When Princess Margaret and her entourage arrived at the Sunningdale Water Ski Club in Berkshire, the members expected a polite royal visit. What they got was a master class in aristocratic cruelty. After failing to stand on her skis, the princess lost her temper so violently and so publicly with her instructor that her aggressive, foul-mouthed behavior paralyzed the entire lake.
The Sunningdale Water Ski Club occupies a stretch of the River Thames about 30 miles west of London, where the river bends east of the village and runs through a broad, flat reach that holds its water still enough for serious competition. Slalom courses, jump approaches, the kind of technical sport that requires months of specific practice and rewards precision over strength.
By the early 1960s, Sunning was hosting national-level events, an organized institution built by people who had invested years in it and had a collective stake in how the afternoons went. On 13th June, 1963, British Pathé cameras were present to film the English Open Water Ski Championship. The newsreel still exists. Film ID 1768.
02, issue date 13th June, 1963, cataloged under water ski champions, held in the British Pathé archive. It shows Princess Margaret arriving by boat with her husband, Lord Snowdon, the entourage stepping onto the bank, club officials positioned along the shore. Around them, actual competition. Lance Callingham competing in the slalom event, the kind of technical water sport that requires a skier to read the tow, read the water, and execute under pressure.
A separate archival photograph, dated 6th August, 1963, and held in the Mauritius Images collection, shows Margaret back on the Berkshire water 6 weeks later, working alongside an instructor. She wasn’t there for ceremony. She was there to get better. Barry O’Connell was the president of the Sunning Water Ski Club.
A 1974 press photograph caption from the British Water Ski Championships at Sunning identifies him specifically as the man who taught Princess Margaret. He is pictured that day giving a kite flying demonstration at Sunning as club president. Not a casual volunteer. Not someone doing a favor. The organizational authority of the institution giving his time to a member of the royal family who had chosen his club for her skill development.
He would have been on the bank on the days she was on the water. He would have been responsible for how those days went. A 1964 photograph even shows Queen Elizabeth helping Margaret prepare for a water skiing lesson. The two sisters on a bank somewhere, equipment laid out, the older one assisting the younger with whatever adjustment was required before she went in.
Margaret had resources, instruction, and repeated opportunity across multiple seasons. She had reasons to expect some competence. And when the water refused to cooperate on a particular afternoon at Sunning, when the tow rope snapped taut, and the skis skidded sideways, and she went under again, the frustration that surfaced wasn’t the mild embarrassment of a beginner encountering a new challenge.
It was older and more corrosive than that. The Thames in summer carries its own acoustics. Flat water reflects sound the way flat surfaces reflect light, efficiently, without the absorption that carpets and walls and crowds provide in enclosed spaces. A voice raised on the water at Sunning travels to the bank in detail.
Individual words. Specific vocabulary. The timbre of anger versus the timbre of embarrassment. What Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling, 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, published 2017, winner of the 2018 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, documents from contributed recollections connected to the event, is that the princess didn’t fall quietly.
The language directed at her instructor was specific and profane. It crossed the water and reached the bank, and reached the members and officials and families gathered that afternoon at the club without filtering or reduction. The club members heard individual words. The people in adjacent boats heard individual words.
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The summer afternoon at Sunning, whatever it had been before that moment, became something else. The kind of social suspension that descends on a public space when something is happening that everyone present can see and nobody present has any mechanism to address. The instructor himself, the specific individual who had arrived at work that morning prepared to do his job, absorbed it because there was nothing else available to him.
Not a competitor, not a journalist, not someone who had challenged her in any way. A club official on the water, doing what club officials do, who had become the nearest available target for a frustration he hadn’t caused. His options in that moment collapsed to essentially one. Absorb the anger, keep his expression controlled, continue.
Then, reportedly, according to Brown’s assembled account, something shifted. A club member stepped forward to offer assistance. A former military medical officer, described as around 60 years old, who had served in the Second World War. He hadn’t come to Sunning that day to assist the princess.
He was a member present on his own time, with his own reasons for being at the river that afternoon. But when he saw that the situation had reached an impasse, when the instructor’s ability to continue the lesson had been effectively ended by the temperature of the exchange, he volunteered himself. What he knew about the specific mechanics of water skiing isn’t part of the record.
He maintained his courtesy throughout this. He maintained it while the social temperature of the afternoon was anything but courteous. He continued past the point where any reasonable person would have constructed an excuse to exit the situation when the heat of the earlier tantrum was still in the air.
When the club’s membership was watching from the bank. When the thing he was doing required patience that the situation hadn’t earned. Eventually, he produced a result. A full circuit. The princess upright on the skis moving across the flat reach of the Thames for long enough to call the afternoon something other than a complete failure. He had given her through sustained effort and unearned patience the thing she had come for.
She came ashore. She walked away. Not a word. Craig Brown’s account of the sunning afternoon also preserves something that no newsreel could capture and no press report would print. What the afternoon felt like from inside the machinery of that visit. According to the vignette assembled in Ma’am Darling, there were children present in the speedboat.
The kind of incidental presence that royal visits generated when club members brought their families or when the logistics of the day produced a situation where children were in the boat with nowhere else to be sent. They wore life belts. Standard river safety equipment. Orange float jackets that smell of rubber and sun-warmed canvas.
Strapped on and unbuckled and strapped on through the long seasons of a river childhood. Practical items unremarkable on any other afternoon. They couldn’t leave. The boat was on the water. The adult world around them had closed into a specific kind of silence, not the comfortable silence of people at ease, but the pressurized silence of people managing their exposure to something they couldn’t acknowledge.
The adults had arranged their faces carefully. They were watching the river, or the bank, or the middle distance, anywhere that was the correct distance from what was unfolding, maintaining by collective discipline the fiction that everything was proceeding normally. The children, who had not yet learned to perform that fiction, sat in their life belts and waited.
Brown describes the atmosphere as ghastly. That word keeps attaching itself, independently, to accounts of afternoons in Princess Margaret’s orbit when things had broken down. Mitford used it about the hairdresser and the dinner, and here it surfaces again about the boat and the river. Ghastly, a word that combines disgust and dread and social impossibility into a single syllable.
A child on that afternoon in Berkshire grew up carrying the memory of it in the way that children carry the experiences in which the adult world revealed itself as fundamentally different from the story they’d been given. Not dangerous, not physically frightening, just wrong in a way that didn’t come with an explanation.
A person who was supposed to represent something special directing her frustration at the people around her in language children weren’t supposed to hear, in a situation that nobody around them would acknowledge. Brown assembled Ma’am Darling over years, pulling from a dizzying range of sources, the published diaries of Chips Channon, Kenneth Williams, and A. L.
Rowse, dozens of royal biographies and memoirs, the accounts contributed directly by people who had been in the rooms and on the rivers and at the dinners and who had maintained what they’d seen at the level of private knowledge for decades until Brown’s project gave those memories somewhere to go. The Books Are My Favorite and Best Review of the 2017 book notes that loads of people were willing to share an incident story.
What Brown provided was the form. What contributors provided was the substance. The book’s critical reception was consistent. The Guardian’s review described Margaret as bossy, petty, and volatile, looked down on and lusted after. The New York Times described Margaret as beautiful, bad-tempered, scandal-prone. The Christian Science Monitor’s review called it unflinching, engrossing, and recommended it specifically to fans of The Crown who wanted a deeper look at the sister who didn’t become queen.
Kitty Kelley, reviewing it for the Washington Independent Review of Books, called it a more searing than humorous look at the scandalous, off-putting royal. None of these reviewers challenged Brown’s documentation. None disputed the incidents he reported. They accepted the portrait and debated its tone. The James Tait Black Prize, the oldest literary prize in the United Kingdom, running continuously since 1919, awarded him the biography prize in 2018.
Not fiction, not satire, biography. What The Sunning Afternoon illustrates in compressed form is a behavioral pattern documented across decades by people who had no connection to each other in settings that had nothing in common except the presence of the princess. Paris, 1959. A dinner party held in her honor.
Royal protocol dictated that dinner couldn’t be served before she arrived, a piece of etiquette she had grown up inside, fully understood, and knew how to deploy. She arrived late, not casually late, the ordinary social latitude of people comfortable enough not to watch the clock, but deliberately late, in the specific way of someone who understands what their lateness costs, and has decided to cost it.
The wait stretched. At the dinner hour, Margaret’s hairdresser arrived. Nancy Mitford’s published letters record what happened next. The assembled guests stood and waited while the coiffure was constructed over the following hours. Mitford’s description of the result, a ghastly coiffure that had consumed the dinner hour, is precise.
The dinner sat. The hosts managed the situation with the professional grace that formal entertaining required. The princess arrived when she was ready. Dinner was eventually served. Nobody said anything because there was nothing to say. At a social gathering, she approached the architect who had done renovation work on Glamis Castle, her mother’s ancestral home in Angus, Scotland, and opened with a remark that he had completely ruined her mother’s old home.
The man had been disabled since childhood. She then asked whether he had ever looked at himself in the mirror and seen the way he walked. Both questions were asked in company. The Guardian’s review of Ma’am Darling cites the exchange directly. Other people heard them. The man absorbed both, as people in Margaret’s company absorbed things, because absorption was the only option the situation offered.
At a dinner party, she met Leslie Hornby, Twiggy, at the height of her career as the most photographed face in Britain. Brown’s account, cited in Vogue’s summary of his book, records the exchange. The princess asked who she was, and when Twiggy identified herself, the reply was immediate. “How unfortunate.” Twiggy was around 20 years old and globally recognizable.
Margaret was a princess telling her that her name was a problem. The Vogue article summarizing “Ma’am Darling” also records what happened when she encountered a woman feeding squirrels in a public park. She walked over and began hitting the squirrels with her umbrella. Brown doesn’t editorialize about this. He records it. During dinners that bored her, she and Lord Snowdon played the bread game.
Every time a guest said something clichéd, one of them would tear off a piece of bread and place it on the table. Whoever had torn off more pieces by evening’s end won. This required them to sit at tables organized in their honor and silently score their hosts’ conversation for originality.
The Vogue article cites this directly from Brown’s research. She told the poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, according to biographer Theo Aronson, that disobedience was her joy. This wasn’t a moment of self-deprecating wit. It was a statement of orientation, the orientation of someone who had concluded that the rules that governed everyone else were available to her as options rather than constraints.
She required “Ma’am” from people who had known her for decades. Noel Botham’s Margaret, The Last Real Princess, documents this specifically. The requirement didn’t apply only to strangers or officials. It extended to the closest friends of her adult life, people who had watched her marriage to Antony Armstrong Jones unravel across 18 years, who had been present for the private versions of her life rather than just the public ones, who understood her in the way that only sustained personal proximity allows. Even these people,
every time they addressed her, were required to use the formal title. Craig Brown’s research in Ma’am Darling records her at dinner parties declaring herself unique, the daughter of a king and the sister of a queen. This was a position requiring constant maintenance, constant reassertion at every social occasion, in every address, in every interaction with staff who couldn’t look at her and friends who couldn’t call her by name.
She called herself, on at least one documented occasion, a bad-tempered old devil. Marie Claire covered this in an article drawing on Tom Quinn’s palace research, connected to a specific tearful incident. The self-description matters not as evidence of guilt. Self-awareness and behavioral change are entirely different things, but as evidence that the pattern wasn’t invisible to her.
She had a name for what people experienced in her company. What she didn’t have was either the inclination or the capacity to act on that knowledge in any way that would have mattered to the people absorbing her behavior. The world inside Kensington Palace apartment 1A, the rooms that would eventually be occupied by the Prince and Princess of Wales, and later by William and Kate, was organized around rules that the people who worked there received verbally and maintained by convention, rather than by any written
protocol anyone could point to. In 1955, the daily schedule drawn from period biographical accounts, and consistent across multiple independent sources, ran like this. Breakfast in bed at 9:00 in the morning, then 2 hours of radio and newspapers. The papers read and left as Craig Brown’s research in Ma’am Darling puts it precisely, scattered over the floor while chain-smoking through both.
The newspapers scattered across the floor of a royal apartment didn’t gather themselves. The ash from the chain-smoking settled on whatever surface it settled on. 2 hours of this, then a long bath, then the appropriate outfit, then by 12:30 in the afternoon, vodka. Brown also records via his research that she tried to combine the smoking and the drinking by gluing matchboxes onto tumblers so she could strike matches while holding her glass.
This is a literal engineering solution to the problem of hands occupied by both a cigarette and a drink. The permanent attachment of a matchbox to the tumbler, so neither activity needed to interrupt the other. The domestic staff of apartment 1A worked around the results of this arrangement.
The vodka arrived at 12:30, someone brought it, someone procured the appropriate glass, someone assessed what was required and provided it. The former Kensington Palace maid from the 1950s, whose testimony is preserved in Tom Quinn’s Kensington Palace: An Intimate Memoir from Queen Mary to Meghan Markle, described the explicit terms under which she conducted her work.
She was instructed not to look at Princess Margaret, not to speak to her unless spoken to. If they encountered each other in a corridor, the maid moving through the apartment, the princess coming the other direction, she was to step aside and look at the floor. Think about the physical mechanics of that instruction. A corridor in apartment 1A, walls, floors, a certain width, a certain length.
The maid and the princess approaching from opposite ends. At the appropriate moment, the maid moves to the side and redirects her gaze downward. The princess passes. The maid may continue. This happened repeatedly, as a matter of routine, as part of the unremarkable daily infrastructure of domestic employment in the princess’s household.
It wasn’t a formal ceremony or a special occasion. It was the ordinary condition of working in her home. This instruction wasn’t written down. It was communicated verbally at the time of employment and maintained through the understood requirements of the job. A maid who looked up, who let her eyes meet the princess’s eyes in a corridor, who spoke when not spoken to, wouldn’t have been formally disciplined.
The consequences would have been more immediate. The awareness that she had made the household atmosphere worse, rather than better. The awareness that displeasure had been generated. The awareness that displeasure had implications for how long she remained employed. Anne de Courcy, researching for her biography of Lord Snowdon, described what working in Margaret’s household felt like from the staff’s perspective.
The princess’s attitude was inconsiderate. Her demands were maddening. Their effect was endless extra work. Not the work of the job itself, but the additional labor generated by the specific unpredictability of a household run around a person whose moods were volatile and whose requirements expanded to fill whatever space of time and energy her staff had available.
De Courcy is a working biographer who drew on the documented record and on interviews with people who had been present. Her characterization is a research conclusion, not a tabloid impression. From the social media post attached to records of the Kensington Palace apartment, citing a primary source that hasn’t been independently attributed to a named memoir, staff waited approximately 2 hours every morning for her breakfast arrangements to resolve before the household’s daily rhythm could fully proceed.
2 hours of the working day in which the rooms she occupied couldn’t be accessed, the work couldn’t be completed, the household was in suspension. This is what inconsiderate looks like when it has been institutionalized into the operating schedule of a residential household. Yes, Ma’am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants addresses the range of experience among royal household staff in the second half of the 20th century.
In the accessible excerpt, it names Margaret specifically among the figures that even experienced household staff found distinctly taxing, framing her as occupying the difficult end of a spectrum even by the standards of royal employment, where difficult was already normalized. David John Payne, Margaret’s footman, eventually published a memoir about his time in her service.
The Vox review of Brown’s Ma’am Darling notes that Payne’s account included long, panting descriptions of her body alongside the documentation of his professional experience, a detail that conveys something about the particular combination of fascination and proximity that service in her household produced in the people who worked there.
Payne waited until after her death to publish. The delay was the system working as designed. None of what was documented in the biographical record was secret. The people at Sunning knew. The maid who looked at the floor in the corridor knew. The diplomatic guests in Paris who had waited for hours in 1959 knew.
The architect who’d been asked in company whether he’d looked at himself in the mirror knew. What none of them had was a mechanism for registering what they knew. The mechanism that might have changed this, the formal complaint, the press report, the grievance documented through an official channel, was unavailable to any of these people in any practical sense.
A water ski club president in Berkshire in the early 1960s had no route for reporting that a member of the royal family had sworn at him and walked away without acknowledging the man who had spent the afternoon in the river on her behalf. The British press that covered royal engagements in that period wasn’t in the business of filing dispatches about royal tantrums at sporting venues.
The culture surrounding the monarchy functioned as a distributed and automatic system of redaction. Events happened. Events were observed. Events were then filed under the general category of how things were rather than the category of events worth recording. Not enforced by any central authority, maintained by the collective behavior of every individual in the system, each of whom understood that the cost of being the person who named the thing was considerably higher than the cost of not naming it. The economic dimension was
specific and documented. Royal household staff in this period were paid considerably below the market rate for equivalent work in private domestic service. Royal sisters, the Anne Edwards biography, states directly that in royal households private staff were paid far below the average wage for the same job.
The prestige of the position, the proximity to royalty, the institutional gravity of working in Kensington Palace was the currency that made below market wages tolerable. Losing the position meant sacrificing that prestige, which had been the only real compensation for the below market wage. Most people weren’t willing to make that trade while the household was still operational.
The accounts that eventually emerged demonstrate that the silence was never absolute. David John Payne published his memoir. The anonymous Kensington Palace maid gave her account to Tom Quinn. Lady Anne Glenconner published Lady in Waiting in 2019. People waited until it was safer to speak, until the princess was dead, until the institutional pressures had dissolved, until enough time had passed to make the private knowledge feel like history rather than betrayal.
Margaret herself worked on reducing the documentary record in the years when her health was failing. Following her first stroke in 1998 and through the series of strokes that led to her death on 9 February 2002 at King Edward VII Hospital in London at age 71. She burned garbage bag after garbage bag of correspondence that she had removed from Clarence House, her mother’s residence where decades of letters had accumulated.
The New York Review of Books, reviewing Brown’s work in 2018, records this specifically. A sustained act of self-editing pursued through the period when her concern about how she would be remembered had become pressing enough to require physical action. She could reduce the archive, shape the official record, manage whatever could be managed from inside the household.
She couldn’t burn other people’s memories. After her death, the royal family moved with notable speed. The Independent reported in 2014 that her staff were shown to the door with minimal delay. The severance terms undisclosed. The family declining publicly to discuss the arrangements. Staff who had maintained the household through the late nights, the late mornings, the unpredictable social weather at below-market wages under explicit conduct requirements, were dismissed when the household ended.
The household ending immediately and without ceremony was at least consistent with the operational principle that had governed Margaret’s relationship with the people who served her throughout her life. Lady Anne Glenconner spoke in 2019 in an interview with The Guardian about Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling.
She called it horrible and objected to what she saw as people trying to damage Margaret’s reputation. She didn’t dispute its accuracy. She objected to its existence. The horror in her formulation wasn’t that Brown had invented had been private knowledge, what people had understood privately for decades, and published it in a form the public could read.
That response from Margaret’s closest surviving friend and former lady-in-waiting is the clearest possible confirmation of what Brown’s book actually achieved. If the incidents documented were fabrications or exaggerations, Glenconner’s objection would have been different. What she objected to was the surfacing, the legibility.
The private consensus had been made public, and the public could now read it, and that was the thing that was horrible. Back to the river, then. The flat reach at Sonning on a summer afternoon, the motor of the tow boat idling, the club members on the bank. The veteran who had spent the afternoon in the water had produced the result.
A full circuit. The princess upright on the skis, moving across the Thames for long enough to close the books on an afternoon that had looked, for most of its duration, like a complete and unrecoverable failure. He had maintained his patience through the anger he hadn’t caused and the impasse he hadn’t created, and he had given her the thing she had come for.
She came ashore. The entourage formed around her. She didn’t even have the grace to thank him. She simply stomped off in a filthy temper with her entourage, leaving ordinary people to clean up the ghastly atmosphere she had created. The club members remained behind on the bank.
The water flattened back to its Thames reach calm. The afternoon’s social weather dispersed, as social weather always does, and the people who had been caught in it went back to their ordinary lives without any mechanism for registering what had happened to them. That wasn’t a royal having a bad day. That was who she really was, documented, witnessed, and absorbed in silence by the people the establishment required to play along.
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