BIOGRAPHY

HUGHMASSINGBERD SWEET AND SOUR

PRINCESS MARGARET: A LIFEUNRAVELLED

★By Tim Heald (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 346pp £20)

I ONCESPENTa Sunday with Princess Margaret. It was not an unqualified success. I was supposed to be showing her round some houses and gardens, in which she took a lively interest, but because of my incompetent map-reading we found ourselves in the hall of an unplanned pile. The wretched chatelaine, roused from an afternoon nap to discover that the Queen’s sister was on the premises, dropped a very creditable curtsey in her nightdress on the stairs, but the Princess was not amused. Nonetheless, I was quite bowled over by Her Royal Highness. Far from the grotesquely caricatured demon drunken dwarf of popular mythology, the Princess was fun to be with and, in the flesh, extraordinarily alluring, with beautiful eyes and lovely skin. Even in her midfifties she still had an overpowering sex appeal. She was a witty, intelligent, stimulating companion with a genuine enthusiasm for the arts, as well as evidently having a religious, indeed spiritual, side to her personality. What especially struck me was her loyalty. When we eventually arrived at the right house, I confided in the Princess that I was hoping to feature it in an article. At just the right moment she tackled the initially reluctant owner: ‘Now, you will let him write it up, won’t you?’ Happily Tim Heald captures all these qualities in his admirably well-balanced biography. He also rightly stresses her much-underrated sense of duty, throws light on the largely unacknowledged hard work she undertook in the service of the Crown, and makes the excellent point that her children, ‘conspicuously not royal in the sense that their mother felt herself to be, won wide approval for their apparent normality and niceness’. He adds: ‘To some they seemed her greatest credit.’ Yet this is certainly no hagiography. As Heald himself, who knew and liked the Princess, says: ‘She could be inconsiderate, rude, insensitive and spoiled.’ Even close friends acknowledged she was contrary and contradictory. The veteran courtier, Lt-Col Sir ‘Johnny’ Johnston, who died last year, summed it up pretty well: ‘When she was nice, she was very very nice. When she was awkward she was very awkward.’ As he showed in his perceptive biography of Prince Philip, the affable Heald hits it off well with courtiers, understands what makes them tick and, as an experienced reporter, takes the trouble to explain how the ‘royal roadshow’ really works. Behind the bright and

Amusing, but not always amused

breezy faççade of his chatty, refreshingly irreverent text, there is a sound structure of solid research trawling through the Royal Archives, files of letters from ladies-in-waiting and exhaustively detailed records of long-forgotten royal tours. His journalistic eye for amusing detail, whether in Tuvalu or Swaziland (where the King, whom she was investing with an Order, towered above her), makes for an entertaining read. In Japan the Princess asked an imperial prince whether he enjoyed dancing. The Japanese prince, who had little English, replied: ‘No, I prefer my balls on ice.’ I also particularly enjoyed this extract from a letter to a circus from the Princess’s office: ‘You ask about the bouquet. I think it would be best if this were not to be presented by one of the clowns, or indeed an animal.’ With his sensible understanding of the stuffiness of the postwar Establishment, Heald finds the behaviour of Group Captain Peter Townsend in embarking on a relationship with his boss’s daughter (‘above all, his capacity for self-delusion’) ‘frankly bizarre’. But neither is he convinced by the Earl of Snowdon’s semi-rhetorical question, ‘I never really thought the Townsend business was all it was cracked up to be, did you?’ Heald shrewdly assesses their marriage ‘on the rebound’ and gives a sympathetic account of Princess Margaret’s gradual disappearance from centre stage, followed by a sad end. When this most enjoyable book is reprinted, it would be worth correcting a few slips. The nickname ‘Tugboat Annie’ (because she moved from peer to peer) was not bestowed upon Mrs Ian Fleming but the Countess of Rosse (also unkindly dubbed ‘Lady Roscommon’), Lord Snowdon’s mother. The Duke of Marlborough is not called ‘Sonny’ but ‘Sunny’ – short for Sunderland, his original courtesy title. John Wayne was hardly ‘diminutive’ (perhaps Heald was thinking of Alan Ladd?). ‘Debo’ Devonshire was not Mistress of the Robes; that was her mother-in-law, ‘Moucher’. The late Duke of Beaufort’s nickname of ‘Master’ did not allude to his Mastership of the Horse or of the Beaufort Hunt but – as he told me when I went to interview him about his memoirs, a work he had clearly not read, let alone written – went back to his boyhood, when he was given his own pack of harriers at the age of eight. And Billy Wallace was not an ‘Hon’. Such things mattered to HRH The Princess Margaret. To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 37

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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