‘You are astonished by the applause and then struck speechless by the grace of the beautiful Queen . . . HM’s general tone reflects the contentment of a normally happy married life, in contradiction of all the rumours and accounts of monarchs, which restores your faith in people as people. A handsome couple with careers. Two young people trying to get along.’
He did indeed write a suite for her after that meeting, and had a single copy produced to give her as a personal gift.
Daphne du Maurier really was married to General Boy Browning, who had also been Princess Elizabeth’s head of household and then worked for Prince Philip. As a couple, they went to Balmoral, which Daphne hated because of the stuffiness of court life. But not, as far as I know, in 1957. However, she was asked to work on the Christmas message that year, which is how I got to find out about this – to me – extraordinary association with the Queen. And yes, Prince Philip was a fan, with a love of sailing in common (though not, I imagine, her novels). He was rumoured to have asked her advice before he married. I like to think the author of
Billy Hill was unimpressed about having his phone tapped by the police. He retired to Spain, but bought a nightclub in Tangier in the late 1950s, which his partner, Gypsy, ran for many years. I wonder where he got the idea from . . . His place in the London underworld was taken by his protégés, the Krays.
My story contains echoes of scandals that would eventually happen in the 1960s – the Profumo affair, featuring the swimming pool at Cliveden; the Third, Fourth and Fifth men of the Cambridge spy ring – one of whom, Kim Philby, announced his (disproven) innocence in a house that happened to back onto Cresswell Place; and the ‘treacherous’ coup that Harold Wilson feared in 1968. Powerful men with an excessive regard for their own intelligence have been known to make stupid decisions. Truth is always stranger than fiction.
I invented a lot, but not the way the Queen was received in France or the USA. From Eleanor Roosevelt’s diary, 26 October, 1957:
Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the United States, I think, has done much to eliminate some of the bitterness that resulted when this country allowed the Suez crisis to occur and then said we knew nothing of what our allies were doing.
It always seemed to me that this was a rather lame excuse, since Great Britain and France were our allies and it indicated that our communication must have deteriorated to a point which is not permitted among friends. I hope we will never again indulge in such negligence.
Now that the Queen has done all she can to repair the damage, I hope we will do what we can to restore the warmth of the British-American relationship which is, I think, essential to the strength of the West.
As I looked at the young Queen and her husband, Prince Philip, on their visit to New York, it seemed that she was filling her role with great dignity but also with some weariness. How very young this couple looked – and how we do make our visitors work!
In 1959, Princess Margaret bought the Poltimore Tiara at auction. She wore it on her wedding day in 1960 to a society photographer called Anthony Armstrong-Jones. He had taken the official photograph of the Queen and Princess Anne reading together, to mark the young princess’s birthday in 1957. The print was made on 10 October, shortly before the Queen left for her trip to Canada and the United States.
