The Queen Mother by William Shawcross

Author:William Shawcross
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307273314
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2009-10-26T05:00:00+00:00

In fact her gowns in wartime were a constant worry. The King looked elegant in uniform throughout the war; the Queen had more difficulty deciding what she should wear. She knew that press photographs tended to reveal her plumpness rather than her clear skin, let alone her charm. Her dressmaker, Norman Hartnell, advised that she must stand out in the crowd and that since most of the people she mingled with would be darkly if not drably dressed, she should wear light colours. In his autobiography he recalled the problem of how she should appear when visiting the victims of the bombing. ‘In black? Black does not appear in the rainbow of hope. Conscious of tradition, the Queen made a wise decision in adhering to the gentle colours, and even though they became muted into what one might call dusty pink, dusty blue and dusty lilac, she never wore green and she never wore black. She wished to convey the most comforting, encouraging and sympathetic note possible.’140 In such clothes, and often in high heels, she certainly stood out in the bombed streets. Her gentle ostentation was deliberate and it seems to have been effective. It was encouraging for people who had lost almost everything to see that the Queen still had her style.141

She was careful to abide by the rules for ‘austerity’ clothes – the amount of material, the number of seams, the amount of adornment and width of collar and belt. For receptions at the Palace or the Castle more elegant dresses were needed, but restrictions still applied. Embroidery was forbidden, so Hartnell ‘re-tinted and re-arranged’ dresses from pre-war years. Many of them were the clothes he had created for the Canadian tour. In one case he painted by hand garlands of lilac and green leaves on a voluminous white satin gown. The Queen also encouraged him to accept a Board of Trade request to design utility clothes for the public.142

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THROUGHOUT THE Battle of Britain the King and Queen drove to London almost every day and slept at Windsor Castle with their daughters. A large dugout had been constructed for the Royal Family under the Brunswick Tower, at the northern corner of the East Terrace. The King and Queen did not like this hole in the ground (which was also quite far from their rooms) and from early September 1940 they usually slept on the ground floor of the Victoria Tower (now Queen’s Tower) which had been protected outside by huge concrete frames filled with sand, while more extensive reinforcing works took place. The whole tower was clothed in scaffolding and a ten-inch raft of concrete, steel and asbestos was built across the roof, while the four rooms in the cellar were given added protection by constructing a four-feet-thick roof of concrete and girders across the ground floor. ‘At least there we can sleep undisturbed, unless we are attacked by dive bombers,’ the King wrote to Queen Mary. ‘We still have the deep underground shelter to go to as a last resort, which is safe.

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