An hour with Mrs Margaret Rhodes is worth a week trawling through history books or biographies of the Royal family – and a lot more fun. What other young girl had digs at Windsor Castle during the war and was teased by King George VI about her work for M16? Who is better qualified to record the last days of her aunt, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother? When she takes her place in Westminster Abbey on April 29, this small, birdlike and very astute old lady will have witnessed the marriages of three heirs to the throne – in 1947 as a bridesmaid to Princess Elizabeth and Lt Philip Mountbatten. All because, as she so crisply puts it, “my mother’s sister [Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon] married somebody important [the future King].”
Mrs Rhodes, cousin and friend of the Queen, and lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother at the time of her death, is a natural anecdotalist and a sharp observer. Her discretion has not always been absolute and her helpfulness can sometimes get her into trouble. That is why it is exciting to see the table in the big bay window of her house in Windsor Great Park strewn with proofs of her memoirs. For years, she has been sitting almost unnoticed in the grandstand of 20th century history, mostly keeping her counsel but occasionally popping up to correct inaccuracies or to provide courteous biographers with guidance over a glass of sherry. Now she has written her own story, The Final Curtsey.
“It was going to be all about my foreign travels and my father [Lord Elphinstone], who was an explorer and big game hunter and lived a fascinating life but, of course, it turned out differently…” That is fortunate for posterity. Her life has been so intertwined with that of the Royal family that her book promises new insights and, if it is anything like her conversation, great verve. She has submitted passages for royal approval, especially knowing that the Queen had not previously wanted her mother’s death – at the age of 101 in 2002 – to be reported in any great detail.
“It was deliciously quiet and peaceful, the whole thing,” she says. “She never left Royal Lodge for the final month of her life and I used to go in every day and have lunch with her on a card table. It was a very gradual drift away. I’ve said in the book exactly what happened. She truly had the death she deserved. All of us would think it best if the Bon Dieu decided to take us when we were asleep in our beds.”
In the past, Mrs Rhodes has loyally debunked the idea that the Queen Mother had “hollow legs” and was partial to a gin and Dubonnet after breakfast. She has also maintained that she was not vindictive towards Mrs Simpson. “I never heard her say anything remotely unpleasant about the Duchess of Windsor.”
Mrs Rhodes is 85, sharp as a tack. In jeans and a smudged blue jumper, she looks outdoorish and busy, as if she’s been interrupted while pruning. Her gardener’s hands are purply-blue and cold as the Scottish keep of her childhood.
Being only 10 months apart in age, she and Princess Elizabeth were “obvious potential playmates” when the Yorks were at Balmoral. They rode hill ponies and picnicked together. “We had blissfully happy times up in Scotland. Birkhall [the small house on the estate, beloved of the Queen Mother and now the Prince of Wales] was a very special place in the lives of all the family.” While she was doing a secretarial course at Egham during the war, Margaret, aged 17, was invited to live at Windsor Castle. Then when she landed a secretarial job at MI6, Buckingham Palace became her “wonderfully convenient” second home.
“Windsor was a good landmark for enemy bombers,” she says. “I remember one night going to an underground shelter – probably part of the dungeons – which meant walking for miles down subterranean corridors and Queen Elizabeth refusing to be hurried, walking very slowly and rather crossly, not wanting to go to the air raid shelter.
“At MI6, it was absolutely drilled into one how secret one had to be but needless to say the Royal family knew I worked there. The King used to tease me, trying to get me to tell him things that were going on, knowing that I couldn’t say.” She says she cried “quite a lot” when she saw the film The King’s Speech. “He was such a wonderfully attractive person. In the family, we didn’t notice his stammer very much. But I can still see the muscles standing out in his neck when he got stuck, trying to get the words out from a depth somewhere.
“A lot of the press stuff has rather downplayed his role, as if the Queen Mother was the stronger person but she often told me she always asked the King’s advice about any proposition.”
Petite and pretty, Margaret Elphinstone, daughter of the 16th Lord Elphinstone and Lady Mary Bowes-Lyon, was one of Princess Elizabeth’s eight bridesmaids. “My family had a little shooting lodge up in Invernesshire and the Queen and Princess Elizabeth came to stay. That is when she asked me. They were without the King, just the female side of the family making plans for the wedding and talking about the dresses.
“To me, as a very country girl, actually to walk through the portals of Norman Hartnell [the royal couturier] was in itself earth-shakingly exciting because it was not a place I would normally ever go.” Driving to the Abbey, waving to the crowds in her long white gloves, made her feel “tremendously grand”. Paired with the Hon Pamela Mountbatten, she walked at the back of the procession into the Abbey, after the titled bridesmaids, because she was just “plain old Miss”.
Prince Philip of Greece made a dazzling impact on all the girls. “He had absolutely god-like good looks. A Viking god. Very blonde, with piercing eyes and clean features. He was dreamlike, really. From the day Princess Elizabeth met him at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth when she was 13, I don’t think she ever, ever, ever looked at, or thought about, another man. At that age, one didn’t seriously think about being married but one always knew that she had a yen for him.
“He was inclined to be a little bit new-broomish – probably an inevitable reaction to over-traditional things – but all that’s melded together now and he’s become a traditionalist himself. He is much mellower in his older age but there is still a spark of rebellion lying in wait, ready to pounce, which is rather refreshing.
“I think he’s the most amazing person. He’s going to be 90 this year. I can’t believe it. His figure is wonderful still and he works so hard. It was a very difficult position for a man like him, very bright mentally, to accept that you’re always going to walk a couple of paces behind your wife. There was no role model – the Prince Consort was a totally different kettle of fish – so he had to carve out a career for himself. He has done miraculously well.”
By contrast, Margaret had no time at all for Philip’s choice of best man, David Milford Haven. After the bridesmaids had seen the couple off on their honeymoon, pelting them with rose petals, they were taken to dinner by the Prince’s fellow naval officer. “We went somewhere like Quaglino’s and he was much keener on some dolly bird at another table than he was on us. He was palpably frightfully bored by all of us and had a tendency to go for rather prettier girls somewhere else. He was not my idea of a gentleman…
“There were a lot of funny little German and Danish princelings who were our men for the evening. Once of them was rather unfortunately called Prince Phlem – I don’t think with a 'gm’ It wasn’t the most successful banquet of the year.”
Margaret Elphinstone married Denys Rhodes, grandson of the 5th Lord Plunket, when she was 25 in 1950 and they travelled widely for two years before settling down in austerity Britain. “There was still rationing. We ate heart and lots of liver, which I hate. There were terrible things called faggots, now a rather rude term. A kind of meatball. We thought it best not to ask what was in them.”
The couple had two sons and two daughters. Denys Rhodes died in 1981, six months after they moved from Devon to Windsor. Knowing that he needed to be closer to London for cancer treatment, the Queen offered the couple the Garden House in Windsor Great Park, where Mrs Rhodes has lived ever since. The Queen calls in for a drink after church.
“I was up at Balmoral and we were riding on the hill ponies,” she recalls. “I can see the Queen now, exactly as she was. She turned round in the saddle and said: 'How would you like to live in suburbia?’ That was the first I heard of this wonderful house. It was the answer to a prayer and one of her many, many kindnesses.”
A former lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, Mrs Rhodes looks forward to seeing Prince William and Catherine Middleton exchange vows at the end of a long courtship. “I think the wedding will be wonderful,” she says. “There certainly can’t be an excuse like not knowing one another properly. I think it’s got every hope.
“There isn’t a marriage in the world that doesn’t have hiccoughs and difficulties. You weather them. I don’t think couples try hard enough.
“I tell my children that life is like making a tapestry. You have one gold thread that you have to sew through the tapestry, which is your marriage. Sometimes it gets frayed and sometimes it gets worn. But you have to work hard to keep your gold thread going. People must not give up too easily.”
Being only 10 months apart in age, she and Princess Elizabeth were “obvious potential playmates” when the Yorks were at Balmoral. They rode hill ponies and picnicked together. “We had blissfully happy times up in Scotland. Birkhall [the small house on the estate, beloved of the Queen Mother and now the Prince of Wales] was a very special place in the lives of all the family.” While she was doing a secretarial course at Egham during the war, Margaret, aged 17, was invited to live at Windsor Castle. Then when she landed a secretarial job at MI6, Buckingham Palace became her “wonderfully convenient” second home.
“Windsor was a good landmark for enemy bombers,” she says. “I remember one night going to an underground shelter – probably part of the dungeons – which meant walking for miles down subterranean corridors and Queen Elizabeth refusing to be hurried, walking very slowly and rather crossly, not wanting to go to the air raid shelter.
“At MI6, it was absolutely drilled into one how secret one had to be but needless to say the Royal family knew I worked there. The King used to tease me, trying to get me to tell him things that were going on, knowing that I couldn’t say.” She says she cried “quite a lot” when she saw the film The King’s Speech. “He was such a wonderfully attractive person. In the family, we didn’t notice his stammer very much. But I can still see the muscles standing out in his neck when he got stuck, trying to get the words out from a depth somewhere.
“A lot of the press stuff has rather downplayed his role, as if the Queen Mother was the stronger person but she often told me she always asked the King’s advice about any proposition.”
Petite and pretty, Margaret Elphinstone, daughter of the 16th Lord Elphinstone and Lady Mary Bowes-Lyon, was one of Princess Elizabeth’s eight bridesmaids. “My family had a little shooting lodge up in Invernesshire and the Queen and Princess Elizabeth came to stay. That is when she asked me. They were without the King, just the female side of the family making plans for the wedding and talking about the dresses.
“To me, as a very country girl, actually to walk through the portals of Norman Hartnell [the royal couturier] was in itself earth-shakingly exciting because it was not a place I would normally ever go.” Driving to the Abbey, waving to the crowds in her long white gloves, made her feel “tremendously grand”. Paired with the Hon Pamela Mountbatten, she walked at the back of the procession into the Abbey, after the titled bridesmaids, because she was just “plain old Miss”.
Prince Philip of Greece made a dazzling impact on all the girls. “He had absolutely god-like good looks. A Viking god. Very blonde, with piercing eyes and clean features. He was dreamlike, really. From the day Princess Elizabeth met him at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth when she was 13, I don’t think she ever, ever, ever looked at, or thought about, another man. At that age, one didn’t seriously think about being married but one always knew that she had a yen for him.
“He was inclined to be a little bit new-broomish – probably an inevitable reaction to over-traditional things – but all that’s melded together now and he’s become a traditionalist himself. He is much mellower in his older age but there is still a spark of rebellion lying in wait, ready to pounce, which is rather refreshing.
“I think he’s the most amazing person. He’s going to be 90 this year. I can’t believe it. His figure is wonderful still and he works so hard. It was a very difficult position for a man like him, very bright mentally, to accept that you’re always going to walk a couple of paces behind your wife. There was no role model – the Prince Consort was a totally different kettle of fish – so he had to carve out a career for himself. He has done miraculously well.”
By contrast, Margaret had no time at all for Philip’s choice of best man, David Milford Haven. After the bridesmaids had seen the couple off on their honeymoon, pelting them with rose petals, they were taken to dinner by the Prince’s fellow naval officer. “We went somewhere like Quaglino’s and he was much keener on some dolly bird at another table than he was on us. He was palpably frightfully bored by all of us and had a tendency to go for rather prettier girls somewhere else. He was not my idea of a gentleman…
“There were a lot of funny little German and Danish princelings who were our men for the evening. Once of them was rather unfortunately called Prince Phlem – I don’t think with a 'gm’ It wasn’t the most successful banquet of the year.”
Margaret Elphinstone married Denys Rhodes, grandson of the 5th Lord Plunket, when she was 25 in 1950 and they travelled widely for two years before settling down in austerity Britain. “There was still rationing. We ate heart and lots of liver, which I hate. There were terrible things called faggots, now a rather rude term. A kind of meatball. We thought it best not to ask what was in them.”
The couple had two sons and two daughters. Denys Rhodes died in 1981, six months after they moved from Devon to Windsor. Knowing that he needed to be closer to London for cancer treatment, the Queen offered the couple the Garden House in Windsor Great Park, where Mrs Rhodes has lived ever since. The Queen calls in for a drink after church.
“I was up at Balmoral and we were riding on the hill ponies,” she recalls. “I can see the Queen now, exactly as she was. She turned round in the saddle and said: 'How would you like to live in suburbia?’ That was the first I heard of this wonderful house. It was the answer to a prayer and one of her many, many kindnesses.”
A former lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, Mrs Rhodes looks forward to seeing Prince William and Catherine Middleton exchange vows at the end of a long courtship. “I think the wedding will be wonderful,” she says. “There certainly can’t be an excuse like not knowing one another properly. I think it’s got every hope.
“There isn’t a marriage in the world that doesn’t have hiccoughs and difficulties. You weather them. I don’t think couples try hard enough.
“I tell my children that life is like making a tapestry. You have one gold thread that you have to sew through the tapestry, which is your marriage. Sometimes it gets frayed and sometimes it gets worn. But you have to work hard to keep your gold thread going. People must not give up too easily.”
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