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atmosphere in the Private Secretaries’ Office. Charteris’s charm concealed a nimble and
far-seeing mind and his relaxed manner a consummate diplomatic ability and a steely
resolve in defence of his Queen. He was one of the few courtiers who realized that
openness is the best defence against prying and that an air of concealment only
strengthens a journalist’s determination to investigate. Equally, as a loyal friend and
servant to Elizabeth, he was prepared to tell her things he thought she should know but
about which others had not dared to approach her. He discovered a hidden talent for
sculpture when Oscar Nemon was working on a portrait bust of the Queen and later in
life became an honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy. He was devoted to Elizabeth
and, as he freely admitted, had been a little in love with her since first meeting her on
his appointment as her Private Secretary when she was Princess Elizabeth. ‘There was
definitely a twinkle in the Queen’s relationship with Martin,’ a courtier said.
His colleague, Edward Ford, once described himself as ‘encircled by dog collars’. He
was the son of a Dean of York, headmaster of Harrow, and grandson of a Bishop of
Westminster, one of his uncles was Bishop of Pretoria and another was a monk. His own
training was legal and military. Educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, he had
trained as a lawyer before the war (as a pupil in the chambers of Ronald Armstrong-
Jones, father of Princess Margaret’s future husband), then fought in the Grenadier
Guards. His introduction to the Palace came through Lascelles, whose only son he had
tutored; he had worked as Assistant Private Secretary to George VI and continued in the
same job under Elizabeth. Tall and dark with the leonine head of a nineteenth-century
bishop, he, like Charteris, was worldly and had a lively sense of humour. Both of them,
privately, thought some of Altrincham’s strictures were ‘the best thing that had
happened to the Palace for years’.
The same could not be said of the Queen’s Press Secretary, Commander Richard
Colville, whom, like several other officials, she had inherited from her father. Colville, a
relation of Jock, was described by Peter Townsend as ‘a thin man, with a thin face,
straight black hair, black-rimmed spectacles and dressed (invariably, it seemed) in
formal black clothes’. He had ‘distinguished himself gallantly’ in the Navy during the
Second World War and his attitude to journalists was that of the press-gang rather than
the press officer. ‘I am not’, he informed a visiting Canadian newspaperman who asked
to see round Buckingham Palace, ‘what you North Americans would call a public
relations man.’ Born in 1907, he was already middle-aged by the time he was appointed
Press Secretary in 1947 and remained there until 1968, as resolutely defensive of his
Queen throughout the Swinging Sixties as he had been in his naval days. He had had
absolutely no previous qualification for the job and was incapable of making any
distinction between scandal-mongers and serious journalists. ‘All were made to feel’,
George V’s biographer, Kenneth Rose, wrote, ‘that their questions were impertinent if
not downright vulgar.’ Colville was a protagonist of the siege mentality at Buckingham
Palace which has caused so much friction between Palace officials, newspapermen and
writers and which earned him a rebuke from the Press Council. ‘Press inquiries’, Rose
wrote, ‘were met at best with guarded courtesy, sometimes with impatient disdain,