Another effect was to give Elizabeth a companion, and the public an additional character on which to build an ever-evolving fantasy. The Yorks were now a neatly symmetrical family, the inter-war ideal. There were no more children to spoil the balance, or dilute the cast. After the birth of Margaret Rose, 145 Piccadilly acquired a settled, tranquil, comforting air, and the image of it became a fixed point in the national and imperial psyche. When people imagined getting married and setting up a home, they thought of the Yorks. The modest, reserved, quietly proud father, the practical, child-centred mother, the well-mannered, well-groomed daughters; the ponies, dogs and open air; the servants dealing with the chores, tactfully out of sight; the lack of vanity, ambition, or doubt – all represented, for Middle England and its agents overseas, a distillation of British wholesomeness.
It did not matter that the Yorks were not ‘the Royal Family’ – that the Duke was not the King, or ever likely to be. Indeed, it helped that they were sufficiently removed from the ceremonial and servility of the Court to lead comprehensible lives, and for their daughters to have the kind of fancy-filled yet soundly based childhood that every boy and girl, and many adults, yearned for. At a time of poverty and uncertainty for millions, the York princesses in their J. M. Barrie-like London home and country castles stood for safety and permanence. The picture magazines showed them laughing, relaxed, perpetually hugging or stroking pets, always apart from their peers, doll-like mascots to adorn school and bedroom walls. Children often wrote to them, as if they were playmates, or sisters: little girls they already knew. Story books spun homely little tales around their lives, helping to incorporate them as imaginary friends in ordinary families.
The most dramatic attempt to appropriate them for ordinariness occurred in 1932, with the erection of a thatched cottage, two-thirds natural size, by ‘the people of Wales,’ as a present for Princess Elizabeth on her sixth birthday. This remarkable object made an implicit point, for no part of the United Kingdom had suffered more terrible unemployment than the mining valleys of the principality. Built exclusively by Welsh labour out of Welsh materials, it provided a stirring demonstration of the ingenuity of a workforce whose skills were tragically wasted. At the same time – loyally and movingly – its creators sought to connect the lives of the little Princess and her baby sister to those of thousands of children who inhabited real cottages. The point, however, could not be too political, and an abode, even an imitation one, intended for a princess had to be filled with greater luxuries than average families ever experienced.
Great efforts were made to ensure that it conformed to the specifications of a real home. Electric lights were installed, and the contents included a tiny radio, a little oak dresser and tiny china set, linen with the initial ‘E’, and a portrait of the Duchess of York over the dining-room mantelpiece. The house also contained little books, pots and pans, food cans, brooms, and a packet of Epsom salts, a radio licence and an insurance policy, all made to scale. The bathroom had a heated towel rail. In the kitchen, the reduced-size gas cooker, copper and refrigerator worked, and hot water came out of the tap in the sink.
It was scarcely a surprise present. Months of publicity preceded its completion. There was also a near-disastrous mishap. When the house was finished and in transit, the tarpaulin protecting it caught fire, and the thatched roof and many of the timbers were destroyed. Though some felt it lucky that the incendiary nature of the materials had been discovered before, and not after, the Princess was inside, the project was not abandoned. Instead, indefatigable craftsmen worked day and night to repair the damage and apply a fire-resistant coating, in time to display the renovated house at the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia.3 Then it was reconstructed in Windsor Great Park for the birthday girl, and became a favourite plaything.
Whatever Elizabeth may have made of the house’s message, she and her sister were soon using it for the purpose for which it was intended: to exercise and display their ordinariness. Elizabeth was ‘a very neat child,’ according to her governess, and the Welsh house provided an excellent opportunity to show it. The two girls spent happy hours cleaning, dusting and tidying their special home.4 Thousands of people who had experienced a vicarious contact with royalty by inspecting the cottage when it was on public show, were later able to enjoy a series of photographs of the elfin princesses, filling the doorway of ‘Y Bwthyn Bach’ – the Little House – not just as children but as Peter Pan adults, miniaturized in a securely diminutive world, the perfect setting for the fantasy of ‘royal simplicity’. The contrast between the oriental extravagance of the structure – fabulously costly in design, equipment, production and delivery – and the games that were to be played in it, highlighted the triumphant paradox.
It was also, of course, a female artefact, a point made by Lisa Sheridan, when the children proudly took her on a tour in 1936:
In the delightful panelled living-room everything was in its proper place. Not a speck of dust anywhere! Brass and silver shone brilliantly. Everything which could be folded was neatly put away. The household brushes and the pots and pans all hung in their places. Surely this inspired toy provided an ideal domestic training for children in an enchanted world . . . Everything in the elegantly furnished house had been reduced, as if by magic, to those enchanting proportions so endearing to the heart of a woman. How much more so to those young princesses whose status fitted so perfectly the surroundings?5
Y Bwthyn Bach gave Elizabeth a Welsh dimension. A Scottish one was provided shortly afterwards by the appointment, early in 1933, of a governess from north of the border, Marion Crawford. In a sense, of course, Elizabeth was already half-Scottish, and it was the Scottish networks of the Duchess of York that had led to the appointment. However Miss Crawford belonged to a different kind of Scotland from the one known to the Bowes-Lyons, or – for that matter – to the kilt-wearing Windsor dynasty. A twenty-two-year-old recent graduate of the Moray House Training College in Edinburgh, she came from a formidable stratum: the presbyterian lower middle class.
Miss Crawford stayed with the Yorks, later the Royal Family, teaching, guiding and providing companionship to both girls for fourteen years, until she married in 1947, shortly before the wedding of Princess Elizabeth. Three years later, she published a detailed account of her experiences in the royal service, against the express wishes of the Palace. ‘She snaked,’ is how a member of the Royal Family describes her behaviour today.6 Perhaps it was the incongruity of a woman from such a background betraying, for financial gain, the trust that had been placed in her (as her employers came to see it) which accounted for the anger that was felt. She was not the last to snake, but she was the pioneer. Marion Crawford was soon known as ‘Crawfie’ to the princesses: ‘doing a Crawfie’ became an expression for selling family secrets, especially royal ones, acquired during a period of personal service. To the modern reader, however, Miss Crawford’s Little Princesses is a singularly inoffensive work. Composed with the help of a ghost writer in a gushing Enid Blyton, or possibly Beverley Nichols, style, it does not destroy the Never-Never-Land mythology of 145 Piccadilly, but embraces it. Love, duty and sacrifice are the currency of daily life, and everybody always acts from the best of motives. Yet the book also has perceptiveness – and the ring of authenticity. Although effusively loyal in tone, it reveals a sharp and sometimes critical eye, and opinions which were not always official ones.
It shows a character with just enough of a rebellious edge to make the subsequent ‘betrayal’ explicable. Until she became notorious, Crawfie and her presence at the Yorks’ hearth were regarded in the press (perhaps rightly) as evidence of the Bowes-Lyon belief in no-nonsense training for young girls. According to The Times on the occasion of Princess Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday, Miss Crawford ‘upheld through the years of tutelage the standards of simple living and honest thinking that Scotland peculiarly respects’.7 When the Duke of York became King, she was also felt to provide a politically useful bond between the kingdoms. The most important point about Crawfie, however, which