In July 2008, a sale room in Colchester, England, was filled with nearly a thousand people waiting by their telephones, all there to bid on the private life of a dead man. The items on the tables had once belonged to a queen. There were her letters and her Christmas cards, a photograph of an old woman at ninety dancing with her servant at a staff party, and a note in her own hand asking him to pack two small bottles of Dubonnet and gin in case it was needed. That single scrap of paper sold for more than thirty thousand dollars.
The man who had saved it was William Talon, and for fifty-one years he had opened the Queen Mother’s door in the morning and been the last to close it at night. He had stood nearer to her than any duke, any minister, any child of her own. His entire life had come to rest on that auction table, carried out of the room by strangers. William John Stevenson Talon was born on the twelfth of November 1935 in Bertley, a coal town in County Durham.
He was a boy from the industrial north of England, a landscape of pit villages and terrace streets where work was scarce and money was tight. The Depression had fallen hardest on exactly these places. Within a year, his family moved south to Coventry, a manufacturing city that would soon be flattened by German bombers in the war. Talon was a small boy there when the war came, one of millions of British children whose earliest memories were shaped by rationing and blackout.
He went to a secondary modern school, the kind built for children not expected to rise. When his schooling ended, he trained as a jeweler in Leamington Spa, but he did not want it. What he wanted was the world of palaces and processions he had only seen in newspapers and newsreels. And so he wrote letters.
Year after year, he wrote to the royal household asking for a place, any place. He wrote for five years before anything happened. Then at Easter in 1951, the answer came. He was taken on as a junior assistant at Windsor Castle.
He was fifteen years old. King George VI was still on the throne, a tired and ailing man. Windsor in 1951 was a thousand years of history made stone, and a jeweler’s apprentice from Coventry walked in through the servants’ entrance and did not walk back out of that world for the rest of his working life. He moved to Buckingham Palace, and his progress was interrupted by national service in the Royal Air Force.
When he came back, he made the choice that would decide the rest of his life. King George VI had died in 1952, and his widow had become Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, a woman with half her life still to live. Talon did not want to serve the young queen in the vast machinery of Buckingham Palace. He wanted a transfer to the warmer, smaller court of the Queen Mother at Clarence House.
He remained in that household from the 1950s until the day its mistress died. The other half of his life arrived at Clarence House by way of an exiled king in Paris. His name was Reginald Wilcock, and he would be Talon’s partner for more than thirty years. Wilcock had begun in royal service in 1954 and spent time in the household of the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, who had abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson.
That abdication was the hidden pivot of the whole story, because it was the reason the Queen Mother had ever become a queen. Wilcock saw what became of royalty that stepped off the stage. Around 1960, he came home to Clarence House, and the two men’s lives joined and did not part again. What grew between them was a partnership in the fullest sense the times would allow.
They shared a home, a grace and favor lodge at the gates of Clarence House, for three decades. In the language of their own time, there was no word that could be spoken aloud. For the first years of their life together, what they were to each other was a crime in England, punishable by prison, and it remained so until 1967. Two men who loved each other lived under a roof lent by the crown in the most watched family in the country, protected by discretion and the loyalty of those around them.
By 1978, both men reached the summit of the servants’ world. Talon became steward and page of the backstairs at Clarence House, the most senior position a domestic servant could hold. In the same year, Wilcock rose to become deputy steward and page of the presence. The two partners now ran the household between them.
The newspapers gave Talon the name that would outlive him: Backstairs Billy. Every day of that household kept time to a small silver tray and the drink it carried. The Queen Mother’s fondness for gin and Dubonnet, taken at around noon, was one of the few things about her private life that was openly documented. The man who mixed it and carried it was William Talon.
He knew how she liked it, and he knew when she wanted it. That knowledge was not written down anywhere and could not be handed on. It made him, in the most literal sense, irreplaceable. There was a power in that position.
Talon moved through her private apartments in a way no one else dared. He is said to have entered her rooms without knocking, a huge statement of standing in a royal household. By the account of the royal biographer Tom Quinn, he managed the rhythm of her day and bought the gifts she gave to other people, so that the taste of the Queen Mother’s generosity was often his taste wearing her name. The Queen Mother herself understood the value of what he did.
She had been born in 1900 and died at the age of 101. Her husband’s death in 1952 left her widowed at fifty-one, and she filled half a century of widowhood with company, laughter, and racing. Talon’s job was to make that endless good cheer actually happen day after day. Guests remembered him as a spectacular presence, tall and theatrical, a man who entered a room and raised the temperature.
He was staff and he was also somehow part of the show. His devotion to hospitality shaded gloriously into tyranny; he believed no guest should ever be without a drink, and he enforced the belief by pouring wine through the fingers of a guest who tried to cover his glass. The relationship between Talon and the Queen Mother, when the guests had gone, had the ease of an old double act. By the accounts gathered after his death, she teased him and he teased her.
She is reported to have said to him, dancing at a party, that they were two old dears, but they had had some fun. In 1991, the protection she gave him was tested. A newspaper printed a story about Talon, that he had brought a young man back to royal premises. It was a scandal that could have finished him, and there were courtiers who meant to see that it did.
The Queen Mother declined to be scandalized. She is reported to have asked whether it was not kind of William to invite the young man in when it was raining so hard outside. The scandal broke over his head and left him standing, because the only judge who counted had decided to laugh it off. But the world below stairs was harder.
Talon ruled the servants’ hall with a sharp tongue and guarded his territory. Younger staff found him difficult, quick to remind them of their place. He had come up the hard way and had little sympathy for newcomers. One former colleague alleged a petty habit of replacing clean salt and pepper cruets with used ones after junior staff had laid the tables.
He had climbed from the bottom of that world to the top, and he defended the summit with the weariness of a man who remembered how far there was to fall. The summer of the year 2000 was meant to be a celebration. The Queen Mother reached the age of one hundred on the fourth of August, and the nation made a festival of it. Inside the household, it was the triumph of Talon’s and Wilcock’s careers.
It was Reginald Wilcock who served the Queen Mother her birthday tea, a fitting place for the trusted servant of decades. Seven days later, on the eleventh of August 2000, Wilcock died. He was around sixty-six years old. The other half of Talon’s life was gone in the space of a single week.
In the months that followed, Talon was a man in real trouble. Friends used the word depression. He had lost his partner and he could not mourn him publicly, because a partnership that had never been spoken aloud could not be publicly mourned. He kept working, still opening the Queen Mother’s door, still seeing to the flowers and the guests and the drinks, while something inside him quietly broke.
The household was changing around him. The Queen Mother was past one hundred, and the daily care of her life passed into the hands of nurses and younger staff who did not regard the below-stairs favorite with the awe he was used to. He found himself increasingly sidelined. In 2001, he was photographed pushing the frail Princess Margaret in a wheelchair, and the images reportedly angered Queen Elizabeth II.
The servant who had once been untouchable was now a figure to be managed rather than trusted. When the Queen Mother began to fail for the last time in the early spring of 2002, the man who knew her rooms best was not in them. He was kept at the edges of her final decline. For fifty-one years, his whole existence had been organized around being near her, and that was the one thing he was not given at the end.
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother died on the thirtieth of March 2002 at the age of 101. William Talon learned that she had died from a journalist calling to ask how he felt. The man who had stood closest to her door for half a century found out the way the public found out. The household was wound up in a matter of days.
With the death of the queen mother, there was no further reason for it to exist. The staff were let go, and the lodge at the gates, his home for thirty years, was reclaimed by the crown. He wrote to a friend that spring that life was bloody and that he had to move house within the month. He was sixty-six years old, beginning again from nothing in a rented flat.
He had every reason for bitterness and every opportunity to profit. The tabloids circled with checkbooks, offering real money for the inside story of the household. He had been told of her death by a reporter, moved out of his home, eased aside in her final years. If ever a man had both the means and the grievance to sell his story, it was William Talon in the spring of 2002.
He never sold a word. Through all the years that followed, with the offers growing and his own situation shrinking, he gave no tell-all interview, wrote no memoir. When he did speak of her publicly at her funeral, he offered a tribute plain and unguarded. She was, he said, the most wonderful employer, very compassionate, incredibly kind, very understanding, and I loved her.
He went south of the river to a small flat in Kennington, a district of South London far from any palace. He lived there for five years, and by every sign they were sad ones. The scaffolding that had held up his entire existence was gone. His health failed him in the end.
On the twenty-third of November 2007, William Talon was found dead in his Kennington flat. He was seventy-two years old. The cause was liver failure. His funeral was a different matter.
On the seventh of December 2007, he was buried from the Queen’s Chapel at St James’s Palace, and more than two hundred people came to see him off. There were royals and aristocrats, including the Earl of Snowdon and Lady Sarah Chatto, and the theatrical friends who had loved his wit and warmth, including the actress June Brown and the entertainer Paulo Grady. The readings were given by Sir Derek Jacobi and Patricia Routledge. A boy from Coundon who had entered service at fifteen was sent to his grave by actors and knights of the theater in a royal chapel.
Then, within the year, the private life he had guarded so fiercely was gathered up and carried into a sale room to be sold to whoever would pay. In July of 2008, the auction house Reeman Dansie in Colchester laid out his whole life in nearly seven hundred lots. Talon had reportedly wished to leave items from his collection to the royal collection. That wish was never carried out.
The collection passed to his estate, and the estate sent it to auction. The man who would not sell his stories in life had his life sold for him once he could no longer object. The note about the two bottles of Dubonnet and gin, valued before the sale at a few hundred pounds, sold for more than thirty thousand dollars. A letter from Princess Diana describing the new arrival, Prince William, sold for around ten thousand dollars.
The auctioneer, James Grinter, put his finger on what was happening. For a lot of people, he said, it is the only way they can get anything that touches the Queen Mother. Some of the stories told after his death were kinder to the teller than to the woman he served. The fullest account of Talon’s world, the biography by Tom Quinn, gathered many affectionate stories, and the most vivid of them clustered around the drink.
In some tellings, the Queen Mother’s fondness for gin swelled into a picture of an old woman more or less permanently merry. Buckingham Palace dismissed the suggestion, and the Queen Mother’s own niece, Margaret Rhodes, corrected the record directly, saying her aunt rarely drank gin and tonic at all, and what she did enjoy was a gin-based drink she generally mixed for herself. The caricature was disputed at the source. William Talon, who had been there for every one of those noontime drinks across fifty-one years, never told a single tale.
He took his knowledge to the grave on purpose, as a final act of loyalty. His silence was his last gift to her. The shape of the whole life is plain. William Talon spent half a century three feet from a queen, and when she died, the household discovered it could manage perfectly well without him.
He had never held power. He had only ever stood beside it. Everything he seemed to command had been lent to him for as long as one woman drew breath, and it reverted to the crown on the same morning she did. A duke owns his dukedom and passes it to his son.
A servant owns nothing but his usefulness, and usefulness dies with the person it serves. He never seems to have regretted paying that price. He had opened her door every morning for fifty-one years, carried her drink, kept her secrets, made her laugh. He had loved her in the plain word he used.
His name lived on in the nickname the newspapers gave him, on the cover of a biography, and in a West End play in 2023. But the man himself died alone and half-forgotten in Kennington. He had asked for nothing in return but to stay near her. In the end, that was the one thing he could not keep.
He gave the world only a handful of plain words about her at her funeral, and the last three of them will do for his epitaph as well as hers. I loved her.