Crawfiegate: The Original Royal Scandal; Scottish governess Marion

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

Crawfie, notes Pimlott, was no scholar, and seemed to share the royal family's indifference to academic values. "Yet she did not share its lack of curiosity, and she had a strong, indignant sense of the Court as old-fashioned and remote. She deplored what she saw as the children's ignorance of the world, and her book - perhaps this was the most infuriating thing about it - describes her personal crusade to widen the little girls' horizons. There was a Jean Brodie- style, charismatic aspect to Miss Crawford, both in the power of her passionate yet selfishly demanding personality (sometimes she seemed to forget who was the princess) and in her evangelical determination to make contact with life outside. Although for part of the time she had Queen Mary as an ally, it was an uphill struggle."

Among her innovations was the founding of a Girl Guide company based at Buckingham Palace. She took the princesses on walks round Hyde Park and related how they were only once "beleaguered" by the press, when a man wanted to take their picture. Crawfie sent him packing with a flea in his ear. "Crawfie, you were savage," said Lilibet. She also took them on the Underground, where they bought their own tickets and went undiscovered even although a detective was hovering at the far end of the carriage. The next adventure was to be a ride on the top deck of a bus but the IRA started a letter-bombing campaign and it was cancelled. "We went back to our games of Indians and hide-and-seek and horse fairs in Hamilton Gardens," reported a regretful Crawfie.

A sense of discontent is evident throughout the book, maybe because she felt she had missed her true vocation. "I always wanted to teach," she said, "but I had certainly never intended to become a governess." Her disapproval of pomp and circumstance, and the dead hand of tradition which pervaded the corridors of the royal household also undoubtedly added to her feeling of isolation. Indeed, suggests Pimlott, the self-portrait contained in The Little Princesses is of a rather lonely and restless person, "an immigrant to England and an outsider to a strange tribe whose members, though friendly, persisted in their unusual and disturbing customs. She was a taker as much as a giver. But she was interesting, intelligent and forceful. Patricia (now Lady) Mountbatten - a second cousin of the princesses - remembers her from Guide meetings in the Buckingham Palace gardens as a tall, attractive, highly competent woman, with 'a good personality for bringing out someone like Princess Elizabeth, who had a stiff upper lip ingrained from birth'. There seems to have developed a mutual dependence, as she became, during critical years, the princesses' confidante and friend."

That said, Crawfie's years of faithful service counted for nothing after the publication of The Little Princesses. The Christmas cards dried up and her letters went unanswered. For a while she enjoyed a lucrative career in journalism but that came to an end in 1955 when she gave the readers of Women's Own highly coloured accounts of the Trooping the Colour and Ascot. By necessity, she had to file her copy before these events had actually taken place. However a rail strike resulted in the events being cancelled.