The sale room in Colchester was full of strangers waiting by their telephones, come to bid on the private life of a dead man. Nearly everything on those tables had once belonged to a queen. There were letters and Christmas cards, a photograph of a woman at ninety dancing with her servant, 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 named 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. He had been born on the twelfth of November 1935 in a coal town in County Durham, the industrial north of England, a place where the money came out of the ground and the horizon was a colliery wheel. The family moved to Coventry, and the boy grew up in a manufacturing city in a district called Coundon, far from anything gilded.
When the war came, he was a small child in a city that German bombers nearly flattened in one terrible night in 1940. He went to a secondary modern school, the kind built for children who were not expected to rise, and when his schooling ended he was sent to train as a jeweler in Leamington Spa. It was honest work. He did not want it.
What he wanted was the world he had only seen in newspapers and newsreels, the world of palaces and processions, and so he did the only thing a boy in Coundon could do about it. He wrote letters. Year after year he wrote to the royal household asking for a place, any place, a foot on the lowest rung. He is said to have written for five years before anything happened.
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 who had carried the crown through a war.
Windsor in 1951 was a thousand years of history made stone, and the 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 had no title, no family behind him at court, no money, no connection. He had a quick mind, an appetite for the world he was entering, and a refusal to believe that the world he wanted was closed to him. The world he entered was ordered as strictly as an army.
A servant’s whole career was a slow climb up the hidden backstairs, and the title that waited at the top would one day give William Talon his name. He did not stay at Windsor. He moved to Buckingham Palace, and there his progress was interrupted by national service in the Royal Air Force. Before he went, he had been in line to join the young Queen Elizabeth II on her great Commonwealth tour of 1953 and 1954.
The uniform took him instead, and the tour went without him. It was one of those small hinges on which a life turns, because had he gone, his whole story might have belonged to the queen rather than to her mother. When he came back, King George VI had died, and his widow had become the Queen Mother, a woman with half her life still to live and no throne of her own to fill it. She had taken Clarence House and made it a household of her own.
Talon did not want the vast machinery of Buckingham Palace. He wanted a transfer to the warmer, smaller court of the Queen Mother. A servant of ambition would have gone to the palace. A servant who wanted to be loved went to Clarence House.
Talon went to Clarence House and remained there from the 1950s until the day its mistress died. The other half of his life arrived at Clarence House in a footman’s coat by way of an exiled king in Paris. His name was Reginald Wilcock, and he would be the great companion of Talon’s life, his partner for more than thirty years. Wilcock had joined the household in 1954.
For a time he served not a reigning royal but a fallen one, in the household of the Duke of Windsor, the man who had once been King Edward VIII and given up the throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson. That abdication is the hidden pivot of the whole story. When Edward walked away from the throne, it fell to his younger brother, the shy Duke of York, who became King George VI. And the Duke of York’s wife, who had never expected to be queen, became the Queen Mother whom William Talon would serve.
Every hour Talon ever spent at Clarence House existed because one king gave up his throne for love. Around 1960, Wilcock came home to Clarence House as a footman, and the two men’s lives joined and did not part again. They came to share the Grace and Favour Lodge at the gates of the house, lent by the crown to a trusted servant for as long as favour lasted. 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, at a time when discovery could have ended everything. They managed it by discretion, by the loyalty of the people around them, and by the quiet protection of the one woman whose word in that house was final. In 1978, the summit came to both of them at once. Talon became steward and page of the backstairs at Clarence House, the most senior position a domestic servant in that household could hold.
Wilcock rose to become deputy steward and page of the presence, the second man in the house. The two partners now ran the household between them. Around that rise the newspapers gave Talon the name that would outlive him: Backstairs Billy. He never chose it, and never complained about it.
The Queen Mother’s day ran on ritual, and the most famous ritual of all belonged to the late morning, when the tray came in with the drink she preferred, gin and Dubonnet, taken at around noon. The man who mixed it and carried it was William Talon. Knowing how she liked it, knowing when she wanted it, reading the difference between a day when the tray should come in quietly and a day when it should come in with a joke, was a kind of intimacy that outlasts any grand gesture. He arranged the flowers she saw when she woke.
He chose the gifts she gave to other people, so that the taste of her famous generosity was as often as not his taste wearing her name. He was the man who stood closest to the door of her private rooms, nearer than any lady-in-waiting, nearer than any member of her own family. In 1991, a newspaper printed the story the courtiers had waited years to read. Talon was said to have brought a young man back to royal premises, a private matter that in a private household would have stayed private, but attached to the Queen Mother’s home it became a tabloid prize.
There were those who believed this was the end of Backstairs Billy. The Queen Mother, told of the affair, declined to be scandalized. She is said to have asked whether it was not kind of William to invite that young man back into the house when it was raining so hard outside. The outcome is a matter of record.
Talon did not go. She had turned a scandal into a joke and a joke into a shield. The summer of 2000 was meant to be a summer of celebration. The Queen Mother reached the age of one hundred on the fourth of August, and the nation made a festival of it.
It was Willcock who served her her birthday tea. Seven days later, on the eleventh of August 2000, Reginald Wilcock died. He was around sixty-six. The partner of more than thirty years was gone in the space of a single week, from the height of the birthday to the silence of a funeral.
Talon arranged the funeral, as he had arranged everything else in their shared life, by getting the details right. Then he came back to an empty lodge. By the accounts of the friends who knew him then, he was a man in real trouble. There was no official condolence, no formal recognition of what the two of them had been to each other across thirty years.
The very discretion that had protected their life together now left him alone in his grief, unable even to name what he had lost. He kept working because the work was all he had left. But the household itself was changing around him. The Queen Mother was past one hundred, and her daily care was passing into the hands of nurses and younger staff.
Slowly, without a word ever being said, he was moved to the edges of the room. In 2001, photographs of him pushing the frail Princess Margaret in a wheelchair angered Queen Elizabeth II. A photograph of Backstairs Billy had once been a charming thing. Now the same image was a liability.
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. By the accounts that survive, Talon was kept at the edges of her final decline. He had spent his life being closer to her than her blood relations in every practical daily sense, but when the final door closed, he found himself on the wrong side of it. On the thirtieth of March 2002, the Queen Mother died at the age of 101.
The news reached Talon through a journalist calling to ask him how he felt. The man who had stood closest to her door for fifty-one years learned she was gone from a voice on a telephone belonging to someone who had never met her. Within weeks, the household was wound up and the staff let go. The grace and favour lodge was reclaimed by the crown, and Talon was asked to leave.
He wrote a friend that spring: “Life is bloody at the moment and I must move house within the month. ” He packed thirty years of a shared life alone and handed the keys back to the crown. He moved to a small flat in Kennington, south of the river, far from any palace. He never sold a word about the woman he had served.
Newspapers would have paid a great deal for fifty-one years of secrets at the heart of the most watched family in the land, and he turned them all away. At her funeral, approached for a few words, he said only that she was “the most wonderful employer, very compassionate, incredibly kind, very understanding, and I loved her. ” That was all, and then he went away. He died alone in his Kennington flat on the twenty-third of November 2007, at seventy-two, of liver failure.
On the seventh of December 2007, he was buried from the Queen’s Chapel at St James’s Palace. More than two hundred people came, among them the Earl of Snowdon and Lady Sarah Chatto, the actress June Brown and the entertainer Paul O’Grady, with readings by Sir Derek Jacobi and Patricia Routledge. A boy from Coundon who had entered service at fifteen was sent to his grave by earls and dames and knights of the theatre in a royal chapel a few steps from the world he had served. In July of 2008, a sale room in Colchester laid out his whole life in nearly seven hundred lots.
Talon had wished to leave items from his collection to the Royal Collection, to give them back to the institution he had served. That wish was never carried out. The collection passed to his estate, and the estate sent it to auction. Around three hundred bidders crowded into the room, and something like a thousand more bid by telephone.
The note about the two small bottles of Dubonnet and gin, valued at a few hundred pounds, sold for more than thirty thousand dollars. The sale realized in the region of four hundred and forty thousand pounds. The auctioneer put his finger on it: for a lot of people, it was the only way they could get anything that touched the Queen Mother. In the end, the truth the auction laid bare was this.
Talon had never held power. He had only ever stood beside it. Everything he seemed to command had been lent to him exactly as the lodge 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. He had poured himself so completely into her days that when her days ended, his own had no shape left.
That was the price. He never seems to have regretted paying it. He asked for nothing in return but to stay near her. In the end, that was the one thing he could not keep.
He never told her story for money. 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.