Not in Front of the Corgis

nyone who attempts to write about the Royal Family soon learns the art of utmost discretion. The family themselves rarely give interviews, and then only under the strictest control. Senior members of the Household are
similarly
constrained, so it is left to the junior and mainly domestic staff to enlighten authors on the secrets of life in royal service – and then only when they are satisfied that their identity will be concealed.

As I have been writing about royalty for more than forty years, there is no one left at Buckingham Palace who was working there when I started. Therefore, many of the anecdotes and stories I relate come from former members of the Household, now retired – or even gone to that greater palace in the sky. Nevertheless, I remain bound by my original promise not to reveal my sources, and this applies equally to those currently
employed by The Queen and her family, even though most of the tales are completely harmless and were told to me out of a sense of affection and amusement, rather than with any malicious intent.

The present Household is usually prepared to assist in correcting factual matters, but understandably its members are not willing to offer opinions – or gossip.

I am very grateful to all who have helped me in preparing this book and once again emphasise that, unless from quoted sources, all opinions – and errors – are mine.

At The Robson Press, the publisher Jeremy Robson commissioned the book, for which I am truly
appreciative
, while the Senior Editor, Sam Carter, has done a magnificent job in amending the text and making sure, with his colleague Clara Pelly, that my mistakes have been corrected. Namkwan Cho designed the cover and text.

At my agents, Curtis Brown, Gordon Wise and his colleague John Parton have handled all the necessary paperwork with their usual efficiency and kindness, while my grandchildren have rescued me with patience and tact when the intricacies of computers defeated me.

My thanks to them all.

Brian Hoey
Talygarn 2011

was once in Buckingham Palace when I passed two young footmen whispering together in a corridor. I jokingly asked them if they were conspiring, to which they replied, ‘Please Sir, not in front of the Corgis.’ The expression was new to me. What they meant was that when they saw the Corgis approaching, they knew The Queen would not be far behind.

Because the dogs hold such an important place in Her Majesty’s affections, the staff are careful not to offend them in any way, and they dare not utter a remark in Royal hearing criticising the animals.

The Queen’s Corgi dogs are the most pampered pooches in the world. They are allowed unrestricted access to any part of any Royal residence; nowhere is off-limits. They travel with Her Majesty when she moves from palace to castle and back again and no
one is allowed to touch them apart from their Royal mistress. If a visitor attempts to pat them, The Queen will sharply remind them that they do not like to be handled by anyone except her.

She insists on feeding them herself and they obey only her, no one else. The royal chef prepares their food. The proud boast is that none of The Queen’s Corgis has ever eaten anything from a can; everything is cooked to order and when the bowls are placed in front of the animals, they never start until Her Majesty gives the word.

Once they have eaten, they have to be exercised in the gardens, rain or shine. If The Queen is free she likes to walk them and the rule for gardeners at work is that they should remove their hats when she passes (The Queen not the dogs) and not speak unless she talks first. She usually will have a few words.

If the Corgis decide to ‘water’ the flowerbeds, the gardeners are forbidden from stopping them. The Palace footmen loathe the animals, as they are yappy and snappy. They also are not fully house-trained so a supply of soda water and blotting paper is kept at hand just in case of any ‘little accidents’.

It should come as no surprise to learn that royalty considers their animals more important than their servants. It’s a throwback to medieval times when dogs and horses occupied a unique position in many
aristocratic
homes.

And in several other ways, the present Royal Family likes to preserve old-fashioned values. They prefer to distance themselves from their retainers, allowing them to get on with their lives in their own ways, on
their side of the green baize door – just so long as nothing interferes with the family’s comfort.

Buckingham Palace, which has been unkindly referred to as a monument to the past, is one of the few remaining households where an almost feudal upstairs/downstairs system is maintained, with as much adherence to precedence and protocol below stairs as among the Royal Family themselves.

The senior of The Queen’s domestic servants, the Palace Steward, is as much a sovereign on his side of the green baize door as Her Majesty is on hers. His word is law and he is waited on hand, foot and finger by a retinue of junior staff, actually greater in number than the personal servants who work directly for The Queen. His morning tea is served in the finest bone china cup and saucer and no one would dare disturb him when he is taking his afternoon nap.

The present Palace Steward started as a junior footman and it has taken more than twenty years to work up to his current exalted position in the Royal Household. Nobody argues with him except perhaps the royal chef, who works entirely independently in his own little kingdom.

The Royal Family has an old-fashioned attitude to its servants: patriarchal, benevolent and at times severe if things are not done promptly. If a servant does not do his or her master’s or mistress’s bidding quickly enough, or has not carried out instructions to the letter, the Royal’s wrath is rapidly felt.

The tiniest things irritate members of the Royal Family: an article being moved, furniture being changed or repositioned without permission, or a
servant not answering a call immediately. And their attitude to their visitors can be equally confusing at times.

The late James [later Lord] Callaghan, when he was Prime Minister, was a frequent guest of The Queen Mother at Clarence House, and on one occasion, when there were just the two of them present, she was eating from an enormous box of chocolates when he arrived. She asked him if he would like one. When he said yes, she then pointed to one in the middle of the box and said, ‘Have that one,’ which he thought a little unusual. During the time he was eating his one chocolate, she ate three more and then invited him to have another, once again selecting the one he should have. This went on for the remainder of the morning, with Her Majesty always pointing to the ones he could have. As Callaghan left he spoke to The Queen’s Page and asked why he was offered only those particular chocolates. The Page let him in on the secret: ‘Those are the ones with hard centres. Her Majesty only eats the chocolates with soft centres.’

When Prince Philip gives a private dinner, he likes to decide the subject for conversation. One lady was dismayed to find she was expected to contribute on the subject of ‘deciduous trees’, about which she knew absolutely nothing. If guests are not quite as
knowledgeable
as they should be, the Prince can become very touchy – but if someone is more expert than him, it can just as easily ruin the occasion. Apparently the secret is to contact his office beforehand and find out his pet topics of the moment and learn just enough to be able to contribute intelligently, but not to upstage the host. Otherwise he can become ‘less than pleased’.

Another of his foibles emerges if, when
watching
one of his favourite television programmes, an expected guest arrives – and no others would be admitted. He will order his footman to give the man a drink and tell him His Royal Highness won’t be long as he is involved in urgent business.

The Duke of York employs the same tactic when he has visitors he feels can be put off.

Prince Andrew loves television and his staff record any programme he fancies so he can watch it later. As he spends a great deal of time away from home, they reckon they have a backlog of some three years of programmes waiting to be seen, but he will not allow any of them to be deleted.

His chef is said to despair of his master’s
culinary
tastes, with his preference for ‘burgers and fries drowned in ketchup’, but when guests are invited – usually his golfing cronies – they eat and drink the finest foods and wines; he is an excellent host. Andrew dresses better than his brothers, and his valets – he has two – say he prefers dark pin-stripe suits to any others. Some people have remarked on the fact that Andrew always appears to wear the same suit; it’s simply because he orders several in identical patterns and materials. He likes them, so why not?

Prince Charles employs one hundred and
thirty-three
staff to look after him and Camilla, with more than sixty of them domestics: chefs, cooks, footmen, housemaids, gardeners, chauffeurs, cleaners and his three personal valets whose sole responsibility is the care of their Royal master’s extensive wardrobe and choosing what he is to wear on any particular day.

A serving soldier (he is not called a batman but a soldier servant) based at Birdcage Walk, polishes the Prince’s boots and shoes every day – he has fifty pairs each costing over £800 to make by Lobb of St James’s – and a housemaid washes his underwear as soon as it is discarded. Nothing Charles or Camilla wears is ever allowed near a washing machine. Particular attention is paid to handkerchiefs, which are monogrammed and again all hand-washed, as it was found that when they were sent to a laundry, some would go missing – as souvenirs.

HRH’s suits, of which he has sixty, cost over £3,000 each, with his shirts, all hand-made at £350 a time (and he has more than 200) while his collar stiffeners are solid gold or silver.

The Duchess of Cornwall will not attend a private function unless she has been sent, in advance, a copy of the guest list. And she has been said to demand that certain names are deleted. On one occasion, two were apparently struck off and those of her son and daughter added.

As we shall see in the following pages, the Royal Household is a self-contained community, described by The Queen herself (though how she would know is anyone’s guess) as a tiny village in itself, with all the infighting, gossip, jealousies, back-biting and intrigue one might encounter in an Agatha Christie novel. Her Majesty was spot on in her description, wherever she got it from.

A number of suicides have occurred among the staff, usually because of a love affair that has gone wrong – either between a housemaid and a footman,
or occasionally because two male staff have ended a relationship. Another problem experienced by certain long-serving servants (who have known no other life) is that they suddenly found they no longer had a job to do. They were not sacked but were quietly isolated in their rooms on the top floor, and couldn’t face a future without the daily routine and protective blanket they were used to in the Royal Household. Old-timers at the Palace will tell you that working there is not just a job but a way of life. Once you get sucked in, it is very difficult to move away, even if you want to. In fact, for some of these men and women, it is a self-imposed life sentence, albeit in the most comfortable surroundings.

The present generation of younger staff are better educated than those who previously worked there, so the adjustment to outside life is not so difficult. They know how to operate a bank account, use an ATM, where the local supermarket is and how much a curry and chips costs. But there are still some older
domestic
staff at the Palace who have come to depend on it totally. They like the idea of a post office where there is never a long line waiting to be served, or a bank that opens twenty-four hours a day – and doesn’t charge for foreign currency if you are going abroad. It is still nice to have your laundry and dry cleaning collected and delivered free of charge, and if you are senior enough, to dine in surroundings reminiscent of the best
gentlemen
’s clubs.

One former Master of the Household, the man responsible for the domestic side of the Palace, said that he was relieved there was only one ‘proper’ Queen in Buckingham Palace, as, with the temperamental
staff he had to cope with, he had over a hundred below stairs.

Nobody outside the Royal Household really knows the luxurious extent of the lifestyle of the Royal Family. Outwardly, they give the impression of being frugal and parsimonious – which they are, even though Princess Anne prefers to call it ‘Good old-fashioned Hanoverian Housekeeping’ – but it does not apply to what they eat, drink, wear, drive and ride. Every one of them, from The Queen down to Prince Harry, enjoys only the best that money can buy, even if they expect their staff to negotiate the most advantageous deals when ordering on their behalf.

As a family they take luxury for granted, and regard loyalty – in others – above all other virtues. Servants are expected to obey without question, and to stand and be verbally abused without answering back, even when they are clearly not at fault. And there are constant reminders that they are held in less regard than the furniture, which is priceless, whereas servants can be replaced at any time.

There is a little-known network of mega-rich friends, British and foreign, who fall over themselves to provide ‘safe’ houses for the Royals to hold private dinners and for them to attend weekend house parties in the knowledge that nobody outside the inner circle will be aware of who else is present and what goes on. The younger members of the Royal Family all have a select group of acquaintances who provide yachts and private jets for holidays, and the arrangements when they make these trips are amazingly detailed and complicated, in order to avoid press intrusion.

Even those who are not involved in royal duties, such as the Earl of Snowdon’s children, are the
beneficiaries
of largesse which would be denied any ordinary man or woman. Sir Anthony Bamford, son of the man who founded the world-famous JCB earth digger company, owns an enormous estate in Gloucestershire and he has provided Viscount Linley, The Queen’s grandson, with a ‘cottage’ (actually a pleasant
four-bedroom
house) in the grounds as a weekend retreat. A member of the Sainsbury family has done the same thing for his goddaughter, Lady Sarah Chatto, and her husband, on his country estate.

It’s a well-documented fact that figuratively all traffic lights turn to green for royalty. When the Princess Royal travels by ordinary schedule train from her home in Gloucestershire to London (using her Forces Family discount card) it can involve up to seven different organisations, including police from three counties, railway, Royal Household, Royal Protection Department and road traffic organisations. The only concession made to her royal status is that the car meeting her is allowed onto the forecourt at Paddington Station, but this is for security reasons.

Of course, the Princess Royal is considered to be the most self-reliant of The Queen’s children. She refused to allow her own children to be given titles; she was the first to be married – and then divorced, and, so far, the only one to become romantically entangled with one of her mother’s servants.