Crawfie: the original Royal outsider

A sparky career girl from an ordinary background is catapulted right to the heart of the Royal Family. She brings her woke ideas with her and begins the work of dragging the Windsors into the modern age. There is trouble and the young woman leaves. A best-selling tell-all book appears…

Sound familiar? It certainly feels like a story of our times, but I’m not talking about the Duchess of Sussex. The former actress is not the first would-be moderniser of the monarchy. Nearly 90 years ago, someone else attempted the same thing.

Her name was Marion Crawford and for 17 years she was governess to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. She is one of the most important of royal influencers and one who many in the family would have preferred to be airbrushed from history.

Yet she never intended to shift the plates of an institution. The daughter of a Dunfermline widow, raised in straitened circumstances, Marion planned to work in the Edinburgh slums when she qualified as a teacher. Unusually for the era, she had trained in modern methods including child psychology. She was passionate about poverty’s disastrous impact on the ability to learn – something few people cared about in the early 1930s.

So how did this progressive young woman end up teaching two princesses in palaces from Buckingham to Balmoral?

It was the first thing I wondered after her memoir, The Little Princesses, tumbled from a shelf in a second-hand bookshop one rainy day. The second thing I pondered, having skimmed through her amazing account of the Queen’s childhood, was how soon could I turn it into a novel. The Governess, out this week, is that book, based on Marion Crawford’s incredible years at the heart of royalty.

She entered their service reluctantly. In 1932, the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth, then the Queen Mother) was visiting her sister, Lady Rose Leveson-Gower, at Edinburgh’s Rosyth docks. A young trainee teacher, Marion Crawford, had been hired by Lady Rose to teach her daughter in the holidays.

Zooming in on the lively 22-year-old, the duchess decided Marion was just the ticket for her own girls. She turned her famous charm up to eleven and persuaded the doubtful student to come south for a trial month “to see if you like us and we like you”.

Marion was certain she would not. Arriving, exhausted from the train, to be told that six-year-old Princess Elizabeth was waiting up for her did not help. But that first encounter – a joy to fictionalise – was love at first sight for both.

She might have left the slums behind, but Marion brought her liberal ideas to the royal household. She immediately set about changing things, first and foremost introducing some fun. Her boisterous sessions of hide and seek and hopscotch with her young charges exasperated Mrs Knight, the territorial royal nanny, who had never before allowed the girls off the garden path.

The new governess thought the monarchy old-fashioned and too remote from everyday life. Determined to show her royal pupils how normal people lived, ‘Crawfie’, as the princesses dubbed her, took them out of the palace gates and on Tube trains. Shopping trips to Woolworth’s followed (the girls loved collecting china animals) and swimming in public baths.

Later, she provided stability in a rapidly-changing world. Crawfie’s service coincided with some of the most seismic events of modern history; the abdication, the unexpected coronation of George VI and the Second World War, during which she sheltered with the princesses in Windsor Castle’s dungeons as the Luftwaffe roared overhead.

Seeing these events through the eyes of the royal children is what makes Crawfie’s story unique. In writing my book, I was able to draw on her fascinating insights, such as Princess Elizabeth exhibiting signs of what could be called obsessive compulsion today. At night she would only go to bed after grooming and “feeding” more than 30 separate toy horses. She would set her brogues just so, laces ruler-straight, and even get out of bed in the night to check their position. It’s a touching glimpse of our composed monarch as a vulnerable girl, desperate to impose order on a world beyond her control.

Her knowledge of psychology meant Crawfie understood this, but there was little reciprocal empathy. As her youth drained away, and with it her chance of romance and a family of her own, she attempted several times to leave. But she was rebuffed by her royal employers.

When she finally managed to leave in 1949 it was to marry a bad hat, George Buthlay, a Scottish bank manager. It was he who encouraged her to write The Little Princesses, a 200-page memoir taking the reader into the Windsors’ private world.

The Royals were furious, seeing it as a heinous betrayal. Queen Elizabeth (as the Duchess of York had become) declared that the governess had “gone off her head.” Neither she nor her daughters Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, the girls to whom Crawfie had been so devoted for so long, ever spoke to her again.

Was this fair? Marion had been a discreet and loyal servant for 17 years. No doubt her brutal ostracism was intended to discourage other Palace associates from doing the same thing. In a world where non-disclosure agreements were as yet undreamed of, she had broken the royal employees’ code of silence.

And yet. One of her story’s many complicating factors is that what ended with Crawfie’s lid-lifter had started with the royals themselves.

The war was only recently over and the PR-savvy Queen wanted articles about Princess Elizabeth, now heir to the throne, to appear in the American press. The idea was to strengthen bilateral post-war relations and a courtier was selected to write the pieces.

George Buthlay felt that his wife, who knew the princess better than anyone, should write them. But the idea was rejected and Crawfie shelved the project. Her husband, however, had different ideas. Together with a pair of American magazine editors, he manipulated the former governess into penning her own account. In 1950, The Little Princesses was serialised in the American magazine The Ladies’ Home Journal and Woman’s Own in Britain; both saw their circulation hit the stratosphere.

The book that followed was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic.

All this meant little to Crawfie. For her, it was a personal disaster. She was cast into the darkness by the family for whom she had sacrificed so much. And as a deterrent, it was futile anyway. Invasions of royal privacy, sometimes by the royals themselves, have been non-stop ever since.

It is hard to see what so outraged the Windsors. By the standards of the modern royal exposé, Crawfie’s memoir is loving and respectful. Apart from the odd sisterly spat with yells of “brute!” and “beast!”, the picture painted of the home life of “We Four”, as George VI called his wife and daughters, is idyllic.

But the Windsors have long memories, they hold grudges hard. Fleeing to Aberdeen after her book came out, Crawfie bought a house on the route to Balmoral in the vain hope that the Royals would one day forgive her.

This seemed to me such a tragic detail and when writing The Governess – the idea of the old lady at the window, year after year, so caught my imagination that I made it the opening chapter.

When she died in 1988, not a single royal flower appeared at her funeral. Yet her final loyal act was to leave, in her will, a box of letters from her former royal charges. Bound in faded ribbon, written in childish hands, these fond notes, cards and letters from two princesses to their devoted teacher could have been sold any time for huge amounts.

But Crawfie left them to her beloved Lilibet and they are now buried in the Royal archives. Much as Crawfie’s own story was, for 70 years, before it came tumbling from those bookshop shelves to my feet.

Yet, even at this late stage, there could be signs that the Queen might be revisiting the matter. Among the material recently released to mark her 94th birthday were a few seconds of unseen footage showing Crawfie and the princesses performing The Lambeth Walk. Royal memories may be long, but royal hearts perhaps can soften. Perhaps that’s what Meghan and Harry are banking on.

The Governess by Wendy Holden (RRP ￡12.99). Buy now for ￡10.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514