The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (18 page)

When King George VI and his ministers heard that Hitler had set August 1940 for his planned invasion of Britain, the Queen immediately commissioned John Piper to paint a series of pictures of Windsor Castle, ‘so that it would be remembered as it was if the worst happened’. The paintings that Piper produced hang in Clarence House to this day. Hitler’s plan was to destroy London and kill or capture the King, and he and Queen Elizabeth were advised to take their two young daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, and evacuate to the safety of Canada or the United States. ‘The children won’t go without me,’ was the Queen’s famous reply. ‘I won’t leave without the King. And the King will never leave.’

She sent the children to the comparative safety of Windsor Castle but she and the King stayed on in Buckingham Palace for the remainder of the war. There were other, safer houses in London, less obvious from the air, which they could have used but George VI refused to move. Ordinary Londoners didn’t have the option of moving out of their homes; remaining in Buckingham Palace was a visible and potent gesture of solidarity with the people.

But it wasn’t safe. The Blitz began on 7 September 1940
and during the first night two hundred German planes bombed London, killing four hundred people and seriously wounding 4357. During the following years Buckingham Palace suffered nine direct hits from German bombs and the damage sustained was extensive. The swimming pool was hit, leaving a crater fifteen feet wide, ceilings came down, glass was broken and windows shattered; there was damage to the roof and the ground floor, to a conservatory, the West Front and lawn, the quadrangle, the forecourt and gardens, and the North Lodge was entirely demolished, killing a policeman. An equerry who had fought in the trenches during the First World War described the night when ‘this great house continuously shook like a jelly … for two or three hours it was like a front-line trench under bombardment’.

In one attack on 13 September the King and Queen had a lucky escape. They had just returned to Buckingham Palace at about 10.45 and had gone to their rooms on the first floor to collect a few odds and ends before going down to the air-raid shelter in the basement. They delayed a moment while the Queen removed an eyelash from the King’s eye, and, as she did so, a German bomber flew under low clouds straight up the Mall in broad daylight and launched a direct attack on the Palace. ‘At this moment we heard the unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German plane,’ said the Queen in a letter to her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, the next day. ‘We said “ah, a German”, and before anything else could be said, there was the noise of an aircraft diving at great speed, and then the scream of a bomb. It all happened so quickly that we had only time to look foolishly at each other, when the scream hurtled past us, and exploded with a tremendous crash in the quadrangle … Then there was another tremendous explosion … Then came a cry for “bandages”. My knees trembled a little
bit for a minute or two after the explosions!’ The King and Queen then calmly retreated to the basement for lunch, where the chef, when asked by the Queen if he was all right, said with a broad smile, there had been ‘
une petite quelque chose dans le coin, un petit bruit
’. The ‘
petite quelque chose
’ was the bomb demolishing the chapel next door – which today houses the Queen’s Gallery.

When the all-clear sounded at 1.30 the King and Queen set off to visit the East End of London, where the bombing and the casualties had been heaviest. ‘I’m glad we’ve been bombed,’ said the Queen. ‘It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.’ Her lady-in-waiting remarked, ‘When we saw the devastation there, we were ashamed even of the glass of sherry we had had after the bang.’ Describing the visit to Queen Mary, the Queen wrote:

The damage there is ghastly. I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city, when we walked down a little empty street. All the houses evacuated and yet through the broken windows one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds just as they were left. At the end of the street is a school which was hit, and collapsed on the top of five hundred people waiting to be evacuated – about two hundred are still under the ruins. It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction. I think that really I mind it much more than being bombed myself. The people are marvellous, and full of fight. One could not imagine that life
could
become so terrible. We
must
win in the end.

Day after day she and the King toured blitzed areas of Britain, travelling by train to those cities and communities that had been bombed, arriving as soon as possible after the air raids
to comfort those who had lost relatives, friends and possessions. ‘The war’, in Winston Churchill’s words, was to draw ‘the Throne and the people more closely together than was ever recorded’. From its outbreak the Queen had been quick to visit Civil Defence points, Red Cross centres, hospitals, factories and troops. She made a point of dressing in her most cheerful clothes and went from group to group boosting morale and giving her support to local and national efforts to raise money or set up welfare schemes to help people who were homeless and hungry. The King visited troops; he travelled to France in 1939, to North Africa in 1943 after the victory at El Alamein and he was kept informed about the plans for D-Day. ‘Once more a supreme test has to be faced,’ he said in a broadcast to the nation on 6 June 1944. ‘This time the challenge is not to fight to survive but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause.’ Cornelius Ryan described the extraordinary flotilla that carried the troops on to the Normandy beaches in
The Longest Day
:

They came, rank after relentless rank, ten lanes wide, twenty miles across, five thousand ships of every description. There were fast new attack transports, slow rust-scarred freighters, small ocean liners, Channel steamers, hospital ships, weather-beaten tankers, coasters and swarms of fussing tugs. There were endless columns of shallow-draft landing ships – great wallowing vessels, some of them almost 350 feet long … Ahead of the convoys were processions of mine sweepers, Coast Guard cutters, buoy-layers and motor launches. Barrage balloons flew above the ships. Squadrons of fighter planes weaved below the clouds. And surrounding this fantastic cavalcade of ships packed with men, guns, tanks, motor vehicles and supplies … was a formidable array of 702 warships.

Ten days later King George VI was there, visiting his Army on the Normandy beaches as they fought to liberate Western Europe from Nazi rule.

Being there, being visible, showing his support, sharing the danger – and being bombed in his home as others were being bombed – was an important part of sustaining morale during the terrible years of war. As Lord Mountbatten said to the King, ‘If Goering could have realized the depths of feeling which his bombing of Buckingham Palace has aroused throughout the Empire and America, he would have been well advised to instruct his assassins to keep off.’ The King and Queen symbolically held the country together; they supported, encouraged, thanked, praised and commiserated with their subjects. They united the nation under threat from the enemy. The troops felt proud to be fighting for King and country, and the citizens at home were comforted to know that the King and Queen were there for them. As one of the survivors of the devastating air raid on Coventry in November 1940 said, ‘We suddenly felt that if the King was there everything was all right and the rest of England was behind us.’

Sixty years later, on 6 June 2004, it was the King’s daughter who stood on a dais in the town square at the coastal town of Arromanches-les-Bains, in Normandy, and, with the Duke of Edinburgh beside her, took the salute while eight hundred soldiers, sailors and airmen, a sea of white hair, berets, blazers and regimental badges – the last survivors from that remarkable D-Day operation, proud liberators of Europe – marched past their Queen in a stirring and emotional climax to the 60th anniversary commemorations.

‘What for you is a haunting memory of danger and sacrifice one summer long ago,’ she told them, ‘is for your country, and for generations of your countrymen to come, one of the proudest moments in our long national history.

‘I take it upon myself to express the immense debt of gratitude we owe to you all. I salute you and thank you on behalf of our whole nation.’

She praised the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which looks after the graves of more than 22,000 Commonwealth servicemen who died fighting in Normandy. The sacrifice of those who died or who were wounded ‘must never be forgotten’, she said. Neither should ‘the courage and fortitude and the dogged determination of the hundreds of thousands of servicemen who landed on the beaches on that day and then fought their way inland in the face of determined opposition’. And she quoted her father from his broadcast sixty years before.

It was stirring, emotional stuff, fuelled by a fly-past of the Battle of Britain memorial flight – the Lancaster, Spitfire, Hurricane and DC 3 Dakota – the Red Arrows with their vapour trails of red, white and blue; while on the ground cheers for ‘Her Majesty’ and the mournful lament of bagpipes, the bugles and drums of the Royal Irish Regiment band and the King’s Division Band sent tingles down more than a few heroic spines.

At moments such as this, there is no question about what the monarchy is for; the pride on the faces of those old soldiers, their pleasure that the sacrifices they had made in their youth and their bravery all those years ago were being recognized and appreciated by their Queen on behalf of their country said it all. They hadn’t fought for the Prime Minister or for a political party or ideology. They had fought for their King and country and to preserve the freedom and way of life for which their fathers before them had fought. And those fathers and mothers, grandparents, wives and children who lived through five years of fear, of rationing, bereavement and hardship while Britain was at war understood what monarchy was all about,
too. When the King and Queen visited their bombed-out houses and offered comfort and concern for their loss they felt they were not alone.

Before her appearance at Arromanches, the Queen had laid a wreath at Courseulles-sur-Mer to commemorate Canada’s role in the Normandy landings, she had reviewed a Guard of Honour, attended a service of commemoration in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Bayeux alongside President Chirac of France and had lunch with heads of state; she met and talked to veterans at every stop. Most members of the Royal Family were involved in some sort of activity over that weekend. The Prince of Wales was in various towns along the Normandy coast, laying wreaths, unveiling statues, meeting veterans from the Parachute Regiment, the Royal Navy, Royal Marines and Army Air Corps and, finally, opening a British Garden of Remembrance in Caen, created as a tribute to the fifteen British and Allied divisions which fought in the eighty-day battle for Normandy between June and August 1944 to try to bring the war to an end. The Earl of Wessex, the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Gloucester were all in Normandy, while the Princess Royal was in Canada visiting the regiments there of which she is Colonel-in-Chief. And for all those old soldiers, sailors and airmen recognition from a member of the Royal Family – whichever member of the Royal Family – has a very special significance which no politician could ever match.

Mercifully there has been no comparable threat to national security since the Second World War. There has been terrorist activity of a terrifying nature, civil war in Northern Ireland and wars in the Balkans and Iraq in which British forces have been engaged. Those wars have come into our living rooms via vivid, graphic images on our television screens and because of that we know more about the horrors of war and terror than we ever did before, but civilians in London, Sheffield and
Coventry and all the other cities that suffered the devastation of Hitler’s bombs have not feared for their safety here in Britain. There has been no common enemy that has brought us together and generations of Britons have no memory of there ever having been one. No memory of needing a figurehead to hold the nation together in the way that the King and Queen did during the Second World War. When those veterans and their contemporaries die, there will be fewer people who unquestioningly accept the value of the monarchy.

Prolonged peace brought all sorts of changes, not just to the automatic acceptance of monarchy. Society has changed out of all recognition in the last sixty years. The values that once underpinned our lives have shifted. Hierarchy and deference have largely gone, and so has respect. We stick two fingers up to authority; we think traditional British institutions like Parliament, the police, the BBC and the Church of England are sleazy and corrupt; we swear, blaspheme and trample all over people, their property and their sensibilities. Our democracy is so secure, and politicians so discredited, that we have lost interest in politics. We believe in nothing, care about nothing and prepare for nothing, expecting the state to nanny us when things go wrong and technology to answer our prayers. We live vicariously through the media – newspapers, television and the internet – and through the lives of two-bit celebrities. And our young binge-drink and do drugs – mug old ladies if they have to, to get them – have iPods and mobile phones glued to their ears and £200 trainers on their feet; and see no point in anything.

Where in all of this (which, of course, I exaggerate) does the monarchy fit? The answer, I believe, is in being a fixture in this morass. The Queen is approaching eighty and has been there, her face on our money, our stamps and in the media, for most if not all of most people’s lives. She has got older and
greyer in that time and her face is lined – and occasionally she nods off on the final day of an exhausting foreign state visit – but her values, her routine, even her hats, have scarcely changed in all that time. And when our world crumbles, as it does in times of national horror like Lockerbie, Dunblane or 9/11, we seem to need a figurehead to put their arms around us, metaphorically, and direct and articulate our emotion.