In a private office at Buckingham Palace on the 3rd of June 1944, a courtier in his late 50s leaned across a desk at his sovereign and refused to let him sail into battle. King George V 6th, defied by his own servant, surrendered the argument. Days later that same courtier turned the same constitutional logic on Winston Churchill and the prime minister too yielded.
So who was Sir Alan Lel’s the man known to family and friends as Tommy? How did a private secretary holding no elected office and possessing no constitutional authority of his own exert such pressure on kings and prime ministers across three reigns? Why has his name slipped from public memory when his fingerprints touched almost every royal crisis of the midentth century? Sir Alan Frederick Lels entered the world on the 11th of April 1887 at Sutton Waldron in Dorset where his birth placed him squarely within the late Victorian aristocracy though not at its
uppermost rung. His grandfather Henry Lels held the title of fourth Earl of Herwood. The family seat at Herwood House outside Leeds carried the slow ordered rhythms of country gentility that Tommy would later defend at court with unflinching severity. The Lel’s name traced its prominence to the 18th century when the family fortune sprang partly from the sugar plantations of the West Indies.
By Tommy’s birth, that older world of imperial commerce had quietly receded. The respectable life of the landed gentleman had taken its place. His relations sat in the House of Lords, married into other great houses, and accepted the kind of administrative posts in the empire that defined a certain English breed. His mother, Frederica Maria Liddell, died before his third birthday.
The loss left him in the care of an emotionally austere father and a household of distant relations who treated children with a polite indifference now hard to imagine. Tommy grew up reserved, watchful, and inclined toward the company of books. Some of the ruthless objectivity for which he would later become known took root in that early lesson learned without quite being taught that the world owed no one its sympathy and the only sensible response amounted to studying it carefully.
Tommy attended Hazelhurst Preparatory School in Sussex, then Malbra College, and finally Trinity College, Oxford, where he earned his BA. He proved bookish and sharp tonged. The young man emerged from this passage already drawn to literature and history rather than to the playing fields. And he read voraciously, kept a private commonplace book of quotations, and developed early the dry wit that contemporaries would later find either bracing or terrifying.
Eduwardian Britain stood at the height of its imperial confidence. The court of Edward IIIth set the social tone for an elite who had known each other since their school days and countryhouse weekends measured out a precise rhythm of shooting parties and formal dinners. Tommy entered adulthood inside this closed world and never really left it.
When war broke out in August 1914, Tommy turned 27. By class and inclination, he already counted as a candidate for the officer corps. He joined the Bedfordshire, a cavalry regiment that, like much of the British army, would soon adapt to a kind of warfare nobody had imagined. By 1916, his unit reached the Western Front, where the cavalry, robbed of the open battlefield by trenches and machine guns, often fought dismounted alongside the infantry.
The next years shaped him permanently. He watched friends from school and Oxford die in numbers that scarcely seemed credible. He endured long stretches in mud and cold, saw men break down in the trenches, and once described in a letter the particular kind of fatigue that settles in the bones during a long bombardment.
Whatever romantic notions he had carried into uniform did not survive the psalm. In December 1917, he earned the Military Cross for gallantry and rose to the rank of captain. Years afterward, even as an established figure at court, he rarely spoke of his service except in passing and almost never in detail. The war, for Tommy, as for so many of his generation, became a private fact rather than a public boast.
Advertisements
What he had learned in Fllanders, more than any single technical skill, sharpened into an instinct for the cost of poor decisions taken by men in positions of authority. That instinct traveled with him to Buckingham Palace. After the armistice, Tommy spent a brief unhappy stretch trying to settle into civilian life before accepting an appointment as aid to camp to his brother-in-law, Lord Lloyd, the new governor of Bombay.
India in 1919 and 1920 churned with unrest. The massacre at Amitritsar in April 1919 had shaken the moral foundations of the Raj and Mahatma Gandhi’s non-ooperation movement began to take recognizable shape. Tommy observed all this from the comfortable distance of government house but he kept acute enough eyes to register what he saw.
In Delhi in 1920, he married Joan Francis V. Thessiger, the daughter of Lord Chelmsford, the outgoing viceroy of India. The wedding bound him still more tightly into the imperial aristocratic network that already defined his life. Joan brought to the marriage a sharp mind and the kind of unshowy strength that would sustain him during the more punishing years ahead, and she would prove the most reliable presence in a life otherwise spent serving difficult masters.
Their marriage produced three children and lasted until his death 61 years later. In 1920, Tommy received an offer to serve as assistant private secretary to Edward, Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne. He accepted, partly out of duty and partly out of curiosity. The journey took him from India to London in the late autumn.
At 33, decorated and well-married and wellconed, he was walking without quite realizing it into the most exhausting chapter of his life. Edward, Prince of Wales, ranked in 1920 as the most photographed man on earth. Slim, fair-haired, restless, and rumored to charm everyone he met within 30 seconds.
He had emerged from the war as the symbol of a new and supposedly more modern monarchy. His tours of Canada, Australia, India, and South America drew enormous crowds. Newspapers tracked his clothes, his polo ponies, and the names of the married women linked to him in gossip columns from Buenos Iris to Bombay. To the British public, he embodied the future, and the future looked golden.
Tommy took the job expecting a serious young prince preparing for the throne. He found a man of charm without application, restless energy without curiosity. The prince refused to read state papers and drank heavily, and anyone who tried to organize his diary met sullen resistance. His affairs with married women conducted in plain sight of the household embarrassed every department of government that quietly depended on the heir’s public face being kept in good repair.
Public duty bored him, and the bureaucracy that surrounded him existed mainly to be evaded. Tommy’s letters and journal entries from this period grew darker year by year. At first, he tried to manage the prince with weary diplomacy. He shouldered correspondence the prince refused to handle, arranged the diary, soothed offended dignitaries, and tried to instill the rhythms of public life.
None of it took. The prince treated his private secretary’s office as a service for shielding his pleasures, not as a partner in the heavy work of monarchy. By the mid 1920s, the strain between the two men could no longer be concealed inside the household. Tommy had begun to fear in his sober judicial way what the prince might one day do to the crown itself when his father, King George V, lay in the grave.
The fear ran deeper than personal dislike. It drove him toward the step that would define this early chapter of his career. In August 1927, during the Prince of Wales’s tour of Canada, Tommy did something almost unheard of for a courtier. He sought a private conversation with the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who happened also to be in Ottawa, and used the meeting to warn him plainly about the unfitness of the heir to the throne.
According to Tommy’s own diary, he told Baldwin in flat, unguarded language that he sometimes felt while waiting for the prince that the best thing that could happen to the man and to the country would be for him to break his neck out hunting. Baldwin reportedly replied, “God forgive me.
I have often thought the same.” The prince’s private secretary and the prime minister of the United Kingdom had agreed in a hotel suite in Ottawa that the heir’s death by hunting accident might prove the cleanest outcome available to the constitution. In November 1928, after another quarrel over the prince’s behavior, Tommy at last offered his resignation directly to his master.
He told him to his face that he amounted to going rapidly to the devil and would not be sorry to see the end of him. The prince accepted the resignation with a shrug. In January 1929, Tommy walked out of the household for the last time, his health damaged and his faith in his immediate royal employer broken beyond repair.
A post duly appeared as secretary to the Earl of Besper, the new governor general of Canada. And from 1931 to 1935, Tommy and Joan settled into the calmer rhythms of Reedo Hall in Ottawa. The work proved undemanding by comparison. Canadian political life moved at a slower pace than Westminster, and the household around Besper ran on courtesies rather than crisis.
For the first time in years, Tommy could read at leisure, walk the Canadian countryside, and recover something of the equilibrium his years with the prince had eroded. By late 1935, with King George Visibly declining, the senior officials of the royal household began casting around for experienced men. Tommy’s name returned. He accepted after some hesitation the post of assistant private secretary to the king.
He sailed back to England in time to attend the silver jubilee festivities and then to witness only months later the old king’s death and the opening of the catastrophe he had long predicted. In January 1936, the man Tommy had once told to his face was going to the devil ascended the throne as King Edward VIII. For the first months of the new reign, Tommy worked under the conviction that his worst fears about the new king’s character would shortly come true in public.
Edward’s relationship with Wallace Simpson, an American divorce then in the process of leaving her second husband, already counted as an open secret inside the establishment. The cabinet, the Church of England, the Dominion governments, and the senior figures of the household stood firmly opposed. Mrs. Simpson amounted to more than an unsuitable mistress.
She represented a woman the king now spoke openly of marrying, and her marital history rendered that constitutionally and ecclesiastically impossible without ripping the institution apart. Tommy did not act as the prime mover in the abdication crisis. That role belonged to the king’s principal private secretary, Alexander Harding, and to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the same man Tommy had spoken to in Ottawa nine years earlier.
Yet Tommy operated deeply inside the internal mechanics of the resistance. He helped draft Harding’s celebrated letter of November 1936, warning the king of the political consequences of pursuing the marriage. Working behind the scenes, he coordinated the household’s quiet opposition, kept the lines of communication open between the palace, Downing Street, and Lambbeath Palace, and ensured that the various pillars of the establishment moved in step.
When Edward VIII finally signed the instrument of abdication on the 10th of December, 1936, and broadcast his farewell the following evening, Tommy felt no triumph. He recorded in his diary a kind of grim relief. The crown had survived a man he had long believed unfit for it. Edward’s stammering younger brother, Albert, would now reign as George V 6th.
Tommy stayed on at his post. George V 6th lacked his brother’s nature in almost every respect. He proved shy, dutiful, and acutely conscious of his own limitations. Raised without expectation of the throne. He had not particularly wanted it. The early years of his reign passed in rebuilding the dignity of the crown after the abdication, restoring confidence at home, and preparing the country, however reluctantly, for the war that everyone could see coming.
In July 1943, after the resignation of Alexander Harding, Tommy rose to principal private secretary to the king, the most powerful courtier post in the United Kingdom. He now controlled the flow of state papers between the monarch and the cabinet, drafted the king’s letters to the prime minister, and liazed with the civil service, the church, the dominions, and fleet street.
Constitutional textbooks of the period described the office in restrained language. In wartime, the reality ran much more active. By late 1943, the strain on the country weighed enormous. The king, who had insisted on staying at Buckingham Palace through the Blitz, looked visibly tired. Tommy organized the king’s working life with a tact and precision that the monarch came in time to depend on completely.
Between them, the two men did not entirely understand each other in personal terms, but they trusted each other absolutely on matters of state. Behind the dignified facade, Tommy’s diaries, later published, reveal a man working at a pitch of constant strain. He recorded the king’s exchanges with Churchill in unsparing detail.
Cabinet papers got their own dissection on his pages. Ministers, generals, and visiting foreign leaders all receive judgment in language of bracing severity. The diaries amount to an unguarded inside account of the wartime British state written from a desk where nearly every important document of the realm passed at least once through his hands.
In the spring of 1944, as the Allied invasion of Normandy approached, both King George V 6th and Winston Churchill formed the idea that they would observe the landings in person from a Royal Navy flagship in the channel. To both men, this seemed natural. The king had always wished to share the dangers of his country at war.
Churchill, never one to miss a historic occasion, longed to stand present at the moment of greatest drama. Tommy disagreed with savage clarity. On the 3rd of June, with the invasion already loading at the southern ports, he sat across from the king at Buckingham Palace and put a constitutional question to him in plain terms.
If the king and the prime minister both perished from a German mine or torpedo in the channel, what advice would the king wish to give his 18-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth? On the choice of her first prime minister, did his majesty prepare to make that choice for her here and now in writing before he sailed. The king had not considered the question in those terms.
He realized at once that his private secretary had pinned him. He could not constitutionally leave the eventuality unresolved and he could not bring himself to settle it in advance since either path threatened the orderly succession of constitutional government. Within hours he had written to Churchill withdrawing from the venture and asking the prime minister to do the same.
Churchill furious drafted a reply refusing. Tommy worked through the next 48 hours with the king’s full backing to wear the prime minister down. By the evening of the 5th of June, hours before the first troops sailed, Churchill had grudgingly capitulated. Neither the king nor the prime minister observed the landings on the 6th of June.
Both stayed in London where the constitutional government of the country could be carried on under the most uncertain circumstances any administration had faced since 1066. The episode recorded in Tommy’s diary in his usual unvarnished pros distills the practical shape of his power. He held no legal authority over either man.
What he held came down to the ability to reduce a tangled question of duty into a single undeniable constitutional principle and to hold that principle in front of his masters until they agreed. By 1950, the Second World War lay 5 years behind, and a new constitutional question had begun to trouble the political class.
Britain now bowed to Clement Atley’s Labor Ministry, the first majority Labor government in British history. The Conservative opposition under Churchill pressed hard. Labour’s majority shrank. A real prospect existed that the prime minister might soon ask the new king for an early dissolution of parliament in the hope of returning to office with a larger mandate.
Could the king in such a situation lawfully refuse being unwritten? The British Constitution gave no clear answer. Textbooks of the day describe the sovereign’s power to refuse a dissolution as theoretically existing but never exercised in modern times. The civil service felt nervous of the question. Buckingham Palace felt nervous of it.
So did Tommy, who saw in the muddle an opening for monarchical disaster if a future king ever faced the question in a moment of acute political crisis without guidance. On the 2nd of May 1950, a letter appeared in the Times of London under the pseudonym Senx, the Latin word for an old man. The letter set out three conditions under which in the writer’s view a sovereign would be constitutionally entitled to refuse a prime minister’s request to dissolve parliament.
First, the existing parliament must still be capable of doing its job effectively. Second, a general election would be detrimental to the national economy. Third, the king must rely on finding another prime minister who could govern for a reasonable period with a working majority in the existing House of Commons. Tommy Lels had written it.
He had drafted the letter himself in his own study and submitted it under a pseudonym so that the palace could disclaim any official endorsement. Yet everyone who mattered in Whiteall and Westminster knew or quickly guessed that the letter came from the king’s private secretary. The three conditions entered the working constitutional doctrine of the United Kingdom and have been known ever since as the LEL’s principles.
He had not invented his doctrine out of nothing. The principles he believed had long governed the crown’s prerogative on dissolution found in him their first plain articulation. what he had done amounted to giving them a form. From that point onward, every conversation between Buckingham Palace and a prime minister about an early election would refer, at least implicitly, to a letter written by a man who signed himself an old man.
George V 6th died at Sandringham on the 6th of February, 1952. He had reached 56, exhausted by a lifetime of duty and undermined by lung cancer. His daughter, 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth, then touring Kenya, received the news there. By the time she stepped off the aircraft at London airport in her black morning clothes, Tommy had already begun arranging the machinery of the new rain.
She knew him well and trusted him absolutely, but she did not resemble her father, and the Britain she now reigned over had begun to slip out of the world, Tommy understood. For his first two years at the Queen’s elbow, Tommy proved indispensable. He ran the coronation planning, drafted her speeches, and briefed her on the constitutional realities of the new Elizabethan age.
His diary entries reveal a mixture of respect for her diligence and unease at her relative inexperience. Some later historians, notably Ben Pimlot, would argue that Tommy’s traditionalist instincts kept the young queen at one remove from the social changes of post-war Britain. Others, including Sarah Bradford, have suggested that without his steadying presence, the early years of the reign might have lost their footing during a period of immense pressure.
Then, in the spring of 1953, a new crisis arrived. It came not from politics, but from inside the Queen’s own family, and it would shadow Tommy’s final months in office, with consequences he could only partly contain. Princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister, had fallen in love with a divorced commoner.
Group Captain Peter Townsend had served as an equary to George V 6th during the war. He stood 16 years older than Margaret, fathered two young boys, and counted as a recent divorce, whose estranged wife had been named the guilty party in the divorce proceedings. Towns end struck everyone who met him as charming and decent. Under the rules then governing the royal family, however, he counted as an almost certainly impossible match.
Margaret confessed her wish to marry Townsen to the queen in early 1953. The queen, sympathetic but constitutionally constrained, referred the matter to Tommy. Under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, the consent of the monarch applied to the marriage of any descendant of George II under the age of 25. Margaret had turned 22.
The Queen could not give her consent without the agreement of the cabinet, and the cabinet, advised by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, opposed a marriage to a divorced man with two living children and a former wife still alive. Tommy advised the Queen accordingly. He told her in private that consent did not lie legally available to her in 1953 and that the only constitutional path forward ran through delaying any decision until Margaret reached the age of 25 in 1955 at which point the question would shift from royal consent to parliamentary
approval. He coordinated with the foreign office to send Townsend to the British embassy in Brussels as heir attaches, partly to remove him from the immediate scene, and partly to allow public attention to cool. The decision pressed harshly on Margaret, pressed harshly on Town’s end and carved a wound in the princess’s life that never quite healed.
Historians have argued ever since about Tommy’s part in the affair. To his defenders, he merely applied the existing law and the existing political reality. The Royal Marriages Act sat on the statute book. Cabinet had taken its position openly. The Church of England with the Queen as its supreme governor did not then permit the remarage of divorced persons in church.
Tommy in this reading played the role of messenger rather than author of Margaret’s misery. To his critics, he embodied the iron face of an institutional rigidity that could have softened. Craig Brown in his portrait of Margaret suggests that more sympathetic advice from the palace might at least have given the princess time to weigh her decision more clearly.
The argument has never quite died. The crisis would reach its public climax in October 1955 when Margaret announced that she would not marry Townsend after all. By then, Tommy had retired for nearly two years, and the handling of the final stages passed to his successor, Sir Michael Adine. Tommy retired as principal private secretary on the 31st of December, 1953.
He had reached 66, weary and ready to lay down the burden he had carried for more than a decade. The queen who had known him since her childhood accepted his retirement with reluctance. She granted him the honorary post of extra equiry which allowed him to attend court on ceremonial occasions and she presented him with personal gifts in recognition of his service.
He moved into a grace and favor residence in the old stables at Kensington Palace where he spent the next 27 years. The pen never left his hand. Correspondence flowed back and forth between his desk and friends from his court years, and a younger generation of historians came regularly to interview him about events he had witnessed.
The palace gardens absorbed his afternoons. Over the years, he grew into a kind of unofficial elder statesman of the British monarchy, whose opinions on constitutional questions found quiet but serious audiences among those who would inherit his old desk. His wife Joan, the steady partner of his entire adult life, died in 1971.
Tommy outlived her by 10 years. He died on the 10th of August, 1981, at Kensington Palace, in the same apartments he had occupied since his retirement, 94 years old and lucid almost to the end. The obituaries of the day described him with restraint and accuracy as the last of the great Victorian courtiers. Tommy had kept diaries since his earliest days at court.
He had filled them with a kind of unguarded observation that could only flow for a private audience, judging kings, princes, prime ministers, and visiting heads of state in language that pulled no punches. The texture of court life appeared on his pages with a novelist’s precision. On his death, he left these volumes to his daughter Caroline with instructions to make them available to historians.
The first volume covering his years with the Prince of Wales appeared in 1989 under the title In Royal Service, edited by Duffheart Davis. It caused a sensation. The portrait it drew of Edward VII as a charming, shallow, and dangerously irresponsible young man lined up almost exactly with the picture later historians had pieced together from official sources.
but it carried the authority of an eyewitness who had stood at the prince’s elbow for almost a decade. A second volume, King’s Counselor, appeared in 2006 and covered the war years and the abdication crisis. It added a layer of granular detail to the story of George V 6th’s reign that no other source could provide. Reading the diaries, one encounters a formidable mind sharpened by dry wit and an almost merciless habit of judgment.
Tommy could be unfair and snobbish by turns. His view of certain labour ministers carried class assumption, and his impatience with the Duke of Windsor sometimes blurred into something closer to disgust. Yet he wrote with honesty, and he understood with a clarity that few of his colleagues matched what the institution he served could afford and what it could not.
Through these private pages, 20th century British monarchy acquired its sharpest internal chronicler. Within the closed world of Buckingham Palace, the name Leelss remained a kind of standard for decades after his death. Successive private secretaries inherited his principles, his sense of the office, and his quiet horror of personal indiscretion.
The Lel’s template held well into the 21st century. The office he had shaped continued to operate along lines that he had drawn in pencil on his own working papers half a century earlier. In the wider public memory, however, his name slipped quickly into shadow. The constitutional monarchy he had defended so single-mindedly preferred by its nature to keep its servants invisible.
He never courted celebrity, never wrote for the popular press under his own name. and the anonymity of the Senx letter to the Times amounted to a deliberate piece of self-effacement. By the time of his death in 1981, only a small circle of historians and political insiders knew quite how much of the mid-century crown had been engineered from his desk.
That changed gradually after the diaries appeared. By the time the Netflix drama The Crown began to air in 2016, Tommy had become a recognizable figure to a mass audience, played with chilling precision by the actor Pip Torrren. While the show portrayed him as a dramatic enforcer, declaring the crown must always win, the real Tommy’s authority rested on something colder, a flawless understanding of constitutional paperwork.
The man himself proves harder to dramatize. He played neither villain nor saint. The biography that emerges from the diaries shows a Victorian aristocrat, a decorated soldier, a husband, a father, a literary man, a meticulous diarist, and the courtier who shaped more royal decisions in the 20th century than any other in the same office.
Year in and year out, he worked to keep the British monarchy intact through some of the most dangerous decades it had ever faced. That conviction made him formidable and on occasion made him cruel. Princess Margaret would never have spoken his name with affection, and the Duke of Windsor, who outlived him by 9 years, certainly did not either.
Yet without him, the chain of British constitutional monarchy from George V to Elizabeth II would have run a far rougher course, and the crown that the present king inherited in 2022 would have looked in shape and texture quite different. Sir Alan Lel’s rests in the family vault at Goldsborough near Hwood.
The old stables apartment at Kensington Palace, where he wrote the last of his diaries, remains in use. His three constitutional principles, anonymous and unrepalled, sit somewhere in every prime minister’s mental furniture when an early dissolution drifts into the air. For a man so committed to invisibility, his shadow has proven unusually long.
