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- Herausgeber: The Robson Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
"William Tallon was a creature of extremes: though intensely loyal, he was also a dangerous risk-taker; though charming, he could also be vicious; though considerate and amusing, he could be ruthless and predatory. For much of his life he was driven by two demons: a powerful sex drive and an intense, almost pathological love for the Queen Mother…" From humble beginnings as a shopkeeper's son in Coventry to 'Page of the Backstairs' at Clarence House, William Tallon, or 'Backstairs Billy' as he came to be known, entered royal service at the age of fifteen. Over the next fifty years, he became one of the most notorious and flamboyant characters ever to have graced the royal household - the one servant the Queen Mother just could not do without. While others came and went, he remained by her side, becoming one of her most trusted friends and confidants. The fascinating life story of the man who spent more than half a century working for one of the world's most elusive institutions, Backstairs Billy provides a rare glimpse of what the royals really get up to behind closed doors…
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Contents
Introduction
AT THE TIME of his death in 2007, William John Stephenson Tallon, or ‘Backstairs Billy’ as he was known, was familiar to a relatively small circle that included the members of the royal family, but especially Prince Charles and Lord Snowdon, and a long list of former homosexual lovers, many of whom had also been in royal service. Outside that circle Billy was not at that time widely known, but in the years since his death a picture has emerged of a man whose life was extraordinary by any standards.
It was extraordinary because Tallon was always an unlikely candidate to be part of the intimate royal circle.
William Tallon spent more than half a century working for the royal family at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. Nominally, he was a servant; in reality, he was a uniquely trusted friend and confidant to the Queen Mother. Other friends and advisers came and went but Billy was a man the Queen Mother could never quite do without. The history of their remarkable relationship is the subject of this book.
Though intensely loyal, Billy was also a dangerous risk taker; though charming he could also be vicious; though considerate and amusing he could also be ruthless and predatory.
This is the story of a curiously contradictory man and it is a story that has never before been told. For the first time since Billy’s death, many of those who knew him have agreed to talk about Billy and their memories add up to a picture of a complex man who, with none of the usual qualifications of birth and privilege, became a central figure in one of the world’s most admired institutions.
I met William Tallon a number of times during the last years of his life. I met some of his friends and a number of his former colleagues. Most of his friends were people he met socially; his few enemies tended to be those with whom he had worked.
There is no doubt that if William Tallon took to someone he was wonderfully good company – he was funny, talkative and very witty. And he loved gossip. He could make a story come to life as no one else could. He could also be very kind. But occasionally he would take against someone and then he could be very unkind indeed.
He was a creature of extremes: he was immensely loyal to his friends, but very spiteful to his enemies. For much of his life he was driven by two demons: a powerful sex drive and an intense, almost pathological love for the Queen Mother.
I’ve spoken to and corresponded with more of Billy’s enemies and former colleagues than his friends. His friends understandably remember only the witty storyteller, the generous host, the performer, so their memories tend to cast a rosy glow. Billy’s colleagues and subordinates, not all of whom disliked him, add the shadows and most of the deeper complexities, and so their memories, perhaps inevitably, make up a greater part of this book.
One difficulty with a book such as this – one that portrays someone only very recently dead – is that the subject’s contemporaries are wary of upsetting others still alive. But, even allowing for that, I was still surprised at quite how many of those who talked to me were willing to help only if they were not identified. Some are still working in service and feared they would be dismissed if they were quoted in anything controversial. Others felt their memories were still too raw to be acknowledged openly. For good or ill, I agreed to these requests for anonymity, or for a change of name, for without them this book could not have been written.
As the years go by, memories of this fascinating – some would say wholly remarkable – character will inevitably fade, especially as he was someone whose life was not, as it were, part of official record. He was not in any real sense a public figure; yet he was often the subject of public, especially media, speculation. He cannot, however, be described as an entirely private figure either.
William Tallon was in truth that rarest of all rare creatures, a very ordinary person who carved out an extraordinary role for himself in one of the world’s most secretive institutions: the British royal family. On the face of it, he was the last person one would have expected to reach a position of influence among the royals. He had very little formal education and came from a working-class background, yet, relying entirely on personality and force of character, he became, in many ways, one of the most significant characters in a world where education and social class meant everything.
But if it is hard to write about a royal servant, it is even more difficult to write about a member of the royal family.
The sensitivities involved in any discussion of the Queen Mother and other members of the royal family are legion. Any and every book published about the Windsors is either derided as sycophantic or attacked for denigrating the members of one of our most cherished institutions.
The newspapers’ usual technique is to track down an elderly, distant relative of the royal family who then denounces the book as a tissue of lies and insults. This kind of automatic reaction is largely based on a desire to preserve an image of the royal family as symbols rather than real people. Critics of books about the royals would have us believe that members of the royal family do not have flesh-and-blood lives with faults and foibles like the rest of us. The case is particularly acute with the Queen Mother, who was by any standards a remarkable and in many ways admirable woman. But are we really to believe she never lost her temper, never became confused or embarrassed, never drank a little too much? And we are forced to ask the question: does it really damage the Queen Mother’s reputation to report that she liked jokes and gossip, that she enjoyed dancing and games and horseplay? Backstairs Billy once said that the great thing about the Queen Mother was that she liked to have fun and didn’t care who knew it and in this, as in many other ways, he was almost certainly right.
TWO HUNDRED GUESTS, including HM the Queen’s cousin Lord Snowdon and actors Patricia Routledge and Sir Derek Jacobi, gathered at the Queen’s Chapel in St James’s Palace on a cold winter’s day in 2007. Hundreds more had applied for tickets for a most unusual funeral service.
A casual observer might have assumed some great dignitary had passed on.
In fact the service was for a working-class boy born above a hardware shop in a run-down town in Co. Durham during the Great Depression; a boy who grew to become one of the late Queen Mother’s most trusted aides.
One of the difficulties of writing about Billy was that he was himself naturally inclined to secrecy and this tendency was intensified by a lifetime’s devotion to a job where discretion, loyalty and secrecy were vital. But Billy also liked to embellish and to some extent he was a master of evasion and fantasy. Sometimes his exaggerations were entirely unnecessary. If he was so very close to the Queen Mother, why was he at pains to over-state the case?
It is difficult to separate truth from fiction in many areas of his life because all those who have written about him – including friends and journalists – have had an agenda according to whether they liked or loathed him. Some say, for example, that Billy was the only male member of staff permitted to enter the Queen Mother’s bedroom without knocking. Others say this is nonsense and that although he carried the breakfast tray to her room he always left it outside for her personal maid to carry in. Some insist that Billy was so manipulative that the Queen Mother was almost afraid of him. Others insist this is nonsense and that the Queen Mother delighted in keeping her sometimes-wayward page in check. In these and in so many other ways there is something mysterious about Billy and his life. He and others embellished almost everything to do with his role in the royal household. It was as if during his long life in service he became a character in a play, a play directed largely by himself.
Chapter One
Joining the royals
MILLIONS OF PEOPLE around the world are fascinated by the British royal family. The children of Her Majesty the Queen may have had messy divorces and given embarrassing interviews to the press at various times, but the Queen herself famously never complains and never explains.
On royal tours and the endless series of visits and events that make up the royal calendar, we watch as the royal presence conjures a magical world of ritual through the State Opening of Parliament, Trooping the Colour, Changing of the Guard, not to mention processions down the Mall with various foreign heads of state.
The Queen is a familiar figure, yet she seems both well known and, at the same time, profoundly unknowable. There is no chink in her armour; no hint at a genuinely private life behind the facade.
Until her death in 2002, there was only one figure who rivalled the Queen in terms of the world’s interest and the nation’s affection, and that was her mother. Like her daughter, Elizabeth the Queen Mother never gave interviews; never explained, never complained. She seemed to float – cynics would say on a tide of gin – above criticism.
But, unlike her daughter, the Queen Mother was occasionally indiscreet and frequently off-message. This was perhaps because she had married rather than been born into the royal family. Indeed, when the prospect first appeared on the horizon, she had been horrified at the idea of being a member of the royal family for precisely the reason that she knew her life would never be normal again.
THE BOWES-LYON FAMILY were certainly aristocratic, but when Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon married Albert, Duke of York in 1923, the more conservative elements of the British establishment were aghast that the young prince had not been persuaded to marry a foreign princess. Elizabeth’s father, it is true, was the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, but, despite this, it was thought by some that a minor German princess might have been preferable to a mere aristocrat. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century such things may seem ridiculous, but in the early part of the twentieth century they were considered of the first importance.
However, there was less to worry about than might at first appear. As the more conservative members of the royal family’s advisers pointed out, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon’s young husband Albert, the second son of King George V and Queen Mary, was never going to become king. In fact, it was only the shocking abdication of her husband’s brother in 1936 that led to a change in Elizabeth’s fortunes that no one could have predicted. She might otherwise have lived out her life in wealth and relative obscurity, able to do and say more or less as she pleased.
But, for all the complaints about a lack of royal blood, Elizabeth had no doubts about her position. She grew up in the decade before the Great War when the British aristocracy simply assumed that their vast landed fortunes – untaxed and unencumbered by death duties – would last forever. The taste for the high life that those fortunes created never left Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who, to the end of her life, spent money as if it really did grow on trees.
Too polite to speculate about royal extravagance during her lifetime, the public did begin to speculate – and with a vengeance – once the Queen Mother died.
Despite the criticisms, however, it must have been difficult for Elizabeth to imagine a world where servants did not provide every possible creature comfort, where tradesmen did not deliver the finest food and wine at the back door and where, having made their deliveries, they were not paid by a housekeeper or butler so that the head of the family need never be bothered by anything so sordid as money.
Elizabeth’s lifestyle was fundamentally the same in 2000 as it had been in 1930. It reflected precisely an earlier era when the aristocracy and the royal family could simply do as they pleased and the taxpayer must uncomplainingly foot the bill.
Some idea of the world in which Elizabeth grew up can be gleaned from the fact that only a few decades before her birth, an official in the Government tax office (as it then was) pointed out that it was rather undignified for the royal family to pay any tax at all. They had paid tax without complaint for as long as anyone could remember, but quietly, and without a word of dissent from Parliament or the press, the royal family was immediately made exempt from all income tax – a situation that remained unchanged until the 1990s.
The fact is that the Queen Mother famously spent money as she pleased and was hugely in debt at the time of her death. According to various newspaper reports, which admittedly it is difficult to verify, she owed her bankers, Coutts, more than £7 million and the joke in Clarence House, her home for more than fifty years, was that nobody could be found who had the courage to tell her that the money would have to be paid back. Again unconfirmed reports suggest that the Queen Mother’s daughter Queen Elizabeth, in order to avoid the inevitable scandal, quietly repaid the huge debt.
Living a life that was rather like a fairy-tale fantasy was the only life Elizabeth ever knew and it was this fairy-tale life that was to draw William Tallon into royal service for more than five decades. As he also would have no doubt been aware, not telling the royals embarrassing truths has a long history.
When the Labouchere Amendment was passed in England in 1881 (replacing the earlier crime of buggery) all homosexual acts between men became known, for the purposes of the law, as ‘gross indecency’. At the time it was thought wise to include a clause banning female homosexuality also, but when it was realised that this clause would have to be seen by Queen Victoria when she signed the Bill into law, Parliament reacted with horror. Someone would actually have to explain to Her Majesty what lesbianism involved. This was unthinkable. The clause was hastily removed and female homosexuality was never made illegal as a result.
The terror of bringing bad or awkward and embarrassing news to the royals continued more or less unchanged until the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Her passion for complaining and explaining to the press, and to anyone else who would listen, exposed the royal family to unprecedented criticism and even the Queen temporarily lost some of her allure. Yet even at this difficult time – a time when it is generally agreed the monarchy came close to collapse – the Queen Mother sailed through relatively unscathed.
The cracks really only appeared after she had died because memories of royal criticism following Diana’s death were fresh in people’s minds. It was permissible to criticise where abuses were rampant because a new precedent had been set. When the royal family gathered in black at the gates of Buckingham Palace to watch Diana’s funeral cortege, many claimed, perhaps unfairly, that they were there not because they wanted to be but because they wanted to head off the risk of a huge public backlash.
Surprise at the state of the Queen Mother’s finances led inevitably to speculation about her entourage. To the end of her life, she is rumoured to have employed around sixty personal attendants at any one time. This seemed an almost medieval extravagance to some commentators and the low pay that these servants – for that is what they were – often received only increased their indignation.
As one newspaper columnist put it, average pay below stairs in the royal household was sometimes on a par with that of a road sweeper, and yet servants were routinely expected to work extraordinarily long hours.
SERVANTS HAVE ALWAYS been the one weak spot in the royal defences. They are relatively badly paid so they are always a risk as the newspapers are inevitably keen to pay for stories about Britain’s most secretive and famous family.
The late Princess of Wales’s butler Paul Burrell is a good example. His book about life as a servant with the royals caused a scandal, not because he revealed embarrassing secrets but because he claimed an intimacy with Diana that many questioned.
Back in the 1940s Marion Crawford – nanny to Princess Elizabeth and her sister Margaret – had also famously written a book about her experiences. This shone a relatively innocuous light on the hidden world of the royals but despite the fact that the book gave very little away and simply served, as it were, to polish the reputations of the royals, poor Nanny Crawford was never forgiven and was never again contacted by the children she had cherished through their early years.
Despite their so-called revelations, Marion Crawford and Paul Burrell were benign interpreters of life behind the royal facade. Far more dangerous, potentially, was the man who became the most famous ex-royal servant of all: Backstairs Billy.
Billy never wrote a book, although at the time of his death his friends were convinced he was at work on his memoirs. But even without written evidence from Billy himself, his love–hate relationship with the royals can be pieced together from a wide range of sources, but especially former fellow servants, as well as friends and lovers.
ANYONE WHO HAS ever watched any public event that involved the Queen Mother at its centre will have noticed a distinguished-looking man always in close attendance, but lagging behind the Queen Mother at a discreet distance. This was William Tallon, or Backstairs Billy.
He always looked the same, hardly seeming to age as the years passed and almost always in charge of the corgis or helping collect spontaneous gifts from the public. With his long, brushed-back hair which apparently remained dark well into middle age, his elegant, perfectly worn morning suit and medals, Tallon seemed to embody all that we think we know about the royals’ upper-class attendants.
In fact Billy always looked far too grand, too much the commanding presence, to be described as a servant; his regal air extended to smiling and waving to the crowd, even, on occasion, stopping to engage in small talk, as if he really were a member of the royal family.
Indeed, Billy was thought by many unsuspecting members of the public to be a relative or personal friend of the Queen Mother. Certainly he was seen as coming from a similar social stratum.
Most people thought Billy was at the very least a public-school-educated equerry much like the other equerries in the royal household, who were and are still largely drawn from the middle and upper classes. But Billy was nothing of the kind. As we have seen, he was a shopkeeper’s son from the north of England. Yet, despite his humble origins, he was to beat the equerries at their own game.
Chapter Two
Working for the firm
THE ROYAL FAMILY’S advisers are usually, though not always, drawn from what used to be called ‘the top drawer’. They are often old Etonians or old Harrovians who have formerly been officers in the ‘best’ regiments – typically the Household Cavalry.
No one ever seems to notice that the royals vary rarely employ what we might describe as ordinary people in these roles. The public schools supply the advisers while state schools provide the staff for jobs in the kitchens, the gardens and the stables; ordinary mortals work as maids and cleaners, hall boys, junior footmen and butlers. You might be forgiven, while in the royal household, for thinking you were in a medieval court of some kind. When it comes to working for the royals, the lines of social demarcation are pretty strict.
Backstairs Billy was different. He was rather like a private in the army who becomes a field marshal. Despite his origins, he rose to become unusually powerful in the royal household. Formally, his job defined him as not from the top drawer. Yet in his role as both servant and intimate adviser he blurred those strict lines of demarcation.
Much has been said about the veracity of Billy’s claims concerning his closeness to the Queen Mother, and the power he claimed to have over her, but whatever his pretentions, it is highly likely that the Queen Mother’s affection for Billy was largely a result of genuine sympathy and trust, but also her way of teasing the well-born advisers. Certainly Billy seems to have been disliked by the rather grand advisers who, then and now, inhabit the royal corridors above stairs. In Billy’s day, they simply could not understand why the Queen Mother seemed so fond of what they may have seen as a ‘rather common’ man.
The truth is almost certainly that the Queen Mother’s affection for Billy was genuine. She liked Billy because he was amusing, devoted and discreet in those areas that mattered to her. But she never thought of him in the way she thought of her advisers. She had been born at a time when such distinctions were automatic and if someone from the lower ranks happened to be given particular notice of favour this was always combined with a sense that that favour could be withdrawn at any time. One’s friends, on the other hand, were one’s friends precisely because they came from the same social stratum.
Remarkably, Billy’s relationship with the Queen Mother echoes Queen Victoria’s relationship with her gillie John Brown. Although a servant, Brown was treated with enormous respect and affection by the Queen. It has been said that Victoria’s passion for all things Scottish was really a reflection of her passion for Brown. Certainly, until his death in 1883 Queen Victoria spent every moment when she was at Balmoral with a man who, by all accounts, treated her with a shocking disregard for convention. He made jokes and teased her at one moment and spoke sharply the next.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this over-familiarity, Brown was adored by Victoria, so far as we can tell from reports made at the time. But she would never have thought of Brown as a friend outside the confines of her Scottish holidays. If anyone doubts Victoria’s genuine affection for Brown, however, we need only remind ourselves that in her instructions for what should happen after her death she insisted – to the scandalised outrage of her advisers – that Brown’s photograph, rather than that of her late husband Prince Albert, should be buried with her. There is also some evidence, including the deathbed confession of a Presbyterian minister, that Victoria actually married Brown in a secret ceremony towards the end of the gillie’s life.
Nothing quite like this happened with Backstairs Billy but the story of his rise and fall provides a fascinating insight into a world where the power of personality may sometimes outweigh the power of convention.
BACKSTAIRS BILLY WAS a complex man who, in truth, both loved and occasionally loathed the royals; he was addicted to being part of their glamorous world and he revelled in the theatre that life as a royal servant provided. Billy was somehow vulnerable and yet also supremely manipulative; he was at times an immensely serious man and at others obsessed with trivia and the outward display of his own importance. But to the last he loved, perhaps more than anything, what might best be called the high camp of royal service.
I knew Billy only when his life had begun to spiral downwards. In his small flat in Kennington, south London, he seemed a forlorn figure, but perhaps no more so than many men without family, who, finding themselves retired from a job they once loved, feel that life is empty and largely meaningless.
But there was always an edge to Billy’s tone when he talked about the royal family in general and the Queen Mother in particular. Many of those who knew him towards the end of his life have argued that his love for the Queen Mother refused to admit the least hint of criticism of her, but this seems in many ways to be an attempt to protect him from the bitterness of his own decline.
Indirectly and by implication he was in fact occasionally critical of her. He felt she should perhaps have done more to protect him from what he called the ‘royal wolves’.
Several of his friends knew that he would like to be remembered only as a loyal servant and they assumed that his bitter attacks on those he felt had ousted him from the royal household were simply the result of old age and illness and not of real feeling. This seems to me to be a misreading for the sake of posthumous reputation. Billy did feel let down at the end of his life. He felt he had been harshly treated, but his unhappiness was compounded by the knowledge that to some extent he had brought disaster upon himself; he had made enemies where he should have made friends and he had been blind to the realities of his position. In fact, Billy’s life might be seen as an almost perfect exemplar of the ancient warning that hubris leads inevitably to nemesis.
Chapter Three
Northern lights
BIRTLEY ISA small town centred on the now-vanished Durham coalfield and a few miles south of Gateshead, the town on the south bank of the River Tyne with Newcastle a little to the north. Northumberland and Durham are economically depressed areas with high levels of social deprivation, high unemployment and, for the majority of ordinary people, few prospects. In the 1930s it was far worse.
The biggest employers today are the Royal Ordnance Factory and the Japanese engineering firm Komatsu, who make high-tech mining equipment. When William John Stephenson Tallon was born here at home on 12 November 1935, the town’s Victorian terraced houses and municipal buildings would have been black with the soot of thousands of domestic coal fires, the pollution-filled air alive with talk of what went on in the mines and factories. Billy was born above his father’s hardware shop at 27 Durham Road and, despite high levels of infant mortality in solidly working-class districts such as this, Billy was a robust, lively baby – ‘a strong ’un’ – who was hardly ever ill.
Birtley was a dark, forbidding place and people rarely risked showing their neighbours they aspired to anything out of the ordinary. In this respect and others, the town was very much like Hunslet, described in Richard Hoggart’s famous book The Uses of Literacy on working-class life in the north of England. Birtley was a place where, as Hoggart memorably puts it, the local and the personal counted for everything. Abstract discussions about life in general, aspirations to get on, any kind of ambition beyond the local were all frowned upon and children were expected to go into the local factories just as their fathers and grandfathers had done. Girls could expect to marry in their late teens or early twenties, have children and run a home on what was usually a pitifully small income.
Alfred Gill, who was born in Birtley in 1940, recalled the narrowness of this industrial world:
I don’t recall anyone really getting away because there was a feeling you shouldn’t try to be better than your dad, your friends and their dads. It was a pride thing that you would do as your dad had done. I only heard of one boy who passed his eleven plus and went to grammar school and I think he became a bit of an outcast, or at least he was isolated in a way.
The idea of going to London even for a visit was like the idea of going to the moon. A charabanc to the seaside once a year was about the best we could hope for!
Another near contemporary of Billy’s, who was born a few years later and just a few streets from his birthplace, recalled, ‘You didn’t expect much out of life in Birtley, but it was the same across much of the old industrial north east. Life revolved around the pub, the pit and the factory gates.’
But if life really did match the cliché of the north before the Second World War – a mix of pub, pit, whippets and ferrets – it was at least a close-knit community where families had often lived side by side for several generations. And there was always work in the mines and factories as well as trips to the seaside and even occasionally to the early cinema.
But by all accounts Billy’s parents felt – like most shopkeepers at the time – that they were very slightly a cut above the rest. They didn’t work in the mines or the factories and though they only sold hardware they felt they were business people with a degree of financial independence. It was true that, like all shopkeepers of the time in northern industrial towns, they had to sell goods ‘on tick’ – if they hadn’t business would have soon dried up – but as Alfred Gill recalled, ‘shopkeepers definitely had more money than the rest of us and they looked down slightly on their customers. They felt that they were lower middle class if you like, rather than obviously working class.’
This sense of slight otherness would have been very similar to that felt by the late Margaret Thatcher – another shopkeeper’s child from the provinces. It was a vague sense of superiority but one tinged with uncertainty about one’s place in society. Margaret Thatcher’s father compensated by becoming an ardent Tory; it was his way of nailing his colours to the middle-class mast. But for Margaret Thatcher and Billy Tallon this early social uncertainty led them to want to escape into a different world; a world that represented everything their home towns could not give them.
BIRTLEY OWED ITS origins to the demand for coal to fuel the Industrial Revolution. Few of the houses, factories and municipal buildings in the town had been built earlier than 1850 when the main Anglican church was constructed. Rows of dingy back-to-back terraced houses stretched in every direction.
The whole family, Billy’s parents, grandparents and his sister Jennie, lived above the shop, but conditions at home were far better than those for many of the town’s children who lived in tiny damp houses with outside lavatories and tin baths hanging on shed walls. These vermin-infested terraces were largely demolished during the 1960s and 1970s, but in the 1930s they were the only houses available.
So far as anyone can tell, the Tallons had lived in the area since at least the mid-nineteenth century, but it is almost certain the family originally came from Cornwall or Ireland. Certainly the name ‘Tallon’ is of Celtic origin.
Billy’s paternal grandparents arrived as part of a wave of migration from the countryside to the north east of England and other mining and industrial centres during the boom years of the mid-nineteenth century when Durham and Yorkshire pits provided a seemingly endless supply of the cheap, high-quality coal that helped make Britain the manufacturing hub of the world.
Somehow, Billy’s grandparents saved enough money during the final decades of the 1800s to buy the shop and the rooms above. They chose to sell hardware – everyday stuff that people would always need to buy and replace regularly: pots and pans, nails, brooms, dustbins, tools, lamps and even bicycles.
Billy rarely talked about his early days but he once confided to a friend:
Although I left Birtley when I was just one and therefore don’t remember a thing about it, it was something we talked about. We had been able to move which most of the other people in the town would never have contemplated, so I think I did feel different. Shopkeepers were always a slight oddity in any town and it was no different when we moved because we had another shop. But I always reminded myself in later years that Fortnum & Mason was started by two footmen who worked in St James’s Palace. Shopkeepers had an independent spirit and I think that background gave me a lifelong belief that I was destined for higher things.
This sense of being different was even reflected in the name the Tallons gave their son. He was given the same name as his father – William – but his extra middle name ‘Stephenson’ was his mother Mabel’s maiden name and she believed it was important that her son should have this name because she believed – probably correctly – that she was distantly related to the north-east’s most famous son: the George Stephenson who built the first public railway in 1830. Railway Stephenson was born just thirty miles from Birtley in the village of Wylam on the banks of the River Tyne. Mabel, unlike William Senior, was a local girl and proud of it.
Adding this name to their son’s other names suggested they had high hopes for him, but it also reveals his mother’s powerful influence in the family. Billy revered his mother and though he loved his amiable father it was Mabel who dominated his early years and gave him a vague yearning for a more glamorous life. Mabel was always at pains to remind Billy that his family was well connected; they were not working class, they were middle class and she had a taste for the finer things that William undoubtedly inherited.
‘She loved coloured glass and knick-knacks,’ he recalled years later. ‘And china. She had a very good eye.’
John Robson, who lived in Birtley during the 1940s, remembered that the shopkeepers’ sense that they were different made them unpopular in some quarters:
The shopkeepers didn’t have to get their hands dirty. This was a rock-solid socialist area and during the 1930s and 1940s many even turned to the Communist Party. Communists hated the shopkeepers because they saw them as mini-capitalists exploiting the poor almost as much as the factory and mine owners. It was a bit unfair because some shopkeepers had just had a bit of luck or spent less on drink and managed to save up. But it was no better if their grandfather had been a miner and they’d bettered themselves. Trying to get on was seen often as a sort of class betrayal.
Billy’s mother would have risen above these concerns. Neighbours and friends remember her as ‘a nice woman but a bit aloof’. She was a serious woman who gave customers in the hardware shop credit but disliked doing it. She would complain that if people managed their money better and stayed out of the pub they would not need her to provide credit all the time. This undiplomatic attitude created a certain distance between the Tallons and the people among whom they lived. As one neighbour put it:
People in those days were desperate not to be looked down on, but Mabel made a point of looking down on you or at least appearing to. She was polite enough to your face but she had a hard streak. I always thought her perm said it all – her hair was never a fraction out of place. Very severe.
The golden rule among the factory workers and the miners was that people should not ‘get above themselves’, but Mabel was determined to be seen as a cut above the rest.
By the time Billy was born, the boom years in the north-east were over. The steady decline that was to lead to the closure of every mine in Durham during the 1970s and 1980s had begun. Birtley, like much of the north-east, was in the grip of the worst recession in history.
Like many families the Tallons were badly hit. With layoffs and falling demand for the industrial products of the town, the hardware business virtually collapsed. Try as the family did to scrimp and save to keep the business afloat until better times came along, it was impossible. In 1937 the business failed and the family sold up and moved south to Coventry where there was more work and therefore better prospects.
Details of Billy’s early life are hard to come by but according to Coventry records and those whose recollections of him go back to childhood it seems that the family used the money from the sale of the shop in Birtley to buy the house in Coundon, a suburb of Coventry, and they worked only sporadically thereafter. It seems they had enough money – but only just.
Despite being devoted to their son, Billy’s parents seem to have made no attempt to get him into an especially good school and they were quite happy to allow him to leave at the first opportunity.
Billy rarely talked about his parents to his colleagues in later life, but this is not unusual when someone moves from one social stratum to another. There is almost always a degree of embarrassment, or at least compartmentalisation. The playwright Alan Bennett famously said that when he went to Oxford from his Leeds grammar school he quickly found his parents embarrassing and tried to avoid letting them come to see him in Oxford.
Something similar seems to have happened to Billy, but like Bennett he loved his parents and returned regularly to the house in Coundon to see them. In later years as his royal responsibilities grew his visits became less frequent, but he never entirely forgot his origins or the people he had known as a child.
