I enjoyed Hugo Vickers’ diaries written when he was writing Cecil Beaton’s biography (Malice in Wonderland) so it was just a step back of thirty years to James Pope-Hennessy’s diaries when he was writing Queen Mary’s biography.
The early entries are a bit off-putting unless you happen to be an expert and interested in 19th century European royalty, their convoluted relationships and titles but now I’ve got into my stride. J H-P obviously wrote his notes for posthumous publication. His observations are acute, sometimes malicious, but usually show genuine affection for his interviewees and their eccentricities. Most, of course, are dead but his description of a visit to Balmoral for lunch with the Queen and the Queen Mother in 1957 may raise at best a wintery twitch of the lips from Her Majesty.
”Jamesy” explains why he gets nervous meeting Royalties.
”I had forgotten the number one truth I had discovered last year in Stockholm, and which should be axiomatic for anyone having to interview or get tangled up with royal persons: it is courtiers who make royalty frightened and frightening; taken neat like whiskey they are perfectly all right. This does not mean that they are as others, but you can get on to plain terms with the species, like an ornithologist making friends with some rare wild duck.”
Some of his observations might make readers younger than me think royalty are rather middle class but it was the 1950s. The country was recovering from the war and the upper classes were attempting to modernise, re-using napkins, eating and drinking frugally but having butter extravagantly prepared. It was thus at Barmeath in my childhood in respect of butter pats (without adornment) and Kia-ora. This is lunch and tea at Barnwell Manor with the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester.
”We went into lunch. The table was decorated with silver pheasants with sweeping tails, and there were napkins in polished napkin rings. The pats of deep-yellow butter were stamped with an H inside a crowned Garter. The macaroni cheese had been in the oven too long, and there was Kia-ora for the ladies and beer for the gents.”
“When we had sat down to tea Princess Alice remarked on a rather unpleasant Formica tea trolley which runs on rubber wheels and opens into a table. ‘What a nice trolley that is, Alice*.’ ‘Yes’, smiling. ‘It’s the very latest thing. It won’t burn or stain or scratch and it folds up. It was Lilibet’s Christmas present to us. Wasn’t it kind of her? Terribly expensive though.’ ‘How much?’ ‘Seventeen pounds. It came from Fortnum and Mason.’
The Duke looked at it solemnly, and with the air of a man making a decisive announcement, the product of much thought, said: ‘most things that come from Fortnum and Mason are terribly expensive.’ “
J P-H thinks he is exposing royalty as common but he reveals in his diaries how like us they are, albeit bound by convention to maintain social distancing. They were ahead of the times.
* Princess Alice is the Countess of Athlone; Alice is the Duchess of Gloucester (Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott, daughter of the Duke of Bucchleuch and Queensberry prior to her marriage in 1935.)
J P-H’s insights are more revealing than this sugar-coated obituary by Pathé News.