Backstairs Billy (9 page)
Authors: Tom Quinn
M
ANY PUBLISHED MEMOIRS
of servant life in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century mention aristocratic employers’ almost obsessive concern that working-class servants could not be trusted with valuable items. Not only were the working classes seen as congenitally dim, but they were also seen as clumsy, rough and unable to appreciate anything beyond fighting and fish and chips.
Billy and Reg would have been aware of this, but they were famously skilled at looking after the more valuable items at Clarence House. They were taught by the indomitable Walter Taylor and other older servants of the time and, in fact, Billy quickly became something of a connoisseur in his own right.
Former maid Sally Dexter recalled a life that must have been rather similar to Billy’s when he first started work. She remembered that ‘the mistress had an idea that it would be almost impossible for me not to break everything I touched, so for the first week or so she followed me round the sitting room watching me clean her ornaments. And you know it was ridiculous really because the ornaments were not that delicate, nor were they particularly valuable. She quickly realised I was not a complete clot and after those initial worries she left me alone.’
Billy understood this world but somehow an in-built fastidiousness – a fastidiousness that had shown itself years earlier in his carefully pressed schoolboy trousers and general avoidance of anything dirty or chaotic – made him unusually sensitive to the values of those for whom he worked. An early report by the Comptroller of the Royal Household mentions that William Tallon is ‘intelligent, quick to learn and can be trusted with more delicate tasks’.
F
ROM
1955
TO
1957 Billy’s life, to an outsider, might have seemed fairly routine. When the Queen Mother went up to Scotland, to Birkhall, her house on the estate at Balmoral, he
accompanied her. His main responsibility – in addition to his customary skill with the gin bottle – was the corgis. And it was Billy who amused Elizabeth by introducing at Birkhall a novel system of getting people to come down for lunch in which he would walk the halls and corridors ringing a bell and swinging a censer like a Catholic priest. He also threw himself into the dances that were a regular feature of life at Balmoral. ‘The Queen Mother loved the fact that Billy knew how to enjoy himself. At Balmoral dances the social barriers vanished temporarily and the Queen Mother would frequently ask specifically for Billy if she wanted a partner,’ remembered one Balmoral servant. On one occasion Billy excused himself from a dance and found a quiet corner to catch his breath. He had already danced a number of times with the Queen Mother and simply needed a rest.
‘Then I heard a high-pitched cry,’ he later recalled. ‘It was the Queen Mother shouting, “William, William, where on earth are you hiding?”’
When Billy re-appeared looking slightly shame-faced, the Queen Mother would tease him by saying, ‘William, I hope you haven’t been neglecting me in favour of the young men in the kitchen.’
Occasionally fuelled by excitement and drink Billy would suddenly execute his own version of a Highland sword dance. ‘It was very camp, very extravagant and very funny,’ recalled a Balmoral gillie. ‘It was the sort of thing only Billy could carry off but even so people were worried. I saw people glancing nervously towards the Queen Mother but she smiled and clapped her hands in delight.’
It was at these parties that the royal family could completely relax. One servant recalled HM the Queen, the Queen Mother and Prince Philip at lunch giggling uncontrollably after five minutes of throwing napkins at each other ended when Prince Philip almost fell off his chair.
They would also do impersonations or silly voices until they were all laughing. Or they would discuss things in the media that had annoyed them. They would always complain in a light-hearted way, but Prince Philip made everyone laugh on one occasion when he said about a journalist who had written about him that he was a ‘complete shit’.
At lunch Billy would stand behind the Queen Mother’s chair or close by, always ready to fill her glass and those of her guests. Indeed, Billy became famous for making these parties go with a swing both in Scotland and, more importantly, in London. It was famously said of him that if you tried to stop him filling your glass by putting your hand over it he would simply pour the wine through your fingers.
Billy gradually went from opening doors for pretty much anyone senior to him to having doors opened for him by the junior staff once it was realised that the Queen Mother had a special affection for him. All this was entirely unofficial. It was simply that the Queen Mother was gradually coming to rely more and more on this curiously talented young man. She liked him in the early days because he was very funny when he wanted to be, as John Hobsom remembered.
It is a great pity no one made a tape recording of Billy in full flow – I mean in full conversational flow. He could be very funny just in telling a story that might not in itself be funny at all, by which I mean there was no punch line. It was all to do with his delivery, the way he drawled out certain key words, and nothing to do with telling jokes. There was something wonderfully theatrical about his tone, his timing and the gestures he made. I can quite see why the Queen Mother loved having him around. He had an ability to sing for his supper, as it were, that hardly anyone else has ever had.
But he also had a tremendous ability to flounce out in a rage when the need arose. Sometimes he was genuinely cross; at others it was all a pretence. He would do it and the Queen Mother was always amused – so long as he hadn’t really lost his temper. She just found him good company and company was what the Queen Mother craved throughout her long life.
Billy could sense when the Queen Mother’s luncheon guests had left the room which of them it was safe to ridicule or at least gently mock. He very rarely misjudged it. And her life was usually so serious that she found his attitude delightfully entertaining.
‘William, you must tell me what you thought of so and so,’ she would say.
Billy would reply by raising his eyebrows, tossing his head a little to one side and saying, ‘Well, I’m afraid words simply fail me. Pearls before swine.’
The Queen Mother would throw her head back and laugh out loud.
By contrast, one or two of the advisers and equerries were seen as terrific bores, as one of Billy’s closest friends recalled:
They were loyal, certainly, but often no fun at all. They’d got their jobs in the royal palaces because, despite the advantages of birth and education, they were otherwise completely unsuited to any kind of work in the modern world. Well, that was what William rather bitchily used to say. And they were just too serious.
John Hobsom explained that though the Queen Mother had many duties to fulfil – official duties that is – she also had a tremendous amount of time that could have hung very heavily indeed without people like Billy.
She broke up her long, occasionally dreary days by inviting old friends for regular lunches and dinner parties. If she did not have an official public engagement she would always invite old friends to Clarence House – less so to Birkhall or the Castle of Mey – but above all things she detested lunching alone. She avoided it at all costs and in truth she didn’t much like dining with the other royals either because they were not likely to be as amusing as her friends. Films about the royals have sometimes shown the family having breakfast or lunch together, but this is entirely wrong. It really did not happen that often.
Favoured luncheon guests included many of Elizabeth’s contemporaries – from the days when she first came out, as aristocratic girls still did in the 1920s. Several of these aristocratic friends
from her youth had become her ladies in waiting. Very few have ever spoken of their experiences at Clarence House – no doubt with the lesson of Nanny Crawford always before their eyes – but Lady Frances Campbell-Preston, who was a lady in waiting to the Queen Mother from 1965 to 2002, remembered these lunches, and more especially Billy.
She recalled a man who was attentive but occasionally temperamental. He was also very good with the corgis, but it is doubtful he really liked them. He knew he had to be good to them because the Queen Mother and Her Majesty the Queen – but certainly not the younger royals – were devoted to them. Any sign of dislike would not have been welcomed at all. This is why in so many royal photographs Billy can be seen serious-faced and usually rather dashing in the background leading one or two of the little dogs. In one photograph he can be seen carrying a corgi wrapped in a blanket up the stairs of an aeroplane. The Queen Mother never considered flying the corgis to Scotland an extravagance, as Billy himself recalled:
Well, I did get cross with her sometimes because she had no idea how the rest of the world lived. She would have hired an aeroplane just for the dogs if it had been necessary. She would leave me a letter asking me to arrange for a helicopter to arrive twenty minutes later than planned as she wanted a slightly longer luncheon or something similar. It never occurred to her that it might have been very expensive to keep a helicopter waiting, but on the other hand she was a queen and she had spent her life behaving in a certain way and wasn’t going
to change for anyone. That was part of her charm. I don’t think she was in the least bit self-conscious in the sense that she never questioned her own behaviour or thought she was either extravagant or privileged. That was her great strength. But it could be bloody irritating. You got a strong sense of her being entirely cut off from the real world in her constant complaints that Clarence House was a dreary, poky little house – she really said that often. She wanted something far bigger. But then she’d grown up in Glamis Castle and had spent her youth travelling between other castles. She was the genuine article if you see what I mean.
Among the royals the Queen Mother was always the least bothered by protocol. Many of the rules that surrounded her were perfectly understandable – guests at her luncheons completely understood why she would be served before anyone else and that lunch would only be over when she decided it was over. But other traditions were positively rejected by the Queen Mother.
There had long been a rule, for example, that when the royal host (or guest) at the head of the table stopped eating everyone else had to stop. The Queen Mother said about this, ‘We can’t possibly stick to it. I eat so little that my guests would starve if we did.’
And it is certainly true that as she grew older she ate less and less. She amused Billy on one occasion when her food arrived by saying, ‘William, I asked for fish and they appear to have cooked a whale for me.’
She had a wonderfully restrained, dry aristocratic wit that revealed that she was in essence a Victorian. She had a Victorian
sense of the need for restraint and economy of expression; a sense that it was unseemly to get worked up about anything and that dry wit would always win the day. When student protesters threw loo rolls at her she famously picked one up and handed it back, saying, ‘I think this is yours.’
If Billy inadvertently served an unusually small gin at lunch she might say, ‘William, do remember that when it comes to gin I have my reputation to consider.’ Billy obligingly topped her glass up.
One of Billy’s own favourite stories involved the Queen Mother discussing a lunch party with Billy and then during a long pause she said, ‘William, I wonder if we might invite Reginald to join us? It will be like St Trinian’s!’
Billy was less pleased with a remark the Queen Mother made when he had irritated her by arriving late one morning and then being in a bad mood. She always knew when he was cross because he would say a curt ‘Good morning, ma’am’, and then fall silent, in contrast to his more usual merry chatter. If he was in a really bad mood he would begin a slightly manic process of appearing to tidy various objects on the tables in the room but he was really just moving things about unnecessarily and making a great deal of noise as he did so, almost like a child trying to attract attention.
According to one version of events, the Queen Mother became increasingly irritated by Billy’s sulk, picked up a newspaper, flicked nonchalantly through it for a while and then said, ‘William, you might be interested in one of the situations vacant in today’s
Times
. Yes, I’m sure it’s just right for you. They are advertising two positions in Sydney.’ Others have insisted that the Queen Mother
would never have said anything quite so vulgar and that the jibe actually came from one of Billy’s fellow servants.
Whoever said it, the fact remains that it was a rebuke that, like all amusing comments, would have spread quickly through the household.
It was rare for the Queen Mother to be deliberately cutting to Billy, but it happened more often than people realised. Billy always gave the impression that he and the Queen Mother were always of one mind, which was not entirely true.