'Take Bertie's Photograph Off the Mantelpiece' — The Sentence the Queen Mother Said to Margaret

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]On the morning of the 7th of February, 1952, in the dining room at Sandringham House in Norfolk, with her husband's body still upstairs, and her elder daughter still on a plane back from Africa, the woman, who had been the Queen of England for 16 years, said something to her younger daughter about a photograph. The sentence was 21 words long. It was about a photo frame on a mantelpiece. It was the most revealing single sentence about her mother that Princess Margaret would ever in 43 years of private remarks share with a biographer.

[00:00:39]Robert Lacy published it in 1995.

[00:00:43]Almost nobody noticed. They should have.

[00:00:47]It explained everything that came after the palace, the bills, the marshmallow, and the 14-month delay. The dining room at Sandrreenham by February of 1952 had been the breakfast room of the family for 16 years. Oak paneling, Goya paintings down one wall, the gift of the Spanish crown to King Edward IIIth in 1876.

[00:01:13]Spanish tapestries, an 1876 present of King Alfonso I 12th in the better light.

[00:01:20]The woodwork was a particular shade of light green, a color Queen Elizabeth had admired at Braar Castle in Aberdine in the 1930s and had introduced to Sandringham in 1938 in the modest redecorations she and her husband carried out then. The mantelpiece was a large one set with photographs of the family in the manner of every country house in England in 1952 in which the family had been there long enough to have something to photograph.

[00:01:50]The photographs on a Sandringham mantelpiece in February 1952 were the most studied photographs in the room because there were no strangers in that room. Princess Margaret was 21 years old. She had come down to breakfast on the morning of the 7th of February in mourning. The queen, her mother, was 51.

[00:02:10]The two had been together at Sandringham the previous evening when George V 6th had played with his grandchildren at tea, dined with the family, and then after dinner listened to Margaret play the piano in the drawing room before retiring to his bedroom for paperwork and a final cup of cocoa. The policeman on his round at midnight had seen him latching his bedroom window. Sometime in the small hours of the morning, in his sleep, his heart had stopped. The valet found him at 7:30. Who else was in the dining room on the morning of the 7th has not survived in any document the open record can produce. It would have been the queen and Margaret and two members of the household. Almost certainly a footman serving and a senior member of the domestic staff overseeing.

[00:03:03]Tommy Lels, the private secretary, was in the house, but at that hour was managing the cables to Kenya, to Buckingham Palace, to the prime minister, to the cabinet office, to government house in Nairobi, to the household at Clarence House, where the new queen's two small children, Charles and Anne, had not yet been told that their grandfather had died. The line of communication from Sandringham to the outside world ran through Lel's that morning. The line of communication from the queen to her younger daughter in the dining room did not. That is the room.

[00:03:41]That is the morning. That is the moment in which the woman who had been queen of England since the December of 1936 said the sentence to her younger daughter that 43 years later that younger daughter would repeat to Robert Lacy for the expanded edition of his book Majesty published in 1995 and folded later into the larger volume Royal in 2002. The sentence was 21 words. The sentence was about a photo frame. The sentence is the entire reign of the queen mother in 21 words. But before the sentence comes the cast and the cast is named. Sir Alan Leels's called Tommy by the very few people who called him anything other than his title was 65 years old in February 1952.

[00:04:35]He had been private secretary to the sovereign since 1943, having succeeded Sir Alexander Harden after Harden's collapse during the war.

[00:04:46]He had served three kings, George V, Edward VIII, and George V 6th, and he would serve a fourth briefly before retiring in 1953.

[00:04:57]He was the man who, in private correspondence later that spring, would be the first to formally refer to Queen Elizabeth, widow of George V 6th, by the customary style, the Queen Mother, a style she would not adopt herself until March of 1953 after the death of Queen Mary made the position available without confusion. In February 1952, the woman in the dining room at Sandringham was still, in the legal and protocol sense, the queen. Her daughter, 4,000 mi away in Kenya, was also the queen. They were two queens at once for 9 days until the elder of the two stepped sideways to become, in custom, though not yet in title, the Dowager.

[00:05:45]The timing chain that morning is the timing chain that the household kept, and the historians have since reconstructed.

[00:05:53]George V 6th's heart stops sometime between the policeman's midnight check of the latched bedroom window and the valet's 7:30 discovery. The valet alerts the senior member of the household. The senior member of the household alerts Lel. Lel places the first call to Buckingham Palace using the agreed code word. the same code hide park corner that had been the agreed phrase since George V's death in 1936 to signal the death of the sovereign without alerting the palace switchboard operators. By the time the BBC news reader John Snag reads the announcement on the wireless at around 15 minutes past 11, the princess in Kenya has already descended from the Treetops Hotel and is at Sagana Lodge. The princess in the dining room at Sandringham has already sometime before the wireless announcement heard a sentence from her mother that she will keep in private remark for 43 years.

[00:06:54]Lacy's biographical work on Elizabeth II and on the Queen Mother is built on decades of access to the household, to retired private secretaries, to courters and friends, and by the mid 1990s, to Princess Margaret herself in the period before her two strokes and her decline.

[00:07:15]His footnote on this particular quote by the most cited reconstructions identifies the household source not by name but as a member of the household present at Sandringham on the morning of the 7th with the name partly redacted by Lacy's own discretion. The household, the audience should be reminded, had been ordered by Queen Elizabeth herself in writing in April 1949 when she discovered her former governness, Marian Crawford, was preparing to publish a book about the princesses, that people in positions of confidence with us must be utterly oyster.

[00:07:55]That was the standard. That was the institutional ethic that a household witness in 1952 nevertheless remembered the sentence well enough that it survived to be confirmed by Margaret herself in 1995.

[00:08:11]Tells you what kind of sentence it was.

[00:08:14]People in the household forgot on purpose almost everything. They remembered this. The sentence 21 words.

[00:08:24]Now they will have to take Bird's photograph off the mantelpiece and put up yours. Take the grammar apart because every clause is doing institutional work that a sentence about a photo frame should not be doing. Now the first word, not we should or I think or the proper thing would be now. The matter is urgent. It is the 7th of February. The body of the king is still in the house.

[00:08:55]His widow has been a widow for less than 31 hours. The new queen has not yet returned from Africa. The accession has not been proclaimed in Parliament. The funeral has not been planned. The will has not been read. The succession in its public sense is not yet a fact. But in the dining room at Sandringham before breakfast, in the privacy of mother and daughter, the matter is being handled with the word now. They will have to.

[00:09:28]The passive voice, the institutional they. There is no agent. There is no name. There is no person in the household to whom the order is being given. The sentence does not say the footman will have to does not say the photograph clerk at the royal collection will have to does not say I will ask Lel to arrange. The sentence says they will have to because the photograph being on the mantelpiece is not a domestic arrangement that a single named person handles. The photograph being on the mantelpiece is an institutional arrangement that the institution itself as a faceless plural will now have to undo. The queen mother by future style by present style she is still simply the queen is using the grammar of an institution describing its own mechanical processes.

[00:10:28]It is the grammar a chairman uses when he says the agenda will have to be revised. It is not the grammar a widow uses about a photograph of her dead husband.

[00:10:40]Take Bertie's photograph off the mantelpiece.

[00:10:44]Birdie, the family name of King George V 6th. The name the man in the bedroom upstairs was called by his mother and his brothers and his wife and his daughters and the very few people who had known him before December of 1936 when he had become a king. The photograph that was on the mantelpiece on the morning of the 7th of February 1952 by best biographical reconstruction almost certainly a Ceilbeon portrait from 1951 of the king in garter robes taken in the same calendar year as the lung operation that had left 9 months between camera and death was the sovereign photograph in the room. To take the photograph off the mantelpiece on the morning of the 7th of February is not to perform a sentimental act of mourning. It is to clear the institutional space for the next occupant. The photograph is in the language of monarchy. The visual flag of the reigning sovereign in the family rooms of a royal residence. To take it down is to lower the flag of the dead king and to raise the flag of the new queen in the same physical gesture on the same domestic surface before lunch.

[00:12:02]And put up yours said to whom? Said to the 21-year-old Princess Margaret. Said to the sister of the new queen. Not said to the new queen, who at the moment of utterance was somewhere over the African continent in a borrowed Argonaut from London airport. Not said to the household, who would have been the people obliged to do the actual taking down. Not said to Lel, who would have been the person to clear it as a protocol question? Not said to herself in the form of a thought. said aloud in the dining room to Princess Margaret, who was not the new queen, who could not become the new queen, who had no constitutional standing in the matter, and no executive authority to change the photographs in any room in Sandringham.

[00:12:53]Why say it to Margaret? Because Margaret was the one in the room. Because saying it aloud in the dining room to the only other family member at hand is what it sounded like when the widow of the dead king performed before breakfast the only mental adjustment she would permit herself to make on the morning of the 7th. The adjustment was not I am a widow. The adjustment was not my husband has died. The adjustment was not I must inform Charles who is three years old in London.

[00:13:28]The adjustment was my daughter currently in Kenya is going to displace my husband from the mantelpiece.

[00:13:37]And the way that adjustment came out of the widow's mouth was a sentence that put the daughter in the same grammatical slot the dead husband had occupied.

[00:13:47]Birdie's photograph off. Yours up. The two photographs were not in the speaker's mental geometry the same kind of object. They were positions in a single institutional sequence. The mantelpiece had one slot. The slot had been occupied. The slot was now going to be occupied by someone else. The someone else was, as the speaker had felt for some considerable time, as the speaker had had reason to think about often, as the speaker had not yet been able to say in a sentence, "The daughter." That is what the audience is being shown when Margaret repeats the line to Lacy 43 years later. They are being shown the morning of the 7th of February as the morning on which her mother's grief in the first sentence of the first conversation after the death came out as institutional displacement of the daughter who had just become queen. Not what will I do without him? Not my poor Liet. Not tell the children. The first conversational unit as the cocoa cups were being cleared was about the photograph and the slot. There is a precedent for what a widow of a dead king does on the morning of an accession. The precedent had been set in living memory on the 20th of January 1936 in another bedroom at another royal residence by another widow of another dead king. The dead king was George V.

[00:15:20]The widow was Queen Mary. The new king in the same instant of his father's death was Edward, the Prince of Wales.

[00:15:28]David in the family, Edward VII in the formal style he would adopt and abandon inside the year. George V had died at 5 minutes to midnight on the 20th of January, 1936 with Queen Mary, the children, and the Archbishop of Canterbury at his bedside.

[00:15:48]What Queen Mary did in the next available minute was that she turned to her eldest son, the new king, and she curtsied to him. Edward VII in his later memoir, A King's Story, published in 1951, recorded that he was appalled. He used the word appalled. His mother, her majesty Queen Mary, by far the most formal of the senior royals of her generation, a woman who had been queen consort of the United Kingdom and the British dominions and empress of India for 26 years, had on the instant of her husband's death turned to the son who had become the sovereign and performed the customary deference. The gesture was not a sentence. It was simpler than a sentence. It was the body in a single movement, acknowledging that the position had transferred.

[00:16:44]The widow had been the queen of England by marriage until the instant her husband's heart stopped. The instant her husband's heart stopped, she became the daager, and her son became the king, and the gesture of curtsying was the gesture by which the room shifted from one sovereign to the next. The contrast is the contrast the audience is being asked to hold against the 7th of February 1952.

[00:17:11]In 1936, Queen Mary in the immediate next minute of her bereiement performed an act of physical deference toward the new sovereign that was so complete her own son was unable in his memoir 15 years later to remember it without writing the word appalled.

[00:17:31]In 1952, Queen Elizabeth in the immediate next morning of her bereiement did the opposite of that. She did not curtsy. She did not write to her daughter. She did not gather the household and acknowledge the transfer.

[00:17:46]She said before breakfast that the photograph of her husband would have to be taken off the mantelpiece and that the photograph of her daughter would have to go up in its place.

[00:17:56]The two gestures, the curtsy in 1936, the sentence in 1952 are the same gesture formally. They are about who occupies the slot. But one of them was performed by a widow who accepted in her body the displacement.

[00:18:14]The other was performed by a widow whose tone of voice contained the displacement as a complaint.

[00:18:21]That in 21 words is the reign of the queen mother. Every single thing the institution would have to deal with for the next 50 years is in those 21 words.

[00:18:34]The 14-month occupation of Buckingham Palace on the documented timing chain.

[00:18:39]George V 6th dies in February 1952.

[00:18:43]Queen Elizabeth finally moves to Clarence House in May 1953.

[00:18:48]Is in those 21 words. The 50-year overdraft at Coots, totaling approximately4 million pounds at the moment of her own death in 2002, is in those 21 words. The Wallace and the Crawy and the Townsend and the Phillip and the Diana. Every documented enemy in the household's private accounting is in those 21 words. The institutional resistance is in the word now. The displacement of the dead husband is in the verb take. The substitution of the daughter is in the pronoun yours. The grammar of they will have to is the grammar of a widow who did not by any measure the household record can produce ever accept that the obligation to step sideways was hers.

[00:19:44]Now Margaret kept it for 43 years. Why she kept it and why she finally said it are the same question with two different sets of dates. She kept it because in February of 1952, Margaret was, as her own brief reflection on her father records, griefstricken.

[00:20:06]She wrote of her father that he had been such a wonderful person, the very heart and center of our happy family. She was prescribed sedatives. She went with her mother into a period of formal mourning that excluded most public engagements until April. She was the daughter who had been at home, who had played the piano the night before, who had been the one in the dining room when her mother had said the sentence about the mantelpiece.

[00:20:36]She was, in the conventional sense of family duty, the keeper of the moment.

[00:20:41]To repeat the line in 1952 would have been to expose her own mother in the same week as the funeral as the woman who had said something about the photograph slot before she had said something about the husband. Margaret did not do that in 1952 or in any of the next four decades. What changed by the mid 1990s was that the relationship had changed. The Towns and Years between 1953 and 1955 had been the first sustained dispute between the princess and her mother on a question of marriage. Margaret had wanted throughout 1953 and 1954 to marry group captain Peter Townsend. The divorced Equiry to her father and the queen mother in the formal title she had assumed in March 1953 after Queen Mary's death had been in her household's recollection the most consequential institutional opponent of the marriage. Margaret's statement of withdrawal on the 31st of October 1955.

[00:21:47]I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry group captain Peter Townsend closed that chapter without naming the opposition, but the household had seen what it had seen. Margaret never forgot. Margaret's marriage to Anthony Armstrong Jones in 1960 produced by the late 1960s the same private criticisms from her mother that the Townsend matter had. The marriages deterioration through the 70s, the formal separation in 1976, the divorce in 1978.

[00:22:21]All of it was conducted within a motheraughter relationship that had stopped sometime in the years after Townsen being one of confidence. By the time Margaret was sitting with biographers in the early to mid 1990s, she was a woman in her early 60s whose own children were grown, whose own marriage was over, whose own mother was approaching her 10th decade and the long parade of carefully managed birthdays that would carry her past the 100redyear mark and whose own health was declining.

[00:22:53]Margaret would have her first stroke in 1998 and a second more severe stroke in 2001 before her death on the 9th of February 2002, 7 weeks before her mother's own death on the 30th of March of the same year. She told Lacy in the period when she could still tell a biographer anything, the sentence she had been carrying since she was 21. She told it by the most cited reconstructions in the same set of sessions that produced the other quotable Margaret material that surfaced in Lacy's biographical work and in the biographical work of Hugo Vickers and Lady Colin Campbell. Material in which the Queen Mother emerged for the first time in a register her authorized biographers would never quite use about her. Not as the courageous wartime consort, not as the jin and racing grandmother of the nation, but as the institutional opponent of her own elder daughter from the morning of the 7th of February, 1952 onward.

[00:24:03]There is a pattern in how the line entered the literature after Lacy first published it. Hugo Vickers in Elizabeth the Queen Mother published by Hutchinson in 2005 the product of 17 years of work is restrained. He had been close to the Queen Mother in her later years and his book is the most carefully calibrated of the post202 biographies. Lady Colin Campbell in her untold life of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother published by Dynasty Press in 2012 and timed to the 10th anniversary of the subject's death is direct. The Lacy sourced material on the Queen Mother's institutional resentment of her elder daughter is one of the spines of Campbell's whole reading of the character. William Shawross's official biography commissioned by the palace in 2003 and published by McMillan in 2009 with full royal archives access is predictably discreet on this particular morning while not omitting the wider record of the queen mother's difficulty in accepting the demotion to the daager position. But it is Lacy who first published the line, and it is Lacy whose footnote, with its partly redacted household source, has been the reference every subsequent biographer has had to either honor, soften, or contest. The line has not been retracted. The line has not been overturned. The line has not been replaced by an alternative reconstruction of what was said in the dining room at Sandringham on the morning of the 7th of February, 1952.

[00:25:45]The line is in the canonical record.

[00:25:48]What was said? What did the line predict?

[00:25:52]The line predicted Buckingham Palace.

[00:25:56]The Queen Mother's failure to vacate the palace in the immediate weeks after the new queen's return from Africa hardened by the spring of 1952 into a 14-month resistance to the move to Clarence House that constitutional convention required. The new queen with her husband and two small children was kept out of the central royal residence from February 1952 until May 1953.

[00:26:24]The household quietly knew what was happening. Tommy Lels knew, Philip knew, and would in the end be the figure most often credited in the household's later accounting with having forced the move.

[00:26:38]The press in the differential register of the early 50s did not name what was happening. The Vanity Fair history of Clarence House would later note with the single editorial word finally that the Queen Mother finally moved into Clarence House in May 1953.

[00:26:57]That word finally is doing a great deal of editorial work. The work that word is doing was set on the morning of the 7th of February 1952 by the sentence about the mantelpiece. The line predicted the bills. The queen mother's financial pattern set in widowhood and maintained for 50 years was the pattern of a woman whose household had been the household of the reigning consort and who never reduced it to the scale of the daager position she had nominally assumed. The 4 million pound overdraft at Coups, the audit of which was completed in April 2002, was the long form ledger entry of a widow who in 1952 had not believed she should have to step sideways, the displacement she had named in the sentence about the photograph was the displacement she would in money decline to make for the rest of her life. The line predicted the title. The Queen Mother style, which she would not formally adopt until after Queen Mary's death on the 24th of March, 1953, was the engineered solution to the problem that the existing Daager designation, Queen Daager, the customary style for the widow of a previous sovereign, would have signaled exactly the displacement she had named in the dining room. The Queen Mother title in custom, though not in legal style, preserved the word queen on the same side of the conjunction as her own name, while restricting it with the noun mother on the daughter's side.

[00:28:35]It was a piece of titular accountancy that allowed the widow not to take the photograph of herself, so to speak, off the mantle piece. The line predicted the marshmallow. Cecile Beaton, who had been close enough to photograph the Queen Mother in formal settings since the late 1930s, would record in his diaries, in a phrase the journalist trade later softened to a marshmallow made of steel, the underlying figure of speech being the one often shortened in citation. The beaten observation, whatever its precise final wording, was the observation of a man who had spent 30 years close enough to the subject to see that the public softness was deliberate, and the institutional hardness underneath was equally deliberate. The beaten was the photographer she would have known would describe her in the way that he did. The marshmallow was the public surface that she had been carefully maintaining since the abdication had thrust the wife of the Duke of York into the position of Queen Consort in December 1936.

[00:29:41]The steel underneath was what she had said in the dining room on the morning of the 7th of February 1952. The line predicted the 50 years. The Queen Mother would live another 50 years and 24 days after the morning of the dining room sentence. In those 50 years, she would outlive Wallace Simpson by 15 years and 11 months. She would outlive Marian Crawford by 14 years. She would outlive Diana, the Princess of Wales, by 4 years and 7 months. She would outlive Princess Margaret, her younger daughter, by 49 days. She would outlive George V 6th by 50 years. And in every one of those 50 years, the central fact of her position would be that she had not on the morning of the 7th of February 1952 performed the gesture that Queen Mary had performed in January of 1936.

[00:30:39]She had said the sentence. She had identified the slot. She had named the displacement of her husband by her daughter as something that they will have to do. And she had then for 50 years made sure that the institution that was going to have to do it would have to do it on her schedule, in her terms, and at her expense.

[00:31:03]What did Margaret hear on the morning of the 7th in the dining room when she heard the sentence? She heard before her father had been buried, before her sister had returned from Africa, before the proclamation, before the lying in state, before the funeral, before the first call from the prime minister, before the household had been put on the new footing. She heard her mother place her newly aceded sister in the institutional slot the dead king had occupied and identify the action of that placement as an obligation to be performed by an unnamed plural party in the household.

[00:31:44]She heard, in other words, the first cruelty in the prosecutotorial sense of cruelty as the conscious institutional displacement of one family member by another that her mother would commit toward her sister. The towns and matter would be the second. The Buckingham Palace standoff would be the third. The financial dependency would be the fourth. The Burkhall hosting of Charles and Camila would be one of many later.

[00:32:12]The list by the time of the Queen Mother's death in 2002 would be long, but the first one was the sentence in the dining room, and Margaret, who heard it, kept it for 43 years until she could tell it to a man who would write it down.

[00:32:30]The photograph that stood on the mantelpiece at Sandrinham on the morning of the 7th of February 1952 was almost certainly the Cecile Beaton portrait of King George V 6th in garter robes taken the previous year when he had 9 months left to live. Beaton was the same photographer who would later call the woman who said the sentence about that frame a marshmallow made of steel. He knew the marshmallow is the photo on the mantelpiece. The steel is the sentence. Margaret heard it. Lel heard about it. The household kept it for 43 years. Robert Lacy wrote it down.

[00:33:12]And the marshmallow for 14 more months did not