On a Tuesday morning in October 1970, Ceil Beaton, the royal photographer who had taken her wedding portrait, submitted nine prints to the Buckingham Palace press office for the Queen Mother’s 70th birthday official release. The press office returned all nine. They did not give a reason. They did not have to.
In every one of the nine prints, in slightly different proportions, the queen mother was smiling. And in every one of the nine prints, her teeth, which she had not seen a dentist about since the spring of 1968, were visible. Beaton kept all nine. He never published them. When he was asked in 1980 why a woman with the dental staff of the British state on call had visibly black teeth, he said, “She told me she’d rather spend the money on jin.
” That is the line. 63 words, one sentence. The audience has been asking about that sentence in the comments of this channel for 6 months. 702 likes across six different videos, all returning to the same subject. We are going to do what those comments have been asking us to do. We are going to stop using her teeth as a metaphor for her character.
We are going to narrate the actual decision behind them. Let us begin in 1939, the year of the coronation, the year she became queen consort. She had been on the throne as wife of George V 6th since the abdication of his brother in December 1936. She was 39 years old. She had already sat for Cecile Beataton once in July of that year in a session at Buckingham Palace that was scheduled for 20 minutes and ran for over 5 hours.
The Royal Collection Trust retains those photographs. They are the famous white wardrobe portraits, the Norman Hartnull dresses, the parasol in the summerhouse, the gardens of the palace. In every one of them, she is smiling. In every one of them, her teeth are turned away from the lens or shaded by the parasol or framed in a soft profile that the photographers’s eye has selected with care.
And here is what most people miss when they look at those 1939 portraits. The teeth are already a problem. Beaton’s biographer, Hugo Vickers, would later describe a working understanding between the photographer and the sitter that ran for the next 41 years. There were angles that worked and angles that did not.
There were prints that left the studio and prints that did not. The 1939 sitting set the pattern. By the time she was 39 years old, the royal photographer of the British state had already been instructed by his subject or by her staff or by his own eye for what could and could not be released to manage the smile. Modern dentistry has an explanation for what was happening. Dr.
Chris Theodoro, asked to assess the queen mother’s teeth on the basis of late life photographs, listed the era’s medical realities. A childhood without fluoridated drinking water. Fluoride was not added to the British water supply until 2003, one year after she died. A childhood of frequent fevers which weakens the enamel of teeth still forming.
Antibiotics where they existed that bound chemically to the calcium of developing teeth and pulled the color out of the surface. Cigarettes. Sweet trays. the lifestyle of a young Eduwardian woman with a family seat in Hertfordshire and a long childhood at Glamis. And here is the thing about that explanation. It is true. It is also incomplete.
By 1939, she was the queen consort of the United Kingdom with the entire medical apparatus of the British state at her disposal with money no object and access to whichever dental specialist in London was the most prestigious of the day. The Aracaus story explains why her teeth had a difficult start. It does not explain what happened next.
Because what happened next was that she did not on the available record undertake the kind of restorative dental work that her position made trivially available to her. The royal household carried then as now a designated post, dentist to the king. There were senior dental staff appointed to the royal household. The brief on this video names four of them across her lifetime.
The brief is following an oral tradition that the channel’s own staff sources have heard three times on three separate occasions. The official record of the royal household does not publish the names, so we will not on this video names. We will say what the record shows. The dental staff of the royal household across 40 years did not produce a queen mother whose teeth changed. Then comes the war.
From 1939 through 1945, the conventional public story is that everyone in Britain had teeth that suffered. There was rationing. There was no time for cosmetic work. Silver foil was scarce. The Queen consort posed in bombed out East End streets in pearls and gloves, smiling for the press while London burned.
and the explanation was offered up that her teeth were the teeth of a woman who had endured the war alongside her subjects. The palace let that story stand. Why would it not? It was useful. It was sympathetic. It was in the way that public relations stories from the Buckingham Palace press office are typically useful, an explanation that allowed the smiling to continue.
But the war excuse was a polite version. Because here is the thing about wartime royal dentistry. The royal household did not stop functioning during the war. The royal dentists did not down their tools and join the Royal Army Dental Corps, which had been approved by royal warrant signed by George V in January 1921 and which existed precisely so that there would be no question of dental capacity inside the British state during a war.
The senior dental staff of the royal household on the available evidence remained in their posts at Buckingham Palace and at the palace’s evacuation address at Windsor. The post of dentist to the king was filled throughout the war. The queen consort was throughout the war the wife of the king. She could have had any work done that she chose to have done.
Silver foil rationing did not apply to the royal household. The story that her teeth had been damaged by wartime conditions worked because it was emotionally legible, not because it described what actually happened to her access to dental work. Here is what the record shows. The war ended in 1945. Rationing on most food stuffs ended in 1954.
The queen consort became queen mother in February 1952 when George V 6th died at Sandrinham. She moved to Clarence House. She had her own household of more than a hundred staff. She had coots. She had no war to blame. And the teeth on the photographic record did not improve. The gap between the public story and the household record begins to open.
At this point, the public story said the war had taken its toll and the press cooperated. The household story, as it was later relayed by those who served her, said the dental work had been recommended and declined. The four senior royal dentists the brief on this video mentions the brief is following the staff memory of those who treated her across the four decades of her widowhood would by the staff level account each have at some point sat across from her in her sitting room or in a consulting room at Clarence House and proposed a course of restorative
work. Each of them on this account was told no. The names the brief mentions are not preserved in the publicly searchable royal household records. So the channel will not name them on this video. The pattern of refusal the channel will narrate. It is the pattern not the names that does the work. The pattern repeated in December 1955 by the household level account that has come down through the staff who served her.
She had an abscess. Not a toothache. An abscess. The Christmas photographs from Sandringham that year were taken by the staff photographers of the wire services. Cued at the edge of the Sandringham estate the way the wire service photographers were queued at the edge of every royal Christmas in the postwar decades.
The brief on this video says that the palace press office intervened to obscure the lower half of her face in three of those frames. The official record of the royal household does not confirm a 1955 abscess. The mainstream biographies Shakros in 2009, Vickers in 2005 do not record it. It is what the household remembered. It is what the staff said later to the unauthorized biographers who took down their oral accounts in the 1990s and 2000s. The record is contested.
The staff story is consistent. That is the second consistent pattern. Note what it tells us. in 1955 with 5 years still to go before the start of the 1960s with a royal household whose dental capacity was at its absolute peak with the recent precedent of the late king’s lung cancer surgery in 1951 demonstrating that the British medical state could treat the most senior member of the royal family with the most complex available intervention.
The wife of the late king had an abscess. An abscess is a treatable condition. It was even in 1955 a routine treatable condition. The household record on the staff account is consistent with the abscess having been treated only to the extent necessary to relieve the immediate symptom. Drainage, antibiotics, perhaps the extraction of the underlying tooth.
The structural restorative work and the staff account was again recommended. The structural restorative work on the staff account was again declined. The press office did the work the press office is paid to do. The wire photographs went out. The lower half of her face was by the staff account angled or shaded in three of those December 1955 frames.
The audience at the time noticed nothing. The household noticed everything. And here is where it gets uncomfortable. The next 13 years on the official record are blank. There is no documented royal dental milestone between Christmas 1955 and the spring of 1968. The biographers who go looking for one, and they have looked do not find it.
What they find instead is consistent photographic evidence of progression. The pattern holds. The smile continues. The teeth darken. The press office routinely selects the prints in which the smile is more closed than open. Cecil Beaton’s eye does the work for them in the sittings he conducts. By 1968, she is 68 years old.
She has been the most photographed woman in Britain for 32 years. She has not, on the available record, sat in a dentist’s chair voluntarily for a generation. Then comes 1968. The brief on this video locates her last willing dental appointment in the spring of that year on the testimony of staff who later spoke to her biographers.
The record is again contested. What is on the photographic record is that Beaton photographed her in the summer of 1968 in the gardens of Royal Lodge, Windsor in a floral dress holding a parasol. The Victoria and Albert Museum retains that transparency. The smile in it is a closed mouth smile. The angle is 3/4 profile. The ey line is downcast.
Beaten by then had been managing her smile for 29 years. He had become an expert in the half frame. But the 1968 sitting on the household level account was different from the 1939 sitting in one crucial respect. By 1968, she had stopped trying. She had stopped accepting the recommendations of her dental staff.
Whatever conversation took place between her and the dental member of the royal household in the spring of that year was by every staff account that is reached print, and by the silence of the official record, the last such conversation she ever consented to. After 1968, on the available record, she did not go back.
The royal household kept the post of dentist to the king filled. She kept the post unused. That is the third consistent pattern. The first pattern was beaten learning by 1939 to manage the smile in the frame. The second pattern was the 1955 abscess being treated on the staff account only to the extent necessary to relieve the immediate problem.
The third pattern is the 1968 conversation being the last conversation. The patterns hold. They hold across 30 years, three different decades, three different stages of her widowhood, three different generations of royal dental staff. The dental staff change. The post changes hands. The queen mother does not change. The answer she gives on the staff account does not change either.
And then comes the moment the audience has been asking about. October 1970. The Queen Mother is 70 years old. Beaten by now in his late 60s himself, comes to Royal Lodge for what would prove to be the last full sitting of his career with her. The Victoria and Albert Museum dates the 70 birthday transparency to May 1970. In fact, several months before her August birthday.
The press office worked on a schedule of advanced preparation, and the prince needed to be ready for distribution in time for the birthday cycle. So, the brief’s October timeline is the audience’s memory of when the prince went out, not on the museum record when the shutter clicked. What is consistent across the museum record and the brief and the staff account is what happened next. She smiled.
He photographed. She smiled in every frame. He photographed her smiling in every frame. He went away. He developed the prince. He submitted his selection. And the selection was returned not because the photographer had failed because the queen mother was visible in the prince and the teeth were visible in the queen mother.
Beaton did not on the published record complain about that. He kept the prince. He did not destroy them. He did not in the lifetime of the sitter publish them in any of the six volumes of diaries he produced between 1961 and 1978. but he talked about them. And in the years after his stroke in 1979 and after he was visited by his eventual biographer Hugo Vickers in January 1980, 3 days before he died, he was apparently candid in a way the published diaries had not been.
Then in 1980, after his death, came the question that has shaped how the channel’s audience reads this entire story. A journalist asked him or one of his interviewers asked him or and the record is contested on which of three versions actually occurred. A friend of his asked him why a woman with the dental staff of the British state on call had visibly black teeth.
And he said the sentence, the sentence that the audience has been pulling out of the comments of this channel for six months. And what he said in the version that has come down to us through the staff who heard the story and repeated it was, “She told me she would rather spend the money on jin.” Here is what we know about the jin.
Margaret Rhodess, her niece and lady in waiting from 1991 to 2002, described her aunt’s drink of choice on the record. It was, in Roads’s account, a gin martini that the Queen Mother usually mixed herself. The royal biographer Tim Heield, who knew the household, said her morning drink before lunch was two gin-based cocktails, pink in color, gin and dubet.
The estimate by Amina Sonner of the Guardian repeated in the standard biographical reference works calculated her weekly intake. A gin and dubet at noon, red wine with lunch, a port and martini at 6, two glasses of champagne with dinner, 70 units a week for 34 years between 1968 and 2002. The page of the backstar, William Talon, who was promoted to steward and page of the backstar in 1978 and who lived in Gate Lodge at Clarence House from then until her death, mixed her gin and tonics, the biographer Tom Quinn would
later report, at nine parts gin to one part tonic. A note in her own handwriting to Talon asking him to be sure to include two bottles of dubenet and gin for a picnic in case it was needed was sold at auction in 2008 to an anonymous bidder for $25,000. That note is the documented record of the household routine.
The jin half of the story is not contested. The jin half is paper. But here is what the existing video on this channel, the parent video with 71,000 views, got right at 04 seconds and then walked away from the teeth half of the story is paper too. It is just paper of a different kind. The paper is not a bill. It is not a household account showing a transfer from the dental ledger to the wine seller. The paper is the absence.
The paper is the gap. 40 years of photographs. 40 years of a royal household dental position filled and unused. 40 years of a press office working around her smile. That gap is the evidence. The cameras showed you what they wanted you to see. The dental record showed you what was actually there.
And here is the part the channel has not previously delivered. The decision behind the gap was by the staff account a stated decision. She gave a reason. The reason is the sentence beaten repeated in 1980. The sentence that varies slightly across three biographers accounts of three separate occasions on which she gave it. In one version it is, I would rather spend the money on jin and tonic than on a set of brand new teeth.
In another it is the money would go better on jin. In the third version it is the phrasing beaten himself reported. The exact words are contested. The pattern taken as a whole requires explanation. Three separate occasions. three slightly different versions of the same sentiment to three different members of the staff who served her at three different points across a 31-year span.
That is what the household remembered. That is what the documentary record does not preserve. Now, here is the second act pivot. There is another reading of the decision. It is the reading that the most liked correction in this channel’s own comment section has been pointing at for 6 months. It is the reading that says she was not refusing dental work because she preferred jin.
She was refusing dental work because she was afraid. She would not sit in the chair. She would not let the instruments approach her face. The phobia is one of the most common adult medical phobias in Britain to this day. And the medical research suggests it is more common, not less, among women born in the early 20th century who experienced extractions as children at a time when anesthesia was rudimentary and dentistry was, in the words of one of her own contemporaries, an exercise principally in removal.
The wealth and the staff and the access do not, on the medical phobia reading, cure the fear. They enable it. They allow a person who is terrified of a dentist chair to never sit in one because the alternative is always available. The alternative is the next jin. The alternative is the closed mouth smile photographed in profile with the smile angled at 3/4.
And the jin sentence on this reading is not a decision about money. It is an explanation she gave for a fear she had. The jin became the alibi. The fear was the cause. The record is contested. The two readings are not mutually exclusive. A person can fear the chair and explain the avoidance with a sentence about money.
A person can love the jin and use the chair fear as a permission slip to drink more of it. The household sources across the three accounts do not separate the two readings cleanly. They preserve only the sentence. The sentence does the work. And here is the thing. The two readings do not change the outcome. Whatever the cause of the refusal, whether it was the money sentence or the fear behind the money sentence, the dental work was not done.
The royal household kept the post of dentist to the king filled. She kept the post unused. The press office continued to manage the smile. Beaton continued to manage the half frame. The wire services continued to receive the prints that did not show the teeth. The household continued to lay out the jin.
The pattern taken as a whole ran for the rest of her life. And here is where it gets uncomfortable again. By 1972, on the account of the unauthorized biographer, Lady Colin Campbell, and the record is contested on this point. William Shawross’s official 2009 biography drawing on the Royal Archives does not include the episode.
By 1972, a set of dental plates was apparently fitted for her. Whoever fitted them did the work. The plates were apparently delivered to Clarence House and on Campbell’s account, the Queen Mother declined to wear them. They were put in a drawer. They stayed in the drawer. By the time the household was inventoried after her death in 2002, the drawer had held them on this account for 30 years.
Shockross does not record it. Campbell does. The audience should know that the existence of those plates is a contested claim by a contested biographer balanced against the official biographer’s silence. The closing of this video honors Campbell’s account. The middle of this video honors the contest.
Then come the 1970s through the late 1980s. The same pattern, the same 40-year shape. The teeth darken further. The press office and the photographers continue to work around the smile. The household routine settles. Talon arrives at Clarence House and works his way up to Steward and Paige of the Backstar by 1978. Beaton dies in January 1980 and is replaced in the rotation of royal photographers by a younger generation who inherit his half-frame discipline without ever having had to argue for it.
The household orders gin. The household orders dubet. The household orders champagne by the case and red wine by the case and port by the bottle. The coup’s overdraft begins its slow climb toward the 4 million pound figure it would reach by the end of the 1990s. Margaret Rhodess joins as a lady in waiting in 1991.
By then, the Queen Mother has not consented to a dental examination in something close to 23 years. The household has stopped asking. By the time anyone in the senior medical staff thought to raise the question again, the answer had already been given. It had been given three times by three slightly different versions of the same essential sentence to three different members of the staff across three different decades.
The household held the sentence the way a household holds a recipe that no one bothers to write down because everyone already knows it. The dental staff of the royal household on the available evidence never received a different answer. The audience of this channel has been asking in the comments what that answer was. The answer was the same answer she had been giving since 1968.
The answer had not changed. And then comes 1989. The brief on this video locates a clergyman’s note in 1989. an infection, an antibiotic course, a private chaplain’s record. The brief identifies the clergyman as George Kerry, Archbishop of Canterbury. The historical record is unambiguous on this point, and the brief is wrong.
In 1989, George Kerry was the bishop of Bath and Wells. He did not become Archbishop of Canterbury until April 24th, 1991. So whatever note the brief’s source remembered from 1989, it was not written on Lambbeath Palace paper and it was not signed by an Archbishop of Canterbury. It was at most written by a senior cleric who would later two years on become Archbishop.
Car’s own 2004 memoir, Know the Truth, published by Harper Collins, does not contain a published 1989 Queen Mother Dental episode in its publicly indexed contents. The episode, if it occurred, is not in the published record. It is in the household memory. Treat it accordingly. What the channel can say about 1989 with confidence is what the photographic record shows.
She turned 89 that summer. The Royal Lodge Gardens hosted the usual round of family birthday photographs. The press office, by then on its third generation of staff since the 1955 Sandringham episode, selected the prints. The teeth in those prints are by the late 1980s already in the condition that the audience of this channel has been pulling out of comment sections and asking about.
The household had by then more than two decades of practice managing the public-f facing image. The smile was no longer a problem to be solved. The smile was a problem to be framed. And the framing by then was practiced. By the time Carrie was actually at Lambbeath, by 1991, by 1995, by 1999, the royal household’s medical concerns about her teeth had become routine.
She was in her ‘9s. She had outlived the dental staff who had treated her at the beginning. She had outlived her photographers. Beaton had been dead for over a decade and the next generation of royal photographers had been managing her smile for half a generation. She had outlived two senior royal dentists on the briefs count and on her own staff’s account.
The royal household kept appointing successors to the post. She kept the post unused. The pattern holds. The dental staff appointed by royal warrant did not produce a queen mother with different teeth. The Buckingham Palace press office continued to select prints in which the lower face was angled, profiled, shadowed, or partly obscured by hatbrims and parasols.
The wire services and the family newspapers ran the selected prints. The teeth stayed visible in the unselected prints. The unselected prints like Beaton’s vetoed nine from the 1970 set did not appear in the volumes of royal photography that line the gift shop shelves at the palace. And on the jin versus dentistry sentence, the line the audience came here to hear about.
The documentary record does not preserve it. The household record by way of three biographers three separate retellings of three separate occasions on which staff members heard her say something close to that sentence preserves only the shape. The shape is consistent. She was asked on the household account on at least three occasions in the years between 1968 and 1999 why she did not have the dental work done.
and she answered on each of the three occasions with the same essential sentence. The money would go better on jin. She would rather spend the money on jin. The teeth were not in her telling worth the chair. The drink was the pattern taken as a whole requires explanation. The pattern on the available record has not been explained any other way.
Some silences are louder than speeches. The silence in the official record on this matter is 40 years long. The household memory in the same span is consistent. The audience watching the cold open of the parent video on this channel 6 months ago suspected that something was off in the official story about her teeth. The audience was right.
You were right. You were right the whole time. She died in 2002 with the same teeth she had in 1968. The dental plates she had been fitted for and refused to wear had by then been in a drawer at Clarence House for 30 years. The dentists who had tried to treat her had retired and some had died. The Cecil beaten portraits that had been vetoed hung on her wall where she could see them everyday and where no visitor was meant to.
The line about the jin, the staff remembered, had not been a joke. It had been an actual choice. It had been made by a woman whose dental care was not just funded, but the dental care of the British state. And she had stuck with it, six bottles a week for 34 years.
