by Queen Elizabeth II did not want her personal beauty consultant to do her face for the Coronation but asked her to go to Buckingham Palace that morning “just in case anything goes wrong”.
The rare insight into his state of mind on the historic day has emerged through the memoirs of Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde’s grandson, about his mother, Thelma Holland (née Besant), who was the monarch’s beautician as well as some of his own. her housewives.
He said: “When the Queen was crowned in 1953, she asked my mother if she would go to the palace in the morning. She said, ‘I don’t want you to make me up. It’s a big day for me. I want to be alone with my thoughts on this day. But I want you to be there in case anything goes wrong’.”
His views can be heard in a new podcast, in which he is interviewed by Gyles Brandreth, the writer, broadcaster and former Taoiseach, whose famous biography of Queen Elizabeth II is among his books.
This weekend’s podcast release is the birthday of the late Queen, who was born on 21 April 1926.
Mr Holland’s mother, who was born in Australia, got the royal engagement when she was running a salon in London for Cyclax, a British cosmetics company.
Among her clients were housewives and, in the podcast, her son says she was summoned to the palace after admiring a photograph of the then Princess Elizabeth in a magazine: “My mother said to one of the ladies home – waiting, ‘I think the Princess with that beautiful skin needs some advice for the future’. One thing that came up… The housekeeper goes back to the palace and says, ‘This very nice lady, Thelma Besant, who does my face, thinks she could be of help to Princess Elizabeth’. “
He added: “My mother will go to the palace and… give her a facial treatment and – whenever [the Queen] went… on tour – would be contacted [fashion designer] Norman Hartnell, who was preparing the dresses. My mother would have samples of all the dresses and she would match the lipsticks and powders and foundations and the rest.”
Mr Holland told the Telegraph: “The Queen made her own composition [for the Coronation]. Never knew that about him. I didn’t know about it until… I was going through my mother’s unpublished papers. My mother left an unpublished memoir about him. She wrote about the period before the Coronation. She went to [tailors] Ede & Ravenscroft to get a sample of the Coronation dress because of the lipstick [and makeup needed to match. The Queen] went to the Abbey in bright red and then she was crowned and came out of the Abbey in Imperial purple, so there had to be a lipstick that didn’t clash…. I still have a sample of the Coronation suit.”
He also recalled that when Prince Charles was then a toddler, Thelma sent him a birthday present of a xylophone. The Queen wrote a letter of thanks, which Mr Holland shared with The Telegraph on Saturday: “I know he will really enjoy playing the xylophone, as he already prefers noisy things to woolly things!”
Mr Holland is one of the leading experts on Wilde, the Irish wit and author of The Importance of Being Earnest, among other masterpieces, who was exiled from England after his notorious trial for gross indecency and imprisonment. Wilde died in France in abject poverty in 1900, aged 46.
It was a big scandal that Wilde’s wife, Constance, fled with her sons Vyvyan and Cyril to Europe, changing her surname to Holland, an ancestral family name.
In the podcast, Mr Holland discusses the toll it took on his father Vyvyan and uncle Cyril: “They were sent to separate boarding schools, so they couldn’t talk to each other and reveal who they were.”
He said that Cyril, who was killed in the First World War in 1915, was always afraid that people would find out who his father was: “He thought it would ruin his career in the army… as it might have been done…
“Cyril wrote to my father… around 1912, when he was sent to India with his battalion – and he said, you know, my task for all these years was to clear the stain on the family’s honour… He felt that his father had been destroyed. family name.”
Even at Mr Holland’s nursery in Chelsea in the late 1940s, Wilde was nervous, he recalls in the podcast: “My brother’s son was at the same school and when we were… walking down the street, I put my arm through his shoulder or around his shoulders…. Apparently, we had broken up, so to speak, because… with my parents, did I have a chance to become gay?… I was five or six years old. It’s extraordinary.”
Mr. Brandreth, who is president of the Oscar Wilde Society, hosts a podcast series called “Rosebud,” which focuses in particular on the early memories and formative experiences of notable people. The title comes from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.
