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was to remain with Elizabeth and Margaret for sixteen years. Three years later she
published a book about her experiences in the royal household, The Little Princesses,
which today seems tame and sugary, but in the buttoned-up early 1950s was as
sensational as Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story was to be in the 1990s. As the first
royal employee to publish an intimate account of their family life, traitor Crawfie would
become a non-person as far as the royal family was concerned.
Crawfie’s account is not entirely to be trusted. There was undoubtedly some beefing
up of the manuscript to suit her publishers. Certain remarks and conversations are pure
fantasy which could charitably be put down to memory lapses after the passage of
years. The characters are cardboard and superficially observed and the style is that of a
women’s magazine, but the book does have value as a portrait drawn by an intelligent
observer who came from outside and who had no longer, in the royal context, any
reason to colour her picture rose. Yet Crawfie’s portrayal of life with the Yorks, though
sometimes mawkish, was a happy one. She fell for her employers, particularly the
Duchess, and their family: ‘The Duke and Duchess were so young, and so much in love.
They took great delight in each other and in their children.’
Crawfie first saw Elizabeth sitting up in bed driving an imaginary horse with a pair of
toy reins. When asked if she usually drove in bed, Elizabeth replied seriously, ‘I mostly
go once or twice round the park before I go to sleep. It exercises my horses.’ She and
Margaret had a collection of over thirty toy horses, each one of which would be
solemnly unsaddled before they went to bed. In Hamilton Gardens or at the Royal
Lodge, her favourite games involved horses. Elizabeth and her cousin, Margaret
Elphinstone, would pretend to draw Margaret sitting in a miniature cart, or Elizabeth
would harness up Crawfie as a drayhorse delivering goods on a round, as she saw them
doing from the windows of No. 145. She groomed, fed and watered her toy ponies,
keeping the necessary brushes and pails lined up in the corridor outside her nursery. At
Royal Lodge she was already being taught to ride her own pony; it was the beginning of
a lifelong passion for horses. There was nothing unusual about this at her age, but most
girls end their love-affair with the horse at puberty; only relatively few, like Elizabeth,
never do. Perhaps her interest lasted because it was technical and practical as well as
passionate: she was to become an acknowledged expert on the breeding and form of
racehorses. Dogs were equally important to her. Nineteen thirty-three was the Year of
the Corgi, when her father bought the first of the long line of the short-legged and shorttempered
Welsh breed that was to become inseparable from Elizabeth’s domestic image.
This animal, whose pedigree name was Rozavel Golden Eagle but who was always
known as Dookie, was not popular among the royal household, being all too prone to
snap at ankles or proffered hands, but the Yorks none the less bought another one
named Jane and founded a dynasty. Elizabeth had an unusual rapport with animals,
particularly dogs; in some ways she seemed more interested in them than she was in
human beings. Like her father, who was an expert on wildlife and game, she was a
country person at heart. She told Crawfie that when she grew up she would marry a
farmer so that she could have ‘lots of cows, horses and dogs and children’.