Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret

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In Italy with his wife in September 1962, Fowles was still mulling over Princess Margaret, though by now his lust had curdled into irritation. Never blessed with the sunniest of dispositions, particularly when thinking of England, he complained to his diary of ‘The grey shock of England and the English … I haven’t had the extent of my exile from land and people so clear for a long time. They are foreign to me, and so the land seems foreign.’

He went on to chastise England for ‘a colossal lack of style, an almost total inability to design life’, and noted sulkily that ‘The British sit like a fat pasty-faced bespectacled girl at the European party.’

For a man so desperate to put his own country behind him, his choice of holiday reading that September was perverse, and harked back to his trusty old obsession:

An extraordinary book we read in Rome – the banned-in-England My Life with Princess Margaret by a former footman. Written, or ghosted, in a nauseatingly cloying, inverted style: the man sounds like a voyeur and a fetishist. He constantly uses turns of phrase (and the sort of euphemism, in particular) that I gave the monster in The Collector. Again and again he praises, or smirks at, behaviour by the filthy little prig-princess that any decent person would despise; and the horror is not that he does this, but that one knows millions of silly men and women in America and here will agree with him. A whole society wrote this miserable book, not one man.

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The book in question had been banned in Britain after the Queen Mother gained an injunction against it. The judge agreed that Princess Margaret’s former footman, David John Payne, had signed an agreement preventing him from writing about his time in the royal household. But no such restriction existed in the US, where Payne’s work was serialised in Good Housekeeping magazine, and had now been published in book form.

In 1959, while in service to Lord Rothermere, Payne heard of a vacancy for a footman at Clarence House.

He passed the interview. ‘You are tall, smart, and seem to have the bearing required to carry out your duties,’ said the comptroller, Lord Gordon, hiring Payne at a basic wage of five pounds ten shillings a week. Gordon then introduced him to Jack Kemp, steward to the household, who in turn presented him to HRH the Princess Margaret. Payne’s first impression was of ‘a tiny figure, beautiful in a pink and white cotton dress, her dark hair brushed into a bouffant style and a shining double row of pearls round her throat … She extended her small white hand – I had time to see the smoothness of the skin and the care which had gone into the manicure of her nails – and we shook hands … Margaret at twenty-nine was a beautiful woman. Her face, not too heavily powdered, had been made up by an expert – herself, as it later turned out. Her eyebrows had been pencilled in and her lipstick smoothly formed in a delightful cupid’s bow. But her most striking, almost mesmeric features were her enormous deep blue eyes.’

From the start there is, as Fowles suggests, something voyeuristic, even fetishistic, about Payne’s memories of the Princess. And creepy, too: My Life with Princess Margaret is a strange, unsettling mixture of idolatry and loathing, suggesting they are two sides of the same coin. Payne is a forerunner of the Kathy Bates character in the film Misery, hero-worship turning, without warning, into almost passionate resentment, then back again, and all in the flicker of an eyelid.

A few months later, now part of the furniture, Payne entered the Princess’s sitting room while she was

lying full-length on the settee, her head pillowed on two pink brocade cushions and her dark hair spread out around her face. Her eyes were closed and she was concentrating on the music … She looked her very loveliest lying there in a midnight blue sequined cocktail dress with a tight bodice and flared skirt. She was lightly made up, her powder and lipstick applied with the delicate touch of an expert. Her shoulders above the low-cut neckline shone silkily in the soft lights. On the table by her side stood a half-glass of whisky and water and in the ashtray there were two or three inch-long stubs. She lay perfectly still, lost in the atmosphere of the romantic music, her eyes closed, her face serene. I stood there for a few seconds, inwardly moved by the sight of the lovely sleeping beauty.

Small wonder if Princess Margaret felt unnerved by these creamily intrusive reminiscences: Payne slips into a room as stealthily as a cat-burglar, prowling around, gathering everything up for future use, always the observer, never the observed.

‘I was one of the very few servants who ever saw the Princess’s bedroom,’ he boasted. ‘She would often send me up to get a jewel case or some item she particularly wanted to take with her on a trip … Once the Princess and myself were used to each other, she had no second thoughts about sending me up on such errands to her innermost sanctuary.’

Throughout his time in her service, Payne seems to have been sizing up his mistress, her family and friends with the watchfulness of a boa constrictor. As Fowles suggested, the reader grows complicit with this particular Collector, perching voyeuristically on his shoulder as he slithers around the Princess’s private domain.

Imagine, now, that you are with me as we walk up the main staircase and into the bedroom. It is deserted now, of course, but has been prepared for the Princess to retire. We tread the thick carpet of the corridor silently, with only the occasional creak of a floorboard to tell we are there … The 5-foot tall Princess has chosen a 6-foot, 4 inch bed topped by a foam-rubber mattress, firm but yielding gently to the touch … And just to complete the picture, Mrs Gordon has already laid out one of the Princess’s flimsy, full-length nylon nighties.

And why stop there?

Let us take a closer look. We can see a collection of nail files, jars of face cream, tubes of lipstick, and a brush set comprising two green bone-backed brushes edged in gold, and a hand mirror in the same material. Next to them Margaret has thrown an ordinary comb. Also lying there is a half-filled packet of tissues which she uses for removing her make-up at night. In the morning there will be half a dozen of them smeared with lipstick and powder tossed on the dressing table.

Our tour continues into her bathroom, with its fitted carpet in oyster pink, its loo in the far left-hand corner, its white porcelain bath with two chromium-plated taps. Resting across the bath is a tray with compartments containing coloured scented soaps and a long-handled loofah. ‘There is no shower as such, but in one of the lockers of the bathroom there is a rubber tubing hand shower which can be plugged into the taps.’ Hitchcock’s film Psycho was released while Payne was still in service at Clarence House, Fowles’s book The Collector soon after he left.

Back in the bedroom, Payne leers long and hard at the Princess’s bedside table, with its light-brown pigskin photograph case. ‘It is on the table near the lamp. Look closer and you will see that the case contains three small head-and-shoulders portraits of a man. You may recognize him. And you will not be surprised when I say that to me, they constitute one of the most significant things I encountered during my service with Princess Margaret. But more of that later …’

Those three bedside photographs are all, it emerges, of Group Captain Peter Townsend.

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Ah! The Group Captain! The rest of us are allowed to forget a youthful passion, but the world defined Princess Margaret by hers, bringing it up at the slightest opportunity. The two of them – the Group Captain and the Princess – had called it a day four years before, when she was twenty-five years old, but when you are royal, nothing is allowed to be forgotten. That is the price to pay for being part of history.

Those who think of Princess Margaret’s life as a tragedy see the Group Captain as its unfortunate hero. He was the dashing air ace, she the fairy-tale Princess, the two of them torn apart by the cold-hearted Establishment. For these people, their broken romance was the source of all her later discontent. But how true is the myth?

Peter Townsend entered the scene in February 1944, when he took up his three-month appointment as the King’s Extra Equerry. At this time he was twenty-nine years old, with a wife and a small son. Princess Margaret was thirteen, and a keen Girl Guide.

The King took to him immediately; some say he came to regard him as a son. Three months turned into three years, at which point Townsend was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order; after a further three years he was promoted to Deputy Master of the Household. Following the death of the King in 1952 he moved to Clarence House, as comptroller to the newly widowed Queen Mother.

When, precisely, did Townsend start taking a shine to the young Princess? For all the fuss surrounding him, it is a question rarely asked. In his autobiography Time and Chance, published in 1978, when he was sixty-four, he fails to set a date on it, insisting that when he first set eyes on the two Princesses, he thought of them purely as ‘two rather adorable and quite unsophisticated girls’.

But by the time of Margaret’s fifteenth birthday in August 1945, he was already thinking of her in more affectionate terms. Describing a typical dinner party at Balmoral shortly after the end of the war, he writes that the gentlemen would join the ladies for ‘crazy games, or canasta, or, most enchanting of all, Princess Margaret singing and playing at the piano’. By now, he was clearly quite smitten:

Her repertoire was varied; she was brilliant as she swung, in her rich, supple voice, into American musical hits, like ‘Buttons and Bows’, ‘I’m as corny as Kansas in August …’ droll when, in a very false falsetto, she bounced between the stool and the keyboard in ‘I’m looking over a four-leaf clover, which I’d overlooked before …’, and lovable when she lisped some lilting old ballad: ‘I gave my love a cherry, it had no stone.’

He accompanied the Royal Family on their 1947 tour of South Africa; by now the Princess was sixteen, and Townsend exactly twice her age. ‘Throughout the daily round of civic ceremonies,’ he recalls, ‘that pretty and highly personable young princess held her own.’ Margaret herself was more open, telling a friend, in later life, ‘We rode together every morning in that wonderful country, in marvellous weather. That’s when I really fell in love with him.’

The tour ended in April 1947. In his autobiography, Townsend insists that he returned home ‘eager to see my wife and family’. But, as it happened, ‘within moments’ he sensed that ‘something had come between Rosemary and me’. He now takes a break in his narrative to detail the difficulties within his marriage.

Townsend had married Rosemary Pawle in 1941. He paints it as a marriage made in the most tremendous haste. ‘I had stepped out of my cockpit, succumbed to the charms of the first pretty girl I met and, within a few weeks married her.’

At this point, Townsend launches into one of the most curious parts of the book, a rambling homily against the perils of sexual attraction. ‘I cannot help feeling that the sex urge is a rather unfair device employed by God,’ it begins. ‘He needs children and counts on us to beget them. But while He has incorporated in our make-up an insatiable capacity for the pleasures which flow from love, He seems to have forgotten to build a monitoring device, to warn us of the unseen snags which may be lurking further on.

‘Sex,’ he continues, ‘is an enemy of the head, an ally of the heart. Boys and girls, madly in love, generally do not act intelligently. The sex-trap is baited and set and the boys and girls go rushing headlong into it. They live on love and kisses, until there are no more left. Then they look desperately for a way of escape.’

One of the anomalies of this passage is that, when Townsend rushed into this particular sex-trap, he was rather more than a boy. In fact, he was a distinguished Battle of Britain fighter pilot of twenty-six, the recipient of the DSO and the DFC and bar.

His marriage, he says, ‘began to founder’ on his return from South Africa. The couple’s problems were ‘intrinsic and personal’, principal among them his yearning to go back to South Africa and ‘Rosemary’s fierce opposition to my ravings about South Africa and my longing for horizons beyond the narrow life at home’. He argues that while ‘Rosemary preferred to remain ensconced in her world of the “system” and its social ramifications’, he was a rebel who reacted instinctively against ‘the conventional existence, the “system”, the Establishment, with its taboos, its shibboleths and its obsession with class status’. At this time the Group Captain was the equerry to the King, and had applied (unsuccessfully) to be a Conservative parliamentary candidate, neither the hallmark of a rebel.

Halfway through 1948, the Princess shed the ‘Rose’ in Margaret Rose. It seems to have been her way of declaring that she was no longer a little girl but a young woman, a transition greeted with a certain lasciviousness by some of her biographers.

‘Never before had there been a Princess like her. Though she had a sophistication and charisma far in advance of her years, she was young, sensual and stunningly beautiful,’ observes Christopher Warwick. ‘With her vivid blue eyes … and lips that were described as both “generous” and “sensitive”, she was acknowledged to be one of the greatest beauties of her generation. In addition, she was curvaceous, extremely proud of her eighteen-inch waist … unpredictable, irrepressible and coquettish.’

Phwoarr! Tim Heald is equally smitten: ‘At eighteen, she was beautiful, sexy … the drop-dead gorgeous personification of everything a princess was supposed to be.’ Furthermore, she was ‘a pocket Venus … an almost impossibly glamorous figure’.

Her emergence into adulthood had its drawbacks. She was burdened with a succession of royal duties, most of them bottom-drawer and dreary. ‘The opening of the pumping station went very well in spite of the gale that was blowing,’ she wrote in a letter that year to her demanding grandmother, Queen Mary. ‘I am afraid that one photographer rather overdid things by taking a picture of me with my eyes shut.’ A little later, she oversaw the official opening of the Sandringham Company Girl Guides’ hut. The speech she delivered reflects the nature of the occasion:

Looking around me, I can imagine how hard Miss Musselwhite and the company must have worked … I do congratulate you on the charming appearance of your new meeting place. I have been in the movement ten years as a Brownie, a Guide and a Sea Ranger … I have now great pleasure in declaring this hut open.

At the same time, her elder sister was opening bridges, launching ships, taking parades and welcoming foreign dignitaries.

From now on, would Margaret have to measure her life in scout huts and pumping stations? Was that all there was? As her day job as her sister’s stand-in grew ever more mundane, who could blame her if she looked for excitement elsewhere?

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‘Without realising it,’ Peter Townsend writes of autumn 1948, when he was chosen to accompany the Princess to Amsterdam for the inauguration of Queen Juliana, ‘I was being carried a little further from home, a little nearer to the Princess.’

In August 1950, Townsend’s ongoing rebellion against the British Establishment continued along its mysterious path with his appointment as assistant master of the royal household, a promotion that elevated him to a smart carpeted office on the south side of Buckingham Palace, ‘a little paradise compared with the gloomy equerry’s room’. At home, though, ‘conjugal life, practically, emotionally and sentimentally, had come to a standstill’.

Not so his enchantment with the Princess, who was now within an inch of her twentieth birthday. Townsend was entranced. ‘If her extravagant vivacity sometimes outraged the elder members of the household and of London society, it was contagious to those who still felt young,’ he writes, adding, a touch dolefully, ‘whether they were or not.’

Written when he was in his sixties, his memories of the young Princess retain their sense of wonder. ‘She was a girl of unusual, intense beauty, confined as it was in her short, slender figure and centred about large purple-blue eyes, generous lips and a complexion as smooth as a peach. She was capable, in her face and in her whole being, of an astonishing power of expression. It could change in an instant from saintly, almost melancholic, composure to hilarious, uncontrollable joy. She was, by nature, generous, volatile … She was coquettish, sophisticated. But what ultimately made Princess Margaret so attractive and lovable was that behind the dazzling facade, the apparent self-assurance, you could find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sincerity. She could make you bend double with laughing; she could also touch you deeply.’ No one else, before or since, has written about the Princess in quite such adoring terms.

By this time, a group of bright young blades surrounded the Princess. Townsend looked on with a sense of yearning, perhaps even entitlement. ‘I dare say that there was not one among them more touched by the Princess’s joie de vivre than I, for, in my present marital predicament, it gave me what I most lacked – joy. More, it created a sympathy between us and I began to sense that, in her life too, there was something lacking.’

While Princess Margaret admitted to having fallen in love with the Group Captain in the spring of 1947, when she was sixteen years old, Townsend claims to have noticed the first spark in their romance over four years later, in August 1951, following a picnic lunch in the middle of a day’s shooting. He was dozing in the heather when he became aware that someone was covering him with a coat. ‘I opened one eye – to see Princess Margaret’s lovely face, very close, looking into mine. Then I opened the other eye, and saw, behind her, the King.’ At this point, Townsend whispered to the Princess, ‘You know your father is watching us?’ In response she laughed, straightened up, and went over to her father’s side. ‘Then she took his arm and walked away,’ adds Townsend, ‘leaving me to my dreams.’