The Queen Mother (62 page)

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A
T
THE
END
of July 1934 the Duchess went to Cowes with the King and Queen. She looked forward to it. ‘I like the feel of yacht racing – it is very exciting, & very peaceful. No noise, except the creak of the sails & the water rushing by – & a glow of health after a few days at sea!!’
¹⁷⁹
In the event the weather was poor and she only had one day racing on
Britannia;
^*
they spent more time than they expected aboard the royal yacht, the
Victoria and Albert
.
^†
The Duchess made the best of it, writing to Osbert Sitwell ‘in a little house on the top deck. It has leather seats, silver fittings and too many tassels to count. Extremely Edwardian, & of course extremely comfortable. I am looking at a
battleship as I write, hundreds of seagulls are crying &
nobody
bothers me, so I am happy.’
¹⁸⁰

She left Cowes on her thirty-fourth birthday – and that day
Britannia
had a spectacular win, beating her rival
Astra
by twelve seconds.
¹⁸¹
The Duchess wrote to the King to say that she ‘would have blown up with excitement!’ if she had been there. ‘It is very odd, but nothing in the whole year gives me such pleasure as my few days at Cowes, I feel quite different, &
so
happy … there is something so exhilarating about the elements, the sea & the wind & the sun, and one feels far away from the horrors of modern civilization with its noise and eternal hurry.’
¹⁸²

She and the Duke and their daughters now travelled, as every August, to Scotland where they divided their time between Glamis and Birkhall. It was an idyllic interlude; the girls in particular loved it. They took Princess Margaret for the first time to the Braemar Gathering; this display of Highland Games was a regular engagement for the Royal Family but not one in which many members rejoiced. This year the King escaped it, on grounds of a slight chill. At the end of their holiday the family was as sad as ever to leave Birkhall. The Duchess told the King, ‘Lilibet nearly wept when we left the other day.’
¹⁸³

However, they were soon caught up in the preparations for the major royal event of the year. In the autumn of 1934 the King’s fourth son Prince George, Duke of Kent, became engaged to and married Princess Marina of Greece. The Duchess had discussed this possibility with the Prince himself and with Queen Mary while they were together in Cowes. She told the Queen that she hoped something would come of the idea but ‘He
must
get to know her well, because with his character it would be madness to marry somebody who was not congenial to him.’
¹⁸⁴
Before the Duke left to meet the Princess in Yugoslavia in August, he wrote to the Duchess to say that he doubted anything would happen. In the event, he was pleasantly surprised by the beautiful Greek Princess – by the end of the month he was engaged and the Duchess wrote to congratulate him. ‘She is so sweet, & so pretty, and do tell her that nobody will welcome her more than her future sister in law … Darling, Bertie & I, the old married couple, pray that you will both be as happy as we are.’
¹⁸⁵

In mid-September the bride-to-be and her parents, Prince and Princess Nicholas of Greece, accompanied by Prince George, came to Balmoral to meet their future in-laws. The Duchess may well have
sympathized with Princess Marina, whose introduction to the Royal Family was, in its way, as daunting as her own had been. Ironically, Princess Marina would have been perfectly at ease with the bevy of royal cousins and aunts gathered at Sandringham to inspect Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon in 1923. Lady Elizabeth, on the other hand, would have seen nothing odd in the King and all the male members of his family turning out in kilts to greet her, nor in the Ghillies’ Ball to which the Greek visitors were subjected two days later. But they at least ‘seemed to enjoy’ the ball, as the King noted cautiously in his diary.
¹⁸⁶

The Duchess then arranged for Beryl Poignand to come in to deal with Princess Marina’s correspondence. ‘Don’t forget to make a nice curtsey to Marina, her mother & father, & anybody that should be curtseyed to!’ she warned her old friend. ‘Practise shaking hands & bending those proud knees of yours. A curtsey in the morning ought to get you through the day!’ But of course, she added, ‘this doesn’t apply to you & me. It’s only for other members of the Royal family … Au revoir and sharpen up the old pencil. Your loving E.’
¹⁸⁷

Most of the important members of the remaining royal houses in Europe came to London for the wedding on 29 November 1934. At the first ‘family’ dinner, for seventy-five, the Duchess sat between Prince Charles of Sweden and Prince Nicholas of Greece, the father of the bride. Her old friend Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was also at her table. Another guest was Princess Marina’s thirteen-year-old cousin Prince Philip of Greece, who was at school at Gordonstoun. The next night the King and Queen gave a party for 800 people at the Palace.

The wedding day was overcast but fortunately there was no fog as had been feared and the marriage was clearly popular. Princess Elizabeth was again an excited bridesmaid. The four-year-old Princess Margaret was keen to go to the wedding too; the King and Queen agreed on condition that the Duchess could ‘really guarantee that Margaret will behave like an angel & that
you
will keep her near you’.
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The Duchess complied. She wore what
The Times
called ‘an unusual shade of japonica-pink velvet. The coat had a collar of blue fox fur and wide sleeves drawn into a band at the cuffs. Her close fitting hat had two tufts of shaded pink feathers at the side.’
¹⁸⁹
She led Princess Margaret, who was wearing a cream satin coat and bonnet trimmed with narrow bands of beaver, by the hand into the Abbey. The Princess sat on a stool at her mother’s feet and, according to her
grandfather, Lord Strathmore, she was ‘as good as gold’ during the service.
¹⁹⁰
The
Daily Telegraph
recorded that when her sister appeared, holding the train, only a few feet from her, Princess Margaret waved to attract her attention, whereupon Princess Elizabeth gave her a stern look and shook her head. ‘Thenceforth all exuberance was quelled.’
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D
URING
1935
THE
Duke and Duchess of Kent began to play an active part in public life, which relieved the pressure upon the Prince of Wales and the Yorks. This was welcome to them all, because it was an especially busy year, the year of the King’s Silver Jubilee. The Duchess of York’s files show her turning down as many engagements as she accepted. She rejected most charitable film premieres because she believed that they did more for the film companies than for the charities. She was firm about where she wanted to go and what she would do, but flexible and generous in her approach to the people on the ground, and ready to change dates or times to suit them. Charity organizers were often pleasantly surprised by her willingness to shake more hands and spend more time than expected, because she knew the pleasure it gave.

The King and Queen asked them to attend more functions at Court than usual this year, but both she and the Duke much preferred their relatively independent public work with their own patronages and charities to the predictable and repetitive formalities of Court life.
The Duchess scored a small but important victory in this respect by writing the King a cleverly worded letter asking him to allow her to accept the honorary colonelcy of the London Scottish Regiment. If he agreed, she said, ‘I promise you that I should behave very quietly and not traipse about Hyde Park in a grey kilt!’
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She pointed out that the Scots so easily felt left out and she would be sorry if she had to cancel her attendance at the regiment’s annual prize-giving and concert in order to attend a Court. As usual her charm worked – the King gave way to her on both issues.

The Jubilee was a much greater success than anyone, in particular the King, had dared to hope. Indeed it was in every way a vindication of the King’s low-key but steadfast approach to his task, his devotion to his duty, his acceptance of political change and his strategy of reaching out to his people.

On 6 May, the actual anniversary of the King’s accession, the four
Yorks led the royal carriage procession to St Paul’s for the thanksgiving service. The King wrote in his diary, ‘A never to be forgotten day, when we celebrated our Silver Jubilee. It was a glorious summer’s day 75° in the shade. The greatest number of people in the streets that I have ever seen in my life, the enthusiasm was indeed most touching.’ After returning to Buckingham Palace he was gratified to be cheered by an enormous crowd. ‘By only one post in morning I received 610 letters. At 8.0 I broadcast a message of thanks to the Empire. After dinner we went out on the balcony again & there must have been 100,000 people.’
¹⁹³

Every night that week, the King and Queen appeared on the Buckingham Palace balcony and every night it was the same. Every day he and the Queen were driven in an open coach through London. In all the poorest areas – Lambeth, Whitechapel, Battersea, Kennington, Limehouse – they were greeted by rapturous crowds. Hordes of children waving flags and shouting, their parents smiling, laughing and clapping, greeted the dignified elderly couple everywhere. Houses were exuberantly decorated with streamers, flags and bunting and the King remarked in his diary that all this decoration had been put up ‘by the poor’. The King’s official biographer, Harold Nicolson, noted later that students of mass behaviour were ‘fascinated and perplexed’ by this popular rejoicing. Among the reasons he gave were deep affection for the King, pride that Britain’s monarchy, unlike so many others, had survived, reverence for the Crown as a symbol of patriotism, and more. ‘Comfort in the realization that here was a strong benevolent patriarch personifying the highest standards of the race. Gratitude to a man who by his probity had earned the esteem of the whole world.’
¹⁹⁴

Dedicated left-wingers like the distinguished radical sociologist Beatrice Webb disliked what they saw. More flexible ones rejoiced. George Orwell suggested that it was possible to see in the expressions of loyalty ‘the survival, or recrudescence, of an idea almost as old as history, the idea of the King and the common people being in some sort of alliance against the upper classes.’
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The Jubilee gave a great fillip to thousands of charities which launched Jubilee appeals and enlisted different members of the Royal Family in their causes. The King’s Fund sold £11,000 worth of seats at Jubilee processions. Canada raised £250,000 for a Silver Jubilee Cancer Fund within weeks of its being launched. All over the Empire Jubilee contributions came pouring in.
¹⁹⁶
The King was surprised and moved by it all. After one happy
drive through the East End, he said to his nurse Sister Black, ‘I’d no idea they felt like that about me … I am beginning to think they must really like me for myself.’
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The Yorks played their part in the celebrations. On 9 May they went with the rest of the family to Westminster Hall where the King received loyal addresses. There were 2,000 people there – they sang the National Anthem robustly and cheered wildly. The next night the Duke and Duchess took the night train to Edinburgh to assist in Scotland’s own Jubilee festivities.

The celebrations continued until early June. On the 8th (the day after Ramsay MacDonald resigned as prime minister on grounds of health, and Stanley Baldwin was sworn in) the King and Queen made the last of their triumphal drives around London. The emotion and enthusiasm engendered by such an event as the Jubilee produce many monuments. One of the most important from 1935 was King George’s Jubilee Trust, a national appeal headed by the Prince of Wales to ‘promote the welfare of the younger generation’. A total of £1 million was quickly raised and distributed between existing youth organizations and the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides.

Soon after the Jubilee Trust was launched,
Punch
published a cartoon of a man in uniform looking angry as he read in the
Daily Mail
the news of the ‘King’s Call to Youth’ and saying, ‘I thought I had the best youth movement in Europe, but I begin to think I am mistaken.’ The uniformed man was Adolf Hitler.
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T
HROUGHOUT
MOST
of the ‘long weekend’, successive British governments of the early 1930s had encouraged the people to believe that another appalling war could be best avoided by the magic of collective security. The League of Nations, created with great optimism in 1919, was portrayed by most people as by far the best hope of avoiding the cataclysm of war. Mutual restraint and the spirit of co-operation under the aegis of international law were offered as the best deterrents to aggressors. Such hopes were completely understandable given the horrors of 1914–18 but, after the rise of the dictators, less and less realistic. In Britain governments and most people believed that, after Passchendaele and the Somme, no one would ever wish to go to war again. They failed to reckon with the fascist mentality, which derived
an entirely different lesson from the Great War – that their countries had not been ruthless enough.

In September 1930 the German people, terrified by the economic crisis and the threat of runaway inflation, awarded Hitler’s National Socialist Party 107 seats in the Reichstag. In January 1933 Hitler was invited to form a national government and the Reichstag fire a few weeks later gave him an excuse to arrest all communist deputies; that summer he asserted that Nazism was now the only legitimate force in Germany. His dictatorship was established. In March 1935, he defied the Treaty of Versailles by introducing conscription. As Harold Nicolson put it, ‘to attentive ears there came, in the last months of George V’s life, the distant grumble of the thunder of a second war.’
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But not everyone wished to hear it and those, like Winston Churchill, who heard it most clearly were often denounced as selfish warmongers.