Princess Elizabeth’s other recreations were also uncompromisingly those of royalty and the landed aristocracy. Like her grandfather, father and mother, she was relentless in her pursuit of the fauna on the Sandringham and Balmoral estates. She did not use a shotgun, but she became skilled with a rifle, and in stalking deer during Scottish holidays. One report described how, while staying on the Invernesshire estate of Lord Elphinstone, the Queen’s brother-in-law, in October 1946, the twenty-year-old Princess followed a stag through the forest, ‘aimed with steadiness and brought down the animal,’ which turned out to be a twelve-pointer.28 It was a sport for which she was well-equipped. After visiting Balmoral during the war, King Peter of Yugoslavia, Alexandra’s husband, expressed admiration at the quality of the rifle she lent him.29 Later, Porchey gave her a .22 rifle as a present.
The pace quickened at the end of the war, in shooting as in everything else. Aubrey (now Lord) Buxton, a Norfolk neighbour who became a close friend of the royal couple – and who later helped to inspire Philip’s interest in wildlife and conservation – described one extraordinary day’s shooting at Balmoral, a fortnight after the Japanese surrender. A royal house party, headed by the Monarch, set itself the task of killing as wide a range of different birds and animals as possible. The King set out in search of ptarmigan, somebody else had to catch a salmon and a trout, and so on. After a hard day, the final bag in the game book was 1 pheasant, 12 partridges, 1 mountain hare, 1 brown hare, 3 rabbits, 1 woodcock, 1 snipe, 1 wild duck, 1 stag, 1 roe deer, 2 pigeons, 2 black game, 17 grouse, 2 capercailzie, 6 ptarmigan, 2 salmon, 1 trout, 1 heron and a sparrow hawk. Princess Elizabeth was the proud dispatcher of the stag.30
Margaret did not share Elizabeth’s sporting enthusiasms – one of the factors which led to the growth of different and contrasting circles of friends. To some extent, despite the age gap, their circles overlapped. Weekend parties in the mid-1940s included the heirs to great titles, who were regarded as potential husbands for either of them. Names like Blandford, Dalkeith, Rutland, Euston, Westmorland tended to crop up. ‘There was a good deal of speculation,’ an ex-courtier remembers, ‘about whether any of them would do.’ When Philip became a fixture, the circles diverged. Margaret began to attract a smarter set: her friends thought of themselves as gaier, wilder, wittier, and regarded Elizabeth’s as grand, conventional and dull.
As well as the gap in interests, the distinction reflected a difference in temperament. ‘Princess Margaret loved being amused,’ suggests one of her friends, ‘in a way that her sister didn’t.’ It was also a product of the princesses’ contrasting relationship with the King. Elizabeth, the introvert, had been brought up to be responsible; Margaret, the extrovert, to be pretty, entertaining and fun. ‘George VI had a strong concern for Princess Elizabeth,’ says the same source, ‘but he had a more fatherly attitude towards her sister. I remember him leaning on a piano when she was singing light-hearted songs, with an adoring look, thinking it was frightfully funny.’ While Margaret reached out to people, Elizabeth seemed never to give much away. A lady-in-waiting recalls her, in the mid–1940s, as ‘very charming, but very quiet and shy – much more shy than later.’31 Colville formed a similar impression. ‘Princess Elizabeth has the sweetest of characters,’ he recorded, shortly after joining her, ‘but she is not easy to talk to, except when one sits next to her at dinner, and her worth, which I take to be very real, is not on the surface.’32
The impression of Princess Elizabeth is of a strangely poised young person used to going her own way, which tended to be the way of her class rather than of her age group, and making few concessions to fashion. Yet the sense of her as highly conventional – in contrast to her sister – depends partly on the vantage-point and the generation of the observer. Simon Phipps, friendly with Margaret when he was a theological student and young clergyman, and who later became Bishop of Lincoln, remembers the stiffness of royal protocol, including having to change twice in the evening (once for tea, and again for dinner), and turning at table when the Monarch turned. But he also recalls happy games of charades, including an anarchic one in which he was cast as a bishop, and the King as his chaplain.33 When Lady Airlie, Queen Mary’s friend and lady-in-waiting, visited Sandringham in January 1946, what shocked her was the extent of change since before the war. She found youth in control, with jig-saw puzzles set out on a baize-covered table in the entrance hall. ‘The younger members of the party – the princesses, Lady Mary Cambridge, Mrs Gibbs and several young guardsmen congregated round them from morning to night,’ she noted. ‘The radio, worked by Princess Elizabeth, blared incessantly.’ No orders or medals were worn at dinner, as they had been in the old days, and the girls related to their parents with – to Lady Airlie – startling informality. Modernity was also visible ‘in the way both sisters teased, and were teased by, the young Guardsmen.’34
Teasing and teased Guards Officers were, however, only one aspect of their lives. The chasm that divided the King’s daughters from the young men and women they were able to meet socially, widened early in 1947 when they accompanied their parents on a major tour of southern Africa which attracted world attention, and set the stage for Princess Elizabeth’s début as a fully-fledged royal performer.
The end of the war had given a brief, almost paradoxical, boost to the imperial ideal. Partly, it was an effect of sheer survival – defending the Empire had been one of the causes for which the war had been fought. Britain’s near-bankruptcy had made the vision of a shared, transoceanic loyalty all the more necessary to national self-esteem: a necessity which the granting of self-government to India seemed, if anything, to increase. At the same time, the British Government was aware that the bonds that tied together the Commonwealth were in need of repair. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of Pretoria, capital of a Union still bitterly divided between English-speakers and Afrikaners.
Officially, the tour – which involved a total of four months’ travel – was supposed to be a chance for the King and Queen to rest after the ordeal of war. In practice, the schedule prepared for the Royal Family was strenuous, and the objectives highly political. Wheeler-Bennett later called it a ‘great imperial mission’35. That was one way of describing it. From the South African point of view, the visit was (in the words of another historian) ‘essentially a mission to save Smuts and the Crown of South Africa’.36 English-speakers were enthusiastic about it, Afrikaners on the other hand, were cynical – seeing George VI (according to the High Commissioner, in a telegram to the Palace) ‘as the symbol of the “Empire-bond” which they had pledged themselves to break.’ General Smuts was accused of having arranged the trip in order to rally the English section round him for the coming general election.37 But there was also something else, which in one sense made nationalist Boers right to be suspicious: the royal trip had an ‘imperial’ aspect that went beyond the attempt to improve relations with the Union. South Africa was important in a new ‘multi-cultural’ definition of the Commonwealth – in the light of Indian independence – because it was the only ‘white’ dominion that was in reality predominantly black. The royal visit was to be a way of showing Windsor and Westminster interest in what one (pro-British) Natal paper described as ‘the complex problems of race relationships – problems which are certain to assume an increasing importance in the years ahead,’ in the many countries which owed allegiance to the Crown.38
These factors, however, were not the ones that got the most publicity. In the eyes of the world, the tour also had a personal and dynastic interest: Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would be apart for four