A homeless king dropped in once a week to collect his laundry. Another exiled monarch sat motionless in the Palace gardens day after day, stunned by the destruction of her country. Other kings brought their wives, while one preferred to bring his mistress. This was wartime Buckingham Palace - unofficial. Just a step away, Queen Camilla's great-grandmother sat sipping champagne and boasting of her miraculous escape from the enemy. While quietly, imperceptibly, lesser royals jockeyed for position in the post-war pecking order. The palace was a second home to them all. Or almost all - one monarch was turned away because of his outrageously criminal activities.
Meantime safe in her country retreat, the almost-criminal Queen Mary, mother of the king, broke wartime regulations with impunity. We all know the story of the royals at war - the bombs, the Queen looking the East End in the eye, King George valiantly overcoming his stutter to address the nation. But in the roar and dust of the Blitz many events went unnoticed, and remain virtually unknown to this day. With the invasion of Europe crowned heads fled their countries to the sanctuary of London, gathering under the protective umbrella of their fellow-monarch King George VI.
King Peter of Yugoslavia, a mere kid of 17 when his country was overrun, had the disadvantage of having a gun-toting busybody, Queen Maria, for a mother. So intensely was Maria disliked that, though long-established in London with her lesbian lover Rosemary Cresswell, she was never invited to the Palace. It wasn't her sexuality which barred her but her loud mouth.
The English public-school educated Peter squeaked through the door because he was George VI's godson, but officials wanted rid of him because he was deemed to be weak and untrustworthy. He was soon packed off to Cairo in the hope he'd never come back (he didn't). Equally distrusted by senior courtiers was Zog of Albania, a former brigand who decided one day he'd like to be known as king - and so crowned himself.
When the Italian army invaded his country in 1939, he fled to London accompanied by a huge haul of gold bars, property of Albania's National Bank, which represented a very large part of the impoverished country's exchequer. He set up home at The Ritz hotel but its proximity to Buckingham Palace and his blatantly criminal activities were an embarrassment, and when he attempted to call on the King and Queen, Zog found they were "not at home".
The Foreign Office quickly found him a large house some miles from London and he was rarely seen again. Also to be found at The Ritz in the Blitz was Alice Keppel, great grandmother of our present Queen Camilla - a boastful, larger-than-life woman who fled her Italian home via France when war broke out. "To hear Alice talk, one would think she had swum the Channel with her maid between her teeth," sniffed a friend. Not welcome at the Palace!
But inside the iconic building, badly damaged by the Luftwaffe - after one raid the Queen is reported to have said, "I am glad we have been bombed. Now we can look the East End in the eye" - there were occasional comic scenes. George VI's uncle King Haakon of Norway, together with his son Crown Prince Olaf, turned up on the doorstep after their 1940 flight from Oslo with just the clothes they stood up in. "The first thing our King did was to tell his valet to find clothes for them from his own wardrobe," recalled a Buckingham Palace official, Frederick Corbitt. This presented something of a challenge, since the English king stood 5ft 7ins in his socks, the Norwegian monarch seven inches taller.
But Haakon, it turned out, was an engagingly modest man - he was found a suitable London residence but still liked to get his laundry done at the Palace. "He used to call on us personally once a week to collect his parcel," recalled Corbitt. "He could have sent somebody, but preferred to do it himself - I've never known any king so democratic and friendly."
The next royal refugee to knock on the door was Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. After being chased across her country by the advancing German hordes, the 60-year old crossed the North Sea in a destroyer, only to be bombed by Stukas and other aircraft before finally making safe landfall on the east coast. She too arrived at the palace with nothing beyond the clothes she was wearing. "Many a morning I saw her sitting alone in a deckchair which had been provided for her in the garden," recalled Corbitt.
"But not once did I see her either pick up a book or a piece of paper to write on. She just sat quite still, gazing across the lawn to the lake. She'd been stunned into silence by what had happened to her country, and her frightening journey to England."
In 1941 King George II of Greece arrived having escaped his overrun country. He was put up at Claridge's Hotel while his mistress, the English-born Joyce Brittain-Jones, was lodged nearby at Brown's Hotel. For the duration she was known jokingly among the royal pack as "Mrs Brown".
Also welcomed was Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, his country overcome by Italian forces. Selassie stayed more modestly at the Langham Hotel opposite the 's Broadcasting House, before returning in triumph to Addis Ababa after the invaders were driven out in the spring of 1941.
All these crowned heads, with the exception of Zog, were welcomed at Buckingham Palace - where they discovered after a drink and a handshake that while they may have ruled in their own land, while in Britain they must adhere to wartime regulations. All were given gas masks, warned about the blackout, and issued with ration books.
Meanwhile Queen Mary, the widow of King George V, was safe in the country staying with her niece the Duchess of Beaufort. Born Princess May of Teck, she had many German relations and saw no reason why she shouldn't write to them. Wartime regulations firmly stated it was an offence to make contact with the enemy - but Her Majesty didn't see that a family note inquiring after their health was anything much to bother about.
However Mary was shrewd enough to send her mail via Lord Mountbatten's sister Queen Louise of (neutral) Sweden, who acted as a universal royal postmistress throughout the conflict - she knew all too well she was breaking the rules. Certainly Mary, whose husband died in 1936, was happy to defy regulations when she picked up a hitchhiking RAF officer on a drive through Gloucestershire. She discovered he was in charge of canteen rations at a nearby airbase. "Do you have sausages?" she asked.
The startled officer replied he did. "I miss sausages," said Her Majesty dolefully. "Get me some. I'll pay!"
The officer duly obliged, until he was warned that RAF rations were just that - food for servicemen. Black-market deals like this, queen or no queen, risked court-martial and disgrace. Other than that, our royal family discharged their wartime duties with distinction, though behind closed doors there was not always such a united front.
After the Palace was bombed in 1940 the unspoken question was - who will succeed George VI if the next one drops on his head? The heir apparent, Princess Elizabeth, was just 14. (Within a year of turning 18, Elizabeth would sign up for the Auxiliary Territorial Service. It was an unprecedented decision - making her the first woman in the Royal Family to become a full-time member of the armed services). Whatever the constitutional rights and wrongs, it would not serve the country's best interests to have a teenager on the throne in wartime - so who would step in as Regent, until she came of age?
With the former king Edward VIII in exile in the Bahamas, there was no question of his recall. So that left the king's two other brothers - the dukes of Gloucester and Kent - as potential heads of state. Gloucester, though a valiant soldier, was viewed by most people as a buffoon.
His goose was cooked when an MP stood up in the Commons and suggested he should be made Commander-in-Chief of the Army, only to be greeted with ribald laughter on all sides. "That was a joke that lasted all week," snorted one Cabinet minister.
Then there was the wayward, handsome, not entirely reliable Duke of Kent. At the time of the abdication, and with good reason, he believed he stood a fair chance of rising to the throne rather than his stuttering older brother. But around that time he died in a mysterious plane crash, and the question of a regency was shelved.
Kent's passing left his widow Princess Marina without an income or pension, and she was short of cash. Though in the end King George dipped into his own pocket to help her out, a worrying delay occurred, which some put down to the fact that the Queen (later Queen Mother) was curiously jealous of Marina - her looks, her style, and the fact that she'd been born royal while Elizabeth had not. If there was one thing almost as precious as the life of the Sovereign, it was the symbol of the royal family's durability down the centuries - the Crown Jewels.
With one item dating back to the 12th century and others from the 17th century, they are the ultimate emblems of majesty and hereditary power, to be guarded at all costs. With the threat of invasion, something previously unthinkable occurred - the priceless gems were ripped from their ancient gold settings by an official, wrapped in cotton wool, and jammed into a humble biscuit tin. They were then buried deep under a gateway at Windsor Castle - so that if the Germans did arrive and storm the Tower of London, they'd find the cupboard bare.
It wasn't the only subterfuge. The enduring image we have of stately survival is the Royal Standard - the flag that flies wherever the monarch is to be found. Except that in the war, it was often used as a decoy. If the Nazis saw it fluttering above the Palace and broke down the doors to arrest the king, they'd find him gone. There were half-a-dozen safe houses he could escape to.
However, they might possibly have bumped into the fearless Queen. She had taken shooting lessons - and promised to "take one with me" if ever confronted by a German. That good old wartime fighting spirit!
