In May 1935, Britain celebrated the Silver Jubilee
of King George V and his Consort, Queen Mary.
Despite the tribulations of George's reign,
the Royal family had never been more popular.
George had steered the monarchy through
the catastrophe of the First World War and its chaotic aftermath.
While the crowned heads of Europe were falling,
he had preserved and strengthened his own dynasty.
But the King hadn't done it alone.
Throughout his reign, he had relied upon
the support of his wife, Queen Mary -
the present Queen's formidable grandmother.
Queen Mary was tremendously important.
She was there as the one pillar of the monarchy.
She became a sort of rock around which the royal family focused.
Like her husband,
Mary was a deeply conservative product of the Victorian era.
She was also a ruthless survivor,
who was prepared to sacrifice anything - including her own son -
to protect the monarchy.
Control and restraint and responsibility and duty -
these were all the things that she had to stand for,
and she felt her son had let her down.
And when her husband King George died,
it was Queen Mary's steely resolve that helped
to rescue a troubled dynasty, reinvent it for the modern age,
and shape the character of our own Queen Elizabeth.
In December 1948, the Royal family came together at Buckingham Palace
to celebrate the christening of the newest member of their dynasty.
As he squinted out at the cameras, the newborn Prince Charles
couldn't have been in a safer pair of hands.
Ramrod straight and tough as nails,
Queen Mary had been a symbol of strength and continuity
across four generations of monarchy -
as grandmother to a queen...
..mother to two kings...
..and a Queen Empress in her own right.
And yet, for a matriarch who became the acme of regal decorum
Queen Mary didn't start life as very royal at all.
Born Princess Victoria Mary of Teck in 1867,
she was given the nickname May because of the month of her birth,
a name that stuck.
But although Princess May's mother could boast that she was
directly descended from King George III,
her grandfather - a German Royal Duke -
had done the unthinkable and married for love.
Princess May suffered from the fact that her grandfather had married below his level.
Her grandfather married only a countess, so a commoner,
and that had meant
they were taken from the rank of Royal Highness
down to Serene Highness, so she was only a Serene Highness
which really mattered in royal circles.
And other members of the royal families rather thought
she was always a little bit below the quality line.
Princess May's position was very invidious, actually,
because she was sort of royal - a very difficult position to be in.
Certainly, as the Princess grew older,
various German royal families made it quite clear
that they did not consider her an equal or appropriate match,
but certainly one thing she did take from that
was the importance of position.
If her inferior blood seemed to make May unsaleable on the marriage market,
there was further humiliation to be endured
in the form of May's fun-loving mother the Duchess of Teck -
better known to smart London society as Fat Mary.
Mary's mother was enormous. I mean, she was absolutely vast as a structure,
not only as a human being, but also in her character.
Mary Adelaide was extremely loud, and liked nothing more
than making a public spectacle of herself. She loved crowds,
and she'd go out in her carriage and wave,
which was, I think, regarded as rather vulgar
by the rest of the royal family.
She wanted to be this great social figure
and entertain all the politicians and the great leading lights and stars of society.
I mean, they became a couple that most visiting royals
would pop in and say hello, you know, they were pretty central,
but always in this sort of slightly anarchic way.
Entertaining grandly, spending madly,
she lived the high life, she ordered satin ball gowns,
she went to the opera, she went to balls, she went shopping -
didn't do very much for the bank balance at all.
In 1883, the bank manager came calling.
Up to their ears in debt, the Teck family were forced
to sell off the silver in a mortifying public auction.
"Public notice of sale by auction at Knightsbridge,
"by command of the Duke and Duchess of Teck.
"Valuable ornamental furniture, lights, bronzes, clocks,
"paintings and other effects may be viewed at Kensington palace.
"Catalogue - one shilling."
It was humiliating to the last degree.
To a 16-year-old girl -
it's an age at which you feel terribly embarrassed anyway -
to see her all her family's possessions being publicly sold,
and bills in the Pall Mall Gazette saying this.
And of course, London society gossiped about this the whole time.
The chaotic world of May's parents
carried the unmistakeable whiff of Hanoverian excess,
and it gave May a lesson in Victorian decorum that she would never forget.
Princess May had to witness her parents
being sort of dunned for debts,
and tradesmen lounging downstairs waiting for payment,
and the sort of humiliation of it all,
and in her I think it created a desire to retreat
to a sense of order, where everyone knew what was what.
Mary responded to this terrible parental embarrassment
by becoming completely the opposite of her incredibly embarrassing parents.
She devoted herself to being the absolute epitome of duty and control,
and absolutely sort of willed herself
to be this very correct person who never did anything out of place.
With angry creditors snapping at their heels,
in 1883 May's family exchanged the splendours of Kensington Palace
for exile - and social death - in Florence.
But life in the wilderness brought unexpected rewards.
For Princess May herself, going to Florence was the best thing
that could have happened to her.
At 16, Florence was, in a sense, her Damascus moment.
Her eyes were opened to the magnificence of this city -
the galleries, the cathedrals, the churches and so on -
and she developed a knowledge of history and modern history.
So that, by the time she returned to London at the age of 18,
she operated on a completely different level
to other members of the royal family.
May emerged from her exile an unusually cultured and practical princess.
And although not out of the top drawer of royalty,
her attributes didn't go unnoticed by the one person who mattered -
the matchmaker in chief.
In 1891, Queen Victoria needed a solution
to a tricky family problem - her grandson, Prince Eddy.
The scandal-prone prince was everything that May was not.
Dissolute and dim, he lived the life of a wastrel,
gambling and womanising.
Finding a match for Eddy on the marriage market
wasn't going to be an easy matter.
Queen Victoria went through all the princesses in Europe one by one,
and she dismissed them all as, variously,
Catholic, idiotic, thick, ghastly and ugly,
and the person she came up with in the end was May,
because she thought that May had backbone.
Here she is, she's good-looking,
she believes in the monarchy to the Nth degree
and she's very strong and very dutiful.
I think all of that wraps up to being a pretty good idea for Prince Eddy.
In December 1891, the betrothal was announced.
The Princess had salvaged her own prospects and the honour of her family.
Fat Mary was in seventh heaven.
After all those years of humiliation, of being put down,
snubbed on the fringes of royalty, here she is, she's got the plum.
The plum was rotten.
In January 1892, the Teck family arrived at Sandringham
to celebrate the forthcoming union with their future in-laws.
But during the visit, the ever-unreliable Eddy contracted pneumonia and died.
The wedding party had turned into a funeral.
For May and her mother Mary it was like
having victory snatched away from you at the absolute last minute,
I mean, it must have been just devastating.
But Queen Victoria was quite unsentimental about the whole thing,
and very, very quickly reckons that her good work
in finding May should not go to waste.
All was not yet lost - Eddy had a younger brother.
A straight-talking naval officer with an obsession for order and routine,
Prince George now stood to inherit the throne.
And if May was good enough for Eddy,
she was good enough for his understudy.
To our generation,
the idea of marrying the brother of your dead fiance
seems rather bizarre, not to say a little macabre,
but the general assumption was that the engagement to Prince Eddy
had been motivated by duty rather than passion.
She saw a job that she could do well,
and I don't think she had any self-doubt about that.
After a suitable period of mourning, the courtship rituals resumed
and May transferred her affections from the wild Prince Eddy
to his dutiful brother George.
"Dear George, I am very sorry I am so shy with you.
"It is stupid to be so stiff.
"Really there is nothing I would not tell you,
"except that I love you more than anybody.
"And this I cannot tell you myself, so I write it to relieve my feelings."
In the spring of 1893, May and George were married,
and May took her place among the very highest ranks of British royalty...
..in all likelihood a future Queen of Great Britain,
and Empress of the largest empire the world had ever seen.
But the marital home, a mere cottage on the Sandringham Estate
was hardly the palace she might have imagined.
People made disparagingly sneering remarks about it
and described it as a glum little villa.
The drawing room was very small,
you couldn't get more than about two or three people in it.
And, of course, George loved this because he hated entertaining,
and it was a wonderful excuse not to have lots of people to stay and to dinner.
And he had the whole thing furnished by Maples,
which was the sort of John Lewis of the day.
And this was terrible for May, because it meant that
the one thing she really enjoyed doing - decorating - she wasn't allowed to do.
She hoped to make a real show,
and when you consider that they possessed
vast amounts of fantastic furniture
and all these marvellous things that had come down to them,
it was extraordinary.
George wanted to be
in a simple squire's house with the mottos on the wall,
like, "A stitch in times saves nine,"
and living a simple kind of life.
But it was a pretty odd kind of existence.
George's idea of fun was blasting game birds from the skies over Sandringham.
Her husband's passions left his cultivated wife decidedly cold.
After one particularly dull shooting party, she confided...
"It was so stiff I could have turned cartwheels for sixpence."
For 17 years, the Princess endured the tedium of the Norfolk shooting parties.
It was all a long way from the galleries and churches of Florence.
Princess May, the future Queen Mary,
was intellectually and up to a point
emotionally starved in her marriage.
She was far more intelligent than the King,
she had a far wider range of interests.
Left to herself, she would have travelled around.
Instead, if she did want to go and look at a cathedral or museum or something,
she was regarded as being a slightly absurd eccentric.
She's much better educated than George is,
she's much more interested in things like books, and she knows about art...
She's pretty much the closest the royal family gets to an intellectual.
George has no interest in that at all,
all he wants to do is shoot and put in his stamps.
She couldn't bear going out on the grouse moors
for days and days at a time looking like she was having a nice time, but she did it.
May also did her duty in the marriage bed.
In little over ten years she produced six children
including a male heir and four spares.
But in the claustrophobic confines of York Cottage
she always deferred to her husband,
and there was little room for a loving mother to express her feelings.
"We used to have a most lovely time with her alone,
"always laughing and joking.
"She was a different human being away from him."
The children lived this very, very strange existence.
It's almost like a ship, with their father as captain
marching up and down the quarter deck,
who frightened his children, intimidated them,
and when they got things wrong he punished them.
And it was difficult for May to intercede,
because she had an extraordinary -
almost unimaginable to ordinary people's minds -
an extraordinary reverence for the monarchy.
I think Queen Mary loved her children.
It's just that there was no question of her
taking their part against her husband,
that was absolutely never going to happen.
And when he was dressing them down or when he was disappointed in them,
I think they were sort of stuck.
In 1910, May traded in the Norfolk cottage for a real palace.
With the death of Edward VII, May's husband became King.
In keeping with the dignity of her new position as Consort,
at her coronation in Westminster
Princess May took the name Queen Mary.
Mary wasn't now just a queen married to a king.
She was also an empress, wife of the greatest emperor in the world.
In 1911, shortly after the coronation,
she and her husband travelled to India
to receive the homage of their distant subjects at a ceremonial court.
Suddenly, this relatively self-effacing woman is centre stage
of this massive crowd all the way round,
with enormous numbers of cavalry going one way
and princes going the other, all of them falling on their knees in front of her.
There they are in their purple velvet cloaks,
the crowns on their heads, they seat themselves on two gold thrones,
the have these jewelled princes coming and paying homage.
And after they had left, the crowds rushed on to the ground where they'd been
and kissed the very earth on which they'd walked.
I think that had the most tremendous effect on her.
On the plains of India, Mary had found her true calling.
The one-time social untouchable had been reincarnated as a living deity,
and Mary was determined to put her new role to good use.
In 1914, Britain was plunged into the most catastrophic war in its history.
The slaughter on the battlefields touched the lives
of every British family.
With a world war on their doorstep and the nation facing disaster,
these were testing times for the monarchy.
Queen Mary's response was both patriotic and practical.
Mary very much does see her position as Queen as being
an opportunity to identify the monarchy with charity,
she plunges into all sorts of charitable activities.
And she doesn't just do it,
she organises everybody else to do it on a huge scale.
She was an incredibly successful and impressive organizer.
There was Queen Mary's Needlework Guild,
there was the Relief Clothing Guild,
there was the National Relief Fund.
In many ways, during the First World War, Queen Mary came into her own.
"I appeal to all women who are in a position to do so
"to organise a collection of garments for soldiers and sailors
"who will suffer on account of the war.
"All parcels should be addressed to Friary Court, St James's Palace, London."
Prodded by Mary, the nation's women took up their knitting needles.
A mountain of clothing for the troops descended on the palace.
Mary's Needlework Guild continues the tradition to this day.
She has certainly left her mark on us.
The object of the guild
remains the same today as it did in Queen Mary's time.
It's to collect new clothing and linen that goes only to UK charities.
Today, all the clothing that has been collected during the past year
we start to pack up, so from 12.30 there will be complete chaos in here.
During the First World War, Queen Mary had an army of people working for her.
She was incredibly hands-on, and people were on shifts, I think,
when it got really busy and the packages were going out all the time.
This is a book produced covering the work Queen Mary did
during the war years.
On this page it show articles
received at St James's Palace since August 1914.
Blankets, rugs and quilts - 25,565.
Caps - 10,252.
Shirts - 224,686.
Operation shirts - 61,000.
Pyjamas - 113,000.
Shoes and slippers - 40,460.
Bed socks and operating stockings - 72,715.
So, in all a total of over 15 million articles went out in that package.
She recognised that she was in an immensely powerful position
to actually look after her subjects.
She felt that she really could make a difference.
The Queen's charitable work not only helped to cement the ties
between the monarchy and the millions of women
who were mobilised to help the war effort.
It also helped to reinvent the royal family in the national consciousness as a force for good.
But with victory overseas secured, Mary and George faced a new crisis.
The First World War had been catastrophic for the old system of European monarchies.
Across Russia and Europe, royal houses were falling
and the spread of communism threatened a complete rupture with the past.
There was this fear that communism would have an impact on British society,
it would manifest itself particularly in the trade union movement
and periodically, of course, the Labour Party sang The Red Flag.
They were very worried that what this presaged was the revolution,
the guillotine set up in Trafalgar Square - that was the nightmare.
The war was followed by recession in the industries that had built the weapons of victory.
Many men returned from the trenches to a bleak world of unemployment and poverty.
With industrial unrest and militant socialism on the rise,
the King and Queen took action to strengthen their links with their people,
not as individuals, but as a team.
For a Queen Consort, this was a daring new departure.
One of the most important things they do is to go together,
both of them playing a part, to mining districts
in the North of England or Wales, trying to see for themselves, trying to talk to the people.
And what's interesting is this is a new take on the monarchy.
Monarchs had gone on sort of visits to Lancashire or whatever,
but basically it was a question of driving through crowds of people in a big car.
George and Mary - particularly Mary - are actually trying
to sort of talk to people and visit communities, and much more engaged.
This was nothing less than a new formula for a modernised monarchy -
a combination of public relations, meeting and greeting the people,
and at the same time preserving the ancient mystique of royalty.
For Mary, it was a balancing act that required all the skills of a first-class actress.
One of the things about Queen Mary
is that she had a very strong performance instinct.
She saw the roles of King and Queen as roles that needed to be played correctly.
She never made the mistake of thinking,
"Because I'm Queen, that's enough."
She was always asking absolutely top level of performance from herself.
Like every good actress, Queen Mary was meticulous in her costume
and honed her stage look to perfection.
Queen Mary, of course, looked the part.
She wore tiaras...
earrings...
..necklaces, chokers, ropes of pearls.
There would be brooches.
There would be the riband of the Order of the Garter,
the Diamond Star of the Order of Garter,
the family orders.
Her evening gown was reinforced with buckram
so that it could take the weight of the jewels.
You know, she was...
like a magnificent walking Christmas tree, really.
She used her jewels almost like a uniform,
they were absolutely marvellous, and they were a kind of armour.
She presented
an image of magnificence that fitted -
she was, after all, a Queen Empress, and she played up to that.
The once-shy Princess grew into a formidable figure.
Officials responsible for organising the Queen Empress's royal visits
needed to be quick on their toes.
Queen Mary was invited to open a ward and plant a tree in one of the South London hospitals.
They rolled out the red carpet for her,
she walked along it, she came to the end of the red carpet.
But, alas, there was six feet of raw earth between herself and the spade.
She wouldn't budge.
And the quick-witted hospital administrator
shot to the other end of the carpet, cut six feet off and put it at her feet,
and she duly walked upon this red carpet and planted the tree.
ANNOUNCER: 'A golden day for the Silver Jubilee,
'and the spectacle of a nation exalted.'
In 1935, Britain celebrated King George and Queen Mary's Silver Jubilee -
25 years on the throne.
Few could have thought that this conservative couple
would successfully steer the monarchy through a period of such turbulent change.
But George and Mary's instincts for combining duty and subtle modernisation
had hit precisely the right note.
The awkward young couple brought together
by a piece of dynastic business had grown into a loving partnership.
I don't think they were sort of madly in love,
I don't think it was that.
But I think a sense of common purpose
and a real belief in what they were doing.
I think the fact that they had such joint belief
in the value of their role did bring them very close together.
"I can never sufficiently express my deep gratitude to you,
"darling May, for the way you have helped and stood by me.
"This is not sentimental rubbish, but what I really feel."
The King and Queen's reign had been an undoubted public triumph.
But there was one area of royal life in which they had failed spectacularly.
George and Mary had neglected to provide a loving family life
in which their children could thrive.
The heir to the throne
was this handsome, charming, glamorous young man.
He was a pin-up boy around the world.
And the public, all they knew was this smiling wonderful face.
But the other side to this was that
David displayed a sort of petulance,
that if he wanted it, he could have it - it was his by right.
And that went contrary to all notions of service
that the monarchy stood for.
George and Mary's eldest son, David, Prince of Wales,
had been alienated by his bullying father,
and for emotional support felt unable to turn to his mother.
Instead of imbuing him with their sense of duty and tradition,
they had produced a Prince more like George's brother,
the late Prince Eddy, than George himself.
King George V believed that being King was a full-time job,
a 100% job, and everything was second to it.
But the Prince of Wales was convinced that he had every right
to do what he wanted to do with his private life, to indulge himself when he wanted to.
And this meant that, more and more,
King George V sort of lost faith in his son.
In January 1936, worn down by years of service,
and desperately anxious about the succession,
George V took to his bed at Sandringham.
As the end of the King's life approached,
his wife and sons gathered at his beloved Norfolk estate.
For over 40 years,
Mary had been unflinching in her support of her husband.
As she contemplated an uncertain future,
Mary summoned up her iron composure.
When the King dies,
it must have been a hammer blow to Mary,
but that sense of duty boards up again in her back.
And she stands away from the body
and goes over to her eldest son
and does obeisance to him as her new King.
And he can't cope with it.
David pretty much fell apart.
Here was the new King distraught at the death of his father,
whilst he'd been yearning for the day when he was free of him.
On 21st January 1936,
David was proclaimed King Edward VIII.
The high and mighty Prince,
Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David,
is now...
As he watched the proclamation from a side window at St James's Palace,
a pale figure in the window beside him was a portent of trouble ahead.
As the Prince of Wales,
Queen Mary's eldest son had had numerous mistresses -
none of whom he seriously considered marrying.
But the King's latest lover
represented a threat of a different order.
Chic, shamelessly modern and exuding sexual power,
Wallis Simpson couldn't have been more alarming.
They thought that she was common and brash and gold-digging.
The rumours abounded that when she went out to visit David,
she started doing wild belly dances
and that she antagonised the staff and did outrageous things.
Well, all of that is conjecture.
But what they really didn't like
was that she already had two husbands.
In the eyes of Queen Mary,
she was somebody who should ideally be kept out of England altogether.
If she got into England,
on no account should be received in the smarter drawing rooms.
Even if she penetrated into smarter drawing rooms,
she certainly shouldn't be allowed at court.
And the remote idea that she could conceivably be considered
as a wife for the future King of England
was, to her, something so inconceivably shocking
as to be not merely unmentionable but unthinkable.
On 3rd December 1936,
news of the crisis appeared for the first time in the London press.
Isolated from her son, who had kept her at arm's length throughout,
Queen Mary was aghast.
"Darling David, this news in the papers is very upsetting.
"I would much like to see you. Won't you look in some time today?
"I shall only be out from 3 to 5."
Determined to make a public display of business-as-usual,
Queen Mary drove to survey the smoking ruins
of a famous London landmark destroyed by fire.
It wasn't only the Crystal Palace built by her forbears
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert that was collapsing around her.
Later that afternoon, Mary drove to Marlborough House and met the King.
When King Edward VIII finally made it clear to his mother
he was going to marry Mrs Simpson,
I think it must have been, for her, the most painful
and the most terrible blow that can be imagined,
because it set at naught everything which she held most sacred.
Because of her upbringing, because of the immense honour
which she felt had been done her
when she married the future King of England,
it seemed to her inconceivable
that her elder son should put his own private gratification,
his marriage to this impossible woman,
ahead of his duty.
On 10th December 1936, the King turned his back on his birthright.
EDWARD VIII: 'A few hours ago,
'I discharged my last duty
'as King and Emperor.'
On the Windsor Estate, Queen Mary listened in horror.
'I have found it impossible
'to carry the heavy burden of responsibility
'and to discharge my duties as King
'as I would wish to do
'without the help and support
'of the woman I love.'
'His Former Majesty, King Edward VIII
'did declare his irrevocable determination
'to renounce the throne
'for himself and his descendents.'
As far as she was concerned,
you know, they lived lives of great privilege and importance,
but the price was that you couldn't do as you liked.
It was a simple deal.
I think that is why the whole abdication crisis
was so profoundly painful,
that she, this exemplar of moral probity and uprightness and order,
should have the child who takes this twice-divorced, you know, whatever.
I think it really went like a sword through her.
In a letter to her son, now Duke of Windsor,
Mary offered a rare glimpse of her innermost feelings.
"It seemed inconceivable to those who had made
"such sacrifices during the war that you, as their King,
"refused a lesser sacrifice.
"After all, all my life,
"I have put my country before anything else.
"And I simply cannot change now."
I'm sure that we are all...
..happy to feel that the generosity...
It was a supreme irony that just as King George, a second son,
had reluctantly taken up the burden of kingship
from a dissolute elder brother,
so now the stammering Bertie should be forced into the role he dreaded
by his older brother.
Can you imagine what it was like for Bertie?
Not being given any guidance or clarity, no structure of support.
He's alone.
But he has got his mother,
and when the time comes for the abdication,
Bertie collapses into the arms of his mother.
Queen Mary later confided
that the new King sobbed on her shoulder for a whole hour.
In the weeks leading up to the coronation,
Mary acted to bolster the resolve of the new King.
In May 1937, she staged a dramatic break with royal protocol
in a public show of support for her second son.
By tradition, Dowager Queens don't attend the coronation.
But nevertheless, Queen Mary felt that her duty
was to support the King.
And she did that rare thing of breaking with precedent
by asking permission to attend the coronation.
And so the fact that
the mother figure is there at the time of the coronation
blessing her son and granddaughters,
the fact that he takes the name George VI -
following on from his father -
it gives great feeling of continuity and stability,
and I think that's what she saw was her mission at that point.
When you look at those coronation balcony scenes,
Queen Mary is clearly there, incredibly important.
She was there as the one pillar of the monarchy.
She became a sort of rock around which the royal family focused.
So, when people looked up there,
they thought, "Well, it's all right, then."
She was one symbol of the old days.
On 3rd June 1937,
the Duke of Windsor married his twice-divorced American
at a rented chateau in France.
Queen Mary chose to spend the day quietly at her residence in London.
Not a single member of her family
was permitted to share her son's happy day.
When you realise how much she loved her eldest son
and all the hopes and aspirations that she must have pinned on him
for the first 40 years of his life,
suddenly to change all of that and freeze him out of her life,
tells you that she must have been a very steely character.
But that was how she was bought up. Control and restraint
and responsibility and duty.
These were all the things that she had to stand for
and she felt that her son had let her down,
so why on Earth should she bend?
With her eldest son out of the country,
Mary moved to bolster the position of her second son, the new King.
There was real fear when Duke of Windsor went abroad
that he would, in some way, steal the new King's thunder.
I mean, after all, he was an immensely charismatic figure.
He looked the part.
He was articulate, as compared to poor stammering George VI.
And so they had to keep the Duke of Windsor at bay.
Forming an alliance with the new Queen Elizabeth,
the two women chose as their battleground
the question of Wallis Simpson's royal status.
David - the Duke of Windsor, as he now is -
really believed that Wallis was entitled to the letters HRH,
which would have given her a royal title as Duchess,
and people would have curtseyed to her.
And that meant everything - it meant the whole world.
Queen Mary, a woman who had once been shunned by royalty
on account of her own inferior status,
now seized upon protocol as her weapon,
and acted to ensure that
Wallis was denied her rightful royal title.
She knew that the Duke of Windsor would not come back to England
if his wife is going to be treated as non-Royalty.
He's not going to allow his wife to be offended.
So, as long as she is not HRH, effectively they are exiles.
I think it's quite clear that Mary wanted to keep Wallis and David
out of the country to protect her second son and his wife.
The Duke and the Duchess' exile lasted for the rest of their lives
and created a bitterness between mother and son
that never fully cleared.
Years later, the Duke wrote to his wife that
"the fluid in his mother's veins was as cold as ice".
In 1939, for the second time in Queen Mary's life,
Britain went to war with Germany.
With Hitler's bombers threatening London,
thousands of schoolchildren headed for the countryside.
But they weren't the only ones to be evacuated.
Wartime London was no place for the 72-year-old Dowager Queen.
For the next five years,
her home was to be Badminton House in Gloucestershire,
the home of her niece, the Duchess of Beaufort.
Together, with 63 members
of her household and their families,
Queen Mary formed a caravan to Badminton.
I think the Duchess of Beaufort, her niece, was absolutely horrified
when she saw all the furniture vans arriving, as Queen Mary
lumbered up the drive at the beginning for the war
for this very long stay.
It must have been a daunting prospect.
For the first time since her marriage to her domineering husband,
Mary was free to be herself.
And from the chrysalis of royal decorum
emerged an eccentric butterfly.
While war was raging outside,
Mary started her own battle...against a wall-creeper.
She decided that the ivy growing up the house
was something to be deplored
and she waged a personal campaign against it.
Worse still, she recruited all her ladies in waiting,
anyone who came to the house practically found themselves
helping to chop or tear down ivy.
But the Duke of Beaufort rather liked his ivy.
What he felt when he saw Queen Mary leading these raging operations
to completely eliminate the stuff, I don't know.
With the Duke's ivy under control,
Mary now set her sights on the Duchess' favourite garden feature.
Queen Mary took against - seriously took against -
the cedar tree that was outside her sitting room.
And she was being bothered by the insects
that she maintained infested this tree.
And she wanted it taken down.
The Duchess of Beaufort did not want this tree taken down.
She liked it.
And it reached the point where she just had enough,
and she said, "That tree comes down over my dead body."
And Queen Mary didn't mention another word about it.
The Queen also made a lasting impression in the village.
My dad found a job with Queen Mary as one of her chauffeurs,
which was lovely.
He would tell me that when he picked the Queen up,
wherever they were going, if they met a serviceman
she would say, "Bartholomew, pull up and pick him up."
And he'd come and sit in.
And he probably had the shock of his life
when he saw Queen Mary was in there.
If it was an American, he'd say,
"You're a royal?! You're a Queen?"
Couldn't believe it, you know.
I think you can see an element in her widowhood
of a certain loosening of the stays.
She'd done her job, she'd handed the baton on,
the institution was strong and so on.
And you do sense that not having the King there all the time
allowed her to entertain herself a bit more.
She used to go to the theatre far more.
And I think you do see her having a little bit more fun.
Without her husband, Mary was also able to throw herself
into her abiding passion for art and antiques.
She set about improving and documenting
the royal family's vast, somewhat chaotic collection.
She built up the most fantastic collection.
Her priority was family history.
She would have preferred a bad portrait of George II
to a Tintoretto.
It was always this re-enforcement of her royalness.
She didn't have to get interested in the royal family
when she married into it. She WAS interested in it
and its history and its institutions and everything.
And I think the collecting was an offshoot of that.
Queen Mary's enthusiasm
for collecting antiques and curios was boundless,
as unwitting hostesses discovered to their cost.
The sensible hostess,
if she had some particularly desirable objects in a cabinet,
would hide them before the Queen came
because the Queen would look at them
and she might easily say,
"I've got a pair of that at home
"and I've always thought how terribly lonely it looks by itself."
And the reluctant hostess would have to say,
"Oh, Your Majesty, I do hope you will accept this from me."
And she did acquire quite a number of objects like that.
Those who received Queen Mary
could be alarmed at the prospect of a visit from a haughty kleptomaniac.
But her reserved public manner
concealed a much more relaxed personality.
Queen Mary telephoned my father and said she wanted to come to tea.
And, I mean, she was hugely dignified
and I think that everyone was quite alarmed by her in a way.
Certainly deferred to her.
But she came in and they were getting a bit worried as to how
they were going to entertain her,
so they had a music box which they put on the table beside her
and it played Yes, We Have No Bananas.
And she was immediately delighted.
And my father used to say that
she spoke with quite a strong German accent
and she sat there, drumming her fingers on the table and singing.
"Yah, ve have no bananas, ve have no bananas today."
But as far as the music box goes, she didn't attempt to remove it,
so perhaps she didn't think it was that pretty.
# Yes, we have no bananas
# We have no bananas today. #
There was one crucial royal mission still to be accomplished.
From the very beginning, Mary was determined
to pass on her sense of duty and reverence for the monarchy
to her granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen.
When you read the newspapers and diaries
of the little Princess Elizabeth growing up,
it is extraordinary the amount of time
that she spent with Queen Mary.
She spent more time with Queen Mary in her first year
than she did with her own mother.
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth
were excellent, conscientious, caring, affectionate parents.
They didn't attach very much importance to education.
Queen Mary did take it seriously.
I mean, she discovered with horror one year
that the little princesses' summer reading list,
which had been drawn up by the Queen Mother, consisted of 17 novels -
all of them by PG Wodehouse.
Queen Mary would quietly arrange tours of Windsor Castle
and then make sure that, as they went round,
they received lessons about everything.
And just before the crucial coronation of '37
after the abdication, she got out this enormous tableau
of, I think, one of the Georgian coronations,
and explained every single detail.
The symbolism of the orb and the sceptre
and King Edward's throne and all that sort of thing,
so that these very receptive little girls,
and the future Queen in particular, absorbed it all.
Mary didn't only instil the princesses
with a sense of their heritage.
She also taught Elizabeth how to be a queen.
There's a very telling story of
how the little princess was with her grandmother at the theatre,
and said, "Well, Granny, we'd better stay afterwards
"because everybody will want to see us and wave to us."
And Queen Mary took her straight home
because she thought she was getting too big for her boots
and that was the wrong way to look at being royal.
That being royal, at the end of the day,
is about being shy, it's about being modest,
and you won't survive unless you understand that
and put that into practice.
In 1952, Mary's second son, King George VI, died
and the granddaughter she cherished became Queen.
Mary,
her daughter-in-law Elizabeth,
and her granddaughter -
three Queens united in grief.
And at the age of 84, Mary faced one last battle
to protect the dynasty she had helped to create.
Queen Elizabeth II had married Prince Philip
whose family name was Mountbatten.
Philip's uncle, the ambitious Earl Mountbatten,
considered that the Windsor dynasty was now at an end.
We're told just 12 days after the death of King George VI,
Lord Mountbatten had been crowing and boasting
about, "The House of Mountbatten now reigned."
The Queen, who had spent a lifetime
fighting to build and protect the House of Windsor
now rose in its defence.
Windsor was a perfect name as far as Queen Mary herself was concerned. She felt it was English as apple pie,
so when she heard it was now going to be called Mountbatten,
she was absolutely incandescent with rage.
She immediately protested
to Churchill's private secretary, John Colville,
and the whole thing came up in front of Churchill and he said no.
"Windsor is the name and that is how it will stay."
Queen Mary had ensured that the name of Windsor
would be carried forward by her descendents.
But Mary didn't live to see her granddaughter crowned.
In March 1953, just 10 weeks before the coronation,
Queen Mary died.
With duty and tradition uppermost in her mind as ever,
Queen Mary left instructions that no period of mourning
should be permitted to interfere with her granddaughter's coronation.
Queen Mary helped to raise the British monarchy to a new level
of affection and respect
during a prolonged period of conflict and crisis.
From a shy Victorian princess,
she became the matriarch of a dynasty whose survival she ensured.
And the values of duty and service that she embodied
became the guiding lights of our own Queen Elizabeth.
One of the miracles of the British monarchy
is that it's thriving
in the 21st century.
And is so much in the style of King George and Queen Mary
and what they created nearly 100 years ago now,
what they salvaged from the catastrophe of the First World War.
Mary's career was incredibly fulfilled, yes.
I mean, she began as a poor relation of royalty,
on the fringes of royalty,
and she ended up as a grand dame,
but she played a huge part as Queen
in transforming the monarchy.
The present Queen Elizabeth II was enormously influenced by her.
The importance of duty.
The Queen's withering look that she can give
when she is not amused.
But much more important, the respect that our Queen has
and understanding for the symbolism of monarchy
and the duty of monarchy.
And the fact that the crown is a bigger thing than she is.
All of this goes right back to King George and Queen Mary
who said that the monarchy has no meaning
unless it reflects its nation and its people
and it gives its people what they want.
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