Yes Ma’am: Upstairs Downstairs in the British Royal Family

What really makes the British royal family tick? It’s a question that royal watchers have pondered for as long as there has been a royal family. And the answer? Well, surprisingly, it’s not the royal family’s devotion to duty, it’s not their wealth or their status, it’s not even their popularity (or notoriety!). No, what really makes the royal family tick is the huge body of servants and staff past and present who feed and clothe the royals, organise their days, polish their shoes, carry the deer and pheasants they shoot, and even put the toothpaste on their toothbrushes. If you want to find out who these servants are, what they do and why, in so many cases, they devote their whole lives to royal service, then this book is for you. Some servants became utterly indispensable to the royals for whom they worked - Elizabeth II’s childhood nanny Bobo MacDonald, for example, was closer to the late Queen than anyone in her family, not excepting even her husband Prince Philip and her sister Princess Margaret. At the other end of the spectrum, some members of staff found their royal employers arrogant, overbearing, snobbish and even infantile. As one recent member of the Kensington Palace team put it: ’What you get with one or two members of the royal family is a public angel and a private devil! And only the staff see the private devil!’

Tom Quinn is the author of Scandals of the Royal Palaces: An Intimate Memoir of Royals Behaving Badly; Kensington Palace: An Intimate Memoir from Queen Mary to Meghan Markle; The Reluctant Billionaire: The Tragic Life of Gerald Grosvenor, Sixth Duke of Westminster; Mrs Keppel: Mistress to the King; Backstairs Billy: The Life of William Tallon, the Queen Mother’s Most Devoted Servant and many more titles.