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others no atmosphere at all. It was like a visit to the morgue; and everywhere were their faces, painted,
drawn or photographed: few pictures not directly relating to themselves: most curiously borné[limited] their
horizon seems to have been, ringed in by their own family and their own likenesses, with an outer
constellation of ‘servants’ of every class. 10
‘Creepy’ and ‘somehow frightening’ were other words he used to describe the house. The
main staircase is, as he wrote, ‘almost incredibly gloomy, a great windowless well of
tangerine-coloured wood’. The passages are painted in Nile green while the carpet is
ugly, blotched with red. Elizabeth’s office is very 1950s with pale washed walls and
brocade curtains to match.
Each generation of the family has left its mark on the house, although the spirit of the
place is Queen Alexandra’s, particularly in the drawing-room, ‘1860 masquerading as
1760’, as Pope-Hennessy puts it, rather like the Ritz Hotel in London with rococo
plasterwork and pretty painted ceiling panels of sky, balustrades, peacocks and vases of
flowers. One can imagine the Edwardian ladies there after dinner, Mrs Keppel among
them, with their streamlined, heavily embroidered evening dresses, their pearl chokers
and diamond ornaments on their piled-up hair, fluttering like doves in a dovecote for
the arrival of the bearded, paunchy King with a pungent aura of Havana cigars. A
celebrity screen is a microcosm of the Edwardian era from Gladstone to Nellie Melba
and the first ‘Gibson Girl’, and there are vitrines of Alexandra’s collection of Fabergé
animals, many of them given to her by her nephew, the last Tsar. There are, of course,
serried ranks of royal photographs, many of them of Christmas past, notably 1951
(George VI’s last) and 1900 (the last of the Victorian era). The dining-room next door,
again reminiscent of the Ritz, has been, as Pope-Hennessy says, ‘effectually disinfected’
by the Queen Mother, painted pea-green and hung with Goya tapestries. She also
lightened the panelling of estate oak lining the ‘saloon’ – the social centre of the house
where everyone meets for tea, and which is disconcertingly off the hall so that nervous
non-royal guests come right into the midst of the family. The almost obligatory
Edwardian stuffed bear (usually Russian, upright and proffering a tray for visiting
cards) has been swept away, but in the hall two weather machines, the focus of George
V’s daily interest, still remain.
Within walking distance from the Big House down an avenue of Scots pines is the
little Sandringham church built out of the rich reddish-brown carstone quarried on the
estate and cut into small tiles inserted horizontally, with stone trimming. Inside it is the
normal English parish church of its time with an oak vaulted roof supported by angels
and a mosaic-tiled floor of the Edwardian period. It is full of family plaques: to Edward
VII’s sisters, Alice of Hesse and the Empress Frederick of Prussia, to his haemophiliac
brother, Leopold, and to his eldest son, Prince Eddy. Outside the church are two pathetic
graves: those of Prince Alexander John Charles Albert, ‘3rd son of Edward and
Alexandra b. 6 April 1871 d. 7 April 1871’, and next to him under a red granite stone,
Elizabeth’s sad, afflicted uncle, Prince John, ‘b. 12 July 1905 d. 18 January 1919’. In the
graveyard too are the tombstones of the local families who have worked on the estate