Thank you R.I! Hardly beautifully put, my grammar is terrible, still one trys ones best!! The Queen Mothers appearance has come under fire rather, i've done a little reading as I though it would be interesting to see some impressions of her where at the time she was Queen.
Cecil Beaton (the arch critic) admired her so much and wondered how he could have felt that "it was dreary & dosdy to have the Yorks onm the throne..No.one could have done the job as well as she & one knows that there is nothing she could not succeed at if sent out of her country - she might even win Hitler to peace" (IMO wonderful tribute for a lady, expecially in those days).
Beaton thought she looked "sloppy" at her wedding (I agree) but a while later saw her at the Ritz and thought her a "charming little person, She looks horrid from her photographs but she is really delightful with a very fresh complexion and face and charming style" (so nice and refreshing different to some of those ill looking ladies of the 1920s!). Three years later he gushed "Oh the fresh little Duchess. She has a lovely skin, like a baby's soft & pink & white & hardy at all made up, just a little dusting of powder".
Beaton also wrote "...she is the ideal as Queen of England for she is the personofication of all that is best & a real lady" (just what a Queen should be, which is why Wallis would never do)
Kirst McLeod wrote in Battle Royal "the season of 1919-20 saw Elizabeth effortlessly upstaging the other debs, and loving every minute of it". Unlike her Cotemporaries who were raising their skirts, bobing their hair, downing cocktails and languidly puffing at cigarettes, she conveyes a straightforward charm and wholesomeness.
Thelma Furness wrote "I remember thinking at the time, that if ever I had to live in a bungalow in a small town, this is the woman I would most like to have as a next door neighbour to gossip with whiole hanging out the washing in our backyards"
Interestingly I love the story of Wallis's first meeting with the then Duchess of York, it was at a ball held to celebrate Princess Marina's wedding, the royal bride to-be dressed in a simply cut white evning dress. McLeod relates that Wallis on the other hand was dressed in a strikingly outre violet lame dress (very typical of her). Wallis curtisied to the Duchess of York, a soft, well rounded figure in old fashioned orchid pink. It was a metting neither of minds nor of temperaments. As Wallis curtsied, she looked up to meet what she later remembered as "the almost startling blueness" of the Duchess of York's eyes regarding her coolly. Lady Hardings who was also present related "I am afraid Mrs Simpson went down badly with the Duchess from the word go. It may have been the rather ostentatious dress, or the fact she allowed the Prince to push her forward in what seemed an inappropriate manner. The Duchess was never discourteous in my experience, but those of us who knew her very well could always tell when she did not care for something or someone, and it was very apparent to me that she did not care for Mrs Simpson at all."
