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  The car gave its driver a position of power, raising, as Osbert Sitwell noticed, ‘the rich and even the humble lorry driver to a new and god-like level.’ That spring, Rolls-Royce had commissioned Charles Robinson Sykes to design a new mascot for the bonnet of the car, and his elegant winged figure leaning bravely into the facing wind in her body-clinging gown was named, ‘The Spirit of Ecstasy’. Sykes’s inspiration was the lovely Miss Eleanor Velasco Thornton, whose liaison with Lord Montagu, a leading enthusiast among the collectors of Rolls-Royce cars, had remained a secret for a decade.

  Men who until recently had only been able to take their sweethearts on a bicycle made for two were now flying down country lanes in a state of speed-induced sensuality. Osbert Sitwell described ‘their hair blown back from their temples, features sculptured by the wind, bodies and limbs shaped and carved by it continually under their clothes so that they enjoyed a new physical sensation, comparable to swimming except here the element was speed not water.’Young people had never been so unchaperoned, and ‘no other generation had been able to speed into the sunset’.

  In Vita Sackville-West’s novel The Edwardians, set during the first eleven years of the twentieth century, the mistress of the Duke of Chevron returns exhilarated from a drive. ‘What I like better than anything is driving in that racing motor of yours,’ she says to her lover, ‘then I feel we may be dashed to death at any moment.’ Just as speed had never been so invigorating, so the lack of responsibility had never provided such intoxication.

  And yet there were dangers involved on the roads. Not all cars had windscreens; their engines blew up, their tyres exploded; and inexperienced drivers took to the wheel with gusto. Pedestrians were still unused to this mechanical hazard. The Metropolitan Police Statistics for accidents caused by vehicles in London in 1909 were published in 1911. There had been 3,488 accidents recorded involving motor-cars and motor cycles, 2,220 for trams, 1,343 for motor omnibuses, 304 for horse-drawn omnibuses and 6,033 for other horse-drawn vehicles. Of these accidents, 303 were fatal. In the middle of June F.E. Smith, MP, lawyer, and close friend of the Home Secretary Winston Churchill, found himself late for dinner. As he drove along beside the banks of the Thames, on the approach to the House of Commons, his car hit a man who was crossing Westminster Bridge. The man had not, according to The Times , been paying full attention to the road, but looking up at the clock on the tower that housed the Westminster bell, Big Ben. He was killed instantly. Later in the summer the Prime Minister, Henry Asquith, was being driven in his official car to London from Berkshire when his car collided with a young woman riding her bicycle; she was critically injured.

  Change for this generation was rapid. The novelist H.G. Wells thought Queen Victoria had ‘like a great paperweight sat on men’s minds and when she was removed their ideas began to blow about all over the place haphazardly.’ The Edwardians were the beneficiaries of this exciting and ever-shifting wind. In London new lines were being opened on the underground train system every few years. In 1906, to prove its safety and reliability, a man with a wooden leg had been invited as the inaugural passenger on the first moving underground staircase, on the Bakerloo line. The ‘escalator’ had proved such a success that a larger version was ready for use at Earl’s Court by May of 1911, for the Festival of Empire. An immense ship, said to be as tall as the highest skyscraper in New York and ‘practically unsinkable’, was nearing completion in the Belfast shipyard of Harland and Wolfe. The first journey by air over the Channel had taken place two years earlier. Moving films, after the first blurry jerky days, were becoming both an increasingly sophisticated art form and, screened in conjunction with the topical news films, a hugely popular form of entertainment. A visit to the cinema became a valuable source of information about current affairs. Over-busy theatre lovers, including the Queen, enjoyed the new service offered by the post office: special headphones that provided a live link from private homes to many of the shows and operas on the West End stage. Cornflakes and tea bags had arrived on breakfast tables.

  The fixity of the nineteenth century had vanished, yet change brought with it a mixture of excitement and anxiety. The rapidly increasing military and naval power of Germany and the continuing debate between the Unionists and those who supported Home Rule in Ireland were England’s predominant off-shore concerns that summer, and the strength of the internal unrest that began to find expression took many by surprise. The vast labour force of industrial England was flexing its muscles, on the verge of reaching full political maturity. The profound despair felt among the poor of the country remained unvoiced no longer, and strike action marked the whole summer of 1911. Even domestic servants were beginning to question their long-accepted role.

  Many of the very poor sent their children abroad, after replying to daily newspaper advertisements that seemed to offer the next generation better opportunities. The sum required to separate child from parent, perhaps forever, was a quarter of the average annual wage of a farm labourer. Dr Barnado’s advised that ‘£10 a head for the outfit and for travelling’ would be a good investment for a ‘guaranteed good home in Canada, for the benefit of the Empire’. Children were evacuated as if to escape a war that had not been declared.

  However, many people in Englandwere united in their national preoccupation with the weather. They hoped that the beautiful early summer days would last at least until the Coronation. One woman, however, was doubtful whether even the sunshine could dispel her mood of anxiety. From her bedroom window at the top of the Mall she could hear the hammering of wooden stands being knocked into place in preparation for the unveiling of the memorial to Queen Victoria in two weeks’ time. Queen Mary was not looking forward to the months ahead.

  2

  Early May

  The position is no bed of roses.

  HM Queen Mary

  MARY HAD NEVER felt so lonely. She had been shy all her life, a self-conscious woman who now found herself at the pinnacle of a society that alarmed her. On 22 June she would be crowned Queen. She had been flattered when many years earlier her godmother Queen Victoria, recognising in her the potential to make a good Queen, had singled her out as a suitable bride for her grandson George. But Mary had not expected the position of joint head of state to come vacant so suddenly.

  Mary lived in a palace lit by two hundred thousand electric light bulbs, with a faithful husband, six loving children, dozens of servants, twelve personal postmen doing their rounds inside the palace, a private police force, and six florists. It felt like a trap. Both her parents were dead, her favourite relation, her Aunt Augusta, lived abroad and was too old to travel to England, and her husband’s mother and sisters were jealous of her. Even Mabell Airlie, her Lady-in-Waiting and closest friend, was unavailable for advice and support: she had returned for the summer to her home, Cortachy Castle in Scotland, to spend time with her young children.

  Mary had been formally christened ‘Victoria Mary’ but May, the month of her birthday, had given her the childhood nickname by which she had been known all her life. ‘May’was not considered a weighty enough name for a Queen, however, and a second ‘Victoria’would have been thought disrespectful to her husband’s grandmother (even though she had been dead for a full decade) so there was really no choice in the matter, and ‘Queen Mary’ she was to be. The change brought with it an erosion of her old identity. Unable to conceal her regret at the loss, she wrote two letters, the first to Aunt Augusta: ‘I hope you like my new name, Mary. George dislikes double names and I could not be Victoria but it strikes me as curious to be re-christened at the age of forty-three.’ Filled with nostalgia for her lost private life, and only half-joking, she also wrote to Lady Airlie to confide that ‘there is one thing I never did and wish I had done: climb over a fence.’

  Preparations for the Coronation of George V were already evident in London. Tottering, tiered, wooden viewing platforms under construction were disfiguring many of the most famous streets and the huge stands that dwarfed the buildings al
ong the route seemed top-heavy and ugly. St Clement Dane’s church in the Strand had almost disappeared beneath scaffolding. Advertisements for seats that promised good views of the procession crammed the popular newspapers. The quantity of public engagements that packed the Queen’s diary for the month of May filled her with gloom. Four ‘Royal Courts’were planned – the official receptions to each of which more than a thousand worthies would be invited and at which the season’s debutantes would be presented. In anticipation, The Times had carried a ‘semi official intimation’, released on the instruction of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and directed at the leading Court dressmakers, to discourage the making and wearing of the hobble skirt. This highly fashionable close-fitting garment, another design by the trend setting Frenchman Paul Poiret, forced women to totter like geishas and made the deep curtsey required in the presence of the Sovereign impossible. The word of warning in The Times was a triumph for the Rational Dress League in its long campaign for the abolition of restrictive female clothes, sparked after their President, Viscountess Harberton, in the middle of a bicycle tour of the Home Counties, arrived in the salon of the Hautboy Hotel in Ockham, Surrey wearing ‘bifurcated garments’. The management had asked her to leave, arousing in her and her loyal allies a lifelong outrage.

  May was weary of the draining black and purple she had been obliged to wear for so long, and very ready to celebrate the ending of the official mourning period for Edward VII. On 7 May, in her weekly Sunday letter to her Aunt Augusta in Austria, she wrote: ‘I am dressed in grey, and feel quite odd.’ But this was her view of herself. She did not look odd at all. She looked elegant if vulnerable, a little unconfident or uncomfortable under the gaze of strangers, her shyness mistaken for severity. That afternoon, glad to feel the warmth of the sunshine of early summer, she set out for the park wearing a buttery-yellow hat with a large blue feather pinned on her poodle-fringed, wheat-coloured hair, her famously prominent bosom draped in the palest grey silk. May had good reason to hate mourning dress. Her mother had died fourteen years before, her father three years after that; two British monarchs had died within nine years of each other; and only six weeks after Edward VII was buried her adored younger brother Frank was struck down by pleurisy after a minor operation on his nose: for years May had been enveloped in black dresses trimmed with crepe, with black shoes, black gloves, black fans, and black feathers sewn onto black hats. The sight of a whip with black crepe ribbon tied to the tip wielded by a horse-drawn taxi driver became enough to sink her into total despondency. And though the mourning was over, the subject of clothes had been making her feel anxious for months. Again and again, as she had complained, she had endured a hard day’s work at her ‘tiresome trousseau’. She had never enjoyed shopping, even though her mother-in-law Queen Alexandra teased that she was always ‘looking in her glass’. There had been dozens of tedious fittings for the impending balls and parties and she had spent £2,000 on velvet and silk dresses, equivalent to the turnover of a small factory. As she confided to Aunt Augusta, she considered ‘the fashions of the season . . . so hideous that it has been a great trouble to evolve pretty toilettes out of them, however I hope some of the gowns will be a success.’

  That sunny morning of 7 May 1911, May’s chauffeur drove her car through the new iron gates at the front of Buckingham Palace and turned left up Constitution Hill. The streets were already packed with motorised taxis edging their way past the horse-drawn hansom cabs, pretty in their gay summer tasselled trappings, made by the drivers’ wives. Horse-drawn buses were becoming an increasingly rare sight, and some of the traditions of Victorian London were disappearing with them. Every retired driver missed the customary gift of a brace of pheasant or partridge shot on his estate that they had received on Lord Rothschild’s birthday. In gratitude, they had worn the Rothschild colours tied to their whips. With the phasing out of the hansom cabs people were no longer reminded that it was the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race day by the sight of the contrasting light and dark blue colours flying from the whips. Nor was St Patrick’s Day still commemorated with fluttering emerald green ribbons.

  Notice had been given that year of the withdrawal of horse-drawn fire engines, for it had become obvious that the straining animals could not match the speed of machine-driven equivalents. Taxi drivers earned their licences to criss-cross the eight square miles of London by taking an exam that was said to require more study time than a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. Chauffeurs rounded Hyde Park Corner in gleaming Rolls-Royces as their passengers, failing to make themselves heard above the din of the engine, jabbed them in the neck with the tip of an umbrella to attract their attention. An over-talkative driver would be asked to ‘shut his trap’ by closing the sliding panel that allowed conversation between a chauffeur and his passenger. Bicyclists and pedestrians had to keep their wits about them to avoid the frequent crashes at unmonitored junctions. The pure scent of the early May air clashed with the stink of horse dung and thick diesel exhaust.

  As the Royal car edged through the streets of south London, its passenger allowed herself the smallest of smiles. She enjoyed these outings to Richmond, the park which as children she and her brothers had grown to know well from their home in White Lodge and where they had been able to run about freely with their spinning hoops. To her delight she had found that she was greeted with warmth by fellow strollers. The press noted that she was given a friendly reception from all classes and that she appeared pleased when people would crowd round her as she walked under the splendid oak trees that were just beginning to unfurl their buds of brilliant green. May’s back was as straight as a ceremonial sword, and her rounded face gave the curious impression that she had a small greengage wedged high in each cheek. E.M. Forster was reported to have bowed to a wedding cake, having mistaken it for the new stiffly-structured silhouette of the Queen. However, her solemn-looking outward confidence disguised a deep discomfort in her public role. She had begun the year of 1911 with her profound sense of duty in conflict with feelings of apprehension, inadequacy and fear. She knew she was more capable and intelligent than she had the self-assurance to reveal.

  As well as all the elaborate official commitments scheduled to take place inside the dark walls of Buckingham Palace, there were to be many public appearances up and down the country. In May alone she faced the prospect of The Trooping the Colour, the opening of the Festival of Empire, and a visit from her husband’s first cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and his family. This last would be particularly demanding, involving five days of official lunches, dinners and balls as well as a visit to Windsor culminating with the main event of the trip, the unveiling of the statue of Queen Victoria at the top of the Mall outside Buckingham Palace. The summer programme of celebration was so packed that May wondered if she would get through it. A tour of England had been planned, and visits to Wales, Ireland and Scotland were also part of the agenda, all of it a source of dread. A different woman, perhaps the dead King’s mistress Alice Keppel, or the beautiful aristocratic Marchioness of Ripon, subject of one of the great portrait painter John Singer Sargent’s most seductive paintings, or even her own mother, the late Duchess of Teck, might have taken to the role of Queen with relish. May did not. ‘The position is no bed of roses’, she had written to her aunt the summer before. Ceremonial occasions, even those in her own home, filled her with alarm. She hated the sound of a gun salute, having been terrified by thunder as a child, and had a self-confessed antipathy to ‘a surfeit of gold plate and orchids’. She had abhorred long meals from childhood, when lunch had lasted up to three hours, during which she was obliged to listen to her greedy overweight mother rolling her Rs in relish over the words ‘rich cream’, her favourite brand of biscuit. At Buckingham Palace, under the direction of the new King, a five-course dinner could now be dispatched within the hour, but even so the Prime Minister Henry Asquith was known to find dining there more exhausting than an entire evening’s debate in the House of Commons. The Queen had no gift for small-talk,
and politics bored her. An observant royal aide was aware of an unfortunate abruptness in the Queen’s habit of ‘a shy nod, which offends so much’. Her self-consciousness and lack of ease among the sophisticated beau monde of Edward VII’s Court had increased her feelings of inadequacy, and Lady Airlie noticed a shell of self-preservation beginning to formover the natural gaiety that had once so captivated Queen Victoria. ‘The hard crust of inhibition which gradually closed over her’ was, her Lady-inWaiting observed, ‘hiding the warmth and tenderness of her personality.’

  The scrutiny of the press did not diminish May’s discomfort during the first year of the reign. Although at five foot six inches the Royal couple were the same height as each other, journalists ignored this equality and, perhaps as a comment on May’s evident deference to the King, referred to them as ‘King George the Fifth and Mary the Four Fifths’. Furthermore, two scandalous old rumours had resurfaced to blight the preceding year. There was much behind-the-hand whispering that George, whose voice was naturally strident and his complexion blotchy because of poor digestion, had an alcohol problem. Only by demonstrating a consistently steady hand when holding a shotgun and equally consistently refusing a second glass of port did he manage to quash the rumour. A malicious report that he had secretly married the daughter of a naval captain in Malta the week before proposing to May caused much hilarity at Court until that story too was proved libellous. May had found both episodes upsetting.

  Her anxieties were exacerbated by her mother-in-law. Lacking Alexandra’s glamour and style, May inevitably suffered unfavourable comparisons with her predecessor. ‘Dazzlingly beautiful, whether in gold and silver by night or in violet velvet by day,’ swooned Margot Asquith of Edward VII’s widow, ‘she succeeded in making every other woman look common beside her.’ Margot’s step-daughter Violet Asquith, aged 24, was charitable in noting her first impression of May after a Downing Street dinner.‘Much less plain than I thought,’ she wrote in her diary, adding, however: ‘quite a tidy dreary face, with regular Royal hair in exact imitation of the old one without any of her beauty and grace.’