Sir Alan (Tommy) Lascelles cropped up recently in a reply to a comment. He served as Assistant Private Secretary to George V, Edward VIII and George VI and then as Private Secretary to George VI and Elizabeth II, retiring in 1953 aged 66.
His diaries, edited by Duff Hart-Davis, were published in 2006. They’re called King’s Counsellor. Not as racey as Chips Channon or Alan Clark, but as a picture of Britain in the war from one at the centre of government it is fascinating and eminently readable. It combines his working life and private life with plenty of anecdotes thrown in. This picture is of him (on the left, George VI centre) with George VI on board HMS Arethusa en route to the Normandy beaches in June 1944.
In 1943 he was faced by a problem. A tripartite (Anglo-American-Soviet) Foreign Secretaries’ conference was being planned. Churchill suggested Windsor as a suitable place to meet. Through an oversight nobody had thought to ask the King’s permission. As it turned out, the other parties wanted to hold the meeting in North Africa so he never told the King about the proposal.
Have other Private Secretaries decided to withhold information from their monarch? I believe so. I was told by someone in a position to know that it is likely that Sir Michael Adeane did not tell the Queen in 1964 that the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Anthony Blunt, was a Soviet spy. The Queen had frequent meetings with Blunt and he felt that she would find it hard to dissemble. Blunt was publicly accused and stripped of his titles in 1979, by which time Adeane had retired.
Lascelles is another Trollopian, mentioning six of his novels in the course of the diaries. His conclusion, expressed in a letter to Rupert Hart-Davis on 14th March 1970, may be of interest:
You ask, “Are you a Trollope fan?” My dear boy, by the end of the late war I had read 95 per cent of what A. T. wrote, and had compiled, in the long, Blitz-ridden nights of my solitary occupation of Buckingham Palace, a Trollope Who’s Who, which I only abandoned because the old man contradicts himself so often in one book what he wrote about some character in another that he made a nonsense of it. He is said never to have opened any of his books again once they were published. Barchester Towers is a great book and Bertie Stanhope (“an apish-looking man in baggy trousers”, said Mrs Proudie) one of my favourite characters. I have got practically everything he wrote in pocket editions.
Re Blunt and the Queen. From my time in Washington I recall an old Langley hand casually mentioning that Blunt was the Queen’s cousin (via the Queen Mother’s Bowes-Lyon clan)and it was thought the QM would confront AB if she knew of his Soviet espionage activities.
Robert, I like “an old Langley hand” as I also like reading John le Carré. Whatever the reason I think that, most unusually, Blunt’s treachery was withheld from Her Majesty (with the best intentions). Tommy Lascelles, where this started, has already appeared in the Letters that I am now re-reading – as president of the Literary Society of which Rupert Hart-Davis is an unwilling Secretary.