Two Scottish women entered the service of the same royal nursery within a few years of each other, and their fates could not have ended more differently. Margaret Macdonald, called Bobo, came to work for the infant Princess Elizabeth in 1926 and stayed silent for sixty-seven years. Marion Crawford came to teach the same child in 1933, wrote one gentle book about her, and was never spoken to by the family again. Bobo was born in 1904 in the Scottish Highlands, the daughter of a working man who rented a small cottage.
She began service as an assistant chambermaid earning six shillings a week, worked her way into a great house, and from there into the nursery at 145 Piccadilly. The baby she was hired to help care for was six weeks old. Above her stood the old nanny, Clara Knight, who had nursed the baby’s mother before her. When Princess Margaret was born four years later, Bobo took charge of the elder princess, Elizabeth, and the two shared a bedroom for years.
The child gave her the name Bobo, though the origin of that name is disputed. Within the household, she was strictly Miss Macdonald to everyone but the family. Marion Crawford came from less humble beginnings but was just as Scottish. Born in 1909 near Kilmarnock, she trained as a teacher in Edinburgh and saw enough poverty in the city’s poorer districts to fire a crusading spirit.
She wanted to teach slum children. Instead, a summer job tutoring the children of Lord Elgin led to an introduction to the Duke and Duchess of York. The Duchess invited her for a month’s trial at Royal Lodge. Crawford arrived in the spring of 1933, about twenty-three years old, and met her six-year-old pupil for the first time when the child stared at her from a window at her aunt’s house.
That long, cool stare was the first thing she noted about the future queen. The month became a term, and the term became years. Crawford taught the two princesses their lessons, took them on the London Underground and walks in the park, and showed them the ordinary world they never saw. Old King George V asked her only to teach the girls to write a decent hand.
She stayed for sixteen years. Bobo, meanwhile, remained the constant presence beside the elder princess, the woman who woke with her, dressed her, made her favorite fudge, and shared her air raid shelter during the war. The abdication of King Edward VIII in December 1936 changed everything. The Duke of York became King George VI, and his ten-year-old daughter became heir to the throne.
The nursery moved from Piccadilly to Buckingham Palace. The two Scottish women suddenly held knowledge worth money to anyone outside the palace walls. Crawford recorded the coronation morning in a famous essay written by the princess herself, who wrote that she leapt out of bed, and so did Bobo. The queen’s weary remark after the coronation photographs, that they weren’t supposed to be human, went into Crawford’s memory.
In 1947, Princess Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten, and Bobo went on the honeymoon. She prepared the bride’s bath and pottered in and out of the bathroom, effectively keeping the new husband at bay. There was no question, as one of Philip’s friends put it, that Princess Elizabeth was Bobo’s baby, and that was that. That same year, Crawford finally married George Buthlay, a Scottish bank official, after postponing the wedding for years.
She retired from royal service, was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, and was given a grace and favor home at Kensington Palace. Then the Americans came. Bruce and Beatrice Gould, editors of the Ladies’ Home Journal, wanted an inside account of the princesses. They approached the palace and the Foreign Office.
The palace refused, but the government was keen, because postwar Britain needed American goodwill and dollars. The plan was for the story to be told anonymously by a royal writer, with Crawford helping from the background. In April 1949, Queen Elizabeth wrote to her daughters’ former governess a letter that has become famous. She warned that people in positions of confidence must be utterly oyster, and that signing articles about the children would mean the family could never feel confidence in anyone again.
But she also wrote that anonymous help, paid from America, would be quite all right, as long as Crawford’s name did not come into it. Seven weeks later, Crawford signed a contract with the American editors. The Queen read the finished manuscript in October and found it shockingly frank, annotating it and asking for cuts. The editors rewrote the prose and inserted incidents.
When the serial ran in early 1950 under Crawford’s own name, the reaction was absolute. The Queen and her daughters cut off all contact with her. She lost her grace and favor home. She retreated to Scotland.
The household coined a phrase for servants who spoke publicly for money: doing a Crawfie. Bobo, meanwhile, had been offered a reported $150,000 for her own story and turned it down. She had no husband, no children, no life outside the palace. Everything she valued was already inside it.
When King George VI said goodbye to his daughter at the airport in January 1952, too ill to make the Commonwealth tour himself, he turned to Bobo and said, Look after the princess for me. Days later, the princess learned at Sagana Lodge in Kenya that her father had died and she was queen. Bobo packed for the journey home, found mourning clothes, and lowered a hem in eight minutes. At the coronation in June 1953, she was made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order.
Crawford’s fall continued. A magazine column printed under her name in 1955 described the Trooping the Colour parade on a day when the parade had been cancelled by a rail strike. The column ruined her writing career for good. She had been cast out for putting her name to the truth, and now she was mocked for putting her name to fiction.
She withdrew completely, refused every interview, and lived quietly. Her husband died in 1977. There is evidence that she attempted to take her own life and left a note that read, The world has passed me by, and I can’t bear those I love to pass me by on the road. She lived near the road the royal family took to Balmoral, and by every account, the royal cars never stopped.
She died in a nursing home in Aberdeen on 11 February 1988, aged seventy-eight. Neither the Queen, the Queen Mother, nor Princess Margaret sent a wreath. Bobo stayed. She broke her collarbone and four ribs in 1974 and remained in service.
She was promoted within the Royal Victorian Order in 1985. She retired through ill health around 1990, remaining in her rooms at Buckingham Palace. When her health failed, nurses were hired on royal orders to look after her. She died on the night of 22 September 1993, aged eighty-nine, in her rooms filled with the Queen’s dresses, coats, and ceremonial outfits.
The Queen attended her funeral eight days later at the Queen’s Chapel beside St. James’s Palace. A photograph from that day shows the Queen leaving the funeral of Margaret Bobo Macdonald. Years after Crawford’s death, her private papers were opened and told a different story.
The Foreign Office had wanted the story sold. The Queen had blessed an anonymous version. The editors, not Crawford alone, had put her name on the cover. Only one person was punished, and she never lived to see the world judge her more kindly.
The royal household now requires staff to sign confidentiality agreements that bind them for life and beyond death. The rule that once existed only in a queen’s letter is now written down. Two Scottish women served the same child. One kept every secret and died inside the palace, mourned by the Queen in person.
The other wrote down the fudge, the toy horses, and the face at the window, and spent her exile watching the family she loved drive past her door.