The Queen, page 8
During his stay his shooting was as wayward as his dress sense, with the ghillies and beaters declaring his marksmanship “erratic and poor.”12 He did, though, hit the target in matters of the heart. This was where it really mattered. Forthright and to the point, he took Elizabeth out for a drive on the estate and then, as they walked alone on the heather, the sound of a distant curlew adding to the sense of solitude, he asked if she would be his bride. The princess, who had inserted pictures of the prince in her photograph album and had kept a framed picture of her bearded navy beau on her desk for months, accepted on the spot. It was only later that the prince separately sought the formal permission of the king, his consent required under the 1772 Royal Marriages Act, which was passed by Parliament to prevent unsuitable or improper marriages that would diminish the standing of the royal house.
During his six-week stay the king formed a warm attachment with the young prince. Like any father he was happy to see his daughter blossom thanks to the love and support of her future husband. In the dynastic juggling act this was, caveats aside, deemed to be a good match, and he willingly gave his permission. There was one condition.
A royal tour of South Africa, which had been months in the planning, was scheduled for early 1947, and the king asked the couple to wait until the royal family returned in May before making a formal announcement. The palace even issued a statement in early September denying the rumor that there was an engagement between the two. This prevarication left the princess bewildered and crestfallen. She knew her own mind; it was her parents who were being indecisive, using the excuse of the South African tour to test the couple’s resolve. In fairness the prince still needed to become a naturalized British citizen before any announcement, and that was not going to be a straightforward application.
Reluctantly the couple agreed to hold off on the announcement and to continue disguising their feelings for each other in public for just a little longer. In his letter of thanks to Queen Elizabeth, dated September 14, 1946, the emotionally circumspect prince offered a window into his feelings. He wrote: “I am sure I do not deserve all the good things which have happened to me. To have been spared in the war and seen victory. To have fallen in love completely and unreservedly makes all one’s personal and even the world’s troubles seem small and petty.”13
Though the couple had agreed to keep their betrothal a secret, the public sensed that a romance was blossoming between the heir and the naval officer when they appeared at the wedding at Romsey in Hampshire of Philip’s first cousin Patricia Mountbatten to Captain Lord Brabourne in October 1946. Sharp-eyed onlookers noticed that Philip and Elizabeth were probably more than just friends. Not only did he walk with the royal family to the church but, at the entrance, he also solicitously helped Princess Elizabeth, who was a bridesmaid, with her fur coat. Over the next few months well-wishers, who read media speculation about the couple, took to asking “Where’s Philip?” when Elizabeth appeared in public, much to her embarrassment and irritation.
In late January 1947, just a few days before the royal family sailed for South Africa aboard HMS Vanguard, some of those genuinely in the know attended a small dinner party at Chester Street hosted by Lord Mountbatten. Noël Coward serenaded the party and guests toasted Philip and Elizabeth with champagne, except for the king who always drank whiskey. The royal family would be away for four months and at least two of those present were counting the days until their return.
A key member of the traveling party was the Times journalist Dermot Morrah, a passionate monarchist. When he was four years old his nanny found him in floods of tears after learning of Queen Victoria’s death. A mathematician, classicist, historian, and fellow of All Souls College who went by the title Arundel Herald of Arms Extraordinary, he became a lead writer for the Times, always ready with a high-flown phrase or lofty sentiment. If a Latin simile was required, Morrah was your man. During the war he came to the notice of the king who, his stammer under control, felt much more comfortable about speaking in public. Frequently the gentleman journalist was drafted in to prepare, construct, and polish His Majesty’s utterances.
As one of the journalists on the White Train which was the royal family’s home for the next few weeks as they visited hundreds of towns and hamlets throughout South Africa, Morrah was frequently called upon during the 11,000 mile tour to craft speeches for the king. Though the visit was ostensibly to thank the South Africans for their sacrifice and support during the war, it was also hoped that the sunshine and temperate climate would give the king, visibly gaunt after the tribulations of the conflict, a much-needed tonic. The optics of the visit were important, too. Not only was it hoped that the presence of the royal family would bolster the moderate government of General Jan Smuts against racist nationalists, but the palace considered Princess Elizabeth’s planned coming-of-age speech, which was due to be broadcast on her twenty-first birthday, to be the high point of the trip.
The speech would touch on the time-honored values of monarchy—service, loyalty, and tradition—while articulating the continued significance of the institution in a rapidly changing world. It was an important address of commitment and connection that needed careful thought and memorable prose, as the speech would serve as a manifesto for the postwar monarchy. The king’s private secretary assigned the delicate task to Morrah, who worked assiduously on a draft throughout the tour. At one point, the precious manuscript went missing somewhere aboard the train, but it was finally located among the bottles of booze in the bar of the “Protea” dining car.
The normally gruff Alan Lascelles was mightily impressed by the speech. “I have been reading drafts now for many years,” he wrote to Morrah, “but I cannot recall one that has so completely satisfied me and left me feeling that no single word should be altered. Moreover, dusty cynic though I am it moved me greatly. It has the trumpeting ring of the other Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech, combined with the immortal simplicity of Queen Victoria’s ‘I will be good.’”14
Others were not so impressed. For once the king disagreed with his private secretary. According to BBC radio correspondent Frank Gillard the monarch found Morrah’s original “too pompous and full of platitudes.”15 As it was likely to be one of the most important royal speeches ever made, it deserved everyone’s full attention. One Sunday, following a church service held at the Victoria Falls Hotel, the king, queen, and Princess Elizabeth as well as Frank Gillard took deck chairs into the garden and for the next two hours worked on the speech, page by page, line by line, the princess reading out passages and changing words here and there to improve clarity and meaning. As Elizabeth would be the one reading this declaration of intent, she was an important voice literally and figuratively in the shaping of the historic speech.
Once everyone was satisfied, the princess rehearsed the finished product under the watchful gaze of Gillard. Unlike her stuttering father, the radio veteran deemed the princess “composed, confident and extremely cooperative.”16 The speech was then secretly recorded and filmed under the trees in the hotel garden, the proceedings watched by a curious troop of baboons. On the princess’s birthday, April 21, the speech was broadcast as if it were live from Government House in Cape Town, with an audience of more than two hundred million, including America, tuning in to listen to her words.
She made clear from the opening sentence that her life, which she voluntarily yoked to the growth of the Commonwealth of Nations, would not be an all-white affair. “On my twenty-first birthday, I welcome the opportunity to speak to all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they may live, whatever race they come from and whatever language they speak.”
The climax to the seven-minute speech came as she dedicated her life to the service of the crown and the people. It was an almost nun-like vow and brought Elizabeth to tears when she first read the draft.
“I should like to make that dedication to you now. It is very simple. I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.
“But I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do. I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow and God bless you all you who are willing to share in it.”17
Many around the world paused in their daily round to listen to the princess’s speech, which clearly came from the heart. It brought tears to the eyes of the king and queen as well as Queen Mary, who confided to her diary: “Of course I wept.”18 She was not alone. Churchill, a romantic to the tip of his Romeo y Julieta cigar, admitted that he, too, was moved to tears.
Tory grandee Viscount Templewood, formerly Sir Samuel Hoare, wrote in the Times, “It may well be that the Crown will make possible a Commonwealth of free peoples and many races far more varied than any that may exist today.”19
During her radio address she stated that while she was six thousand miles away from her birthplace she was not six thousand miles away from home. That was a cute compliment to her South African hosts but something of a stretch. While the ever-loyal Bobo MacDonald brought her morning calling tray and her sister and parents gave private gifts over breakfast, her twenty-first birthday was spent in the company of strangers who, though they wished her well, were not her friends or family. Her coming of age reminded her that in a lifetime of duty, personal happiness and pleasure came a poor second.
For most of the day she nursed a headache. She found herself surrounded by overeager outsiders while the man she loved was thousands of miles away.
As the final insult, at the first of two balls in her honor, her dance partner, a clumsy if good-looking rugby player called Nellis Bolus, not only trod on her toes with his size-thirteen shoes but succeeded in dancing her into the fender in front of the ballroom mantelpiece. At the end of the dance, departing revelers recall seeing the two princesses, their shoes off, sitting on the staircase giggling and rubbing their sore feet.20
There were, though, glittering compensations. At the second ball, which was held at Government House, General Jan Smuts had presented her with a beautiful necklace of twenty-one flawless diamonds with fifty-two facets. She forever referred to them as her “best diamonds.”21
Though her birthday speech was a personal triumph, the opening sentiments of inclusion and racial integration fell on stony ground, at least in South Africa. Within a year the National Party was in power and the cruel apartheid system voted into law. An informal policy of racial segregation was already in effect when the tour began. It infuriated the king that he was prevented from personally pinning medals on black ex-servicemen or shaking the hands of chiefs and elders at gatherings. During walkabouts and open car tours, the indigenous black population was on one side of the road, the whites on the other. It was an eye-opening experience for the princess. Already learning to see beyond official bromides, during the tour Elizabeth began to appreciate the reality of life in South Africa and understand why her father, who was frustrated by the way he was controlled by the tour organizers, referred to their white police guard as “our Gestapo.”
She wrote to Queen Mary: “The Zulus nowadays are a broken people not at all what one expects to see after hearing about the ‘huge Zulus’ [of military folklore]. The Union government has been very ruthless with them, which is sad and have removed a lot of their customs.”22
As the tour progressed, the king, far from relaxing and reviving, became increasingly tetchy. Even Smuts was alarmed by his deteriorating health and his frequent uncontrolled outbursts of temper. During what his family called his gnashes, the king was notorious among his entourage for kicking wastepaper baskets and twisting bath sponges to destruction. On one occasion the White Train stopped on a remote bay by the Indian Ocean so that the king could go for a swim on his own. “The loneliest man in the world,” journalist James Cameron described him.23 The experience was far from a rest cure: When the king returned to Britain he was seventeen pounds lighter and looked much frailer.
If the rigors of the seemingly endless tour and the constant pain in his legs distracted him, it was his family who provided consolation. As their equerry Peter Townsend observed: “A perpetual current of it [affection] flows between them, between father and mother, between sister and sister, between parents and their daughters and back again.” He mused, somewhat optimistically given the hostility of the Nationalist Party to the tour, that the affection felt among the royal family had an impact around the globe. “Then it [affection] radiated outward to the ends of the world, touching thousands of millions of hearts who sent, rolling back, a massive wave of love to the royal family.”24
This romantic image perhaps expressed his own feelings toward the royal family—and one member in particular. It was during this visit to the land he described as a “paradise” that Townsend, who was then still married with two boys, fell in love with Princess Margaret, nearly sixteen years his junior.
Theirs was a love affair that began in plain sight of the rest of the family, their courtiers, and the accompanying media. Every morning and evening, the princesses, accompanied by Townsend and assistant private secretary Michael Adeane, went riding through the rolling countryside or along the seashore. “We sped in the cool air, across the sands or across the veldt, those were the most glorious moments of the day,” wrote Townsend. It was during these exhilarating and much-anticipated daily rituals that the sixteen-year-old princess, as she admitted years later, fell “madly in love”25 with her riding companion.
In her sensible way, her elder sister would have initially dismissed her sister’s mooning over the married group captain as a juvenile crush. Only later would she be obliged to take their burgeoning relationship more seriously.
Elizabeth was the great success of tour, the princess seen as sensible, solicitous toward others, a skillful conversationalist, with a well-developed sense of fun and a briskly business-like attitude to bread-and-butter royal engagements. Her let’s-get-on-with-it approach was often at variance with her mother’s dilatory if more theatrical style.
She developed a habit of jabbing the queen on her Achilles’ heel with her parasol if she was overrunning the schedule. Nor was Elizabeth—known by some as the colonel—averse to putting her father on a “charge” if he was being too difficult. In short she was a courtier’s dream. Yet, and this was mentioned time and again, she was always solicitous with regard to the well-being of others. Elizabeth’s chief cheerleader, Dermot Morrah, described watching her scrambling up a granite hillside in her stocking feet because she had handed over her own pair of shoes to her mother after her heels broke.26
Tommy Lascelles wrote to his wife about the “remarkable” development of Princess Elizabeth. “She has come on in the most surprising way and all in the right direction.”27 It was her father who struck a poignant and knowing observation about his beloved daughter during a visit to Cecil Rhodes’s grave. He was asked by a government minister if he should accompany the princess. With a brief shake of his head, the king watched her walk away from the monument and said, “There she goes, Elizabeth, poor lonely girl, she will be lonely all her life.”28
As they sailed back to Portsmouth in May, little did Princess Elizabeth think that she would not return to South Africa for nearly half a century. However, the vibrant colors, the endless skies, and the banquet of exotic food left an indelible impression. It was a nation, as the princess concluded, where some lived like kings.
She had her own treasure waiting patiently for her return. As the Vanguard approached the south coast port, Elizabeth was seen doing a jig of glee on deck, knowing that her own engagement could not be long delayed. Her father, recognizing his daughter’s stalwart patience on this important matter of the heart, later wrote to her: “I was rather afraid that you had thought I was being rather hard-hearted about it. I was so anxious for you to come to South Africa as you know.”29
On their return the royal family realized that the trials and tribulations of their long tour were as nothing compared with the catastrophic weather experienced by their subjects. In the worst winter in memory the country had suffered dreadful flooding, towering snowdrifts, transport chaos, dwindling coal supplies, and food rationing worse than during the war.
At Corsham naval base Prince Philip took to wearing a heavy greatcoat in the freezing classroom, where he delivered his lectures by candlelight.
Before the royal party left for South Africa he had accepted that the king was right to ask them to delay their announcement. Now he was eager to end the secrecy. He had not been idle while Elizabeth was away. The prince was all too aware that his exotic surname and family background might be a cause for criticism. In February, in order to deflect these concerns, he had become a naturalized British subject. No longer Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, he was known as plain Lieutenant Mountbatten RN. It had been a close-run thing and the matter needed all of Mountbatten’s legendary string pulling to encourage an indifferent court and civil service to thread the administrative needle and formally make him a British citizen.
It would, however, be another two frustrating months before the official engagement was announced. The king and queen still had their doubts, with the queen expressing her ambivalence to Tommy Lascelles. She wrote: “One can only pray that she has made the right decision, I think she has—but he is untried as yet.”30
