The Queen Mother (143 page)

After Devon Loch’s disastrous collapse in the 1956 Grand National, probably the most thrilling race in which she was involved was the 1984 Whitbread Gold Cup in which she ran Special Cargo. That year’s race was in a class of its own, as the
Sunday Times
correspondent, Brough Scott, related. In the final uphill stretch, after twenty-four fences had been jumped, four horses – Special Cargo, Lettoch, Diamond Edge and Plundering – strained towards the post. In the Royal Box, the Queen Mother was visibly excited. Plundering then fell away and, with only a hundred yards to go, Diamond Edge was gaining on the leader, Lettoch. But Special Cargo was now within two lengths and flying fast. ‘All three were together as the post flashed by. First thoughts were that none could be a loser.’ There were long minutes of suspense as the judges considered the photographs. Queen Elizabeth was unable to move until she knew the result.
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Special Cargo had won by a fraction; overjoyed she rushed down to the winner’s enclosure, where her pale-blue coat matched her jockey’s silks.
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T
HE MOST REMOTE
of her houses, the Castle of Mey, was the most personal – in good part, no doubt, because it was the only one that actually belonged to her. She was able to invest Mey, and her stays there, with her own individual spirit and tastes. Her principal visit every year from 1956 onwards was made in August, immediately after her birthday, and she used to say that it was ‘the beginning of the holidays’ and the end of the ‘term’ in London. She loved the fresh air and the open space that the Castle offered, with the ever changing view of clouds and sea and the shadows on Orkney beyond. Another great advantage was that ‘at the furthest tip of these islands, one feels
so beautifully far away and the newspapers come too late to be readable’.
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Her visits to Mey started privately and modestly, but developed into what her neighbour Lord Thurso called ‘a mini season’ in Caithness. Local landowners made sure they were in residence when she came, and many threw parties in the hope of attracting her; she gave a cocktail party every summer which was a major event. There was no question but that her ownership of Mey put Caithness on the map.

The Castle itself required constant maintenance even after she had completed the basic structural repairs in the 1950s. Because it was built of porous sandstone, it was very hard to keep the damp out. In addition, as the years went by, water seeped through the roof, and lead work was found to be missing; the initial repairs had been inadequate.

The furnishings developed and moved over time. Many of the original pieces she and the Vyners had bought locally, in Miss Miller Calder’s shop in Thurso. A huge clam-shell jardinière stood in the front hall, packed with flowers while the Queen Mother was in residence. In the hall there was a chronometer from King George V’s racing yacht
Britannia
, which struck the bells of the watch instead of the hours. The London firm of Lenygon and Morant, which worked for the Queen Mother in her other homes, was responsible for much of the internal design and decoration, and supplied curtains and other furnishings. She and those around her were pleased with the results. In 1959 Arthur Penn wrote to her to say, ‘What a
very
rewarding & memorable visit your Castle gave us all this spring. It was bristling with triumphs.’
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Today the house is preserved as it was in her lifetime. The main room on the raised ground floor is the drawing room, whose windows face both inland and north towards the sea and the Orkney Islands. A large sixteenth-century Flemish wool tapestry hangs on the north wall. When she was in residence a peat fire burned continuously in the grate. Next door to the drawing room is the equerry’s room. On the desk the red leatherbound hymnal and prayer book which the equerry carried for her to church every Sunday can still be seen. In this and other rooms are paintings and miniature model casts of some of her most successful cattle.

Beyond the equerry’s room is the Library where, in later life,
Queen Elizabeth dealt with her correspondence every day – ‘my Hunka-Munka room’, she called it. On her desk are three of her favourite photographs, slightly faded by time – the King in uniform in 1943, the King in South Africa, the King with her and Princess Elizabeth – and various objects, including a little corgi from the Buckingham Palace gift shop. On a small Formica table by the wall sits an elderly television, on top of which are photographs of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, dressed for a wartime pantomime. Against one wall stands a handsome upright piano in a walnut case, which the Queen Mother bought in Inverness and which she encouraged Ruth Fermoy and others to play after dinner.

The most striking room in the house is the dining room, at the western end. This was added in 1819 by the twelfth Earl of Caithness as an extension to the original Castle. On the east wall Queen Elizabeth hung a spectacularly vivid tapestry of her coat of arms, which she had commissioned from the Dovecote Studio in Edinburgh in 1950.
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It was designed by Stephen Gooden RA, a distinguished book illustrator and line engraver, and was woven on an ancient loom using Cheviot wool specially spun and dyed in Scotland. In the fireplace at the opposite end of the room is a beautiful cast-iron fire-back created by Martin Charteris, the Queen’s long-serving Private Secretary and a friend of the Queen Mother. The piece depicts the Queen Mother’s ER cipher and the royal yacht
Britannia
among local flora and fauna. Above the fireplace is a naive painting of the Castle from the sea painted by R. I. Gray in 1884. It is an oddly prophetic picture. In the field in front of the Castle there is a herd of black cattle; offshore a yacht lies at anchor. Just over a century later
Britannia
could have been seen sailing past Queen Elizabeth’s herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle. On either side of the fireplace is an oil painting by Prince Philip, an accomplished amateur painter.

Next door to the dining room is the butler’s pantry, which by the end of the century had become almost a museum piece of 1950s domestic design, with white metal doors and drawers, a wheezing, ancient gas-fired refrigerator and an old electric oven in which plates were warmed. Connecting the pantry with the much more modern kitchen below is a steep and narrow staircase and a small dumb-waiter food lift. But the dumb-waiter was hand operated and made a great deal of noise – the footmen and pages preferred to run up and down
stairs balancing heavy trays rather than disturb the guests with its wailing mechanism.

At the opposite end of the house, Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom is reached up the stone stairs in the turret, which she managed to navigate until the end of her life. (In the 1950s she restored the lift that the Imbert-Terrys had installed, but she rarely used it except for regular Sunday-morning descents to talk to the chef and his staff in the kitchen, after which she would insist on walking up the narrow stairs before leaving for church.) Her bedroom has north-, east- and south-facing windows which enabled her to keep an eye not only on her cattle and sheep but also on the comings and goings of guests in the driveway. Ceilings and walls are all painted light blue; her bed covers and the headboard are also blue and have faded gently with the years. The room is modestly furnished with a simple blue-painted wardrobe and mahogany chest of drawers.

Near her room is a bedroom with a small four-poster bed with pale-blue hangings. This is called Princess Margaret’s Bedroom, although the Princess never spent a night there. She did not much like ‘Mummy’s draughty castle’. At the western end of the corridor is Lady Doris Vyner’s Bedroom; this looks out on the Castle’s walled garden, which Queen Elizabeth cherished. The garden is surrounded by the fifteen-foot high Great Wall of Mey, as it became known, to shield the flowers, shrubs and vegetables from the worst of the elements. Everything grown there had to be chosen for its resistance to wind and sea spray. Queen Elizabeth was pleased to be able to grow even her favourite old rose, Albertine, on the south-facing wall between the garden and the Castle; within the garden a complicated network of seven-foot-high hedges of privet, currant and elder protected flowerbeds of marigolds, pansies, dahlias, primulas, nasturtiums and sweet peas. A wide variety of fruits and vegetables was grown for the dining table.
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Near the Castle is Longoe Farm, where she insisted, despite the expense, on raising her livestock. Whenever she was at Mey she would walk down through the gardens and policies (fields) between the Castle and the sea to visit her animals and talk to those who cared for them, especially the McCarthy family who farmed the land. She took great pleasure in showing off the cattle and sheep to knowledgeable farmers and stockmen who occasionally came on organized visits, and in
getting their views – ‘the more forthright and frank the better!’ said Martin Leslie, her factor. At such visits tea, chocolate cake and drams of whisky were served in the dining room. ‘Afterwards a Page reported on the whisky consumption and the hostess got much satisfaction, and amusement, judging how well her hospitality had been received while marvelling at her guests’ capacity.’ She would show her cattle and sheep at both local and national shows. When Leslie went up to Mey in her absence, she would ask him to telephone her every day to tell her ‘how the people are, how the stock are looking, what Caithness is looking like and if the weather is fine and the skies are beautiful’.
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The Mey Visitors’ Book is a large brown-leather volume. Its first page is inscribed ‘Arrival at Wick Airport 1952’ and a photograph shows Queen Elizabeth at the bottom of the steps of a plane, being greeted by the Vyners. She is all in black, wearing a string of pearls and a long fur stole. This is followed by photographs of her and the Vyners on a trawler and taking a picnic on the cliffs. The first signatures of guests appear in October 1959 – they include Queen Elizabeth’s niece Elizabeth Elphinstone, Martin Gilliat and E. H. ‘Mouse’ Fielden, an RAF veteran who had been appointed the first captain of the King’s Flight by King Edward VIII in 1936 and was reappointed in the next two reigns.

Fielden was a courageous man; during the war he had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for flying British agents in and out of occupied France in tiny Lysander planes. In 1941 he brought back a bottle of that year’s wine and presented it to the King. According to the historian Kenneth Rose, the King served the bottle to Winston Churchill, at one of their weekly lunches, ‘teasing his guest by refusing to say how he had come by it’.
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Fielden worked hard within the postwar Whitehall bureaucracy to ensure the best and safest planes for his royal charges; he was an exuberant and delightful man and became a long-standing friend of Queen Elizabeth.

These and many other guests – both friends and members of her Household – Elizabeth Basset, David McMicking, Olivia Mulholland, Adam Gordon, Ruth Fermoy and her niece Margaret Elphinstone, with her husband Denys Rhodes, came frequently over the decades. In 1970 and in later years Archie Winskill,
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the Captain of the Queen’s Flight
and a popular guest, was often invited – it was of him that Queen Elizabeth was reported to have said, ‘It’s people like Archie who make it worth putting lipstick on.’

During the 1970s the guests at Mey were younger and occasionally more high-spirited. The Visitors’ Book is filled with more colour snapshots of picnics and individuals. One shows a picnic basket close to piles of rusting steel tubing and is entitled ‘Lunch in a rubbish dump’. In 1973 a young officer in the Blues and Royals of whom she was fond, Andrew Parker Bowles, was invited with his wife Camilla. Parker Bowles’s father Derek was an old and close friend of Queen Elizabeth.

There was grouse shooting at Mey for the guests, but the birds became more and more scarce, as elsewhere in Scotland; the keeper, who was only six months younger than his employer, organized days of walked-up grouse shooting until he was well into his nineties. Lunches were almost always out, at various favourite picnic places which included Captain’s House, a cottage with spectacular views of the Castle and the Pentland Firth, and Ralph Anstruther’s nearby home at Watten.

In 1975 a young man named Ashe Windham arrived at Mey. Windham, who served in the Irish Guards from 1976 to 1987, was a friend of Lord (‘Mikie’) Glamis, the son of Queen Elizabeth’s nephew Fergus, seventeenth Earl of Strathmore. He invited Windham to come with him to visit his great-aunt at Mey; she liked the young man and from that first encounter grew many years of service and friendship from Windham.

Every Sunday at Mey she worshipped in her own pew at Canisbay Church. From 1959 the minister was the Rev. George Bell. He and his wife were nervous when they first met the Queen Mother but she put them at their ease, inviting them to the Castle every year.
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On Bell’s retirement the Queen Mother provided him with a cottage, and when he fell ill, she visited him. After his death, Mrs Bell said, ‘she was a tremendous support to me … I am sure she realised exactly how I felt, because she had experienced the same thing, at a much younger age too.’
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Mrs Bell, still regularly invited to the Castle, would entertain the Queen Mother and her guests with comic recitations of popular Scottish poetry, for which she had a talent. One in particular, ‘Bella Macrae’, was a great favourite and Queen Elizabeth named a horse after the heroine. Another was ‘McAllister Dances
before the King’, the tale of a Scotsman who went to London and stunned the King and particularly the Queen with his prowess as a dancer. The last two verses raised especial smiles when Mrs Bell recited them at Mey:

When Mrs Bell succumbed to Alzheimer’s, Queen Elizabeth continued to ask her to tea, with her daughter Christine Shearer.
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