William Talon spent fifty-one years three feet from a queen, and he learned she had died from a journalist on the telephone. The man who had opened the Queen Mother’s door every morning and been the last to close it at night, who had stood nearer to her than any duke or minister or grandchild, heard the news the way any stranger on the street heard it, from a reporter asking how he felt. It was the final humiliation of a life that had been built entirely on proximity, and it came at the end of a long, slow fall from favor that had begun years before she drew her last breath. He had started as an outsider.
Born in 1935 above a grandfather’s hardware shop in the Durham pit town of Bertley, he was a working-class boy in an industrial England where the great houses of the South might as well have been on the moon. The family moved to Coventry, to a district called Coundon, and the Depression shaped his earliest years. Wartime came when he was small, and he grew up with rationing and blackout and the drone of aircraft overhead. He was sent to a secondary modern school, the kind built for children who were not expected to rise, and trained as a jeweler’s apprentice in Leamington Spa.
It was honest work, and he did not want it. What he wanted was the world he had only ever seen in newsreels, the palaces and processions and the family who waved from behind railings. So he did the only thing a boy in Coundon could do about it. He wrote letters.
For five years by the account that survives, he wrote to the royal household asking for a place, any place, a foot on the lowest rung. Most boys would have stopped. He did not. 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. The old order of great houses and liveried servants had been shaken but had not fallen, and a boy of fifteen could still enter it at the bottom.
Talon arrived with nothing but his willingness and his answered letters, no family behind him at court, no money, no connection. He had a quick mind and a refusal to believe that the world he wanted was closed to him. He moved to Buckingham Palace, served his national service in the Royal Air Force, and then made the choice that would decide the rest of his life. He did not want to serve the young Queen Elizabeth in the vast machinery of Buckingham Palace.
He wanted a transfer to the warmer, smaller court of the Queen Mother at Clarence House. Buckingham Palace was power and formality and a thousand rules. Clarence House was a home, built around one remarkable woman who liked laughter and hospitality and clever, amusing people more than protocol. 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 he would remain there until the day its mistress died. The other half of his life arrived there through an exiled king in Paris. Reginald Wilcock had served in the household of the Duke of Windsor, the man whose abdication in 1936 had made the Queen Mother a queen, before returning to Clarence House around 1960 as a footman.
The two men’s lives joined and did not part again. They shared the Grace and Favour Lodge at the gates of Clarence House for three decades. In the language of a later age, they were a couple, and everyone who knew the household knew it. 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, until the law changed in 1967. They built their life in secret under a roof lent by the crown, protected by the loyalty of those around them and by the quiet tolerance of the one woman whose word in that house was final. In 1978, Talon reached the summit of the servants’ world, becoming steward and page of the back stairs at Clarence House, the most senior domestic position in the household. Wilcock rose with him to become deputy steward.
The two partners now ran the house between them. The newspapers had already given Talon the name that would outlive him. They called him Backstairs Billy. He was the man who controlled the private rooms of the most beloved woman in Britain, who decided how her day would run, who was the first face she saw in the morning and the last at night.
He had reached it by climbing a hidden stair for twenty-seven years. 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 at around noon is one of the few genuinely documented facts of her private life. Talon mixed it and carried it and knew when the tray should come in quietly and when it should come in with a joke.
He knew which guests lifted her and which wore her out, knew the small vanities and the private sorrows, knew her moods and her needs better than anyone alive. He bought the gifts she gave to other people, chose them and wrapped them, so that the taste of her famous generosity was often his taste wearing her name. He had made himself the invisible author of her kindnesses, and he guarded her private life with his own. The parties at Clarence House were legendary.
The guests were artists and actors and writers and wits, the kind of company the Queen Mother had always preferred. Talon moved through that company like a performer who knew exactly where the light fell. The royal portrait painter Richard Stone remembered his flair and his fun, the sense that when he entered a room, the evening began in earnest. His devotion to hospitality bordered on tyranny.
He believed no guest should ever be without a drink and enforced it with zeal. When one guest tried to signal he had had enough by covering his glass with a hand, Talon simply poured the wine through the man’s fingers. He treated an empty glass as a personal defeat. He was charming upstairs and harder below.
The younger staff who worked under him remembered a man who guarded his territory jealously, quick to put newcomers in their place. He had climbed from the very bottom of the world he served, and he defended the summit with the wariness of a man who knew exactly how far there was to fall. But the Queen Mother delighted in him. She teased him and he teased her, and the teasing was the truest thing between them.
At a staff party, an old woman of ninety danced with her servant, and she said, as those who remembered it reported, that they were two old dears who had had some fun. In 1991, the peril that had always shadowed their secret came close to ending it. A story reached the press about Talon bringing a young man back to royal premises. The courtiers who had long resented the below-stairs favourite with the airs of a favourite finally had a weapon.
A more anxious establishment in a more anxious decade might have sacrificed him to protect the house. But the Queen Mother, told of the scandal, declined to be scandalised at all. She is reported 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 wording survives in more than one version and should be carried as a remembered line, but the spirit is beyond dispute because the outcome is a matter of record.
Talon did not go. In one dry sentence, she had turned a scandal into a joke and a joke into a shield. The summer of 2000 was meant to be a season of celebration. The Queen Mother reached one hundred on the fourth of August, and the nation made a festival of it.
It was Wilcock who served her birthday tea, the greatest day of her public life. Seven days later, on the eleventh of August, he died, around sixty-six years old. Thirty years of a shared life ended in the same week the household reached the peak of its long service. The whole country was talking about the birthday.
Almost no one was allowed to mourn the death. In the months that followed, Talon’s grief hollowed him out. He could not mourn Wilcock the way a widower mourns a wife. There was no official condolence, no ceremony for a partnership the world had never been allowed to acknowledge.
He was in his mid-sixties and alone in a lodge full of their shared life. And the household itself was changing around him. The Queen Mother was very old, and the daily business of her care was passing into the hands of nurses and younger staff who did not regard the old favourite with the awe he was used to. Slowly, without a confrontation, he was moved to the edges of the room.
In 2001, a photograph of him pushing the frail Princess Margaret in a wheelchair reportedly angered Queen Elizabeth II. The servant who had once been an untouchable favourite had become a figure whose visibility could embarrass the family. When the Queen Mother began to fail for the last time in the spring of 2002, the man who knew her rooms best was not in them. He had spent fifty-one years being closer to her than her blood relations in every practical daily sense, but a servant has a place at a deathbed only by permission, and permission had been withdrawn.
The love that had made him feel like family had no standing against the arrangements of a modern household. And then the telephone rang, and a journalist told him she was gone. He found out the way the public found out, except the public was not being asked to perform its grief for a reporter’s notebook. Within days, her household, which had no further reason to exist, was wound up in the cold logic of these things.
The staff were let go. The lodge, which had only ever been his by grace and favour, was no longer his to keep. He wrote to a friend that spring that life was bloody and that he had to move house within the month. It is one of the few pieces of his own plain voice that survive from that terrible season.
He was sixty-six years old and beginning again from nothing in a rented flat. He had every reason for bitterness and every opportunity to profit from it. The tabloids came circling with their checkbooks, offering real money for the inside story of the household. He carried fifty-one years of the most valuable secrets in Britain and no pension grand enough to match the life he had lost.
All he had to do was talk. He would not, not then and not ever. He gave no tell-all interview and wrote no memoir. When he spoke of her at the funeral, he offered only a tribute, plain and unguarded.
She was, he said, the most wonderful employer, very compassionate, incredibly kind, very understanding, and I loved her. The last chapter of his life was a ground-floor flat in Kennington, south of the river, far from any palace. He lived out five quiet and sad years there, keeping her secrets and turning away the reporters and ghostwriters who still came seeking the story he would not tell. On the twenty-third of November 2007, eleven days after his seventy-second birthday, he was found dead in his flat.
The cause was liver failure. A quiet death in a quiet room for the loudest personality any of them had known. 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 the royal and the aristocratic, including the Earl of Snowdon and Lady Sarah Chatto, and there were the players, the theatrical friends who had loved his wit and his warmth. 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 earls and dames and knights of the theatre in a royal chapel a few steps from the world he had served. Within a year, the private life he had guarded so fiercely was gathered up, catalogued, and carried into a sale room.
The auction was at Reeman Dansie in Colchester. Nearly seven hundred lots went under the hammer, expected to fetch up to £500,000 and realising in the region of £440,000. A thousand strangers waited by their telephones. There was the note in the Queen Mother’s own hand asking him to pack two small bottles of Dubonnet and gin in case it was needed, which sold for more than thirty thousand dollars.
There were letters from Princess Diana, one written after the birth of Prince William, describing the new arrival as having brought them a very strong pair of lungs. There were Christmas cards and photographs and invitations, and among them a photograph of an old woman of ninety dancing with her servant at a staff party. The auctioneer put his finger on exactly what was happening. For a lot of people, he said, it is the only way they can get anything that touches the Queen Mother.
Talon had said he wished to leave items from his collection to the royal collection. That wish was never carried out. The man who would not sell his stories in life had his life sold for him once he could no longer object. He had kept every note and every photograph because they were the record of his days, the proof that he had been there in the room.
He asked for nothing in return but to stay near her. In the end, that was the one thing he could not keep. His silence was his last gift to her, and the plainest thing he ever said.
There are men with titles and fortunes who have shown less honour than that.