The former First Sea Lord, holder of the highest-ranking office in the Royal Navy, was sat at a dinner, he told Radio 4 – perhaps some gala or diplomatic banquet. The Admiral signaled to one of the Queen Mother’s ladies-in-waiting that he was in need of a handkerchief. The confidant passed him the royal’s handbag– no doubt assuming it would contain some practical effects.
Upon opening the bag, Admiral Lord West must have found himself not only without a handkerchief but lost for words. What did the last ever Empress of India hold on her person? What impediments of statecraft were carried by the lady that Hitler once called ‘the most dangerous person in Europe?’
Precisely nothing. ‘It was completely empty,’ recounted Lord West. A hollow crown indeed for the Queen Mother. But this is not to say that her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, followed in her ontologically absent footprints.
Queen Elizabeth II waits for King Hassan in Marrakech during her state visit to Morocco, 27 October 1980. Photo: Getty
Her late Majesty carried all the quotidian items you might expect to find in a handbag: ‘makeup, (coin) purse, sweeteners she put in her coffee, the normal stuff,’ disclosed Hull City manager Phil Brown to The Lady after sitting next to the Queen at lunch. ‘You expect that a lady-in-waiting would carry her handbag,’ he continued, ‘but for the Queen, it was almost like a comfort blanket.’
Her ladies-in-waiting, of course, were responsible for the clunkier royal necessities like an extra pair of gloves, or needles and thread for emergency first aid on Rachel Trevor-Morgan hat. Rather than mere portability, the late Queen Elizabeth used her handbag (custom-made with longer handles, so as to avoid snagging on a coat dress or errant Anglophile) to deliver complex secret codes, a sort of sartorial semaphore.
Say she were stuck in a conversation with a particularly dreary head of state, or was urgently needed for a call back in Buckingham Palace but couldn’t get away from an enamoured member of the public. Rather than interrupt (gauche, unseemly), her late Majesty would simply switch the arm from which she dangled her Traviata style Launer handbag. Thus, she could deliver urgent messages to her staff without running any kind of security risk.
Fluent in this semiotics of style, one of the gathered ladies-in-waiting would immediately flock to the Queen, grip the conversation by the handles and allow Elizabeth to get on with her day – so says Royal critic Kristen Meinzer.
A secret code: Queen Elizabeth II fetches her spectacles at The London Commonwealth Institute. Photo: Getty
If she were to lay her bag on the table during dinner, those in the know took the hint and promptly began to bring proceedings to a close. (There was also, the story goes, a handily concealed buzzer for such circumstances.) And heaven forbid she lay her bag flat on the ground. The prostration of the royal purse was a sign that the late Queen felt a near overwhelming need to leave whatever situation happened to be at hand with absolutely immediate effect. Were convention, ceremony, or some sort of natural disaster to render Her Majesty temporarily unable to adjust her handbag, she would apparently twist the ring on her finger. How’s that for handbags at dawn?
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