Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
WEEKEND AT WINDSOR
Like any proud hostess, the Queen is keen to make sure everything’s perfect when she’s having 136 people over for dinner, as Robert Hardman discovered when he visited three royal residences
When Prince Edward decided to talk about pursuing a career in television, he talked to Weekend. When Zara Phillips went public about the first royal tongue stud, she talked to Weekend, too. From Earl Spencer’s reflections on the funeral of his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales, to historic images of the Windsors at work and play, this magazine has been chronicling the human side of the monarchy since our first edition was published a quarter of a century back.
So, we could not possibly mark Weekend’s 25th celebrations without revisiting some of our own memorable royal landmarks. In 2005, BBC1 broadcast a historic series called The Queen’s Castle about l i fe at Windsor Castle. Weekend was the first to show the results. As the writer of the series, I had been part of the small team behind it and what made it so special was that we had a particularly well-informed guide – the Duke of Edinburgh.
He and the Queen had moved into Windsor almost immediately after the Second World War and, as the duke explained, they wanted to make it a real home, not simply a royal residence. ‘We’ve lived here more than everybody since Queen Victoria,’ he told me, adding that a lived-in castle is very different from a museum piece. ‘It starts with the fact that the Queen is here and things evolve from that,’ he added. ‘It would still go on if she wasn’t, but it would be a different atmosphere.’
It was certainly a unique atmosphere, with a thriving community inside thousand-year- old walls. We met some of the cast of characters who keep the place alive, people like the royal ‘clockmaker’. He doesn’t actually make clocks but ensures that the 450 timepieces around the castle precincts keep the time. Whenever it is time for the clocks to go forwards or backwards, he has a very long weekend.
While we were filming, the Queen announced a state banquet for President Jacques Chirac to mark the 100th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France. It was riveting to see the royal machine leap into action as Britain’s longest dining table was laid with priceless crystal and china for 136 French and British guests.
Every state banquet must be perfect but the Queen’s chef, Mark Flanagan, was going the extra mile, given that this one was for the President of France. He’d planned a dinner of poached fillets of sole and Scottish beef – he’d even travelled to Scotland to meet the beef farmer.
With a few hours to go before the banquet, all held their breath as the Queen made her usual pre-dinner tour of the table. Even she was impressed by the sight of it all. ‘It’s quite something, isn’t it,’ she murmured proudly as she gave the table the all-clear. Drama soon followed, however. A demonstration outside the castle, aimed at Prime Minister Tony Blair, led to a late arrival by the Chiracs. That put dinner back by 15 minutes – just as Mark Flanagan had started cooking his sole. Behind his self-restraint on camera, it was not hard to discern his frustration. Yet, as with all royal occasions, the turmoil below stairs passed unnoticed as the main event sailed on above.
One other tricky problem had been easier to resolve. A performance of Les Misérables was due to take place in Windsor’s Waterloo Chamber. This was hardly the place for a celebration of Franco-British friendship. For one night only, at the Queen’s request, it was renamed ‘The Music Room’.
One of the highlights of the Windsor calendar is the Royal Windsor Horse Show. There, on another occasion, the Duke of Edinburgh gave me an exclusive interview for Weekend to discuss his love of carriage driving. He had
‘You’ve got to be a nutcase to do carriage driving’ PRINCE PHILIP
taken up the sport in middle age when it was time to retire from polo and, typically, did not do things by halves. He not only went on to compete at the highest international level but rewrote the rulebook for the sport and ended up as the president of the International Equestrian Federation. At the time of our inter- view he was approaching his 83rd birthday and competing against people half his age (he came third in his class that day). The show organisers had arranged our chat with a view to promoting carriage driving, so I began by asking him what he liked about his sport.
‘You’ve got to be a nutcase,’ he said cheerfully. Not the most promising sales pitch. So what was the highlight of a day’s carriage-driving? ‘It’s when it’s all over and you’re still in one piece.’ Did he have a message for young people interested in taking it up. ‘I haven’t got a message for anybody, thank you,’ he replied. ‘I’m not trying to promote it
like some soap powder. I mean, it’s a sport for Christ’s sake. If people want to take part, it’s up to them.’
Behind the banter, though, were words of advice for anyone embarking on a risky sport. ‘Like all these things, risks are hugely reduced if you learn to do it properly,’ he added. ‘If you know what the risk is, you take precautions against it. If you’re climbing a mountain, there is a risk your rope will break. So you get the best possible rope because you know the consequences. What would really make it a risk is climbing up with a rotten rope.’
A few years later, Weekend had the first glimpse of a royal TV series that
had made headlines long before it was aired – not because of the series itself but thanks to a misleading scene in a promotional trailer (the story is discussed on page 20). After the furore passed, viewers of BBC1 finally saw the five-part series called Monarchy: The Royal Family At Work. As the writer of the series and the accompanying book, I was part of a team privy to the inner workings of ‘The Firm’ for over a year. We saw the monarch and her private secretary in their daily morning meeting. We visited the palace unit which plots every single royal engagement with a dot on a map. We
met the people who organise the 100th birthday cards from the Queen and saw the Queen’s Piper playing his 9am recital under her window. We met the team behind her Royal Warrants, her cooks, coachmen and guards. In short, we saw the whole royal team doing its bit.
We followed the Queen everywhere, from the Baltic to the US. Ahead of the royal arrival, President George W Bush talked to us about the ‘twinkle’ in her eye, Laura Bush took us on a tour of the White House bedrooms and, down in the kitchens, the presidential chef, Cristeta Comerford, took us through her piece de resistance for the royal visitor, a pudding called ‘Rose Blossom’. The excitement was summed up by the man in charge of the White House, Admiral Stephen Rochon, marching around repeating his new mantra to the staff: ‘Pristine for the Queen!’ And it was.
Back in Britain, the excitement was much the same as we followed the Queen to places like Huddersfield and East Sussex. Wherever she went, the level of preparation was astonishing. The same went for events at home. We witnessed the colossal operation behind Buckingham Palace garden parties, starting with the ‘Garden Party Ladies’, the part-time team in charge of the guest lists. They not only had to write out 40,000 invitations to that summer’s parties (three in London, one in Scotland) but had to check every address and the name of every ‘plus one’.
Come the day, the Queen would do a pre-party patrol on the palace lawn and talk to the caterers. We learned that guests at a typical garden party at Buckingham Palace would consume 65,000 scones and sandwiches plus 11,000 cups of the Queen’s special Garden Party tea (a blend of Darjeeling and Assam), and 8,000 glasses of cordial. No alcohol is ever served, though the guests would absorb about 80 litres of Balmoral whisky in the 25,000 slices of whisky cake served during that particular garden party season.
Doing her rounds, the Queen spotted one potential problem given the sweltering heat on this particular day. ‘You can’t take those away in a doggy bag because they melt, which is no good,’ she remarked, inspecting the chocolate brownies. And she made a point of dropping in on the St John Ambulance volunteers. ‘You may be busy,’ she told them. They were.
Some of the most memorable royal scenes ever to appear in Weekend accompanied another 60th celebration – the Queen’s Dia-
mond Jubilee. Britain had two stupendous events in the summer of 2012: the Olympics and the Jubilee. At the heart of both was Her Majesty. Billions watched that unforgettable Olympic opening ceremony sequence as James Bond turned up for an audience with the Queen at the palace before the pair appeared to parachute out of a helicopter and into the stadium. The scene came as a surprise to everyone, including another queen in the stadium that night. The Queen of Denmark was gobsmacked. ‘You thought, “Can it be? Will it be?” She turned round and it was!’ recalled Queen Margrethe. She was one of many monarchs who appeared in the ITV documentary, Our Queen, based on my book of the same name. The film followed the run of royal events which took place through 2012, from the star-laden concert at the palace to the river pageant down the Thames in appalling conditions. I was also there when we dropped in on an eye-popping Windsor Castle lunch for the world’s crowned heads.
The Queen had asked every living monarch to Windsor for a Jubilee celebration and a very special photograph. To this day, it remains a piece of visual history – a full set of 21st-century hereditary rulers in one place. It was also a monumental protocol challenge. How should one arrange a room of kings and queens – plus a fullyfledged emperor ( Japan) – for a photo? In short, who should trump whom in the pecking order? The Queen had a solution – the seating was arranged according to the date of accession to the throne. As a result, she ended up between two kings, neither of whom had been in possession of a kingdom for many years. The King of Bulgaria and the King of Romania had both been young sovereigns when they were deposed after the Second World War. But the Queen likes to stay loyal to her fellow monarchs, throne or no throne. And, as we found out, when you get a room full of majesties, the atmosphere can be surprisingly informal.
In that same year, Weekend published a selection of magnificent images from Keepers, a book of portraits of some of the oldest and quirkiest positions in British public life. They ranged from the monarch herself to the Royal Falconer and the vicar’s son who holds the hereditary title of Lord High Admiral of the Wash. It showed British history not through a collection of museum pieces but through the human institutions which have shaped the story of these islands.
There were more celebrations for Weekend readers and for TV viewers in 2016 when we made Our Queen At Ninety, an ITV tribute to the longest-lived monarch in history as she entered her tenth decade. We not only saw the birthday girl riding her favourite fell pony, Emma, at Windsor – ‘Who else is riding at 90? That’s what’s so incredible,’ the Duchess of Cornwall told us – but we discovered that Prince George calls his great-grandmother ‘Gan Gan’.
And, of course, another new member of the Royal Family featured prominently just last month as the Duchess of Sussex was reunited with her wedding dress. She had been filmed for the ITV documentary Queen Of The World, based on my new book about the Royal Family on the international stage. In the series, the former Meghan Markle explained how she had wanted to give Prince Harry a surprise on her wedding day by including floral emblems of all 53 Commonwealth nations in her veil.
Just weeks later, the couple would be in one of those Commonwealth nations as they announced the news that another royal baby is on the way. And so, another chapter opens in Britain’s great royal story. Whatever happens over the next 25 years, you can be sure Weekend will capture it beautifully.
Queen Of The World by Robert Hardman is published by Century, £25.
‘Who else is riding at 90? That’s what’s so incredible’ DUCHESS OF CORNWALL