George VI and Elizabeth, page 39
In the following weeks, more portraits from the sessions with Beaton appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world, displaying a romantic and serene consort. The picture on the cover of The Tatler society magazine was an effulgent vision of the bareheaded Queen seated in her flowing tulle gown on a sofa in the Blue Drawing Room. “H.M. the Queen—God Bless Her!” ran the headline. The setting, explained The Tatler, made an “appropriate background for Her Majesty’s distinguished beauty,” but reminded readers that “nowadays, the Queen is more often seen in the workmanlike surroundings” of a Palace room where she was leading “a party of ladies and palace employees in preparing comforts” for the British armed forces.
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The summer of 1939 was forever known as the last season of peace. The most consequential event for the royal family occurred far from Buckingham Palace on July 22, when George VI, Elizabeth, Lilibet, and Margaret arrived at the King’s alma mater, the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, for a two-day visit. The King’s cousin Dickie Mountbatten accompanied the royal foursome for George VI’s first visit since 1919, when he was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. They disembarked from the royal yacht Victoria and Albert in a downpour, which didn’t dampen the reaction of Lilibet when she was introduced to Cadet Captain Prince Philip of Greece. In a coup de foudre similar to her father’s first sighting of Elizabeth nearly two decades earlier, thirteen-year-old Lilibet fell in love with the strikingly handsome eighteen-year-old.
They were third cousins and great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Philip’s mother and father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg, along with many members of his extended family, had been entertained over the years by the British royal family. Lilibet and the young prince had met glancingly at the wedding of Prince George and Princess Marina five years earlier, and Philip had attended the 1937 coronation.
At Dartmouth, Lilibet “never took her eyes off him the whole time,” Crawfie recounted. He was polite to her “but did not pay her any special attention.” Remembering the day many years later, Philip said to Lilibet, “You were so shy. I couldn’t get a word out of you.” In her own reminiscences more than seven decades after their marriage, Queen Elizabeth II spoke of Philip’s “mischievous, enquiring twinkle” that captivated her “when I first set eyes on him.”
Lilibet and Philip had tea with her parents and other cadets, although Lilibet “was not allowed to stay up,” according to Crawfie, to attend dinner on the yacht that evening when her cousin was among the guests. Crawfie noticed that at tea the next day, Lilibet plied Philip with food. The princess sat “pink-faced, enjoying it all very much.”
When the Victoria and Albert steamed away early that evening, a “huge flotilla” of cadets in their blue boats escorted the yacht into the bay and “cheered lusty farewells.” Prompted by the King’s concern that the harbor conditions were unsafe, the ship’s captain signaled the cadets to turn around. The one exception was Philip, “rowing away as hard as he could,” according to Crawfie. Lilibet watched him through binoculars, and her exasperated father said, “The young fool. He must go back, otherwise we will have to heave ho and send him back.” Philip heeded the order shouted through a megaphone and duly turned around.
Ten days later, the King and his family arrived at Balmoral, where he and the Queen began preparing for the two hundred boys scheduled to attend what had been renamed “the King’s Camp.” It was the eighteenth season, and George VI had moved the gathering to the grounds of his boyhood home at Abergeldie—located three miles from the castle—so he could spend more time with the campers. He halved the usual number to provide a more intimate experience, but the camp was still equally divided between public schoolboys and factory workers. Within hours of his Royal Deeside arrival, George VI was inspecting the big tents for sleeping, dining, and entertainment, and the Queen was busy consulting on the catering arrangements.
When the campers appeared on Saturday, August 5, George VI greeted them. The next day, he and the Queen gave them tea at the castle and showed them around the grounds. The royal family visited the camp on Monday morning in the bright sunshine after a weekend of rain, entering the site through tall fir trees and a narrow lane formed by the cheering boys.
The King personally planned the week meticulously, with games scheduled on only one day. Otherwise, the boys went with him for long daily hikes across the moors, mountains, and deer forests. George VI explained to them that the treks would build their endurance and foster comradeship. Walking over the heather in twos and threes, “we got to know each other properly,” wrote a boy from Bryanston School. “Class distinction vanished in our common appreciation of nature.”
To set a casual tone that Monday, the King wore an open-neck sports shirt with his Balmoral tartan kilt and tweed jacket, and the Queen was dressed in a simple linen frock. He took home movies and operated a newsreel camera for a “talkie” featuring the boys singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The royal couple and the princesses grinned throughout the hand signals and silences of the traditional camp song, “Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree.” While Elizabeth, Lilibet, and Margaret watched, the King took part with the boys in their games. The Queen reported to Queen Mary that it was “wonderful how happily they mix with each other.”
After lunch, George VI led the boys on their first five-mile hike together, through Balmoral Forest on a long climb to Birkhall. He “pointed out activity going on all round them which their inexperienced eyes had failed to see. Herds of deer…the sparrow hawk hovering in the sky,” recalled the camp chief, Captain J. G. Paterson. The boys from “the more crowded parts of the Kingdom” shared their experiences of industrial life with the monarch.
“We talked to the King as if he was an assistant schoolmaster,” said the Bryanston student. “His Majesty is a very good walker,” recalled a factory boy. “He talks and jokes with us…and sits down and has lunch with us.” Tommy Lascelles marveled that “without any forewarning,” he couldn’t tell “which came from Eton & which from a pitman’s cottage. How intelligent the young are nowadays & how thirsty for information about world-affairs.”
The final night, Friday, August 11, Elizabeth and the girls were at Glamis for the weekend, which enabled the King to celebrate with his campers on his own. They met at the castle grounds, where he led them up the steep Craigowan hill. At the summit, he lit a huge pile of wood for a bonfire as the boys sang “God Save the King,” and six bagpipers played Highland airs. At the end, the King and his two hundred campers held hands and sang “Auld Lang Syne.” When they left Balmoral in buses, they saw King George VI, standing in the road, illuminated by headlights, waving goodbye.
Three weeks later, Britain would be at war with Germany, and many of the seventeen-to-nineteen-year-old campers would be in uniform. The Abergeldie King’s Camp was his last. It would be an indelible memory for the participants as well as a lasting legacy for the seven thousand boys who in the years since 1921 had been touched by George VI’s unusually egalitarian spirit.
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The first war alarm sounded suddenly, on August 22, with the stunning announcement that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact negotiated in secret. Their undisclosed aim was to divide Poland between them after launching attacks from the east and west. Even without that specific knowledge, Chamberlain and his government knew that Hitler’s threats of aggression against Poland would mean fulfilling the British commitment to safeguard the country. Britain reaffirmed that guarantee in a message to Hitler, and sealed it on the twenty-fifth by signing a formal treaty with the Polish government. By then two million German troops had massed on Poland’s border.
The King had arrived in London the previous day, determined to do what he could to promote a peaceful resolution. Once again, he proposed a personal appeal to Hitler, and once more Chamberlain politely rejected the idea. The British government continued to try dissuading Germany from its planned invasion, and other leaders from around the world, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Pope Pius XII, issued pleas for peace. As Hardinge explained to Tweedsmuir, “No one any longer has any illusions about the Nazi regime, and everyone is quite convinced that the only thing to do is to remain absolutely firm.” Britain would only negotiate if “it is not at the point of a pistol.”
On August 25, George VI wrote to Elizabeth at Balmoral enclosing a letter from Chamberlain to Hitler and the führer’s answer, possibly offering the basis for some kind of settlement. “All hope is not gone anyhow for the moment,” he wrote. He sent the documents in a locked box “which I know your key will fit.”
Elizabeth followed her husband to Buckingham Palace on the twenty-ninth. She found him “very calm and cheerful despite the great anxiety that he is going through.” In the midst of this high tension, the Duke of Windsor resurfaced in a burst of breathtaking presumptuousness, not to mention grandiosity, and sent a telegram to Hitler. Edward told Walter Monckton that “as a citizen of the world,” he asked “not to plunge the world in war.” According to the duke, Hitler replied by saying “he never wanted a war with England, and if it took place it would not be his fault.”
The prospect of a conflict with Germany meant that Edward would need to be in Britain if only for his safety. A year earlier, George VI had confided to a senior diplomat that “one of the minor calamities” of war would be the return of the Duke of Windsor. In the last days of August, Monckton was already “speaking constantly to the Duke from 10 Downing Street, making elaborate arrangements” for the former king’s return. He offered George VI’s airplane and personal pilot to retrieve him from Antibes. After Edward refused to come “unless he was promised accommodation at Windsor or one of the royal castles,” Monckton regretfully had to cancel the arrangements.
Still, the duke and duchess would certainly return to England on terms yet to be defined. “What are we going to do about Mrs. S?” Elizabeth wrote to Queen Mary on August 31. “Personally I do not wish to receive her at all, tho’ it must depend on circumstances…. I am afraid that if they do return, they will wriggle their way into things…. It is a very difficult position & a great nuisance, with many pitfalls.”
The Wehrmacht surged across the Polish border on September 1. Britain and France countered with an ultimatum stating that unless Hitler withdrew his troops by 11:00 a.m. on Sunday, September 3, they would declare war. On Saturday, George and Elizabeth accepted the inevitable. “We went to bed with sad hearts,” she wrote. She later told Lionel Logue that the King scarcely slept because “he was so worried.”
She awakened on Sunday morning at 5:30—the dawn of a radiant London day—saying to herself, “We only have a few hours of Peace left.” From that instant until 11:00 a.m., “every moment was an agony,” she wrote in a diary of the day’s events. She clocked her last cup of tea and last bath “in peace” and thought of Britain’s people: “their courage, their sense of humour, their sense of right and wrong.” She believed that they would “come through the wicked things that war lets loose.” At 10:30, she joined Bertie in his sitting room at Buckingham Palace.
The King began a diary that would continue throughout the war and for nearly two years afterward. When the eleven o’clock deadline came and went, “I had a certain feeling of relief,” he wrote. Fifteen minutes later, Bertie and Elizabeth listened on the radio to Neville Chamberlain’s announcement that Britain was at war. “He spoke so quietly, so sincerely, & was evidently deeply moved & unhappy,” Elizabeth wrote. “I could not help tears running down my face.” But she and her husband agreed that “if there was to be any freedom left in our world…we must face the cruel Nazi creed & rid ourselves of this continual nightmare of force.” The King reassured himself that “the country is calm, firm & united behind its leaders.”
Within minutes, they heard the “ghastly, horrible wailing of the air raid siren.” They descended “with beating hearts” to a shelter in the Palace basement that had been prepared for them. “We felt stunned & horrified,” Elizabeth wrote, “waiting for the bombs to fall.” George VI noted that he and his wife were “very well trained in Air Raid Precautions” and took their gas masks along. When they returned to their rooms, “We prayed with all our hearts that Peace would come about,” Elizabeth wrote. “Real peace not a Nazi peace.”
George VI faced one of the biggest challenges of his reign that night: a radio broadcast at six p.m. to the empire. Logue arrived at the Palace with less than an hour to spare. As they reviewed the text, Logue marked pauses and substituted more easily pronounced words such as “ourselves” for “government.”
“In this grave hour,” King George VI began, “perhaps the most fateful in our history,” he asked his listeners to vanquish the “selfish pursuit of power” that sought to keep people “in the bondage of fear.” He held out the challenge to preserve “all that we ourselves hold dear.” He called upon his people at home and abroad to “stand calm and firm and united in this time of trial.” He warned that “there may be dark days ahead,” as “war can no longer be confined to the battlefield.” But he emphasized the rightness of their cause and urged “one and all” to “keep resolutely faithful to it” and prepare to make the necessary sacrifices. “With God’s help, we shall prevail.”
It was a stirring and beautiful speech that lasted just under six minutes. The King delivered it slowly, with sturdy solemnity. The prearranged pauses imposed control, and he stumbled only slightly toward the end, at the word “prevail.” “That was good, Bertie,” said the Queen, who was waiting for him outside the broadcasting room. Queen Mary told him that he “came through very well,” adding, “of course I wept, yr voice is so like dear Papa’s.”
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France declared war within hours of Britain, and in the days afterward so did Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa, followed by the other Commonwealth countries. The Republic of Ireland, however, stubbornly maintained its neutrality. The subsequent eight months were known as the “Phoney War” because the anticipated bombings of Britain didn’t happen, and Hitler held off further invasions. Still, the country remained on nerve-jangling high alert. Blackout paper covered all windows, trenches and air raid shelters scarred the parkland, and more than a million children were evacuated to the countryside. Gasoline rationing began at once. Food rationing followed several weeks later.
As a temporary measure, the King and Queen decided to keep the princesses in Scotland. They moved from the castle to the more sheltered Birkhall, under the care of the Queen’s sister Rosie, who promised to “try my very best to smooth their lives,” and the ever-faithful Alah Knight. Crawfie, who had been away on holiday, and Madame “Monty” Montaudon-Smith, the French tutor, joined them there, and their lessons resumed. When Henry Marten mailed Lilibet history assignments, she wrote essays that Crawfie sent to him at Eton.
George VI and Elizabeth keenly missed their daughters and telephoned them every day at six p.m. “Stick to the usual programme as far as you can Crawfie,” said the Queen. It was a mercifully contented existence for the princesses, who had their cousins, Margaret Elphinstone and Jock’s daughter Diana Bowes Lyon, for companionship. They rode on ponies and had picnics, and they signed on with the local Girl Guides troop, where they got to know evacuees from “the Gorbals,” one of Glasgow’s worst slums.
Some of them were housed around Balmoral and Abergeldie, and staff members taught their mothers practical household skills. At weekly sewing parties, the princesses “handed round teacups and cake, and talked away happily” to the ladies. But Lilibet was taken aback that her adored countryside unsettled the evacuees. “The children were terrified of the silence, scared to go into the woods, and frightened if they saw a deer,” Crawfie recalled.
The London skies filled with gray barrage balloons—inflatable devices designed to disrupt low-flying dive bombers. Elizabeth described them as “swimming over our heads like pretty fishes when high & very like elephants & sheep when low!”
At Buckingham Palace, crystal chandeliers in the state rooms were taken down, packed, and sent to the country for storage, along with chinaware, furniture, and precious objects. The famous “gold plate” was removed from the basement strong room and similarly dispatched. The priceless art collection was tagged, catalogued, and buried in distant caves. Sandbags surrounded the Palace, where the guards now wore khaki uniforms and steel helmets instead of the traditional bearskins.
Windsor Castle was similarly fortified, its most valuable contents removed and hidden away. Antiaircraft guns were installed on the grounds and in barrels next to the Thames. Air raid shelters were fitted out in former basement dungeons. Glass-fronted cabinets were emptied and turned to face the walls, while dust sheets were draped over the remaining furniture. Workers lowered the chandeliers close to the floor to minimize breakage from bomb blasts. High-wattage lightbulbs were replaced with low-power substitutes. It took weeks to fully cover the castle’s many windows with blackout paper and paint, along with wire mesh.
Two chambers were dug at the castle to hide the Crown Jewels. Unmarked cars from Garrard jewelers transported them from London to Windsor. There the King and Owen Morshead, the royal librarian, used pliers “to wrench the major gems off their settings.” Wrapped in cotton wool, some jewels ended up in leather hatboxes, while others were tucked into cookie tins.
The King and Queen planned to live at Buckingham Palace “until the raids get bad, then probably to Windsor or further west,” he told Queen Mary. But he decided that his mother was unsafe at Marlborough House or at Sandringham, a potential bombing target with its proximity to the seacoast. The day after the declaration of war, she moved to Gloucestershire to stay with her niece Mary, the Duchess of Beaufort, on the Badminton estate, where she would live for six years. Set on more than fifty thousand acres, Badminton approached Sandringham in scale, with eighteenth-century Palladian elegance. Badminton House had some twenty bedrooms and bathrooms as well as multiple drawing rooms and a massive library.
