Toe-curling night Princess Margaret gate-crashed my date with her daughter
The son of arch-Leftie Jonathan Miller endured hell at a city comp. Then he escaped to a posh boarding school and thought his troubles were over. Until the...
IN THE first extract from his new memoir, published in the Mail on Saturday, William Miller, son of the brilliant polymath Jonathan Miller, described growing up in a gilded enclave surrounded by London’s intelligentsia. But his Dad’s Left-wing principles made life challenging at home, at school and, as he reveals in this concluding part, particularly when meeting the Royals.
dAD always gets irritated when anyone talks about the Royal Family. They don’t serve any purpose, he says, and they ‘enforce our terrible class structure’.
he was pretty annoyed once, when we had to pull over on the road to let the Queen and Prince Philip go past.
I quite like the Royal Family, but I never expected to become friends with someone who belongs to it.
That happened at Bedales, the hampshire boarding school I went to after getting only five Cs at O-level at my inner London comprehensive.
Dad said that only Tories go to private schools, so sending me to Bedales was a bitter pill for him to swallow. By 1980, though, even he could see that I was struggling at Pimlico School — and I was sick and tired of being beaten up by gangs.
Like many of the children of our equally Left-leaning neighbours, I’d been part of an education experiment driven by my parents’ principles, rather than their care. And it had failed.
At 16, I longed to escape from our home in Gloucester Crescent, North London, to find a way of life that was more structured and conventional. BeDALeS felt like a safe haven after Pimlico. To my relief, there were no security guards at the gate, no bullies or knife attacks.
Nor was there any of the vicious gossip I’d become used to, with everyone talking over each other about who’d been beaten up or expelled, or who’d slept with who over the holidays or might have got pregnant.
Mind you, I did feel a twinge of embarrassment as I listened in to conversations in the Bedales dining hall.
One girl was boasting to her friends about being seduced by an ageing rock star on a beach in Mustique, while a boy moaned that his first week of school was bound to be a write-off because of jet-lag.
My friend Conrad, who also lived in Gloucester Crescent, and I were the only two pupils from a comprehensive in the sixth form. This created a certain mystique around us that led some to believe we were streetwise.
After all our years at Pimlico, where our status had been the complete opposite, we found this rather perplexing.
My first school dance was another problem. I had no dance moves that didn’t come with the risk of ruining my reputation, so I found a dark corner. Suddenly, a girl called Juliet lurched out of the throbbing mass, grabbed my hand and dragged me out. It was no good protesting.
I was halfway through Kool & The Gang’s Get Down On It when she led me straight up to another girl, who was standing in the shadows trying to avoid catching anyone’s eye.
This girl was pretty and sweet in an innocent way, with perfect teeth that came into their own when she smiled. Shy and rather too neatly dressed for a Bedalian, she shook my hand.
‘William, this is Sarah, who I know would love to dance with you,’ said my companion.
Sarah’s smile vanished and the look on her face turned to one of terror.
I took her hand and pulled her onto the dance floor, where she moved her shoulders from side to side, obviously counting the seconds for the song to end. Then she slipped back into her corner.
Later that evening, a boy said: ‘I see you were dancing with Sarah Armstrong-Jones.’ My immediate response was: ‘Who?’
‘You know, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret’s daughter.’
I wished I’d known who she was, so I could have toned down my dreadful dancing. I was also embarrassed because Dad knew Princess Margaret quite well.
Although he never stopped complaining about the Royal Family’s ‘complete irrelevance’ and their ‘responsibility for the rot in our class system’, she had always been very nice to him — even if he did claim that she was more interested in him than he was in her.
Princess Margaret, he said, was obsessed with three things: theatre people, intellectuals and Jews. The first two she was desperate to be part of, and the third she found intriguing — though he wasn’t entirely sure why.
Dad, of course, ticked all three boxes, so she always sought him out at parties and invited him to dinners or other events.
Mum was convinced Princess Margaret had a crush on him. She was even more certain after going to a party at Windsor Castle, where the Princess made Dad sit next to her while Mum was left with some boring old man on another table.
Then, after the dinner, Princess Margaret took Dad off on his own for a tour of the private rooms. She was far from his type, but flattery can go a long way with Dad. AT The end of the school year, the holidays kicked off with the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Since my awkward first meeting with Sarah Armstrong-Jones, we’d become good friends, and I’d promised to watch her walking up the aisle. So Conrad and I sat in front of the TV, looking at her perform her royal duties as a bridesmaid.
Less than two months later, we cadged a lift with her back to school. This meant turning up at Kensington Palace and being driven in a black Range Rover by Princess Margaret’s chauffeur, Mr Griffin.
Then, during the following easter break, Sarah asked if Conrad and I would like to go to the theatre with her to see Cats. The musical seemed a welcome break from memorising the formula for photosynthesis and the elements of the periodic table, so we said we’d collect her from Kensington Palace.
Just before I left, Dad and his author friend Alan Bennett, a Gloucester Crescent neighbour, thought it might be amusing to give me a lesson in the basics of royal etiquette.
Looking back, I think their motive had more to do with the absurdity of it all rather than the importance of not embarrassing myself in royal company.
either way, they stood in the middle of the kitchen, facing each
other, and acted it out for me. Dad — playing the commoner while Alan played the royal personage — kicked off with how to address Princess Margaret.
‘Remember,’ Dad said, ‘it’s “ma’am”, which should rhyme with “spam”, and not “marm” as in “palm”.’
Alan uttered mock-regal squeals of pleasure, then went on to explain that girls curtsy and boys bow, which Dad demonstrated with a quick nod of the head.
Funny as this all was, I said it was highly unlikely that I’d be meeting Princess Margaret, who’d probably be out cutting ribbons or hosting a dinner for the Girl Guides.
With a little persuasion, my parents agreed to lend me their car, so my friend Conrad and I set off to collect Sarah.
We parked in the Kensington Palace courtyard and walked up the front steps, where we were greeted by a tall, smartly dressed butler who showed us to the drawing room.
A few minutes later, he reappeared with a tray of glasses and a bottle of champagne — the first clue that the evening wasn’t about to go in the direction Conrad and I had been led to believe.
Sarah came in looking slightly uncomfortable, closely followed by her mother, who was dressed in a pale-pink taffeta ballgown.
Surprised and momentarily confused, I forgot the key points of Dad and Alan’s etiquette lesson.
So I found myself curtsying and nodding at the same time, and whatever it was I said, it definitely didn’t rhyme with ‘spam’.
But Princess Margaret graciously ignored my awkward greeting, and asked after my father and what he was working on.
As I was trying to remember the name of Dad’s latest production, the butler returned with more champagne and a tray of canapés. I reached out and took a confection of beef on melba toast with an unidentifiable garnish.
As I bit into it, I knew it was a mistake as the beef stuck to my teeth, the toast snapped in two and everything else fell down the front of my shirt, leaving a snail trail of what looked like mayonnaise. The conversation stopped briefly as everyone stared at the canapé remains on the carpet.
Princess Margaret looked up, smiled kindly at me and said: ‘So sad we don’t have corgis like my sister — they’d have gobbled it up in an instant.’ Then she clapped her hands and shouted: ‘Chopchop, let’s go!’
I looked across to Sarah for some kind of explanation. But it soon became obvious that our party of three had become four, and Princess Margaret was coming with us to the theatre.
By now, Sarah was blushing and looking at her feet, clearly feeling guilty that she’d left out this minor detail of the evening in case we turned her down. In the courtyard, Mr Griffin held open the back door to Princess Margaret’s official car — a brown Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. It wasn’t quite as big inside as I’d imagined: Conrad, Sarah and her mother squeezed into the back seat, leaving me to go in front.
‘Well, this is cosy,’ Princess Margaret announced as I looked back at them. She was grinning from ear to ear, and somewhere under a mass of taffeta were Conrad and Sarah.
As we pulled out of the palace courtyard, we were joined by two police cars and two motorcycle outriders. On Kensington High Street, the motorcyclists raced ahead to clear the traffic.
There’s no royal box at the New London Theatre on Drury Lane, so we sat right in the middle of the stalls, with Princess Margaret in her pink ballgown, Sarah, still looking embarrassed, and Conrad and me in our casual jackets and jeans. Princess Margaret seemed to be captivated by Cats, whereas I found there was very little to like about it. As my mind wandered, I looked around the auditorium and noticed that most of the audience were staring at us rather than the stage.
When the curtain finally came down, an official-looking man from the theatre politely instructed our entire row to stay in their seats while the four of us awkwardly climbed over their legs. Then he escorted us to a hospitality room backstage where we were to have drinks with the cast.
One by one, the performers filed into the room, curtsied or bowed to Princess Margaret and Sarah, and then to Conrad and me. After gushing with praise and congratulating each of them, Princess Margaret announced to everyone in the room that I was the son of Jonathan Miller.
I really wished she hadn’t. I was now the centre of attention, with little to say other than lying about how much I liked the show and how sad my father was to have missed it.
Eventually, I was saved by the familiar cry of ‘chop-chop’, and we were back in the Rolls-Royce.
Only this time, our departure didn’t go quite as smoothly.
As I climbed into the front seat, I realised that my wallet had probably fallen out of my jacket in the hospitality room.
The police escorts were revving their engines as I leapt out, apologising profusely, and ran back into the theatre to retrieve the wallet. Back at the car, however, the police were now battling with a crowd of autograph-hunters and a couple of drunks who were trying to get to the car for a better look.
Conrad and Sarah were looking terrified, and Princess Margaret
was clearly not amused. Once we sped away, there was an uncomfortable silence in the car. As we passed a McDonald’s, I promised myself that Conrad and I would head there after being dropped off at the palace.
When we arrived, the butler was waiting for us on the front steps and we followed him into the drawing room.
I was seconds away from saying: ‘Thank you for a lovely evening, Ma’am, but we really must be off.’ But just as I was trying to remember if it was ‘ma’am’ or ‘marm’, the butler pushed open a door to reveal a table laid for dinner.
Unfurling our napkins and placing them carefully on our laps, he poured Princess Margaret a very large whisky and placed a silver cigarette box beside her.
Once everyone was settled, he brought in four prawn cocktails in glass bowls. Princess Margaret lit a cigarette and took a long sip of her whisky, pushing her prawns to the side.
‘I don’t think your father would have liked Cats, would he?’ she said. She was right; he would have hated it.
‘Shame,’ she said. ‘I went to see Guys And Dolls at the National last week and it was wonderful.’ She then informed us that she had the soundtrack and wanted to play it to us after dinner.
She didn’t seem to have much of an appetite. As I was trying to extract a second prawn from under its pink sauce, her fist came thumping down on a rubber clam shell positioned six inches from her placemat.
The clam must have contained a hidden bell, as seconds later the butler came flying back, removed our nearly full bowls, topped up her whisky, then ran off to get the next course — which was petit poulet with roast vegetables, bread sauce and gravy.
I was just lifting a forkful up to my mouth when down came the royal fist, back came the butler and my plate was gone.
When he next returned, he was carrying a tray with four enormous glass bowls, each containing a delicious-looking trifle. This produced a steely glare from the Princess.
‘I really don’t think anyone has space for pudding,’ she announced, waving the butler off.
Crestfallen, Conrad and I were led back into the drawing room by Sarah and her mother, who was now waltzing her way across the room to the record player.
For the next two hours, she proceeded to choreograph Sarah, Conrad and me through a series of dance routines from Guys And Dolls — a nightmare combination of my two least favourite things: dancing and musical theatre.
It was the eventual return of the butler that saved us when, at around two in the morning, he came in and offered us nightcaps. This was our cue to leave, and within ten minutes Conrad and I were driving towards McDonald’s — which turned out to be shut.
AdApted by Corinna Honan from Gloucester Crescent, by William Miller (profile Books, £14.99). © William Miller 2018. to order a copy for £11.99 (offer valid to September 8, 2018) visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. p&p is free on orders over £15. PS: William — who’d never been properly taught how to study — didn’t manage to pass a single A-level. And, much to his parents’ distress, he refused to sit them again.
He eventually became a TV producer, making Nigella Lawson’s cookery programmes among others, as well as creating, launching and running her retail brand.
His father has never fully approved of his son’s career, convinced that he’s joined the Establishment.
Now happily married with two children, William ended up buying his own house in Gloucester Crescent. He lives three doors away from his parents, whom he sees frequently.
Jonathan Miller, 84, has yet to read his son’s candid memoir.