Only a handful of women from the Jubilee Generation remain. They have been alive so long they don’t just remember the Second World War, they served in it at a time when the military was fighting for King and Country.
“I’m two years older than the Queen,” says Grace Taylor, nearly 98. Age is a competitive game when you’re over 90.
“I’m not envious of Her Majesty,” she insists. “I can still put my shoulders back and stand up straight like a soldier.”
Grace recalls once meeting the Queen’s grandparents. “George V and Mary came to Ilford Town Hall,” she says. “Queen Mary had a lovely hat, a long pale dress and wore boots with lavatory pan heels.”
Her second brush with royalty was in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) during the war when the then Princess Elizabeth’s parents inspected her unit.
“George VI and Queen Elizabeth walked down the line,” she says. “If you were in the front row, you weren’t allowed to look at them. You had to have eyes front and stand to attention.”
Grace is a tad dismissive of the current Queen’s wartime service, however.
She says: “Unlike me, she joined the ATS right at the end of the conflict and she never slept in barracks. They drove her home to Windsor Castle at night.”
Grace is very sympathetic about Her Majesty’s current mobility issues, however: “It’s emotionally upsetting. Your brain tells you, ‘You can do it’, but physically, when you try to get up, you can’t.”
Barbara Weatherill, 96 from Yorkshire, is more forthright. “Her Majesty needs to get rid of that silly stick,” she says. “It’s the wrong shape and size. She’d be better off with a walking frame like mine then she could scoot up and down the palace corridors.”
Last time I met Barbara, she was zipping out of a TV studio where she had been regaling the audience with stories of the Second World War.
She admits: “I do get frustrated when all the media want to talk about is the Queen.
“I trained in the same ATS motor depot as [Princess] Elizabeth, but I served for much longer and the course the princess did was truncated.”
Barbara reminds me she is nine months older than Her Majesty.
“Bless her! I’ll always be ahead,” she laughs. “We have a lot in common. We both got married to men in uniform in the same year and we both have four children.”
Despite her keen affinity with the Queen, Barbara did not watch the coronation in 1953. “Dear me, no,” she says. “We didn’t have a television until the late 1960s. I was at home in Yorkshire looking after our first two children, but my husband went up to London.”
Stan Weatherill was one of ten policemen from the West Riding Constabulary selected to line the route through the capital as the new Queen’s golden carriage made its way to Westminster Abbey in a downpour.
Stan’s father had done the same thing at George VI’s coronation.
“I have both their coronation medals,” says Barbara. “I’ve always been a royalist.”
She finally got to meet the Queen on the 70th anniversary of VE day in Westminster Abbey in 2015. Barbara says: “I was the only female veteran and they bumped me to the top of the line so I met Her Majesty first.
“We had a chat, but I can’t remember a word she said. Apparently that happens a lot when you meet the Queen.” Unlike Barbara, Joyce Wilding, 97, from Petworth, West Sussex, saw the Queen in her coronation year. “I was invited to the Royal Coronation Luncheon at the Guild Hall in June 1953,” she says proudly.
Joyce still has the menu – sherry, clear turtle soup, Scotch salmon and cucumber, a baron of beef with Norfolk asparagus and for pudding, Kent strawberries with maids of honour. “I bought a new dress and wore a hat and gloves,” she recalls. “They were all there… the Queen, the Queen Mother and Margaret.” It’s just one of the many royal markers in Joyce’s life. She says: “I was in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry – an elite organisation that let me take my pony with me to Oxfordshire, where I was stationed.”
Joyce first saw Princess Elizabeth on VE Day when the young royal was looking down from Buckingham Palace balcony at the sea of people below. She says: “We danced the Lambeth Walk up the Mall and climbed a lamp post. It was the best day of my life!”
The future Queen also wanted a slice of the action – and snuck down into the crowd. Like Joyce, she too would remember May 8, 1945, as one of the best days of her life. Joyce no longer rides horses and recently swapped tennis for table tennis.
“I blame coronavirus,” she sighs. But like Her Majesty, Joyce still drives, and while Ma’am restricts her road trips to Windsor’s private estate in an old Jaguar, Joyce is more daring.
She says: “I have a Honda Hybrid that I drive to Chichester. I’ve never taken a test. You didn’t have to during the war – and to fox the enemy, there were no sign posts on the road.”
Had war not got in the way, Joyce, who was from an upper-class family, would probably have been presented at court in front of the royals at a time when debutantes were introduced to society.
Pat Owtram, a Bletchley Park veteran aged 98, and her sister Jean Owtram, 96, were in the same boat.
“We thought we had missed this ordeal and then a pushy aunt after the war arranged it for us,” says Pat.
It was 1950 and Pat was at the University of St Andrews. The last thing she wanted to do was curtsey in front of the King in a Buckingham Palace drawing room.
“I was wearing a rather short mauve cocktail dress and Princess Elizabeth was perched on a stool behind her sickly father. He wore make-up to hide the fact he was ill.”
Within a year, the King was dead and Elizabeth was the new Queen.
Today, Pat lives alone in Chiswick, West London, and her sister, Jean, occasionally visits from Lancashire. While the Queen took to Zoom
during lockdown, Pat marked the days by talking on the telephone and enjoying surreptitious drinks with her neighbour.
Like Her Majesty, she enjoys a daily tipple too. “I love a whisky in the evening and I always have sherry on Sunday after church.”
Betty Webb MBE, 99, is friends with Pat and Jean. They met latterly as veterans of Bletchley Park, which was Britain’s Second World War code-breaking centre.
Betty’s life is a testament to simple living. She was born in Shropshire with “no car, no telephone and we pumped the water every morning from a well underneath the house”.
She didn’t even go to school. “My mother home educated us,” she says. “A bit like Princess Elizabeth, my sister and I lived very sheltered lives. I didn’t really have friends my own age.”
And like Princess Elizabeth, Betty also joined the ATS during the war where she discovered her solitary upbringing did not prepare her for the “rough diamonds in my Wrexham training camp. They were like animals at the trough”.
No wonder HRH Elizabeth was driven home to Windsor Castle every night.
Betty stood out among the recruits and was quickly selected for work at Bletchley Park as a transcriber of Japanese decoded messages. It was 2019 when she finally met the Queen, who subsequently sent Betty photographs of their time together.
Both these pictures and the letter from Her Majesty’s equerry hang on Betty’s wall.
Proof, if any was needed, that the Queen was impressed by this woman three years her senior. In her 100th year, Betty still wears black patent shoes with a slight heel – just like Her Majesty – and does all her own cleaning and cooking.
When asked what the secret to her long life is, Betty says: “It’s important to stay optimistic and interested in your surroundings.”
Tactfully, she adds: “It’s helped that our generation has been wonderfully represented by the Queen. She is magnificent.”
Tessa Dunlop is the author of the Jubilee paperback edition of Army Girls (Headline Press, 2022).
