On the morning of March 30th, 2002, William Talon was at his residence at the Gate Lodge, Clarence House in central London, when a journalist from the press association telephoned him. The journalist asked him how he felt about the Queen Mother’s death. Talon, who was 67 years old and who had served Elizabeth Bose Lion as her page for 51 years, said, “I beg your pardon.
” The journalist repeated the question. Talon, by his own later account, hung up the telephone. He sat for a moment in the small front room of the gate lodge. The royal household had not yet called him. By the time they did, 2 hours and 17 minutes later, he had already heard it on the radio twice.
The interval, in his own retelling, was the interval. Other accounts give it differently. What no account disputes is the order. The journalist called first, the household called after. 51 years of service ended in the wrong order. And the wrong order was the story. To understand what those two hours actually meant, you have to go back to the start.
Not to 1973 when a tabloid first put the nickname Backstair Billy on him. not to the August of 2001 when he was barred from the Queen Mother’s private rooms for pushing Princess Margaret in a wheelchair into the path of the cameras at the 101st birthday photo call. Not even to the eviction letter that arrived a few weeks after she died.
You have to go back to Easter 1951 to a shop above a hardware store in Bertley County Durham and to a 15-year-old boy who had been writing to King George V 6th since he was 12, asking in handwriting that still had the loops of a school boy whether the king had any work for him. The letters worked. In Easter of 1951, William John Stevenson Talon, 15 years old, the son of a Durham hardware shop family that had moved to Coventry, was summoned to Windsor Castle.
He started as a junior footman at the Easter Court. He was, by the standards of the household, the youngest member of staff in the building. He had a single suit. He had no London relatives. He had a letter kept the rest of his life in which the king’s private office acknowledged the application of a boy from a Midlands ironmongers family and accepted him into service.
His own description of the early weeks later given to his biographer Tom Quinn was that he had spent the first three days hiding in cupboards rather than risk meeting anyone above his station. He learned the corridors by walking them at night when the senior staff were asleep. He learned the dining room geography by counting the chairs.
He learned the difference between a page of the presents and a page of the back stairs by listening to how the senior pages spoke about each other. The Easter Court at Windsor in 1951 was a household still constructed on pre-war lines. There were rules for how one entered a room.
There were rules for how one stood when an equiry passed. There were rules for how one held a tray. The boy from Bertley learned all of them in the practical way that boys with no other prospect learn things in 3 months. Within a year, King George V 6th was dead. The 15-year-old footman at Windsor had become, by the geometry of the household, a 16-year-old footman serving a widowed queen mother who had just lost her husband, her home, and her constitutional role on the same week.
The historians later wrote about her grief in the abstract. The boy at the door knew it differently. He saw what time she came down. He saw what time she stopped coming down. He saw the staff routines reform around a woman whose previous routines had been built around a different man. The household’s internal life in the 18 months after February 1952 contracted around a single principal who was now the most famous widow in Britain.
The boy who had been the youngest member of staff at the Easter Court a year earlier was now by accident of position the person who held the door for her at the bottom of the stairs. He went into the Royal Air Force for national service between 1953 and 1954. The household kept his post open. When he came back, he was redirected to Clarence House to the Queen Mother’s new establishment, and he stayed there.
Reginald Wilcock, who had become a Buckingham Palace footman in 1954 and had served the Duke of Windsor as a valet in Paris between 1957 and 1959. Joined Clarence House in 1960. The two men began a partnership that would last more than 30 years. The household knew. The household did not officially know.
The arrangement in the language of the time was tolerated as long as it was not visible. For four decades it was not visible. What does that actually mean? It meant that Talon and Wilcock lived together at Gate Lodge, a grace in favor cottage attached to Clarence House in a domestic arrangement everyone on the inside understood and no one on the inside described.
It meant that Christmas was spent at the lodge. It meant that the queen mother sent presents to the lodge. It meant that at staff parties, neither of them disguised the partnership. It meant that the queen mother attended Willox’s funeral at the Queen’s Chapel in August 2000, in the way one attends the funeral of a deeply senior member of the household, which in the institutional sense he had been.
The arrangement was not concealed. It was simply not discussed. The difference matters. Concealment implies shame. Non-discussion implies a kind of professional courtesy extended by one set of people to another, which both sides understood would last only as long as the principal was alive to defend it. When the principal died in 2002, the non-discussion ended.
And what replaced it was not concealment. What replaced it was an eviction letter. By the late 1970s, Talon was a senior member of staff. In 1978, he succeeded Walter Taylor as Steward and Paige of the Backstar. The job was the one the public eventually mythologized. It is also, in plain English, the most intimate, non-medical role in a royal household.
He was on duty from before the queen mother came down to breakfast until after she had gone to bed. He entered her private rooms without knocking. He bought her Christmas presents on her behalf for members of the family she would not have known how to shop for. He prepared the gin and dubet at noon in the proportions the household had standardized.
One part gin to two parts dubet with a slice of lemon. He mixed her gin and tonics. His biographer Tom Quinn recorded at 9/10 jin and onetenth tonic. He arranged her wardrobe for state events. He stood three paces behind her at every royal ascot lunchon between 1951 and 2002. He saw her at her oldest and at her angriest and at her quietest.
He took none of it to a newspaper. He took none of it to a publisher. He took in the end almost all of it to the grave. The Telegraph obituary when it ran in November 2007 included one of the few public quotes he had ever given about the daily routine. He said it was still an exciting moment when he saw her each morning.
He said to the queen mother, “Every day is a new adventure.” That sentence, the one he was willing to give the press in his lifetime, is the entire surface he was prepared to show. The rest he kept. He kept the staff arrangements. He kept the visitor lists. He kept the moods. He kept the morning gin trolley up the back staircase as a daily ritual that did not vary in 50 years.
He inaugurated in 1970 the now iconic birthday gate greeting at Clarence House. The moment when on the Queen Mother’s birthday each August, she came out to meet the crowd at the gate and Talon, half behind her, half beside her, marshaled the staff who had been instructed not to be visible. In June 2001, 10 months before she died, he received the Royal Victorian Medal in gold.
Earlier the same year, he had received the 50-year service clasp. The household knew by the spring of 2001 exactly what the half century of service had been worth. The medals were the institution’s last warm acknowledgement of him. Within 14 months, the same institution would send him a letter telling him to leave the cottage he had lived in for the longest part of his adult life.
The tabloid nickname arrived somewhere along the way. The papers called him backst Billy. The phrase was meant to diminish him. It located him on the back staircase on the wrong side of the green bays door where the proper staff lived. The public version was a comic figure, a flamboyant page, a man with strong opinions about flower arrangements, a slightly too loud presence at staff parties.
The private version, which the household saw, was the man who knew where the queen mother kept the photographs she did not want her daughter to see, and who never told anyone what was in those photographs. The two versions did not match. The household for 45 years preferred the gap. The gap kept the institution safe. The gay life in the language of the household was quietly tolerated.
Willcock died on the 11th of August 2000 of cancer age 66, a week after he and Talon had served the queen mother her 100th birthday tea at Clarence House. He died in the Royal Marsden. Talon was at the Royal Opera House with the Queen Mother when he was told Wilcock was dying. He returned to the hospital. Wilcock died a week later.
The Queen Mother attended Wilcock’s funeral at the Queen’s Chapel, an extraordinary gesture from a queen mother to a deputy steward, and the kind of detail that does not survive in the obituaries because it does not fit either the warm grandmother narrative or the cold institution narrative. It fits the third narrative, the one in which she knew exactly who Talon and Wilco were to each other, and the household knew, and the bargain held.
The bargain had been tested before. There was an incident in 1991 at Gate Lodge. Talon had entertained a young man on the grounds whose criminal record subsequently emerged. The tabloid press treated him shoddily in the language of the telegraph obituary and the household contained the story. He was not dismissed.
He was not in any visible way punished. The bargain held because the bargain had to hold. He knew too much. He carried too many decades of the household’s interior weather. The institution’s instinct in the early 1990s was the instinct it had always had. Keep him on the staircase. Keep the staircase quiet. Keep going. For a long time, it worked.
And then almost overnight, it stopped working. In August 2001, the Queen Mother turned 101. A photo call was arranged at Clarence House. Princess Margaret, who had suffered a series of strokes and was recuperating inside the house, had not been expected to appear. Talon pushed her in a wheelchair into the line of the photographers.
The picture that ran in the British papers the next morning was the first time the public had seen Princess Margaret in a wheelchair. It was the first time the country had been forced to look at her decline. Palace staff were furious. They called it a gross invasion of the princess’s privacy. Whether Talon had acted out of devotion or out of mischief or out of a senior pages old instinct to give the photographers what they came for has never been resolved.
What is resolved is the consequence. He was from that day barred from the queen mother’s personal quarters. The princess died 6 months later. The queen mother died 7 months after that. and the bargain that it held for 45 years had quietly stopped holding the autumn before the Queen Mother actually died.
Which brings us back to the morning of March the 30th, 2002. The Queen Mother was at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park. Talon was at Gate Lodge in central London. The two lodges, the same word, 10 mi apart. The Queen Mother died at 12 minutes 3 in the afternoon. The news was given first to the queen. It was given second to the prime minister.
It was given third to a wire service journalist. The journalist made several calls. One of those calls was to Gate Lodge. Talon picked up. The journalist asked him how he felt about the queen mother’s death. Talon said, “I beg your pardon.” The journalist repeated the question. Talon hung up. For the next interval, Talon’s account gives 2 hours and 17 minutes.
Other accounts give less. No published source confirms the exact figure. He sat in the front room of Gate Lodge and waited for the household to ring him. The radio was on. The bulletins began. He heard the first bulletin. He heard the second. The household had still not rung. By the time the call from Clarence house came through, he had already heard the death announced on the radio twice.
He had not been told by a person. He had been told by a wire service stranger and then confirmed by a radio newsreader. 51 years of service to one woman, ended by a phone call from someone he had never met. He attended her funeral. He gave the press a single careful sentence about her. She had been, he said, the most wonderful employer, very compassionate, incredibly kind, very understanding.
He did not say more. He had nothing he was willing to say more about. The cameras followed him into the abbey. The cameras followed him out. The cameras did not follow him back to Gate Lodge, which is where the second act of the story actually happens. A few weeks after the funeral, a letter arrived at the gate lodge.
The letter has never been published. Tom Quinn, in his 2015 biography of Talon, summarized its content. It was short. It was unsigned by any of the senior family members. And it told Talon that the gate lodge had to be vacated. There was no leaving party. There was no letter of thanks. There was no formal goodbye.
The household subsequently said that staff become redundant when the principal dies which is in the bureaucratic sense accurate. It was also in the human sense the institution at its coldest. Read that twice. a man who had lived in a cottage on the grounds since the late 1960s, who had served the same woman across the reigns of two different monarchs, who held the Royal Victorian Medal in gold awarded to him by that woman 10 months earlier, was told by Post that the cottage was no longer his.
The letter in Quinn’s summary did not name him with any of his three royal service titles. It did not refer to the half century. It did not refer to the medal. It did not refer to the daily routine that had ended on the 30th of March. It treated him in the language of an employment contract as the holder of a teny that had been linked to a job that no longer existed.
The job had ended. The teny had ended with it. That in the bureaucratic logic of the privy purse was the whole of the matter. The most quoted line about the period is Talon’s own. He wrote to a friend, Rita Michael that summer. The letter is the only contemporaneous Talon document we have from the period.
He said, “Life is bloody at the moment, and I must move house within the month. The palace and privy purse have behaved appallingly, but what can one do?” Read it aloud and notice the shape of the sentence. He is 67 years old. He has lived through 51 years of a household. He has the discipline, even in a private letter to a friend, to put the word appallingly, in the middle of a sentence, and to follow it with a question rather than an accusation.
What can one do? He had been trained by the institution in the habit of the question rather than the accusation. the habit held even when the institution was the thing he was describing. The verbatim text of the household’s letter to him, the date, the signatory, the wording is not in print. The brief that built this script gave it a date of April 12th.
The truth is the household has never released the document and no biographer has been allowed to quote it directly. What we know is the result. He had to move within the month. He was 67 years old. He had lived at Gate Lodge for the largest part of his adult life. He had no children. He had no surviving partner.
He had in the household’s filing system become redundant. He vacated by the end of July 2002. The arrangements that followed were not the households formally. They were Prince Charles’s in his personal capacity as Duke of Cornwall. A groundf flooror flat in Kennington, South London, owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, was made available to him at a low rent.
An additional pension supplement of 100 a week was added to his royal service pension, paid out of Charles’s own arrangements. This is the detail the standard YouTube version of the story leaves out, and it complicates the moral arc in a way that the audience deserves to hear. The household institutionally treated him as an ex employee.
The man who is now king personally did not. But the man who is now king was not the man who had given Talon the 51 years. The 51 years had been given to the queen mother. And the queen mother’s executives, Sir Alan Reed, the privy purse, the senior household staff who managed the estate, were the people who sent the short letter.
They were the people who set the leaving date. They were the people who, according to Talon’s own account to Tom Quinn, treated him, as he put it, as if he had worked in the palace for 6 months washing bottles. That sentence is the loadbearing sentence of the entire post202 record. It is in his voice. It is on the page.
It is the closest thing we have to a verbatim statement of what 51 years had been worth to the household that had received them. He moved into the Kennington flat. He kept a signed photograph of the queen mother on the kitchen wall. He kept the cufflinks she had given him in 1971. He kept a small set of Christmas cards she had sent him over the years.
He kept the things that had passed between them privately. He did not for the rest of his life publicly criticize the household. He was offered by his own account repeated in Quinn’s book and in the Kennington news profile significant sums by the tabloids for memoir rights. He refused every offer. His neighbor Arthur Butler told the list years later that Talon had been extremely discreet and very loyal and refused.
The discretion was not a strategy. It was a temperament. It was who he had always been. He was not in any documented sense offered reemployment by the new household. The brief that shaped this script suggested a 2003 attempt at reemployment that was refused by Buckingham Palace. The record of that specific offer is not in any published source.
What is in the published sources is the silence. He was not invited to Clarence House under its new arrangement. He was not invited to Buckingham Palace under its new arrangement. He was, according to those who knew him, increasingly isolated. He drank. He had always drunk. He drank more. He kept a small circle. The funeral he attended most regularly in those years was Reg Wilcox.
He went to the grave at the Queen’s Chapel ground every August on the anniversary of Willox’s death. He brought flowers. He stood for a long time. The records of who he saw between 2003 and 2007 are not complete. The Kennington News profile written after his death sketched a man who spent his days in the local pubs telling stories about a household he refused to liel. He kept a small flat.
He kept the cufflings. He kept the photograph. He did not in those final years write a memoir, sit for an interview with anyone other than Quinn’s researchers, or give the press the line they wanted. In March 2007, he was admitted to hospital. The Prince of Wales visited him there. The visit was not made public at the time.
It surfaced later in obituaries and in the alt obituaries archive of the telegraph’s piece. Charles’s visit was the household’s last act of personal recognition. It was made by a man who had known Talon since Charles was a boy at Clarence House, a man whose grandmother’s Christmas presents Talon had bought every year for half a century. It was made in March.
8 months later, the man Charles had visited was dead. The pattern taken as a whole requires explanation. A 15-year-old footman becomes a 16-year-old footman serving a widowed queen mother. He grows up inside the institution. He partners for 30 years with another member of the staff and the institution tolerates the arrangement as long as it stays on the staircase.
He becomes the most senior page in the household. He earns the 50-year clasp. He earns the Royal Victorian Medal in gold. He survives a 1991 security scandal that should have ended him. He survives the 2001 wheelchair photograph that did quietly end the trust the principal had in him. He serves until the principal’s death, and then in the wrong order, in the wrong tone, in the wrong silence, the institution he had grown old inside disposes of him by post.
The gap between what the public was told about the Queen Mother’s beloved household and what the senior page of that household received from it on his way out is the gap this whole story is for. The gap is the only honest measure of what the institution actually was. There is one more piece of evidence. It does not arrive until the summer after his death on the 5th of July 2008 at Reman Danzy Auctioneers in Colchester, not Sabes, as has been repeatedly misreported.
Approximately 700 lots from Talon’s estate were sold in a single owner sale. Approximately 300 people attended. The total realized was approximately £440,000. The standout lot was a handwritten note in the queen mother’s hand to Talon. It read, “I think that I will take two small bottles of dubenet and gin with me this morning in case it is needed.
” The note had a pre-sale estimate of £3,000. It sold for £16,000. The buyer was anonymous. The note had not been published before the sale and has not been published since the sale in any official royal household record. Its existence was confirmed only because Talon had kept it. He had kept everything she had ever written to him.
He had kept it for 40 years. The catalog, the auction houses institutional page records made Reayman Danzy’s reputation as the leading specialist in royal memorabilia. The estate had been left to a small group of friends. The proceeds were distributed accordingly. The household as an institution took no part in the sale.
No member of the senior household attended. No member of the senior household bid. No member of the senior household issued a statement before, during, or after the sale. The silence around the sale was the same silence that had followed the eviction letter 6 years earlier. It was the same silence Talon had been trained by the institution to maintain for 51 years on its own behalf.
The silence in the end was the institutions, not his. If you suspected watching the obituaries roll over the Queen Mother in the spring of 2002, the archbishops, the cues at Westminster Hall, the language of beloved grandmother of the nation, that the people closest to her daily life were missing from the choreography. You were right.
You were right the whole time. The senior page who had served her for 51 years was not at the funeral cortees. He was in the back of the abbey. He was given, by his own description, the dignity of an ex employee, as if he had worked in the palace for 6 months washing bottles. The household had its narrative. He had the cuff links she had given him in 1971, a handwritten note about two small bottles of dubet and gin, and a short letter telling him that the flat that had been promised had to be vacated within the month.
William Talon died alone in a small flat in Brixton on the 23rd of November 2007. He was 72. He had no children. He had given 51 years of his life, most of it under the same roof, in service to one woman, to a royal household which by then had not spoken to him since the spring of 2003. His belongings were auctioned at Sabes the following year, including a set of cufflinks the Queen Mother had given him in 1971 and a small framed photograph of her signed that had hung in his Brixing kitchen. The photograph sold for £290.
The household, the catalog did not say, attended no part of the auction.
