A stiff ration of whisky, then a flash of royal resentment
April 25, 1981
TRAIN to Cambridge to stay with [Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge] Jack Plumb at Christ’s. His other house guest is Princess Margaret. She is very critical of Shirley Williams for attempting to abolish the grammar schools — and says that the Queen Mother also feels strongly about it. Her most interesting remark on King George V is that her mother, who came from a home where nobody quarrelled, was appalled by the family storms that swept over York Cottage — and did much to relieve the tension of those cramped rooms.
March 26, 1984
DINE with Princess Margaret, after which she absorbs her usual stiff ration of whisky. She still resents that she was not allowed to share the Queen’s History tutorials with [Eton Provost] Sir Henry Marten. ‘I was told that it wasn’t necessary. I have often reproached Mummy with this.’
May 9, 1984
I HAVE dinner with Tony Snowdon. I have hardly seen him for many years, but it was as if we have been close friends since Eton [Rose taught him there]. ‘Hello, Sir,’ he begins and repeats the joke throughout the evening. Tony will never go to any reunion — Eton, Cambridge, etc. He is even shy of sitting at the communal lunch table in the House of Lords. Nor would he ever go alone to a restaurant. When we talk of watches, he shows me his: costing only £7 at Marks & Spencer.
September 23, 1984
I TALK with Jock Colville [former PPS to Churchill]. Princess Margaret once said to him: ‘The two men who have ruined my life are Tommy Lascelles and Winston Churchill, who would not let me marry Peter Townsend.’ Jock replied: ‘I don’t know about Tommy, but Winston did not want to repeat the mistake of 1936.’ Princess Margaret was not pleased by this.
January 22, 1986
PRINCESS Margaret, pretty and animated, talks of [photographer] Cecil Beaton’s jealousy of Tony Snowdon, and his drawling at her at the time of their engagement: ‘Thank you, Ma’am, for removing a dangerous rival.’ Princess Margaret continues: ‘After we were married, Tony wanted to give up photography. We all thought this was wrong. So Lillibet and I worked on him for a year and eventually succeeded. He returned to photography.’
April 26, 1987
JACK Plumb invites me to what he says is his last Princess Margaret weekend before he retires as Master of Christ’s. After dinner, Princess Margaret sings: ‘Oh come into the garden, Maud,’ in a pleasantly light voice!
June 8, 1989
LUNCH with Tony Snowdon. He has always had a passion for Marmite, he says. He was once arrested for shoplifting at a Moscow hotel. The detective saw something bulging in his pocket: it was his personal jar of Marmite.
January 2, 1994
PRINCESS Margaret tells me that Tony Snowdon and she used to ask Noel Coward to dine à trois, in order to have his wit to themselves. But Noel asked for a bigger party: he needed an audience.
June 11, 1994
WITH Princess Margaret for a weekend at Henham Hall, near Macclesfield. On Suez, PM says: ‘We were all against it except Mummy, who liked Eden. I could never bear him.’
November 5, 1994
STAYING at Blagdon. Princess Margaret is a fellow guest. When I mention King George VI’s habit of wearing his bearskin for a few days before the Trooping the Colour, even when gardening, she says: ‘Yes, I used to wear his bearskin, too — and the crown.’
May 31, 1996
PRINCESS Margaret says that Charles and Anne were well brought up, but the Queen was too busy to bring up Andrew and Edward.
February 9, 2002
PRINCESS Margaret died early this morning in King Edward VII Hospital, having had a stroke followed by a heart attack. One could not have wanted her ghastly existence to be prolonged.
February 13, 2002
TONY SNOWDON telephones. He says: ‘People forget how incredibly happy we were in the first years of our marriage.’ He goes on to say how sad he is.
one evening some years ago, when she said: ‘The Boots are coming to see me.’
She meant the Wellington family.
June 17, 1995
TO LUNCH with [former labour chancellor] Denis and edna healey at their home at Alfriston, near lewes.
Denis describes the Queen Mother at dinner saying: ‘Think of all that port going down people’s throats whenever the loyal toast is drunk. how good for the nation’s health!’
July 16, 1995
DRIVE to Walmer Castle in the evening light to dine with the Queen Mother. The corgis are on guard. The table mats are of watercolours done by Prince Charles.
After dinner, the QM insists that we see the room where the Duke of Wellington died.
And so we say goodbye to the most remarkable, enchanting woman of our time. She has had three full days of engagements on the eve of her 95th birthday, yet never flags for an instant.
July 12, 1998
The Queen Mother tells me she is strongly against the lowering of the homosexual age of consent from 18 to 16, which is soon to be debated in Parliament. She has urged the Queen to speak to the PM about it.
May 6, 2000
LUNCH at Clarence house, just the Queen Mother, [her lady-in-waiting] Prue Penn and myself. We touch on the ejection of most of the hereditary peers from the lords: QM makes her feelings all too clear.
July 11, 2000
TO ST Paul’s Cathedral for the Service of Celebration and Thanksgiving for the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday.
later, Prue Penn tells me that after the service, the Queen Mother lunched with the Prince of Wales at St James’s Palace, never having been there before — all of ten yards from the rear door of Clarence house.
May 8, 2001
PRUE Penn managed to get hold of [the
Queen Mother’s steward] William Tallon alone this morning and asked him what exactly had taken place when Princess Margaret descended on Clarence house six or seven years ago to ‘tidy up Mummy’s sitting room’.
She spent a week going through every drawer, wearing white gloves and stopping only for a picnic lunch, throwing away most of her mother’s personal correspondence. She filled no fewer than 30 black bags with the papers, which William thinks were shredded.
Certain letters were not destroyed, mostly family: the King, Queen Mary, the Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales.
Since this happened, the Queen Mother has no longer kept the letters of her friends, but tears them up when read and answered. What a terrible act of destruction.
July 15, 2001
TO WALMER Castle to dine with the Queen Mother. [At nearly 101] she looks lovely in pink silk. We bemoan the loss of the Royal Yacht. When we talk of the robust character of the north-east, she sings a few lines of the ‘Blaydon Races’, before buttering some biscuits for the corgis.
March 30, 2002
The Queen Mother died at 3.15 this afternoon with the Queen at her bedside. So ends an epoch of history.
September 17, 2003
The Queen has told [Queen Mother biographer] William Shawcross that she does not want him to write a political book, ‘as my mother had no interest in politics’. The QM was in fact deeply interested in politics and firmly Conservative in her views.
February 27, 2004
[The Queen Mother’s former steward] William Tallon lunches with me at the Ark.
When the Queen Mother was not dining out, he said, she would always change her clothes and jewellery for her solitary dinner with the two corgis, then TV and early to bed.
Of her early life, she said: ‘I think of my 20 best friends in 1914. Only five came back.’
September 14, 2008
I SIT next to Bob Worcester of MORI, very agreeable. he tells me that when he met the Queen Mother, she complained to him that she had never been polled by his MORI investigators.
September 20, 2009
PRUE Penn regrets Willie Shawcross’s lack of both enquiry and insight into the QM’s lively mind [in his official biography].
September 22, 2009
[BIOGRAPHER] hugo Vickers telephones to give me his opinion on Willie Shawcross’s life of the Queen Mother. hugo says: ‘There is not a drop of humour in Willie’s book or any character sketches of courtiers. he does not explain what inspired her and how she kept going.’
hugo sounds bitter at not having been chosen to write the official life himself.
EXTRACTED from Who Loses, Who Wins: the Journals Of Kenneth rose, Vol. II 1979-2014, edited by d.r. thorpe and published by Weidenfeld on November 14 at £30. © the Estate of Kenneth rose and d.r. thorpe 2019. to order a copy for £24 (offer valid until November 16, 2019; P&P free), visit mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155.