CHAPTER VI
‘I HAD A MOST beautiful birthday present,’ eleven-year-old Betty Murphy wrote to her mother in November 1939. ‘Princess Elizabeth’s coat. She said she had grown out of it and that if it fitted me I could have it. It is fawn and has wee tyers to tie inside. It is double-breasted, has a half-belt at the back and an inverted pleat. It is lined with fawn satin and has two pockets, but not for putting your hands in. I’m going to write to Princess Elizabeth and thank her for her lovely present.’1
Betty Murphy was an evacuee. While her mother stayed behind in the family’s Glasgow tenement, she was living at Craigowan Lodge on the King’s Scottish estate, among a large group of Glaswegian evacuees, in some cases mothers as well as children. Also separated from their parents, though there the similarity ended, Elizabeth and Margaret had moved from Balmoral to the smaller house of Birkhall. Convinced until the last minute that war would be avoided, the King had nevertheless been forced to cut short his Scottish holiday and return to London, followed, on 28 August, by the Queen; as late as 27 August, he had written to the exiled Queen Ena of Spain about her visiting the family in Scotland.2 Instead, their cousin Margaret Elphinstone kept the girls company. When war was declared on 3 September, all three were at Crathie church. ‘The Minister, a small, spare man called Dr Lamb preached a highly emotional sermon and told his flock that the uneasy peace which had prevailed since the end of the First World War was now over,’ remembered Margaret Elphinstone.3 In the evening the King broadcast to the nation. Despite warning signals for some time, Elizabeth may still have been surprised, misled by her father’s conviction that Hitler would relent and both her parents’ determined concealment from their daughters of their ‘deepening sense of crisis’.4 In the event Elizabeth’s concerns mirrored those of her sister, whose response to their parents’ return to London was the unvarnished question, ‘Do you think the Germans will get them?’ ‘I hope he won’t come over here,’ Elizabeth said simply of Hitler.5 The Queen wrote to her sister Rose Granville, asking that she look after Elizabeth and Margaret in the event of anything happening to her and the King, her letter a measure of her concern. ‘I would give up everything to try & make the two darlings happy,’ Lady Granville replied on 6 September.6 As in the aftermath of George V’s death, Crawfie was recalled early from her holiday. She joined Alah, the French holiday governess Georgina Guérin and lady-in-waiting Lettice Bowlby; her presence mitigated the animosity between the mademoiselle and the courtier.
Elizabeth and Margaret and their small party of attendants remained at Birkhall until Christmas, despite nights so cold in the unheated house that, to their delight, sponges and flannels froze solid and windows glittered with a lacework of frost. Sometimes they wore their Guide and Brownie uniforms; they attended Guide meetings joined by Glasgow evacuees. Crawfie went out of her way to fill the girls’ days, denying them insofar as possible time for anxiety over their parents. She introduced initiatives she labelled ‘war work’, inspired by similar innovations of the Queen at Buckingham Palace. At sewing parties in the schoolroom for ‘crofters’ wives, farmers’ wives, wives of estate employees’, the princesses handed round teacups and cake, ‘talked away happily to the various women’ and entertained them with records on an immensely loud, old-fashioned horn gramophone; they knitted for the Red Cross; there were ‘hikes and tea parties and outings’, the last to include the evacuees.7 Brought up among adults and trained in good manners, the sisters fared better at the sedate tea parties. ‘We have got hundreds all around about from Glasgow,’ Elizabeth had written to Crawfie ahead of her return.8 She may have felt overwhelmed by these children whose lives were so remote from her own; their discomfort in one another’s company was mutual. More successful were the princesses’ donations of discarded clothes and toys, like the coat given to Betty Murphy. In Betty’s letter to her mother a sense of wonder permeates the careful itemization of each hand-stitched detail. The coat’s decorative pockets are a reminder of the formality of Elizabeth’s life. Only in her nineties was she photographed for the first time with her hands in her pockets. Even then she knew that, had she been alive, her mother would have disapproved.
To Elizabeth her parents explained the necessity of the war that the Queen described in a letter to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia as ‘a struggle of the spirit, evil thinking, arrogance and materialism, against truth, liberty & justice’.9 Crawfie ‘read the newspapers to the children after tea, trying as far as possible to give them some idea of what was happening without too many horrible details’; patriotically she read them Milton, including ‘At a Solemn Musick’, with its invocation to ‘sirens’ that gave rise to amused misunderstanding. They listened to the radio. The girls jeered Lord Haw-Haw, throwing books and cushions at the set; they enjoyed comedian Arthur Askey in a weekly programme called Band Waggon. On the Queen’s instructions, Crawfie did her best to restore schoolroom routine at the end of an unsettled year.10 The princesses’ distance from their parents and the distractions of peacetime London proved unexpectedly beneficial. Even Elizabeth’s lessons with Henry Marten continued after a fashion, essays posted, marked, returned. Hanni Davey, the princesses’ German teacher, also sent exercises by post. Georgina Guérin returned to France to join the French Resistance; French lessons were entrusted to a Mrs Montaudon-Smith, called ‘Monty’. The King and Queen telephoned at six o’clock each evening, their calls eagerly awaited by both sisters. In the middle of September, the Queen arrived for a week. She visited the evacuees and showed an enthusiastic Elizabeth how to make up roller bandages for ambulance supplies.11 Elizabeth in turn taught Margaret. She wrote regularly to her grandmother Queen Mary, in reluctant exile at Badminton House with her niece, the Duchess of Beaufort. Elizabeth may or may not have known that the list of serving officers for whom Queen Mary knitted woollen scarves and pullovers included Philip of Greece.12
Crawfie organized picnics, the girls rode a pony called George, on long autumn walks they looked out for hares and geese, they tramped high on the moors and sometimes through the darkness of the woods; they were thrilled by the first white frosts on stubble fields and early falls of snow. There were special evening screenings, on a borrowed projector, of Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin films and, occasionally, weekend visitors. A dentist in Aberdeen oversaw Elizabeth’s braces; in Woolworths the sisters shopped for Christmas presents. In the safety of the Highlands, parted from their parents but cossetted by their nurse and governess, the princesses’ ‘evacuation’ differed markedly from that of children like Betty Murphy, sent to unfamiliar surrounds, uncertain of their reception, cut off from anything they had previously known. Aspects of her wartime experience shaped Elizabeth: that autumn at Birkhall cemented her love of the Highlands and her hermetic companionship with Margaret. It did not expand her understanding of many of those who would one day be her subjects. Instead, the first months of conflict increased Elizabeth’s isolation. Newspapers lamented ‘the restriction of intercourse with girls of her own age which Princess Elizabeth enjoyed so freely when living in Buckingham Palace’, an exaggeration of her erstwhile freedoms that also discounted the Glaswegian girls billeted nearby.13 The walls of the sisters’ ivory tower did not crumble yet.
After Christmas at Sandringham, made possible by the non-events of the Phoney War, Elizabeth and Margaret moved to Royal Lodge. Five months later, on 12 May, they moved again, this time into Windsor Castle itself. The five-room ‘royal nursery’ in the Augusta Tower was their home for the remainder of the war. Elizabeth shared with Bobo MacDonald the bedroom that had always been hers. Alah and Margaret were next door, Crawfie accommodated at a remove in the Victoria Tower. Newspapers explained to their readers the inconveniences of Birkhall, too far from affairs of state for the King to visit; ‘another place nearer London, but in the “safety area”’ was obviously more practical.14 The princesses’ whereabouts – their ‘country evacuation home’ – were kept secret.15 In his diary, the King stated ‘at their age, their education is too important to be neglected’.16 In fact, Crawfie’s programme at Windsor did not differ materially from the routine she had re-established at Birkhall in the war’s first weeks, though Henry Marten was nearby, and Elizabeth’s lessons resumed, sometimes in Marten’s rooms at Eton, complete with his pet raven, Marten addressing Elizabeth and Crawfie absentmindedly as ‘Gentlemen’; their studies included the world’s great explorers, beginning with Columbus, and the history of America. There was still a weekly dancing class with Miss Vacani. In place of the singing classes of pre-war London were afternoon cookery lessons;17 Queen Mary’s ‘instructive amusements’ were replaced by tours of the castle with the royal librarian, Owen Morshead; in his house in the castle cloisters, Elizabeth and Margaret visited the organist of St George’s Chapel, Dr Harris, for weekly conversations about the lives and works of prominent composers. In addition, Crawfie referred to ‘numerous other children staying in and around Windsor’, including Owen Morshead’s daughter Mary and Libby Hardinge.18 One in particular shared much of the princesses’ war. ‘One of the closest companions of Princess Elizabeth – the sixteen-year-old daughter of an old family friend – is living close at hand,’ reported the Sunday Mirror.19 She was Alathea Fitzalan Howard, who had also been evacuated from her parents’ house in London, like Libby Hardinge a member of the palace Guide company. She spent the war at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park, with her grandfather, Viscount Fitzalan of Derwent, and an unmarried great-aunt, only too happy to flee this repressive, elderly household for the sunshine world of the princesses and Crawfie, whom she loved.
Officially in hiding, Elizabeth experienced a greater degree of privacy than at any moment to date. Concealed from the world at large, she escaped temporarily the ever-present bystanders and photographers, cocooned with Margaret in a small but busy world of Crawfie, Monty, Alah and Bobo, friends like Alathea Fitzalan Howard, castle staff and household officials. From a distance, newspapers selected details of their sequestered existence to demonstrate the royal children’s participation in the collective war effort. As throughout the difficult decade of the 1930s, with or without their parents Elizabeth and Margaret embodied a family ideal that was also a national ideal. Stories illustrated their concern for the plight of others, small-scale kindnesses, patriotic frugality, and, whenever possible, reunions with their parents: riding with the King, picnic teas at Frogmore in Windsor Great Park, a film together, like the evening of the King’s birthday when they watched Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. In public the King and Queen dedicated themselves to national morale; in private, according to Lisa Sheridan, they battled ‘to maintain a simple, united family life, whatever calls there might be to duty’.20 The princesses’ contributions to the war effort were assiduously publicized: presents of chocolate to evacuated French children; donations to the Over-Seas League Tobacco Fund to supply servicemen with 18 million cigarettes on Empire Day 1940; ‘a gift of sweets... received at the Army Comforts Depot, Reading, for distribution to some of the British and French troops who have returned from Dunkirk’; the royal Christmas tree passed on to the Mayor of Windsor for use at children’s parties.21 Improbably, an appeal for aluminium by the Women’s Voluntary Service elicited a veritable royal ironmongery: ‘saucepans and frying pans that have cooked many a royal meal’ and utensils from Y Bwthyn Bach: a miniature kitchen measure and a stock pot.22 At Queen Mary’s suggestion and to assist the government’s salvage scheme, the sisters became ‘keen collectors of tin foil’, a thrifty impulse in line with Elizabeth’s years of saving wrapping paper and ribbons.23 None of this, in truth, consumed much of Elizabeth’s time, as she would become increasingly aware. Her life retained a leisurely quality. Crawfie referred to ‘monotonous days’ and ‘long slow months’;24 Marcus Adams photographed the sisters occupied with a large jigsaw puzzle in an incongruously splendid interior, an image released as a wartime postcard. Conscientious, and recognizably the same child who had jumped out of bed to straighten her shoes, Elizabeth wore her gas mask, as officially instructed, for ten minutes a day, then ‘carefully clean[ed] the eyepiece every evening with the ointment provided’.25 The sisters drove a pony cart. The Times explained that the cart had been brought back into use ‘in view of the need for saving petrol’.26 Photographs suggest their enjoyment of their new conveyance, which they drove themselves, accompanied by a corgi. Attended by an equerry, Elizabeth had a handful of carriage driving lessons with the royal riding instructor, Horace Smith, owner of a nearby riding school, who also taught her to ride side-saddle. It was Smith who received her much-quoted confidence that ‘had she not been who she was, she would like to be a lady living in the country with lots of dogs and horses’, a statement invariably interpreted as suggesting a craving for ordinariness. It may simply have been a conversational politeness to highlight common ground – their love of the country – between instructor and pupil.27 Elizabeth’s experience of country life – at Royal Lodge, Balmoral and Sandringham – was far from typical, as she may have been old enough to understand.
In March 1940, society magazine Queen lamented ‘we have seen very little of the Princesses for such a long time that new pictures of them would be very much appreciated by everybody.’28 A sitting with Marcus Adams in April reflected the altered mood of the time. In place of their fairy frills, the girls wore tweed jackets and kilts. Elizabeth appears serious, as indeed she was, ‘very matter of fact’ in Alathea Fitzalan Howard’s verdict.29 Examining Adams’s pictures, loyally the Sunday Mirror enumerated wartime changes in the royal sisters’ lives: ‘There are fewer frocks, fewer parties and fewer outings... Jerseys and skirts are the order of the day, except when the hot weather has made a change into cotton frocks necessary.’30 For a sugary picture book called Our Princesses at Home, Lisa Sheridan photographed the sisters outdoors at Royal Lodge ‘in their natural home life away from the public eye’:31 gardening, knitting, playing with their dogs, still dressed alike, though Elizabeth wears stockings in place of Margaret’s ankle socks and bare legs. Even Elizabeth’s fourteenth birthday conformed to the new narrative of cheerful stoicism: her birthday cake was a plain sponge and her presents included a gift of £100 that was only nominally hers. In his accompanying letter, the governor of Jamaica explained, ‘The children of Jamaica wish Her Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth many happy returns... and submit with their humble greetings a draft for £100, which they hope Her Royal Highness will donate to her favourite war charity.’32 When Margaret’s birthday arrived in August, much was made of the lack of icing on her cake. Frances Towers, the author of another paean, The Two Princesses, wrote that the sisters ‘try to be useful, make their own beds, wrap up and address their own parcels’, again small-scale inroads into long days.33
Over the course of 1940, as war escalated with the fall of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, the King and Queen were frequently at Windsor, spending nights at the castle, though the Royal Standard flew at Buckingham Palace to maintain the illusion of their presence in the capital. For Elizabeth and Margaret, ‘no longer... allowed to appear in public for reasons affecting their own safety’, their lives resembled those of their aristocratic contemporaries: educated by their governess in a large country house, with plenty of fresh air and more time with their nurse than their parents.34 Alah’s unquenchable instinct for royal state went some way to maintaining pre-war levels of ceremony, including meals served by the nursery footman, Cyril Dickman, with rigid punctuality. Over time the pudding of stewed bottled plums from the garden was always the same, the regime increasingly spartan, despite venison and game to supplement rations, the rooms often unpleasantly cold. Nothing indicated to Alah grounds for lowering standards. Neither sister protested. Alah’s attitude reflected the Queen’s, itself shaped by Queen Mary’s view of appropriate royal behaviour. It was all the princesses knew.
The suggestion that the princesses spend the war in Canada like members of the Dutch and Norwegian royal families and several of their friends was firmly rebuffed by the Queen, a popular decision, not least with the girls themselves. But the plan had not simply been concerned with their safety. ‘If the Nazis got hold of their Persons,’ wrote a former Lord Chancellor to Winston Churchill, ‘they would be able to bring tremendous pressure to bear on the King and Queen to accept intimidation by threatening death and even worse things.’35 Mischievously, German radio reported the sisters living in Montreal and, later, New York.36 Instead, an air raid shelter was made under the Brunswick Tower, with reinforced walls and a four-feet-thick roof of concrete and girders, and, in time, subterranean bedrooms and bathrooms for all the royal family. Throughout the castle low-wattage light bulbs replaced brighter peacetime lighting (‘it seemed to be perpetual twilight,’ Margaret Elphinstone remembered),37 chandeliers were taken down to eliminate the threat of splintering crystal and, as thoroughly as possible in a house of a thousand rooms, the blackout enforced. Paintings were removed from their frames to safe storage, cabinets and vitrines emptied or turned to face the wall to protect their contents. Barbed wire circled the ancient stronghold. In their underground shelter, Elizabeth and Margaret stowed away their personal treasures, using the blue and pink jewel cases that belonged to the dolls Marianne and France. They kept a selection of books in the shelter, too, and the diaries they wrote daily. After a delay in their appearance below ground during Windsor’s first air raid, caused by Alah insisting they change out of their nightclothes, they were provided with siren suits for convenience.
Despite considerable anxieties – unusually, in this period she found herself waking early and lying in bed worrying – the Queen remained successfully dedicated to her daughters’ happiness. As a young woman, Elizabeth would tell George V’s biographer Harold Nicolson that ‘all the happiest memories of her childhood were associated with [Windsor] Castle and the Park’.38 The sisters found the war exciting as well as alarming. On a visit to bomb craters in the autumn of 1940, agog, both ‘expressed a desire to have a souvenir of the raids’; each was rewarded with her own bomb fin.39 Months later, at RAF Coastal Command, they enjoyed watching planes landing and taking off, exploring a Hudson aircraft with its New Zealander pilot and listening to pilots’ messages through headphones. When bombers targeted Windsor on consecutive nights in October 1940, both girls had been ‘wonderful’, their mother wrote. It was ‘the first time that the children had actually heard the whistle & scream of bombs’.40 Neither expressed fear. On the contrary, Crawfie described Elizabeth as ‘troublesome’ during air raids: ‘“Do let me see what is happening,” she would beg, her eyes very large.’41
Again a Guide company was formed. Evacuees from Stepney, billeted in Windsor, swelled its numbers. Crawfie detected a wartime spirit of democracy in the cries of ‘Wait for me, Lilibet’ in Cockney accents and the Eastenders’ lack of special treatment of the princesses; she records the sisters’ response as one of fascination, like their absorption in a world beyond their own, standing on the hill in the garden of Buckingham Palace, hearing fragments of conversations over the garden wall.42 At a concert in aid of the Minesweepers’ Comforts Fund, this democratic spirit failed. Elizabeth and Margaret were acclaimed ‘the stars’; ‘the other performers’ were village children and the London evacuees.43 Each princess performed a solo dance, they danced together, then, with the ‘other performers’, they took part in a scene written for them by Hubert Tanner, headmaster of the Royal School at Windsor. In ‘An Apple for the Teacher’, Elizabeth was the teacher in mortar board and gown, recalling her play-acting with miniature blackboard a decade earlier, Margaret one of a quartet of tap-dancing pupils. At Christmas the sisters appeared in a nativity play, The Christmas Child. An unnamed mother quoted in the Daily Herald praised Elizabeth for setting an example: ‘During the rehearsals Princess Elizabeth tried hard to be word perfect, and all the other children followed her example.’44 It was the role thrust upon Elizabeth by Anne Ring ten years earlier. Appropriately she played the part of a king. In the audience, her father wept throughout. This modest man discerned in both his daughters something miraculous. The emotional glue that bonded the family of four was of the tightest.
A starring role on an altogether bigger stage, however, had been Elizabeth’s in the autumn. A week after its announcement, and after much rehearsing of phrasing and breathing, on 13 October, in the BBC’s Children’s Hour, Elizabeth made her first radio broadcast. With some hauteur the palace had declined all previous requests that she broadcast. By the autumn of 1940, opinions had changed. In September, the Blitz began – seventy-six consecutive nights of German bombing of ports and cities the length and breadth of Britain that killed 40,000 civilians and destroyed more than a million homes, including 145 Piccadilly and 32 Prince’s Gate, where Elizabeth and Margaret had shared singing classes with Elizabeth and Joanna Lambart. Elizabeth’s speech addressed the children sent away from their families to places of greater safety, including those who had gone abroad; she spoke to them as one who ‘[knew] from experience what it means to be away from those you love most of all’. She referred to her sister ‘Margaret Rose... by my side’, and Margaret had joined her in wishing the unseen childish millions goodnight. Older courtiers considered it mawkish. The response of audiences globally was overwhelmingly positive. Joyce Grenfell wrote to her mother, ‘It was one of the loveliest things I’ve ever heard. So young, so true – so touching in its innocence and wisdom... Whoever thought up the whole idea was a genius; whoever wrote that little speech couldn’t have done it better... you can’t possibly defeat what that little talk stood for. The love and generosity and warmth of it.’45 In her diary, a South African novelist, Sarah Gertrude Millin, described it as ‘perfectly done’ and prophesied, ‘If there are still queens in the world a generation hence, this child will be a good queen.’46 Even the International Women’s Suffrage News congratulated Elizabeth ‘on the manner in which she has performed her first public service’, which it considered ‘typical of a generation of children confronted with adult cares’.47 In February of the following year, the Princess Elizabeth of York Hospital Shadwell received a cheque for 25 guineas from the proceeds of a gramophone record of the speech.
Listeners to Elizabeth’s broadcast, including her father, noted how like the Queen she sounded, ‘that little voice, so like her mother’s, so strong and clear’; like Joyce Grenfell they noted that she sounded very young.48 As previously, Elizabeth’s double life as princess and daughter required her to be simultaneously adult and child, like the three-year-old who had revelled in feeding biscuits to George V’s Cairn terrier and, on her birthday, taken the salute at the changing of the guard in her honour. Alathea Fitzalan Howard described a Sunday in July 1941 typical of Elizabeth and Margaret’s storybook childhood: punting on the water close to Frogmore, a picnic with Crawfie, Monty, the corgis and ginger beer drunk straight from the bottle; feeding flies to the princesses’ pet chameleon. Ten days later, Elizabeth was on parade as royal hostess. She joined her parents at Buckingham Palace for an afternoon party for 200 heads and representatives of Allied states living in Britain, and helped the King and Queen to receive guests including the rulers of Norway, Yugoslavia and the Netherlands, the presidents of Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet ambassador. As so often in the past, public and private blurred. Photographs released to mark Margaret’s eleventh birthday in August showed the sisters dressed identically in summer frocks and straw hats playing with their chameleon in the garden and Elizabeth netting lettuces and strawberry plants. The princesses were symbols of hope; an immaculately dressed Elizabeth dug, weeded, netted for victory. Matching clothes emphasized their relationship: as always, the sisters embodied affectionate family ties, a powerful message at a time when casualties, conscription, women’s war work and evacuation had done so much to disperse many families. The pictures excluded jarring notes. They presented the princesses in a self-contained world of sunshine, occupied with an everyday routine whose orderliness defied war’s tumult, ‘a “governess & schoolroom” atmosphere’ in the Queen’s words, ‘which, in these days of war, is very healing’.49
The Queen took Elizabeth and Margaret with her on hospital visits, aware of the tonic qualities of her pretty, prettily behaved daughters. Although it was the Queen who was the star of the trio, Joyce Grenfell decided, after witnessing one such visit in August 1940, Elizabeth caught her imagination. ‘Princess Elizabeth is going to be lovely,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘One can suddenly see her as she will be. She’s got her mother’s smile and Queen Mary’s colouring so she’ll do.’50 The Queen agreed to Elizabeth lending her name to a new flag day for children’s charities. In June, the first Princess Elizabeth Day raised £19,962, a record for initiatives of its sort, with 3 million Princess Elizabeth Day emblems, the forerunner of today’s charity ribbon knots or rubber wristbands, sold in the London area alone.51 The following year, the total reached £23,588. As throughout her childhood, the princess’s imprimatur yielded profits for others.
The day after Elizabeth’s sixteenth birthday, the Tatler printed a full-page photograph of Lady Mary Cambridge in her VAD uniform. Lady Mary, it told readers, ‘though only seventeen years of age... for some time past has been doing Red Cross work at a convalescent home in Gloucestershire’.52 At eighteen, George Lascelles had joined the Grenadier Guards. Waiting to follow him, his brother Gerald, a year younger, had spent the last year working in a munitions factory under an assumed name. ‘He has not waited until old enough (officially!) to do his bit,’ the illustrated paper trilled.53 Winifred Hardinge, who had edited The Snapdragon during pre-war summers at Balmoral, was in the WRNS; Elizabeth’s friend and singing partner Lady Elizabeth Lambart was taking lessons in French and cookery in Oxford. Also at Windsor Castle was Margaret Elphinstone, who travelled daily by bus to the Queen’s Secretarial College in Egham, assuming that she, too, would join the WRNS when the course ended (in fact she joined MI6); her eldest sister Elizabeth was a VAD. Within weeks of Elizabeth’s birthday, Wentworth Beaumont, the eldest of the six children of the Royal Family’s Piccadilly neighbours the Allendales, was reported missing on operations and shortly confirmed as a German prisoner of war. He was a pilot officer in the RAF Volunteer Reserve. Sonia Graham Hodgson would take a job in a Polish government office in London.
Elizabeth was growing up. As recently as 1940, headlines had called her ‘the world’s most famous little girl’, but she was no longer a little girl.54 Photographs taken by Lisa Sheridan in 1941 showed that she was as tall as her mother.55 One by one her friends were leaving the schoolroom behind, making first steps towards adulthood and, in most cases, war work. It was not the King’s plan for the elder daughter on whom he doted. Elizabeth, a friend considered, was ‘relatively young [for her age]’.56 A result of her parents’ decision to treat their two daughters as equals, it suited the King.
Instead, on 28 March 1942, Elizabeth was confirmed in the private chapel at Windsor Castle, by the same Archbishop Lang who had christened her. The congregation included her aunt, the Princess Royal, and her grandmother. Queen Mary praised Elizabeth’s composure: the service was a rite of passage of particular significance for a communicant destined to be the Church’s supreme governor. Excitedly, Mabell, Countess of Airlie, noticed something more in the princess, a quality she identified as regal. ‘I saw a grave little face under a small white net veil, and a slender figure in a plain white woollen frock,’ she wrote. ‘The carriage of her head was unequalled, and there was about her that indescribable something which Queen Victoria had. Although she was perfectly simple, modest and unselfconscious, she gave the impression of great personality.’57 The King had made the same comparison to Osbert Sitwell years earlier. It was quite safe now. No one expected the Queen to give birth again at the age of forty-one. If a technicality forced upon Elizabeth the label heir presumptive rather than heir apparent, there could be no real doubts that she would succeed her father as Britain’s first queen regnant since her great-great-grandmother.
In February, the King gave his daughter an early birthday present, appointing her colonel of the Grenadier Guards after the death of her great-great-uncle and their shared godfather, the Duke of Connaught. Elizabeth inspected the regiment for the first time on her birthday. ‘Slowly and with dignity’ she walked along the line of troops, followed by her parents and Margaret, before making her way to a dais for the march past, all in view of the inevitable flotilla of reporters and photographers.58 A Daily Mail reporter detected ‘no sign of nervousness’;59 photographs tell a different story. Elizabeth herself described the experience as ‘a bit frightening... but not as bad as I expected it to be.’60 She carried out a second inspection weeks later, wearing a hat shaped like a service cap to which was fastened a Grenadier badge, on the lapel of her coat a brooch in the form of a regimental cipher, given to her by the brigade’s officers. Little details suggest the eager earnestness with which she approached her task (so, too, the thoroughness of her ‘inspection’ that overlooked no minor details; she had inherited the family’s attachment to minutiae of dress and decorations). She was photographed wearing hat, badge and brooch in October by Cecil Beaton, an engagingly sympathetic image that captured Beaton’s delighted response to his first encounter with the sixteen-year-old and turned Elizabeth’s hat into a fashion sensation, copied, according to the Sunday Post, in ‘tens of thousands’.61 ‘I was enthusiastic to see how very much more charming Princess Elizabeth has become than any of the photographs I have seen of her. She has her mother’s smile,’ Beaton wrote in his diary.62 At the same sitting he also photographed Elizabeth and Margaret together. The pictures copied a portrait by Gainsborough of the painter’s daughters. They are romantic, even theatrical images. More than the ‘Grenadier’ portrait, with its Girl Guide sweetness, they depict Elizabeth on the cusp of womanhood.
The weekend after her birthday, accompanied by her mother and wearing her Guides uniform, Elizabeth reported to the local Labour Exchange and registered for the government’s youth service scheme. It was the first time, newspapers reported, that ‘a Princess of the reigning house and a future Queen’ had done so (it was the first time such an opportunity had existed for a future queen).63 Of course, her services were not called on. Only three years later did she embark on the sort of war work undertaken by her peers, as Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). By then, the King had marked Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday by outlining for her work of a different variety. He appointed her a counsellor of state, authorized to carry out many of his own official duties in his absence overseas. Since counsellorship had previously been restricted to those over the age of twenty-one, this required an amendment to the Regency Act, which the King successfully pressed Churchill’s government to pass. Her father’s response to Elizabeth’s wartime desire to ‘do as other girls do’ and join one of the women’s service organizations suggests a rare breakdown in understanding between them: the King regarded Elizabeth’s destiny as specifically royal, her training for the crown more important than any possible role in ordinary national service. In the spring of 1942, father and daughter were photographed together by Lisa Sheridan at the King’s desk at Royal Lodge. Beside a vase of flowering forsythia stand the red boxes of daily government despatches. Over the King’s shoulder, Elizabeth reads the same document as her father, his heir in training. She had been encouraged to listen carefully to BBC news bulletins. Her father discussed the mechanisms of kingship with her. And he continued to introduce her to high-ranking visitors. ‘Part – and an important part – of Princess Elizabeth’s training is for her to meet outstanding figures of the day,’ explained The Tatler.64 Among those she impressed with her knowledge and serious-mindedness was the US president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, staying with the King and Queen in the autumn of 1942. Elizabeth ‘asked her many questions about the youth movements of America’ and showed her footage she had taken herself with her cine camera of ‘home life scenes of the Royal Family’, including the King stalking at Balmoral with Margaret.65 ‘She asked me a number of questions about life in the United States,’ Mrs Roosevelt recorded, ‘and they were serious questions.’66
The King and Queen considered that the war had denied their daughters fun. ‘What a beastly time it is for people growing up,’ the Queen wrote.67 She also had her reservations about Windsor Castle as a permanent home for the frequently parentless princesses, describing it as ‘not really a good place for them, the noise of guns is heavy, and then of course there have been so many bombs dropped all around, & some so close’.68 Neither was Elizabeth’s view. ‘Oh, Crawfie, do you think we are being too happy?’ she asked in the spring of 1941.69
That Elizabeth could ask such a question – characteristic of her desire to behave in a manner exactly ‘right’ – points to the success with which the miniature court at Windsor managed the princesses’ lives. ‘Sometimes one’s heart seems near breaking under the stress of so much sorrow and anxiety,’ the Queen wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt.70 None of this did she communicate to her daughters. From infancy she had nurtured their happiness; to the best of her ability, she did not let Hitler deflect her from her purpose now. Sorrow and anxiety there had undoubtedly been: the relentless setbacks of the war’s first years; the bombs that destroyed 145 Piccadilly and, in repeated attacks, parts of Buckingham Palace, including the private chapel in which Elizabeth had been christened; and, in August 1942, the death in an accidental plane crash of her brother-in-law, George, Duke of Kent, only seven weeks after the birth of his youngest child, Michael. ‘I cannot & will not accept any idea of defeat,’ she wrote to her mother-in-law, her bravado stiffened by the deep religious faith that she shared with her husband.71 This kindliest of warrior spirits coloured her daughters’ lives. When Elizabeth grieved over the deaths of her pet chameleon and the corgi Jane, killed by a car in Windsor Great Park, the Queen encouraged her to maintain a sense of proportion at what was, after all, the height of a world war. Had Elizabeth’s life been less happy, the reminder would have been unnecessary, ‘but there was no feeling of doom and gloom’ according to a palace insider.72 Artist Rex Whistler described the King and Queen in May 1943, giving the impression ‘they hadn’t a care in the world!’73 It was not achieved without considerable effort.
If the war had permitted few of the splendid court entertainments that Elizabeth and Margaret had once watched in their dressing gowns with their ‘fly’s-eye view’, or the lunches and cocktail parties and balls of the London season, there were more intimate occasions instead. Among them were small-scale fortnightly dances held in the Bow Room at Buckingham Palace and the dance the King and Queen gave at Windsor on 26 March 1943, ahead of Elizabeth’s seventeenth birthday, with Guards officers, including subalterns from the Grenadiers, and a handful of American officers. Country life provided quieter treats. At Balmoral in the autumn of 1942, the King took Elizabeth stalking. Her bag of three included a ten-pointer and kindled an enthusiasm shared by neither Margaret nor Crawfie. She caught her first salmon; she visited the royal racehorses in training at Beckhampton; the following year she hunted with the Garth Foxhounds and the Duke of Beaufort’s Hounds. ‘The strong inherent love for country life is a marked characteristic of Princess Elizabeth,’ commented a Pathé news bulletin. Although the big house at Sandringham was shut up at the outbreak of war, the royal family used nearby Appleton House, previously the English home of George V’s sister, Queen Maud of Norway; Elizabeth joined the local Women’s Institute in March 1943, after paying her annual subscription of two shillings. Her favourite recreation, according to Pathé, was ‘to ride her brown pony Jock in the lovely surroundings of Sandringham’; idyllic end-of-summer photographs showed the family inspecting the harvest, the Queen driving a pony trap across flat, tree-studded fields, Elizabeth, Margaret and the King following on bicycles. At Windsor, officers of the Castle Company of Grenadiers, tasked with guarding the royal family, provided male companionship for Elizabeth and Margaret drawn from the same elite background as their Strathmore cousins. This group of men, whom Queen Mary called ‘the body guard’, included the Earl of Euston, heir to the Duke of Grafton, afterwards a candidate for Elizabeth’s husband, Lord Rupert Nevill and Mark Bonham Carter. Officers joined the princesses for lunch and what Crawfie called ‘clump parties’, with hide-and-seek, treasure hunts and sardines; they sang madrigals with the princesses, their numbers supplemented by Etonians and, sometimes, the Eton choir.
Once Elizabeth’s interest was engaged, claimed Horace Smith, it did not ‘wane with the passing of time or the claim of other new matters upon her attention’.74 She was diligent, thorough, conscientious. What was true of all things equine proved equally true of the princess’s affections.
Elizabeth did not forget the handsome blond cadet at Dartmouth. Afterwards, sporadically, they exchanged letters, cousinly on Philip’s part, for Elizabeth was only fifteen when, in Cape Town, in June 1941, his own cousin, Princess Alexandra of Greece, interrupted him writing to her. She was still too young for him to consider her in any other light when he spent a weekend’s leave at Windsor in October. Later he described his response to wartime weekends with the royal family as ‘the simple enjoyment of family pleasures and amusements’.75 It was an affectionate but unromantic remembering.
Elizabeth almost certainly took a different view. Philip was an idée fixe for her, her fidelity to her obsession stiffened by a drip feed of reminders of him: his attendance at the funeral of the Duke of Connaught in January 1942; the mention in despatches a month later of ‘Midshipman Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, serving in HMS Valiant’;76 his regular visits to his cousin, Princess Marina, at her house, Coppins, in Buckinghamshire, after his posting in June 1942 to ‘E-boat Alley’: convoy duty the length of the east coast from Sheerness to Rosyth. By September of that year Elizabeth’s mind was made up: in a letter to Crawfie she suggested that Philip was ‘the one’. She was sixteen years old. She had told Alathea Fitzalan Howard that ‘P[hilip] was her “boy”’ as long ago as April of the previous year.77
The princesses’ nativity play had been followed by an annual pantomime, beginning in 1941 with Cinderella, staged in the castle’s Waterloo Chamber, with proceeds used to buy wool for knitting for the troops. Elizabeth took the part of the principal boy, Prince Florizel; Margaret was Cinderella. This allocation would be repeated. It appears to have reflected Elizabeth’s own view of the sisters’ relative attractions (‘Princess Margaret does draw all the attention and Princess Elizabeth lets her do that,’ wrote a concerned Crawfie).78 Less flatteringly, Alathea Fitzalan Howard found herself cast as an ugly sister, Agatha Blimp. If reliable, Crawfie’s account of a disagreement between Elizabeth and Margaret over ticket prices illustrates Elizabeth’s unassumingness, a characteristic she would retain, and a measure of unworldliness. ‘You can’t ask people to pay seven and sixpence, Crawfie. No one will pay that to look at us!’ protests Elizabeth. Crawfie’s Margaret replies more knowingly, ‘They’ll pay anything to see us.’79 The Sleeping Beauty followed in 1942, then, in 1943, dressed in breeches and silk stockings, Elizabeth took the lead in Aladdin. In the front row on the last night sat Philip.
For seventeen-year-old Elizabeth it was a particular boon. Flu had kept Philip away from the dance the King and Queen had given for their daughters days before; he recovered in time for the pantomime’s final performance. She was unable to conceal her excitement. ‘Who do you think is coming to see us act?’ she asked her governess; Crawfie described her as ‘rather pink’.80 Her animation coloured her performance. Crawfie recorded that ‘there was a sparkle [about Elizabeth] none of us had ever seen before. Many people remarked on it.’ Philip laughed loudly at each bad joke; coyly Lisa Sheridan remembered that ‘he thoroughly entered into the fun, and was welcomed by the princesses as a delightful boy cousin’.81 And then he stayed for the weekend. And then he stayed for Christmas, too, a boisterous, ebullient interlude quite different from earlier wartime Christmases, ‘a very gay time’, according to Elizabeth, with a film show, dinner parties and dancing to the gramophone.82 There were Boxing Day charades; the young ‘capered and frisked away’ into the early hours; Philip worried afterwards that his behaviour had got out of hand.83 The King and Queen’s invitation to this royal rolling stone perhaps challenges Harold Nicolson’s assessment of their first reaction: ‘The family were… horrified when they saw that Prince Philip was making up to Princess Elizabeth. They felt he was rough, ill mannered, uneducated and would probably not be faithful.’84 For some time, ‘rough, ill mannered [and] uneducated’ would certainly be courtiers’ verdict. ‘He was new-broomish… and no respecter of the status quo,’ remembered one.85
Elizabeth was untroubled, unaware or impervious to their view. She was in love and happy. Queen Mary traced her affection to Philip’s first Windsor stay.86 The Dartmouth coup de foudre notwithstanding, Elizabeth’s feelings had developed over time. Crawfie described an altered Philip in December 1943: grave and charming, no sign of erstwhile bumptiousness. The greater change was in Elizabeth. At Dartmouth, Philip had encountered a child. The sparkling Elizabeth Philip saw at Windsor was closer to the ‘sweet little Princess Elizabeth’ artist Rex Whistler described to writer Edith Olivier in May of the following year, ‘sweet-natured charming... and a little demure from shyness but not too shy, and a delicious way of gazing – very serious and solemn – into your eyes while talking but all breaking up into enchanting laughter if we came to anything funny’.87 One of Elizabeth’s Grenadiers found himself similarly enchanted, transported, according to the Queen’s private secretary Arthur Penn, to ‘a state which I can best describe as exaltation’: ‘it was a new experience... to find friendliness so allied to dignity and kindness to a perfect naturalness’.88 Philip would find that he disagreed with the view of Elizabeth formed earlier in the year by novelist Rebecca West, who met the whole royal family at Buckingham Palace. West considered Elizabeth ‘too good, too sexless’, deciding ‘she may be the one who falls in love and is too innocent to be loved’.89
Her parents’ focus was not Elizabeth’s romantic life. In March 1944, the King wrote to his mother that Elizabeth was ‘too young for that now, as she has never met any young men of her own age’.90 Instead the King and Queen concentrated on Elizabeth’s royal vocation. Rumours in 1942 that the imminent appointment of a lady-in-waiting of her own signalled her entry into public life remained unrealized for two more years. At eighteen Elizabeth was a ‘grave girl with honest blue-grey eyes’, president of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Royal College of Music, a counsellor of state, colonel of the Grenadier Guards and an enthusiastic Sea Ranger.91 She was also still a pupil of Henry Marten. Marten’s later lessons examined the evolution of ‘responsible government’ and details of parliamentary procedure; topics included ‘National Expenditure before the War of 1939’ and ‘National Expenditure during the War’; ahead of their discussions on current affairs, Marten sent Elizabeth newspaper cuttings.92 In addition, Elizabeth studied Continental history with an émigré Belgian aristocrat, the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue. Antoinette de Bellaigue, known to the sisters as ‘Toni’, had joined the household in 1942 to improve Elizabeth and Margaret’s French conversation. She interpreted her task as raising their ‘awareness of other countries, their way of thought and customs’, a comment on the insularity of the Crawfie/Alah regime.93 Henry Marten set essays on Toni’s teaching; Elizabeth wrote her answers in French. When, on 30 January 1945, Elizabeth broadcast a message of thanks to Belgian children for Christmas toys sent to Britain, she did so in French under Toni’s direction. Horace Smith considered that the teenage princess possessed ‘a keen and retentive mind’:94 in meticulous pencilled notes, Elizabeth set about the considerable task of retaining as much as possible of Marten’s training for her future. Newspapers referred to her ‘serving the apprenticeship which will fit her to rule Britain’, a sentiment that mirrored in its seriousness her own and her parents’ view of the preparation for sovereignty Elizabeth received both from Marten and her father’s dogged example.95 Marten’s teaching emphasized the importance of royal flexibility. From her father’s exhausted and overtaxed record, Elizabeth absorbed lessons in duty. Even the royal pantomimes came to be seen as part of Elizabeth’s training. ‘How thankful I am too for those pantomimes,’ she reflected later. ‘They taught me so much about speaking in public.’96
Wartime restrictions and the King’s patriotic austerity curbed celebrations of Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday in April 1944, despite flurries of congratulatory telegrams and offerings like F. H. Shilcock’s ‘To The Royal Princess Elizabeth’ that again linked Elizabeth with spring: ‘Oh glorious spring / Let your sweet flowers bring / Gladness and pleasure / To our Royal princess’.97 Rumours that the princess would make a nationwide ‘independent tour’ came to nothing, and, in February, the King had acted decisively to overrule suggestions that Elizabeth be created Princess of Wales, his decision guided by precedent and the belief he expressed in his diary that ‘her own name is so nice’. On the day itself, with George and Gerald Lascelles overseas, Margaret was Elizabeth’s only contemporary at a family lunch at Windsor. The dance given by the King and Queen early in May was considered ‘a comparatively small affair’ with just 150 guests.98 That Elizabeth and Margaret danced on that occasion ‘till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their shoes’ around three o’clock in the morning reflected both their enjoyment and the paucity of such treats.99 To Queen Mary, the Queen had written, ‘I am giving Lilibet a small diamond tiara of my own for her 18th birthday [the halo tiara given to the Queen by her husband in 1936], & Bertie is giving her a little bracelet to wear now.’100 Although the Queen explained the impossibility of buying ‘anything good’, husband and wife found a Cartier aquamarine and diamond clip brooch, which Elizabeth has continued to wear; they also gave Elizabeth a corgi puppy, Susan, to replace Jane. Among presents from members of the public was a photograph from a resident of Newton Abbot of her grandparents as the Duke and Duchess of York on a visit to the town in 1899, another reminder of her place in the royal continuum. In similar spirit, the Sketch produced a montage of photographs of Elizabeth and her mother at similar ages from infancy to eighteen, entitled ‘Our royal Elizabeths in Childhood and Youth’, its purpose to enable readers ‘to trace the likeness between mother and daughter’.101 A Pathé newsreel, ‘Many Happy Returns’, described Elizabeth as ‘the gracious young lady in whom there reposes the endearing charms of her parents’. Again, there were comparisons to Queen Mary.102 More straightforwardly, the crew of President III, the Sea Ranger vessel of which Elizabeth was bosun, gave her a copy of John Masefield’s ‘A Sailor’s Garland’.
Elizabeth’s parents marked the milestone by sharing with her for the first time their concern for their own safety, after Germany launched the pilotless V1 flying bomb in June with raids in central London. The King wrote an explanation of the terms of his will for Elizabeth, while the Queen, admitting ‘it seems silly’, concerned herself with how most fairly to divide her jewels between her daughters.103 Less morbidly, they sanctioned her first steps in public life, including making speeches at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children and on behalf of the NSPCC. Then, in July, the King confirmed the appointment of Elizabeth’s first lady-in-waiting, Lady Mary Palmer, like the princess an ex-Guide with a taste for dancing. The youngest daughter of the Earl of Selborne, twenty-three-year-old Lady Mary, was drawn from the same aristocratic circle as Elizabeth’s childhood friends. As so often, there was a Strathmore connection: Lord Selborne worked alongside the Queen’s brother David Bowes-Lyon at the Ministry of Economic Warfare. ‘She seems a most charming girl, well-educated, poised, intelligent and delightfully natural & unshy,’ the Queen wrote.104 Six years older than Elizabeth and already engaged to be married, she accompanied Elizabeth on her early engagements. On these occasions the princess’s public wardrobe closely resembled her mother’s, partly a result of her lack of interest (‘she accepted the fitting as part of her official duties but one did not feel that she was interested in clothes as such,’ Norman Hartnell wrote of the making of an early evening dress).105 The combination of 1940s tailoring, heavy stuffs for coats and the princess’s large bust gave her a less than youthful appearance. ‘Now that Princess Elizabeth is being dressed ten years above her age she looks the image of her mother,’ Sheffield housewife Edie Rutherford recorded in her diary.106 Tactfully reporters drew attention to her hats. After a series of autumn appearances in Scotland, the Perthshire Advertiser announced, ‘Princess Elizabeth’s loveliness and charm are now known and acknowledged in the north. From pictures, from reports and from descriptions of those who have seen her, there is now no question on the subject. She is fair and beautiful, fresh and altogether delightful.’107 A lady-in-waiting described her then as ‘very charming, but very quiet and shy’.108 For contemporary commentators, her shyness contributed to her charm, considered appropriate for her age and sex.
Elizabeth won plaudits for the conspicuous diligence with which she carried out the duties assigned to her, the earnestness of her desire to do her very best at all times; she always would. Among her tasks as a counsellor of state during her father’s visit to the Eighth Army in Italy in July 1944 was the granting of a reprieve in a murder case. In her discussions with Crawfie afterwards, her response mixed puzzlement with a determination to understand better, her own equivalent of the teenage Queen Victoria’s resolution to be ‘good’. ‘What makes people do such terrible things?’ she asked her governess. ‘One ought to know. There should be some way to help them. I have so much to learn about people!’109
The difficulty of learning about people – then and ever since – was the impossibility of encountering her contemporaries on an equal footing. Elizabeth’s social exposure had been narrow, markedly more so than that of her father or grandfather, both of whom, at naval college in their teens, had encountered boys of backgrounds different from their own. Elizabeth and Margaret had grown up in an aristocratic world in which the courtier’s code of honeyed deference dominated social interaction. Even as a Guide, Elizabeth was still a princess, surrounded by the children of courtiers and aristocrats, and none of her fellow Guides treated her, as the movement required, quite as a sister. It was not stand-offishness on Elizabeth’s part that imposed a barrier between her and those she encountered, although her upbringing’s lack of rough and tumble with girls outside her family created a reserve: at Guide camps at Frogmore she found excuses to avoid sharing a tent, retreating instead to private quarters. In her photograph albums were pictures from a Sea Rangers camp in the summer of 1944. Elizabeth labelled one ‘In the trench during an alert for flying bombs’. On it she identified each of the eight girls with her, as if this meticulous recording of their names brought her closer to them.
It was camaraderie of a sort, as Elizabeth experienced again the following year when, in March, after repeated entreaties, the King capitulated, aware now that the end of the war was approaching, and she began an NCO cadre course for the Auxiliary Territorial Service at No. 1 Mechanical Transport Training Centre, Camberley. Crawfie recorded Elizabeth’s pride in her uniform of belted khaki and ‘in the fact that she was doing what other girls of her age had to do’; Elizabeth herself later told politician Barbara Castle that her ATS training represented a sole instance in her life of testing herself against people of her own age.110 It was nearly the case. Initially, over-attentive officers all but screened Elizabeth from the eleven other girls on her Vehicle Maintenance Course; she lunched in the officers’ mess and returned to Windsor Castle every evening while her classmates slept in dormitory huts. Mischievous reports in the Daily Mail of special treatment for the princess heralded a shake-up. ‘She is very interested in us,’ wrote Corporal Eileen Heron, an observation that would not have surprised Crawfie.111 Remembering fifty years later, Elizabeth said she had ‘learned a little about driving and the workings of the combustion engine and much about the strength and happiness of comradeship’.112 Her classmates, of course, were equally interested in her. Like the Perthshire Advertiser, they reached flattering conclusions about her appearance: ‘Quite striking... Short, pretty, brown, crisp, curly hair. Lovely blue-grey eyes and an extremely charming smile, and she uses lipstick!’113 Elizabeth relaxed with them, something that was easier for her than for them, and Corporal Heron recorded her ‘talk[ing] much more now she is used to us and is not a bit shy’.114 Five years later, during a visit to a Wills cigarette factory in Bristol in March 1950, Elizabeth encountered one of her fellow ATS trainees, Elsie Huff, working as an operator of machines producing filter- and cork-tipped cigarettes.115
Alah wrote that ‘Princess E enjoyed every minute of her course in the ATS.’ Her letter expressed her own nervousness at her charge’s very grown-up adventure: ‘You can take it I worried when she was taking her night driving tests when the rockets used to be falling about!’116 To a friend Elizabeth wrote, ‘Everything I learnt was brand new to me – all the oddities of the inside of a car, and all the intricacies of map reading. But I enjoyed it all very much and found it a great experience.’117 The Queen described Elizabeth’s ‘really hard work at the Motor Company’ to Queen Mary as ‘such a success’, adding rather vaguely, ‘the experience will be of use to her in the future’.118 Neither mother nor daughter commented on the number of times Elizabeth was photographed during the three-week course: photographers were among the norms of the daily experience of both. A studio portrait of a uniformed Elizabeth by Dorothy Wilding, responsible for a similar portrait two years earlier of Elizabeth in her Sea Rangers uniform, presented the servicewoman-princess as chicly efficient. Newspapers preferred images of Elizabeth uncharacteristically dishevelled, dressed in trousers, hair awry, busy with spanner or motor parts. And Elizabeth, not imaginative, learned about more than car maintenance. During visits by the Princess Royal and then her parents, she glimpsed the other side of the royal experience. To Crawfie she reported, ‘Aunt Mary is coming down on an inspection. You’ve no idea what a business it has been. Everyone working so hard – spit and polish the whole day long. Now I realise what must happen when Papa and Mummie go anywhere. That’s something I shall never forget.’119
There was to be no corollary to Elizabeth’s ATS training. The King and Queen marked her nineteenth birthday with a particularly feminine present, a Cartier brooch in the shape of a flower sprig, with petals of pink and blue sapphires, and within weeks of her return to Windsor, the Queen’s private secretary, Arthur Penn, had written to the pretty, twenty-two-year-old widow of Guards officer Captain the Hon. Vicary Gibbs, inviting her to become an extra lady-in-waiting to the princess. The invitation was symbolic, a sign that Elizabeth’s royal duties were set to expand: the end of her career in the ATS. The day after Jean Gibbs joined the princess, Britain celebrated victory in Europe. On 8 May, amid unprecedented public outpourings of relief and joy, the royal family appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, alongside prime minister Winston Churchill. Elizabeth wore her ATS uniform.
That night Elizabeth and Margaret left their parents to join the crowds beyond the palace railings. With them were Margaret Elphinstone and Jean Gibbs, Toni de Bellaigue, a clutch of Guards officers and the King’s equerry Peter Townsend. Among sardine-packed crowds, the gaggle of sixteen danced the conga, the Lambeth Walk and the hokey-cokey up St James’s Street and along Piccadilly, ‘all of us’, in Elizabeth’s words, ‘swept along by tides of happiness and relief’; later she told the novelist Hammond Innes that she had knocked off a policeman’s helmet.120 They pushed forwards to the palace forecourt and someone, probably Townsend, smuggled a message inside to the King and Queen, who reappeared on the balcony following chants of ‘We want the King! We want the Queen!’ in which their daughters joined. ‘It was a view of their parents that the princesses had never before experienced,’ suggested Margaret Elphinstone, of the girls gazing distantly at the tiny figures on the balcony.121 In fact it confirmed the view of the King and Queen as heroic, out-of-the-common-run, more than human that Elizabeth had conceived at their coronation. Decades later, she remembered it as ‘one of the most memorable nights of my life’.
Like princesses in a fairy tale, who had once tasted freedom, the sisters escaped again the following evening. ‘Out in crowd again,’ Elizabeth wrote in her diary, ‘Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, walked simply miles. Saw parents on balcony at 12.30am – ate, partied, bed 3am!’122 On the first night, according to Madame de Bellaigue, they went unrecognized, despite an officer in the party stuffily refusing to allow Elizabeth to break King’s Regulations and pull her cap low on to her forehead as disguise. On 9 May fifteen-year-old Ronald Thomas recognized the princess. For a fraction of a minute he danced with Elizabeth in Trafalgar Square. She denied her identity; he promised to say nothing. Swiftly their companions moved the princesses on. Policemen, The Times reported, told merry-makers that the princesses ‘wished to be treated as private individuals, and they were allowed to go on their way’.123 Margaret Elphinstone described the experience as ‘a unique burst of freedom’ for her cousins, ‘a Cinderella moment in reverse, in which they could pretend that they were ordinary and unknown’.124 On VJ Day and the night that followed it, Elizabeth and Margaret relived their adventure, including running through the Ritz.
Recognized by strangers, protected by police intervention, accompanied by her lady-in-waiting and her father’s equerry, prevented even from wearing her uniform cap in the way she wished, Elizabeth could not deceive herself that she was either unknown or free. Her willingness, at the age of nineteen, to settle for so brief and qualified a ‘burst of freedom’ is proof of the extent of her acceptance of the fate thrust upon her in December 1936. Within a decade her life was already settling into the groove of her parents’ making. On her behalf the King or Queen decided on her patronages and nominated her ladies-in-waiting; the King’s private secretary accepted or declined her engagements. Her nearest attendants were chosen for her, her home life regulated by Bobo MacDonald and Cyril Dickman, the nursery footman promoted to Elizabeth’s service. Her clothes were made by her mother’s dressmakers, including Miss Ford of Albermarle Street, who had made clothes for the princesses as children, and her rooms decorated according to her mother’s choices (in her sitting room at Buckingham Palace, even her favourite pink carnations in the vase on her desk matched the Queen’s preferred colour scheme of pink and fawn). ‘The greater part of her day she gave up to performing what must often have been pretty dull duties, and she did this quite as a matter of course. Like her parents she considered it her job, and it never struck her to try to avoid it,’ reflected Crawfie.125 Alah described Elizabeth in 1945 as ‘a nice girl, with a beautiful character’.126 Compliance was key to the character of this girl encouraged from childhood to emulate her parents and grandparents. Only in one way would she defy their expectations.