News for Friday: August 4th, 2000

Honours mark Queen Mother's birthday(BBC News)

The Queen has recognised services to her mother The Queen has issued a special Honours List to mark her mother's 100th birthday.
Nine people are honoured, including five who helped stage the Queen Mother's centenary pageant on London's Horse Guards parade ground last month.
Major Michael Parker, the pageant's producer, is knighted along with Major General Evelyn Webb-Carter, chairman of the pageant committee.
The two men become Knight Commanders of the prestigious Royal Victorian Order, an honour in the Queen's personal gift.
Miss Fiona Fletcher, secretary to the Queen Mother's ladies in waiting, receives a CVO, becoming a Commander of the Victorian Order.
Also made CVOs are Ian Gill, registrar and seneschal of the Cinque Ports, Kent, of which the Queen Mother is Lord Warden, and Captain Ashe Windham, chairman of the Castle Mey Trust, set up to administer the Queen Mother's Scottish home.
Equerry honoured
Colonel William Toby Browne receives an LVO (Lieutenant of the Victorian Order) for his work as organiser and parade commander of the Queen Mother's centenary pageant.
The Queen Mother's equerry, Captain William de Rouet of the Irish Guards, gets an MVO (Member of the Victorian Order) as does Coldstream Guards Warrant Officer Alan Mason, who was the pageant's parade sergeant major.
Major Parker's assistant as producer of the pageant, Mrs Emma Bagwell Purefoy, receives an RVM (Silver), a Royal Victorian Medal.
Major Parker also masterminded the Queen Mother's 90th birthday pageant on Horse Guards, the VE and VJ Day 50th anniversary commemorations in London five years ago, and the Royal Tournament and other military tattoos.
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Royal diehards soak up birthday spirit(BBC News)

By BBC News Online's Dominic Bailey
Tarpaulins, brollies and sleeping bags were hurriedly erected to keep flags and banners dry as the skies opened outside Buckingham Palace.
But rain-soaked well-wishers on the Victoria memorial showed the resilience and spirit they believe is embodied by the woman they are waiting to wish Happy Birthday to - the Queen Mother.
Tourists hurrying back to dry hotels after watching the Changing of the Guard vowed to return in their thousands for the official celebrations on Friday.
For the die-hard fans, the party starts with another night under canvas to ensure the best view of the nation's favourite grandmother.
Mad for it
Alvine Pearce, who has left her husband running their snooker club business in Gloucester, admits most people think she's mad for camping out on Thursday.
But says she would not miss the Queen Mother's 100th birthday for the world.
"She is a real Royal, she always has a smile and never lets anyone down," she said.
She first stumbled across the celebrating crowds outside Clarence House in 1979 and has been back ever since.
Her friend Elaine Gaffney, laden with flasks, blankets, hooters and banners, is waiting to sing Happy Birthday to a woman she respects.
"She always sticks to her principles," she said. "I know she has had the best of everything but the woman has guts and you can see it all over her."
The matriarch
The ladies, decked out with Union Flags, were not alone in their dedication and admiration.
Cheryl Bernstein, 39 has flown from Minnesota, USA, to celebrate the Queen Mother's birthday since 1984.
She met up with familiar faces sheltering from the rain waiting for another Royal occasion.
"We love her and admire her," she said.
"She is the matriarch. Over here you don't appreciate what you have."
Fellow Royal occasion veteran and retired carpenter Terry Hutt, 65, from Waltham Abbey, Essex, picked his spot for the celebrations on Wednesday night.
"She was my Queen when I was a little boy and I met her when I was five during the Blitz on North London," he said.
"I have been coming here seven years, it's to catch up on lost time.
"I always wanted to meet her and when I do she says "thank you for coming," she is just a nice person."
Generations celebrate
Sharing a step for the night but generations apart, Barbara Kewell, 80, from Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, joined the family of Zoe Maidment, three, who first celebrated the Queen Mother's birthday 97th birthday as a baby.
Mrs Kewell said she had been coming to see the Queen Mother's birthday since 1983.
"I am 20 years younger than the Queen Mum, but I feel like I've really grown up with her," she said.
"It's very reassuring. Things in her life seem to parallel mine."
But Royal memorabilia collector Greg Paxton, 44, from Middlesex, was the only one of the fans to dare to mention the real reason why this year is so special.
"She is a nice lady who has reached 100," he said.
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'Courage and wisdom; behind the smile lies a character of steel'(Electronic Telegraph)
By W F Deedes

SHE is much loved and smarter than she looks. The legs are shaky, the eyes are weak but they don't miss much and the mind is sharp as ever. Behind that famous smile lies a racy disposition, a firm hand on the family helm, infinite courage and a flair for extravagant living.
My favourite portrait of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother is drawn from the scene at Buckingham Palace in May 1995, the VE-Day jubilee. She stepped out on the balcony, central figure between her daughters the Queen and Princess Margaret, a reminder to my generation of the star she had been when the enemy was at the gate.
What an artiste, I thought; and so she is, at 100 years of age. On the stage she would have wrung laughter and tears from her audiences; but mainly laughter, for she is a bit of wag and a good mimic. Part of the act is looking straight at you when she talks to you. She can make people feel, even in a crowd, that she is speaking to them and them only.
There was another and more poignant thought to be drawn from the balcony scene. It recalled the pain she suffered almost half a century ago when her sick husband King George VI died in his sleep, leaving her a widow at 51 without a throne, without a role and without a home.
She set about creating a life of her own and she has stuck to it. The world has changed a lot since then, but she has not. She clings to the routine of a past era, quite regardless of expense. Clarence House is staffed as it might have been during the reign of King Edward VII. She is, after all, an Edwardian. Everything around her is of the best.
There is also Birkhall on the 50,000-acre Balmoral estate, which is more bracing but no less well appointed. She owns a second home in Scotland, the Castle of Mey, which she bought as a ruin, restored and made snug soon after the King died and its isolation caught her mood. To keep Birkhall and Mey going costs a packet, and the Queen sighs, but the Queen Mother would probably say that Scotland, where she was born and spends the late summer and early autumn, is her spiritual home.
It seems to be the rugged outdoor life that draws her still, the chilly mists, the driving rain. Diana, Princess of Wales loathed the Scottish life and was glad to escape from it. The Queen Mother cannot wait to get up there. She sees it also as a retreat from the disciplines of royal life. There is wisdom in seeking a place where you can be yourself for a while.
She hates to part from her personal staff. My old regimental mate, Lt Col Martin Gilliat of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, joined her as private secretary in 1956 and was coaxed into staying with the job until almost the final years of his life. The affection is entirely mutual. The staff are fond of her and enjoy indulging her little eccentricities.
When members of her family argued recently about GM crops, there appeared a headline: "Royals should be seen and not heard". Therein lies part of the Queen Mother's secret. She is rarely heard to speak, and so discloses very little of herself. Her circle is not one in which she "is overheard to say during a dinner party . . ." or in which "sources close to the Queen Mother say . . ." So nobody knows what she really thinks.
But she is the source of some good stories. My favourite relates to her visit an old people's home. "Do you know who I am?" she asked one of them playfully. "If you don't know who you are dear," came the reply, "go to the desk at the end of the corridor and they'll help you."
Towards the end of the Second World War, reading letters sent home by soldiers (as we had to do in those days) it struck me that when the boys came home many reunions would soon fail. I entered a plea through a third party for Queen Elizabeth to make a sympathetic broadcast about this, warning families of the difficulties ahead, urging patience. It didn't come off, because she didn't then and doesn't now like holding forth. But I sometimes wish it had. She would have made a good job of it, and in the post-war years the divorce rate among ex-service families soared.
There is, of course, a drawback to guarding your privacy as successfully as the Queen Mother does. It leaves critics free to tell tales about you which, for want of any other evidence, people tend to believe. Well-loved as she is, and though ardent republicans usually step carefully round her, the Queen Mother has not been immune from sniping. When Buckingham Palace was bombed during the war, for example, she was quoted as saying she was glad about it, for she could now look east London in the face.
On which Penelope Mortimer, a hostile witness, observed: "The East End, however, was not able to retreat to Windsor for the weekend to catch up on sleep, or to spend recuperative holidays in Norfolk and Scotland. Nor was the East End able to supplement its diet with pheasants and venison shot at the royal estates."
In reality, the King and Queen lived in huge discomfort at Buckingham Palace during the war. Rationing was observed. Eleanor Roosevelt, who stayed there in the autumn of 1941, found no heating, one electric bulb in each room and shallow bathwater.
There is light criticism of her enormous overdraft and her refusal to budge from an Edwardian style of life. A more persistent cloud hangs over the personal vendetta Queen Elizabeth is reputed to have conducted against the Duchess of Windsor. It runs so contrary to the public vision of the Queen Mother as a tender-hearted old thing.
As a reporter around the time of the abdication of Edward VIII, I have always thought it would be unnatural if the then Duchess of York had not heartily disliked and mistrusted the then Mrs Simpson. Bertie, the Duke of York, was closer to David, as the Prince of Wales was known within the family, than any other brother. Bertie and Elizabeth watched with anguish David's infatuation with an American divorcee.
It was a hole in the corner business because the British press (mainly from fear of defamation, but also with a sense of propriety that prevailed in those years) said nothing about it. Most of the gossip came from imported publications. So when the Bishop of Bradford unwittingly lit the touchpaper, the short-lived crisis exploded over a largely unsuspecting public. As a reporter, I was outside 145 Piccadilly, where the Yorks lived, to see their departure for the Palace. They looked strained with anxiety. "I don't think we could ever imagine a more incredible tragedy," the Queen wrote later, "and the agony of it was beyond words."
What few of us knew at the time was how much the Duke of Windsor, after his departure, preyed on his brother's peace of mind. We now know that Windsor could never have rallied support for his return, but it was not like that at the time. The King felt uneasy on the throne. Edward then plagued his brother about money (after lying to him as to the extent of his own resources), about granting the Duchess the rank of HRH, and when war came what job he could do. Such was the pressure that at one point Queen Elizabeth feared it would cause her husband a breakdown.
She has been described as the sworn enemy of the Duchess of Windsor. It is nearer the mark to say that the King was driven almost batty by his brother and Elizabeth was fiercely protective of her troubled husband. How could it have been otherwise? Ill-feeling between the two women was mutual. Wallis was contemptuous of Elizabeth: she and her husband referred to her as Cookie, an intended slight on her ample figure and her domestic inclinations, and called the young Princess Elizabeth "Shirley Temple".
I met Edward as the Prince of Wales a couple of times. We once entertained him in Bethnal Green where my uncle, Wyndham Deedes, was engaged in social work. On short acquaintance, he struck me as fretful. I see him now pitching a half-finished cigar towards the fireplace of our sitting room - and missing it. But then and later he had countless admirers, among them (up to the war) Winston Churchill.
The waters ran deep. So deep that the King hoped Churchill would not be made Prime Minister in 1940. He and Elizabeth saw him as one of the old enemy. It was war that brought them together - war and the fact that Churchill came to see for himself the flaws in Edward's character. There is a good study to be made of how Churchill developed this thinking, how it communicated itself to the King and Queen, and slowly bound the three of them closer together.
As some have it, the Queen vetoed the title HRH for the Duchess of Windsor. As history has it, the King took the decision, cordially supported by his wife. In taking that decision, he had no precedent to guide him. Come to that, there was no precedent for the title of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. It was a style she established for herself. Before the Duchess of Windsor died, Elizabeth, while on an official visit to Paris, sought to make peace with her. The Duchess was too unwell to receive her, but flowers were left with a card: "In friendship. Elizabeth."
It is a plain statement of fact that the Queen played a heroic part in the war. The King told his wife virtually everything of importance and valued her opinions and advice. After wartime expeditions of her own, she would sometimes return with insight and fresh guidance. Between them, they travelled some 50,000 miles in this country alone. It was a close partnership, which made the pain of losing him so relatively early so acute.
Given the life she has led, it would be strange if the Queen Mother had not developed a strong will. She was a stronger character than her husband, who at first badly lacked self-confidence. When King George VI died, Churchill put on his wreath the VC's inscription "For valour." But the King was also a man of many moods, which Elizabeth understood better than any of his staff or his ministers.
We have forgotten how uncertain was the process of that war, and how many heavy blows it delivered before it was won. The strain of it wore him down. Without Elizabeth, it might have destroyed him. Some reckon that the visit they made to Canada and America in the summer of 1939, and at the eve of war, was the most important voyage of their lives. The tour was a triumph. It altered the minds of some Americans who until then had inclined to side with the Duchess of Windsor as one of their own, and who saw Edward VIII as the rightful occupant of the throne.
The tour also had its bearing on American attitudes when war came. "It was," the President's roving ambassador Harry Hopkins later told Churchill, "the astounding success of the King and Queen's visit to US which made America give up its partisanship of the Windsors."
If that was providential, so was the way they found each other. From the day Bertie first set eyes on Elizabeth at a London ball and fell in love with her, almost two and a half years elapsed before she accepted him. At the first time of asking, she turned him down. Not for her, she thought, the life of a servant to the country.
Blessed with other admirers, she seemed at one point more likely to marry the handsome James Stuart, a Scottish neighbour, MC and bar from the First World War, an MP at 26, Churchill's wartime Chief Whip and a serious philanderer. Bertie's luck seems to have turned on a false report in a London newspaper that Elizabeth was really destined for the Prince of Wales. In the flurry of embarrassment that caused, they went for a walk in the woods and Bertie won acceptance.
Talking at schools, I sometimes find the young have a better understanding of what the Queen Mother embodies by way of history than their elders. She was our last Empress of India, the last Queen to reign over the British Empire. A week before their coronation, Prime Minister Baldwin, appealing for peace in the coalfields and making the last speech of his life to the Commons, spoke of "our young King and Queen, who were called suddenly and unexpectedly to the most tremendous position on Earth". So it was, in May 1937.
Naturally, to some eyes in these times, the Queen Mother's level of living borders on the eccentric. She no longer has that talented snob Hartnell to dress her extravagantly well; but he more than anyone else established the regal style and her love of expensive clothes. In those days she never bothered to discuss prices and she doesn't now. The lure of milliners and hatters remains strong. Hence some of the overdraft.
The bank account joins other difficulties in life which the Queen Mother simply shrugs off. She has been described as an "emotional ostrich". The awkward things of life are gently pushed out of sight. The same applies to little local difficulties within the family. She adores Charles, her favourite grandchild, and if she had had her way he would have gone to Eton, not Gordonstoun. But he won no support from her when he complained about school life.
Some of the bruising caused by his ill-starred marriage to Diana must have hurt her, mainly because she saw her as a threat to the stability of the Royal Family. But a remark she is said to have made to the Queen on one occasion - "different generation; let them get on with it . . ." - gives the flavour of her philosophy towards the young mismatches. When it came to the Townsend affair with her own daughter Margaret, she was described as "serenely detached". There is no knowing how she really felt about it. Perhaps she owes something of her longevity to this gift of shrugging off life's awkwardnesses.
No sensible person grudges the Queen Mother's style of life, her ample staff, stable of horses in Norfolk and love of racing over half a century, her talent with rod and line, her taste for a stiff gin and Dubonnet. One does wonder though how far that formidable will has discouraged changes in the Royal Family's way of doing things.
There has, after all, been a conscious endeavour by the Queen and her family to adjust to the fact that we are no longer an imperial power; that she no longer occupies "the most tremendous position on Earth". But we "mustn't upset granny". And granny, in common with many grannies, likes things as they were. If she strongly opposes an idea, the chances are she will get her way. Prince Philip exercises caution in that direction.
A devout Christian, she does not take divorce as lightly as some. A divorced acquaintance is liable to suffer banishment. Yet she is not a prude. In the old days, she relished an after-the-show supper at the Savoy Grill with Noel Coward, a discreet but notorious homosexual. She can thoroughly enjoy herself in pretty raffish company.
Then again, there are times when we see the stoic in her. She has always taken her physical mishaps lightly, and there have been quite a few. Yet, along with the cold Scottish mists, she loves the pampered life. A woman of attractive contradictions. Such a well-known figure to us all, and yet how little we know of her. Behind the smile, steel.

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