Sunday 11 September 2022 10:28 PM GYLES BRANDRETH recalls how the Queen lit up in her husband's presence trends now

When Prince Charles was born, in November 1948, footman John Gibson was working temporarily in Winston Churchill's household. 

He told me, 'When I heard the news on the radio, I went in to tell Mr Churchill and he jumped up in the air and gave three cheers.

'He was over the moon for the Princess. He ran round the room waving his hands above his head and shouting, 'Hooray! It's marvellous news! Tell everybody to come in, John. And bring the champagne. We must toast the heir to the throne.' '

Princess Elizabeth's confinement — in the Palace's Buhl Room, specially converted into a well-equipped surgery – had been a painfully long one. Afterwards, she spent ten days in bed recuperating (as new mothers were encouraged to do) and breast-fed her son from the start.

She wrote to her former music teacher: 'The baby is very sweet and we are enormously proud of him. He has an interesting pair of hands for a baby. They are rather large, but with fine long fingers quite unlike mine and certainly unlike his father's. It will be interesting to see what they become. I still find it hard to believe I have a baby of my own!'

Patricia Mountbatten told me she thought Philip and Elizabeth chose 'Charles' as a name simply because they liked it. Boy Browning [Philip's Comptroller] was one of those who felt the name was 'bad news', given the precedents of Charles I and II, to say nothing of the unhappy fate that befell Charles Stuart, 'Bonnie Prince Charlie'.

Princess Margaret, however, was delighted with the choice of name, explaining that henceforward she would be known as 'Charley's Aunt — probably my finest title'.

Philip and Lilibet were very happy with their new baby. According to friends who have known them across all their adult lives, the first few years of their marriage were, in many ways, the happiest.

Gina Kennard said to me, 'Princess Elizabeth was not yet Queen, Philip was still in the navy. They were young, they were relatively carefree.'

And they were cosseted. While devoted to little Prince Charles, they did not have to tend to him unaided. He had two Scottish nurses in constant attendance.

Before Charles was born, Elizabeth had declared, 'I'm going to be the child's mother, not the nurses.' Well, she was — but, inevitably, because she was a princess as well as a mother, because 'royal duty' called and all her life Elizabeth made answering the call of royal duty her first priority, and because it was the way of her class and her time, much of the nitty-gritty of childcare was left to the nurses.

Until Clarence House was ready for the family to move into in July 1949, the baby lived at their country house, Windlesham Moor, only seeing his parents when they came down from London at weekends.

After that, Elizabeth saw her young children as much as any aristocratic mother of her generation and more, perhaps, than many busy working mothers today.

John Gibson, who returned to royal service as 'nursery footman' at Windlesham Moor, assured me that Princess Elizabeth was 'very hands-on' with Charles, 'like a real mother — not a princess'. He could not fault the young royal couple: 'When they were on their own, it was a very simple life. They were quite normal people, really. They were waited on hand and foot, obviously, but they sat at the table and they had a natter about what was going on in the day.'

Much of the domestic conversation overheard by John related to home-making. 'They couldn't wait to get into their new home at Clarence House. They talked about it all the time. 'I think Grandma is giving me a nice sideboard. I'm sure she is.' Grandma was Queen Mary, of course.'

When John Dean, Philip's valet, had a day off, John Gibson would take the young Duke of Edinburgh his early morning tea. Philip would look in on Elizabeth in her intercommunicating room and tease her for not being out of bed yet.

When they were up at Birkhall in Scotland, Philip and Elizabeth would drive over to Balmoral with the staff piled into the back of the shooting brake.

'He'd drive like mad over the country roads,' according to John Gibson. 'Philip, Philip, slow down for God's sake, slow down, you're killing all the rabbits,' she said. 'What's the matter with you?'

At 28, Philip was appointed second-in-command of HMS Chequers, the Leader of the 1st Destroyer Flotilla of the Mediterranean Fleet at Malta. For several weeks at a time, Elizabeth would leave Charles with her mother and fly out to join him.

This is the period in her adult life that can perhaps be described as the most normal — or, at least, the least unreal. He was a serving officer; she was a naval wife. Buckingham Palace was a thousand miles away.

'It was a good time,' according to Philip. 'It was a fabulous time,' according to his equerry Mike Parker. 'I think it was their happiest time,' said his valet John Dean. 'They were so relaxed and free, coming and going as they pleased.'

In Malta, there were parties and picnics, swimming expeditions and boat trips. Elizabeth went out for coffee and shopping and visits to the hairdresser with the other young officers' wives.

Of course, nothing is ever entirely normal when it comes to royalty. The princess, who had arrived with the ever-faithful Bobo (her nursery maid-turned dresser and confidante) plus a new lady-in-waiting, stayed with her husband at the Mountbattens' villa — where the indoor help included a butler, a housekeeper, three cooks, six stewards, two housemaids, two cleaning ladies, and a valet.

Princess Anne was born at Clarence House in August 1950. Elizabeth reported to a friend, 'We only hope that Charles will take kindly to it. He has only seen Fortune Euston's baby at close quarters and he then tried to pull her toes off and poke her eyes out, all of which she took very kindly, having a brother of two who presumably did the same.'

The following year, Princess Elizabeth became the first member of the Royal Family to fly the Atlantic. She and Philip were accompanied on their gruelling 35-day tour of Canada and the U.S. by her new private secretary, Martin Charteris.

'Please smile more, Ma'am,' pleaded Charteris at one point. 'But my jaws are aching,' sighed the Princess.

(Fifty years later, accompanying the Queen on a tour of the West Country, the Duchess of Grafton told me, 'She does find this constant smiling very exhausting, you know. After a day like today, her jaw really aches.')

Martin Charteris said to me, 'It was a long trip and it wasn't plain sailing. It wasn't easy for either of them.'

Is it true, I asked, that, at breakfast one morning on the Governor-General's train, the Duke called the Princess 'a bloody fool'? 'He might have done,' said Charteris, smiling. 'He had a naval turn of phrase.'

On a long train ride across Canada that autumn, Philip did his best to entertain his wife with a range of practical jokes. According to John Dean, these included surprising her with a booby-trapped can of nuts and chasing her down the corridor wearing a set of joke false teeth.

The idea that, as a mother, the Queen was remote and uncaring — an idea spread by Prince Charles via Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994 — is flatly rejected by the Princess Royal.

'I'm not going to speak for anyone else,' said Princess Anne, 'but I simply don't believe that there is any evidence whatsoever to suggest that she wasn't caring. It just beggars belief.

'We as children may have not been too demanding, in the sense that we understood what the limitations were in time and the responsibilities placed on her as monarch in the things she had to do and the travels she had to make. But I don't believe that any of us, for a second, thought she didn't care for us in exactly the same way as any other mother did. I just think it's extraordinary that anybody could construe that that might not be true.'

Anne found her mother tolerant in a way that allowed her children to find their own feet.

'If she'd been a disciplinarian,' she said with a wry smile, 'and said 'no' to everybody, we'd have all been psychoanalysed out of existence on the basis that we had too controlling a mother. We've all been allowed to find our own way and we were always encouraged to discuss problems,

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