On a cold, misty morning in May 1937, an eleven-year-old girl was woken by the band of the Royal Marines striking up just outside her window. She leapt out of bed, and so did Bobo. They put on dressing gowns and shoes, Bobo made the princess put on an eiderdown because it was cold, and they crouched together at the window looking out onto the day her father would be crowned King. The girl who would one day be Queen Elizabeth II wrote those words herself in an exercise book she gave to her parents.

In all the millions of words that would be written about her, few mean more than these, because the person she mentioned first was not her mother or her father, not a courtier or a minister, but the servant who had shared her bedroom since she was a baby. Two Scottish women came to work for the same two little girls. One put her name to a gentle book about those girls, and by the accounts that survive, was never spoken to by the family again. The other kept silent for a lifetime, and died in her own rooms inside the palace.

What did one woman understand about that family that the other never could? ****

On the Black Isle north of Inverness, a girl grew up in a three-room cottage with no bathroom and bathed in a zinc tub, as an American magazine described her childhood in 1961. Her name was Margaret McKay Macdonald, born in 1904 on a farming peninsula in the Scottish Highlands. For most of her life, almost nobody outside the royal household knew her name at all.

An American magazine profile of 1961 traces her earliest steps into service. She began as an assistant chambermaid at a hotel near Muir of Ord for six shillings a week. From there she went south to a great house in West Lothian, the home of the Marquess and Marchioness of Linlithgow, where she worked as a chambermaid. It was the Linlithgows’ recommendation, the magazine said, that took the young Scotswoman to a nursery in London.

A syndicated newspaper story of 1957 told it differently: she went, trembling with nerves, to Balmoral to apply for a place as an under-housemaid, and within a few weeks was sent down to London to work in a nursery. Both versions survive, and neither can be settled now. In 1926, a baby girl was born to the Duke and Duchess of York. The Duke was the second son of King George V, and nobody expected him to reign.

Their first child, a daughter named Elizabeth whom the family called Lilibet, was born on the 21st of April 1926. That year, the Yorks moved into a tall London townhouse at 145 Piccadilly, and at the top of that house was the nursery. When the baby was six weeks old, Margaret Macdonald, then about twenty-two, came to work in it as an under-nurse, the junior of the nursery staff. Above her stood a woman who would shape that nursery for the next twenty years.

Clara Knight had been born in 1879, the daughter of a tenant farmer from Witwell in Hertfordshire. The Bowes-Lyon family had hired her when she was seventeen, and she had nursed the Duchess herself as a baby. When the little Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon could not say the name Clara, she made something else of it, and the something else stuck: for the rest of her life, the old nanny was called Alah. In 1926, Alah moved into the top floor of 145 Piccadilly to take charge of the new princess, and the young Highland girl worked under her.

The nursery was a private domestic place, and the people who worked in it were private domestic people. But a nursery is where a child learns who to trust. The under-nurse worked the daily round and answered to Alah. She did not yet know that the household had a rule, one never written into her terms of service.

It would decide in time the whole shape of her life, and the shape of another woman’s life too. Within four years, a second baby would be born to the Yorks. When Princess Margaret arrived in August 1930, the old nanny took the new baby, and the young Scotswoman took Lilibet. From that point, the elder princess was hers.

It meant that a four-year-old girl and a nursemaid of about twenty-six became each other’s daily world. They shared a room. Every account agrees on that, though none agrees on how long it lasted: a newspaper obituary of 1993 said the two slept in the same bedroom until Elizabeth was eleven; a later royal biography says thirteen. The child gave her the name she would carry for the rest of her life.

It was Bobo, and there are at least three stories of where it came from. The obituaries of 1993 said it was the baby’s first word. Other writers said it came from a nursery game of hide-and-seek, with cries of “boo” that settled into a name. Prince Philip’s valet, writing in 1954, told it as the nursemaid jumping out and calling “Bobo” herself.

The baby’s progress book records her first words as “Mama” and “Be. ” No one has ever proved that “Be” meant “Bobo. ” The legend is lovely, and it is only a legend. Inside the household, the name was strictly private.

One later royal writer put it plainly: the Queen and the royal family might call her Bobo, but she was Miss Macdonald to everyone else. A newspaper profile from the 1950s went further, warning that woe betide anyone who called her anything other than Miss Macdonald. Bobo’s kindnesses were small and practical, and one of them survives because someone else wrote it down. The two princesses had a favorite sweet, a certain fudge that Bobo used to make for them in the kitchen.

It is a tiny detail of the sort families keep to themselves. ****

That someone else was Marian Crawford, who would arrive in the nursery with a very different understanding of what a servant owed the family. Her own book opens with a confession she clearly meant: she had always wanted to teach, and she had certainly never intended to become a governess. Before she was anyone’s governess, she was a young woman with a cause.

Born on the 5th of June 1909 at Woodside Cottage near Kilmarnock, in the same house where her mother and grandfather had been born, she lost her father when she was one. When she was six, her mother married again and the family moved east to Dunfermline. A girl growing up there in those years had no reason to imagine she would ever live among royal people, and Marian Crawford’s ambitions pointed in the opposite direction. She trained as a teacher at Moray House Training College in Edinburgh, and her training took her into the poorer parts of the city.

What she saw there stayed with her. In her own words, she saw a great deal of poverty and had to do with children who were not very bright because they were undernourished. “I was at that time very young,” she wrote, “and I became fired with a crusading spirit. I wanted desperately to help.

”

By several accounts, she took a summer job tutoring the children of Lord Elgin near Dunfermline. That led by a single step to the throne. Lady Rose Leveson-Gower, the Duchess of York’s sister, came about this time to Rosyth with her husband, the Admiral. Lady Rose heard about the young teacher and arranged for her to meet the Duke and Duchess.

Before that meeting, there was a smaller moment, the one she remembered first. She was crossing the lawn at Lady Rose’s house when an eerie feeling came over her that someone was watching. She looked up. “Then it was I saw there was a face at the window,” she wrote, “and for the first time I met that long, cool stare I was later to come to know so well.

” The face belonged to the six-year-old Princess Elizabeth, and the stare stayed with the young teacher for the rest of her life. Marian Crawford found the Duchess delightful, with “the nicest, easiest, most friendly of manners” and a merry laugh. Of the Duke, she wrote that he was extraordinarily handsome with a diffident manner and a slight impediment in his speech. The Duchess made the offer lightly: “Why not come for a month,” she said, “and see how you like us and how we like you.

” It was a trial, a month’s work at the family’s country house at Windsor, beginning just before Easter. A young woman who meant to save the children of the slums would spend four weeks teaching two little princesses and then presumably go back to her own life. Most accounts date her arrival in the household to the spring of 1933. When she began, Princess Elizabeth was about six and Princess Margaret about two.

She packed for a month, took the train south toward Windsor, and was taken up to meet her pupil. The scene she recorded is one of the best-known passages about the young Elizabeth ever written. A small figure with a mop of curls sat up in bed, wearing a nightgown with a design of small pink roses on it. She had tied the cords of her dressing gown to the knobs of the old-fashioned bed, and was busy driving her team.

The nanny made the introduction. “This is Miss Crawford,” said Alah in her stern way. The little girl said “How do you do? ” Then she gave the newcomer the same long look she had given her from the window and went on: “Why have you no hair?

”

“I have enough to go on with,” the governess answered. “It’s an Eton crop. ” Then she asked the obvious question: “Do you usually drive in bed? ”

“I mostly go once or twice around the park before I go to sleep, you know,” the princess replied.

The old king had one request for the new governess. “For goodness sake,” King George V told her, “teach Margaret and Lilibet to write a decent hand. That’s all I ask you. ” Crawfy, as she came to be known, had other ideas.

She believed children should know something of the world outside their walls. The surviving accounts record trips on the London Underground, walks in the park, and cups of tea at the YWCA. Those outings were small acts of daring for a royal household. Two little girls who lived behind high walls were being shown how other people lived by a teacher who had spent her training years among poor children in Edinburgh.

The month became a term, and the term became years. There was no formal moment when the trial became a post. She simply stayed because the family wanted her to, and for the next sixteen years or so she was among the people closest to the two princesses outside their own family. The trial turned quietly into a life.

****

On the 10th of December 1936, at Fort Belvedere, Edward VIII signed away the throne he had held for 327 days, giving up the crown to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée. With one signature, he changed the lives of everyone at 145 Piccadilly. On the 12th, his younger brother, the Duke of York, was proclaimed King George VI. The Duchess became Queen Elizabeth, and their elder daughter, the ten-year-old Lilibet, who had no brothers, became heir presumptive to the throne.

From that day, she was the most watched child in the kingdom. For the two Scottish women who cared for her, the work itself barely changed. Bobo still woke beside the princess, dressed her, and kept her clothes. Crawfy still taught her lessons and walked her in the park.

What changed was the value of everything they saw. A nursemaid and a governess in the house of a younger son knew nothing anyone would pay for. A nursemaid and a governess in the house of the heir presumptive held, without ever asking for it, one of the most sought-after stories in the world. The family moved from the tall house on Piccadilly to Buckingham Palace.

The younger princess, then six, protested in the way children do. “But I have only just learned to write York,” she said, according to the governess who wrote it down. The new home was enormous and old, and Crawfy was not impressed. “Life in a palace,” she later wrote, “rather resembles camping in a museum.

”

The coronation came on the 12th of May 1937. The eleven-year-old heir presumptive was woken early, and she wrote about it afterward in an exercise book titled “To Mummy and Papa, in memory of their Coronation, from Lilibet by herself. ” Its opening has become one of the most famous pieces of royal childhood writing: at five in the morning, she was woken by the band of the Royal Marines striking up just outside her window. “I leapt out of bed, and so did Bobo.

” On the most public morning of her father’s reign, the first person the future queen mentioned was the woman in the room with her. After the ceremony, there were photographs and then more photographs. The new queen, worn out by it, said something the governess never forgot. “We aren’t supposed to be human,” she said.

Crawfy put that line in her book. It is a sentence of exhaustion and humor, and it is also a sentence about the rule. ****

When war came in 1939, the princesses were sent north to Balmoral first, with Crawfy, who stayed with them for several months. Then they were moved south to Windsor Castle, and for most of the next five years the old fortress was their home.

Elizabeth was thirteen when the war began. At Windsor, the princess had her own bedroom and a bathroom, sharing the bedroom with Bobo. A Scottish newspaper’s obituary of Bobo in 1993 recorded that the two had shared an air raid shelter under Windsor Castle. Crawfy found a phrase for that sealed world: “A glass curtain seems to come down between you and the outer world,” she wrote, “and escape is not entirely possible.

”

The governess admired the nursemaid’s steadiness. Bobo, she wrote, was “a sensible Scottish lass” who one felt would come “calm and unperturbed through innumerable bombardments. ” The governness also watched the two sisters grow apart in character. Margaret, she recorded, was often naughty, would often defy her with a sidelong look, and was pleased to know she kept them waiting.

In earlier years there had been bath times of “hilarious shrieks, splashing and pillow fights,” and the little sister forever calling after the elder, “Wait for me, Lilibet. Wait for me. ”

The princesses staged Christmas pantomimes at Windsor to raise money for the Queen’s Wool Fund. In 1940, Elizabeth made her first broadcast on the BBC’s Children’s Hour.

Before her first public speech at sixteen, Bobo is said to have given her glucose sweets so that her mouth would not dry. On the 7th of October 1940, an air raid badly damaged 145 Piccadilly. It was finally pulled down in 1959, and in 1975 the Intercontinental Hotel was built on the site. The family recognized the service it had been given.

On the 28th of May 1943, in the King’s Birthday Honours, the London Gazette listed a new member of the Royal Victorian Order, fourth class. The name was Marian Kirk Crawford. It was a personal mark of thanks from the king himself, ten years after her trial month. Bobo had no place in the order yet.

On the 2nd of January 1946, Clara Knight, the nanny the children called Alah, died at Sandringham. She was sixty-six or sixty-seven. She had cared for the Queen herself as a baby and for the Queen’s daughters after her. The family buried her as one of their own.

The funeral was held at St Paul’s Walden in Hertfordshire, and the Queen attended it with both princesses. Alah had kept the family’s confidence absolutely. She was never photographed out of her uniform, and she never spoke to the press. Some of Princess Elizabeth’s childhood dolls stayed with the Knight family for decades, not sold until an auction in 2017.

The Royal Victorian Order, instituted on the 21st of April 1896 by Queen Victoria, was the first order of chivalry given at the sole discretion of the sovereign. It had five grades, from Knight or Dame Grand Cross at the top down through Knight or Dame Commander, then Commander, then Lieutenant, and at the bottom, Member. Below the order itself, there was a Royal Victorian Medal for the more junior members of the household. A Member stood at the foot of the order.

Bobo understood this world instinctively. Prince Philip’s valet, who worked alongside her for years, recorded a small exchange that reveals her whole philosophy. Bobo once told him, “Well, to me you will always be Mr. Dean.

We have to keep up a certain standing in the house. ” Standing meant formality, distance, and discretion. Familiarity was a door, and doors let things out. Her sister Ruby lived by the same code.

In time, Ruby married a palace footman, Norman Gordon, and a gift from Princess Margaret carried an inscription that sums up the whole bargain in a handful of words: “To my dear faithful Ruby, from Margaret. ” Faithful was the word that mattered. ****

In 1947, too ill to walk aboard, Bobo had herself carried onto the ship for South Africa on a stretcher. The royal family was sailing for a long tour, and the nursemaid, now the princess’s personal maid, would not let Lilibet go without her.

That year was a hinge for both Scottish women. The princess was twenty-one, and her own marriage was coming. The governess’s long work was nearly done. Marian Crawford had found the man she meant to marry, George Buthlay, a Scottish bank official.

According to an account in the Daily Express, later cited by her biographers, she had put off marrying for years because she did not want to abandon the King and Queen. In 1947, she finally married him. The sources disagree on the month, some saying July, others September. A Scottish newspaper listed a coffee set from Princess Elizabeth and three bedside lamps from Princess Margaret, and noted nothing from the King and Queen.

Another article from the same paper mentioned a full dinner service from the Queen. Then came the wedding everyone remembered. On the 20th of November 1947, Princess Elizabeth married Philip at Westminster Abbey. He had been born a prince of Greece and Denmark and had served as an officer in the Royal Navy.

He was about to discover that he had married into a household with a fixed and immovable center. Bobo went on the honeymoon. A newspaper story ten years later told how she had laid sprigs of rosemary on the tea table of the honeymoon train with a note: “God bless you both. Rosemary for remembrance.

” Then the friction began. Patricia Mountbatten later described the honeymoon scene to the royal biographer Gyles Brandreth. Bobo would prepare Lilibet’s bath, she said, and then potter in and out of the bathroom while she was having it, effectively keeping Philip at bay. Philip’s friend and private secretary Mike Parker summed it up in a single sentence: “Princess Elizabeth was Bobo’s baby, and that was that.

”

A biographer of Philip wrote in 1981 that the Duke continued to feel that Bobo Macdonald exercised too much influence. The royal writer Ingrid Seward put it the other way round: Bobo Macdonald, she wrote, has never really approved of Prince Philip. An unnamed friend at court, quoted by an American magazine in 1961, explained the problem in the plainest possible terms. “He knows that only one person sits on the Queen’s bed in the morning and gives her all the below-stairs dirt,” the friend said.

“No man would really welcome that. ”

Eileen Parker, Mike Parker’s wife, later wrote that no one was trusted more than Bobo, and she expected the difference due. She also left a small comic scene of a very flustered Bobo who had ironed Eileen’s nylon nightgown and burned a hole in it. But there was no doubting who ranked where, and one biography records that Bobo also took Philip his morning pot of tea.

****

In the honours list gazetted on the last day of 1948, a name appeared that the household had not seen before: Marian Kirk Buthlay, the governess under her married name, made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, the third grade, two steps above where she had begun in 1943. It was a higher grade than Bobo Macdonald would ever hold. On her retirement, the governess was given a grace-and-favour home within the walls of Kensington Palace, a house called Nottingham Cottage. By one biographer’s account, Queen Mary, the princesses’ grandmother, furnished it for her with antiques and flower prints.

A later American history site described a generous pension and a home that cost her no rent. In that same winter, Bobo held no place in the order at all. She had nursed the heir to the throne, slept in her room, sat in a shelter with her through the bombing, and followed her onto her honeymoon. Her first decoration would not come for another four and a half years.

But something else was coming from America. An offer that would later be reported at anywhere from $6,500 to $85,000, depending on whom you believe. Bruce and Beatrice Gould were the editors of the Ladies’ Home Journal, an American magazine for women. They wanted an inside account of the two little princesses.

According to papers that surfaced many years later, they approached the palace and the Foreign Office to get one. The palace refused, those papers suggest, and the government was keen. Britain was poor after the war, and American goodwill mattered. Somewhere in that conversation, the governess’s name came forward.

The plan, as the documents later described it, was for the story to be told anonymously. A royal writer named Dermot Morrah was chosen to write the articles. The governess would help him with her memories. She would be paid from America, and her name would not appear.

The governess kept her papers, the letters she received and the documents she signed, and they ended up in the keeping of her solicitor. They did not reach the public until long after her death. On the 4th of April 1949, Queen Elizabeth, the wife of King George VI, sat down and wrote to her daughter’s governess. Its central sentence has outlived everyone who read it.

“I do feel most definitely,” the Queen wrote, “that you should not write and sign articles about the children, as people in positions of confidence with us must be utterly oyster. ” Then came the threat inside the affection. “If you, the moment you finished teaching Margaret, started writing about her and Lilibet, well, we should never feel confidence in anyone again. ”

But the Queen knew about the anonymous plan, and she did not forbid it.

“Mr. Morrah seemed to think that you could help him with his articles and get paid from America. This would be quite all right as long as your name did not come into it. ” And then she drew the line as firmly as she could.

“Nevertheless, I do feel most strongly that you must resist the allure of American money and persistent editors, and say no, no, no, to offers of dollars for articles about something as private and as precious as our family. ” A newspaper that saw the papers in 2000 quoted a further warning: “You will lose all your friends, because such a thing has never been done. ”

The governess did not say no. On the 25th of May 1949, seven weeks after the Queen’s letter, a contract was dated between Marian Crawford and the Goulds.

A Scottish newspaper that reported on her papers in 2000 quoted one of its clauses: “You will further consider publication of the articles without Her Majesty’s consent. ” Whether the governess understood that her name would appear, whether she believed it would not, or thought the objection had softened, the documents do not settle. What they show is a line drawn on the 4th of April and a contract dated on the 25th of May. In October 1949, Lady Astor, the American-born former member of Parliament, sent the Goulds’ manuscript to the Queen.

Nancy Astor had left the House of Commons in 1945, and she was a natural go-between. The Queen read it. By the account of the biographer Sarah Bradford, she found it “shockingly frank. ” She went through it, annotated it, and asked for cuts.

According to the same biographer, the Goulds did not pass her response on to the governess. Whatever the Queen had marked, whatever she had asked for, Marian Crawford may never have seen it. The Queen’s private verdict was blunt. In a letter, she wrote that “the governess has gone off her head.

” The royal biographer Hugo Vickers, in his life of the Queen Mother published in 2005, wrote that the Goulds rewrote the governess’s prose word by word, line by line. “Incidents were inserted which never happened,” he wrote, “and words put into the mouths of those who never said them. ” If that is right, then the book that would destroy her was partly the work of other hands. Vickers summed up the whole affair in a single line: it was a misinterpretation that would never be solved.

****

The Little Princesses appeared first in the Ladies’ Home Journal in early 1950, and in Britain in Woman’s Own. The serial ran under the governess’s own name. Then came the book. In the United States, it was published by Harcourt Brace at $3.

50, 314 pages. It was an instant success. The Book of the Month Club chose it as its midsummer selection. Time magazine reviewed it on the 17th of July under the headline “The Confessions of Crawfy.

”

Almost nothing in the book would later be recognized as scandal. There were scenes from the nursery and the schoolroom: the toy horses, the Underground, the Guides. There was old King George V asking her to teach the girls to write a decent hand. There was the palace that felt like camping in a museum.

There was the younger princess Margaret, who in the review’s delighted phrase “was known to bite on occasions, leaving a hand bearing the royal teeth marks. ” And there was the Queen’s weary remark after the coronation photographs: “We aren’t supposed to be human. ”

A reviewer in The Scotsman put a finger on what made it striking at all. The frankness, the review said, was “the more striking compared with the unfailing reticence and gentle dignity” of the royal family as described in the book.

The book was frank only by contrast. Against a royal family that said nothing, a governess who said anything at all seemed to be saying a great deal. The book also did something its author perhaps never intended: it put Bobo Macdonald into print. Remember the fudge.

In its pages, the governess recorded that the princesses’ favourite sweet was “a certain fudge that Bobo, the nursery maid, who is now Lilibet’s personal maid, used to make for them in the kitchen. ” She described Bobo reviving disconsolate courtiers with cups of tea, listed Bobo’s Christmas present one year as a tin of Mackintosh’s toffees, and described the two Macdonald sisters in a sentence that has been quoted ever since: “These two girls are there still—Margaret Macdonald and Ruby Macdonald, two sisters who have become the personal maids and friends of two sisters. ” The most discreet woman in the household entered the public record through the pages of the least discreet book the household had ever produced. Bobo had said nothing.

The governess had said it for her. The money was real. In Britain, Woman’s Own was reported to have paid £30,000 for the serial rights. In America, the governess’s own fee is harder to pin down, with most accounts giving $85,000, and the more cautious estimate placing the offer between $6,500 and $85,000.

The reaction was immediate. The historian Adrienne Tenniswood put it in a single plain sentence: “Queen Elizabeth and her daughters were furious. They severed all contact with their old governess, who became a non-person within the royal circle—a traitor, a betrayer of confidences. ” From 1950 onward, the woman who had taught the heir to the throne for sixteen years ceased, in the eyes of the family, to exist.

The Queen, the future Queen Elizabeth II, and Princess Margaret all stopped speaking to her, and as far as the record shows, none of them ever spoke to her again. She lost her home. The governess left Nottingham Cottage, the grace-and-favour house given at the sovereign’s pleasure and in effect taken back by the sovereign’s displeasure. A newspaper in 2022 put it bluntly: Crawfy was “drummed out of her grace-and-favour flat” and never spoken to by any member of the royal family again.

Tenniswood records that she was brought to the edge of a nervous breakdown. By the autumn of 1950, she had retreated to Scotland. The household found a phrase for what she had done, and it outlived her. For years afterward, according to her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, servants who spoke publicly for money were said to be “doing a Crawfy.

” The name of the governess who had taught the heir to the throne to see the Underground had become a verb for betrayal. Princess Elizabeth was twenty-three when the articles appeared. She had known the governess since she was six. No recorded word from Elizabeth about the governess after 1950 has ever been found.

Whether her silence came from her own sense of betrayal, from deference to her mother’s absolute line, or from the household rule itself, nobody knows. The silence is documented. The reason is not. ****

On the 31st of January 1952, at London Airport, a sick king said goodbye to his daughter and turned to her maid.

King George VI was too ill to make the long Commonwealth tour planned for him, and Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh were going in his place. Among the people around the princess was the small, dark-haired Scotswoman who had been with her since she was six weeks old. John Dean, Prince Philip’s valet, wrote about it two years later. He heard the King say to Bobo Macdonald, “Look after the princess for me, Bobo.

” Some later retellings add a line about hoping the tour would not be too tiring. The biographer Sarah Bradford told it as Bobo’s own memory passed on to Dean, adding that Bobo had never before seen the King so upset. It was the last charge the King gave her. She would keep it for the rest of her life.

In Kenya, the princess and the Duke spent a night at Treetops Lodge, then returned to their Kenyan home, Sagana Lodge. It was there, on the 6th of February 1952, that word arrived from England. The King had died at Sandringham. Philip told his wife she was now Queen.

There is a famous saying about that day, that a princess went up a tree and a queen came down. It is a legend. She had already left Treetops when the news arrived, and she learned it at Sagana Lodge. The practical questions began, and many of them fell to Bobo.

The royal biographer William Shawcross describes her packing at Sagana for the journey home. In one version of the story, the clothes packed for the tour included no mourning. According to the recollection of Lady Pamela Hicks, Bobo had to cable her deputy aboard the Gothic to find black clothes. A black coat, a bag, and shoes were found, and a black hat was brought onto the plane in London when it landed, so that the new Queen could step out properly dressed for mourning.

In the other version, told by an American magazine in 1961, mourning clothes were always carried by the royal family when they traveled abroad. In that telling, the problem was different: her grandmother, Queen Mary, remarked that the new Queen’s skirts were far too short for mourning, and Bobo lowered the whole hem in just eight minutes. Both stories cannot be entirely right, and both are told as reported, not proven. What both show is the same woman.

In the worst hours of the princess’s life, the person handling the clothes, the cables, the hems, and the hats was Bobo. ****

On the 1st of June 1953, the eve of the coronation, the London Gazette printed the name Margaret McKay Macdonald in the coronation honours list, made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order, fifth class, by the woman she dressed every morning. The same list contained another name from the royal wardrobe. Norman Hartnell, the couturier who designed the coronation gown, was made a Member of the fourth class, one step above her.

In the formal order of things, the dressmaker ranked above the dresser. In the private order of things, as the household well knew, it was often the other way round. The coronation came the next day, the 2nd of June 1953, in Westminster Abbey, the first coronation in British history to be televised. A royal magazine reported in 2023 that Bobo, her sister Ruby, and Norman Hartnell all watched the ceremony from the Queen’s Box in the Abbey.

A newspaper profile of 1957 told an even more striking story: that the police cleared a special route for Bobo across London. Both accounts are reported rather than proven. The coronation was followed by the longest journey of the Queen’s early reign, the great Commonwealth tour of 1953 and 1954. Bobo and her two assistants packed for days in the wardrobe rooms on the second floor of Buckingham Palace, working from the Queen’s own itinerary on which the Queen had pencilled the outfit for each occasion.

Her working kit included a zip bag holding spare stockings, shoes, and white gloves, so that whatever happened in a receiving line or on a muddy airfield, the Queen would never be caught unprepared. Bobo’s authority over the couturiers was real and it was felt. When she died, The Guardian’s obituary called her “the scourge of milliners and couturiers. ” A milliner who made hats for the Queen left a small scene behind.

“Miss Macdonald and Miss Betty from the house of Hardy Amies had a conference,” the milliner recalled, “and finally gave me the head measurement. ” The Queen’s own head size was a matter for negotiation between her dresser and a couture house, and the dresser held the tape. According to one biography of the Queen, Hardy Amies gave Bobo a couture outfit of her own every year. The royal writer Dorothy Laird said in 1961 that the Queen’s closest woman friend, other than her sister, was undoubtedly Miss Macdonald, so close that their rapport had been called “almost telepathic.

”

In the summer of 1955, a magazine column under the governess’s name described the pageantry of Trooping the Colour, a parade that never took place. The column was called “Crawfy’s Column” and it ran in Woman’s Own, the same magazine reported to have paid £30,000 for The Little Princesses five years earlier. By the accounts of her life, the column was a social diary written by journalists weeks in advance and printed under her name. The governess did not attend the events it described.

On the 28th of May 1955, a national rail strike was called, and Trooping the Colour was cancelled because of it. But the column had already been written and set in type, and it went out describing the parade as if it had happened. The race meeting at Ascot, which the column also covered, is a slightly different case. Many accounts say Royal Ascot was cancelled that year too; a history of the races says it was postponed instead and opened on the 12th of July.

Either way, the column described the meeting as if on a day when it did not take place. The governess had been made to describe royal occasions she had not attended and could not have seen. The result was public ridicule, and it finished her. Her biographer wrote that the disgrace ended her career as a writer.

In July 1957, a syndicated newspaper story ran under a headline that would have pleased the Queen: “Refused Fortune for Royal Secrets. ” The woman who refused it was the Queen’s dresser, and the fortune, according to the story, was $150,000 from an American magazine. An American magazine profile four years later repeated the figure, though it said the offer had come from a newspaperman who wanted her memoirs. The details differ.

The answer in both versions was the same. If the stories were right, Bobo had been offered nearly twice as much as the highest figure ever reported for The Little Princesses, and she had turned it down. No warning letter to her appears in any account. Why not?

Bobo had no husband pressing her, no children to provide for, no home outside the palace, and no life that the money could have bought her. Everything she valued was already hers: the rooms in every royal house, the Queen’s company, the standing she guarded so fiercely. To sell her story would have been to sell the only life she had. Shawcross summed her up in a single sentence: Bobo, he wrote, was “a Scotswoman who was able to combine loyalty and discretion with frankness, sometimes bordering on fierceness.

”

In 1957, according to a biography and a newspaper of the time, Bobo spent three weeks in the London Hospital with a virus after a state visit to Portugal. The Queen came to see her, bringing flowers, and by one newspaper’s account, stayed for forty minutes. Then, by the same accounts, Bobo insisted on going with her to Paris for the state visit that April. “I must go,” she was quoted as saying.

“My little lady wants me. ”

A handwritten letter of hers on palace notepaper sold at auction in 2018 with an estimate of £50 to £70. It was written in 1969 to the Queen’s hairdresser, and it is one of the very few documents in her own words to have surfaced. It is perfectly harmless.

She thought the royal family film very good and the investiture very impressive. Of Prince Charles she wrote that “he is a splendid young man. Everybody loves him. ” Even writing privately to a colleague, she gave nothing away.

****

The governess’s house in Aberdeenshire stood, by the accounts, about two hundred yards from the road the royal family took to Balmoral. Year after year, the story goes, the royal cars passed within sight of the house where the governess lived on their way to the family’s Highland holidays. Nobody stopped. No record has ever been found of any member of the family calling at her door.

After the humiliation of 1955, she wrote nothing more for the magazines. She refused every request from journalists. Some footage of her survives, from an interview later shown in a television documentary, in which she spoke warmly of the Duke and Duchess of York and the responsibility they gave her. “The Duke and Duchess of York, her parents, gave me full responsibility,” she said.

“And you can imagine how very greatly I felt such responsibility. ”

George Buthlay, the husband she had waited so long to marry, died in 1977 by most accounts. She was then sixty-seven or sixty-eight, a widow cut off from the family that had given her life its meaning. The next part of her story has to be told with care.

According to a Scottish newspaper that saw her private papers in 2000, she attempted to take her own life. Some later accounts speak of more than one attempt. The same newspaper reported the note she left, a single sentence that holds the whole of her exile: “The world has passed me by, and I can’t bear those I love to pass me by on the road. ”

She survived.

She lived another decade. By one account, she suffered a series of strokes in her last years; another says she died of cancer. She died on the 11th of February 1988 at Hawkhill House, a nursing home in Aberdeen. She was seventy-eight.

A newspaper later reported that neither the Queen nor the Queen Mother nor Princess Margaret sent a wreath to her funeral. One later account went further: no member of the royal family attended. Yet she kept faith with them to the end, in the only way left to her. She had letters from the princesses written in the years when she was their teacher and their friend.

They would have fetched good money. She never sold them. According to the novelist Wendy Holden, who researched her life, she left a box of those letters in her will, and they are now said to be in the royal archives. She could have published the Queen’s own warning, with its permission for an anonymous version, and made the family’s anger look unjust.

She never did. In that at least, she was as silent as Bobo. According to a Scottish newspaper writing about her in 2018, she was supported in her later life by her royal household pension. If that account is right, the family that would not speak to her went on paying her.

The money came from the household. The silence came from the family. The two never met. ****

In 1974, Bobo broke her collarbone and four ribs in what one writer called a nasty accident, and she remained in service.

She was seventy, or close to it. She stayed at her post for about sixteen years more. A Scottish newspaper’s obituary in 1993 recorded that she had been forced by ill health to retire about three years earlier, which puts the end of her working life at around 1990. By then she was in her middle eighties.

She had dressed the Queen for nearly forty years of the reign, and cared for her for more than twenty-five years before that. Retirement for Bobo meant staying exactly where she was, in her rooms at Buckingham Palace. Douglas Keay, quoted in her obituary, described her position in those last years: “Bobo held a unique position in Buckingham Palace, having her own suite, no duties, and enjoying a closer personal friendship with the Queen than practically anyone else, including some of the Queen’s closest relatives. ” When her health failed, by one magazine’s account, nurses were hired on royal orders to look after her.

The roles had turned. For decades Bobo had cared for Elizabeth. Now the Queen cared for her. Two newspapers reported after her death that on Bobo’s birthday, the Queen would bring her a cup of tea, reversing the habit of a lifetime.

In 1991, the royal yacht Britannia made a cruise of the Western Isles, and according to a royal writer of the time, it was arranged so that Bobo could see her sister Ruby. When the moment came, Bobo decided to stay on board. Perhaps she was too frail. Perhaps the ship had become home.

The record gives no reason. She died on the night of Wednesday, the 22nd of September 1993, at Buckingham Palace. She was eighty-nine. An American newspaper recorded where she died with a detail that no invented story could improve: she died, it said, in her rooms filled with the Queen’s dresses, coats, and ceremonial outfits.

The girl from the cottage with the zinc tub died surrounded by the wardrobe of a Queen. The palace issued a short statement. The Queen, it said, is naturally very sad about the news. The newspapers printed the coronation essay with its eleven-year-old princess leaping out of bed beside her nurse.

A woman who had spent sixty-seven years just out of the camera’s view became, for one week, briefly visible. Today the National Portrait Gallery in London lists her among its subjects as nurse and dresser to Queen Elizabeth II. Even there, a small question hangs in the air. A commenter on its collection has suggested that an old postcard said to show Bobo may in fact show the nanny Alah.

The funeral was held eight days later, on the 30th of September 1993, at the Queen’s Chapel beside St James’s Palace, a small royal chapel built in the seventeenth century for Henrietta Maria, the Catholic Queen of Charles I. The Queen attended. A press photograph from that day carries a caption of almost unbearable plainness: “The Queen leaving the funeral service of Margaret ‘Bobo’ Macdonald at the Queen’s Chapel, St James’s Palace. ” Elizabeth II went in person to mourn the woman who had held her at six weeks old, crouched with her at a window on coronation morning, sat with her in a shelter under Windsor Castle, followed her onto her honeymoon, and packed for her in Kenya on the day her father died.

Bobo’s sister Ruby survived her. An obituary noted that Ruby had also been a member of the royal household since the 1930s. The two sisters from the Black Isle had given their entire working lives to the two royal sisters, and neither, so far as the record shows, ever sold a word of it. Set the two funerals side by side.

In February 1988 in Aberdeen, a governess who had taught the Queen for most of her childhood died, and by every account that has survived, no wreath came from the Queen, the Queen Mother, or Princess Margaret. In September 1993 in London, a dresser who had cared for the Queen since infancy died, and the Queen herself came to her funeral. The two women had arrived in the same household within seven years of each other. They had served the same child.

They had both been decorated by the same order. By the accounts that survive, they had both been offered American money for what they knew. Five and a half years separated their deaths. Everything else about their endings was opposite.

****

In June 2000, Crawfy’s papers, kept by her solicitor, reached the newspapers. The Daily Record in Scotland on the 24th of June and The Guardian in London the next day reported what the documents appeared to show. According to those reports, the Queen Mother had been secretly involved in a government plan to sell anecdotes about the princesses to an American magazine, a plan brokered by the Foreign Office. The palace had refused the Goulds at first.

The government had been keen. The governess’s name had come forward through official channels, and the Queen herself had written that anonymous help, paid from America, would be quite all right, so long as the governess’s name did not come into it. The governness had company in what she did. The government had wanted the story told.

The Queen’s own letter had blessed an anonymous version. And at the end of it all, only one person was punished: the one whose name appeared on the cover. The rule she broke has since hardened into something more formal. The royal household now asks its staff to sign an undertaking of confidentiality.

Its explanatory notes say that it binds them during their employment and during the remainder of their life, binds their executors after they are dead, and applies even after the death of the royal person they served. Any profits from a breach are to be assigned to that person. Nobody knows exactly when the household first put such words on paper, and no record links them directly to the governess. But what the Queen had once asked in a single letter, that people in positions of confidence must be “utterly oyster,” now stood in black and white, for life and beyond it.

Then there was the exception. On the 29th of October 2019, the Queen’s own dresser in later years, Angela Kelly, published a book about her service called The Other Side of the Coin. Kelly had come into the household by one account in 1994, the year after Bobo died. Her publisher said she was the first serving member of the royal household to have been given this extraordinary permission, personally granted by the Queen.

A newspaper in 2022 put it simply: royal servants are not supposed to get too close to the royal family, and certainly not supposed to write books about them, and Kelly was the exception. By one newspaper’s account, she was also given a grace-and-favour house at Windsor and permission for a memoir deal of three books. A dresser who wrote about the Queen with permission kept her house. A governess who wrote about the princesses without it lost hers.

The world has since judged the governess more kindly. A novel by Wendy Holden, The Governess, appeared in 2020, and in America it was called The Royal Governess. Another novelist, Tessa Arlen, told her story the following year in In Royal Service to the Queen. In 2016, she appeared as a character in The Crown, played by the actress Sara Vickers.

A play about her was staged in Sydney in 2024. In April 2020, old film of the governess dancing with the two princesses was released to mark the Queen’s ninety-fourth birthday. Holden wrote that she would take it as a sign that the Queen had finally forgiven her devoted and loving governess. That is one writer’s hope.

Nobody knows what the Queen felt. The mementos have scattered. In February 2024, a Christmas card from the years before the break, drawn in crayon and inscribed “To Crawfy from Lilibet,” sold at auction for $12,183. It had come down through the family of her lawyer.

Her friend Nigel Athel spoke about her with a simplicity that lands harder than any judgment. “She always hoped for a reconciliation,” he said, “but it never came. Crawfy was intensely loyal. ”

Two Scottish women came to work for the same two little girls.

One said nothing for sixty-seven years, and when she died, the Queen came to the chapel beside St James’s Palace to say goodbye. The other wrote down the fudge, the horses, and the face at the window, and spent her exile, by the accounts, within sight of the road to Balmoral as the family she loved drove by.