In ‘lockdown’ with a teenage princess
From the age of 16, Alathea Fitzalan Howard spent her war years with the future Queen and her sister at Windsor Castle. Ahead of her extraordinary diaries being published, Matthew Dennison gets a glimpse of what day-to-day life was like
They are the diaries royal historians have been eager to read for two decades, ever since their aristocratic author died in 2001. Beginning on New Year’s Eve 1939, the journals of Alathea Fitzalan Howard chronicle the six years of the Second World War she spent at Windsor, cheek by jowl with the Queen (then Princess Elizabeth) and her younger sister, Princess Margaret. A selection of Alathea’s diary entries, entitled The Windsor Diaries, will be published for the first time this autumn.
The diaries offer readers a unique portrait of the future queen, including her enjoyment of washing up and her dislike of needlework, as well as anecdotes of the pet chameleon that the royal sisters and their friends fed on flies. They describe picnics, with ginger beer drunk straight from the bottle, and river journeys by punt, as well as the series of Christmas productions, beginning in 1940 with a play called The Three Roses, staged in St George’s Hall, Windsor, in which Elizabeth and Margaret took the lead roles.
Alathea depicts the Princesses’ day-to-day life in wartime, both inside and outside Windsor Castle’s schoolroom. While she had her academic lessons separately in Cumberland Lodge, drawing and dancing lessons were shared with the Princesses.
At the centre of her story is the princess who, a decade later, became Elizabeth II: in Alathea’s account “Lilibet” or “L”, “v. matter of fact, uncurious and above all untemperamental”. Her view of the royal household is candid and affectionate. “I am REALLY HAPPY
WITH THEM ALL”, she writes, resorting to capital letters for emphasis.
Lessons occupied only four hours a day, from 9.30am until 11am and from 2pm until 4.30pm. They were interrupted by riding, then lunch served by the nursery footman, Cyril Dickman; on other days, lunch was eaten outside, with lessons giving way to afternoons lying on blankets reading in the sun.
There were lessons in cookery: Alathea records making bread pudding while Princess Elizabeth made shortbread. The Princesses gardened, carefully netting vegetables to protect them from rabbits. And there were rehearsals for the Windsor Castle productions, including, in December 1941, Cinderella, in which Alathea played an ugly sister, Agatha Blimp, to Princess Margaret’s Cinderella (as ever, Princess Elizabeth took the principal boy part of Prince Florizel).
A concert earlier in the year had raised money to buy wool “for knitting for the Forces”. Among the Princesses’ contributions to the war effort was rolling bandages and knitting socks. For Elizabeth, neither a keen nor an accomplished knitter, like much that lay ahead in her life it was a case of duty over pleasure.
In addition to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, Alathea’s cast of characters includes the King and Queen, George VI and Queen Elizabeth (afterwards the Queen Mother), the Princesses’ Scottish governess Marion Crawford, known as Crawfie, their French governess Mrs Montaudon-smith, called “Monty”, and Bobo Macdonald, the railway worker’s daughter from the Black Isle, who became a nursery maid to the
baby Princess Elizabeth and, in time, her closest confidante outside the Royal family.
Alathea Fitzalan Howard kept her extraordinary diary from shortly after her 16th birthday on the eve of her move to Windsor, until her death in her late 70s, some 64 volumes in total.
Two and a half years older than Princess Elizabeth, she was born on November 24 1923, the elder of the two daughters of Henry Fitzalan Howard, later 2nd Viscount Fitzalan of Derwent, and his wife Joyce Langdale. The Fitzalan Howards were relations of the Dukes of Norfolk, and as a
great-granddaughter of the 14th Duke, Alathea was a member of Britain’s most prominent Catholic dynasty, with a connection to the Royal family through the Dukes of Norfolk’s hereditary appointment as Earl Marshal, the position that confers on its holder responsibility for organising major ceremonial events including coronations and royal funerals.
For Alathea, the war years, from age 16 to 21, would come to represent a glowing coda, to an otherwise unhappy upbringing. Her friendship with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret cemented this happiness.
They knew one another before the outbreak of war. Alathea was part of the tiny gilded circle of the Princesses’ acquaintances outside their family. She was a member of the Buckingham Palace company of Girl Guides and press photographs taken in 1938 show her with both Princesses and three other friends on a visit to London Zoo. Like Elizabeth and Margaret, who, until their parents’ accession to the throne in 1937, in the aftermath of Edward VIII’S abdication, lived in a 25-bedroom townhouse at 145 Piccadilly, Alathea spent much of her childhood in London.
Like many children, with the outbreak of war Alathea was sent away from London to the greater safety of the country; like the King’s daughters, she was sent to Windsor. Since 1924, her grandfather had lived at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park, following his retirement as the last Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In 1940, Lord Fitzalan was 75 and a widower. He lived with one of his seven sisters, the unmarried Lady Mary Fitzalan Howard. Theirs was an old-fashioned, deeply conservative and very strict Catholic household. In her diary Alathea describes her state of mind there as a “sad, lonely feeling”.
Her feelings were in marked contrast to those of the two Princesses. In the five-room “royal nursery” in Windsor Castle’s Augusta Tower, Princess Elizabeth, who was 13 at the beginning of 1940, and her younger sister led strikingly happy lives with their nanny Clara Knight, whom they called “Allah” or “Alah”, their governesses Crawfie and Monty, the nursery maid Bobo Macdonald and at least one attendant corgi. Although the King and Queen spent much of their time in London, they visited their daughters, whose whereabouts were kept secret from the public, as often as possible. From 1944, the sisters had dun-coloured Norwegian ponies, Odd and Rolf, to ride.
Alathea’s diaries provide numerous instances of the easy and loving intimacy of the Royal family whom George VI famously labelled “us four”. Queen Elizabeth’s ambitions for her daughters had always been simple and straightforward: “to have a happy childhood which they can always look back on”. War or no war, and despite the fact they were in hiding in a 1,000-room castle guarded by its own Castle Company of soldiers, Elizabeth and Margaret continued to enjoy the happy childhood their mother intended.
After leaving Windsor at the end of the war, Alathea remained a lifelong friend of Princess Elizabeth’s. She attended her wedding in 1947, six years before her own marriage to the Hon Edward Ward.
Alathea and Edward moved to Lausanne, but had no children. Following Edward’s death in 1987, Alathea became more closely attached to her nephew, Sir Philip Naylor-leyland, the son of her sister Elizabeth, his wife Lady Isabella and their children. It was to Isabella Naylor-leyland that Alathea left her precious diary, alongside her personal archive of letters, photographs and invitations.
Until now, the diary has never been read before.
The Windsor Diaries 1940-45 by Alathea Fitzalan Howard will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in October