Highland home that healed the Queen Mother's broken heart
Restoring Castle of Mey helped her cope with death of the King
IT was on the brink of demolition when it caught the eye of a devastated widow, still only 51 and on the verge of withdrawing permanently from public life. She only paid £100 for the disintegrating pile; its annual running costs, by the end of her very long life, were a cool half a million pounds – and she never spent more than six weeks a year there.
Yet the late Queen Mother loved the Castle of Mey, on the Caithness coast of the far North of Scotland; she duly saved it, and in a way it saved her.
Mey mattered. Of all her five residences, the 16th-century Z-plan fortress, with 30 bedrooms and more besides for staff, was the only home she ever personally owned.
That it was so remote, too, granted her privacy and unusual freedom. Most of all, perhaps, it had no association whatever with the late King, her husband; held no memories to tear the heart.
So affectionately is Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother remembered that few have ever understood the enormous shock of her widowhood. George VI and Elizabeth had been married for nearly 30 years and, she being the stronger personality and of quicker mind, he had been exceptionally dependent on her.
By her determination he had largely overcome a dreadful stammer. A timid prince, never trained for monarchy, found himself – with her glowing by his side – making sensationally successful overseas visits. They shared weighty secrets; she got to read state papers and even sat in when he weekly received his Prime Ministers.
Until that shattering morning in February 1952 when, ashen-faced, the King’s equerry announced to her that His Majesty had died in his sleep. And – unsaid that his Queen had lost her job, her influence and her place as first woman in the land – in due course she would have to vacate her palaces. And, besides, curtsey to her own daughter.
More than three months passed before she could bear to carry out a public engagement – a review of First Battalion the Black Watch in Crail, Fife. She dared not make any reference to the late King in her speech, lest she broke down. The Court wore mourning till early June. The Queen Mother would be in black for a full year.
So low were her spirits than many close to her thought she would simply find a secluded retreat somewhere and seldom leave it. The family worried. Her majestic mother-in-law, Queen Mary, tried to buck Elizabeth up. But she was listless, withdrawn. There was still great uncertainty when, on June 18, she went to stay with old friends in Caithness.
Commander Clare Vyner and his wife resided in the beautifully named House of the Northern Gate, on Dunnet Head and with ravishing views. Elizabeth had known them for decades and they were among the very few she had occasionally spent the night with in the absence of her husband.
She could talk freely with the Vyners and, though at first otherwise brooding or reading in the drawing room, was more and more drawn outside by the dramatic coastline and the lovely evening light of a northern summer.
Elizabeth also found – perhaps it was the air – that, in this country, she could sleep like a log. One day her hosts took her to see Barrogill Castle, country seat of the Earls of Caithness, the last of whom had died (without issue) in 1889.
It was in a dreadful state. Troops had been stationed there during the war, and knocked it about. The staff who usually maintained it had been called up; a storm had denuded the roof of many tiles; and its owner, Captain FB ImbertTerry MC (he and his wife had acquired it in 1923) was distinctly eccentric. He kept a cow and hens, washed in a tin hip-bath and had not the resources to restore the building. He rumbled to Elizabeth that it would probably be pulled down.
‘Never!’ exclaimed the horrified Queen Mother. ‘It’s part of Scotland’s heritage. I’ll save it.’ ImbertTerry offered the pile to her as a gift. But the Royal Family cannot accept presents on that scale. By June or July of 1952, he was persuaded to sell it for a mere £100.
She had, she later trilled to Cecil Beaton, bought herself a castle ‘in the most remote part of the world’ and that her plan was to ‘get away from everything, but I don’t expect I shall ever be able to get there’.
Many speculated that she would indeed immure herself in this far and blasted keep. Some reporters concluded the Castle of Mey – she had promptly restored the original name – had been bought on a whim and would soon be abandoned or sold.
Certainly, it was in such dereliction that it was only after three years, in around October 1955, that the Queen Mother could finally spend a night there. She had first to spend no mean sum restoring the castle.
The roof was repaired; the whole made windproof and watertight. A new dining room was built and, for the first time, it was connected to electricity. Proper bathrooms were fitted; a telephone (with scrambler) was installed.
HER spirits began to recover. Dame Edith Sitwell, a personal friend, in September 1952 sent her an anthology of poetry and Elizabeth thanked her from Birkhall in moving terms. ‘I started to read it, sitting by the river, and it was a day when one felt engulfed by great black clouds of unhappiness and misery, and I found a sort of peace stealing round my heart as I read such lovely poems and heavenly words.
‘I thought how small and selfish is sorrow. But it bangs one about till one is senseless, and I can never thank you enough for giving me such a delicious book wherein I found so much beauty and hope, quite suddenly one day by the river.’
But there were still bad days and low moods. Her ladies-in-waiting worried and, in early October connived with the Prime Minister himself, a guest of his Sovereign at Balmoral. Churchill arrived unannounced at Birkhall and had a very long, private talk with the Queen Mother.
Whatever was said, she visibly turned a corner. ‘He must have said things which made her realise how important it was for her to carry on,’ mused Lady Jean Rankin, ‘how much people wanted her to do things as she had before.’
And suddenly there was this diversion in Caithness – an absorbing project for her energy and interests, something that drew her forwards.
No detail of the castle’s renovation was too mundane for her. The reroofing and the installation of modern comforts were exciting. She enjoyed designing the kitchen and the bathrooms. She personally acquired, piece by piece, appropriate period furniture – often at a roup as big local houses offloaded furniture – and agonised deliciously as to what paintings to hang and took intense interest in the clearing and replanting of the hopelessly overgrown gardens.
Horticulture remained a heroic business in so exposed a spot; it was not unknown for the wind to uproot cabbages entire and hurl them into the sea. But here, at last, she could frame and design a home that was her very own.
Very much as the Queen Mother had left it, the Castle of Mey is externally austere; even forbidding. Inside, though, it is the epitome of Fifties style and comfort. ‘From the moment the visitor enters the stone-flagged walls,’ marvelled the Duchess of Westminster, ‘the atmosphere of a wellloved house is continually apparent… such unashamed femininity, colour and comfort north of the Tweed.’
No detail was overlooked. Elizabeth’s bedroom was gorgeously done – the panelled walls painted aquamarine, white cornices, soft grey carpet, elegant cretonne curtains with pink rose and blue-leaf design.
Her corgis – never fewer than two – slept in metal-framed foldaway beds in her dressing-room. There were comfortable sofas and armchairs in pleasant chintz and she entertained in style and ate very well. And she took avidly to Caithness itself.
She loved her new redoubt ‘as she loves the whole austere landscape of Northern Caithness’, Godfrey Talbot wrote in 1978, ‘its population sparse, its farmlands bleak and its few trees bent halfway to the ground by the wind…
‘Even when she is in London she keeps regularly in touch with the factor of Mey about the progress of the sheep she has; the health of her herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle; and the sale of the flowers and fruit
from the fine old walled garden. Even at Clarence House she is as avid a reader of the John o’ Groats Journal as she is of the London Times.’
The kitchen garden was productive and only well-rotted horse manure applied. Modern fertilisers were shunned.
And the locals took to her, in the few precious weeks she could spend annually in their midst – happily combing the shore for shells, walking the corgis on the cliffs or perched on a boulder crooning to inquisitive seals.
She was happy to shop in Thurso, chatting with all she met; every Sunday she worshipped in the little kirk at Canisbay, being received and led up the aisle by the minister as all deferentially stood.
Elizabeth, too, could be extraordinarily kind. One day she asked permission of a young farmhand on a tractor to cross a field. He gladly granted it and, drawn into conversation, let slip he was to be married within the week.
The Queen Mother, on return to the castle, turned detective. Who was he? Where did he live? Could the fiancée be identified? A few days later he was thrilled when a beautifully boxed breakfast set – Elizabeth had picked it out herself, in Thurso – arrived, complete with a handwritten note of good wishes ‘to you and your lassie’.
Only her nearest friends were invited to Mey, to share a holiday of rugged outdoorsiness and sybaritic evening comfort. Nothing, till great old age – mist, high wind, curtains of hail or rain in rods – put Elizabeth off walks or picnics. ‘The wind,’ she would say dismissively, ‘will blow the cobwebs away.’
Bescarfed and becoated, she would happily tow disconsolate visitors around shore and crags for hours, as the very sheep cowered behind boulders from the elements.
But all paused for afternoon tea (for which you were expected to change) – potted shrimps and cucumber sandwiches and biscuits and a particular chocolate and coffee cake which Elizabeth loved and insisted be freshly baked each day.
Dinner was grander still; and even on the very rare occasions she dined alone, the Queen Mother always dressed for it – a long gown and a fusillade of jewels. All assembled in the drawing room for a priming cocktail of two parts of Dubonnet to one of gin with two ice cubes and a slice of lemon, mixed ‘to a strength fit to knock you sideways’ – before proceeding to the sumptuous fare in the dining room.
Elizabeth liked her food and fine wines: one cherished dish, Oeufs Drumkilbo, was a claggy extravaganza of hard-boiled eggs, lobster, shrimp, tomatoes and mayonnaise. There would be cheese and a creamy pudding, at which point the Queen Mother had a glass and then some of champagne – Krug, at a cool £300 a bottle. Guests were served Veuve-Cliquot and such was her unstinting generosity that she was said to be the champagne house’s key private client.
If it was a clear night, guests might be ushered outside for a view of the Northern Lights. Or enjoy an after-dinner sing-song; or simply watch a video: Elizabeth was particularly fond of Miss Marple and Dad’s Army, and watched them tirelessly.
‘Traditions,’ she would say, ‘exist to be kept.’ She was especially cross about the demise of the Royal Yacht Britannia, which – as the Queen completed her annual holiday cruise of the Western Isles always called at Mey en route for Aberdeen. Her barge – a posh launch – then ferried the family ashore to Scrabster, where Land Rovers swept them up to the castle for lunch, usually eaten on the lawn when the weather was suitable ‘and sometimes even when it wasn’t’.
EVEN at 100, Queen Elizabeth missed her King. ‘Poor woman,’ someone quietly observed, ‘she never had time to cry.’ A lady-inwaiting, widowed months earlier, once sighed, ‘Does it ever get better?’ ‘No,’ said the Queen Mother quietly, ‘but you get better at it.’
Charles teased her for her gutsiness in August 2001, shortly after her 101st birthday, when photographers caught her majestically descending, on her own feet, her plane at Wick Airport. ‘The fact that your dogs were carried down the steps reinforced the message about your rude health.’ The weather for those Mey Highland Games was unspeakable; yet, well wrapped-up, she insisted on attending.
But it was to be for the last time. ‘There was the familiar merriment, the jokes, the toasts to favourites high in the air and to unfavourites below the table,’ notes her official biographer, William Shawcrosss, ‘the video evenings, the pervading sense of happiness.
‘But behind everything there was a sense of frailty, if not finality…’
And in September she said goodbye to her Caithness staff, neighbours and friends ‘with unusual emphasis’.
She had the fiscal foresight in 1996 to pass the ownership of the Castle to a trust; and it is now open to the public from May to September, save for a few summer days when it is occupied by Charles and Camilla.
You can linger in her library; admire the family photos; eye stately oil paintings; and the general Fifties air of understated ease. But you sense too an abiding serenity; that here, amid unutterable heartache, a great lady learned of our incredible capacity to heal.