Russell sets the tone by laughing gently at the gossip surrounding Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon's birth at St Paul's Walden Bury on August 4, 1900. The fact that Elizabeth's father, Lord Strathmore, couldn't be bothered to register her birth until six weeks after the event led to the fabulously bonkers suggestion that she was, in fact, a changeling, the offspring of a French cook or a Welsh servant, the baby then smuggled into Lady Strathmore's bed like a warming-pan. In support of this, conspiracy theorists pointed to the fact that later in life she gained weight, and found it suspiciously easy to talk to ordinary people. "She did look like the daughter of a cook," claimed one (uncredited) source. "You could hardly say she looked aristocratic."
The stories come thick and fast, some of them familiar — how at first she ignored the brewing problem of Wallis Simpson, a tendency one of her courtiers called "ostriching", then ruthlessly cut "that woman" and her allies from society after the abdication. "I heard even Hitler was afraid of her," said a bitter Wallis — too many evenings of bridge with Oswald and Diana Mosley having dulled her, as Russell puts it, to the fact that most people would take this as a compliment.
Other stories are less well-known. We meet Elizabeth in 1940, taking shooting lessons in the gardens at Buckingham Palace as she prepares to make a last stand against the expected German invasion, which conjures up for Russell the image of her "charging down the Mall, firing off her gun like a suicidal yet regal Annie Oakley". Later, he describes a lunch she had at the end of her life with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, and, according to the Queen Mother, a very good pianist: "All afternoon we played the piano and we sang the old music hall songs," she said. When her equerry came to retrieve her, he found the pair belting out Lonnie Donegan's My Old Man's a Dustman. "I think [my Dubonnet] must have been spiked," she said.
The Queen Mother was keen on a sing-song. Noël Coward was an occasional weekend guest at Sandringham, and they would duet to his greatest hits. "I do love her," he confided to his diary. When she caught him salivating over the breastplated soldiers of the Household Cavalry, she said: "I wouldn't if I were you, Noël. They count them before they put them out." She liked gay men around her — Cecil Beaton was another friend, although he fell from favour after the publication of his diaries revealed snide remarks about her weight — and she was known for having a preponderance of homosexuals on her household staff. During the debates over decriminalising homosexuality in the 1960s, one crusader asked her to send a moral message to the nation by firing her gay servants. She replied that, if she did that, she would have to go self-service.
As one might expect from the book's title, alcohol figures prominently, recalling one equerry's description of the Queen Mother as not an alcoholic, exactly, but "a devoted drinker". Once, at a dinner in Hillsborough Castle, she responded to the loyal toast by inviting everyone to raise their glasses not only to "the people of Northern Ireland", but to each of the six counties — one after another. By the end, says Russell, guests were swaying on their feet, while one old general staggered off to throw up in the entrance hall's umbrella stand. The Queen Mother appeared unaffected.
More touching is her reaction to her cancer diagnosis in the 1960s. "Perhaps because I am considered a frail invalid," she complained to Princess Margaret, "I am always given delicious fruit drinks with so little alcohol that one feels quite sick! Then I ask timidly if I might have just a very little gin in it." Unrelenting in his quest to understand his subject, Russell replicated the Queen Mother's favourite cocktail, gin and Dubonnet, and acquired quite a taste for it — until the hangover put him out of action for an entire day, leading a friend to rechristen the drink "Dubonnet and Clyde".
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother died at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park on March 30 2002. Russell's description of the aftermath resonates in a way that he couldn't have foreseen, as he tells of the hundreds of thousands of mourners filing past her coffin in Westminster Hall, the controversies over whether or not TV presenters should have gone on air wearing black ties. In an emotional televised speech, the then Prince Charles said: "Oh, how I shall miss her laugh and wonderful wisdom." Russell has managed to capture both. I raise a glass to him.
— Telegraph Media Group
