by The Laird o’Thistle
December 22, 2018
I’ve not written anything in this series for ages, but I have been pondering of late. Some years back I was lucky enough to start working on my own family history while a number of older relatives were still living, people who personally knew and remembered relatives who had been dead for fifty, sixty, seventy, and even eighty years. They proved to be invaluable sources in moving beyond the facts to a sense of personalities and lifestyles of earlier generations. And, I did it “just in the nick” of time, since almost all of them have since passed on.
That has made me wonder what, given the chance, I would ask the Queen? In the wonderful birthday documentary “Elizabeth at 90” (2016), she shared a number of illuminating and humorous memories of the Strathmore family, but not much on the Windsors. There is, nonetheless, a lot of personal knowledge of the British royal family that she carries with her, and people she remembers that virtually no one else now does. In several cases, she is, quite literally, the last living person who knew them. This is especially true since the death of her deeply beloved “second sister” Margaret Rhodes, just over two years ago.
So, although she is famously averse to being interviewed if I were able to sit down and ask Her Majesty a few key questions, here is what I would most want to know:
1. What are some of your own memories of your grandfather, King George V?
2. As one of the youngest participants, what do you recall of the 1935 Silver Jubilee?
3. An old newsreel shows you following the rest of the royal family into St. George’s Chapel at Windsor for George V’s funeral (1936). What do you recall from that day?
4. Do you have particular memories of King George V’s sisters, Princess Louise (d. 1931), Princess Victoria (d. 1935), and Queen Maud (d. 1938)?
5. Your life also overlaps three of Queen Victoria’s children: Princess Louise (d. 1939), the Duke of Connaught (d. 1942), and Princess Beatrice (d. 1944). What impressions of them remain with you?
6. What sort of childhood memories do you have of your uncle, the Duke of Windsor, from before the Abdication Crisis?
7. You were sixteen when the Duke of Kent was killed in the war (1942), nearly a decade older than his children. Are there particular impressions and memories you have of him?
8. One of the famous stories of your grandmother, Queen Mary, is about her insistence on coming immediately to “kiss your hand” upon your return to London at the time of your father’s death in 1952. Might you be willing to tell us something about that call?
I don’t expect to ever get the chance to ask these things. I can hope and wish, though, that someone might get a chance to do some such… even if the current public never sees it until fifty or sixty years hence. What a treasure it would be, for historians and for history itself. It is the sort of information that makes it come alive.
A blessed Christmas and a “Guid New Year” to all!
Ken Cuthbertson