The secret diary the Queen keeps

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32524, 6 February 1971, Page 13

The secret diary the Queen keeps

(By

CHARLES FRASER)

In > a locked glassfronted cabinet in a comer of the Queen’s Buckingham Palace study are almost a score of manuscripts bound in red leather, which no publisher can hope to get his hands on for at least 80 years. They are the Queen’s private diaries, meticulouslykept volumes in which, since the day she was crowned in June, 1953, the Queen has committed her' personal thoughts on family matters, world events and the joys and difficulties of being born to rule. The diaries are probably the only public chance the Queen will have in her entire life to speak candidly of things which displease her, to assess political policies and personalities, on which her position has always required her to always remain non-committal. That is why the Queen has decreed that no contents of the diaries can be made public until the year 2050 when Charles, if still alive, will have neared his century . . . but more likely her grandchildren or even great-grandchildren will be on the throne. What the memoirs undoubtedly contain are the wealtj of anecdotes for

which the Queen is wellknown among her friends. She has a remarkable memory and remembers, almost verbatim, conversations with celebrities of the past, some of which took place when she was still a child. Lively wit Only a few of the stories have ever been made public —and that was in last year’s film documentary “Royal Family”—dubbed by Prince Philip “The Queen Show.” Viewers then saw that, when off-duty, the Queen has a lively and irreverent wit and is quick to spot absurdities amid the grave pomp with which she is so often surrounded. But most of the dairies contain serious and detailed assessment of the changing role ■ of the Royal Family, from the adoration which greeted the opening of her reign, to the public’s cooler and more calculating reaction nearly two decades later. It is said that no-one has read the entire contents of the diaries there is one for each year of the Queen’s reign. But parts, including a long section on her father’s reaction to becoming King on the abdication of the Duke of Windsor, have been read to Princess Anne and Prince Charles. Photo albums Every royal tour has been meticulously reported in the memoirs, and certain items in the huge

photograph albums that the Royal Family have kept ever since photography was invented. It is part of the Queen’s sense of dynasty to keep a regular journal: she read most of Queen Victoria’s private papers while still a teen-ager and her professed ambition to keep a careful account of her reign when she eventually came to the throne became something of a family joke. The Royal Family, like any other family, has not been without its domestic upheavals. It is known that the Queen has written letters expressing strong disapproval of the marriages of some of her relatives, and it is reasonable to assume that such comments have found their way into her journals too. It’s a fair bet, too, that twenty-first-century racing enthusiasts will be able to discover just how the Royal horses fared during the Queen’s reign she has always kept meticulous racing accounts, and knows every detail of the pedigree of all her horses. “Red books” The Queen Mother, and the late Queen Mary kept diaries during their reigns but on a much smaller scale than the present Queen. In fact, the volumes will have outgrown their present accommodation in a few years; as it is, all the Queen’s racing form guides and studbooks have already been ousted from the cabinet by

what are known in the family as “the red books.” Probably, if precedent is any guide, the more outspoken portions of the memoirs will never see the light of day. These will doubtless include her criticism of what she is known to regard as unwarranted intrusion on royal privacy. Royal budget These matters include the unprecedented ballyhoo surrounding Prince Charles’s arrival at Cheam School, when on 66 of his first 88 days at Cheam there were stories about the Prince in the papers; and the publication of photographs showing her in bed with the baby Price Edward in 1964. She was also known to be< extremely distressed by foreign reports in 1963 of a rift in the Royal family. During a visit to Lisbon that year, 250 photographers crowded in on her seeking pictures of “the tragic Queen.” The inadequacy of the Royal budget, Prince Charles’s future, the possibility of her own eventual abdication in his favour . . . all, it is reliably reported, are subjects referred to in some detail in the Royal memoirs. So are answers to criticisms of the way she dresses, and to her alleged lack of interest in anything remotely highbrow; and the authentic version of her intervention in the romance of Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend.