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Regiment gave me a Colonel’s Colour for my birthday’. A parade was held in the
morning for inspection by Elizabeth. ‘It was a bit frightening inspecting a Regiment for
the first time,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘but it was not as bad as I expected it to be.’
(Harold Nicolson later noted her enthusiasm for her regiment: ‘Princess Elizabeth a clear
nice girl with a most lovely skin, very keen about the Grenadiers.’) In the afternoon
there was ‘a very good entertainment’ organized by the King with all his favourite radio
stars, Jack Warner, Vera Lynn and Tommy Handley, who put on a special performance
of his show ITMA.
On 25 August 1942 the royal family were at Balmoral when news came that the Duke
of Kent had been killed. Ironically, the King and the Duke of Gloucester had been eating
a picnic lunch out shooting on the moors in vile weather, low mist, rain and a chill east
wind, just as, not far to the north-east, an RAF Sunderland flying boat with the Duke of
Kent on board en route for Iceland, flying 700 feet too low in dense mist known locally
as ‘haar’, hit the top of a hill and burst into a fireball, killing all on board. The King was
devastated. ‘He died on Active Service,’ he wrote in his diary, as if to justify and make
some meaning out of his brother’s death, but, as with so many wartime aeroplane
accidents, it had been unnecessary, due to pilot error and disorientation in bad
visibility. He found it hard to restrain his tears at the family funeral four days later in St
George’s Chapel. The Duchess of Kent was left a widow at thirty-five with three children,
the youngest, Prince Michael of Kent, a baby of only seven weeks. ‘It was a great shock
to the two little girls,’ Crawfie wrote (Elizabeth, now sixteen, could hardly be accurately
described as such). ‘It was the second uncle they had lost completely, for though the
first, Uncle David, was not dead, they did not see him any more. The Royal Conspiracy
of silence had closed about him as it did about so many other uncomfortable things.’
Despite the horrors of the war, life within the comforting walls of Windsor Castle was
far from unpleasant. Apart from the familiar courtiers such as the King’s equerry, his old
naval friend, Sir Harold Campbell, the Master of the Household, Joey Legh, and the
Private Secretaries Hardinge and Lascelles, there was the eccentric artist Gerald Kelly,
an old Etonian Irishman of charm and talent, and brother-in-law of the satanist Aleister
Crowley. Kelly had been commissioned in 1938 to execute the official Coronation
portraits of the King and Queen and, on the outbreak of war, had moved down to
Windsor with the paintings to continue his work. He remained there throughout the war
despite mildly humorous complaints by the King as to the length of his stay.
During the war there was always the training battalion of the Grenadiers stationed at
Windsor, and it was the job of the 300-strong No. 1 Company, known as the Castle
Company, to guard the royal family. Young officers of the Castle Company, such as
Mark Bonham Carter and Hugh Euston, used to lunch regularly with the Princesses and
their governesses, Crawfie and Monty. ‘There was a very happy atmosphere when one
lunched,’ one officer remembered. ‘Princess Elizabeth was reserved but charming… her
sister was very forward.’ The young officers used to accompany the Princesses and their
friends on picnics in Windsor Great Park and there would occasionally be small dances
of around one hundred people. At weekends when the King and Queen were there, there