems that the family used the money from the sale of the shop in Birtley to buy the house in Coundon, a suburb of Coventry, and they worked only sporadically thereafter. It seems they had enough money – but only just.

Despite being devoted to their son, Billy’s parents seem to have made no attempt to get him into an especially good school and they were quite happy to allow him to leave at the first opportunity.

Billy rarely talked about his parents to his colleagues in later life, but this is not unusual when someone moves from one social stratum to another. There is almost always a degree of embarrassment, or at least compartmentalisation. The playwright Alan Bennett famously said that when he went to Oxford from his Leeds grammar school he quickly found his parents embarrassing and tried to avoid letting them come to see him in Oxford.

Something similar seems to have happened to Billy, but like Bennett he loved his parents and returned regularly to the house in Coundon to see them. In later years as his royal responsibilities grew his visits became less frequent, but he never entirely forgot his origins or the people he had known as a child.

Coventry contemporaries were to become proud of Billy’s royal connection and he did mix with them whenever he returned to see his parents. He also invited one or two close friends to visit him if they happened to be in London. In turn, Billy was justifiably proud that he was able to offer guided tours of Clarence House. But, when his mother Mabel finally died in the 1970s he cut his ties with Coventry and it seems he never again visited the city.

When the Tallons arrived in Coundon, the terraced house in which they settled in Norman Place Road was by no means the worst in the town. In fact, Coundon was considered one of the better districts. It had only recently lost its status as a village – Coventry’s house-building boom swamped the old village in the years leading up to Billy’s birth but it was still recognised by the older residents as having a distinct difference from Coventry. Some residents welcomed the fact that it would now be part of a bigger town; others lamented the loss of its independence.

Billy, a year old when the family moved, was to spend the rest of his childhood in Coundon, but he never really regarded it as home. He always felt on the edge of things, an outsider. This was undoubtedly partly due to the growing realisation that he was homosexual, but far more to attitudes he had clearly learned from his mother and during his long years in royal service he
would always groan if anyone asked him about his childhood. In fact, it eventually became almost a no-go area for conversation and fellow servants were always careful to avoid the subject. Peter Livesey, who worked in the royal kitchens during the 1970s and 1980s, remembered that Billy made a point of behaving in an aloof manner until he got to know you, but even then his conversation was always rooted in the present.