Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother

• 1. Introduction

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  Adolf Hitler is said to have called Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother "the most dangerous woman in Europe." The reason, according to the story, was her popularity, which he saw as a threat to German interests. She was born Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon in 1900 and died in 2002. Along the way she became a queen, a widow, and finally the royal matriarch whom Britons called the Queen Mum. This documentary asks how an aristocrat's daughter who doubted royal life came to anchor it. It asks what stood behind the famous cheerfulness in wartime, in grief, and in old age. And it asks what such a long life left behind, both in the public record and in the arguments over her reputation.

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• 2. Glamis and the War

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  Elizabeth was the ninth of ten children and the youngest daughter of Claude Bowes-Lyon, Lord Glamis, who later became the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. Her mother, Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck, descended from a prime minister, the 3rd Duke of Portland. She also descended from Richard Wellesley, a Governor-General of India whose younger brother, the Duke of Wellington, became prime minister too.

  Even the place of Elizabeth's birth is unsettled. Reputedly it was either her parents' Westminster home at Belgrave Mansions or a horse-drawn ambulance on the way to hospital. Forbes House in Ham, the home of her maternal grandmother Louisa Scott, is another candidate. Her birth was registered at Hitchin in Hertfordshire, near the family's English country house, St Paul's Walden Bury. The 1901 and 1911 censuses also gave that house as her birthplace. She was christened at the local church, All Saints, on the 23rd of September.

  Childhood was divided between St Paul's Walden and Glamis Castle, the Earl's ancestral home in Scotland. A governess taught her at home until she was eight, and she loved ponies, dogs and field sports. When she entered a school in London, she startled her teachers by opening an essay with two Greek words from Xenophon's Anabasis. Literature and scripture were her best subjects. Later, under a German Jewish governess named Käthe Kübler, she passed the Oxford Local Examination with distinction at the age of thirteen.

  On Elizabeth's 14th birthday, Britain declared war on Germany, and four of her brothers joined the army. Her elder brother Fergus, an officer in the Black Watch, was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Another brother, Michael, was reported missing on the 28th of April 1917. Three weeks later the family learned that he had been wounded and captured, and he stayed in a prisoner of war camp until the war ended.

  Glamis itself became a convalescent home for wounded soldiers, and Elizabeth helped to run it. A serious fire struck the castle on the 16th of September 1916, and she played a leading part in rescuing its contents. One of the soldiers she nursed wrote in her autograph book that she would be "Hung, drawn, & quartered... Hung in diamonds, drawn in a coach and four, and quartered in the best house in the land."

  Her first love was thought to be Charles Gordon-Lennox, Lord Settrington, whose sister Lady Doris was a close friend. He died of wounds on the 24th of August 1919, while serving as a Royal Fusiliers officer with the North Russia Relief Force. Elizabeth called him "my only true friend" and wrote that he was the one person she could talk to "in a completely natural and simple way." Within two years, a prince of the royal house would ask for her hand.

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• 3. The Reluctant Duchess

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  In 1921, Prince Albert, known to his family as Bertie, proposed to Elizabeth, and she turned him down. He was the second son of King George V and Queen Mary. She was "afraid never, never again to be free to think, speak and act as I feel I really ought to." Albert declared that he would marry no one else. Queen Mary then travelled to Glamis to see the young woman for herself. She left convinced that Elizabeth was "the one girl who could make Bertie happy," yet she refused to interfere. Meanwhile James Stuart, Albert's equerry, was also courting Elizabeth, until he left royal service for a better-paid job in the American oil business.

  In February 1922, Elizabeth was a bridesmaid at the wedding of Albert's sister, Princess Mary, to Viscount Lascelles. The following month Albert proposed again, and again she refused. In January 1923 she finally agreed, despite her misgivings about royal life. His choice carried a message, since princes had previously been expected to marry princesses from other royal families. Elizabeth was a peer's daughter, so the match was read as a gesture toward political modernisation. The engagement ring was platinum, with a Kashmir sapphire flanked by two diamonds.

  The couple married at Westminster Abbey on the 26th of April 1923. On her way in, Elizabeth unexpectedly laid her bouquet at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, in memory of her brother Fergus. She was now styled Her Royal Highness The Duchess of York. The chef Gabriel Tschumi prepared the wedding breakfast at Buckingham Palace. The honeymoon began at Polesden Lacey, a Surrey manor owned by the wealthy socialite Margaret Greville, and moved on to Scotland. There she caught whooping cough, which she called "unromantic."

  A successful visit to Northern Ireland in July 1924 helped persuade the Labour government to approve a tour of East Africa, from December 1924 to April 1925. In November the Conservatives defeated Labour in a general election, which Elizabeth told her mother was "marvellous." Three weeks later, Sir Lee Stack, Governor-General of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, was assassinated. The tour went ahead anyway. It took in Aden, Kenya, Uganda and Sudan, though Egypt was avoided because of political tensions.

  Albert had a stammer that hampered his speeches. From October 1925, Elizabeth helped him through the therapy devised by Lionel Logue. In 1926 she gave birth to their first child, Princess Elizabeth, called "Lilibet" by the family, who would later become Queen Elizabeth II.

  In 1927 the couple sailed to open Parliament House in Canberra, leaving the baby at home. Elizabeth admitted she was "very miserable at leaving the baby." The route ran via Jamaica, the Panama Canal and the Pacific. In Fiji, a stray dog wandered into a line of official guests while she was shaking hands, and she shook its paw as well. In New Zealand she caught a cold and missed some engagements, but she fished in the Bay of Islands with the Australian sports fisherman Harry Andreas. The voyage home, via Mauritius, the Suez Canal, Malta and Gibraltar, nearly ended badly. Their ship caught fire, and they prepared to abandon her before the blaze was brought under control. The whole journey was nonetheless a public relations success.

  Princess Margaret was born at Glamis Castle in 1930. The family first lived at White Lodge in Richmond Park, then moved to 145 Piccadilly. That quieter chapter of family life was about to end.

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• 4. Queen Consort

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  On the 20th of January 1936, George V died, and Edward, Prince of Wales, became King Edward VIII. Albert was now heir presumptive. Within months, Edward's wish to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson caused a constitutional crisis that ended in his abdication. On the 11th of December 1936, Albert reluctantly became king as George VI, and Elizabeth became queen and empress. Their coronation at Westminster Abbey on the 12th of May 1937 used the date once reserved for Edward's. Her crown was platinum and set with the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

  Edward and Wallis became the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Edward kept the style of Royal Highness, but George VI withheld it from Wallis, and Elizabeth supported the decision. She was later quoted calling Wallis "that woman," while Wallis nicknamed her "Cookie," after a supposed resemblance to a fat Scots cook. Elizabeth's close friends denied that she stayed bitter. The Duke of Grafton wrote that she "never said anything nasty about the Duchess of Windsor, except to say she really hadn't got a clue what she was dealing with."

  In the summer of 1938, a state visit to France was delayed by three weeks because Elizabeth's mother had died. Norman Hartnell had two weeks to create an all-white trousseau, since she was still in mourning and could not wear colours. The trip was meant to strengthen Anglo-French solidarity against Nazi Germany. The French press praised the couple's demeanour and charm.

  After the Munich Agreement of 1938 seemed to prevent war, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain joined the King and Queen on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to be cheered by a crowd. Some members of the House of Commons opposed his policy toward Hitler. The historian John Grigg called the King's public association with Chamberlain "the most unconstitutional act by a British sovereign in the present century." Other historians reply that George VI only followed ministerial advice, as he was bound to do. Like most of Parliament and the public, the royal couple supported appeasement, because the First World War had convinced them that war must be avoided at all costs.

  In May and June 1939, Elizabeth and her husband toured Canada from coast to coast and back, the first time a reigning monarch had done so. They also visited the United States and stayed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House and at his Hudson Valley estate. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt judged Elizabeth "perfect as a Queen, gracious, informed, saying the right thing & kind but a little self-consciously regal." The tour aimed to build trans-Atlantic support should war come. It also affirmed Canada as an independent kingdom sharing a monarch with Britain.

  An often-told story has a Boer War veteran asking her, "Are you Scots or are you English?" She answered, "I am a Canadian!" The enthusiastic reception in both countries largely dispelled any lingering sense that the couple were a lesser substitute for Edward VIII. She told the Canadian prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, "that tour made us." She returned to Canada frequently, on official tours and in private.

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• 5. The Blitz Years

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  Shortly after war was declared, The Queen's Book of the Red Cross was conceived. Fifty authors and artists contributed, Cecil Beaton's portrait of Elizabeth fronted it, and sales aided the Red Cross. She also broadcast to the nation, trying to comfort families as children were evacuated and men of fighting age were mobilised.

  The British Cabinet advised her to leave London and send the princesses to Canada, even during the Blitz. She refused, and said so publicly: "The children won't go without me. I won't leave the King. And the King will never leave."

  Elizabeth visited troops, hospitals, factories and bombed districts, above all the East End near London's docks. At first the visits went badly. Crowds jeered and rubbish was thrown at her, partly because her expensive clothes set her apart from people enduring wartime hardship. Her answer was that people put on their best clothes to see her, so she should do the same. Norman Hartnell dressed her in gentle colours and avoided black, to suggest "the rainbow of hope."

  When Buckingham Palace took several hits at the height of the bombing, she said, "I'm glad we've been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face." The palace had lost much of its staff to the army, and most rooms were shut. Blasts shattered the windows, which had to be boarded up. The King and Queen worked there by day, but for security and family reasons they slept at Windsor Castle, about 20 miles west of central London, with their daughters. During the Phoney War, fears of imminent invasion led to the Queen being given revolver training.

  Not everyone admired her. The French prime minister Édouard Daladier described her as "an excessively ambitious young woman who would be ready to sacrifice every other country in the world so that she may remain Queen." When Chamberlain resigned, the King asked Winston Churchill to form a government. George VI was at first suspicious of Churchill's character and motives. In time, the royal couple came to respect and admire him. That bond would matter again after the war.

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• 6. Queen Mother

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  In the 1945 general election, Churchill's Conservatives were soundly defeated by Clement Attlee's Labour Party. Elizabeth rarely disclosed her politics, but a letter from 1947 described Attlee's "high hopes of a socialist heaven on earth" as fading. She wrote of the people who had voted for him as "poor people, so many half-educated and bemused. I do love them." Woodrow Wyatt thought her much more pro-Conservative than other royals. She later told him, "I like the dear old Labour Party," and she told the Duchess of Grafton, "I love communists."

  During the 1947 royal tour of South Africa, her serene public manner broke when she rose from the royal car and struck an admirer with her umbrella. She had mistaken his enthusiasm for hostility.

  The 1948 tour of Australia and New Zealand was postponed because of the King's declining health. In March 1949 he had a successful operation to improve the circulation in his right leg. In the summer of 1951, Elizabeth and her daughters carried out his public engagements for him. In September he was diagnosed with lung cancer. After a lung resection he seemed to recover, and the delayed trip was altered so that Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh went in the King and Queen's place in January 1952. George VI died in his sleep on the 6th of February 1952, while his daughter was in Kenya on a Commonwealth tour. She became Queen Elizabeth II at once.

  The usual style for a king's widow, "Queen Elizabeth," would have been too similar to her daughter's, so Elizabeth became Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. The public shortened it to the Queen Mum. Devastated, she retired to Scotland. After meeting Prime Minister Churchill, however, she ended her retirement and resumed her public duties. Eventually she was as busy as she had been as queen consort.

  In July 1953, she made her first overseas visit since the funeral, to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland with Princess Margaret. She laid the foundation stone of the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, now the University of Zimbabwe. When she returned in 1957, she was inaugurated as the college's president, and other events were deliberately designed to be multi-racial. While Queen Elizabeth II toured the Commonwealth in 1953-54, her mother acted as a counsellor of state and looked after her grandchildren, Charles and Anne. In February 1959 she visited Kenya and Uganda.

  The Castle of Mey, on Scotland's remote north coast, was restored under her direction. She used it to "get away from everything" for three weeks each August and ten days each October. The amateur jockey Lord Mildmay of Flete had inspired her interest in horse racing, particularly steeplechasing, in 1949. She owned the winners of approximately 500 races. Contrary to rumour she never placed bets, but she had the racing commentaries piped to her London residence, Clarence House. As an art collector she bought works by Claude Monet, Augustus John and Peter Carl Fabergé, among others.

  In February 1964, an emergency appendectomy forced her to postpone a tour of Australia, New Zealand and Fiji until 1966. She recuperated on a Caribbean cruise aboard the royal yacht Britannia. In December 1966 she had a tumour removed after a diagnosis of colon cancer. Contrary to later rumours, she did not have a colostomy. In 1984 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and a lump was removed. None of her cancers was made public in her lifetime.

  As a widow she made over forty official visits overseas. In 1975 she visited Iran at the invitation of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The British ambassador, Anthony Parsons, and his wife Sheila noted that Iranians were bemused by her habit of speaking to everyone regardless of rank. They hoped the Shah's entourage would learn to pay more attention to ordinary people. From 1976 to 1984 she visited France every summer, among 22 private trips to continental Europe between 1963 and 1992.

  In 1982, a fish bone stuck in her throat and she was rushed to hospital for an operation. A keen angler, she joked calmly afterwards, "The salmon have got their own back." Similar scares followed. In August 1986 at Balmoral she spent a night in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary without needing surgery. In May 1993 she was admitted there for surgery under general anaesthetic.

  In 1987, Elizabeth was criticised when it emerged that two of her nieces, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, had been committed to a psychiatric hospital in Redhill, Surrey, in 1941. Both had severe learning disabilities. Burke's Peerage had listed the sisters as dead, apparently because their mother, Fenella, was "extremely vague" when filling in forms. When Nerissa died in 1986, her grave was first marked only with a plastic tag and a serial number. Elizabeth said the news of their institutionalisation came as a surprise to her. Her 90th birthday, three years later, would bring a very different kind of public attention.

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• 7. Centenarian

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  Her 90th birthday, on the 4th of August 1990, was celebrated with a parade on the 27th of June. It involved many of the 300 organisations of which she was patron. In 1995 she attended events marking fifty years since the end of the war, and had two operations, removing a cataract from her left eye and replacing her right hip. In 1998 she slipped during a visit to the Sandringham stables, broke her left hip, and had it replaced.

  Her 100th birthday brought a parade with contributions from Sir Norman Wisdom and Sir John Mills. The Royal Bank of Scotland issued a commemorative £20 note bearing her image. At a lunch at the Guildhall in London, George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, accidentally tried to drink her glass of wine. Her quick "That's mine!" caused widespread amusement. In November 2000 she broke her collarbone in a fall, and recovered at home over Christmas and the New Year.

  On the 1st of August 2001, she had a blood transfusion for anaemia after mild heat exhaustion. Three days later she was still well enough to make her traditional appearance outside Clarence House on her 101st birthday. Her final public engagements included planting a cross at the Field of Remembrance on the 8th of November 2001. On the 15th of November she attended a Guildhall reception for the re-formation of 600 Squadron, Royal Auxiliary Air Force.

  In December 2001, aged 101, she fractured her pelvis in a fall. Even so, she insisted on standing for the national anthem at the memorial service for her husband on the 6th of February 2002. Three days later, Princess Margaret died. On the 13th of February, Elizabeth fell in her sitting room at Sandringham House and cut her arm. An ambulance and a doctor were called, and the wound was dressed.

  She was still determined to attend Margaret's funeral at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, two days later. Queen Elizabeth II and the family worried about the journey from Norfolk, and she was rumoured to be hardly eating. She flew to Windsor by helicopter. She hated being seen in a wheelchair, so she insisted on being shielded from the press. She travelled to the service in a people carrier with blacked-out windows that Margaret had previously used.

  On the 5th of March 2002, she attended the lunch at the annual lawn party of the Eton Beagles and watched the Cheltenham Races on television. Her health then deteriorated sharply after she retreated to Royal Lodge for the last time. She died there at 3:15 pm on the 30th of March 2002, with Queen Elizabeth II by her side. A chest cold had troubled her since Christmas 2001. At 101 years and 238 days, she was the longest-living member of the British royal family to that date and the first to pass 100. Her sister-in-law Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, later exceeded that, dying at 102 on the 29th of October 2004.

  Elizabeth grew camellias in each of her gardens, and an arrangement from them lay on her flag-draped coffin when it left Windsor for Westminster Hall. An estimated 200,000 people filed past over three days as she lay in state. Members of the Household Cavalry and other branches of the armed forces guarded the four corners of the catafalque. At one point her four grandsons, Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward and Viscount Linley, took the guard. It was an honour similar to the Vigil of the Princes at the lying in state of George V.

  On the day of the funeral, the 9th of April, Canada's governor general, Adrienne Clarkson, issued a proclamation asking Canadians to honour her memory. In Sydney, the Australian Governor-General, Peter Hollingworth, read the lesson at a memorial service in St Andrew's Cathedral. In London, more than a million people filled the area outside Westminster Abbey and lined the 23-mile route to St George's Chapel. She was laid to rest in the King George VI Memorial Chapel, beside her husband and younger daughter. At her request, the wreath from her coffin was then placed on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, 79 years after her wedding-day gesture.

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• 8. Legacy

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  Elizabeth was one of the most popular members of the royal family, and she helped to steady the popularity of the monarchy as a whole. In his official biography, William Shawcross credits her indomitable optimism, zest for life, good manners, mischievous humour and wide curiosity for her popularity and longevity. Sir Hugh Casson compared her to "a wave breaking on a rock." On the surface she was sweet and charming, but beneath it lay "a basic streak of toughness and tenacity."

  Sir Peter Ustinov recalled a student demonstration at the University of Dundee in 1968. Students pelted the royal party with toilet rolls while holding one end of each. Elizabeth stopped and picked the rolls up as though someone had misplaced them, then asked, "Was this yours? Oh, could you take it?" In Ustinov's telling, her refusal to be shocked silenced the students.

  Emine Saner of The Guardian described her daily routine as gin and Dubonnet at noon, red wine with lunch, a port and a martini at 6 pm, and two glasses of champagne at dinner. A conservative estimate, Saner suggested, put her at 70 units of alcohol a week. Journalists were amused when it emerged that she had a multi-million pound overdraft with Coutts Bank. The satirical 1980s television programme Spitting Image also parodied her habits. The makers initially hesitated, fearing that most viewers would consider her off-limits. In the end it portrayed her as a perpetually tipsy Beryl Reid soundalike, the first satirical depiction of her on television.

  Eight years before her death, she reportedly placed two-thirds of her money, an estimated £19 million, into trusts for her great-grandchildren. She received £643,000 a year from the Civil List and spent an estimated £1-2 million annually on her household. By the end of the 1990s her overdraft was said to be around £4 million. She left the bulk of her estate, estimated at £50-70 million, to Queen Elizabeth II. It included paintings, Fabergé eggs, jewellery and horses. Under a 1993 agreement, property passing from a monarch to a monarch, or from a former monarch's consort to the current monarch, is exempt from inheritance tax. That spared a bill estimated at £28 million, or 40 percent of the estate's value. Queen Elizabeth II transferred the most important artworks to the Royal Collection. She also applied successfully to the High Court to keep the details of her mother's will secret. Labour politicians and parts of the public criticised that, and she eventually released the outlines.

  Kitty Kelley alleged that Elizabeth ignored wartime rationing. Official records contradict this, and Eleanor Roosevelt, during her wartime stay at Buckingham Palace, reported on the rationed food served there and the limited bathwater. Claims that Elizabeth used racist slurs were strongly denied by Major Colin Burgess. His wife, Elizabeth Burgess, a mixed-race secretary, had accused members of Prince Charles's household of racial abuse. Elizabeth made no public comment on race. According to Robert Rhodes James, in private she "abhorred racial discrimination" and called apartheid "dreadful." Woodrow Wyatt's diary records that when he said non-white countries had nothing in common with "us," she answered, "I am very keen on the Commonwealth. They're all like us." She did distrust Germans, telling Wyatt, "Never trust them, never trust them." It has been argued that such views were normal for British people of her generation, who had lived through two vicious wars with Germany.

  Actors who have played her include Juliet Aubrey in Bertie and Elizabeth, Sylvia Syms in The Queen, Natalie Dormer in W.E. and Olivia Colman in Hyde Park on Hudson. In The Crown the role passed from Victoria Hamilton to Marion Bailey to Marcia Warren. Helena Bonham Carter played her in the 2010 film The King's Speech. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and won a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

  A Cunard White Star liner was named after her, and she launched it at Clydebank, Scotland, on the 27th of September 1938. Supposedly the ship began to slide into the water before she could officially launch it. Acting sharply, she smashed a bottle of Australian red over the bow just before it slid out of reach. In 1954 she sailed to New York on her namesake. On the 24th of February 2009, a statue of her by the sculptor Philip Jackson was unveiled in front of the George VI Memorial, off The Mall in London.

  In March 2011, details of the small record collection she kept at the Castle of Mey were made public. It held ska, local folk and Scottish reels, the musicals Oklahoma! and The King and I, and artists such as the yodeller Montana Slim, Tony Hancock, The Goons and Noël Coward. Her musical taste, it turned out, was eclectic.

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