The Queen Mother (133 page)

Queen Elizabeth wrote to her daughter on her honeymoon in terms which many mothers would understand. ‘After the tremendous bustle and noise and beauty of your wedding day, you suddenly disappeared, and I feel that I haven’t seen you since you were about 9 years old!’ She thought the wedding was perfect – ‘I felt that it was a
real
wedding service, holy & beautiful, and you looked heavenly darling.’
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From
Britannia
Tony Armstrong-Jones, thanked his mother-in-law for ‘the wonderful feeling of warmth and welcome’ she had given him; he had never in his life been as contented as during the weekends at Royal Lodge.
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Princess Margaret told her mother that every minute of her wedding ‘was a dream of happiness’ – and she thanked her ‘for being so absolutely heavenly all the time we were engaged, you were so encouraging and angelic and it is something that is difficult to express on paper because it is really thanking you for being you’.
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I
N THE
1960s Britain embarked on an extensive social revolution, one which led to more questioning of ancient institutions than ever before. It was uncomfortable for members of the Royal Family. The social historian Asa Briggs suggested later that culturally and politically the year 1956 had seemed to mark the symbolic break with the past. That was the year of John Osborne’s play
Look Back in Anger
, of James Dean’s
Rebel without a Cause
, of Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, of Bill Haley and the Comets’ ‘Rock around the Clock’. It was also the year, as we have noted, of the failed British intervention at Suez, which showed the British more clearly than anything else that their country was no longer the Great Power that it had been.
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The country was becoming richer – and the number of families owning refrigerators, washing machines and cars was increasing all the time. The sociologist Ferdinand Zweig saw such a domestic revolution as leading to ‘a deep transformation of values’, the development of other ways of thinking and feeling, a new ethos, new aspirations and cravings. It was the beginning of the era of what
The Economist
called ‘the deproletarianised consumer’. What this would mean was not clear – and
The Economist
agreed that ‘deproletarianised societies’ would not necessarily become ‘more discriminate, more moral and more self-reliant’.
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In schools and universities students became more assertive. Everywhere authority was questioned. Even hospital matrons and station masters were no longer allowed to run their own empires. A new orthodoxy began to emerge in Britain, at least among the urban intellectual elite, which later came to be known as the chattering classes. Deference began to die and was replaced by indifference, scepticism and satire. Established institutions – the state, the Church,
the education system and the monarchy – were suddenly questioned and satirized, if not challenged.

The most powerful harbinger of change was probably television. In 1955 the BBC had lost its monopoly of television broadcasting, after anguished Parliamentary debate, and new commercial companies flourished and competed thereafter. In 1960 there were ten million combined radio and TV licences in the country; within four years the number had doubled and the coming of colour in 1968 led to another surge in the sale of television sets and the numbers of viewers. In the 1960s, the BBC’s mission changed: it had begun as a temple to arts, science, the glory of God and the propagation of knowledge.
^*
Now its Director General, Hugh Greene, began to push the BBC away from its traditional culture of decorous reserve ‘right into the centre of the swirling forces that were changing life in Britain’.
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Such television shows as
That Was The Week That Was
poked fun at the establishment. This popular programme’s first satirical sketch about the Royal Family was broadcast in March 1963. The producer, Ned Sherrin, claimed that it had in fact been suggested by Princess Margaret. ‘I think she’d been watching the programme,’ said Sherrin. ‘Anyway she said, “Why don’t you do something about the ridiculous way that they report us?” ’
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The sketch, called ‘The Queen’s Departure’, described the Queen setting out from the Pool of London in a barge which started to sink. As it went down, the commentary became more and more reverential until it finally ended, ‘The Queen is swimming for her life’ and the band struck up the National Anthem.

The explosion of pop music was also a powerful harbinger of change. So was the public’s attitude to sex, and it was sex that claimed the political career of John Profumo, Minister for War in the Conservative government; he admitted lying to the House of Commons about his relationship with a call girl, Christine Keeler. His resignation weakened Harold Macmillan’s government, and shortly afterwards Macmillan himself, believing (wrongly) that he was gravely ill, resigned and recommended that the Queen send for Lord Home, the Foreign
Secretary, in his stead. She did so. Home, a Scottish friend of Queen Elizabeth, led the Conservatives into an election in 1964. After thirteen years in power, they narrowly lost to the Labour Party, under the leadership of Harold Wilson, who promised, rather oddly, that ‘the white heat of the technological revolution’ would transform Britain.

In social terms, the Wilson government, re-elected with a larger majority in 1966, did embark on more radical legislation than any before it. The age of voting was lowered to eighteen, the Sexual Offences Act permitted homosexual acts between consenting adults over the age of twenty-one, and abortion was legalized. Capital punishment was abolished. The Lord Chamberlain’s powers of theatrical censorship were removed in 1968. The Divorce Reform Act of 1969 made it easier to end a marriage. Sexuality was discussed and explored more openly than ever before. Along with access to the birth-control pill, these liberalizing measures would have a huge impact on society in the decades ahead.

In these ‘Swinging Sixties’ the Royal Family was judged remote by the vanguard of the London-led cultural revolution. But others, less enamoured of the new standards with which society was experimenting, saw the monarchy and particularly Queen Elizabeth as symbols of the tried and traditional values of Britain.

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‘T
HE VERY
important thing is to be
busy
,’ Queen Elizabeth believed.
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It was advice she herself had followed after the death of the King and ever since. Although nothing could replace her loss, in the end she had found a new role and renewed zest for life in her public responsibilities.

As she grew older, she continued to bear a workload under which many much younger people would have faltered. Above all she displayed unceasing enthusiasm and diligence on behalf of the charities, regiments and other bodies of which she was patron, president, colonel-in-chief, honorary colonel or a dozen other titles. Her list of patronages grew to over 300, and she continued to accept new ones until the last year of her life. Her interest in people and curiosity about them kept her enjoyment of this work alive; and she would not have been human if she had not been gratified by the public acclaim it brought her. But in any event ‘retirement’ was not a concept she entertained for herself; the sense of duty with which she had been
brought up remained with her. Having become aware of the contribution she could still make, she played her part conscientiously.

Royal patronage of charitable organizations has a long history: successive monarchs not only considered it their duty to their people to support good works, but also recognized that it helped maintain the position of the monarchy. Indeed Frank Prochaska argued in
Royal Bounty
that it was of paramount importance to the monarchy: it brought the Royal Family into contact with a wide spectrum of the population, and it underpinned the monarch’s role at the head of civic society.

Prochaska used the term ‘welfare monarchy’ to describe this role. But, as he pointed out, the growth of the welfare state in the twentieth century represented a potential conflict. The first twenty years of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign were the heyday of state-directed health and social services in Britain. It was then almost universally accepted that the government should provide health, welfare and much else on a centralized basis. Voluntarism of the sort epitomized by charities supported by the Royal Family seemed almost to be quaint and outdated. Do-gooders or volunteers were not always made to feel welcome, let alone important. And yet, remarkably, they did not go away. To take just one example: in 1962 – fourteen years after the National Health Service was founded – there were 800,000 volunteers in one organization of which Queen Elizabeth was patron, the National League of Hospital Friends. The Labour government of the mid-1960s was in many circumstances ideologically opposed to the voluntary sector, and so, in general, was the civil service. But when Richard Crossman became Secretary of State for Health and Social Security in 1968 he was ‘staggered’ by the extent of voluntary help in the now twenty-year-old Health Service and he saw its value.
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Indeed, he realized that the Labour Party’s obsession with centralized planning and welfare provision had done ‘grievous harm’ to philanthropy.

The monarchy’s links with the voluntary sector increased. In the mid-1960s, a Mass Observation survey showed that the public identified the Royal Family with their welfare role much more than any other. The survey also showed some correspondents feeling that the Crown was ‘a bulwark’ against the danger of government taking away too many democratic freedoms.

Merely to note a few of the organizations to which Queen
Elizabeth gave her patronage and the work she did for them over many years – some since she had become duchess of York – is to realize the extent to which the monarchy had been woven into the fabric of British life. There was hardly any aspect of it she did not touch. In her choice of societies and institutions, and in her speeches and messages to them, one can glimpse the nature of her priorities and her vision of the world. Clearly only a few of her patronages can be mentioned here, but a chronological sample can at least show the growth of her interests.
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At the same time, it must be admitted that any selection goes against her own firm rule that all should be treated equally. ‘Favourite’ was a word she always avoided as invidious, whether it was a colour, a flower, food or drink, but most especially if it was a patronage or a regiment.

There is no question, however, that the University of London, of which she became chancellor in 1955, was in a league of its own for her and became one of her principal interests in the second half of her life. King George VI’s uncle, the Earl of Athlone, had been chancellor of the University since 1932. Queen Elizabeth had no wish to anticipate the retirement of ‘Uncle Alge’, but after he had indicated in early 1954 that he did want to step down at the age of seventy-nine, she happily allowed herself to be elected as his successor.
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In her acceptance speech she said, ‘It is my hope that I may be able to forge a personal link between myself and this great University.’
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And indeed she did. ‘It was the spark’, Sir Martin Gilliat said later of her appointment, ‘which set off this tumultuously varied way of life.’
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It helped her to remain in touch with young people, which was something she always sought to do. She was chancellor for twenty-five years, handing over to the Princess Royal in 1980. During this time she carried out 208 engagements for the University and made 132 speeches. Diligently every spring she went to the Albert Hall for the annual graduation ceremonies (Presentation Day), and every winter to Senate House for Foundation Day, when honorary degrees were conferred. Each year she and Gilliat would pore over the long list of the University’s colleges and schools, acdemic institutes, halls of residence, libraries and clubs, planning her visits so as to ensure that every aspect of the life of the University was included at some point, from the Institute of Archaeology and Classical Studies to the Sailing
Club, from the CDC 6600 Computer Centre to the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies. The University’s activities, and thus her visits, were not restricted to London: she went, for instance, to the Marine Biology Station on the Isle of Cumbrae, the British School in Tehran and the British Cultural Centre in Paris, all of which came under ‘the marvellous umbrella of the University’, as she put it.
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Her efforts helped the University’s fundraising. In the 1970s, for instance, she strongly supported an appeal which garnered £1,800,000 for a new library for the London School of Economics. She opened the library in July 1979 and after congratulating all who had been assiduous in raising the money she invoked the name of John Ruskin, the distinguished Victorian educationalist: ‘Ruskin, in a lecture, once made the somewhat stern observation: “What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our
horses
?” ’ This brought the house down.
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Lord Annan, the Vice-Chancellor of London University for many years, recalled that whenever she visited any part of the University ‘the whole morale of the place shot up. She had that gift of encouraging people simply by being there and taking an interest in what they did.’
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