Crawfiegate: The Original Royal Scandal; Scottish governess Marion

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jan 27, 2002 | by Alan Taylor

EVEN now, more than half a century after it all happened, mention of her name causes members of the royal family to bridle like a headstrong filly. In the year of the Queen's Golden Jubilee, when she ought to be able to look back fondly on a halcyon upbringing, there is one person who has been wiped from her memory, though she was perhaps her greatest influence and closest friend.

Marion Crawford, known affectionately as Crawfie, who was governess to Princess Elizabeth - "Lilibet" - and her sister, Princess Margaret, from early childhood to marriage, is still taboo in royal circles. One aide recalled being told that "letters signed Bongo or Biffo should not be put in the bin because they were probably from cousins. Letters from Marion Crawford should be handled with a very long pair of forceps."

Crawfie's crime was the publication in 1950, three years after she'd left the royal household, of The Little Princesses, the first public expose of the domestic life of the royals. In comparison with today's lurid indiscretions, when the tabloids publish verbatim intimate telephone conversations between Prince Charles and his mistress and Princess Diana felt free to pour out her woes to Martin Bashir on television, Crawfie's account seems insipid and pedestrian. But despite its lack of bite it remains essential reading for royal watchers and has been reissued regularly. The latest edition, to be published in April, has an introduction by the BBC's royal correspondent Jennie Bond.

Certainly the Queen considered The Little Princesses intrusive and regarded her former governess as persona non grata, so much so that the phrase "doing a Crawfie" entered the lexicon, meaning to sell family secrets, especially royal ones, acquired during a period of personal service. "She snaked," a member of the royal family told Ben Pimlott, author of The Queen.

"Crawfie," wrote AN Wilson in his introduction in 1993 to a new edition of The Little Princesses, "is probably the most important royal writer of the century precisely because of qualities which in sophisticated literary circles would probably be regarded as faults. She was more like a camera than an authorial intelligence. Her mind was stuffed, like some much-treasured old shoe-box, with snap-shots of the royal nursery."

Quite simply, notes Pimlott: "The Little Princesses marked a watershed. For the former governess had stumbled on a discovery that was to blight the royal family for the rest of the century: the market in intimate details was a rising one. The financial value of revelations was already known, and had been remarked upon within the palace before the war. What had changed, and would henceforth grow with increasing rapidity, was the voracity of the public appetite, and the profits-led crumbling of inhibitions about feeding it."

Unwittingly, naively it seems, Crawfie was the original squealer, the first royal kiss- and-teller, the effects of whose disclosures reverberate still, from Andrew Morton's revelations about Diana to Prince Edward's ham-fisted attempts to film Prince William at St Andrews University. After Crawfie, the life of the royals, which until relatively recently had been cloaked in secrecy, was, quite literally, an open book.

According to Robert Lacey in his new book Royal, the initiative for The Little Princesses came from America and, in particular, Bruce and Beatrice Gould, publishers of Ladies Home Journal, a mass-market magazine in the US. They wanted to publish a series of articles on "The Education of a Princess" and had eventually got the palace to agree, on condition that the articles would be written by Dermot Morrah, a pro-monarchist writer on The Times who had ghosted some of George VI's speeches. Crawfie was the most obvious source but she was curiously uncooperative. After 14 years with the princesses, she had recently left and married her long-term sweetheart George Buthlay, a banker who did not endear himself to the royal family by suggesting they should move their accounts to his bank.

"The pushy Buthlay seems to have been the reason behind Crawfie's intransigence," says Lacey. "He felt that his wife's years of devoted work deserved more than her retirement package - a pension of (pounds) 300 a year (equivalent today to (pounds) 6000), the lifetime use of a charming old grace-and-favour cottage in the grounds of Kensington Palace and the letters CVO after her name. This distinction, Commander of the Royal Victorian Order - an honour in the sovereign's personal gift - was higher than that bestowed on many royal servants, but it was a rank below the clearly illustrious title of Dame, the equivalent of Sir, to which the former governess and her husband evidently felt she was entitled."

Sensing Crawfie's hurt, and her reluctance to hand over her story for nothing, the Goulds flew to London and brokered a deal. "Her awe of the royal family almost paralysed her," recalled Bruce Gould. "Even in her own sanctuary, close as it was to Kensington Palace, she would hardly speak these words above a whisper." Crawfie then took the Goulds' proposal to her former employer, who was not amused. "I do feel most definitely," wrote the Queen Mother on April 4, 1949, "that you should not write and sign articles about the children, as people in positions of confidence with us must be utterly oyster I do feel most strongly that you must resist the allure of American money and persistent editors and say No No No to offers of dollars for articles about something as private and as precious as our family."