Marijae
Team Owner
Starting to watch the Crown and wanted to know more about the queen mother. I barely remember only one thing about her, her disgusting, rotten, brown teeth. But I didn’t know she was universally known as cruel and sadistic. I’ll only post one picture so you have an idea. Cliffs : she was cruel to her family, to the “peasants”, and proudly racist. Also, she robbed tax payers money.
She was not born royal – she was the daughter of a Scottish earl, a commoner, an outsider. According to her previous biographer Hugo Vickers, she had wanted to attract the Prince of Wales – later Edward VIII – but he brushed her off and she married his younger brother, George, instead. She would have lived a life of dogs, shooting and house parties (she never did learn to operate a pedestrian crossing) except that Edward fell for Wallis Simpson and abdicated, because he could not marry a divorcee – and so she became queen.
She was, in fact, rather cruel. Two of her nieces, Nerissa and Catherine, were born with learning difficulties and spent their lives in institutions. She never visited them and when Burke's Peerage falsely reported them dead, she didn't correct the error. But when the scandal eventually broke, she made sure that Vickers noted that the madness was not from her side of the family. Her nephew Timothy was a chronic alcoholic. She never visited him either, nor did she attend the funeral of his wife, who killed herself after her child – and Elizabeth's great-niece – died. There was no room for sickness in Elizabeth's world.
She could be cruel to "the little people" too, in private, because she despised them; she was smelted with class prejudice. George VI's private secretary was asked to define her political philosophy. It was, he said, best summed up by All Things Bright and Beautiful: "The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate/God made them high or lowly/And order'd their estate." "I hate this classlessness thing," Elizabeth said to Woodrow Wyatt, "it's so unreal." According to her equerry Colin Burgess, she wondered why people were always thrusting babies at her, to kiss. She mimicked the voice of a former servant who had come to visit her. She mocked people who pronounced "Ma'am" wrongly – it is supposed to rhyme with spam, not harm.
The wife of the British ambassador to France called her "rather mocking, not very kind". It slipped into racism, which, like her lifestyle, she spun as patriotism. She once walked into a reception for a Japanese prince with the words, "Nip on! Nip on!" She told Wyatt that she had "some reservations about Jews"; in the same spirit, she lobbied the British government to appease Hitler. She opposed democratic elections in India and supported white supremacist rule in Rhodesia. One of her ladies-in-waiting said her attitude to Africa was, "poor darlings; the Africans just don't know how to govern themselves – it's just not their form. What a pity we're not still looking after them."
Other oddities leak out from the books and the memoirs. Apparently, she adored a game where Eton boys were chased by a pack of hounds for her pleasure. What exactly this means, only Sigmund Freud could say.
By the time she died, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was treating the British Treasury --tax-money -- as her personal piggy bank, with her bills running way beyond the millions she was allotted every year. Even the ultra-Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont complained that "she far exceeds her Civil List and the Treasury gets very het up about it." She used the money to pay for eighty-three full-time staffers, including four footmen, two pages, three chauffeurs (what do they do, split her into three parts for transportation?), a private secretary, an orderly, a housekeeper, five housemaids... the list goes on and on. She even insisted that it was a legitimate use of public funds to maintain a full-time 'Ascot office', whose job is to do nothing but keep a register of members of the Royal Enclosure and send them entry vouchers.
She presented this spending -- enough to open and run a new hospital that would save thousands of lives every year -- as an act of selfless patriotism. Michael Mann, the former Dean of Windsor who knew her very well, explained: "She feels that Britain is Great Britain and that, therefore, ours must be no banana court. To lower standards [i.e., her spending on champagne, caviar and limos] is to denigrate the country and, insofar as high standards require big spending, so be it." When single mothers take 0.1 percent of this sum from the state, the same newspapers that laud Elizabeth as "the best of British" savage them as "scroungers." If they refused to pay tax -- as Elizabeth did -- they would have been put in prison.
She was not born royal – she was the daughter of a Scottish earl, a commoner, an outsider. According to her previous biographer Hugo Vickers, she had wanted to attract the Prince of Wales – later Edward VIII – but he brushed her off and she married his younger brother, George, instead. She would have lived a life of dogs, shooting and house parties (she never did learn to operate a pedestrian crossing) except that Edward fell for Wallis Simpson and abdicated, because he could not marry a divorcee – and so she became queen.
She was, in fact, rather cruel. Two of her nieces, Nerissa and Catherine, were born with learning difficulties and spent their lives in institutions. She never visited them and when Burke's Peerage falsely reported them dead, she didn't correct the error. But when the scandal eventually broke, she made sure that Vickers noted that the madness was not from her side of the family. Her nephew Timothy was a chronic alcoholic. She never visited him either, nor did she attend the funeral of his wife, who killed herself after her child – and Elizabeth's great-niece – died. There was no room for sickness in Elizabeth's world.
She could be cruel to "the little people" too, in private, because she despised them; she was smelted with class prejudice. George VI's private secretary was asked to define her political philosophy. It was, he said, best summed up by All Things Bright and Beautiful: "The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate/God made them high or lowly/And order'd their estate." "I hate this classlessness thing," Elizabeth said to Woodrow Wyatt, "it's so unreal." According to her equerry Colin Burgess, she wondered why people were always thrusting babies at her, to kiss. She mimicked the voice of a former servant who had come to visit her. She mocked people who pronounced "Ma'am" wrongly – it is supposed to rhyme with spam, not harm.
The wife of the British ambassador to France called her "rather mocking, not very kind". It slipped into racism, which, like her lifestyle, she spun as patriotism. She once walked into a reception for a Japanese prince with the words, "Nip on! Nip on!" She told Wyatt that she had "some reservations about Jews"; in the same spirit, she lobbied the British government to appease Hitler. She opposed democratic elections in India and supported white supremacist rule in Rhodesia. One of her ladies-in-waiting said her attitude to Africa was, "poor darlings; the Africans just don't know how to govern themselves – it's just not their form. What a pity we're not still looking after them."
Other oddities leak out from the books and the memoirs. Apparently, she adored a game where Eton boys were chased by a pack of hounds for her pleasure. What exactly this means, only Sigmund Freud could say.
By the time she died, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was treating the British Treasury --tax-money -- as her personal piggy bank, with her bills running way beyond the millions she was allotted every year. Even the ultra-Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont complained that "she far exceeds her Civil List and the Treasury gets very het up about it." She used the money to pay for eighty-three full-time staffers, including four footmen, two pages, three chauffeurs (what do they do, split her into three parts for transportation?), a private secretary, an orderly, a housekeeper, five housemaids... the list goes on and on. She even insisted that it was a legitimate use of public funds to maintain a full-time 'Ascot office', whose job is to do nothing but keep a register of members of the Royal Enclosure and send them entry vouchers.
She presented this spending -- enough to open and run a new hospital that would save thousands of lives every year -- as an act of selfless patriotism. Michael Mann, the former Dean of Windsor who knew her very well, explained: "She feels that Britain is Great Britain and that, therefore, ours must be no banana court. To lower standards [i.e., her spending on champagne, caviar and limos] is to denigrate the country and, insofar as high standards require big spending, so be it." When single mothers take 0.1 percent of this sum from the state, the same newspapers that laud Elizabeth as "the best of British" savage them as "scroungers." If they refused to pay tax -- as Elizabeth did -- they would have been put in prison.
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