Would Edward VIII, had he lasted, have been selfish and truculent in wartime, or would he have risen to the occasion? It is an interesting speculation. As it was, the stammering King whom some had believed could not survive the ordeal of being crowned, seemed able to adapt in war, as in peace, to the requirements of his job. These consisted mainly of being photographed, taking part in public ceremonies, and personally bestowing honours – sometimes, because of the fighting, decorating several hundred servicemen in a single session. It also involved, and this was an especially vital role, making important visitors feel pleased to have had the opportunity of meeting him and his family. Surprisingly, this became something that George VI was particularly good at. The strange combination of his own social ineptitude, the Queen’s ability to make whoever she addressed feel that they were the one person to whom she wished to speak, and their daughters’ lack of affectation, provided a recipe for putting people at their ease.
Were they as genuinely pleased to see an endless flow of visitors as they seemed, or was it all act? Noël Coward asked himself this question after experiencing what he called ‘an exhibition of unqualified “niceness” from all concerned’ during a meeting with the Royal Family in 1942. He concluded that it did not matter. Putting oneself out was part of the job of royalty. ‘I’ll settle for anyone who does their job well, anyhow.’23 Few others, however, came away feeling that it was just for show. For most who encountered the Family informally, the wonder of being in the presence of Monarchy in an Empire at war was combined with an uplifting sense of inclusion, as if they themselves were family members. The result was a miasma of shared affection, of which the grateful visitor felt both spectator and part. When Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia (herself a refugee) met them in 1944, she immediately decided that ‘this was the sort of home life I wanted, with children and dogs playing at my feet.’24 General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who spent a shooting weekend with them in Norfolk in the same year, came away with a similar feeling – recording his impression of ‘one of the very best examples of family life. A thoroughly close-knit and happy family all wrapped up in each other.’25
Nobody referred, in their descriptions of the King, to his intellectual capacities, his political judgement, or his knowledge of the war. Yet so far from being a handicap, George VI’s limitations – and his awareness of them – were turned into a precious source of strength. One Gentleman Usher fondly described him as ‘a plodder’ – a man of simple ideas, with a strong sense of what he ought to do. Much was made of such decent ordinariness, which meant confronting what others had to face without complaint – and included such self-denials as not seeking to escape the Blitz, or trying to give his daughters a privileged immunity from danger by sending them with other rich children to Canada. It also meant frugality, and strict obedience to government rules – a topic which played a major part in the use of royalty for propaganda. Thus, in April 1940, the public was informed that at the celebration of Princess Elizabeth’s fourteenth birthday, the Queen had decreed that the three-tier anniversary cake should be limited to plain sponge, as an economy.26 There were many tales of economy with clothing coupons, and of how the Queen cut down and altered her own dresses for Elizabeth, adapting these in turn for Margaret, so that ‘with the three of us, we manage in relays’.27 This was not just for public consumption. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited Buckingham Palace late in 1942, she found an adherence to heat, water and food restrictions that was almost a fetish. Broken window panes in her bedroom had been replaced with wood, and her bath had a painted black line above which she was not supposed to run the water.28
Nevertheless, there remained a wide gulf between the life lived by the Royal Family, with their houses, parks and horses, and retinue of servants, and the conditions of their subjects. After a bomb struck the Palace, the Queen was supposed to have said: ‘Now we can look the East End in the face’. The East End, however, was not able to retreat to Windsor to catch up on sleep, or to spend recuperative holidays in Norfolk and Scotland. Nor was the East End able to supplement its diet with pheasants and venison shot on the royal estates.
Indeed some aspects of royal life went on remarkably undisturbed. There was little interruption to the riding lessons given to the princesses by Horace Smith, which continued throughout the war. Training with Smith involved pony carts, which (as he later observed) had the particular advantage in wartime that journeys in them did not require petrol. With future troop-reviewing in mind, Smith also taught Princess Elizabeth to ride side-saddle. Occasions for demonstrating equestrian prowess did not cease, either. In 1943, Smith personally awarded Princess Elizabeth first prize in the Royal Windsor Horse Show for her driving of a ‘utility vehicle,’ harnessed to her own black Fell pony – a trophy she won again the following year, both times in the presence of the King and Queen.29
Watching was a developing interest, as well as riding or driving. In the spring of 1942, the Princess was taken by her parents to the Beckhampton stables on the Wiltshire Downs, where horses bred at the royal studs were trained, to see two royal horses, Big Game and Sun Chariot, which were highly fancied for the Derby and the Oaks. The jockey Sir Gordon Richards later recalled his meeting with the sixteen-year-old girl ‘who took them all in’, and was quizzed about them by her father as they worked, causing the royal trainer Fred Darling to remark loyally ‘that Princess Elizabeth must have a natural eye for a horse’. Visits to see the mares and foals at the royal stud at Hampton Court, and to see the royal horses in training at Newmarket followed.30
Other pursuits also involved opportunities not available to most compatriots. In October 1942, Princess Elizabeth made her contribution to the royal larder by shooting her first stag in the hills at Balmoral – using a rifle she had been taught to handle the previous year.31 In the autumn of 1943, she hunted with the Garth Foxhounds, and later with the Duke of Beaufort’s Hounds in Gloucestershire.32 The decision to allow her to go hunting was taken, according to a report, ‘in accord with the general policy of making her life as “normal” as possible’ in the light of her position as Heiress Presumptive.33
There were also private entertainments. The King, despite his shyness, was a good dancer, and especially enjoyed dancing in the company of his children. He did not allow the war to curtail this particular pastime. A number of royal balls were held. Princess Elizabeth attended her first at Windsor in July 1941, when she was fifteen. A West End dance band played foxtrots, waltzes and rumbas to the Royal Family and their guests, who included Guards officers, until two in the morning, and Elizabeth danced several times with her father.34 Later in the war, before the start of flying bombs in 1944, dances were held fortnightly in the Bow Room on the ground floor at Buckingham Palace. On one occasion the King, oblivious to cares of state, his stammer forgotten, led his family and other guests in a conga line through the corridors and state rooms.35
FOR MAXIMUM BENEFIT to the war effort, the privacy of the Royal Family needed to be less than complete. If life at Windsor and Buckingham Palace had been simply private, its exemplary virtues could scarcely have been known to loyal subjects. For this reason, as The Times observed just after the end of the war, ‘many glimpses’ of the Royal Family’s home life had ‘reached a wide public, through illustrated journals and the cinema’.36 One avid supplier to the illustrated journals, and propagator of royal mythology, was the photographer Lisa Sheridan who, by her own testimony, never failed to come away from a professional visit to the Royal Family without feeling a better person. Her recollections of the princesses in wartime are interesting not only because her pictures of wagging puppy tails, happy children and proud parents became fixed in the Empire’s imagination, but also because she provides a distillation of the ‘family of families’ miasma in its purest form.
In her memoirs, Mrs Sheridan described several wartime trips to see the princesses. Her account of the first, to Royal Lodge in early 1940, reflected the official line of the phoney war period, that the enemy had done little to change the traditional British