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A shock report has emerged accusing the late Queen Mother of being racist.
Speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales, royal diarist Sir Roy Strong revealed that, despite spending decades chronicling the lives of the British royal family, a ‘certain streak’ in him had been protective of revealing the Queen Mother’s racial prejudices.
The Times reported Strong as saying: ‘I can remember the Queen Mother came to lunch at Ham House, which was a branch of the V&A, and she said, ‘I will bring the liquid refreshment’, and we all knew what that meant, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery and Victorian and Albert Museum said.
‘Suddenly in the middle of lunch, I was on the left of her I think, and the Queen was in Africa at the time, and the Queen Mother leant over to me and said, ‘Beware the blackamoors’. I thought, ‘I can’t put that down, it’s too awful.’
However, this isn’t the first time the Queen Mother’s shock attitude towards other cultures was noted.
Writing seven years after her death in 2009 in a piece for The Guardian, Tanya Gold said: ‘One of her ladies-in-waiting said her attitude to Africa was, “poor darlings; the Africans just don’t know how to govern themselves – it’s just not their form. What a pity we’re not still looking after them.”‘
Furthermore, she was once described by the wife of a British ambassador to France as ‘rather mocking, not very kind’ and on another occasion the Queen Mother said she had ‘some reservations about Jews’.
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