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her to marry a divorced man, however innocent, would not have crossed his mind. He
would not have been surprised that she was attracted by him; ‘Princesses always fall in
love with equerries,’ one royal lady commented cynically. The combination of a
handsome face, a uniform, propinquity and the lure of the unusual was a powerful
aphrodisiac. In the circumstances, with Elizabeth happily married, he was simply glad
that Margaret was amused and not lonely.
Ironically the situation had arisen because of an admirable desire on the King’s part to
widen the system by which royal equerries were chosen beyond the two senior services,
the Army and the Navy, backed by personal connections. He wanted to honour the RAF,
the service of which he had once been an unwilling member, which had saved the
country in the Battle of Britain, but was still not represented at court. Group Captain
Peter Townsend, a Battle of Britain hero who had led ‘B’ flight of Hurricanes in the
famous No. 43 Squadron (known as Kate Meyrick’s Own after the owner of a famous
London watering-hole, the 43), seemed the ideal choice. Townsend says that he first met
Princess Margaret at Buckingham Palace in February 1944 on his way to his first
audience with the King. The Princesses had been waiting on purpose to see their first
Battle of Britain pilot close to – the heroes of 1940 were then on a par with film stars for
glamour and, according to Margaret, as they spied on him coming in, Elizabeth said to
her, ‘Bad luck. He’s married.’ Margaret was thirteen, the same age as Elizabeth had been
when she fell in love with Philip, and she developed an instant crush on the young pilot.
‘He was very beautiful,’ a (male) family friend admitted.
The King and Townsend hit it off immediately. ‘The King did not try, or even need, to
put me at my ease,’ Townsend recalled;’… the humanity of the man and his striking
simplicity came across warmly, unmistakably… sometimes he hesitated in his speech,
and then I felt drawn towards him, to help him keep up the flow of words. I knew
myself the agonies of a stammerer.’ They were both shy and suffered from tension –
Townsend’s war experiences of exhaustion, fear and death had plunged him into a
nervous breakdown at the age of twenty-six. He had made a typically hasty wartime
marriage to the beautiful Rosemary Pawle, fathered a son and suffered a serious
breakdown, which had resulted in three months’ hospitalization. He recovered, but the
careless, reckless courage of 1940 had left him for ever:
I knew in my bones that I should never again be the pilot I once had been [he wrote]. I had gone too far down
the hill ever to get to the top again. In my thoughts and visions I saw myself crashing, over and over again, to
a horrible death. I was convinced I was going to die… exactly the reverse to what I had felt during the herioc
days of 1940, when I was convinced that I was going to live! The more I flew, and there could be no relenting,
the more fear, stark, degrading fear, possessed me. Each time I took off, I felt sure it would be the last… 3
The King came to regard Townsend with an almost paternal affection; the young
equerry was to be the only non-member of the family who could calm him when he had
one of his ‘gnashes’ and the appointment which had been intended only for three
months lasted almost ten years.