celebrations followed the Japanese surrender in August, with the important difference that, though the royal participants were the same, a Labour Government was in office, and a Labour Prime Minister now acknowledged the cheers and addressed the crowd. In place of the romantic Churchillian rhetoric, there was a clipped Attleean homily. ‘We are right to rejoice at the victory of the people,’ declared the new premier, from the balcony of the Ministry of Health, ‘and it is right for a short time that we should relax. But I want to remind you that we have a great deal of work to do to win the peace as we won the war.’ A speech read by the King, loyally described in the press as ‘firm, resonant and strong,’ was broadcast through loudspeakers. The Royal Family spent the rest of the day taking curtain calls on the balcony, waving to the multitude, and acknowledging the roars of approval.
That night, the princesses repeated the escapade of 8 May. This time, however, the attempt to behave like anonymous citizens – masked princesses at the ball – did not quite succeed. Perhaps the mood was less euphoric than on VE-Day; perhaps because Princess Elizabeth was not in uniform, she was easier to identify. At any rate, they were spotted. ‘Big Crowds at the Palace,’ headlined The Times. ‘Royal Family on the Balcony. Princesses Join the Throng.’ The paper revealed that the King’s daughters had left the Palace shortly before eleven o’clock, and that they ‘were here and there recognised and quickly surrounded by cheering men and women’. But police had told the crowds that ‘the princesses wished to be treated as private individuals, and they were allowed to go on their way’.6
IN ITSELF, the coming of peace in August did not greatly affect the everyday lives of the Royal Family, who had been re-united at Buckingham Palace earlier in the year. There had already been various symptoms of the post VE-Day phoney peace. Early in August, Elizabeth was taken to Ascot. It was a doubly memorable day. Gordon Richards won five races, carrying the royal colours to victory in the Burghclere Stakes for the first time; and, during lunch at Windsor, the King received the news from President Truman that an atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.7 Despite such excursions, and weekend trips to Windsor, it took time to re-adjust to the cratered capital and bomb-damaged royal mansion. ‘It was a nasty shock to live in a town again,’ says Princess Margaret.8 The King found himself as busy as at the height of the war: the exhortatory use made of the Monarchy, if anything, increased. Peacetime austerity had its own moralising. So did the newly elected Labour Government.
In 1940 the King had favoured Lord Halifax for the premiership. During the war, however, he had grown to like and depend on Churchill, who behaved towards him with extravagant courtesy, and he was distressed by the outcome of the general election in July 1945. Apart from his familiarity with the war leader, and his dislike of change per se, he was alarmed about the implications for his family, and his kind. ‘Thank God for the Civil Service,’ he is supposed to have remarked on hearing of the huge majority for a party committed to a programme of nationalization, redistribution and social reform. In private, he was unapologetically right-wing (his wife even more so), and was often moved to explosions of anger at the latest socialist outrage, especially if he felt he had not been consulted.
He need not have worried. Though he remained much more uneasy about the Attlee governments of 1945 and 1950 than his father had been about the MacDonald ones of 1924 and 1929, there was little in reality that the Labour Cabinet wished or dared to do to discomfort him. Indeed, the new Prime Minister went out of his way to provide reassurance. At Attlee’s first audience, George VI expressed disquiet at the news that Hugh Dalton, the renegade son of George V’s old tutor Canon Dalton, might be made Foreign Secretary. The Labour premier immediately bowed to the King’s wishes, or at least allowed the Palace to think he was doing so. Ernest Bevin became Foreign Secretary, and Dalton was sent to the Treasury instead. Thereafter, Attlee treated the Sovereign with perfect correctness, and there turned out to be as little republicanism in the Labour Party after the Second World War as there had been before it. Soon, what some saw as the incongruity of a King-Emperor presiding over a social revolution – and over the granting of self-rule to the Indian sub-continent, jewel in the imperial crown – became accepted as natural and even valuable. Whereas, in the reign of George V, Buckingham Palace had stood at the pinnacle of a confident Establishment unshaken by the arrival of a Labour Government, in the late 1940s the Royal Family managed to avoid any outward appearance of discomfiture, as the Establishment took some knocks.
Indeed, George VI’s passivity arguably became even more of an asset after the war than during it. On the one hand the Royal Family could be seen as a typically British piece of camouflage, disguising and making acceptable the Government’s radicalism; on the other, its existence stood as a guarantee that pragmatic caution would prevail, and radicalism kept within bounds. Thus, when Labour took major industries into public ownership (but compensated owners generously) or made adjustments to the powers of the House of Lords (but only modest ones), both left and right thanked God for the Monarchy.
For Elizabeth, peace brought to an end her brief, token excursion into ATS ‘normality’. It also produced an increase in the number of her solo engagements. She was nineteen, Honorary Colonel, occasional Counsellor of State, and a performer of royal duties: cast, it was increasingly clear, in the mould of her father and grandfather, though more self-assured than George VI, and cleverer than both of them. Was there ever a moment, in her early adulthood, when she questioned what she did, or wondered, in the prevailing atmosphere of equality, and fashion for the abandoning of pomp and circumstance, whether it was worth it? If she ever indulged in such a dissident speculation, she kept her thoughts to herself. There was no visible hint of rebellion, or suggestion that her own values and those of her parents and mentors ever clashed. She was now the almost certain future Queen, who, if she did succeed, would become the third monarch of the century who had not been born to such a fate but had had it thrust upon them. As the position became clearer with the passage of time, she accepted it, knowing that the possibility of an alternative did not exist.
She did as she was told in an enclosed world where loyal and experienced advice could be taken for granted. She became used to the ritual of the royal speech, consisting of a few platitudes crafted by courtiers skilled at the job. Her itineraries just after the war reflected the priorities of Buckingham Palace, and also of the Government. Thus, in the summer of 1945, she opened a new library of the Royal College of Nursing, presented prizes and certificates to students of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women, inspected the Fifth Battalion and Training Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, and addressed (in her recently acquired capacity of Sea Ranger Commodore) three thousand Welsh Girl Guides. She also accompanied her parents on a visit to Ulster, travelling by air for the first time, in a flight from Northolt to Long Kesh.9
Some apparently promising requests, however, were refused. Lascelles turned down, on her behalf, an invitation to become the first woman ever to be awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University – despite pressure from the Chancellor, Lord Baldwin.10 Occasionally, the proposals of Labour politicians were considered excessive. In 1947, Lascelles rejected a request from Hugh Gaitskell, the Minister of Fuel and Power, for her to attend ‘The Miner Comes to Town’ exhibition at Marble Arch which had recently been opened by the Prime Minister, on the grounds that she was too busy.11
Generally, her visits expressed support for an officially approved, but non-controversial, good cause – though sometimes what the Palace saw as non-controversial turned out to be political dynamite. This was true of a tour of Northern Ireland without her parents in March 1946, for what was described as ‘the most ambitious mission undertaken by the young Heir Presumptive’. The tour gave the Princess her first experience of being used, not as a symbol above domestic politics, but as a blatant political tool by one faction.
It was a mission to underline the Union, something which a visit from British royalty, personifying United Kingdom ties, achieved more eloquently than anything. The result was a welcome both vehement and purposeful. This was a Protestant tour and the groups and institutions she met and addressed reflected it. Sometimes the message remained implicit. At Dungannon High School 1,200 girls sang ‘Come back to Ulster, dear Princess’ to the tune of ‘Come back to Erin’. On other occasions, it was crudely and disagreeably partisan. At Enniskillen, the Royal Ulster Constabulary put on a display that included an illegal still, camouflaged