Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: The Official Autobiography
by William Shawcross 1,000pp, Macmillan, £25
For the Queen Mother, writes William Shawcross, as he trudges through the second half of her life, "one decade glided into another, with the basic pattern of her days, weeks, months and years being fairly constant". For much of his biography he is remarkably persuasive on this point. Chapter after chapter of his interminable chronicle glides, or rather drags, repetitively past, allowing the few things that did change to stand out in lurid contrast. One year, for instance, she acquired a stairlift.
But there must have been more to it than that. The Queen Mother was deeply in debt most of the time. And the arrival on the public stage of Prince Charles's mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, for example, must have caused a temporary wrinkle in the serene old lady's gin, nags'n'picnics routine.
For grandmother and grandson were close. And considering her feelings about Wallis Simpson, who went to her grave unforgiven, and later about Peter Townsend, the Queen Mother must have had some views on the divorcee who saw off Diana. Concerning Wallis, she wrote at the height of the abdication crisis: "If Mrs Simpson is not fit to be Queen, she is not fit to be the King's morganatic wife." What, then, did she make of Charles's ambitious mistress? The woman features here only once, on page 795, identified as the wife of a royal guest, Andrew Parker Bowles: theirs is a joint entry in a 1970s Castle of Mey visitors' book.
The author devotes far more space to the Queen Mother's lunches, to the decorations on her millions of hats, to her horses, to the various inert objects he spots then solemnly itemises, as if in training for the world championships of the tray game. Among the ornaments arranged on a Castle of Mey desk, he doggedly reports, is "a little corgi from the Buckingham Palace gift shop". It sits there now. The Queen Mother's house, Shawcross assures us, "is preserved as it was in her lifetime". He has chosen to do the same thing for her reputation.
If it's hard to respect a biographer capable of an omission on the Camilla scale, it is impossible to trust him. What else has he left out? Shawcross records Princess Margaret's vandal decision to destroy letters from Diana to the Queen Mother because, she said, they were "so private". Given his determination to empathise, at all times, with the royal point of view, his comment on this affair may be read as savagely critical: "It was understandable, although regrettable from a historical viewpoint."
From that perspective, this biographer appears to be at his most usefully unguarded in the first fifth of the Queen's 101 years. Possibly because it was long ago, Shawcross is willing to depict his heroine, during the first world war, as a giddy airhead gripped by her prodigious appetites for food, clubs, clothes, cocktails, dancing, chocs, actors, shopping and men in uniform, including chauffeurs.
The nautical look had a particularly stimulating effect. Elizabeth Bowes Lyon was only 15 when she wrote a characteristically coarse letter to her governess: the Firth of Forth was heaving, she reported, with "simply hundreds of beautiful brown lieutenants, subs, snotties (midshipmen), Admirals and sailors. Oh my! They were all most amorous!" Not that she was unaware there was a war on. "I feel as if I never want to go to a dance again," she wrote in 1918. "One only makes friends and then they are killed."
Long before she would express her thankfulness at having been bombed, so as to look the East End in the face, the ill-educated Elizabeth complained bitterly at having had to travel to the same area, where she failed her school certificate. "What was the use of toiling down to that – er – place Hackney?" she demanded. But no sooner had this droll but frightful-sounding young woman accepted a proposal from the stammering Duke of York (having strung him along for a year or two), than such disagreeable sentiments were never heard again.
Like her personality, the Queen Mother's epistolary style appears to have been transformed, on the instant of betrothal, into everything that is pious and dignified, sympathetic and charming. Unless we have Shawcross to thank for this unblemished characterisation of a boozy actress who more recently, according to the journalist Edward Stourton, said the EU would never work, because of "all those Huns, wops and dagos". In his diaries, her loyal friend the late Woodrow Wyatt recorded, with more tact "She clearly has some reservations about Jews in her old-fashioned way". "I'm not as nice as you think," she used to tell him. Eleanor Roosevelt suspected something of the sort, noting Elizabeth's gift for "turning on graciousness like water".
Shawcross, who is probably more queen motherly than the Queen Mother, will have none of it. "She may have been a brilliant actress," he allows, "but her feelings were genuine." Really? It comes to something when a biographer's partiality is repeatedly exposed by the testimony of his own subject. Why can't poor women live on tea and "some buns", wondered this legendary trencherwoman, during the depression. In another letter, written after a bomb hit Buckingham Palace, we find her moved by a visit to the East End, where 200 people had died under a school. PS, she writes: "Dear old BP is still standing and that is the main thing". So we learned something, after all.