‘Oh look, Margo’s on fire!’ said the Queen
JUST as with her grandchildren, the Queen Mother’s daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, also had widely different personality traits, and the difference between them can best be summed up by their reaction to an incident which happened at Sandringham one Christmas.
During a meal there, Margaret leant forward to get something and her hair touched a candle. Within seconds the back of her head was blazing away, but her tresses were sufficiently thick that she knew nothing about it until the Queen spotted what was happening.
‘Oh look,’ she said in slight amusement. ‘Margo’s on fire!’
As a quick-thinking member of staff patted it out with his hands, Margaret looked at him in horror as if to say: ‘What the hell do you think you are doing, do you know who I am?’
The Queen’s reaction to her sister catching fire was typical of her, as I was privileged to see at first hand. Although I was contracted to look after the Queen Mother, I was part of a team responsible for any member of royalty and this included the Head of State.
If guests dropped out of dinner at Buckingham Palace for any reason, I was often drafted in to make up the numbers — keeping a black tie and dinner jacket in my office for just such eventualities — and the Queen always made a bee-line for me.
‘Colin, how are you? It’s great to see you,’ she would say and I felt lucky to spend so much time in her presence. In private, she was very much the laughing sort, very bright and very funny, whereas Margaret could get quite snappy, her mood turning on a sixpence.
Once or twice Margaret had a go at me for not doing things quickly, but then she could go to the other extreme, being too friendly.
One morning she asked me what I was doing and, when I told her that I didn’t have much on, she told me to grab my swimming trunks.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go for a swim and then we’ll come back and have lunch.’
We loaded up a Range Rover and went off to one of her friends’ houses where there was an outdoor pool.
She appeared wearing this rather old-fashioned, onepiece bathing outfit and I spent the rest of the morning trying to swim in such a way that I couldn’t touch her. It all seemed a tad too informal, too close for my comfort.
Prince William, then in his early teens, popped into Clarence House with Charles once every couple of weeks.
William was always very affectionate with the Queen Mother, but she was 82 years older than him and the gap was apparent when he talked about films, computer games and the usual things that boys of his age would chat about.
‘Nice — oh that is nice,’ she would say, clearly baffled.
SHE came from a more innocent world. Not that Tony Blair, then the Leader of the Opposition, would have been too pleased about the impressions she liked to do of him.
Fascinated by the fact that he always seemed to be smiling for no apparent reason, she would mimic him by breaking into a huge grin and being all teeth.
That’s pretty much what she thought of his politics, too: ‘all teeth and no bite’. She reserved her admiration for Margaret Thatcher, declaring that she and Churchill were similar but that Thatcher had ‘that little bit extra’.
That said, it was Churchill she drew on for inspiration when my two years with her finally came to an end. Besides the cufflinks which were the traditional gift for departing equerries, she handed me a piece of paper on which she had written: ‘Never Flinch. Never Weary. Never Despair.’
It was Churchill’s wartime battle cry, and summed up her whole attitude to life.
I wasn’t expecting the note. It knocked me for six. All I could think was that this lady had taken the time to go to her study, look up Churchill’s speeches, find something she thought was appropriate.
I almost ended up in tears and when I attended her funeral six years later, it was suddenly brought home to me who I had worked for.
I had never really experienced the full whack of pomp and ceremony as an equerry because there wasn’t much of it in the Queen Mother’s world towards the end of her life; it was all very domestic during my time, so this extraordinary funeral was quite a jolt to the senses.
After the service at Westminster Abbey, I had received an invitation to go back to Clarence House but I couldn’t make it, and anyway, the place wouldn’t have been the same without the Queen Mother there.
So that was that. Everybody just drifted away and a major chapter of my life had closed, leaving me with warm memories of a woman whose oldfashioned values and love of life made her beloved both of the nation and all those like myself who were lucky enough to work for her.