Tom Quinn - Backstairs Billy: The Life of William Tallon, the Queen Mothers Most Devoted Servant

A T THE TIME of his death in 2007, William John Stephenson Tallon, or Backstairs Billy as he was known, was familiar to a relatively small circle that included the members of the royal family, but especially Prince Charles and Lord Snowdon, and a long list of former homosexual lovers, many of whom had also been in royal service. Outside that circle Billy was not at that time widely known, but in the years since his death a picture has emerged of a man whose life was extraordinary by any standards.

It was extraordinary because Tallon was always an unlikely candidate to be part of the intimate royal circle.

William Tallon spent more than half a century working for the royal family at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. Nominally, he was a servant; in reality, he was a uniquely trusted friend and confidant to the Queen Mother. Other friends and advisers came and went but Billy was a man the Queen Mother could never quite do without. The history of their remarkable relationship is the subject of this book.

Though intensely loyal, Billy was also a dangerous risk taker; though charming he could also be vicious; though considerate and amusing he could also be ruthless and predatory.

This is the story of a curiously contradictory man and it is a story that has never before been told. For the first time since Billys death, many of those who knew him have agreed to talk about Billy and their memories add up to a picture of a complex man who, with none of the usual qualifications of birth and privilege, became a central figure in one of the worlds most admired institutions.

I met William Tallon a number of times during the last years of his life. I met some of his friends and a number of his former colleagues. Most of his friends were people he met socially; his few enemies tended to be those with whom he had worked.

There is no doubt that if William Tallon took to someone he was wonderfully good company he was funny, talkative and very witty. And he loved gossip. He could make a story come to life as no one else could. He could also be very kind. But occasionally he would take against someone and then he could be very unkind indeed.

He was a creature of extremes: he was immensely loyal to his friends, but very spiteful to his enemies. For much of his life he was driven by two demons: a powerful sex drive and an intense, almost pathological love for the Queen Mother.

Ive spoken to and corresponded with more of Billys enemies and former colleagues than his friends. His friends understandably remember only the witty storyteller, the generous host, the performer, so their memories tend to cast a rosy glow. Billys colleagues and subordinates, not all of whom disliked him, add the shadows and most of the deeper complexities, and so their memories, perhaps inevitably, make up a greater part of this book.

One difficulty with a book such as this one that portrays someone only very recently dead is that the subjects contemporaries are wary of upsetting others still alive. But, even allowing for that, I was still surprised at quite how many of those who talked to me were willing to help only if they were not identified. Some are still working in service and feared they would be dismissed if they were quoted in anything controversial. Others felt their memories were still too raw to be acknowledged openly. For good or ill, I agreed to these requests for anonymity, or for a change of name, for without them this book could not have been written.

As the years go by, memories of this fascinating some would say wholly remarkable character will inevitably fade, especially as he was someone whose life was not, as it were, part of official record. He was not in any real sense a public figure; yet he was often the subject of public, especially media, speculation. He cannot, however, be described as an entirely private figure either.

William Tallon was in truth that rarest of all rare creatures, a very ordinary person who carved out an extraordinary role for himself in one of the worlds most secretive institutions: the British royal family. On the face of it, he was the last person one would have expected to reach a position of influence among the royals. He had very little formal education and came from a working-class background, yet, relying entirely on personality and force of character, he became, in many ways, one of the most significant characters in a world where education and social class meant everything.

But if it is hard to write about a royal servant, it is even more difficult to write about a member of the royal family.

The sensitivities involved in any discussion of the Queen Mother and other members of the royal family are legion. Any and every book published about the Windsors is either derided as sycophantic or attacked for denigrating the members of one of our most cherished institutions.

The newspapers usual technique is to track down an elderly, distant relative of the royal family who then denounces the book as a tissue of lies and insults. This kind of automatic reaction is largely based on a desire to preserve an image of the royal family as symbols rather than real people. Critics of books about the royals would have us believe that members of the royal family do not have flesh-and-blood lives with faults and foibles like the rest of us. The case is particularly acute with the Queen Mother, who was by any standards a remarkable and in many ways admirable woman. But are we really to believe she never lost her temper, never became confused or embarrassed, never drank a little too much? And we are forced to ask the question: does it really damage the Queen Mothers reputation to report that she liked jokes and gossip, that she enjoyed dancing and games and horseplay? Backstairs Billy once said that the great thing about the Queen Mother was that she liked to have fun and didnt care who knew it and in this, as in many other ways, he was almost certainly right.

T WO HUNDRED GUESTS , including HM the Queens cousin Lord Snowdon and actors Patricia Routledge and Sir Derek Jacobi, gathered at the Queens Chapel in St Jamess Palace on a cold winters day in 2007. Hundreds more had applied for tickets for a most unusual funeral service.

A casual observer might have assumed some great dignitary had passed on.

In fact the service was for a working-class boy born above a hardware shop in a run-down town in Co. Durham during the Great Depression; a boy who grew to become one of the late Queen Mothers most trusted aides.

One of the difficulties of writing about Billy was that he was himself naturally inclined to secrecy and this tendency was intensified by a lifetimes devotion to a job where discretion, loyalty and secrecy were vital. But Billy also liked to embellish and to some extent he was a master of evasion and fantasy. Sometimes his exaggerations were entirely unnecessary. If he was so very close to the Queen Mother, why was he at pains to over-state the case?

It is difficult to separate truth from fiction in many areas of his life because all those who have written about him including friends and journalists have had an agenda according to whether they liked or loathed him. Some say, for example, that Billy was the only male member of staff permitted to enter the Queen Mothers bedroom without knocking. Others say this is nonsense and that although he carried the breakfast tray to her room he always left it outside for her personal maid to carry in. Some insist that Billy was so manipulative that the Queen Mother was almost afraid of him. Others insist this is nonsense and that the Queen Mother delighted in keeping her sometimes-wayward page in check. In these and in so many other ways there is something mysterious about Billy and his life. He and others embellished almost everything to do with his role in the royal household. It was as if during his long life in service he became a character in a play, a play directed largely by himself.