Show notes
Wendy Holden’s latest books feature Royal Sagas with two women who got on the wrong side of the Windsors – that’s Queen Elizabeth’s royal house, in case you didn’t know – and they both lived to regret it. My, how they lived to regret it.
Crawfie, Queen Elizabeth’s very important World War Two governess, and Wallis Simpson, the woman whose name became synonymous with forcing a king’s abdication, both came out of their exchanges with the Windsors very badly.
But have we been told the full story, and have they been treated fairly? Wendy tends to think not.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in today’s Binge Reading Wendy talks about these two latest books – one called The Governess, the other called The Duchess. She explains why she thinks there are still truths to be told about both women and the history that unfolded around them.
We’ve got three eBooks of The Governess to give away to three lucky readers in our new promotion – Royal House for the month of September. Enter the draw on our website www.thejoysofbingereading.com/giveaway. You’ll find links to Wendy’s books and contact details there as well.
ENTER DRAW FOR THE GOVERNESS
News on Binge Reading On Patreon
I’ve got exciting news on the Patreon front. First- the not so good part – I’ve discovered thanks to one of our listeners, Shakkura, who especially liked the Sara Sue’s Cherokee Nation episode – that Patreon Binge Reading link wasn’t working. It was a very minor glitch, but I struggle with the back end stuff so don’t ask me why it opened for me but not for the public. That’s fixed now and I’d like to give a shoutout to Shakkura for alerting me to the problem and them becoming our first Patreon supporter once it was fixed.!
Don’t forget that you too like Shakurra can support Binge Reading on Patreon, for the cost of a cup of coffee a month. You’ll help defray the costs of sound editing, transcribing, and hosting I incur simply getting this al set up – not including the hours it takes to read the books and schedule the interviews.
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Six things you’ll learn from Wendy Holden podcast
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
Why Wendy’s is pivoting from chick lit to historical fiction
How she’d become fascinated with the royals
Her different reading of the Wallis-Edward love affair
The shameful exile of a devoted royal governess
Working in the garden hut during lockdown
The book she just read that she loved
Where to find Wendy Holden:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wendyholdenauthor/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wendy.holden.1401
Twitter: @Wendy_Holden
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53288434-the-lost- apothecary
Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wendy-Holden/e/B000AQ79TO?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1585161065&sr=1-1
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
But now, here’s Wendy.
Introducing historical fiction author Wendy Holden
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Wendy, and welcome to the show. It’s so good to have you with us.
Author Wendy Holden
Wendy Holden: Thank you so much, Jenny. It’s so exciting to be talking to wonderful New Zealand, a country which I would love to visit. When everything’s possible, when the world’s opened up again, I’ll be over like a shot.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it’s a sore point for us, because we’re back in lockdown at the moment.
Wendy Holden: I’m so sorry about that. Isn’t that awful?
Jenny Wheeler: They sent us Delta from Sydney, very unfair of them.
You have got The Governess and The Duchess – two fantastic books out in successive years. You’ve written 30 books, many of them best sellers, but releasing these two blockbuster reads in quick succession like this must be a bit of a career high for you.
Wendy Holden: Yes, it is Jenny, and in so many ways. Changing from chick lit to historic fiction is what they call in the trade a pivot – when you swap one genre for another. But secretly I’ve always wanted to write historical fiction, and these books in particular were burning to be written. I almost feel as if they were waiting for me to do so.
Certainly, when I picked up Marion Crawford’s autobiography, The Little Princesses, in a second-hand bookshop, it really felt like fate, and The Duchess came directly out of writing The Governess. It has been a huge challenge launching The Governess during the first lockdown and writing The Duchess during the second, but I always say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
The Governess and The Duchess – complementary publiching
Jenny Wheeler: They have virtually identical covers; they’re very much published as a set. What did you consider these two women had in common, apart from the obvious thing of women done wrong by the British Crown?
Wendy Holden: Obviously, the covers are meant to be similar and I’m really proud of them. I think they look really beautiful; I adore them. They look similar because the stories have a lot in common. Both Marion and Wallis came from outside the Royal Family and both brought a fresh perspective into it, and both tried to have a modernizing influence. However, as you say, both got on the wrong side of the Windsors and both were condemned by history as a result.
What I have tried to show in both cases was that their stories have been distorted. Wallis, in my view, was far from being the snake-hipped seductress out to steal a king from his throne, and this is what The Duchess is about. The Governess is a story of dedication, devotion, and love. It is not the tale of a woman who betrayed her employers, which is how the Royal Family tried to paint poor Crawfie.
Jenny Wheeler: I must admit, I used to keep scrapbooks about the Royal Family when I was a tiny tot. This is an embarrassing admission, but I do remember Crawfie from those days and the pictures of her with the princesses. Why do you think she has gone into virtual ignominy for so many years?
What made ‘Crawfie’ disappear out of the historical record?
Governess Marion Crawford with the two Princesses – Elizabeth and Margaret
Wendy Holden: Her story disappeared because she was vaporized by the Royal Family. When her autobiography, The Little Princesses, was published, she was cut off. She was ostracized, and she was terribly ashamed and horrified by what had happened, so she hid herself away.
There were two things going on. She hid herself away for basically the rest of her life because of the Royal’s disapproval of her. It meant that any accounts written of those years, any biographies, anything really, only had her as a footnote, if that, so she disappeared from history.
But that was a great opportunity for me, because when I found her book in a second-hand bookshop, I couldn’t believe that this story hadn’t been looked at for such a long time. It was about 70 years since it had last reared its head, because The Little Princesses was written in 1950 after which she disappeared, so it’s pretty much 70 years.
Fast forward 70 years, and Wendy Holden walks into a bookshop in Northumberland, Northern England and picks it up and thinks, hang on! That was amazing. Would you like me to talk about what it was about the story?
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, absolutely.
Wendy Holden: First of all, I thought, hang on a minute, what is this story, who is this woman and what’s happening here? Once I started to flick through it, I thought, this is it. This is the novel I want to write. The reason for that is her story is completely and utterly amazing. It combines so many elements. There is glamor, drama, tragedy. It covers a period of British history which is the most seismic of the 20th century.
Drawn out of the Scottish slums to the Royal Family
She joined the Royal Family just before the abdication, which meant she saw the events close up and exactly as the Windsors did. She kept this ringside seat for the 1937 Coronation of King George and Queen Elizabeth. Then, if that wasn’t enough, along came the Second World War, the whole of which she spent with the Royal Family and particularly with the little girls, in Windsor Castle crouching in the medieval dungeons as a Luftwaffe roared overhead. It couldn’t be more dramatic. That was a second story in a way. Finally, there was the drama of her leaving the family in the circumstances I’ve just described.
But this is all referring to the beginning of the story, which is what drew me in in the first place, because on the very first page of The Little Princesses there is a paragraph which begins something like, I worked for the Royal Family for 17 years, but I never meant to do this. I never wanted to work with royalty. I trained as a teacher, and I wanted to help poor children in Edinburgh. I wanted to work in the slums.
That was what really drew me in. I thought, how did a woman who wanted to work with poor children in the slums end up working for the most privileged family in the world? The story is an amazing one. It’s a story of coincidences and unlikely events, but more than that, it’s the story of a young woman, Crawfie, who was one of the first generation of women in Britain who could train for a profession, who could have a career post-First World War, when society was opening up for women.
Marion Crawford – a very modern figure in 1930’s London
She was a young professional woman, a very modern figure in the early 1930s, when she was drawn into this very traditional institution of the Royal Family. One of the reasons she stuck with the job, having been very reluctant to take it, was that she felt the little girls, the little princesses, particularly Princess Elizabeth, who was the one she was most occupied with when she first began to work for the Windsors, had this bizarrely Victorian, sequestered life. They were not involved at all with how normal people lived, and she felt it was really important that they were shown some degree of normality.
She made that her business – to try and bring normal life and the little princesses together. It was a really interesting story. It isn’t just the story of a posh woman going along to be a nanny for two little princesses. It’s a story of two worlds colliding, to the benefit of the Windsors, because one of the things that Crawfie introduced to the Queen was a degree of normal life.
These days, and throughout her life, particularly now, given what’s happening in the Royal Family, people refer to the Queen’s good sense. They refer to her common touch and the way she can identify with ordinary people. She reads the mood of the nation, and I like to think that was because all those years ago Crawfie introduced her to normal life. She took her on the tube, took her to Woolworths, took her swimming, showed her that there was more to life than the inside of a palace. She was a hugely important figure in the Queen’s life.
How Crawfie help modernize British Royals
Princess Elizabeth works on a vehicle during the Second World War – ‘only allowed because the King knew the end was near.’
Jenny Wheeler: Even at the very ending stages of the war, when the princess desperately wanted to be part of the war effort, her family were utterly against it. Even at that point, she helped her break through, didn’t she?
Wendy Holden: She did help her break through, but Princess Elizabeth’s involvement in the war is really interesting, because the Queen has made a lot of capital out of that over the years, the fact that she knows how to bleed a sump or change an engine or whatever it is.
But what was interesting about that is Crawfie said in her autobiography, part of which I included in The Governess, that that was the point at which it was obvious to Crawfie that the war was about to end.
There was no way the king was going to have his daughter involved in the war effort if there was any actual danger, so she knew then that it was all about to end. It is quite interesting to think that it was right at the end, and that was a sign that it was about to be over.
Crawfie herself tried many times to leave royal service because she wanted to have a private life. She wanted to have a husband. She wanted to have children of her own. In the end this was not possible, because the Windsors insisted on keeping her working for them.
But during the war, one of her efforts to escape was to go and be a Wren, be in the Royal Navy.
How much has changed in the Windsors over 70 years?
She went to the King and said, I want to serve, I want to be in the armed forces. I want to be a Wren. He said, oh for goodness sake, Crawfie. If you went off to join the Wrens, you would just end up cooking some old admiral’s breakfast. Your job, your war effort, is to stay here looking after the girls so the Queen and I can do our jobs.
Of course, the Queen and he were doing a hugely important job. They were rallying the nation, at a time of great peril. At that point, Crawfie is front and center of the British war effort and the Allied war effort, including you lot. It is all amazing that she was really in the frame at this historic moment. If she left her job, the war would be lost.
Jenny Wheeler: Reading The Governess makes us realize just how much has changed since then. I guess it is 70 years, so it is nearly a century when you look at it, but they would never get away with treating someone like Crawfie in their employ like that today, would they?
Wendy Holden: Jenny, that’s such an interesting question because they did treat Crawfie very badly. It was the Queen Mother who was behind it, and the irony of it was that the Queen Mother was the person who wanted the book to be written in the first place. The whole situation began with her. One of the ironies of The Little Princesses, the book on which I based The Governess, is that it was such a loving book. It was a loving tribute to the closeness of the Royal Family. It is a stark contrast to the books published about them now, which tend to reveal some quite unflattering things.
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A ruthless streak plain to see in British Royal Family
That leads me to think – would they want to treat someone now the way they treated Crawfie? It seems to me that they treat people almost worse, including each other. If we are to believe all the things we read – or even some of the things we read – about how Prince Harry is treating his family, they seem to be even worse with the way they treat each other than the way they were treating people who worked for them at the time.
So it’s difficult to say. The heart of this is that the Windsors are a fascinating family for so many reasons, and one of the reasons is that they do have a quite ruthless streak. The way Crawfie was treated was quite ruthless. The way Prince Harry seems to be treating his family is also quite ruthless, and in the way they’re responding there’s a certain amount of ruthlessness.
The old Windsor steel is still flashing. It’s difficult to see that there’s been a huge change, but that’s all part of the interest, because you’re never quite sure what’s really going on.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s very right. Growing up through the era of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and seeing the public face that was presented of her over the years and then reading both these books, The Governess and The Duchess, you get a very different picture of that lady in those books.
So much has been written about Wallis and I wondered what made you think you might have something fresh or different to say about her?
Wallis Simpson – an American at court
Wallis Simpson with Edward, Prince of Wales and abdicated King
Wendy Holden: As I said earlier, The Duchess grew out of The Governess. One of the reasons it emerged as a story was that when I was writing The Governess there was a point in the book in which they were at Balmoral. Wallis Simpson has just arrived at Balmoral and Crawfie is walking in the woods around Balmoral, and she comes across Wallis who is in an agitated state. The reason for this is that she’s arrived to find herself the center of a maelstrom, and this actually happens.
What happened was Wallis was invited, well she was made, basically, to come up to Balmoral by the king as he was then. Edward VIII had been king for six months, and he made her come up to the castle. She didn’t particularly want to, but she was made to come up, and when she arrived, he came to meet her.
This caused a huge furore, because he was supposed to be opening a hospital in Aberdeen, which is where the station was where she came up. This is the nearest station to Balmoral. He was supposed to be opening the hospital in Aberdeen and he didn’t do it, because he was going to meet her at the station. This ended up being all over the papers and when she saw it, it was a nightmare because she got the blame. When I was writing that episode, I thought, I bet Wallis had no idea that was happening. I bet she had no idea about the hospital, I bet she had no idea that he was supposed to be doing that and he came to meet her instead. She must have been furious that she got blamed for it.
An alternative version of Wallis Simpson and the abdication story
I started to see an alternative version of all the terrible stories about Mrs. Simpson. The more I looked into it, she became a bigger character in The Governess. She took up more space than I expected her to, and she ended up dominating that whole chapter and being quite a positive sympathetic woman.
After I had finished The Governess, I started to look at Wallis as a character. I began to find that there was a whole alternative version of her, which has never seen the light of day, and particularly what I call her Cinderella years. These were the years when she first came to London in the late 1920s, when she came to marry Ernest. Ernest and she came to Britain to start a new life because things had gone wrong for them in America, and they wanted a fresh start.
Wallis came to London hoping she’d make friends and have some fun, but it didn’t happen. The British weren’t interested in her. She was a divorcee. They didn’t have any money. They didn’t have any connections. She was very lonely, and she had to get to grips with the strange new city with its terrible weather, the Cockney accent she couldn’t understand.
But she did lots of interesting things. She did her own shopping, which is unusual for the time. She tried to have dinner parties, cooking American food and doing American style things. But it never really worked, and it was all really difficult. Funnily enough, one of the things she found most bizarre about the British was their complete obsession with royalty. She couldn’t understand that at all.
Wallis – no snaky seductress out to steal a King’s heart
The Duchess – Wendy Holden
I based this version of Wallis as a much more positive, sympathetic woman on her autobiography and also Edward VIII’s autobiography, and the various accounts at the time of people who knew them both.
My story in The Duchess was to trace how she got from this very unlikely low base of being someone that no one was interested in, to being this dazzling favorite of the world’s most eligible bachelor. It is an amazing story and involves so many incredible personalities and unlikely things. It is very dramatic.
Again, I had that feeling I had with The Governess, that even though I was writing about a really well-known person, I was breaking fresh ground and shining a light into areas that had never been looked at.
As I was saying earlier, everybody thinks she’s a snake-hipped seductress who wanted to steal a king from his throne. No one has ever been interested in the idea that there was any other version of her, but the actual version I uncovered seems to be much closer to the truth than any of the ghastly versions of her that seem to be the accepted truth.
Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned earlier the ruthlessness and that rings a bell with me because this book shows up a side of the Prince of Wales, Edward VIII. He has often come across as rather a weak character who got captured by this woman. You present quite a different story, don’t you?
Wendy Holden: Yes, absolutely. I don’t think he was weak, and I don’t think he was pushed around at all. I don’t want to spoil the story too much, but my version of their relationship is very different from the accepted version.
How Edward Prince of Wales supported his addict brother
George- Duke of Kent – died in Second World War – but was helped through heroine addiction by his brother, Edward Prince of Wales
I think he saw something in her. He saw many things in her actually. They had dark things and bright things binding them together. The dark things would be things like they both had terrible childhoods and they both had awful experiences with addiction.
Not personally, but people who were close to them. Wallis had this terrible, abusive first husband. In fact, having read her account and other accounts of the horrors of her first marriage, it’s hard to think of her as this terrible woman, because she suffered so much.
He had an awful childhood. The idea that he is this selfish, weak, slippery, treacherous person was completely blown out of the water for me by discovering the story of what happened with his brother George, the Duke of Kent as he later became.
The Duke of Kent was a heroin addict and he nearly died. He was very ill, in an absolute state. His brother Edward and the Prince of Wales came in and looked after him and basically saw him through and saved his life. He did it by sitting by his bedside 24/7, willing him to survive, and it went on for months.
The idea that he is this awful, feckless person was completely confounded by that story. I don’t think he was a weak man. Certainly, he realized he didn’t want to be king, and that he would not be a good king. One of the shocking things for him was the speed at which his father deteriorated, because when George V died in 1936, it wasn’t expected. The Prince of Wales thought he had a good few more years being the Prince of Wales. To be hurled onto the throne so suddenly was a complete nightmare.
Edward ‘knew he wasn’t going to be a good King’
I don’t think he wanted to do it. He knew that he wasn’t going to be any good at it. One of the reasons for that was his temperament. He wasn’t interested in being bowed and scraped to, he didn’t like the formality, he hated all the routine of it – being chained to a banqueting table, as he called it. He wanted to get out there and do modern things, but it wasn’t easy to do.
I don’t think he wanted children because he’d had this awful childhood, as I say, and I don’t think he was a particularly paternal person. Obviously that’s a problem. You can’t be a king who doesn’t want children. I think he looked around and thought, the obvious person to do this job is my brother. He’s got these world-famous little princesses and this wonderful crowd-pleasing wife. I don’t want to do it, so he should do it.
When he met Wallis, as well as liking her for many reasons, including the fact that she encouraged him in his wish to modernize the monarchy, he loved her because she was American. He loved Americans. He loved their modernity; he loved their pizzazz and their know-how and their ingenuity and their informality. He loved all that. The fact that she was a divorcee and she didn’t want children either, and the fact that she was foreign, were completely crucial because he knew she was going to be absolutely the last person who was going to be accepted. He deliberately pursued her because of that.
Being ‘the most unsuitable woman on the planet’ made her irresistible
I think he really loved her, but the fact that she was all those things, i.e., the most unsuitable woman on the planet to be the Queen of England, made her the most suitable woman on the planet as far as he was concerned. It wasn’t that she used him for her own social climbing ends, as is often said. It was completely the other way around because that makes so much more sense when you look at the events. Nothing else makes any sense.
It was weird, what happened over the abdication. The things he did, the actions he took, the decisions he made were all so crazy. But when you look at them in that way, that they were all deliberate, they make perfect sense.
Jenny Wheeler: You get the distinct impression in your book that he had a different idea about what was going to happen after that. He would find a nice quiet corner in England, and of course he didn’t expect to be exiled. Would it have made a difference if he had understood that?
Wendy Holden: Absolutely. I’m sure what happened must have been a nightmare. I don’t think he had any idea that he would never be allowed to come back to live in England. He would never have done that, I’m sure, if he had realized that would be the consequence.
It only makes sense if you look at it in the light of the fact that he thought he was doing something positive. He didn’t see what he was doing as something terrible. He saw it as something positive because, in his mind, he was leaving the throne for someone who was going to do a much better job and who in fact did a much better job. He was right.
Edward Prince of Wales ‘wanted to preserve some private life’
I’m not saying he enjoyed it and went about it with a lightheartedness and a skip in his step. it was a complete traumatic nightmare, the whole thing, but his intentions were positive. He wanted to give the throne to someone who was going to do a better job. That was the end of it really. He didn’t want to do it, but he did want to serve. He did want to be part of the Royal Family and do his bit, but he wanted to do something at a lower level than being the king – something that would allow him to have some kind of private life.
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This is all very Prince Harry territory, obviously. But it wasn’t received in that way. He ended up being exiled for the rest of his life and only allowed to come back when he was dead, which was terrible and not what he intended at all. But it was all out of his hands because it became a constitutional historical matter and his reputation has never recovered. I don’t think he intended it to work out that way at all.
Jenny Wheeler: How much do you think the implacable dislike that Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother had for him made that the end result, that it went on for years?
Wendy Holden: She was completely behind that, and she did not want any threat to her husband’s reign. He wasn’t a very competent king, at least to start with. It wasn’t until the war began that George VI and Queen Elizabeth found their feet. Up until then, they were quite unpopular. They were seen as bumbling, stiff and dowdy, very different from the kind of glamorous king who, in some people’s minds, should have been the king.
Rivalry at court and Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s part
The Little Princesses – the letter of love to the young Princesses that result in Crawfie’s permanent exile by the Queen Mother
Even though Edward didn’t want to be the king, he obviously was a very glamorous, very charismatic person, and George VI was neither of those things. That turned out to be an advantage during the war, but she didn’t want any kind of rival. She didn’t want any alternative courts. She didn’t want anybody casting her husband into the shadow. They had to be the main act. That is why Edward had to be kept away, and that’s why they were kept away.
But yes, she was implacable, and she could really hate people, the Queen Mother. Once you got on the wrong side of her, you were in trouble.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you think that in the end they had a happy life together in France?
Wendy Holden: I don’t know about that and in fact I haven’t made that my remit. In all of these stories, particularly this one, and my next one as well, I’m interested in what leads up to the big moment. I’m interested in the backstory.
They resigned themselves to it. Wallis had a very difficult time because she had to entertain him. She had to compensate for everything he’d lost, even though he had given it up willingly. She had to make sure his days were filled for the rest of his life, the next 36 years, which was tough. They did have fun, but it was hard work and it wasn’t what they had hoped for.
Jenny Wheeler: Pretty amazing parallels with recent history. You make a slight reference to “Americans joining the Royal Family” in the end notes for this book. I couldn’t wait to see a Wendy Holden book on Meghan Markle. Do you think there is one ever likely to happen?
Marion, Wallis and Diana – Women who shook up the House of Windsor
Wendy Holden: It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? Somebody was saying to me, you’ve done The Governess, you’ve done The Duchess, and my next book about Princess Diana was going to be called The Princess. I could end up with The Actress and that would make a lovely foursome.
It is a less attractive prospect because more is known about her. The thing about Wallis and about Marion Crawford, and to a certain extent about Diana, is uncovering what nobody knows about their lives. But quite a lot is known about Meghan and I’m not sure I could uncover anything that was entirely surprising and would show a completely different side. It’s not impossible, but I might finish with Diana in this trilogy – my trilogy of women who shook up the House of Windsor.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, and there is too much of Meghan’s story that is still to unfold.
Wendy Holden: That’s a good point, Jenny. With all these stories, you need a bit of distance. The reason I’m writing about Diana now is that it’s a generation since she died and she is now a proper historical figure. Whereas before she was too close, now you can look at that whole era and see it in some kind of context and what it possibly signified. But with Meghan now, you can’t do that. There’s not enough distance. As you say, the full story has yet to unfold, and who knows what direction it is going to go?
Edward and Wallis – spent their married life in exile in Paris
The House of Windsor – a novelist’s dream
That’s the thing about the Windsors. They are the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to writing a novel. There are so many amazing stories. I always wanted to write about them even when I was little. They always seemed to me like characters from a story. They are such huge personalities, so different and dramatic, the storylines are completely soap opera, so unlikely and amazing. It seemed to me incredible that no one had written a novel about any of them, so I felt that was breaking new ground.
Jenny Wheeler: We have taken a lot of time talking about this, but it’s such a fascinating topic. I was hoping we were going to get on to some of your earlier work, but we’ll have to save that for another day. One thing to round off and that is, are you seeing your future writing now in terms of historical fiction rather than going back to chick lit?
Wendy Holden: Absolutely. I enjoy it very much. I have always secretly hankered after writing historical fiction and particularly modern history, the 20th century. It is so close and yet it’s so different, particularly the early years of the 20th century.
When I was writing The Duchess, and when I was writing The Governess too, being back in the 1930s and the parallels between then and now, which are so close in terms of unrest, political convulsion, neo-conservatism, and the resurgence of right-wing politics. All those things are so similar and yet in other ways so impossibly distant in terms of manners and popular culture. It seems very close and in other ways it seems very, very distant. It’s a fascinating tension.
Returning to the 1930s and a world of social upheaval
I have enjoyed living in the 1930s. I find it extraordinary the way things were then, before the Second World War, before the Welfare State – how people lived so close in time and knew such difficulties, such extremes in society.
This is one thing Crawfie was concerned with – the fact that there was all this unrest. There were the hunger marches. There was the unemployment, all this going on outside the palace gates, practically rioting sometimes, and the Royal Family in the palace being almost completely immune to it. She didn’t feel that was a safe way to live, and she wanted them to be more aware of what was happening outside. I find all the political side of it as interesting as the Royal Family side of it, because these two situations work in tandem.
Jenny Wheeler: It comes through that the Prince of Wales was more aware of that than anyone else in the Royal Family at that time.
Wendy Holden: Absolutely. He was very interested in working conditions and wanted to improve the lives of working people. He could see that it was a problem. He used to be the despair of his equerries and the people who went with him on visits. He would go to a slum, say, and insist on going in every single flat. They would all be going, oh no, not another. He would be popping in and having cups of tea with all these poor and broken people. He used to be absolutely wretched about it, and desperate to do something, but it was difficult to know what to do.
Is it possible to modernize the Royal Family. That’s the question
That touches on what you were saying about the American entering the Royal Family, because one of the questions that these books ask is, how possible is it to modernize the Royal Family? How modern can it be? Is modernity like putting salt on a slug? It shrivels it up because it’s not something that can be modern. It’s a constant question.
Jenny Wheeler: It comes through in The Duchess that the Prince of Wales did also have a reality check about what he was actually going to be able to do as king. He understood that in a limited constitutional monarchy, he was just a figurehead.
Wendy Holden: And that’s the way it had to be, because if he started meddling in social conditions and employment law and all this stuff, that was political, and he couldn’t get involved in that. You could only be a figurehead. You could go and make sympathetic noises, but he couldn’t do anything because the doing was the department of a government and that was not something he could be involved in.
We see this playing out today. Prince Charles hasn’t been making so many noises in that respect recently, but it certainly used to be one of his specialties. And of course, Prince Harry is supposed to be wanting to do more progressive things. One of the things that Meghan Markle is credited with introducing him to is progressive causes she felt he should be involved in.
Wendy Holden as reader – what’s she is reading now
Sarah Winman’s Still Life a Wendy Holden favorite
There is always a tension between the traditional ways of the British Monarchy and the fact that they represent privilege and tradition and an unchanging way of life, and the fact that the country around them is changing all the time and expects to have some vaguely relevant figureheads, not just ones that don’t seem to have any idea what’s going on.
I’m not sure it’s resolvable, but in the resolution of it lies the interest. You see these different characters grappling with it in their different ways. You see Crawfie grappling with it, you see Edward VIII grappling with it, and now you may see Prince Charles and Harry doing the same thing.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Wendy as reader, because we are running out of time and this is The Joys of Binge Reading. This podcast is set up for readers of popular fiction to look for books they might not want to put down. Tell us about the books you don’t want to put down.
Wendy Holden: The last book I read, I really loved, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read for years and years. It’s Sarah Winman’s Still Life. It’s brilliant. Sarah Winman first became well-known for a book called When God Was a Rabbit. That was her first book, which was quite well received and did really well.
This one came out about a month or so ago, and I couldn’t recommend it enough. On the BBC Sounds app, where you listen to the radio, they recently did an audio book of it, and it was wonderful. That definitely would be my number one recommendation.
Some favorite books from Wendy Holden’s shelf
Jenny Wheeler: Tell us a little bit about it.
Wendy Holden: It is vaguely based on E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View. What is so beguiling and wonderful about it – it’s about a gang of friends, people from the East End of London. One is an ex-soldier, one’s a publican, one’s a pub singer, one’s a kind of piano player, one’s a girl and one’s an old bloke. They are a bit like Chaucer’s pilgrims in a way, they are a kind of motley crew.
They end going to live in Florence because the soldier has been left this incredible flat by someone he helped during the war – he was in Italy during the war. It’s all tied up with art and the Italian way of life, and it’s full of sunshine and wonderful friendship. It carries on from the 1940s and ends sometime in the 80s, and it follows them through the different decades and the different things that happen to them.
They are all such wonderful characters and they’re all lovely and they all get on so well, and they’re funny. It’s an account of a particular type of British character, but it’s also universal because it’s all about friendship and love and the pleasures of eating and sunshine and art and beautiful old places. It takes you away to a whole world.
Jenny Wheeler: We definitely need that at the moment, don’t we?
Wendy Holden: Definitely. You’re in the middle of winter, aren’t you?
A writer’s life in lockdown. Political satire, anyone?
Jenny Wheeler: We’re just coming out of winter, and it will be spring next month. But as I mentioned, we’ve gone back into lockdown again, so that was a bit of a nuisance. But we are very lucky. We’ve got a small population and we have got a very regimented Prime Minister who likes to think she’s going to beat it, so we are doing all the right thing.
They are having quite distressing protests in Australia at the moment from people who are sick of being in lockdown. There is a very small contingent of that sort of opinion here, but most of the country is well behind her.
Wendy Holden: She is definitely hugely admired over here. I don’t have words to describe our government or our Prime Minister. She is definitely someone who we heartily envy you as running your country.
Jenny Wheeler: I know your husband is a political consultant, and I did wonder if there was going to be a political book coming sometime, because Boris and some of the other members of your government are just right for fiction.
Wendy Holden: Well, they’re right for something, that’s for sure. I do get asked this sometimes, and I would love to but I’d rather do my historical fiction. It’s odd that there aren’t more political novels coming out. You would think it would be a brilliant time for political fiction. Very little satire, and not even any great big dramas, like House of Cards. That was the last really big successful one.
The Governess and The Duchess. Likely to be on our screens anytime?
I don’t understand why that’s the case, because as you say, it’s a perfect time. The book trader will say, politics doesn’t sell, and people don’t want it, but I love to read a great political satire, so maybe I’ll get onto it. But at the moment, when we’re all living through it, you want to escape from it don’t you? I’m not sure that I could keep my fury in check. It could end up being a really miserable book.
Jenny Wheeler: Thinking of House of Cards and TV renderings of things, both of these books, The Duchess and The Governess, have such connotations of The Crown. You could see a new TV series for both.
Wendy Holden: You absolutely could. There are some Americans at the moment sniffing around The Governess, so I’m hoping something comes of that, because it would be great. I’ve always thought that it would be a great series. I’ll keep you posted.
Jenny Wheeler: Great. Talking about what’s coming next, we have mentioned The Princess Diana book. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Wendy Holden: It is similar to The Duchess in the sense that I’m looking at the period before she became very well known. I’m looking at the forces that created this woman – who wasn’t actually a woman when she first emerged onto the world stage, she was only 19. I’m looking at her background, I’m looking at her childhood and how she came to meet Prince Charles. Again, I’m very interested in the political context of her life. It possibly has more in common with the Crawfie story in a funny way.
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Tackling Diana the Princess. Is there really anything left to say?
Diana was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. This is a time of great political change, great social change, and yet she was growing up in a completely Georgian way. The way she was being brought up hadn’t changed for hundreds of years. I was interested in this.
The fact that when she went down the aisle at St Paul’s, she was a virgin bride and she thought she was marrying her Prince Charming. It was this kind of incredible medieval fantasy that we all bought into, but it turned out to be anything but that, and in fact at the time it was anything but that. She was a virgin, I’m pretty sure of that, but that’s about the only part of it that was actually true, because it turned out to be not the perfect marriage and not the perfect life and not the perfect anything.
Her background was so complicated and so sad in many ways, and dramatic and glamorous and yet lonely too. I wanted to put together the story of other forces that created her and explain the things that happened afterwards. She really wanted to marry Prince Charles. She thought he was going to be everything she wanted him to be, and the reality was so different.
I wanted to look at why she wanted to be rescued by a prince, what things had happened in her background that made her think that was the way she wanted to go, rather than being educated, rather than having a job, rather than having a career – all of which she could have done, but she wanted this very old-fashioned fantasy.
Snapshot of a period – 80s Sloans, punks and paparazzi
Snapshot of a period – The Sloane Ranger handbook, 1982..
Looking into that, and her family and her friends, and also, because I was a teenager at the time, the whole 80s Sloan thing which was so dramatic when it first burst into the worldview. These young, upmarket, wealthy young people who lived in West London. What did they do? How did they live? Who were they? It was all like a new world.
At the same time there was punk, and there were strikes and riots. It was a really interesting periods which she was right the middle of. And the birth of the paparazzi and 24-hour news and the media as we now know it, and celebrity culture. So many things all happened at once in that period, and they are all part of her story.
Jenny Wheeler: With The Duchess, you frame it very cleverly with the funeral. All the way through the book, we come back to that touchstone. Here she is, right at the end of the story, and then we flip back. I can see that Diana’s trajectory could be framed in a very similar way.
Wendy Holden: You’re exactly right. I am beginning at the end. Her story is so stark and dramatic, and her end had so many connections with her beginning – the way she died and the way she lived. Absolutely. The end is the beginning.
Writing disturbed by lockdown
Jenny Wheeler: I can’t wait. When is that one out?
Wendy Holden: Hopefully, by this time next year if I can get cracking on it. It’s been a bit difficult with all the lockdowns because your whole family, who have been getting on with their schooling and all the rest of it, is suddenly under your feet all the time. Instead of sitting writing your great novel, you find yourself unloading the dishwasher and cooking 4,000 meals a day. It’s been a bit like that.
But I’m hoping, when they all go back, that I will be able to get on with it again. That’s definitely my plan anyway, this time next year. It should be finished by the end of the Spring, with any luck.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s great, Wendy. Where can readers find you online?
Wendy Holden: I’ve got my own website, which is www.wendyholden.net. If you go to that, you will find all the connections with Instagram and Twitter and Facebook.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. We’ll put all of those in the show notes with links, so they will be easily found by people who are listening to this. Thank you so much. We’ve gone over time, but it’s been wonderful talking.
Wendy Holden: Jenny, it’s been lovely to talk to you and so thrilling. I can’t believe I’m talking to you in New Zealand and it’s 10 o’clock in the morning there. Amazing.
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