CHAPTER VIII
‘IT IS SOMETIMES the case, even when our sorrows are most hard to bear, that misfortune is opportunity in disguise.’ It was 22 May 1948, and Elizabeth was in Coventry, devastated by wartime bombing, opening the first phase of rebuilding in the city centre. Her speech combined comforting balm with brisk encouragement and she ended with the hope that, before many years, she would return to see new development ‘as fine as modern taste and craftsmanship can build it’.1 The day was a resounding success. The Coventry Telegraph reported that ‘from the youngest to the oldest the hearts of the many thousands who greeted her were captured by Princess Elizabeth’. They responded to Elizabeth’s instinctive combination of willingness and gravity, ‘a most charming mixture in her expression of eagerness to please and yet a serious awareness of her rank and responsibility’ in the verdict of a diplomat’s wife.2 In her letter of thanks to the Mayor – written, like her speech, by Jock Colville – Elizabeth commended ‘flawless arrangements which made what would have been a long and tiring day into one that was a real pleasure’. She had remembered, as she had told her parents she would, observing preparations for the Princess Royal’s visit to the ATS training camp, the painstaking efforts made by visits’ organizers.
From Laura Knight, Coventry Telegraph proprietor Lord Iliffe commissioned a painting of Elizabeth at the moment of cutting the ceremonial ribbon; Elizabeth gave Knight sittings at Buckingham Palace. The artist placed the princess centrally amid a camarilla of civic worthies against a backdrop of the city’s ruins. She appears a messianic figure, in one hand a pair of scissors, the other raised in a gesture like waving, but her face lacks any trace of expression: grave, composed, impassive.
Here, then, was a template, and one to which Elizabeth would adhere for the remainder of her public life: words of reassurance and fellow feeling, and benignity that was no less sincere for a certain detachment in her manner. In the same year she visited Coventry, Attlee’s Labour government passed the National Health Service Act and the National Assistance Act, making free healthcare universal and extending financial provision for the needy. The new Welfare State assumed responsibility for the nation’s wellbeing. It was a development with implications for the royal family. Previously private philanthropy, particularly fundraising for hospitals, had looked to royal patronage for endorsement and support. At a stroke, this role potentially disappeared. Elizabeth’s approach to her nascent public duties registered no change: she appeared to reconsider neither the focus nor conduct of her engagements in an altered world. In a devastated city centre, what ‘touched the heart of Coventry was the winning smile of a young woman – and the many sincere indications of a deep and kindly interest in the people’.3 It was an old-fashioned recipe for royal interaction that had sufficed for generations in a hierarchical society in which members of the royal family were seen to combine intimations of divinity with the glamour of high birth. And in 1948, for many people, it was still enough. In March, a letter printed in the Sunday Mirror, a paper with a large working-class readership, suggested Elizabeth ‘should visit some of the very poor areas and show what charm and breeding can do to bring a little sunshine into drab lives’, an endorsement of feminized paternalism by a representative of its beneficiaries.4
To Laura Knight Lord Iliffe explained his commission: Elizabeth’s opening of the new Broadgate symbolized Coventry’s rebirth. Within a fortnight of the royal visit, Elizabeth’s own pregnancy was announced by Buckingham Palace. She would give birth a week before her first wedding anniversary.
Philip had written affectionately of his young bride to his mother-in-law, ‘My ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence.’5 So long as he remained a serving naval officer, occupied during the week, the couple’s existence included separate working lives; a number of Elizabeth’s engagements were undertaken without her husband. As in Coventry she exercised a hypnotic effect over many she encountered. ‘A visit by a young princess with beautiful blue eyes and a superb natural complexion brought gleams of radiant sunshine into the dingiest streets of the dreariest cities,’ Jock Colville noted.6 He did not agree that this ‘princess effect’ invested Elizabeth’s public life with purpose or sterling value. At the time of the couple’s engagement, Queen Mary had discussed with him the narrowness of Elizabeth’s social exposure, indicating ‘the necessity of travel, of mixing with all the classes (HRH is inclined to associate with young Guards officers to the exclusion of more representative strata of the community) and of learning to know young members of the Labour Party’.7 Colville could not direct Elizabeth’s social life: he was anxious to familiarize her more closely with the business of government and its current practitioners. With the King’s agreement he arranged that she receive Foreign Office telegrams. She read them diligently but without marked interest: in the words of Dermot Morrah, loyal and emollient, ‘she found it rather heavy going, for her natural tastes are not political; but she grappled with the task with perseverance’.8 Colville suggested a visit to a foreign policy debate in the House of Commons. ‘These visits by the heir to the Throne are part of their education for the high responsibilities they will eventually have to assume,’ reporters dutifully noted.9 It was unfortunate that the debate in question was ‘perhaps the most gloomy that has taken place in the life of the present Parliament’. In the face of Elizabeth’s inscrutable good behaviour in the Speaker’s Gallery, attention focused on the fur cape she wore over her blue dress.10 More successful was a visit to a juvenile court three weeks later. The hearing concerned the case of a fifteen-year-old girl found drunk in the street ‘with her arms round a lamppost’. Elizabeth was visibly moved by the unhappiness of the girl, who burst into tears, crying, ‘The real trouble is my home life.’11 Colville regarded exposure of this sort as constructive. Like a number of letters addressed to Elizabeth, it revealed stark inequalities among her father’s subjects and the very real tribulations of many lives.
Colville’s concern that Elizabeth visibly engage with life outside the palace had been sharpened by difficulties surrounding the Civil List allowance granted to the couple at the time of their marriage. On her twenty-first birthday, Elizabeth’s income had increased from £6,000 to £15,000. Only after a degree of wrangling and the timely resignation of chancellor of the exchequer Hugh Dalton, who dug in his heels over a considerably lower sum, did parliament agree to the King’s request of a further increase to £50,000, to include £10,000 for Philip. ‘A royal family that did not maintain a certain ceremonial would ill please a people that loves a show as much as the average Englishman (and woman) does,’ commented a relieved Spectator, reminding its readers that the purpose of Civil List payments was the maintenance of royal bread and circuses.12 As even the Spectator noted, the outlook of the post-war world had changed. ‘That the royal couple should be spoken of commonly by the people and sometimes by the press as simply Philip and Elizabeth is symptomatic... The spirit of egalitarianism is in the air. To that even royalty may in some degree have to adapt itself.’13 Colville’s ‘education’ of Elizabeth was his own contribution to this process of adapting. In the short term its success was qualified; later Elizabeth simply side-stepped egalitarianism in order to survive in a society in thrall to the tenets (if not the reality) of meritocracy. In London again in the autumn, Eleanor Roosevelt noted her keen interest in governments’ responses to social problems, but at a dinner party given by the prime minister, Hugh Gaitskill, minister of Fuel and Power, who spoke to her for fifteen minutes, recorded that Elizabeth ‘had a very pretty voice and quite an easy manner but is not, I think, very interested in politics or affairs generally’.14 It was fortunate, as she demonstrated on the couple’s four-day official visit to Paris in May, that Elizabeth was capable of dazzling simply by dint of youthful good looks, evident good intentions and her status as a princess. (On this occasion, Elizabeth’s determination to acquit herself as well as she possibly could overcame a combination of acute morning sickness and the highest May temperatures on record.) ‘Wildly cheering crowds’ accompanied the royal couple; Pathé referred to Parisians’ ‘spontaneous display of affection’, and an estimated half a million people lined the riverbanks when Elizabeth and Philip took to the Seine in a motor launch.15 On the part of the president, Vincent Auriol, was also a considerable degree of ceremony and deference in his treatment of Elizabeth, a foretaste of what lay ahead and perhaps the explanation for the more ‘queenly attitude’ that members of Elizabeth’s household thought they identified afterwards.16 Elizabeth put to good use the French lessons with Monty and Toni de Bellaigue. When she opened an exhibition on British Life at the Musée Galliera, she delivered her speech in French. ‘In four hectic days the Princess conquered Paris,’ concluded Jock Colville.17 It was a claim that would be repeated throughout her life, of locations across the globe.
Like her parents at the time of her own birth, Elizabeth and Philip were homeless as her November due date approached; like her parents they were blissfully happy. To the Queen Philip wrote straightforwardly, ‘Lilibet is the only “thing” in this world which is absolutely real to me’;18 Chips Channon’s verdict, after watching the pregnant Elizabeth dance ‘until nearly 5 am’ at a party of the Duchess of Kent’s, was that husband and wife ‘seemed supremely happy’.19 Clarence House, close to St James’s Palace, had been chosen as their London home. Eighteen months of renovation delayed their occupancy until the summer of 1949. In the interval, like the Yorks in Bruton Street, they lived with Elizabeth’s parents, in the Buhl Suite in Buckingham Palace; for an interval they borrowed from the Athlones the Clock House at Kensington Palace, densely furnished with big game trophies. They spent weekends in ‘a moderate-size creeper-clad house, about a quarter of a mile off the road, near Sunningdale’: Windlesham Moor, rented part furnished from a Mrs Warwick Bryant. ‘In modern taste and... of two floors, with a large attic storeroom above’, it was a replacement for Sunningdale Park, which had been left a virtual shell.20 Philip hung pictures, Elizabeth directed him moving furniture. Although smaller than she had been used to, the staff of six, including Mrs Barnes the cook and a steward appropriately called King, guaranteed the seamless housekeeping to which Elizabeth was accustomed. In London, Elizabeth tried her hand at mixing green paint for her new dining room. Husband and wife delighted in the cosiness of homemaking that Elizabeth took for granted but which was quite new to Philip. If either was concerned by criticism of the costs of renovation by a team of fifty-five workmen, they did not reveal it beyond maintaining a careful silence over Mountbatten’s offer of a private cinema. At the private view of the Ideal Homes Show in March 1949, a tangle of protesters greeted the couple with shouts of ‘Houses for the working people and not for the rich’. From a balcony, they showered a confetti of leaflets produced by the London Young Communist League, entitled ‘Ideal Homes – Ideal Dreams – Unless’. Elizabeth did not react. With minister Aneurin Bevan she looked at furnished rooms in a Ministry of Health house display. Her response was a practical ‘Yes, but where do you keep the pram?’21
The couple’s happiness owed much to Philip’s forbearance. Buckingham Palace was not only home to his parents-in-law, but a number of courtiers and staff still unreconciled to Philip, among them the influential Tommy Lascelles. Possessive, unyielding and, according to Philip’s equerry, tyrannical, Bobo MacDonald continued her bossy and unrelenting ministrations to her ‘little lady’. ‘When Elizabeth was changing for dinner and having a bath,’ remembered Patricia Mountbatten, Bobo ‘would be in and out of the bathroom, so Philip couldn’t share the bath with her. Elizabeth didn’t feel she could say, “Bobo, please don’t come in,” so Philip had to go off and have a bath on his own.’22 Philip did not complain. He was surely aware that, while his own life had been transformed by marriage, Elizabeth’s had scarcely altered, her working life identical, still surrounded at home by familiar attendants, still in thrall to her parents, with whom, Crawfie claimed, she ‘continued her childhood’s habit, and always went down to the Queen to ask, “Shall I do this?” or “Do you approve of that?”’23 In his own case, experience had not prepared Philip for the reality of the change. A child of impoverished royal exiles, his formative years scarred by pervasive uncertainty, the breakdown in his mother’s mental health and the collapse of his parents’ marriage, he was as unaccustomed to the extreme formality of the royal family’s life as to its charades-and-singsong chumminess; his background of German castles, Gordonstoun and the navy set him apart from the ranks of Etonian ex-Guardsmen courtiers, too; emotional neglect and indigence had taught him self-reliance from childhood. Some of this Elizabeth saw. A letter written to her mother on her honeymoon made clear that she recognized grounds for friction: ‘Philip is terribly independent, and I quite understand the poor darling wanting to start off properly, without everything being done for us’; she told the Queen how much she hoped Philip could be ‘boss in his own home’.24 In many ways unimaginative, Elizabeth possessed a degree of shrewdness, though she failed to create under her parents’ roof the setting for their married life that either partner had anticipated, and Philip’s desire to ‘weld’ their existences into one, for all the dominance implied by his choice of verb, would be forced to wait.
Elizabeth’s public life placed additional hurdles in the path of married bliss. Debate among politicians and outside parliament about the kind of monarchy best suited to the post-war world had not altered Elizabeth’s understanding of royalty or its mission, shaped by her parents and grandparents. As recently as her engagement, the King had written, ‘My father set before me and my family a high standard of duty. I am sure that our daughter will always keep King George’s lofty ideals before her and endeavour to follow his example of constant service.’25 In practice, fidelity to George V’s example, emphasized throughout Elizabeth’s growing up, rated public service above the claims of private life (the lesson the royal family drew from the abdication); it served as a cornerstone of what Colville labelled the family’s ‘semi-divine interpretation of Monarchy’, which he considered distinct from Philip’s ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ approach.26 Even when she was a child, observers had applauded Elizabeth’s dignity and those closest to her, like Crawfie, her determination to do what was expected of her to the best of her ability: marriage did not dispel either her public reserve or her conscientiousness. The combination delighted her contemporaries. Diplomatist’s wife Cynthia Jebb referred to Elizabeth’s ‘charming diffidence’ as ‘very appealing’; she explained that ‘a touch of genuine gravity was always the barrier which separated royalty from the common herd, warning them that no liberty should be taken. But all this with a sweet smile, a very pretty soft voice, and a certain gaucherie in her walk, showing her to be still just a young girl.’27 ‘Semi-divinity’ inferred a gulf between the royal family and the King’s subjects, Jebb’s ‘barrier’. In their sittings at Buckingham Palace, Elizabeth told Laura Knight, ‘I love looking at the crowds gathering when I myself am out of sight,’ a statement that echoes her fascination since childhood with the multitudes beyond the palace railings and embodies this notional separation. In the first year of her marriage, Elizabeth sat for photographs at the Elysée Palace in Paris, wearing full evening dress, including her grandmother’s tiara and her South African birthday necklace; she sat for Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone dressed in furs and wearing Philip’s diamond bracelet; in mid-December she sat for Cecil Beaton, against a painted backcloth in a gilded chair that resembled a throne. Still homeless but happy, Philip could be in no doubt that the woman he had married was also a princess whose identity, model of behaviour and earnest sense of purpose were wrapped up in her royal status.
In a more leisurely age, Elizabeth attended her last official engagement in July. As her confinement drew closer, she received from members of the public at home and abroad presents and torrents of advice. Among presents that were not returned were a baby’s coat, cardigan, bootees and gloves knitted by a Mrs Seager, living in Wells’s renamed workhouse, from wool contributed by her fellow inmates. In her letter of thanks, Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting explained that Elizabeth accepted them gladly ‘as a token of your good wishes’.28
She gave birth to her first child, a son, at 9.14 p.m. on 14 November 1948 in a room specially prepared on the first floor of the palace overlooking the Mall, ‘after a hard time... 30 hours in all’.29 Her parents awaited the good news nearby. Philip played squash to relieve nervous impatience during what his mother called ‘the anxious trying hours of the confinement’.30 Close at hand were Bobo MacDonald and Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting, married now as Lady Mary Strachey. The King and Queen greeted their first grandchild in evening dress, Philip hot from the squash court, a polarity of sorts: on the one hand formality and tradition, on the other restless energy. As at every juncture of her life, Elizabeth had done what was expected of her with the minimum of fuss; her father’s press secretary commented ‘I knew she’d do it! She’d never let us down’, as if the baby’s sex had been a simple matter of choice for the dutiful Elizabeth.31 Ahead of the birth, the King had departed from tradition in countermanding the attendance of the home secretary, James Chuter Ede; he had approved letters patent to ensure the child held the rank of royal prince or princess. Newspapers reported that instead Chuter Ede ‘was the first person to be notified of the birth by a telephone message’ (from Tommy Lascelles) and that the new arrival was the first royal birth at Buckingham Palace since that of Princess Patricia of Connaught in 1886; Queen Mary and Margaret, who was away, were also informed at once. The new great-grandmother arrived at the palace an hour later, accompanied by her brother and sister-in-law, to much cheering. Cheering on the part of large crowds continued into the early hours, despite pleas for quiet. In Trafalgar Square, water in the fountains ran blue in honour of the prince christened, after a month and a day, and for no other reason, his parents claimed, than that they liked the sound of the name and Philip ‘wanted to break away from the more obvious family names’, Charles Philip Arthur George.32 To mark the occasion the King and Queen gave their daughter a brooch in the form of a diamond basket of jewelled flowers. She wore it for her first official photographs with her son.
Crawfie suggested on Elizabeth’s part a business-like attitude to imminent motherhood, apprehension dismissed with an unprotesting ‘After all, it is what we’re made for.’33 Elizabeth wrote to her piano teacher, Mabel Lander, whom she had known most of her life, describing for the pianist the baby’s hands: ‘rather large, but fine with long fingers – quite unlike mine and certainly unlike his father’s. It will be interesting to see what they will become.’ With a mixture of wonder and astonishment, she added, ‘I still find it difficult to believe I have a baby of my own.’34 Like her parents in 1926, she authorized the release of mother-and-child photographs, on this occasion taken by Cecil Beaton. With grand afflatus The Times had described Charles’s birth as ‘a national and imperial event which can for a moment divert the people’s thoughts from the acrimonies of domestic argument and the anxieties of the international scene’, investing Elizabeth’s child with the role she herself had repeatedly embodied of national, even international panacea. At the same time the paper explained the birth’s strengthening of the bond between crown and country, calling it a ‘simple joy... [to be] shared by all’.35 After a month, Queen Louise of Sweden, Philip’s aunt, described Elizabeth ‘looking so well & fresh, a good recovery’.36 Photographs support her view. The Illustrated London News chose a photograph of Elizabeth and her baby that it described as ‘not only one of the most charming of Princess Elizabeth ever taken, but one of the most radiant studies of a young mother with her baby son. No mother, whether of royal or humble birth, who treasures the first photograph of her child for the memories it bestirs can look at it unmoved.’37 Motherhood brought Elizabeth closer to her father’s subjects; maternal joy took no account of rank, and Elizabeth marked Charles’s birth, like her wedding, with food parcels distributed among other mothers of children born on the same day. But no one in Charles’s family overlooked his unique status. Among those invited to be godparents to the infant prince were the King, Queen Mary, the King of Norway and Prince George of Greece, all of them related. Queen Mary glimpsed a resemblance to the Prince Consort; she did not refer to the prince’s namesake, the only English King to be executed by his subjects. She found the baby, Elizabeth wrote, ‘a very lovable creature’.38
For two months Elizabeth breastfed, until, at Sandringham in late January, she contracted measles, and mother and child were separated. Although Elizabeth labelled it ‘a horrid illness’, her recovery, under Sister Turner, was straightforward, and she did not pass the illness on to Charles, who was moved to Windlesham Moor and visited by his parents at weekends.39 Of more pressing concern was the King’s health. In the last weeks of her pregnancy, at his own request, Elizabeth had been shielded from doctors’ concerns for her father’s worsening condition. Privy to their diagnosis of arteriosclerosis caused by a lifetime of heavy smoking and view that amputation of the right leg offered the surest means of avoiding gangrene, the Queen described to Winston Churchill ‘experiences & emotions during the last months... that... have been almost too vampire & have drained away something of the joy of living’.40 Eight hours a day with his legs clamped in a device called an occluder went some way to restoring the King’s circulation and staved off amputation. He was instructed to rest. A royal tour of Australia and New Zealand was cancelled; for the foreseeable future, the King would carry out only light public engagements. The implications for Elizabeth and Philip were clear. Temporarily Philip scaled back his naval commitments. In a contemporary account, he ‘shar[ed] with the Duke of Gloucester many duties as an understudy for the King’.41
From modeller Doris Lindner the Queen had commissioned a china statuette of Elizabeth in her uniform as colonel of the Grenadier Guards, riding side-saddle at the King’s birthday parade the previous year. In the late autumn of 1948, Royal Worcester released a hundred of Lindner’s equestrian figures. Perhaps the Queen regretted the timing of the release that, at such an unhappy pass in the King’s life, so obviously marked out Elizabeth as sovereign-in-waiting. Elizabeth took on a number of the King’s more symbolic engagements, including the service of distribution of the Royal Maundy the following Easter. Her concern was for her father’s wellbeing and for her mother’s anxiety, palpable below the surface despite, a courtier noted, the Queen’s refusal to allow anyone ‘to contemplate the fact of the King’s illness’.42 Nothing dented her happiness. She celebrated her twenty-third birthday in April with a theatre visit, dinner at the Café de Paris and dancing at a nightclub afterwards. To Vivien Leigh, who, with her husband Laurence Olivier, had been of the party, she wrote, ‘I did so enjoy my visit to “School for Scandal” and it was a wonderful birthday party – I am so glad you were both able to come as well.’43
In time the King’s partial recovery lightened the mood at court and, in early July, a year and a half after their wedding, Elizabeth and Philip, with baby Charles, moved into Clarence House. Here at last was a home of their own, its lengthy renovation overseen by the couple jointly, its furniture mostly wedding presents, with pictures borrowed from the Royal Collection. They had significantly overspent the government’s £50,000 budget. The result, in one account, was ‘a cheerful, light, modern house, not overcrowded, but each room furnished with taste and distinction’.44 On architectural historian Christopher Hussey, who visited in the autumn, the effect was alternately giddying and underwhelming. Lyrically he described Elizabeth’s chosen colour scheme for her private sitting room as ‘catching the sensation of an early morning in September, when the sky is of a pale cloudless blue, but when the sun is still veiled by a thin haze and the lawn is silvered with dew’.45 Tactfully he explained an impersonal quality to the decoration, only partly attributable to ongoing restrictions: ‘As the years pass, and Their Royal Highnesses have the leisure to exercise their tastes in supplementing the present collection, most of the components of which have been gifts, no doubt personal preferences will become more marked.’46 For all Philip’s fondness for new technology, the radios and a ‘sleek, white, very futuristic television set’ in the comfortable staff quarters, corners of Elizabeth’s new home suggested the patrician timelessness of her mother’s interiors: handsome eighteenth-century mahogany, a chintz-covered armchair in front of an antique Chinese screen that had been a wedding present from Queen Mary, the Hepplewhite breakfront bookcase given to her by a group of cousins, including Princess Marie Louise and her sister Helena Victoria and the King of Norway, a quartet of red Chinese porcelain cockerels, the gift of an army regiment. Like her parents and many upper-class couples of the time, Elizabeth and Philip had adjoining bedrooms. These were decorated in markedly different manner in line with views about the distinct roles of men and women, Philip’s sleekly panelled in white Scottish sycamore, Elizabeth’s pink and blue, the bed with a draped canopy. In each room, the dressing table stood in reach of the communicating door, allowing husband and wife to talk to one another as they dressed. Philip hung a new portrait of Elizabeth by Russian watercolourist Savely Sorine; the picture, commissioned by the Queen, closely resembled Sorine’s portrait of the Queen as Duchess of York, once displayed in the drawing room at 145 Piccadilly. Acquiescence in this copycat commission said much about Elizabeth’s indifference to evolving a new royal iconography. A year later, despite Deputy Keeper of the King’s Pictures Benedict Nicolson informing Elizabeth that portraiture in Europe was dead, the newlyweds were painted by Edward Halliday, a romantic, full-length double portrait, its arrangement reminiscent of Gainsborough’s Duke and Duchess of Gloucester.47 Nicolson recommended instead ‘excellent photographers’.48
In Clarence House, Elizabeth settled into a way of life that resembled her parents’ as Duke and Duchess of York. In Elizabeth’s case, residence in a substantial London mansion, with a comfortable indoor staff, set her apart from her contemporaries. Swingeing taxation sped the death throes of the aristocratic townhouse and its hierarchy of servants; there would be few equivalents for little Charles of the Allendales, the Cavans or the Londonderrys, close at hand in splendour equivalent to his parents’. Without rancour diplomatist’s wife Cynthia Jebb identified this imperviousness to change as an aspect of post-war royalty: ‘they continue to live the life they have always led, to keep up as much ceremony as modern times permit’.49 Elizabeth was served by her private secretary, her ladies-in-waiting, her comptroller, or treasurer, General Sir Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, recommended by Mountbatten and married to the popular novelist Daphne du Maurier, as well as secretaries known as ‘lady clerks’. Bobo MacDonald was indispensable. There were four Clarence House footmen, Mr Bennett the butler, an under-butler, four housemaids, a separate kitchen staff, two chauffeurs and Elizabeth’s detectives, an equerry for Philip (Michael Parker, an Australian friend from the navy), his valet John Dean, Charles’s nurse Helen Lightbody, inherited from the Gloucesters, the nurserymaid Mabel Anderson and a nursery footman, John Gibson, to deliver Charles’s meals and maintain his navy-blue pram, which was washed and polished, including wheels, tyres and hood, every day. This ‘princely’ establishment perpetuated aspects of the pre-war world in which Elizabeth had grown up: levels of service were of the highest – even the soles of shoes were polished – and long working hours for the servants afforded little time off: half a day a week and every other Sunday. The clockwork regulation of Elizabeth’s life had as much to do with a well-trained staff as with her royal duties: breakfast of scones, eggs and bacon served by a footman in blue livery with Edinburgh green epaulettes, eaten with the newspapers; half an hour with Charles, already washed, dressed and fed; time for correspondence with her lady-in-waiting; a walk with her dogs in St James’s Park, shadowed by her detective, and, engagements permitting, an hour and a half with Charles every evening, ‘romping on the nursery floor, bathing [him] and finally tucking [him] up in bed’.50 Elizabeth’s dog walks took little account of the weather. She wore an old raincoat and a headscarf, schooled from childhood in an upper-class conviction of the unassailable virtues of time spent outdoors. As she wrote once to a friend, ‘Now that we have got some good weather, one might as well make use of it.’51 It was the mindset that made Balmoral bearable. At teatime, Elizabeth fed the corgis, mixing together meat, vegetables and gravy from dishes delivered on a silver tray by a footman.
Despite her lack of political engagement, Elizabeth went about her public duties assiduously. To Helen Hardinge, whose daughters Winifred and Libby had been members of the palace Guide company, she explained that ‘life is very hectic, with every day mapped out to the second’.52 She and Philip undertook visits together: to the Channel Islands, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Macclesfield, Nottingham, Harlech and, of greater personal significance, Dartmouth. Everywhere huge crowds turned out for them, apparently spellbound by this most rarefied of love matches. Such was the interest in the couple that, ahead of their return rail journey from Harlech to Paddington, the Banbury Guardian informed its readers of the royal train’s scheduled halt at Banbury –‘on Friday evening at 8.41 pm... for four minutes’ – so that readers could make their way to the platform in the hope of seeing the couple even though ‘the Royal passengers [were] not expected to alight’.53 Even Chips Channon, urbanest of royal hangers-on, and waspish Cecil Beaton were dazzled by Elizabeth and her husband. ‘They looked divine,’ Channon wrote, of their ‘somewhat late appearance’ at a ball at Windsor Castle in June 1949. ‘She wore a very high tiara and the Garter... They looked like characters out of a fairy tale.’54 Beaton rhapsodized in Elizabeth’s case ‘the effect of the dazzlingly fresh complexion, the clear regard from the glass-blue eyes, and the gentle, all-pervading sweetness of her smile’.55 None of this went to their heads. Shy Elizabeth told Laura Knight that her only way of withstanding the constant attention of crowds was ‘to dismiss it entirely from your mind or you could not possibly continue’, and neither she nor Philip enjoyed public speaking.56 ‘When they are on their way to an important function together,’ one of their household told Dermot Morrah, ‘they are apt to sit in the car holding hands in severe nervous tension which may burst out in a sudden explosion over some trivial mishap on the way’.57 Elizabeth took pains that she overlook no one involved in any detail of an engagement. Organizers of her visit to Plymouth in October 1949 failed to present to her church organist Dr Harry Moreton. Later, she learned that the octogenarian Dr Moreton had composed music in honour of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee as well as for her own visit. Elizabeth made good the oversight with a longer than usual letter dictated to her lady-in-waiting: ‘The Princess was most impressed by the beauty of the anthem which you composed specially for the occasion, and... would like to thank you for the pleasure which it gave her. Princess Elizabeth was very much interested to hear of your long association with the Royal Family and bids me send you her good wishes.’58 Closer to home, her ‘kindness’ suggested the limits of her social awareness lamented by her grandmother. Jewelled and gowned for an evening engagement, she remarked to the female staff invited to line the staircase at Clarence House for a ringside view of her finery, ‘It’s fun to dress up sometimes, isn’t it?’59
The photograph Elizabeth and Philip released to the press in September was taken at Clarence House. Elizabeth wore a simple silk frock, Philip his lieutenant’s uniform, and Philip, not Elizabeth, is the picture’s focus. Following improvements in the King’s health over the summer, the release marked Philip’s return in October to full-time naval duties as first lieutenant on a destroyer called Chequers, stationed at Malta. Elizabeth would join him later, a week after Charles’s first birthday, leaving Charles behind in the care of Nanny Lightbody and Mabel Anderson. Ahead of Philip’s departure, mother, father and baby were photographed by Baron (Sterling Henry Nahum). Released by Raphael Tuck & Sons as postcards, Baron’s pictures capture Elizabeth’s unaffected delight in her new baby. Before her own departure, like her parents in 1927, she and Charles sat for Marcus Adams. Nevertheless Elizabeth was away for five weeks, including Christmas. Unlike her own mother, she was apparently untroubled by the separation, though one of the Maltese house party, shown films of Charles that Elizabeth had taken herself, recorded her pride in the little boy ‘who was now walking and was very sweet’.60 In Malta, she stayed mostly with the Mountbattens. Despite the attendance of a lady-in-waiting, Bobo and a detective, a gun salute to acknowledge her arrival on this island, ‘the Legislative Assembly carr[ying] by acclamation a resolution extending a hearty welcome to her’ and a handful of engagements, including an official visit to the Malta Industrial Exhibition and lunch with Archbishop Gonzi, on Malta Elizabeth came as close as she ever would to living like other naval wives.61 Only Mountbatten appeared unable to forget her rank: he was predictably attentive to his royal houseguest and swiftly smitten. ‘Lilibet is quite enchanting and I’ve lost whatever of my heart is left to spare entirely to her,’ he told his elder daughter.62 Princess and ambitious kinsman played their respective parts. ‘I think she’s so sweet and attractive,’ continued the zealous Mountbatten. ‘At times I think she likes me too, though she is far too reserved to give any indication.’63
Possibly her reserve enabled Elizabeth to manage the separation alternately from Philip and Charles. To her mother she had written of her desire to recreate in her own family the ‘happy atmosphere of love and fairness’ to which she had been accustomed as a child. But she was also in thrall to her strong-minded and adored husband and, as she indicated in a controversial speech to a Mothers’ Union rally shortly before leaving London, she disapproved of divorce. Later Elizabeth’s parenting would be criticized. In the autumn of 1949, weighing all in the balance, she may have estimated Philip’s need for her as greater than that of the year-old baby son attended by his own staff of three and his doting royal grandparents. Certainly the Queen detected no detachment in Elizabeth’s attitude to Charles and appeared to endorse her decision. To Prince Paul of Yugoslavia she had written in January, ‘The baby is so sweet, & Lilibet & Philip are enchanted,’ while to Elizabeth herself, on 21 December, she described her decision to spend Christmas with Philip as ‘quite right to be with the hub of your universe!’64 Elizabeth returned to Britain a week later. She remained at Clarence House alone until New Year’s Eve, when she went racing at Hurst Park to see her horse Monaveen win the Queen Elizabeth Chase. Flushed with success, she made the journey to Sandringham, her parents and, belatedly, Charles. Edwina Mountbatten would describe seeing Elizabeth off on her homeward journeys from Malta as ‘like putting a bird back into a very small cage’.65 Three months later, Elizabeth returned to the island. To Queen Frederica of the Hellenes, the German-born wife of Philip’s cousin King Paul, in a matter-of-fact statement that suggests her ease with her divided domestic life, she described moving between London and Malta as like having ‘a flat in London and a house by the sea’.66
Again she left Charles behind. Again she delighted in her reunion with Philip. Again the fleeting taste of what passed for normality thrilled her. ‘It’s lovely seeing her so radiant and leading a more or less human existence for once,’ wrote Edwina Mountbatten.67 Philip’s valet John Dean remembered the couple on the island as ‘so relaxed and free, coming and going as they pleased’; in retrospect friends considered it the happiest period in their lives.68 Their wedding present from the Chinese government of green, gold and aubergine porcelain was decorated with a motif of five bats to indicate five supreme happinesses round the double Hsi character for married bliss.69 On Malta, its auguries were realized. Elizabeth drove herself along the winding, chattering streets, she visited shops and the hairdresser; with Philip or the Mountbattens she swam in secluded coves and picnicked in the shade of orange trees. She watched Philip play polo. From her vantage point on Fort St Elmo she filmed the fleet with her cine camera, eyes screwed tight behind her sunglasses to make out Philip’s figure on deck. Together she and Philip danced in local restaurants. At the Phoenicia Hotel, the Jimmy Dowling Band played their favourite song, ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’, from Oklahoma!. ‘She and the Duke used to dance a lot. She was always so beautiful and always so nice and kind,’ remembered a band member.70 Maltese shopkeepers noted her slowness in handling money. She stayed six weeks. At some point, for the second time, Elizabeth fell pregnant.
Elizabeth had reasons other than Philip to be happy to be away from home in the spring of 1950. The popular weekly magazine Woman’s Own had begun serialization of a sentimental and adoring version of Elizabeth’s childhood that angered and appalled her parents. Its hapless author was the recently retired Crawfie, the book The Little Princesses, trumpeted as a ‘loving, human, authentic’ account of their story. Serialization began first in an American magazine, the Ladies Home Journal, whose shark-like editors, Bruce and Beatrice Blackmar Gould, had gulled Crawfie into believing she could tell all with impunity, retain the royal family’s friendship and even advance the cause of Anglo-American relations by bolstering Americans’ respect and affection for the monarchy. The Queen believed she had made clear her horror at the prospect, writing to Crawfie in April 1949, ‘I do feel most strongly that you must... say No No No to offers of dollars for articles about something as private & precious as our family.’71 She did not count on the Goulds’ determination or the greedy bullying of the man Crawfie had married in the autumn of 1947, Major George Buthlay. Crawfie completed her manuscript in August 1949; the Goulds devoted a month to rewriting it, and Crawfie submitted it to the Queen. As the Goulds had always intended, publication proceeded inexorably, regardless of royal ire or misgivings at the palace. Lady Astor described Elizabeth as ‘deeply shocked & hurt & furious’.72 She did not add, since it was not necessary, impotent in her rage.
As a child Elizabeth could not have understood the ramifications of a life that was both public and private. By 1950, she had learned to navigate her hybrid existence. Successfully, she and Philip had concealed the secret of their engagement; unprotestingly, she had agreed to government and royal household plans for her marriage: wedding guests unknown to her, public exhibition of her wedding presents and, in time, her dress, snoopers on her honeymoon. Increasingly practised as a public performer, she remained nevertheless shy and unusually reserved. She attached a high value to the privacy permitted her. For all its oozy celebration of Elizabeth herself, The Little Princesses made public the family life that she and Margaret and their parents considered sacrosanct, and focused even greater public attention on Elizabeth and her sister. Crawfie had described their lives as bound by an ivory tower, but it was she, however artlessly, who tore down the tower’s walls. The Queen’s response to Crawfie’s act of betrayal would prove as unequivocal as her view of the abdication. Given the shock, hurt and fury glimpsed by Lady Astor, Elizabeth could not be expected to dispute her mother’s line.
Three months into serialization in the Ladies Home Journal, another American magazine, Pageant, ranked Elizabeth eighth among women internationally who ‘exert[ed] the greatest influence on modern life’.73
More to Elizabeth’s liking that summer was the gesture of the commander of an American Air Force unit stationed close to London who instructed his pilots not to fly over Clarence House until Elizabeth’s baby was born. Elizabeth gave birth to her only daughter on 15 August 1950, again attended by maternity nurse Sister Helen Rowe, inevitably called ‘Rowie’, who had been present at Charles’s birth; thriftily, she reused the layette made for Charles. Police marshalled into orderly crocodiles the crowds who had massed outside Clarence House for days: two by two they filed past the official bulletin. At the Oval an announcement of the baby’s birth interrupted the fourth Test match against the West Indies before play stopped for lunch. Philip was with his wife; the Queen had remained in London after the King’s departure for Balmoral and arrived almost immediately. As at the time of Elizabeth’s birth, newspapers attributed interest in baby Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise to their affection for the royal mother: ‘The warmth of London’s greeting to the youngest Princess’, the Scotsman informed readers, ‘is some measure of the pride and pleasure with which we regard all our memories of this daughter of a Scottish Queen.’74 Elizabeth described herself as ‘very thrilled about the new baby’: ‘We are very delighted and proud to have a little girl as well as a boy – and it will be such fun when they are older.’75 She was concerned that Charles, until recently living on his own without siblings or indeed either parent, ‘take kindly to it’.76 She reported that he ‘appear[ed] fascinated by her and treats her with great care and affection – so far!’77
As after Charles’s birth, Elizabeth’s recovery was leisurely. On 20 September, Clarence House issued a statement: ‘Princess Elizabeth has been advised by her doctors that her programme of engagements for this autumn is too heavy, and she has found it necessary to make alterations to her plans.’ The first cancelled engagement was the opening of the International Motor Show, scheduled for 18 October; commentators noted that this was only two months since Anne’s birth and that Elizabeth had rested for three and a half months after Charles was born. Instead, as autumn turned to winter, Elizabeth rejoined Philip in Malta. She would again be away for Christmas, leaving Charles and Anne with their grandparents, as she and Margaret had spent Christmas 1935 separated from their parents by their mother’s illness; Nurse Lightbody insisted that travel upset small children. Her visit on this occasion included six days spent in Athens with King Paul and Queen Frederica. As at home, public interest levels were high. British newspapers reported crowds outside the royal palace, factory workers rushing to line processional routes and ‘the Greek press... full of the visit. Photographs of Princess Elizabeth are published, with articles on her childhood and marriage.’78 Despite – or because of – Philip’s Greek heritage, Elizabeth proved the main attraction. Observing the couple at close quarters, the British ambassador, Sir Clifford Norton, discerned Philip’s part in his wife’s success, noting that, while she was ‘very shy, rather withdrawn, a bit of a shrinking violet in fact’, Philip was ‘young and vigorous and jollied her along. He didn’t actually say, “Come on, old girl!” but it was that sort of thing.’79 The combination of Elizabeth’s newsworthiness and Philip’s ‘jollying’ set a pattern that would not change. In December, Margaret joined them in Malta, bringing with her new photographs of Charles and Anne; with Elizabeth she flew to Tripoli, where Elizabeth reviewed the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards. ‘Margaret simply adored her visit to you,’ wrote the Queen, concerned to maintain her daughters’ closeness in the face of the separation caused by Elizabeth’s marriage.80
Elizabeth did not return to Clarence House until the middle of February 1951. She had been away from her children for eleven weeks. While the press at home were mostly silent on this aspect of her absences, overseas comment was less favourable. In a case of having its cake and eating it, the Sunday Mirror attributed criticism to the French paper Samedi Soir. ‘A certain section of British opinion started to whisper that she was a bad mother,’ the paper quoted. Samedi Soir, it wrote, claimed that Philip was to give up his naval command and return to England ‘so that Elizabeth does not become a bad mother’.81 Five months would pass before Philip stepped down from his naval command. The cause was not anxiety about Elizabeth’s parenting, but a sharp decline in the King’s health afterwards traced to a malignant tumour that would eventually necessitate the removal of his left lung on 23 September 1951. In the meantime, again without the children, Elizabeth returned to Malta for Easter. She and Philip went to Italy, staying with Philip’s cousin Queen Helen of Romania outside Florence and at the British embassy in Rome. ‘We are living like gypsies,’ Elizabeth wrote home happily.82 Back at home she gave Philip a painting of the harbour at Valletta.
To Elizabeth fell much of her father’s workload, to a philosophical Philip, certain this spelled the end of any independent career, the task of supporting her that would continue for the remainder of his long life. ‘The prince who won [Elizabeth’s] hand has proved himself a ready and willing support in her manifold duties,’ intoned a Pathé announcer months later; readiness almost certainly exceeded willingness as he surrendered the naval man’s life he loved.83 They replaced the King and Queen on a five-week tour of Canada in the autumn of 1951. In style the visit resembled the earlier tour of South Africa: almost half the 10,000-mile itinerary was undertaken in a private train with an observation platform at the rear to ‘give thousands of Canadians the chance to see the Princess as she passes and the Princess the opportunity to acknowledge their cheers’.84 In Elizabeth’s luggage was mourning for her father; her new private secretary, the Hon. Martin Charteris, Jock Colville’s successor and a nephew of Cynthia Asquith, carried with him draft accession documents. The spectre of the King’s death hovered. Elizabeth could not lightly shrug off the memory of Holy Communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace the morning of her father’s operation: herself, Margaret and the Queen. She told listeners at a state banquet in Ottawa on 10 October, ‘The anxiety of these last two weeks has seemed endless’, before reassuring them of the King’s slow improvement. At stopping points, telephone calls were arranged to her father at Buckingham Palace, as if she could make him better by encouragement or force of will. Flashes of lightheartedness punctuated the tour nevertheless. Perhaps there was an ostrich-like quality to the couple’s enjoyment, each of them unwilling to countenance the possibility of the King dying. Elizabeth described as ‘a magnificent experience’ the fourteen miles from Yates to Peers, Alberta, when she and Philip drove the train, Elizabeth as engineer, Philip as fireman, and puzzled crowds lining the track scanned in vain the observation platform for the royal travellers busy in the engine carriage.85 On their second night in Ottawa they danced till midnight at ‘a gay informal square dance’, for which Elizabeth wore ‘“Cinderella” clothes’: ‘a brown checkered blouse, blue dirndl skirt embroidered with beads and Cuban square-heeled shoes’, a tribute to the resourcefulness of John Dean, who also bought blue jeans, a check shirt, loafers and a cowboy belt for Philip.86 Philip ‘jollied’ Elizabeth in private as well as public, chasing her along a corridor of the train wearing false teeth or tricking her with a joke tin of nuts from which, on opening, a toy snake sprang. Elizabeth protested at criticism in Canadian newspapers that she did not smile enough; her ‘sullen’ expression would remain cause for adverse comment, later explained by a cabinet minister as arising ‘when she is deeply moved and tries to control it’: ‘very often when she’s been deeply touched by the plaudits of the crowd she merely looks bad-tempered’.87 For the most part, large crowds – an estimated 170,000 on the couple’s arrival at Ottawa and 500,000 in Quebec – responded excitedly, especially to Philip, who ‘smiled more, waved more, unbent more’; at one railway station, crowds sang ‘Will ye no come back again?’ after the departing train.88 At home the Queen distracted herself with chatty letters full of news of Charles and Anne; she worried over the declamatory quality of Elizabeth’s delivery of her speeches: ‘Don’t forget to put a bit of inflection into your speeches, especially for coming over the radio, darling,’ she wrote.89 Elizabeth and Philip travelled south of the border for a flying visit to President Truman, taking with them presents from the King. In Washington were no complaints about Elizabeth’s dour expression. The New York Herald Tribune acclaimed ‘the world’s most interesting couple’ and enthused that ‘Princess Elizabeth, attractive as she is in photographs, is altogether devastating in person’.90 ‘Certainly movie stuff’ was the Washington Daily News’ description of Philip, who was reported as causing stenographers to swoon. Truman resorted to a familiar conceit. ‘When I was a little boy,’ he said, ‘I read about a fairy princess, and there she is.’91 Adulation on this scale, albeit expressed less fulsomely at home, had become a feature of Elizabeth and Philip’s shared engagements and would colour the first years of Elizabeth’s reign. Back on British soil, the behaviour of their countrymen echoed Canadians’. The Rugby Advertiser reported that, when the homeward-bound royal train passed through Rugby station on its way to London, ‘several hundred people lined the southbound platform’ and were rewarded with ‘a glimpse of Their Royal Highnesses having lunch’ at thirty miles an hour.92
During Elizabeth’s absence, the King cancelled for the second time a tour of Ceylon, Australia and New Zealand planned for the spring. It was not a surprise to Elizabeth, who had set in motion preparations for such a contingency prior to departure, writing to her dressmaker Norman Hartnell on 24 September, ‘I would very much like you to prepare some sketches for me to see… as a precaution against any sudden decision for us to go in the King’s place.’93 In the event, neither Elizabeth nor her parents would visit Australia in 1952.
‘February 3 to February 7, rest at Royal Lodge,’ ran the official programme of Elizabeth and Philip’s visit to Kenya at the start of their four-month overseas tour. On the slopes of Mount Kenya above the Sagana River, in ten acres of immaculate garden green with Ugandan turf, Royal Lodge was the couple’s wedding present from the colony. Photographs show Elizabeth smiling on the threshold of the timber-clad single-storey house: she had waited four years to see for herself this grown-up version of Y Bwthyn Bach complete with uniformed sentry, accommodation for a lady-in-waiting and, in Philip’s dressing room, curtains patterned with famous ships from history.
From Royal Lodge, late in the afternoon of 5 February, Elizabeth and Philip, with lady-in-waiting Henriette Palmer and Michael Parker, drove to a wooden tree house raised on stilts in a wild fig tree in the Aberdare Forest. The Treetops Hotel was an observation post with three bedrooms, a dining area and a viewing platform constructed alongside a lake with a salt lick where big game came to drink. It was a fantastical place, remote and dangerous. ‘Visitors are brought by car to within a quarter of a mile of the post and then go by foot through a jungle full of rhino, elephant, leopard and various poisonous snakes,’ explained the Illustrated London News. ‘Along the path are numerous ladders in case of any attack. From the comfortable “hotel” observation post, visitors can watch the life of the jungle at close range, but in perfect safety.’94 As afternoon turned to evening, Elizabeth watched with fascinated absorption, filming with her cine camera as long as the light lasted. Afterwards the group discussed what they had seen. They talked about the King; Elizabeth described his improvement. ‘Clearly from the tone of her conversation,’ remembered Treetops’ owner Eric Sherbrooke Walker, ‘she was hoping for a complete recovery’.95
Instead, George VI died in his sleep of a coronary thrombosis in the early hours of 6 February, at Sandringham, while Elizabeth was out of reach in her jungle eyrie. The circumstances of her accession, once known, seemed to add another fairy-tale detail to her already fabled existence: the young woman who climbed a tree a princess and descended it a queen. She did so unaware of her altered state, cut off by African forest from radio or telegrams. She rose early, watched the swooping and soaring of an eagle overhead, baboons, a rhino at the salt lick. The party breakfasted on eggs and bacon and coffee, and returned to Royal Lodge, Elizabeth ‘looking wonderful in blue jeans, talking about the rhinoceros’.96 Before lunch they fished; afterwards they rested. It was Martin Charteris, at a nearby hotel, who heard the news first, from a local journalist. He telephoned Michael Parker at Royal Lodge. Parker told Philip. Philip told Elizabeth, now his sovereign as well as his wife. He took her out into the garden where they walked slowly up and down, ‘while he talked and talked and talked to her’ – intently, as Cynthia Jebb remembered them talking under such different circumstances at a party at Sandringham three years before.97 Elizabeth was not crying when they returned to the house: Henriette Palmer described her as ‘very magnificent and strong’.98 ‘She bore her bereavement with queenly courage (the report published in some journals that she broke down in tears was quite unfounded),’ according to the authors of The Coronation Book of Queen Elizabeth II, published the following year; her self-control resembled her mother’s, which a lady-in-waiting called ‘supreme’.99 By the time Martin Charteris arrived at Royal Lodge, she was ‘seated at her desk, very upright, high colour, no sign of tears’;100 she appeared to him ‘absolute master of her fate’.101 To her lady-in-waiting, Lady Pamela Mountbatten, Dickie’s younger daughter, Elizabeth apologized for the immediate cancellation of the remainder of their tour, an example under extraordinary circumstances of that ‘solicitude for other people’s comfort’ that Tommy Lascelles had noted in South Africa; at her desk she wrote letters of apology to others involved in the tour. Charteris asked what she was going to call herself. ‘My own name, of course – what else?’ she replied. It was the only possible answer for the young woman whose royal destiny, calmly accepted long before, was central to her identity, a young woman, an elderly courtier would claim, who ‘always [did] the right thing instinctively’.102