The Queen Mother (15 page)

The year ended forlornly. Massive loss of life had gained little ground for either side. Neither had broken through the other’s lines of trenches. The British Expeditionary Force in France had now grown to over a million men. Many of these were poorly trained divisions upon which General Haig knew he could not really depend. More and more of the young volunteers in Kitchener’s New Armies presented themselves to army medics with what the official medical history of the war described as ‘definite hysterical manifestations (mutism and tremors)’.
⁹⁸
The Germans held stronger positions at the end of the year than they had at its start. Resignation, if not cynicism, had replaced enthusiasm and euphoria. On New Year’s Eve Elizabeth wrote again to Beryl: ‘Today is the last day of 1915. Isn’t it dreadful? If this war doesn’t come to an end next year, it never will, I don’t think so.’
⁹⁹

*

I
N
THE
FIRST
few weeks of 1916 Elizabeth had to cram for the Junior Examination of the Oxford Local Examinations Board. She and Beryl still had some fun. They went to the theatre in Dundee together and Elizabeth teased Beryl’s mother that Beryl had behaved ‘in a
disgraceful
manner’, singing so loudly that the manager asked her to stop, ‘whereupon she sang
most
aggressively to him (the poor man had a red nose) “Put a bit of powder on it”, which is a vulgar song. To crown all that, she drank
three
cocktails on reaching home, and had to be carried up to bed by Barson, who seemed to enjoy the job!!!’
¹⁰⁰

The examination took place in east London. At eight o’clock on the morning of 17 March Elizabeth took the bus and tram from St James’s Square to the Hackney Examination Centre, which she described to her mother as ‘about the last house on that side of London, green fields beyond’. First she had to do a ‘memory drawing paper’ which ended at 10.45, so she travelled home again for lunch and then back to Hackney in the afternoon for the ‘model drawing’ paper. After four hours of travel ‘I’m what you might call “slightly fatigued”,’ she wrote to her mother.
¹⁰¹
The next week she had a paper on Walter Scott which she found ‘difficult’. All in all she was afraid that she had failed her exams. ‘The geography and Arithmetic were
quite
hopeless, much too complicated for me!’
¹⁰²
At some stage she appears to have been fed tapioca pudding in Hackney, which added to her misery.

A trip to the theatre to see Henry Ainley restored her spirits. ‘I’ve seen old Henry in “Who is He” and simply
loved
it. He’s so good looking, (
do
tell Mike & Rosie, and make him as young and beautiful as you can) with BLUE eyes and BLACK hair, and quite THIN, not
too
thin, but just right. I
am
so triumphant, you’d love him, he’s so funny,’ she told Lady Strathmore.
¹⁰³

In the midst of her examinations she had actually received a letter from Ainley, who had heard she was coming to the play. ‘I shall myself look forward with keen pleasure to Friday evening,’ he wrote, adding: ‘at the end of the first act I shall raise my eyes to that part of the house where you & your friend will be seated, & may I hope to meet a smile of appreciation & pleasure.’ Better still, he had sent her a photograph of himself and said he had heard that she was ‘at present engaged on a most difficult advanced examination’ and was sure she would come through ‘with flying colours’.
¹⁰⁴

Alas she did not. A few weeks later she received an impersonal form from the Examination Board. ‘You do not appear to be entitled to a Certificate,’ it announced. Furthermore, no questions ‘respecting the cause or extent of your failure’ could be answered.
¹⁰⁵
She was disappointed, if defiant. ‘All that I say is,
DAMN THE EXAM
!! I always was good at poetry wasn’t I?!!’ she wrote to Beryl. ‘I’m not going to tell
anyone
about it anyhow, till they ask me!! Good heavens! What
was
the use of toiling down to that – er – place Hackney? None, I tell you none. It makes me
boil
with rage to think of that vile stuff, tapioca, eaten for – nothing? Oh hell … Yes, I am very disappointed, but I daresay I shall get over it, if I go and see Henry.’
¹⁰⁶

Less enthralling than the theatre was the prospect of a tea party at Spencer House on 2 April 1916. ‘Lavinia wants me to go to tea, to meet Princess Mary and Prince Albert next Sunday,’ she wrote to her mother, adding, ‘They don’t frighten me
quite
as much as Queens.’
¹⁰⁷
Afterwards, however, she declared the tea party ‘was rather frightening – in fact,
very
’. She had had a table all to herself and ‘nearly
burst
’ trying to think of something to say to her neighbours, Mr Robinson and Mr Dill. She added: ‘Prince Albert was next door, he’s rather nice.’
¹⁰⁸
Beryl Poignand reported to her mother that the Prince and his sister had enjoyed themselves so much that ‘long after their carriage was announced they kept on staying & staying – they played games after tea – “Up Jenkins” & “Clumps”, a guessing game’.
¹⁰⁹

Prince Albert, the second son of King George V, was a twenty-year-old naval sub-lieutenant; he was at this time on sick leave from his ship. He and Elizabeth were later said to have met for the first time at a children’s tea party many years earlier;
^*
but their Spencer House meeting was the first of which either of them left a record. No comment by the Prince has survived, however, and Elizabeth made little of the encounter. The remainder of her letter to her mother was taken up with enthusing about Henry Ainley – his wonderful voice and his dreadful shyness.
¹¹⁰

In the second half of April 1916, she had a holiday in Glamis with her father. A new batch of convalescent soldiers was about to arrive;
she spent a lot of time writing letters and listening to records of Henry Ainley singing patriotic songs. At the end of the month she took the train back to London, leaving her father and Barson, she said, ‘sorrowfully drinking cocktails’.
¹¹¹

Back in St James’s Square, she was much taken up with the rush towards her sister Rose’s wedding. Rose was the beauty of the family. A kind and intelligent girl, she was closest of all to her brother Michael, and she had nursed Alec when he was dying. She had many admirers – her daughter Mary Clayton recalls her grandmother saying that, after Rosie’s twentieth proposal, she gave up counting.
¹¹²

To the chagrin of Freddy Dalrymple Hamilton – always ‘the unlucky third’ in affairs of the heart, he felt – Rose’s choice fell on a fellow naval officer, William Spencer Leveson-Gower (who later became the fourth Earl Granville).
¹¹³
He was known as Wisp, partly because of his Christian names and partly because as a child he had straw-coloured hair.

The preparations for the wedding – held barely a month after the engagement was announced – gave rise to much family hilarity at Rose’s expense. ‘We thought of getting the chorus from the Gaiety for bridesmaids, and the two waiters also from the same theatre, because they are so amusing for the reception affair afterwards!’ wrote her younger sister. ‘Also a band of the Royal Scots, and some sailors to pull the carriage to the church and back, and all sorts of such suggestions have been made!!! It would be rather amusing if it could be done!!’
¹¹⁴
Elizabeth thought the trousseau needlessly extravagant. ‘I should
never
be able to use 2 dozen of everything,
lingerie
I mean, good heavens, I’m thankful to say no.’
¹¹⁵
She went to buy her shoes at Pinet, one of the best shops in Bond Street – ‘the
first and last
time for poverty stricken me I expect, as they were demned expensive’ – over thirty shillings.
¹¹⁶

Wisp and Rose were married on 24 May 1916. ‘The “best man” is very nice – Commander Tom Goldie RN,’ Elizabeth reported to Beryl. But evidently not that nice. ‘Jock says the best man has got to kiss the bridesmaid but he’s jolly well not going to kiss me!!’
¹¹⁷

Not long after the wedding Elizabeth discovered that society magazines were describing Dorothy Cavendish,
^*
Lavinia and herself
as ‘coming Beauties’. ‘Did you ever hear such absolute
rot
in your life? DC is positively ugly, Lavinia is very pretty, but not even a Beauty, and as for me!’ News of the war preoccupied her more. Worried about friends in the navy, she commented, ‘It seems a “damn silly” thing to go and do, only part, and a small part, of our fleet to go & take on the whole Hun fleet, but its very brave.’
¹¹⁸
She was referring to the Battle of Jutland on 31 May, in which 259 warships were deployed to fight each other – Winston Churchill called it ‘the culminating manifestation of naval force in the history of the world’. Prince Albert saw active service in the battle, aboard HMS
Collingwood
.

It had been German strategy since before the turn of the century to deploy a fleet so large that the British (or any other enemy) would be fatally weakened by any decisive engagement.
¹¹⁹
At the end of May, the German High Seas Fleet succeeded in luring the British Grand Fleet out into the North Sea. Sixteen U-boats attacked British ships as they left their ports, though none of the torpedoes succeeded in striking its target. But the next afternoon, within half an hour of each other,
Indefatigable
and
Queen Mary
were both sent to the bottom of the sea, with the loss of over 2,200 men. Two hours later as visibility, made more murky by the smoke from 250 funnels and by cordite, began to fail, Admiral Hood’s flagship,
Invincible
, was blown up and more than a thousand men were drowned. In the dark of that night the German fleet escaped and fled back to its havens.

Despite the immense losses of ships and men, the British navy had not been defeated; but when Admiral Beatty took over the command of the Grand Fleet he concluded that British strategy should be not to engage the German navy but to keep it bottled up in its harbours. The war had to be won in the mud of Flanders.

*

O
N
1 J
ULY
1916 the greatest British catastrophe of the war began. The British and French attempted a mass infantry attack on German lines along the north bank of the River Somme. Almost a quarter of a million shells were fired at German positions in an hour that morning; the noise of this massive barrage was so intense it could be heard on Hampstead Heath. Then the heavily laden men of eleven British divisions hauled themselves out of their trenches to advance against German positions on the north bank of the Somme.

They sang:

The weather in northern France was glorious. As Harold Macmillan, then a captain in the Grenadier Guards, wrote to his mother, it was ‘not the weather for killing people’.
^121
*
The horror unfolding on the Somme was not quickly understood in Britain. At first even the General Staff did not grasp the scale of the tragedy. Indeed, one war correspondent wrote that 1 July was ‘on balance, a good day for England and France’.
¹²²

By nightfall that day, the army had suffered over 57,000 casualties of whom 20,000 were dead. One eyewitness, Brigadier General F. P. Crozier, recorded: ‘I glance to the right through a gap in the trees. I see the 10th Rifles plodding on and then my eyes are riveted by a sight I shall never see again. It is the 32nd Division at its best. I see rows upon rows of British soldiers lying dead, dying or wounded in No Mans Land. Here and there I see an officer urging on his followers. Occasionally I see the hands thrown up and then a body flops to the ground.’ Altogether the Battle of the Somme lasted 141 days. The horrors were almost indescribable.

While the battle was in its early stages, Elizabeth and her mother went to visit ‘dear old Pegg’ (Trooper J. Langfield Pegg of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles, who had been a convalescent at Glamis in December 1915) in the New Zealand hospital at Walton on Thames. He showed them around; there were more than 350 men there, some of them just arrived from the Front, looking very pale, tired and dirty. Returning to Glamis in early August, they found a new batch of soldiers. As Elizabeth reported to Beryl, ‘They’ve most of them been in this new thing [the Somme] & a Scotch one said that only 52 men were left of his batt: by the time they’de reached the German trenches. It must have been awful.’
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*

O
N
S
ATURDAY
16 September 1916 Elizabeth’s father and David went shooting with Gavin Ralston, the Glamis factor, and some neighbours.
Elizabeth and her mother remained at the Castle tending to the soldiers. In the afternoon nine of the soldiers and the Sister went to the pictures in Forfar. Fortunately some of the soldiers stayed behind. One of them, Sergeant Cowie, whom Elizabeth described as ‘remarkably good looking. Very quiet and Scotch and huge’, suddenly smelt smoke and realized that the Castle was on fire. He raised the alarm.
¹²⁴
Elizabeth at once took charge, telephoning for the fire brigades from both Forfar and more distant Dundee. She wrote to Beryl later that she, four soldiers and all the maids ‘rushed up and handed buckets like old Billy-o. The more water, the more smoke, we absolutly could
not
find the fire.’
¹²⁵

The whole village ran up to help, but still the fire spread and ‘the little flames were sort of creeping through the roofs … It was too awful.’ The Forfar fire brigade arrived full tilt but were ‘absolutly no use’, having only a hand pump which was quite unable to get water ninety feet up the tower. Fortunately the Dundee brigade were prompt and reached the Castle only twenty-six minutes after being called out. With their powerful engines they were able to spray water all across the roofs of the tower.