The forgotten story of the Queen’s swimming set
When Buckingham Palace picked a group of girls to join Princess Elizabeth in her childhood pursuits, it forged bonds that lasted a lifetime, says Eleanor Steafel
The morning of December 10 1936 began much like any other Thursday for the young Princess Elizabeth – with a swimming lesson. After her class at the Bath Club on Dover Street, she came home to 145 Piccadilly, the stone-fronted house that looked across to Green Park and beyond to Buckingham Palace, where the Yorks (as they were then) lived. Elizabeth, already a diligent little girl at 10, was getting ready to write up her notes from her swimming lesson when, hearing cries of “God Save the King” from outside her window, she went to investigate, asking a nearby footman what was going on. “Your uncle has abdicated,” he said. “And your father is King.” She went in search of her sister to tell her the news. “Well. Does that mean you’re going to be Queen now?” Princess Margaret asked. “Poor you!”
Unflappable, with a natural instinct to get on with the job even then, Princess Elizabeth went straight back to her swimming notes, simply writing at the top: Abdication Day.
It was the moment her life changed forever; the line in the sand that brought an end to the relatively normal childhood she had enjoyed with her sister and parents, replacing it with a lifetime of duty and expectation. Before Edward VIII abdicated, Elizabeth had enjoyed all the freedom that came with being the offspring of the second in line to the throne; there were walks in the Royal parks, horse riding, birthday parties and swimming.
This week, while on a video call with members of the Royal Life Saving Society, the Queen reminisced about those days before the Second World War when she and her sister were taken to swimming lessons at a gentleman’s club in Mayfair. It was there, in 1941, that she became the first young person in the Commonwealth to receive a Junior Respiration Award.
The Queen recalled how she had to work “very hard” for it. “It’s a very long time ago, I’m afraid. I think it’s changed a lot … But it was a great achievement and I was very proud to wear the badge on the front of my swimming suit. It was very grand, I thought.”
Opening the newspaper this week to see a photograph of the princess with some of the girls in her class, Lady Myra Butter, who also attended the lessons at the Bath Club, was delighted to be reminded of happy days when she and her friends were dragged around the swimming pool on a rope. “I couldn’t believe it when I opened the paper,” Lady Butter (then Myra Wernher) tells me over the phone from her home in London. “The Queen said it’s a very long time ago. Well, it jolly well is – I think I was 12. I’m rather lucky in that department. My memory is good, and so is hers.”
Lady Butter, now 95 and still a close friend of the Queen, was one of several little girls enlisted by Buckingham Palace to join the princess in various childhood activities, from swimming to girl guiding. “They got hold of some girls to be part of the thing to make it more fun,” recalls Lady Butter.
“In the Guides and the Brownies it was a real mixture, which was really nice, some friends, friends of [the family], and all the people in the Royal mews, their children, they were Brownies and Guides. Just a normal sort of pack really.”
Lady Butter recalls their swimming teacher, Miss Daly, who had a rather unusual “YITX” coaching technique.
“[You had to] lie flat on your face, and then stretch your arms out in front of you and use your arms and your legs only,” she recalls. “Y, you open your legs and your arms are stiff. Close your legs which makes an I. Then T, you spread your arms out and then X, you double up and push.
“We all started with that, I suppose on the floor, though I don’t remember the first lesson. But then the next lesson she put a rope round your middle, a long rope, held it very tight and walked along the side pulling you along saying ‘YITX’.
“Once you got quite good at that she slackened the rope and you were off.”
Andrew Neill, son of another of the Queen’s classmates, Sally Backus (later Lady Sally Neill, who died in 2009), remembers how, years later, his mother used that same technique when coaching him as a boy. “When teaching us breaststroke, I do remember my mother quoting YITX for the limb shapes that at she must have learned there,” says s Neill, who still has his mother’s Children’s Challenge Shield, the e lifeguarding medal she won alongside gside Princess Elizabeth.
Eventually, ally, Princess Margaret joined their eir class. “She always had to do the same,” says Lady Butter. “She was a Brownie because her sister was s a Guide, and then she wanted to o swim.
“She was dragged around by this rope pe like the rest of us and she he was quite nervous – we all were, we hung onto the side, we were petrified – and
[the teacher] kept on saying ‘no, don’t touch the side!’, and Princess Margaret was squeaking like anything for a bit until she realised she didn’t have to at all, she was beginning to swim like everybody else. It was quite funny, I must say. It was a very fun time actually, and very useful.” Looking at the picture now, Lady Butter, a granddaughter of Grand Duke Michael of Russia and cousin of the Duke of Edinburgh, recalls her royal friend as being “so calm, always, but laugh laughing a lot” as a child, with a “very g good sense of humour which has gone on for all her life”. Sh She only remembers one or two others from among their former classmates. “The little onew one with all the medals, I rem remember her, she was frig frightfully sprightly and goo good. Well, the Queen was frightfully good too, actually.
“Sonia GrahamH Hodgson, at the back on t the left I think, was my g greatest friend.” Sonia’s daughter,
Vic Victoria Willis, recalls how her mother used to say she was among the speedier members of the class. “Everyone used to get rather fed up because she usually won the race. All she needed to do was dive in and do a few strokes and she was up the other end, whereas the other ones were smaller.”
Like Lady Butter (who is also Willis’s godmother), Sonia enjoyed a friendship with the Queen until her death in 2012. They first met in Hamilton Gardens, just behind 145 Piccadilly, when Sonia was five and the princess was four. It was private, but local residents could get a key, which Willis’s mother did. “One day, she was playing in those gardens and so was Princess Elizabeth, and the princess came up to my mother and asked her if she’d like to play with her. So that’s how their friendship started,” says Willis.
“My mother wouldn’t have known who she was. She was just a little girl who wanted to play. A chance meeting that worked. They became very good friends and met in those gardens almost every day.”
Sonia always spoke fondly of the “quiet”, “reliable”, “serious” Princess Elizabeth, recalling the time she was charged with looking after her toy pony during the great move to Buckingham Palace. “Princess Elizabeth had all these toy horses that she loved and used to have on the landing of 145 Piccadilly all lined up.
“When they moved to Buckingham Palace my mother had her favourite one to stay, called Ben, because she was so worried, Princess Elizabeth, that she didn’t want him put in a packing case. So while the move took place my mother looked after him.”
Sonia moved to Bath years before she died, but her daughter tells me that she and the Queen wrote to each other regularly. Their friendship, perhaps, serving as a treasured reminder for the Queen of those early years of swimming lessons and playing in Hamilton Gardens, before life changed forever.
‘She was dragged around by this rope like the rest of us – we were petrified’