was ten, a regime which involved only seven and a half hours per week in the schoolroom had been designed with a purpose: to ensure that the elder Princess should avoid becoming a ‘blue-stocking’, with all the terrible consequences that that term of derision implied. With the avoidance of such a fate in mind, her studies had been planned ‘in consultation with the leading educationalists in the country,’ and after consideration by the Cabinet.14
If Crawfie is to be believed, the truth was actually more mundane. Whether or not the topic was ever seriously discussed in the Cabinet Room, it caused little anxiety at 145 Piccadilly. The attitude in the York household towards education seems, in general, to have been one of genial casualness, undisturbed in the early years by any premonition of what lay ahead. Crawfie stressed this last point: perhaps seeking a justification for the lack of pedagogic rigour. Nothing seemed less likely, she insisted, than that the two girls would ever have to play an important role in their adult lives, and consequently their parents’ main concern was to give them ‘a happy childhood, with lots of pleasant memories stored up against the days that might come and, later, happy marriages.’15
If the governess had little choice but to accept the relaxed view of her employers, the same was not true of the children’s formidable royal grandmother. Queen Mary – the most serious member of the Royal Family – made purposeful forays into the Piccadilly schoolroom, and was perturbed by what she found. In an attempt to improve matters, she demanded to see a schedule of lessons, urged that Princess Elizabeth should read ‘the best type of children’s books,’ and often chose them for her. She also thought up ‘instructive amusements’ for the children, like a visit to the Tower of London. ‘It would have been impossible for anyone so devoted to the Monarchy as Queen Mary to lose sight of the future Queen in this favourite grandchild,’ recalled the Countess of Airlie.16 This, however, was after the Abdication. Until then, the impact of the Queen’s concern was limited, partly because the Duke took as little active interest in his daughters’ book-learning as the Duchess.
The Duke’s relaxed attitude to female education did not mean, however, that he lacked a social conscience, or sense of royal responsibility. On the contrary: a willingness to keep his own daughters socially cocooned was combined with a strong, even progressive, interest in the plight of children from the urban slums. Before becoming King, as President of the Industrial Welfare (formerly Boys’ Welfare) Association, he was involved in schemes to benefit working-class youth, and he lent his name to the pioneering Duke of York’s Camp – a part paternalist, part egalitarian experiment much in the spirit of the East End universities’ and public schools’ settlements. Each year a hundred public schools and a hundred industrial concerns were invited to send two boys each to a summer holiday camp ‘where all would be on equal terms’.17 The aim, in the words of the organizer, Robert Hyde, was to ‘tame young Bolshevists,’18 by social mingling: each side of the divide would get to know the other and appreciate its qualities. The Duke made a practice of coming for a day or two and, appropriately clad in shorts and open-necked shirt, joining in the games and singsongs. ‘Class distinction was left outside the camp boundaries,’ observed an admiring journalist.19 At the last of the camps, at Abergeldie near Balmoral in 1939, the princesses came daily to take part. One of the happiest and most natural of pre-war royal film clips shows the four of them, parents and daughters, sitting in a throng of laughing, chanting adolescents. It was the kind of educational activity – boisterous, slapstick, communitarian, classless – that appealed to the Duke and he was proud to show it off to his daughters.
This was as close as the princesses ever got, before the war, to any proper contact with ordinary children, middle or working class, of their own age. The question of whether a wider experience might be desirable was discussed, but discarded. For several years, there was whimsical newspaper speculation that Elizabeth might be sent to a girls’ boarding school. When she was seven, the press reported a rumour that – in a daring break with royal precedent – the Princess was about to be enrolled at a preparatory establishment near London, and, furthermore, that ‘one of our larger public schools’ would be her eventual destination.20 There was nothing in the story, though it is conceivable that the Duchess, who had spent two terms in her own adolescence at a day school in Chelsea, may have been behind it. A few weeks after the initial report, the Sunday Express announced under the headline ‘Will Never Go to School: Too Embarrassing,’ that the Duchess of York had asked that her elder daughter should go to school, so that she would be ‘brought up like any normal girl’. But after discussion with the King, Queen and Prince of Wales, and consultation with Cabinet ministers – according to the paper – she had been forced to back down.21
Such an account is supported by the recollection of Lisa Sheridan, who remembered the Duchess telling her, just before the Abdication, that ‘she regretted her own daughters would not be able to go to school,’ and was concerned that they should grow up naturally and unspoilt.22 This conversation, which took place during the brief reign of Edward VIII, coincided with fresh reports of a regal veto. The new King, it was stated, had decided against a school for Elizabeth, in accordance with the wishes of his father who had always been opposed. In addition to deference to a dead Monarch, three other arguments were reckoned to have weighed with the Princess’s uncle: the jealousy the choice of any particular school would cause among schools not so favoured, ‘the question of who would be her schoolmates’ – that is, whether she could be protected from bad influences – and, even more spuriously, her need to study different subjects from those taken by most other girls.23 However, neither George V nor his eldest son deserve exclusive blame for the denial to the Princess of the mixed benefits of 1930s boarding school normality. Indeed, their attitude may have been an excuse. Although it would have been difficult for the Duke and Duchess to defy the Head of State, there is no reason why, after his own accession, George VI and his wife could not have reversed the earlier decision, either for their ten-year-old daughter or their six-year-old one, if they had wished to do so.
But there was one aspect of the Princess’s education that was not neglected: in view of the sporting pursuits of her parents, it would have been remarkable if it had been. Surrounded from earliest childhood by horses, and by servants who trained, fed and groomed, and relatives who owned, rode and talked about them, Elizabeth, like many aristocratic little girls, became a keen equestrian. Every account of her infancy suggests that an interest in horses and ponies was almost innate. George V, player of nursery equestrian games, was one influence: it may not be coincidence that Elizabeth’s early interest in horses and ponies followed her grandfather’s greatest racing success, when his filly Scuttle won the 1,000 Guineas in 1928. Her first reported riding ‘lesson’ took place in the private riding school in Buckingham Palace Mews in January 1930, when she was three and a half, under the supervision of the Crown Equerry, Colonel A. E. Erskine.24 It was her parents, however, who became her first serious teachers. When she was five, the Duchess led her on Peggy, the Shetland pony given by the King, to a meet of the Pytchley Hounds at Boughton Cover. For a time the stud groom at the Royal Mews took charge of the children’s riding. ‘The Princess will undoubtedly be a keen horse-woman when she grows up,’ it was accurately predicted when she was ten.25
In 1938, the royal riding instructor, Horace Smith, took over and began giving the two girls twice-weekly lessons at the Palace, accompanied by his own daughter. Training included mounting exercises, like touching their toes and leaning backwards until they were lying down on their ponies’ backs, to improve their balance and confidence. Smith found Elizabeth, in particular, a good and eager pupil – a conscientious listener, and keen to improve her skills. He also noticed something else: she was as interested in the business of looking after horses as in riding them; and she would ply him with questions about their feeding and management. ‘I think that in those days, when she was twelve years old, her chief interest in life lay in horses,’ Smith later recalled. On one occasion she told him, a sentiment often later repeated, that ‘had she not been who she was, she would like to be a lady living in the country with lots of horses and dogs’.26
Dogs mattered almost as much as horses: a point which also did not escape royal observers of the day. As ordinary children more often owned dogs than horses, the princesses’ canine interest provided, in some ways, a stronger bond. It quickly became established