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epressed in public; the most she allows herself are dry one-liners which sometimes
reveal an uncomfortably critical eye. ‘You feel a tremendous inhibition there,’ one
woman politician said. ‘I think there’s tremendous warmth there when it’s allowed to
show itself,’ a relation said, ‘but it’s terribly controlled.’ ‘She may look grumpy in
photographs, but in fact she does smile a hell of a lot.’ ‘She’s got a wonderful sense of
humour – this is the one thing that never comes over to people when they see
photographs looking rather glum. When she smiles the whole face comes to life. She
loves a good laugh – I’ve seen the Queen laugh till the tears ran down her face about
some ridiculous things.’ ‘The woman I see is full of jokes and fun and amusing and only
too ready to laugh at anything – particularly herself,’ one of her fashion advisers said.
‘If only people could see her as she is.’ ‘She is very self-contained and is perfectly happy
on her own with the dogs and her photograph albums,’ a former aide says. ‘She’s not
gregarious – she likes being alone reading her detective stories.’ ‘She’s not a people
person, she’s a horse person, a dog person, likes being on her own,’ another relation
said. ‘She finds it easier to relate to horses and dogs than people and has an
extraordinary empathy with them.’
Elizabeth had to tread carefully between the conservative influences of her upbringing
– consideration for the feelings of her mother and the people and way of life which she
had inherited from the late King – and the modernizing tendencies of her husband. The
official attitude of the Palace towards Altrincham’s criticism was dismissive. The Lord
Chamberlain, the Earl of Scarbrough, titular head of the royal household, another of the
trio named by Altrincham as ‘second-rate and lacking in gumption’, a sixty-one-year-old
Yorkshire nobleman who was frequently the Queen’s host for the Doncaster race
meetings and one of her own appointees at her accession, went on record as saying he
was not interested in Lord Altrincham’s views. Nevertheless, he had the foresight to try
and escape from one of his traditional responsibilities, that of censoring plays. With
playwrights like John Osborne around, Scarbrough thought it was time to disassociate
the Palace from this potentially controversial duty, but when he approached the Home
Secretary, Rab Butler, in 1957 with a view to disembarrassing himself of the chore, he
was told that the system worked perfectly well and it was not until 1968 under his
successor, Lord Cobbold, that the Palace managed to lay down the burden.
The tedious and outdated circus of debutante presentation parties, which, Altrincham
had rightly said, should have been quietly dropped in 1945, was abandoned after 1958.
Presentation at court had been an essential part of social initiation in the days when, in
Disraeli’s phrase, ‘the high aristocracy clustered round the throne’. It marked the year
when a girl, usually at the age of seventeen, ‘came out’ of the schoolroom into society in
search of a husband and was then duly invited to balls and the other events of the
London ‘Season’. After their marriage they were ‘presented’ again. By the 1950s
presentation was no longer even a glamorous occasion but a snobbish survival; there
were no ostrich feather head-dresses, jewels or satin dresses with trains of a specified
length, it was simply an afternoon reception at which several hundred young women
dressed in ‘afternoon dresses’, hats and white kid gloves to the elbow, filed past the