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The Real Crawfie

Crawfie with Princess Margaret

Although today's royals are used to being treated like any other celebrity – with their private lives up for grabs by the press – it wasn't always this way. The floodgates were first inched open 50 years ago, with the hugely successful The Little Princesses, a sugary memoir of the childhoods of Elizabeth and Margaret.

The secret of its appeal was that the author was not a faceless journalist operating on Palace terms but Marion Crawford (Crawfie), the princesses' former governess. For Crawford, however, the consequences were disastrous. Ostracised by her former charges, she failed to make a new career as a royal gossip columnist. Retiring at the age of 45, she spent her remaining 33 years in seclusion, in a house overlooking the road along which the royals drove to Balmoral.

Channel 4's The Real Crawfie revisits a tragicomic story with strong contemporary resonance, combining the testimony of friends and observers with new archive footage of Crawford. Crawford was an unlikely royal insider. She grew up in Dunfermline and trained as a teacher at Edinburgh's Moray House Institute (since merged with Edinburgh University). The then head of Moray House, Professor Godfrey Thomson, was a pioneer of intelligence testing: 'Thomson's Moray House Test' was a widely used forerunner of the 'Eleven Plus' exam. Thomson's work stressed environmental and social contributions to intelligence rather than heredity. Inspired by him, Crawford planned to make a career in educational psychology after graduating in 1931.

Child minder

Meanwhile, she took a summer job as a governess to the children of Lord Elgin. This led to a month's engagement with Prince Albert, the younger son of George V, whose wife was a distant relation of Lord Elgin. The following year the arrangement was made permanent and Crawford remained with the household for 16 years.

In 1932, George V's eldest son, the future Edward VIII, was next in line to the throne and Albert and his daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, did not expect to become monarchs. But everything changed with the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 (see also The Real Wallis Simpson). Albert became George VI and his daughters next in line to the throne.

George VI and his family gave royalty a reassuringly domestic face: a tonic for the monarchy following the Abdication Crisis, and a comforting image for the country when the Second World War broke out in 1939. Crawfie found herself at the centre of things: combining stern Presbyterian discipline with a flair for keeping the princesses amused, she maintained the domestic tranquillity on which the image depended. She was only permitted to retire in 1947, after the 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth's wedding to Prince Philip; Crawford, 38, had married two months earlier.

Inside informer

Shortly after the wedding, Elizabeth and Philip visited the USA. Seeking to capitalise on their rapturous reception, Bruce and Beatrice Gould, publishers of the US women's magazine Ladies' Home Journal, approached the Palace in search of a story. Rebuffed, the Goulds contacted the Foreign Office, which was more enthusiastic. Under pressure from a government keen to cement its relationship with the USA, the Palace nominated Dermot Morrah, a journalist, crime novelist and speech-writer for George VI, who authored several official books about the royal family and the film Royal Heritage (1953). When the Goulds requested a source of inside information to leaven Morrah's deferential prose, the Foreign Office suggested the recently retired Crawford.

Crawford's response was to ask permission from Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother. This was refused in no uncertain terms:

I do feel, most definitely, that you should not write and sign articles about the children ... I do hope that you will put all the American temptations aside very firmly. Mr Morrah, who I saw the other day, seemed to think that you could help him with his articles, and get paid from America. This would be quite alright [sic] as long as your name did not come into it.

The Goulds persisted, offering Crawford the sizeable sum of $85,000. Eventually she signed a contract which stated that Palace approval would be sought, but gave the Goulds the right to publish in any case. Assisted by a ghostwriter – the romantic novelist Dorothy Black – Crawford spent the summer of 1949 writing a series of features on life with the princesses, describing the wilful Margaret and the serious 'Lilibet' in loving – and extensive – detail.

Queen Elizabeth was outraged:

We can only think that our late and completely trusted governess has gone off her head, because she promised in writing that she would not publish.

Royal columnist

Crawfie's unauthorised work sold well in the Ladies' Home Journal, in the UK Woman's Own and in book form as The Little Princesses. It was believed to have improved the standing of the royal family in the USA; as a mark of gratitude, the Goulds were received by the King and Queen. As for Crawford, she noted with some surprise that Christmas 1949 brought no card from the Palace. This was the first sign of the chill to come.

Crawford followed The Little Princesses with books about George V's widow Queen Mary, the new Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. She also put her name to Woman's Own's 'Crawfie's Column', a frothy social diary written by office-bound journalists several weeks in advance. This timelag, necessitated by the magazine's production schedule, caused Crawford's downfall. In 1955, the column included gushing accounts of Ascot and the Trooping of the Colour, both of which were cancelled due to a train strike. Other columnists had a field day; 'Crawfie's Column' was quietly dropped, bringing Crawford's career as a writer to an inglorious end. Isolated, she lived until 1988.

While Crawford profited materially from her royal revelations, she can also be seen as the victim of the story. On one side, the walls of old British deference were being broken down by new American money, abetted by a government wedded to the 'special relationship'; on the other, the royal family exhibited the clan mentality for which 'the Firm' is famous. Between the two, Crawfie never stood a chance.

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