Queen's House (39 page)

It tookmonths of convalescence – aMediterranean cruise, three months at Bognor and weeks at Windsor – before the King recovered. Lord Dawson had shown his skill, but ‘It had been', said the forthright Labour minister J. H. Thomas, ‘his bloody guts that pulled him through.'
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In 1931, the King lost his faithful friend and secretary, Lord Stamfordham, who died, still in harness, at the age of eighty-one. Lord Stamfordham had been in royal service since 1880 when, as Colonel Arthur Bigge, he had been appointed Assistant Private Secretary to Queen Victoria. He had been brought to the Queen's notice by the Empress Eugénie, wife of the deposed French Emperor, Napoleon III. She had been much taken by the kindness and sensitivity of the young officer Arthur Bigge, who had accompanied her to South Africa to visit the scene of the death of her son, the Prince Imperial, during the Zulu War. Bigge had been a close friend and fellow officer of the Prince Imperial, though he had been in hospital during the action in which the Prince had been killed. Eugenie had warmly praised Bigge to Queen Victoria, who had therefore brought him on to her staff. From then until her death he had been a great source of strength to her. After her death, Edward VII made him Private Secretary to George, Prince of Wales, whom he continued to serve faithfully when the Prince became King.

As Kenneth Rose points out, ‘Most courtiers of the Victorian Age came of aristocratic family; Grey and Ponsonby, Phipps and Knollys. Bigge was the son of a Northumbrian parson.'
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Slight of stature and unassuming in appearance, he was, nevertheless, physically and morally brave. His comparatively humble origins in no way gave him a sense of inferiority among his aristocratic colleagues. Though charming in his dealings with high and low, he could be extremely firm and outspoken – as he was, for example, to Edward, Prince of Wales. And though his political judgement was by no means always infallible, it was always
given honestly and directly, after clear and careful thought. He could always be relied upon to tell the truth, however disagreeable.

To the end he kept the habit, acquired in the reign of Queen Victoria, of writing much of his immense correspondence entirely by hand. Queen Victoria had disliked typewritten communication: even after the late 1880s, when typewriters were introduced into government offices, she insisted on having all communications in handwriting. This was especially difficult in her last years when her eyesight failed. Then Bigge learned to write large in thick black ink.

To King George V, Bigge was invaluable. Many monarchs have been deeply indebted to their Private Secretaries, but perhaps none acknowledged the debt so movingly as gruff King George V. On Christmas Day 1907, when he was still Prince of Wales, he wrote to Bigge:

Fancy, how quickly time flies, it is nearly seven years already since you came to me. You have nothing to thank us for, it is all the other way and we have indeed much to thank you for. As for myself during these seven years you have made my life comparatively an easy one, by your kind help and assistance and entire devotion to work connected with me. What would have happened to me if you had not been there to prepare and help me with my speeches, I can hardly write a letter of any importance without your assistance. I fear sometimes I have lost my temper with you and often been very rude, but I am sure you know me well enough by now to know that I did not mean it…

I offer you my thanks from the bottom of my heart. I am a bad hand at saying what I feel, but I thank God that I have a friend like you, in whom I have the fullest confidence and from whom I know on all occasions I shall get the best and soundest advice whenever I seek it.
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While at home and abroad there was ‘change and decay', riots and revolution, at Buckingham Palace life had slipped back into the old formal round. The traditional protocol was still observed: above all the King and Queen expected correct formal clothes to be worn to the Palace, and the King's eagle eye spotted immediately any discrepancy,
such as a medal wrongly placed. ‘Have you come in the suite of the American Ambassador?' he would ask if any of his family or household appeared in unfamiliar garb. The King dressed as he had always done: his trousers were always creased at the side. He thought turn-ups were vulgar; ‘Is it raining outside?' was his customary query – as though the offender had appeared with his trouser legs rolled up.

There were some relaxations, but the King expected his ministers to wear top hats and morning coats when calling on him in the daytime, and white tie and knee breeches at dinner. Even when he and the Queen dined alone he would wear white tie and his Garter Star, and Queen Mary would always be splendid with jewels and a tiara. Old customs were still kept: forks were always laid with their prongs facing downwards, a relic of the days when gentlemen wore lace cuffs in which the forks might get entangled.

Before the war visitors to the Palace had been happy to conform, but the younger officers who had slept in their clothes in the rain-soaked trenches and drunk out of tin mugs found the formality of the Palace stifling.

Ever since the reign of Queen Victoria much time and diplomatic energy had been expended on questions of protocol and, particularly, what should be worn to Buckingham Palace. Republicans, both American and British, had been unduly exercised about what they considered to be the outward signs of subservience and the same objections to wearing court costume had been made by some British radicals and socialists over the years. When John Bright, in 1868, a minister in Gladstone's government, insisted that as a working man he felt it morally wrong to wear court costume. Queen Victoria accepted his compromise – an old-fashioned black velvet suit. She even permitted him to stand instead of kneeling when he kissed hands.

Correct dress was also excessively important to both King George V and Queen Mary: it was as though they needed the rigid carapace of royalty to protect their vulnerability.

When, in 1924, the first Labour government had taken office, many of the new ministers felt that their clothes were symbols of what they were, and were unwilling to conform. When the new Prime Minister,
Ramsay MacDonald, led his team to the Palace to kiss hands, Court officials were apprehensive. What would these new men wear? Ministers were expected to receive their seals of office from the King wearing frock coats and top hats. Some Labour ministers had such an outfit; Fred Jowett and John Wheatly felt they had to make a gesture and went to the Palace in their best ordinary clothes, wearing a felt cap and a bowler hat respectively. It was said that this shocked Ramsay MacDonald more than the King, who probably sympathized with their obstinate refusal to change or pretend: if that was their uniform, then they should wear it. So, as Lady Airlie wrote,

The King and Queen adapted themselves without difficulty to the new Labour Government, rather to the surprise of members of their entourage who remembered sulphurous speeches on the subject of the monarchy during the General Election … but King George was too fair and openminded to harbour personal prejudices.
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In fact the King and his new ministers got on surprisingly well. It must be remembered that the King had met a wide variety of his people during the war; and when Queen Mary entertained the ministers' wives to tea in the Palace she could draw on a long experience of those who lived on the other side of the tracks: Mary MacArthur and her friends had given her a new insight into trade union and Labour people. There were many traditionalists in the Labour Party who found the sight of their colleagues in court garb, wearing swords, shocking. On 12 March 1924 photographs appeared in the newspapers of the new Labour ministers at their first levee. MacDonald was shown in a

long cloak beneath which appeared the tip of a sword. He was wearing trousers with a broad stripe. Two future peers, Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr. Noel Buxton, were very obviously wearing breeches. Mr. Tom Griffiths wore the same style of dress as the Prime Minister with a plumed hat.
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The Member for Pontypool, who had earned 4d. a day at a tin-plate works, and his colleagues were perfectly prepared to wear fancy dress if they had to – provided it did not cost much, for MPs received no salary at this time. After all, the hats were no funnier than helmets or other
working gear. But the photographs created excessive resentment from both sides of the social and political divide.

Nevertheless, although the war had broken down some of the barriers between classes, the King certainly would have had no desire to create a classless society. There were deep, old wounds that would never heal. The miners of South Wales would never forget Churchill's bellicose insensitivity during their strike. Nor did the King forget the Russian Revolution, as Lady Airlie remembered:

Mr Sokolnikov, the first Soviet Ambassador to be appointed to the Court of St James since the Russian Revolution, presented his credentials. The King bitterly resented having to receive him with other ambassadors at a Levée. I was sitting next to his Majesty at dinner in the spring of 1930 when someone rather tactlessly referred to the new appointment. The King burst out with “What do you think it means to me to be forced to shake hands with a man of the party that murdered my cousin?” Neither Ramsay MacDonald, nor Snowden, or even Henderson, would receive him in their houses, but they let me in for it.
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The Queen and Lady Airlie treated the new ministers of each government and their wives with unfailing courtesy and genuine kindness. When Elizabeth, Duchess of York, was expecting her second child in the summer of 1930, she decided it should be born at her old home, Glamis Castle in Scotland. The Home Secretary, J. R. Clynes, and the official civil servant, Harry Boyd, by tradition, were expected to be present at the birth. As Clynes told Lady Airlie in some agitation, ‘This child is in direct succession to the Throne, and if its birth is not properly witnessed its legal right might be questioned. It has happened before in history.' Then he showed Lady Airlie ‘a book which he had brought with him from the Home Office … giving an account of the birth of the son of James II and Mary of Modena'.

Rather than allow the two ministers to stay in a cheerless hotel, Lady Airlie invited them to stay with her in her castle near Glamis Castle. A telegraph wire linked the two castles and dispatch riders stood by: but the baby, which was due on 6 August, did not arrive until 21 August. Meanwhile Lady Airlie learned to admire Clynes: ‘He was enraptured
with the countryside and as his shyness wore off, I discovered under his homely exterior a deeply sensitive mind, touchingly appreciative of beauty.'

Finally the call came – they had only an hour to get there. Boyd was frenetic with agitation.

But Mr. Clynes was calmly waiting at the door in his big coat and Homburg hat… a lovely sunset was breaking. He pointed to the sky, ‘Just look at that, Boyd, “In such a night did Dido from the walls of Carthage …” ' He continued the quotation with great feeling till Boyd pushed him into the car. They arrived at Glamis with nearly half an hour to spare.
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So Princess Margaret's birth, on a summer night, was witnessed by a Labour minister, preceded by a, somewhat garbled, Shakespearian quotation.

Not all the courtiers had Lady Airlie's intelligent understanding. Many an amusing story – true and apocryphal – went the rounds. They were all the more humorous when told in a Cockney accent, without aitches. One wife was reported to have said at a grand reception at Buckingham Palace: ‘Me shoes is tight, me corsets's tight, me ‘usband's tight, and I want to go 'ome.' For those who had never met a Labour politician socially before, laughter was a protection: the unfamiliar was disturbing.

Lady Airlie was more discriminating. She had met some of the Labour leaders and their wives at a dinner given for the King and Queen by Lady Astor in 1923 and had been instinctively drawn to Mrs Philip Snowden. Just as Queen Mary had been impressed by the radiant Mary MacArthur, so her Lady-in-Waiting was attracted by the vivid, colourful personality of Ethel Snowden. Like Lady Airlie, she loved music.

Behind her rather dusty untidy appearance and schoolma'am mannerisms was a noble generous nature. I liked her exuberance, her passionate enthusiasms and violent hatreds. I could never forget her bitterness when she described the poverty of the mining village and the scenes of hardship and misery which she had witnessed as a girl in Wales. ‘You people, with your marble tiled bathrooms and your soft towels, can you ever imagine what it meant to a man to have nowhere to wash himself when he came up from the pit except in the street or in the kitchen, stripped naked on a winter day.'
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So too she recognized in Mrs James Brown, the wife of the Ayrshire miners' leader, a woman of intelligence and natural dignity. When her husband was appointed Lord High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland and ‘they exchanged their miner's cottage at Annbank for the royal state of the Palace of Holyrood, Mrs Brown took up her position with a natural dignity that silenced the snide remarks of supercilious courtiers'.
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Throughout the years, successive monarchs and their consorts have been influenced, sometimes for ill, but often for good, by their Private Secretaries and Ladies-in-Waiting. Lady Airlie's long and close friendship with Queen Mary was of inestimable value. Not only did she give comfort to the Queen, so isolated in the gilded cage of royalty, but also she listened with understanding and a sympathetic ear to unfamiliar voices in strange accents. Through Queen Mary, who was herself always ready to listen, Lady Airlie's observations reached the King.

Apart from the garb of Labour ministers there were many other unusual costumes seen at Buckingham Palace, particularly during the ‘Round Table Empire Conference' in 1931 on the future of India, but none more sensational than that worn by the Mahatma Gandhi. The Indian leader had twice before been His Majesty's guest – but then in British prisons in India. In his non-violent campaign for Indian independence, Gandhi had always insisted on wearing the humble dress of the poorest Indian. Now the man the King called ‘this rebel fakir' was his guest in his Palace and still simply dressed. The Duke of Windsor remembered: