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The King flatly refused to agree to the suggestion (although many British children,
mainly of the upper classes, were being sent to the United States and Canada for their
safety), and Churchill concurred, minuting on 18 July, ‘I strongly deprecate any
stampede from this country at the present time.’ Queen Mary, much against her will,
was evacuated from Marlborough House and sent down to Gloucestershire to spend the
war at Badminton with her niece, the former Lady Mary Cambridge, now Duchess of
Beaufort. Despite her sojourns at Sandringham and Balmoral, Queen Mary was
emphatically not a country person. ‘So that’s what hay looks like!’ she remarked on
being driven past a harvested field.
Some not particularly stringent precautions were, however, taken to protect the royal
family. An air-raid shelter had been prepared at Buckingham Palace since the Munich
scare in September 1938, but it was simply a former housemaids’ sitting-room in the
basement equipped with Victorian buttoned upholstered settees, armchairs and ornate
tables, and provided with pails of sand and a hand pump for dousing fires. Since June
the King, Queen and members of the household had been having shooting practice in the
Palace garden, while a special unit was formed for their protection consisting of a
company of Coldstream Guardsmen and two troops of armoured cars from the 12th
Lancers and the Northamptonshire Yeomanry, named the Coates Mission after its
commanding officer, Major Jimmy Coates. Its duties were to guard the family in
London, Windsor and at Sandringham, and, in the event of a German invasion, to escort
them to one of three large country houses well away from the Channel coast:
Madresfield, near Malvern, Pitchford House in Shropshire and Newby Hall in Yorkshire.
On one occasion when King Haakon asked for a demonstration of the reaction if the
Palace was attacked by parachutists as had happened in Holland, the Coates Mission did
not distinguish itself. The King pressed the alarm signal with no result. The officer of the
guard telephoned the duty police sergeant and was informed there was no attack; it was
only when alerted by an equerry that a party of Guardsmen appeared and proceeded to
thrash the Palace shrubbery ‘as if they were beaters on a shoot rather than men engaged
in the pursuit of a dangerous enemy’. The King did not seriously contemplate the
possibility of protecting Windsor against parachute attack until 13 October 1940, when
he invited the Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, Alan Brooke, to lunch to discuss the
subject. By then the invasion scare was over.
The danger was none the less real, not so much from invasion but from bombing.
After the Battle of Britain effectively ended the threat of invasion, the Blitz began. On
the night of 7–8 September 1940 more than 200 German bombers attacked London; by
dawn on the morning of the 8th more than 400 Londoners had been killed and 1,357
seriously injured. On the 9th a bomb fell on the north side of the Palace but did not
explode; the King, as yet unused to bombs, continued working in his study directly
above it. Fortunately he was not there when it did explode in the early hours of the next
morning breaking the windows on all floors on that side of the Palace, including his
study, and demolishing his newly built swimming-pool. For security, the King and Queen
then moved to apartments facing the inner courtyard, and they were in the King’s