Not Utterly Oyster

I first picked up Marion Crawford’s The Little Princesses (1950) a few years ago, when I was preparing for a television documentary on the early life of Queen Elizabeth II. Even then, reading in a hurry on a train journey, I remember being struck by the richness of the detail in it. My paperback edition has an off-putting pink jacket, but it would be a mistake to judge The Little Princesses by its cover. Recently I reread it while researching my own book on the late Queen, and I realized that it’s a gem – essential reading for anyone interested in the Royal Family in the twentieth century.

Marion Crawford, known as Crawfie, was an unlikely author of a royal memoir. Tall and lean, she was Scottish, middle-class and a fast walker. She had trained in child psychology at Moray House, Edinburgh, and she planned a career working with disadvantaged children. Her life changed when she took a holiday job teaching the daughter of Lady Rose Leveson-Gower. One day Lady Rose asked Miss Crawford to meet her sister, the Duchess of York (the future Queen Mother). Nothing was said at the time, but a fortnight later Lady Rose told Crawford that the Duchess of York would like her to be governess to the princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. When Marion Crawford first walked into Elizabeth’s night nursery one evening in 1933, she found the 6-year-old princess lying in bed with the cords of her dressing-gown tied to the bed frame, driving an imaginary team of horses. The little girl gave Crawfie a long, comprehensive look, and asked the Eton-cropped governess, ‘Why have you no hair?’ ‘From the very beginning,’ wrote Crawfie, ‘I had a feeling about Lilibet that she was “special”.’ The ‘specialness’ of Elizabeth is a central theme of The Little Princesses. The Yorks lived at No. 145 Piccadilly, a tall, narrow house near Hyde Park Corner, and for Crawfie the four years she spent there represented a golden age. Life at No. 145 revolved entirely around the children. The house, which was bombed in the war and no longer exists, had a glass dome, beneath which, on the top floor, were the nurseries. Here the princesses kept their collection of thirty wooden toy horses, and every evening they unsaddled the horses and fed and watered them. The corgis were here too – the bad-tempered ‘Dookie’, the first of the dynasty, arrived at No. 145 in 1933. The two little girls began each day with a ‘session’ before breakfast in their parents’ bedroom, accompanied by loud laughter. Tea with the parents was at 5 p.m., followed by rowdy games of Racing Demon, and bath-time was another occasion for hilarious shrieks, splashing and pillow fights. Margaret was a small, plump child, and as soon as she graduated from her pram, she could be heard running along behind her sister crying, ‘Wait for me, Lilibet . . . Wait for me!’ She was a born comic, the source of endless funny stories and sayings, and something of a ‘plaything’ to her father: Crawfie recorded how she ‘wound her arms round his neck, nestled against him and cuddled and caressed him’. Elizabeth felt responsible for her little sister. ‘I really don’t know what we are going to do with Margaret, Crawfie,’ she would say, anticipating her lifelong relationship with her sibling. Elizabeth was intelligent, disciplined and tidy, almost obsessively so. At times Crawfie worried about her neatness and her habit of hopping out of bed to straighten her shoes and clothes. Today perhaps she would have been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder. Only once did Lilibet’s extraordinary self-control snap, during a lesson on French irregular verbs, when she emptied a silver inkpot over her own head and sat motionless as the blue ink trickled down her blonde curls and face. Life at No. 145 was truly domestic. It seemed to Crawfie that lessons mattered little to the parents, who were concerned above all that their children should be happy. The Duke and Duchess rarely went out. They dined alone at 8.15, and afterwards they sat by the fire, the Duke skilfully embroidering chair seats in petit point.

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The golden age of No. 145 ended abruptly with the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936. Crawfie describes the crisis from the children’s point of view as they peeped down from beneath the dome to see the great men coming and going and listened to the crowds that surged outside the house. Crawfie was given the job of explaining to the little girls that they must move to Buckingham Palace as their father had now become King. ‘What?’ Lilibet asked. ‘You mean for ever?’ Margaret, by then aged 6, said, ‘But I have only just learnt to write “York”.’ Buckingham Palace, with its endless corridors and shabby bedrooms, was a disappointment after the homeliness of No. 145. Crawfie found herself responsible for the education of the future monarch, a position for which, as nursery governess, she was not qualified. She worried that it was all getting a bit much for her, and no wonder. Matters were not made easier by the Queen, who was no believer in the education of women. Crawfie was commanded to keep afternoons free of lessons, and the Queen and King constantly interrupted the schoolroom routine. The war changed everything. Crawfie and the princesses stayed at Windsor for five years until 1945. The castle is vividly described. It was unheated, dark and frightening. Air-raid warnings frequently interrupted the nights, and the princesses became used to sleeping in the shelter in the dungeons of the castle. The King and Queen were busier and more exhausted than ever, and Crawfie found herself in sole charge of the two little girls. ‘We could not carry on if you weren’t here,’ said the King. Crawfie had intended to marry, but she decided to wait until the war ended. Looking after the princesses was her war work, and only she could do it. She managed to make wartime Windsor enjoyable for the princesses, organizing pantomimes and Girl Guides. And she also liked the young Prince Philip immensely, and encouraged his romance with Lilibet, although her parents preferred to ignore it.

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After the war, Crawfie asked the Queen for permission to leave her job. The Queen looked horrified and said, ‘Crawfie, don’t suggest such a thing.’ However, in spite of the Queen’s disapproval, she did retire, and in September 1947 she married an Aberdeen bank man- ager named George Buthlay. Two months later, on 20 November 1947, Princess Elizabeth married Prince Philip in a fairy-tale wed- ding. Crawfie, now aged 38, was considered too old to have children. Elizabeth became pregnant almost immediately with Prince Charles. For her retirement, Crawfie received a generous payoff. She was given a pension and a grace-and-favour home, Nottingham Cottage in Kensington Palace, and she was awarded the CVO (Commander of the Victorian Order). But she wanted more. Having been compelled by the King and Queen to stay on through the war years, Crawfie felt that she was owed something, perhaps to be made a dame or even a lady-in-waiting. Her husband, who turned out to be a philanderer with a dodgy war record of smuggling, urged her to sell her story. Worst of all, she was taken up by the Goulds, an American husband-and-wife team who pioneered the new mass-market celebrity journalism with the Ladies’ Home Journal. Crawfie asked the Queen’s permission to write about the little princesses. She received a dusty answer. ‘I do feel, most definitely,’ wrote Elizabeth, ‘that you should not write and sign articles about the children, as people in positions of confidence with us must be utterly oyster, and if you, the moment you finished teaching Margaret, started writing about her and Lilibet, well, we should never feel confidence in anyone again.’ Crawfie nonetheless signed a contract with the Goulds, who provided a novelist named Dorothy Black to work with her on ghost-writing the memoir. The book was a bestseller, but it earned Crawfie the lifelong disapproval of the royal family. ‘Doing a Crawfie’ became code for royal servants betraying secrets to the press. Crawfie was ostracized and she retired to her house in Aberdeen, where she lived as a miserable, lonely recluse. The irony is that The Little Princesses was not intended to be an attack on the royals. Far from it. Crawfie’s account is affectionate, bland and inoffensive, very different from the royal memoirs of today. She writes about matters such as the princesses’ bad habit of biting their nails. There are a few inaccuracies, some of which were pointed out by Princess Margaret much later. But the book is unique. Never before or since have royal childhoods been described in such riveting detail. My only grumble is that the book has no index.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Jane Ridley 2024