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courtier. One friend recalls:
I remember one occasion when she’d just done up three of the bedrooms for state visits and she was rather
like a child because, you know, she’s never had an opportunity of really doing up any of those rooms and she
was so excited. She’d found big chintzes to go into these rooms. She’d done a bedroom in Laura Ashley and
she was so thrilled by that. And equally at Balmoral she’s like a housewife manquée. She loves laying the
table in the log cabin and putting out the sandwiches which come out of these old-fashioned biscuit-tin
boxes… you don’t dare help…
The writer Daphne du Maurier, after staying at Balmoral, said of Elizabeth, ‘She’s so
practical. She’d have made a marvellous head of the WI [Women’s Institute].’
She is not interested in gardens as her mother and her eldest son are (‘I’m only a
weeder really,’ she told a guest at a Holyrood party for gardeners), but she keeps an eye
on things none the less. When a friend asked her if he might photograph the herbaceous
borders at Holyrood for a book, she said, ‘Yes, but you mustn’t do it before the 15th
July, or it won’t be ready…’ A former courtier has remarked:
Many, many times I have heard the Queen say, ‘Well, nobody ever tells me anything’, but in fact she is much
better informed than almost anybody I’ve ever known anywhere. Everybody who thinks they know
something nobody else knows loves being the one to tell the Queen first. I mean not least of all her famous
page for many years, Mr Bennett, who knew or gleaned everything from upstairs and downstairs. He was a
great supplier of information, but that is something which I think there is a danger within the Queen’s
household now of being rather eroded. They’ve been going through a period in recent years of financial
reorganization headed by Michael Peat who was appointed Financial Adviser to the Queen…
Over the last decade, the royal household, most traditional of British institutions –
hierarchical, patriarchal, and yet extremely personal and based on loyalty to Elizabeth
herself – has been subjected to the kind of bruising, cost-cutting, managementorientated,
performance-related, pay-minded, memorandum-based exercise which has
changed the ethos of many companies. A former courtier recalled:
All the Members of the Queen’s Household when I first went there put the Queen first. I remember once at
the Lord Chamberlain’s lunch we were arguing about something and a very dry voice of Sir Michael Adeane
said, ‘Does anybody know what the Queen wants?’, and there was dead silence and he said, ‘Well, I think
somebody should ask her and we won’t waste any more time discussing it.’ Lord Plunket said he was seeing
her tomorrow. ‘Well, you ask her tomorrow and I shall be in on Tuesday… let me know what the answer is
and don’t let’s waste any more time on it.’ And that’s how it should be. There’s a lot going on now of… well,
they’ve instituted a lot of civil service sort of things whereby we’re called upon to make an annual report and
to carry out an annual interview with staff and there has been a feeling permeating the lower regions of the
Queen’s Household, amongst officials and staff, that the atmosphere and the feeling’s different and that they
don’t get the feeling the only person they’re working for is the Queen. They feel they’re being given orders by
other people which may or may not have been approved by the Queen… It was said to me by staff at the
Royal Palace. It’s a rather sad situation.
But change and, particularly, financial reorganization have been inevitable, given the