Last of the artistocrats

AN old lady died. Not many were surprised. There was no shock and no tears at the museum in Barnard Castle which bears the Queen Mother's family name, although there was plenty of sadness and reflection.

"I am sorry because of her connections with the area," said Peter Croom, walking his dog Holly in the grounds. "I remember the first time I saw her, I must have been five or six and we lived in a high house near the Buttermarket and we saw her in her car."

That was in 1956 when the Queen Mother played a significant role in saving the museum, founded by her ancestors.

The museum, with its Napoleonic art and Victorian furniture and ceramics, is a good place to start putting her extraordinary life into context, just as the dress she wore to the 1953 Coronation of her daughter is neatly filed away in the museum's collection of costumes through the ages.

"The Queen Mother has been part of the fabric of the nation for 100 years and so it is sad," said Phil McNichol from Edinburgh, who was staying for Easter in Hamsterley. "We have lost something."

We have, in fact, lost a lot. The Queen Mother was the last Victorian, the last Empress, the last aristocrat, the last with personal experience of the First World War, the last of the great Second World War leaders, the last of the stiff upper lip, the last member of the Royal Family who was above and beyond the questions which have battered the generations that have come after her. We will never see her like, and life, again.

SHE was born when Britain ruled a fifth of the world, when the sun never set on the British Empire. From 1936 until Indian independence in 1947, she held the title Empress. But that empire has now slipped into the history books along with the red coloured maps. Now she, our last living link to it, has gone too.

The First World War has also slipped into history. The Queen Mother was one of a handful alive who, despite the vast scale of carnage, could say that they lost a brother - Fergus, who died in 1915. With her passing, the Great War is obliterated from living memory.

The Second World War is going the same way. Veterans' associations are winding down as the old soldiers fade away. The Queen Mother was one of the last who could remember vividly the whirring, screeching noise of the bombs as they fell from the sky onto her palace. Britain's darkest hour, and the inspirational part she played in seeing the country through to dawn, is becoming history leaving behind it only curios in the language - "the spirit of the Blitz".

She was the embodiment of that spirit, and of the qualities that made the Empire: pride, patriotism, duty and determination. Now, though, she seems to have come from a different way of life. In 1952, she watched her husband's funeral without crying because that was the way the British did things. No hearts on sleeves, no blubbing in public, but restrained dignity and stiff-upper lip. She admitted that in private, her emotions had come out - but one didn't want to let the side down in public.

She came from an earlier age of moral certainties. An old-fashioned word, fidelity, was important to her. It was the fidelity of Albert, George V's younger son, that impressed her so much that she married him. Her other suitors had flirtatious dalliances with other young women and ruled themselves out, but Bertie persevered, faithfully proposing three times until she accepted.

In return, she was steadfastly loyal to him, creating the king in him from the shy, stuttering young man she had married. It was the disloyalty and unfaithfulness that so abhored her about Edward VIII's relationship with Wallis Simpson - his disloyalty to the British people; her unfaithfulness to her two living husbands. Her dislike of the couple was intensified by the early death of her husband from lung cancer which she blamed on him doing his duty so resolutely to the country (although 40 cigarettes a day won't have helped him much).

Britons don't do loyalty or fidelity as much nowadays. They do adultery better. Although Prince Charles was her favourite grandson - she chose him to accompany her in her carriage on her 100th birthday - she was deeply dismayed when his marriage to Diana ended in divorce and when he was found to be carrying on with Camilla, herself a divorcee.

Some might say that Charles should have listened more carefully to his grandmother's moral certainties. Diana didn't think so, referring to her as the "chief leper in the leper colony".

And it was the Queen Mother, convinced in her certainties from another era, who steered her daughter Margaret away from a relationship with Group-Captain Peter Townsend because he was divorced. Margaret never again found personal happiness.

We all now know enough about the lives of Charles, Camilla, Fergie, Edward, Sophie and so on to write our own soap opera scripts for them. We even know that Her Majesty the Queen shares her bath with a yellow plastic duck.

But we knew the Queen Mother largely by her official title. Sometimes, it was shortened affectionately to the Queen Mum, but never was she referred to by her first name. She was the last of the Royal Family to retain her deference.

Hers was a very different kind of royalty to that practised nowadays. She did one newspaper interview in 1922, was criticised by George V for it and immediately shut up. All we've seen of her since has been a hat, a veil, a frock, a smile and a wave - always posed professionally for the photographers - but nothing more. No tittle-tattle, no briefing aides, no selective leaks.

She succeeded where they've all been struggling since: she had a perfect public image of warmth, charm and sincerity but her privacy was absolute and her position beyond question.

While Sophie and Edward fell foul for trying to earn a few bucks, the Queen Mother's extravagant lifestyle passed without comment. Until her dying day, she ran four houses, had 50 servants and had no care for cost-control - in 1998 she was £4m overdrawn. She was the last of the aristocrats with extravagant tastes, but there were no public calls for her to pay tax or for her to be brought down a peg. In fact, most people would have willingly tipped her another bottle of gin and a few more quid for the gee-gees.

Even her dress sense has never been criticised. She truly was untouchable.

"She was a marvellous old stick," said Jacqueline Gill-Parsons from Cheshire who was visiting the Bowes Museum yesterday.

"She was the strength behind the Royal Family," said her friend Christine Price. "She was the kingpin who kept it altogether with dignity. She was the matriarch and her opinions really mattered."

THE Queen Mother turned the Royal Family around. We have only history to remind us just how serious the 1936 abdication crisis was, how close the House of Windsor came to collapsing. Indeed, in the early years of the war, the Queen Mother herself was so unpopular that she was pelted with rubbish when she arrived in her best hat and pearls amid the wreckage of another night of bombing.

Her own undoubted popularity has not been transferred down the generations and, having lost its principle asset, the Royal Family has overnight become weaker.

Arthur Heslop, visiting the Bowes from Sunderland, said: "She was a wonderful person who did a lot of good, but I do wonder whether she could have influenced the behaviour of the young royals more.

"I was a royalist in 1951 when I was in the RAF and Princess Elizabeth presented me with the King's Colour in Hyde Park, but now I'm tending not to be because of the behaviour of the others."

The Queen Mother's living prevented certain questions from being asked. Once the mournin g is over, her death will allow them to be aired. The Queen, until Saturday a sprightly spring chicken compared to the old lady on sticks beside her, has suddenly aged. How long can she carry on? After 50 exhausting years on the throne, does she not deserve a retirement and the title of the Queen Mother? And how will Charles resolve his relationship with Camilla? Or, now that the Untouchable is out of the way, will the heretics win the day and prove that we don't need any of them?

An old lady died. Not many were surprised. But nearly all will have an opinion about the future now that she, and all she stood for, have finally entered the history books.