Odd this day

7 February 1941

This was the day the Queen Mother signed off a letter with the words

Tinkety tonk old fruit, & down with the Nazis

…and if that isn’t worth remembering, I don’t know what is.

This may raise a number of questions with you — the answer to the first one being, of course: yes, it is nice that that phrase is so very irrelevant these days, isn’t it? Quite the relief. Anyway, moving on…

Your next question could well be:

Peter?

And here we defer to the expert, Letters of Note, who knows about these things:

It’s worth taking a more detailed look at the letter, too, because there’s some good stuff in it: a perspective on war work, for example — the niece in question being a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse

It’s a pity HM QE the QM didn’t quite manage to impress that “‘What can I do for my country’, & never ‘What can I get out of my country’” on one, in particular, of her grandsons, but she comes across pretty well in this bit about her captured nephew

I mean, you wouldn’t absolutely guarantee that someone very posh and very rich would consider the implications of writing to a POW on Buckingham Palace notepaper — although there are, apparently, other letters which… may not have aged quite so well:

Of course, plenty in these letters also shows the distasteful side of royal conservatism. “It would be a thousand pities if S. Africa became a Republic,” Elizabeth writes at one point, “because the Crown is really the only link now left.” A reaction against the racism in South African politics at the time would have been one thing. But that particular sentence reads more like imperialist nostalgia. Or consider another bit of postwar correspondence: “Your account of Italy is very sad. I do wish that we could take them over, & govern them, & give them a start, & some hope for better things.” The talk of Indian independence, too, might surprise today’s readers: “I wonder what will happen if Gandhi dies? What an old blackmailer, he is, practically committing murder to gain his own ends, it is all very dreadful.”

From a review of Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother:

The Queen Mother's Odd Letters

The very next letter in the collection, incidentally, is from the Royal Train on 5 March 1941 to her younger daughter, who has had a nasty lurgy, and is offered sage advice on recuperation:

Which may not make any sense to you or I, but could well have seemed perfectly reasonable to someone who enjoyed one part gin to two parts Dubonnet with some regularity.

In other Important Anniversary News today, it’s 115 years since Virginia Woolf and her friends blacked up, pretended to be members of the Abyssinian royal family, and got shown round a warship…

Odd this day

…but, obviously, today’s Odd this day can have only one sign-off: tinkety tonk old fruits, & down with the Nazis.