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Room’ and the ‘Boudoir’, with her. They had to be replaced at a cost of £550 to the
public purse. All the walls were repapered and the gilding on the mouldings touched up.
New baths were installed in both the King’s and the Queen’s bathrooms. The King chose
to use as his bedroom his father’s dressing-room, perhaps because it was a good deal
smaller than the King’s official bedroom but also perhaps because it reminded him so
much of his father and his father’s evening ritual of dressing for dinner when he used to
like having his family round him. The Princesses’ rooms were on the second floor above.
Elizabeth now had a sitting-room of her own and a room adjoining. There was a room
for Crawfie, another for Bobo, a day nursery and a night nursery, over which Allah
Knight still reigned, and two bathrooms, neither of them what would nowadays be
called en suite. The Queen, like her mother, had taste and a touch for creating a
welcoming atmosphere wherever she lived. When Lady Airlie, who as Queen Mary’s
lady-in-waiting had known the Palace well, visited them there shortly after they moved
in, she remarked on how cosy and homely the atmosphere was. The King smiled
proudly, ‘Elizabeth can make a home wherever she is.’
The public side of their life was at that time the most important. Elizabeth watched as
her father and mother acted out their parts in the pageant of monarchy, a role which
Edward VIII had found so irksome, although he had possessed the gifts to do it
supremely well. Monarchy is superb theatre or a meaningless charade, whichever way
you like to look at it. The new King and Queen, trained in the extreme formality of the
court of George V and Queen Mary, understood that the Duke and Duchess of York had
to be seen to be transformed into King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. A young
couturier, Norman Hartnell, was brought in to glamorize the Queen’s wardrobe. Her
figure was not suited to the skinny chic that Wallis and her contemporaries wore; she
was not prepared to confine herself to the strict dieting which society women underwent
in order to look good in clinging crêpe by Main-bocher or Patou. Chips Channon was to
describe her as looking ‘bosomy’ at the Coronation and rumours circulated that she was
pregnant. Queen Mary with her unchanging style provided an outstanding example of
how to be regal without being fashionable. Her Edwardian dresses, long-skirted, in soft
colours and fabrics, often edged with fox furs, her toque hats and, above all, the ease
with which she wore staggering amounts of jewellery without looking either overloaded
or vulgar, had become established in the public eye. At the Silver Jubilee Channon, no
mean judge of style, had noted: ‘Suddenly she has become the best-dressed woman in the
world.’ The new King, who had an unerring eye for clothes, found the perfect answer for
his wife in the romantic Winterhalter portraits of Victoria and Albert and various. Saxe-
Coburg relations lining the walls of the Marble Hall. ‘His Majesty made it clear in his
quiet way’, Hartnell wrote, ‘that I should attempt to capture this picturesque grace in
the dresses I was to design for the Queen. Thus it is to the King and Winterhalter that
are owed the fine praises I later received for the regal renaissance of the romantic
crinoline.’ 1 He designed two crinoline evening dresses for the Queen to wear at
banquets for state visits; one, in silver tissue over silver gauze with a deep collar of
silver lace sewn with diamonds, he described as ‘the first great dress I designed for any