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everything,’ Lampson reported on 29 August. ‘HM thought that there would now be
peace and that this time Hitler’s bluff would be called.’ 1 Within five days all hope of
peace was gone. On 1 September German troops crossed the Polish border; from eleven
o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 3 September, no answer having been received to
their ultimatum, Great Britain and France were at war with Germany. On that day the
King began a diary, sitting at the same desk at which his father had sat only twenty-five
years before writing in his own diary, ‘Please God, protect dear Bertie’s life.’ The King’s
mind went back to that moment when he, like so many other young men, had cheered
the news of war with Germany. No one was cheering in 1939.
At the outbreak of War at midnight of Aug 4th–5th 1914, I was a midshipman, keeping the middle watch on
the bridge of HMS ‘Collingwood’ at sea, somewhere in the North Sea. I was 18 years of age.
In the Grand Fleet everyone was pleased that it had come at last. We had been trained in the belief that War
between Germany & this country had to come one day, & when it did come we thought we were prepared for
it. We were not prepared for what we found a modern war really was, & those of us who had been through
the Great War never wanted another. 2
At Balmoral the Princesses were in limbo, their mother having hurried south on the
28th to join the King in London. The castle was closed, Crawfie summoned back from
holiday and the children moved into Birkhall. They remained there until Christmas,
cheered up by a regular evening telephone call from their parents, who were spending
the weekdays at Buckingham Palace and sleeping nights at Windsor Castle. They
worried about their parents and missed them. ‘Do you think the Germans will come and
get them?’ Margaret asked. The war touched Elizabeth deeply for the first time when on
14 October a German submarine penetrated the defences of the northern naval base at
Scapa Flow and sank the battleship Royal Oak with the loss of more than 800 lives. ‘We
were continually studying Jane’s Fighting Ships’, Crawfie wrote, ‘and the little girls took a
personal interest in every one of them. Lilibet jumped horrified from her chair, her eyes
blazing with anger. “Crawfie, it can’t be! All those nice sailors.”’ They vented their rage
against the Germans by throwing cushions at the wireless when William Joyce, ‘Lord
Haw-Haw’, gave his anti-British broadcasts. Six months later they shocked their mother
by their bloodthirsty delight at the success of a British bombing raid on the island of
Sylt.
It was still the period of the phoney war, when, for the French and British allies at
least, nothing much happened. At Birkhall life continued on an even keel. Crawfie gave
them lessons and Mrs Montau-don-Smith taught them French; they learned to sing
French duets together as a surprise for their parents. There were sewing-parties for war
work every Thursday afternoon with tea organized by Allah, attended by the crofters
and the wives of the local farmers and estate employees. Later, evacuee mothers from
Glasgow joined in; the King had lent them Craigowan House on the Balmoral estate, but
not all of them appreciated the peace of the Highlands, complaining about the quiet. At
these sewing-parties the Princesses handed round tea and played records on an ancient
gramophone with six scarves stuffed down the horn to muffle its raucous tone.