Craig Brown - Ma’am Darling - 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret

Inventions that first came on the market in 1930, thus introducing new words to the language, included bulldozer , electric blanket and jingle , all of which have a faint echo of Margaret about them. The Gibson – a martini-like cocktail consisting of gin and vermouth with a cocktail onion – was introduced to fashionable society. In All About Eve (1950), Bette Davis serves her guests Gibsons, saying, ‘Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.’

Then again, learner-driver , washing-up machine and snack bar also came into being in 1930, yet it’s hard to relate any of them to Princess Margaret, who never learned to drive, nor to operate a washing-up machine. And, as far as I know, she never entered a snack bar.

Also making their first entries that year were to bale out , meaning to make an emergency parachute jump, to feel up , meaning to grope or fondle, and sick-making , meaning to make one either feel queasy, or vomit, depending on the force of one’s reaction. Each of these three has something Margaret-ish about it, as do crooner and eye shadow and the adjective luxury .

Two concepts dear to any biographer, but perhaps particularly dear to biographers of Princess Margaret, entered the language in the year of her birth: guesstimate and whodunnit .

There also came a word that had been around for several centuries, but which, as a direct result of the birth of the little Princess in 1930, was to take on a life of its own.

Horoscope.

At his office in Fleet Street, John Gordon, the editor of the Sunday Express , was struggling to come up with a fresh angle on the news of another royal birth. Then it came to him: why not ask Cheiro, *the most famous astrologer of the day, to predict what life might have in store for her? Cheiro had, in his time, given personal readings to, among others, Oscar Wilde, General Kitchener, Mark Twain and King Edward VII. The little Princess would surely be a doddle.

Gordon telephoned Cheiro’s office, only to be informed by his assistant, R.H. Naylor, that the great man was unavailable. Instead, Naylor put himself forward for the task. His article, ‘What the Stars Foretell for the New Princess’, duly appeared the following Sunday.

Naylor foretold that Princess Margaret Rose would have ‘an eventful life’, a prediction that was possibly on the safe side, since few lives are without any event whatsoever. Moreover, it would be decades before anyone could confidently declare it to have been entirely uneventful, and by that time people’s minds would have been distracted by other, more eventful, things. More particularly, Naylor predicted that ‘events of tremendous importance to the Royal Family and the nation will come about near her seventh year’.

The article proved a huge success, so much so that Gordon proceeded to commission Naylor to write forecasts for the months ahead. As luck – or chance, or fate – would have it, one of his predictions was that ‘a British aircraft will be in danger between October 8th and 15th’. He was just three days out: on 5 October, on its maiden overseas flight, the passenger airship R101 crashed in Beauvais, France, killing forty-eight of the fifty-four people on board.

Naylor’s reputation was made. John Gordon now hit on the idea of asking him to write a weekly column making predictions for all Sunday Express readers according to their birthdays. Naylor puzzled for some time over how to incorporate 365 different forecasts into a single column, and eventually devised a more off-the-peg system by dividing the sun’s 360-degree transit into twelve zones, each of them spanning thirty degrees. He then named each of the twelve zones after a different celestial constellation, and offered blocks of predictions for each birth sign. This was how the modern horoscope came into being.

In the Princess’s seventh year, 1936, a series of events of tremendous significance to the Royal Family did indeed come about, exactly as predicted: the death of King George V, the abdication of King Edward VIII, and the accession of King George VI. Small wonder that Naylor was now regarded as something of a genius; before long he was receiving up to 28,000 letters a week from his bedazzled readers, anxious to know what fate had up its sleeve for them.

By now, every other popular newspaper had taken to employing a resident astrologer; according to Mass-Observation, ‘nearly two-thirds of the adult population glance at or read some astrological feature more or less regularly’.

One of the beauties of the horoscope, from the point of view of the astrologer, is that its followers are more than willing to forget or ignore any prediction that turns out to be wrong. In future, Naylor would be the beneficiary of this impulse to turn a blind eye. At the beginning of 1939, for instance, he confidently declared that ‘Hitler’s horoscope is not a war horoscope … if and when war comes, not he but others will strike the first blow.’ He also pinpointed the likely danger areas as ‘the Mediterranean, the Near East and Ireland’. Furthermore, he declared that the causes of any potential conflict would be: ‘1) The childless marriage; 2) The failure of agriculturalists … to understand the ways of nature and conserve the fertility of the soil.’

Within months, all these predictions had gone awry, but Naylor’s reputation remained rock-solid. Nearly ninety years on, the horoscope is quite possibly the most formidable legacy of HRH the Princess Margaret, who shared her birthday, 21 August, and her star sign Leo, with a varied list of famous characters, including Count Basie, King William IV, Kenny Rogers, Aubrey Beardsley, Dame Janet Baker and Joe Strummer of the Clash.

*Born William John Warner (1866–1936), he also went by the name of Count Louis Hamon. Cheiro combined his careers as a clairvoyant, numerologist and palmist with running both a champagne business and a chemical factory, though not from the same premises.

In my biographer’s delirium, as I looked at the list of Princess Margaret’s fellow 21 August Leos I began to notice spooky similarities, and then to think that, actually, she was just like them in every way: after all, King William IV was family, and Dame Janet Baker looked a bit like her, as well as being a near-contemporary (b.1933). The two of them were chummy, too: Dame Janet remembers the Princess saying, ‘Good luck, Janet – be an angel,’ to her before she sang the part of the Angel in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius in Westminster Abbey. Moreover, the Princess was a great fan of Count Basie, and vice versa: in 1957 Basie and his orchestra recorded ‘H.R.H.’, a song dedicated to her. Margaret also shared a louche, camp, decadent streak with Aubrey Beardsley, and might have identified with Kenny Rogers’ songs about being disappointed by love: ‘You picked a fine time to leave me, Tony’. And as for Joe Strummer, if the Margaret/Townsend romance were to be set to music, could there ever be a more perfect keynote duet than this?

PETER TOWNSEND: Darling, you got to let me know

Should I stay or should I go?

PRINCESS MARGARET: If you say that you are mine

I’ll be here ’til the end of time

BOTH: So you got to let me know

Should I stay or should I go?

By now I was hallucinating. The Princess was everywhere and nowhere. It seemed as though everyone I bumped into had met her at one time or another, and had a story to tell, generally about her saying something untoward and an uneasy atmosphere ensuing. At the same time my brain was becoming entangled with the spaghetti-like argy-bargy of the Townsend affair, as knotted and impenetrable as the causes of the First World War.