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the four-year difference between the two children was to be ignored and, from the
moment the youngest was out of baby clothes, the two would be dressed the same with
dresses, shoes and hats in identical colours. This apparently was considered perfectly
normal for upper-class families at the time, but it struck even the assimilated Chips
Channon as odd when he saw the two princesses still dressed the same at the
Thanksgiving Service for the end of the Second World War in 1945, when Elizabeth was
nineteen and Margaret not yet fifteen. Their father would over-compensate for what he
saw as the inferiority of Margaret’s position as the younger sister relative to the royal
heiress by spoiling her, thus storing up trouble for the future.
The Great Depression following on the Stock Market crash of 1929 had made little
impact on Elizabeth’s sheltered world. When Britain went off the Gold Standard in
September 1931, the King ordered a 50 per cent cut on the money he received from the
Government on the Civil List. The Prince of Wales, who had already sold his horses to
concentrate on golf but now had other expensive hobbies, was furious when telephoned
by his father in a Biarritz night-club where he was dancing with his mistress, Viscountess
Furness, to be ordered to give up £10,000 a year. The Duke of York, whose own Civil
List allowance was to be curtailed, decided to give up hunting. ‘It has come as a great
shock to me that with the economy cuts I have had to make my hunting should have
been one of the things I must do without,’ he wrote to Ronald Tree, Master of the
Pytchley Hunt. ‘And I must sell my horses too. This is the worst part of it all and the
parting will be terrible.’ From Elizabeth’s point of view, it was, however, an
improvement. Instead of renting expensive houses in the shires for the hunting season as
her father had been in the habit of doing, George V gave him in September 1931 the
Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, originally built for George IV by the architect, Sir
Jeffrey Wyatville, in the fashionable Gothic style. By the time the Yorks saw it, it was
dilapidated and inconvenient. Most of George IV’s house had been pulled down by his
successor, William IV, who left only the great saloon and chapel and added an
octagonal pavilion. Subsequent tenants had partitioned off the great saloon, spoiling its
proportions. The Yorks took out the partitions to make a large drawing-room and added
two wings on either side, with two bedrooms for themselves on the ground floor of one
wing. Characteristically, the Duke’s was an austere room, neat and tidy like a sailor’s
cabin, furnished with a hard bed, a simple dressing-table and one bookcase on which
was laid out a few personal mementoes, while his wife’s was decorated in her favourite
grey-blue, the large bed in blue silk with lemon pleating, and furniture and cupboards of
white apple wood.
The Yorks now had a country house and their lives followed the traditional
aristocratic pattern. On Fridays the family left 145 Piccadilly to spend the weekend at
the Royal Lodge, where the Duke of York developed his passion for gardening, helped
by his wife and children; both the children had their own plot to cultivate. In 1932 the
people of Wales presented Elizabeth with a miniature cottage, known as the ‘Y Bwthyn
Bach’, ‘The Little House’, fully equipped down to the last vacuum cleaner, in which she
and Margaret Rose could play, Marie-Antoinette-like, at being housewives. The cycle of