# You look awfully like the Queen: Wit and Wisdom from the House of Windsor

Thomas Blaikie

For fans of the ‘Windsors’ and ‘Now we are Sixty’: a beautifully illustrated collection of amusing and affectionate stories from inside the royal family.Arriving at the theatre, the Queen and the Queen Mother appeared to be having words. ‘Who do you think you are?’ demanded the Queen Mother. ‘The Queen, Mummy, the Queen.’About twenty years ago the Guardian first published two camp anecdotes about the Queen Mother. Readers reeled to see stories actually printed in a national newspaper that until then had had only an underground existence in certain circles. After that, tales about the royal family became respectable; they were also, quite rightly, believed. Taken as a whole they reflect the contradictory roles we like royalty to fulfil: unworldly and impossibly regal or engagingly domesticated and just like us, or camp, worldly and outrageous.In this affectionate tribute Thomas Blaikie has gathered together a compendium of stories, many of them never published before, which provide access to a unique world. How exactly does a Queen react when she finds her footmen draped in her jewels? What does she do to amuse herself as she whiles away the hours sitting for her portrait? And how did the Duchess of Windsor and the Queen Mother really get on? This beautifully illustrated book answers these questions and poses many more in its celebration of the diverse personalities of the House of Windsor.

## You Look Awfully Like the Queen. Thomas Blaikie

WIT AND WISDOM FROM THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR

ILLUSTRATED BY GILL TYLER


## Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Foreword

Gracious Me

With Top People

Out and About

At Home

Just Like Us

The Family of Nations

When We Were Young

We Are Family

Making Do

Our Best Friends

We Are Amused

Patrons of The Arts

Sources

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

## Foreword

‘How come you know so much about the Royal Family?’ people often ask me. The question is intended as a challenge. Nowadays an interest in the Monarchy has to be justified. As a child I only wanted to hear about people who lived in large houses and had masses of money. I was engrossed in a life of Queen Mary at the age of nine and later, while other boys at school were leafing through Autocar or setting fire to things, I was slaving in the pottery room on a head of that same queen – capturing her marcel wave in clay was a nightmare. Even now, at forty-four, it’s a comfort to wonder what the Queen might be doing at the same moment as I am dusting or washing up and still almost impossible to accept her parallel existence in the same universe.

Barking mad, you might say. Well, I have another alarming symptom. While compiling this book, I found that my memory for all the little details about the Royal Family that I have ever read or heard is extraordinarily retentive. Often I would say to a friend, ‘You remember when you told me about the Queen hunting for a hat at Buckingham Palace or that time she found the footmen eating her chocolates…?’ and they would look blank. I will never be able to understand how they could have forgotten. This perhaps explains, among other things, why I have been able to include so many previously unpublished stories here.

On a more serious note, it is difficult to explain the allure of Royalty. Judging by the response to the death of the Queen Mother there are many who know that the killjoy anti-monarchists have got it wrong; on the other hand, the era of uncritical worship is over. I hope that this book reflects the freer and more complex way we feel about the Royal Family now. At times we might want to revel in their strange Alice in Wonderland world where they seem simultaneously down to earth and utterly regal, at others we are more sober – appreciating, especially in the Queen’s case, true wit and style and an engaging and distinctive personality. Whatever the truth, let’s hope they are never replaced by some colourless figure elevated drearily on ‘merit’. Long may they reign over us!