Would You Like to Live in a Palace?

     People think that a royal palace is the last word in up-to-date luxury, replete with everything the heart can desire, and that people who live there do so in absolute comfort. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Life in a palace rather resembles camping in a museum. These historic places are so old, so tied up with tradition, that they are dropping to bits, all the equipment there decades behind the times.

    That was the summation made by Marion Crawford ("Crawfie") of her experience of moving into Buckingham Palace when her employer, the Duke of York had unexpectedly and unwillingly become King George VI.
     Prior to that, the family had lived at 145 Piccadilly: not a palace, or even a mansion, but a house which any well-to-do family might occupy, with four floors and a handful of servants. Now they were compelled to move into an edifice which had to do duty as an office, centre of government, guest house, servants' quarters, and staterooms for official occasions. In any palace, the family's living quarters occupy only a small wing. After all, it doesn't matter whether you are a king or a cobbler, you can wear only one set of clothes and sleep in one bed at a time. A king might have a larger range of better clothes, and a more elegant bed, but with respect to utility and comfort, luxury is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Indeed, some of it is chiefly for show. At Windsor Castle is a display of the most exquisite table sets provided as coronation and birthday gifts to the royal family on various occasions. I asked when the royal family uses them, and was informed that they were far too valuable for even royalty to use. Perhaps you have something similar in your own home.
     There are 775 rooms, and interminable corridors. "People here need bicycles," declared a young Princess Elizabeth. It took five minutes to get to the gardens. To reach the dining rooms, food had to be brought the better part of half a mile through corridors and up and down stairs. (In all mansions and palaces the distance between kitchen and dining area is considerable. In the Middle Ages it was only the common people who were able to consume piping hot food. Their betters had to do with luke warm fare.)
     The heating was inadequate, but by the time the new king had arrived, electric lighting had been installed, although it was relatively recent, and the arrangements not always logical. Crawfie found that the switch for her bedroom light was located in the corridor two yards from the door. On the first night, "[t]he wind moaned in the chimneys like a thousand ghosts." On the first morning, she crossed the corridor on the way to her bathroom, and ran into the postman. Buckingham Palace has its own post office, with letters delivered to individual rooms. It also had - and probably still has - a full time resident rodent exterminator. You don't think of such things, of course, but when you do, it seems obvious.
     In the same category was the clock winder, who came in once a week to Windsor Castle, and no doubt Buckingham Palace as well. Likewise the table decker who, every day, would go around filling the flower vases and renew the flowers. Both of these worthies would just walk into a room, no matter what was going on at the time, do their job, and walk out, without taking the slightest notice of anyone, or anyone taking notice of them. "He was impersonal as a bluebottle on a windowpane," to quote Crawfie.
     We tend to forget that palaces were not designed for mod cons. The latter had to be inserted on an ad hoc basis. At Windsor Castle, for example, bathrooms had been carved into the tremendously thick walls, and the bedrooms were supplied with electric stoves, but during the war years there was no central heating. Crawfie remembered wearing fur boots under her evening dress as she traversed the icy passages. During air raids, the family huddled in the dungeons.

     How would the lower orders react to all this? Well, during the Blitz, children and their mothers were evacuated from the working class tenements of Glasgow and billeted on the inhabitants of the countryside. The King also did his bit, and opened up Craigowan Lodge, a magnificent seven bedroom mansion on the Balmoral estate. Alas! Its grandeur was not always appreciated, least of all by the children. They were terrified by the silence, afraid to go into the woods, and frightened if they saw a deer. They wanted to go back to the slums!

Reference: The Little Princesses, by Marion Crawford (1950), the former governess of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.