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member of the Royal Family’. Later Cecil Beaton, the outstanding image-maker of his
age, was called in to photograph the Queen wearing that same dress. Seeing her now he
found it ‘inexplicable that before I could have felt it was dreary and dowdy to have the
Yorks on the throne… [I took] many more lovely pictures that should be very romantic
of the fairy Queen in her ponderous palace.’ 2
State occasions at the ‘ponderous palace’ were very grand. Harold Nicolson attended
the first dinner-party there in March 1937 and was impressed by the splendour. Tall
footmen with powdered hair stood motionless on each fourth step of Nash’s Grand
Staircase, leading up to the drawing-rooms of the state apartments. The dining-table
glittered with gold candelabra and scarlet tulips with the fabulous Windsor gold services
massed in tiers along the walls. There were state visits by the Kings of the Belgians and
Romania and by President Coty of France, on which occasion Elizabeth made a short
speech of welcome in French to the President. Then there were the courts at which
debutantes and recently married ladies were ‘presented’ to the King and Queen. They
were occasions of the utmost formality when the King and Queen wore crowns and sat
on thrones while the women in full evening dress with five-foot trains, three ostrich
feathers in their hair and a white tulle veil hanging down behind, curtseyed to them in
turn as their names were called out by the Lord Chamberlain. The men wore knee
breeches and silk stockings; officials of the household, ambassadors and privy
counsellors were in their uniforms, glittering with gold braid, orders and decorations.
The Princesses stared down from the windows at the guests arriving in their plumes and
jewels – ‘a fly’s eye view,’ Elizabeth called it. Their favourite was Princess Marina,
always beautiful and exquisitely dressed. Garden-parties which they now attended with
their parents were less amusing. Wearing childish smocked silk frocks with matching
knickers, white socks and the hated straw hats, they walked with their parents through
the 3,000 guests in the Palace gardens. Once Crawfie overheard Elizabeth instruct her
sister on how to behave. ‘If you do see someone with a funny hat, Margaret, you must
notpoint at it and laugh. And you must not be in too much of a hurry to get through the
crowds to the tea table. That’s not polite either.’
From the age of ten, Elizabeth was becoming accustomed to the extraordinary pomp
and ceremony surrounding her parents, so that to her it appeared a normal part of life.
This included the swarm of household and staff with medieval-sounding names: the Lord
Chamberlain, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, the Mistress of the Robes, the Yeomen of
the Silver and Gold and of the China and Glass pantry, the Pages of the Chambers, the
Pages of the Backstairs and of the Presence (all adult men, not boys as their titles would
suggest), some four hundred servants headed by the Palace Steward, plus the equerries,
ladies-in-waiting, Ladies of the Bedchamber and Women of the Bedchamber, the King’s
and the Queen’s Private Secretaries and their staff, the Crown Equerry in charge of the
grooms and coachmen looking after the seventy-five horses and state carriages in the
Royal Mews.
The King and Queen were already training Elizabeth for the day when she would be
at the head of this vast establishment. Since she had become the obvious heir to the