The Queen Mum and I
Colin Burgess asks me at least three times whether I like his book, Behind Palace Doors, an account of the two years he spent as equerry (a sort of all-purpose assistant) to the Queen Mother. It’s a tricky question to answer: the style is infantile, the material padded out, yet reading it wasn’t a complete waste of a Sunday. There’s Lord Slim for a start.
Slim was one of the regulars at the QM’s social gatherings, president of the Special Forces Club, extremely tall, and with an odd understanding of social niceties. When young military men greeted him at drinks parties, he would punch them in the stomach – some sort of Special Forces initiation, presumably. Burgess was doubled up in pain recovering from the blow after their first encounter when the QM came over. “Oh,” she said with no hint of surprise, “I see you’ve met Lord Slim.”
“She was completely unshockable,” says Burgess admiringly. On one occasion, he caught her when she slipped and saved her from falling down a steep flight of stone steps at the Castle of Mey. But nothing was said. “That event represents the exact relationship between an equerry and a royal person,” he explains. “To do the right thing but then not mention it. If I had asked her how she was, it would have embarrassed her.”
Burgess, who was a 26-year-old captain in the Irish Guards when he got the royal call in 1994, thought he had written a fond memoir, and claims he was surprised to see the headline “Gin Palace” above the Sunday Times’s serialisation of his book. In truth, though, it was entirely justified – the Queen Mother’s booze consumption was monumental. Industrial quantities of gin, champagne and claret appear to be the recipe for a long life.
More questionable was the verdict on the book of Terence Blacker, writing in the Independent, who argued that Burgess’s “clumsy effort at a tribute to the nation’s favourite grandmother serves to remind one what a ghastly old woman she was, and the Queen Mother emerges as a snob.” This is not, in fact, the main impression one is left with; stronger is the sense of her playfulness, at times almost subversion. After 94 years of pageantry and protocol, it was time to have some fun.
Burgess, who was promoted to major when he took up the royal appointment, is often the butt of her humour. She insists that he tries Scottish dancing, even though he loathes it; and salmon fishing while on holiday in Scotland, which involves standing waist deep in freezing water for hours on end not catching anything and fearing that at any moment you might be swept away. He also, as the only diner under 75, has to finish any uneaten food and, at the Queen Mother’s insistence, have his glass constantly refilled. When he protests that he has to drive after the meal and fears being breathalysed, she instructs him to tell the police that he works for her.
It all sounds mildly nightmarish, and you wonder whether the QM had a sadistic side. The loyal Burgess insists not and that she was simply intent on “stretching people’s boundaries”. This extended to her guests, too. At dinner parties, if she felt the ice needed breaking, she would lob a cork or a roll at someone round the table and shout “here you go, catch that”. Nor were guests safe after supper had finished. “The Queen Mother had several yodelling records,” says Burgess. “She loved to have guests in and say ‘I’m now going to put on one of my favourite records’. She’d give me a nod and I’d put on a disc of yodelling, while she’d sit there waiting for their reaction.” The ultimate test of royal etiquette.
“She didn’t like staged events or a set routine,” says Burgess, “and would deliberately throw a spanner in the works just so people would be themselves. She abided by the rules much more when she was younger, but in the last 10 years of her life you got the impression that she felt ‘Wow, I’m still here, let’s enjoy it’. She wouldn’t seriously subvert anything. She wouldn’t get on to a parade and say, ‘Right this is nonsense, let’s go and have a knees-up’. But where possible she would try to lighten the mood.” She once asked him to bring in a rifle so they could bump off squirrels between courses during lunch in the garden of Clarence House, and was disappointed when her private secretary told her it would annoy the neighbours.
Burgess tells a nice story of the time he took the QM’s beloved corgis for a long walk while on holiday in Scotland. Exercise was anathema to the dogs and they came back shattered. “That evening,” he recalls, “a big drinks party was being held. When the Queen Mother arrived, everyone bowed, but she made a beeline for me and said, ‘Colin what have you done with the dogs, they’re absolutely exhausted?’ Everyone looked at me, and I don’t know why but I said, ‘I tied them to the bumper of the car and went for a drive’. There was an eerie silence when I could almost sense people reaching for panic buttons, but quick as a flash the Queen Mother put her hand on my forearm and said ‘Oh Colin you are wicked’.”
He says she disliked bullies and relates the story of a general ticking him off at a party for roller-blading in Green Park – not the behaviour expected of a Guards officer! “The Queen Mother overheard him, came over later and said to the general, ‘Colin’s been roller-blading to improve his fitness. Don’t you think that’s wonderful?’ What could he say? If she saw someone being bullied, even slightly, she would step in straightaway and level the playing field.”
He says she enjoyed “interacting” with people, and relates the story of a picnic in a remote corner of the Balmoral estate when her party – in a fleet of Range Rovers and accompanied by a team of armed policemen – chanced upon a middle-aged couple from Edinburgh who had settled down in splendid isolation to eat their sandwiches at the top of a hill. “You could see them desperately thinking, ‘Let’s keep looking in to the middle distance and maybe this will go away,” recalls Burgess, “but the Queen Mother said, ‘Go and see what they’re like. Let’s get them over for a drink.”
Even here, however, the evidence of her affability is mixed. Once she was bored with their company, they were summarily dismissed. “She was very particular about her time, as many old people are,” explains Burgess. “They like things to happen, and then they want to move on to the next thing.” The interaction had to be on her terms.
She was the soul of political incorrectness. She thought the Germans “beastly”, the Japanese worse. She didn’t much like the French either, and never forgave them for giving up without a fight in 1940. She adored Mrs Thatcher, whose worldview chimed with her own; thought John Major dull (her political apercus were not terribly original), and Tony Blair “all teeth and no bite”. But, according to Burgess, her knowledge of current affairs was sketchy. She described the IRA, against whom she was given armed protection, as “very naughty”, and, when Nelson Mandela visited, gave Burgess a brief summing up of African politics. “Colin,” she said, “there is always fighting in Africa, it’s just the way they are.”
Burgess excuses her out-of-touchness. The story that once, when gridlock in central London meant she had to walk to her club and stopped to ask her bodyguard what a pedestrian crossing was, has been used against her. But Burgess says it evinces not the remoteness of the royal family, but the fact that she was an old lady. “You wouldn’t expect her to know the inner workings of a pedestrian crossing,” he says.
He is good on the team of ancients that surrounded her. “They were all three-dimensional, larger-than-life people, and the Queen Mother was very fond of them,” he says. “They were the sort of people you don’t meet now – war veterans who could make you laugh and cry in the same sentence. They had weighty, fabulous stories and there was a well-manneredness about them that you just don’t find any more.”
The one who made the greatest impression on him was Sir Ralph Anstruther, who had served the Queen Mother for more than 40 years and insisted on calling airports “aerodromes”. There is a delightful picture in the book of Anstruther sitting in an armchair contentedly listening to The Archers, which may encapsulate the essence of serving the nonagenarian Queen Mother.
Even the QM’s night-time bodyguard was a man in his 70s who had been given special dispensation to carry a gun beyond the usual police cut-off age of 65. “There was a sense that anyone who left the Queen Mother was somehow giving in and being disloyal,” says Burgess. She was battling on at an improbable age, so they had to as well. Symbolically, Anstruther, who had carried on working despite several strokes, died just seven weeks after she did.
Burgess was the exception: he was allowed out at the end of his two-year stint. The Queen Mother gave him a pair of cufflinks – the present she had given to every equerry during her long life. He left the army soon after – he had already been planning to quit when he took up the post of equerry – feeling that he didn’t have the makings of “a dedicated soldier”. (Maybe that’s why he had been selected to eat for England in the first place.) He chose to become a dedicated TV producer instead, and to write this odd travel book, the recollections of a tourist in a fading world peopled by survivors of the second world war who treated monarchy with deathly seriousness and life as a bizarre joke.
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