Authors: Tom Quinn
Backstairs Billy (14 page)
F
ROM AN HISTORICAL
perspective, it was traditional in the afternoon for all servants to have a few hours free before the serious work connected with the family’s wining and dining began in the evening. It was just the same, in theory, for Billy and the other servants at Clarence House.
Eric Gray, who worked with Billy for a short while in the early 1970s, recalls that Billy’s weekday routine was fairly strict, but that things were often very different in the evening or if the Queen Mother was away and Billy had been left to ‘look after the cat’ as he used to put it.
Each day after lunch Billy disappeared to his rooms unless the Queen Mother had asked him to do something in particular – it might just be a request to collect a trinket from somewhere or other – which did occasionally happen. But if the request had to do with the corgis or junior staff, Billy would often get Reg to do it – Reg never complained because he wasn’t the complaining sort and, besides, Billy was his boss. The junior staff, especially the young men, liked Reg but sometimes disliked or at least feared Billy, who could come across as stern or bitchy if he didn’t like you.
When Reg had finished with the junior staff he might join Billy upstairs in his rooms and there was a joke in the house that staff should avoid going anywhere near Billy’s part of the house when Reg was up there in case we heard any noisy lovemaking!
But Billy also liked to walk around St James’s in the afternoon ‘in his full regalia’ as Reg used to say. He liked to be seen leaving the building as often as possible because the duty policeman would always nod respectfully and it made Billy feel as if he really was a VIP, which in a way he was. He liked going to Berry Bros, the royal wine shop, in St James’s, where he was well known, and to Locks the hatters, a place he adored because of its history and
its extraordinarily attentive staff. But wherever he went he was treated with the kind of reverence normally reserved for the aristocracy. Oddly, his desire to be noticed didn’t make him a figure of fun. He was respected because it was widely known that the Queen Mother, though she might tell him off discreetly now and then, could not do without him. A common joke about Billy ran, ‘We know which old queen is really in charge here, and it isn’t the QM!’
Various servants of the time who saw Billy and the Queen Mother together when no one else was around noted that there was something of the devoted couple about them. ‘They had any number of private jokes that no one else understood,’ recalled one. Some people said it was more like Labrador and master but it was common knowledge that they enjoyed little intimate chats and Billy would whisper jokes and little asides in her ear. She was as intimate with Billy as she was with anyone.
This is why she famously lost her temper – a very rare thing – with one of the equerries. He had fallen out with Billy and tried to impose his will, not just on Billy but also on the Queen Mother. She responded by telling the equerry, ‘Your job is negotiable; William’s is not.’
Former servant Eric Gray remembered one of those moments when Billy and the Queen Mother seemed especially like a long-married couple.
When I helped in the dining room, on several occasions I saw the Queen Mother and Billy having a very intimate kind of conversation.
She would smile and sometimes laugh at what he said but he had an incredible sense of just how far he could go. He rarely got it wrong. Although he would at times lean close to her, he was never
overfamiliar
, which I don’t think she would have liked at all, and he was very good with words – very witty in a dry clever way that was camp, but not irritatingly so. I once heard Billy speaking to the Queen Mother as one of her rather boring equerries approached along the corridor. Billy whispered audibly, ‘O la di bloody da, here she comes’. I think it was a slip as Billy avoided more obviously camp stuff in front of the Queen Mother. He went slightly red but the Queen Mother hooted with laughter and I could see Billy was pleased – and perhaps surprised.
Billy’s working day rarely ended before eleven at night, for the Queen Mother enjoyed her social life enormously through the 1970s and 1980s before age began to take its toll. Fuelled by her favourite Tanqueray gin she could keep going for hours on end and was often heard to say there was no point going to bed early as she had nothing to get up for in the morning. Typically, it never occurred to her that other people, especially the servants, were not so lucky.
When the day finally ended at Clarence House, Billy, dressed as ever in his white tie and tails, would politely open the door to the Queen Mother’s private quarters and, having bowed her in, he would retire to bed. That at least is what appeared to be happening. The Queen Mother knew that Billy might well go up to his room after leaving her; she also knew that on many nights
he had no intention of staying in his room. Instead he changed his clothes, trotted quietly down the back stairs and out past the policeman into the night.
B
ILLY’S CHARACTER WAS
created to a large extent by his highly developed sex drive. He had a good solid relationship with his partner Reg but after their initial passion cooled and a lifelong friendship developed, Billy still felt the irresistible pull of night-time adventuring.
As one contemporary, whom Billy seduced a few hours after he started work at Clarence House, said:
Billy was two completely different people. He was calm and almost rigidly decorous during the day, for the most part. Charming and discreet with lovely manners, he could make anyone feel good about themselves, but at night he had only one aim and that was to have sex with as many boys as possible. I don’t think it is fair to say, as some have said, that he was predatory, in the sense that he would force people to do things they didn’t want to do, but let’s put it like this – he could be very persuasive! This was especially true when it came to fellow servants, because he knew he had a certain amount of power over them, although I don’t think he ever used that power, at least he didn’t early on when he was still young and good looking. He mostly didn’t have to.
The truth is that Billy’s only real interest outside his work was sex. Sex, as I’ve said, with as many boys as possible. This might sound shocking, but in those pre-AIDS days in the 1960s and 1970s it was common for highly sexed young gay men to see sex as an end in itself. They rejected the bourgeois idea that you should only have sex with someone with whom you had formed a relationship. And to be fair, the same ideas permeated heterosexual people at that time – sex was a great liberator for all until AIDS terrified everyone into domesticity.
Even Billy’s staunchest supporters admit that his sexual appetites were extraordinary, and they seemed hardly to diminish even as he entered his fifties and sixties.
When Billy left Clarence House late in the evening, instead of his formal butler’s suit – tail coat, white tie and plenty of medals – he would don a casual jacket and trousers. But there was nothing
subtle about this transformation. He loved contrasting colours and might well wear a green tweed coat with purple trousers and an orange shirt. For those used to seeing him in his formal attire, the change was striking. He was virtually unrecognisable, as a fellow servant recalled. ‘I spotted him on the stairs once and thought “Who the bloody hell is that?” I did a double take and then realised it was William in what looked very much like fancy dress!’
Once out into the Mall, Billy had two favourite routes. One of them was to walk up St James’s Street and along Piccadilly to Hyde Park Corner, which, in the 1950s and early 1960s, was a favourite haunt of gay men looking for other men.
Like the Labour Peer Lord Bradwell (better known as Tom Driberg, 1905–1976), with whom he may well have had a brief affair, Billy was far keener on oral rather than any other kind of sex – according to one of his chance encounters, Billy seemed to think that swallowing large quantities of semen was the secret of eternal youth.
Don Jones, who knew Billy well around this time, said:
Billy was one of a number of queens who didn’t really like having sex done to him if you see what I mean – he liked doing it to others. Partly because of the idea that sperm – especially from young men – would keep him young but also because he always wanted to be in charge.
I think his desire for control was linked to the influence of his strong-willed mother. She was the tough one. He liked strong women, which is why he stayed with the Queen Mother for so long, but he didn’t like strong men who might compete with him. I think his father
was much less of an influence. Billy definitely took after his mother. Today we would say he was in touch with his maternal side but it was a pretty fierce and sometimes controlling maternal side.
But when it came to cruising for sex, he was no different really from thousands of other young gay men in London at that time. It’s easy to be unkind about him now that he’s dead [but] I don’t think he was particularly predatory or irresponsible. He was just part of a scene that was very promiscuous. It was also furtive and anonymous and harked back to the days before homosexuality was legalised. You have to remember that Billy was in his thirties before homosexuality ceased to be a crime. In the old days, cottaging was one of the few ways gay men could get sex with the minimum risk of being caught. But even when it was no longer necessary, a lot of older men and some young ones still found it more exciting than meeting men in a bar or in some other, more conventional way. It was exciting because it was slightly dangerous. When homosexuality between consenting adults was legalised in the mid-1960s I think Billy, like a lot of gay men, was a little disappointed. Without the danger some of the fun had gone.
But Billy was also fascinated by other kinds of sex. He was intrigued by reports that Oscar Wilde had enjoyed ‘crus sexus’ – he was delighted to discover that this involved simply rubbing one’s thigh against another man’s genitals. ‘Very poetic, I’m sure,’ he used to say.
If Billy decided not to go to Hyde Park his favoured route was usually along the Mall to Green Park, Victoria and on to Kennington, where he was to spend his last years.
He also liked Soho, which was, in its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, a magnet for people such as the painter Francis Bacon and writer Daniel Farson, who held court in Wheelers and the Colony Room. But Billy was always discreet so far as it was possible to be discreet when you were on the prowl, and he always made sure he was back at Clarence House in time to get just enough sleep to be ready for his duties next morning. Nonetheless, he drove himself hard. For years he had too little sleep and drank heavily yet never missed a day’s work.
‘He was immensely strong,’ recalled a fellow servant. ‘We used to say he had the constitution of an ox, although I think the years of debauchery did begin to tell even before the tremendous shock of losing his job and his home after the Queen Mother’s death. I can remember his hand sometimes shook and he had a permanently red face.’
Occasionally Billy’s natural caution would be abandoned and his carefully concealed love of risk and danger bubbled to the surface. His friends said he was both drawn to risk and repelled by it. In many ways he loved danger – the risk of being found out – because it had been so much a part of his earliest amorous adventures in London in the 1950s, but he knew that taking risks too often could destroy his career and put an end to his nights on the town. The riskier side of sex never quite outweighed his love for his career.
If the Queen Mother was away, which happened several times a year, all her staff – at least those who remained at Clarence House – heaved a sigh of relief. ‘You could feel the atmosphere change in a moment,’ recalled one. ‘We went from a kind of heightened
tension to a relaxed but almost deflated atmosphere where we chatted to each other more and had more free time, but missed the excitement of the Queen Mother being around.’
Noel Kelly, who knew Billy well at this time, remembered how Billy operated:
Well, Billy would go out in the evening ‘to see friends’ as he used to say but we all knew he was probably looking for a pick-up. It is true that he did have a remarkable number of friends, especially in the world of theatre and ballet, but he didn’t see them that often and I don’t think they knew him at all intimately – no one really knew Billy intimately in the sense of understanding what really made him tick.
Billy must have known that his indiscretions were a continual source of delight to the below-stairs gossipers. After all, he liked gossip as much as anyone. But he relied on his position to protect him from any direct challenge.
‘I’m sure Billy didn’t really think the policeman at the gate believed him when he claimed that a very dodgy-looking character shiftily hanging back behind him was an old friend he was simply bringing in for tea,’ remembered Noel Kelly. The policemen knew that so long as Billy had the confidence of the Queen Mother, they couldn’t challenge anyone he chose to take on a tour of the house.
Once or twice Billy told the policemen that the boy he was with was a cousin or even a nephew and the policemen would always nod
them through. Part of the appeal of doing this was not just the danger of taking a boy into Clarence House. It was also an exercise of power. Billy knew that the sort of boys he picked up would be astonished and impressed that they were about to get a tour of one of the world’s most famous houses.
One of Billy’s boyfriends explained that, in the gay bars of Soho, Billy was famous for his standard chat-up line.
He’d eye someone up and offer to buy him a drink. Then when they got talking he would calmly ask what the boy did. Most of the young men around Soho at that time were aspiring or out-of-work actors or they were hoping to break into the fashion or advertising industries. A few claimed they were models or artists. Everyone knew that we all lied about what we did but no one cared. If you wanted to be an actor or a model – if that’s what you aspired to – then it was fine to say you actually
were
an actor or a model.
Then along comes Billy and calmly slips into the conversation that he is a senior member of staff at Clarence House. If that didn’t impress – and some young men would never have understood the significance of the words Clarence House – Billy would explain that he worked in a personal capacity for the Queen Mother. Of course the boys on first acquaintance assumed this too was just fantasy – just another tale told in the bars. We all just wanted to impress each other. So when Billy was met with a sceptical smile, he would say, ‘Why don’t you come back to the house for tea and you can see?’
Very few could resist that kind of an invitation. So they would trot
off on the twenty-minute walk back to the palace. The first time I went back with Billy I remember thinking as we got closer to Clarence House, ‘He really must work there or he would have made a joke by now about inventing the whole thing’. Many people would spin you a line and then make a joke about fiction being much more interesting than fact or they would say, ‘I would say anything to get
you
into bed!’
But Billy was different. He marched into the courtyard with me in tow, shaking in my boots. I daren’t look at the policeman on the gate but Billy had the air of a recently crowned king. I hardly noticed anything as we walked through several corridors and up a staircase and then we were in what I thought was a very grand room. There was also an old wooden lift that Billy mostly used, but that first time we took the stairs for some reason.
I found myself in Billy’s sitting room, but compared to my
bedsit
in Camberwell this was very smart. Having talked about working in the palace when we met, he now refused to answer any searching questions about what exactly he did. I asked a few things about the Queen Mother but he gave nothing away beyond that he worked for her. I thought this was odd after he’d actually brought me into the old girl’s house! I was quite drunk by this time but he carefully poured two glasses of a delicious red wine and asked about me. I thought he was very polite but it was probably just to stop me asking any more questions about him.
Next minute he made a rather crude lunge at me, which I didn’t mind – it was almost comic and besides I was used to that kind of thing. He wasn’t a great lover, I have to say – my memory is that it was all over in about five minutes.
Billy didn’t quite kick me out afterwards but he looked a little bored and I knew better than to ask if I could stay. He saw me to the gate and off I went!
Other men picked up by Billy were not so well behaved and on several occasions after he saw his visitor to the door he would discover that one or two of his possessions were missing. He accepted this with good grace but was furious on another occasion when one of his visitors wandered off on his own for an unscheduled tour of the house.
Rita Edwards, who was a maid at Clarence House, recalled how she was horrified late one night to bump into a stranger in the house who was clearly completely lost.
I stopped dead when I saw this well-dressed young man looking at one of the paintings. I’d never seen him before and I was so surprised that I simply froze. We always knew who to expect to see even during the day so for there to be a stranger alone in the house at night was a serious security breach. Before I could decide what to do, I saw Billy suddenly at the far end of the corridor. His hair was all over the place and he was trying to put his jacket on as he stumbled along the corridor – I’d never seen him so flustered. He quickly reached the young man and was clearly furious, though he tried to control his features. The two of them wandered back the way Billy had come. Next time we met he made absolutely no reference to this embarrassing night-time escapade. But that was so typical of him. He would simply float above any difficulty or embarrassment. He may have known
that the young man’s presence would be talked about in the servants’ hall but so long as no one ever spoke to him about it he didn’t mind what other people said.