Meeting the Man Who Wrote About Princess Margaret

Like a lot of people, I’ve been watching the latest series of The Crown on Netflix recently - and whatever people think about its accuracy, it is a remarkable bit of television.

One of the central characters is, of course, Princess Margaret - and she very much stands out in the episode I’ve just watched about the two unfortunate royal cousins who had been bundled away in some home-for-incurables by the powers that be.

It all brought back a memory I have of going to interview a man who was a good friend of mine - indeed he even acted as Best Man at my impromptu wedding aboard a sailing ship in the middle of the Malacca Straits many years ago.

Tim Heald was a thoroughly nice chap and a great writer - and the reason I went to interview him many years ago was because he’d just written a major biography all about the Princess…

Here’s the article I penned at the time - and a few photos of Tim and I when we visited a little known group of Caribbean islands some years before his death…

Isle de Sants in the Caribbean, which Tim Heald and I explored years ago with his wife Penny

A large media fanfare has this week been heralding the launch of a new book based on the life and times of Princess Margaret – Martin Hesp has been to Fowey, and elsewhere, to talk to the West. Country author who has spent the past four years working on the biography. 

The quietly spoken Cornwall based writer Tim Heald was in a bit of a sweat – he had reached the top of a high hill on an unbelievably beautiful tropical island and all he could think to mutter – apart from remarking something about mad dogs, Englishman and the midday sun – was the following enigmatic remark: “Princess Margaret would have liked it here even more than Mustique.”

You could, perhaps, regard anyone saying such a thing as being a little pretentious, but Mr Heald had every right to make the observation. He was in the middle of a four-year long research marathon that would enable him to write an encyclopaedic royal biography. 

It was a while ago that I stood with him on that scenic hill in the Isle de Sants and since then the Fowey based writer has been trudging on relentlessly through the fascinating life and times of our somewhat forgotten Princess.

Tim Heald makes his way through the streets of Isle de Sant with wife Penny walking ahead

I say somewhat forgotten because that’s how she can come over in the post-Diana era.

This is how the author describes her in one passage of Princess Margaret A life Unravelled: “She was, in her youth, the Diana of her day: a pocket Venus - little more than five feet tall - with lustrous eyes and perfect skin. Attracting admirers and deferential crowds wherever she went, she seemed at first incapable of setting a foot wrong.

“Yet when she died, the valedictories on Princess Margaret ranged from the grudging to the venomous. Indeed, said one commentator, even Harold Shipman, the mass-murderer, had attracted a kinder press than did the Queen's younger sister in her final years.

“The abiding image for those too young to recall her heyday,” writes Tim Heald, “was of a sad, enfeebled woman in a wheelchair, the celebrated eyes hidden by dark glasses and her slight body wrapped in a rug.”  

This week the book bearing these words has hit the streets to great acclaim across the country and I couldn’t help but ask the author if he’d ended up his long researches liking his subject or not. 

“It’s funny,” he mused. “You know how everybody reduces every famous person to clichés - in Margaret’s case she was the Queen’s young sister who drank, smoked, had too much sex. End of story. But nobody is as shallow as that – she is agreeably complicated, actually.” 

In telling the royal tale Mr Heald has had extraordinary help from those closest to Princess Margaret, including her family (Lord Snowdon and her son, Lord Linley), as well as three of her private secretaries and many of her ladies in waiting. These individuals have not talked to any previous biographer. He has also had the Queen's permission to use the royal archives.

“Christ knows how,” Tim told me when we met in Cornwall this week. “But I was allowed to go in royal archives in Windsor and what’s fun is finding out what life is really like beyond the red carpets.”

Here’s an example of a typical Princess Margaret style adventure: “She was sent to Tavalu on the remote Ellice Islands,” recalls Tim. “Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister and she got short shrift because he couldn’t be bothered to send anyone high ranking. Instead she was given two Foreign Office bods - the strangely named Snodgrass and Cortazzi. 

Writer Tim Heald sitting on a Caribbean beach

“There was no Press and it was all hysterically funny – her friend Lord Glenconner was there because he ran a postage stamp company and they’d issued a commemorative stamp.  Princess Margaret would go stomping around to his hut because it was the only one with air conditioning. 

“She also attended the 60th anniversary of the King of Swaziland and the tiny princess had to stick a medal on the massive six-foot eight inch king’s chest which she could not reach. It is all completely ‘barking’,” laughs Tim. “But nobody tends to write about that sort of thing because they are all busy reporting the serious stuff.

“In a way it’s easier to be Queen,” opines the man from Fowey. “You get on with things because you know you have to - but if you are younger sister you don’t know what to do. One side says: ‘put your feet up, etc’ – the other side says: ‘Excuse me, you are daughter of a king and sister of the Queen.’ The two things are always in conflict.

“Even a boring lunch with the Archbishop of Canterbury, which you’d think would be a doddle, is nothing of the kind. There’d be various reccies – and they’d find out it wasn’t appropriate for the Dean to come to lunch because he is a well known card carrying member of the Communist Party. So there’s a great fuss. And so on.

“The Caribbean was her place to switch off,” Tim told me. “The Queen has Balmoral and Sandringham and nobody goes near. For Margaret that escape was the West Indies.”

She may have switched off in the Caribbean, but the Press didn’t. Tales of her tropical excesses often coloured the otherwise drab pages of the 1960s British media.

“One of the things people were horrible about was the way she drank and partied,” shrugs Tim. “Quite honestly, your average hack is every bit as keen on a drink and often on members of the opposite sex as well.

“I don’t know why that was they picked on her. It was very odd. But I do know journalists who ended up liking her, despite having expected not to. People like Andrew Duncan who did an interview with her and thought she was great. When he got home he realised he’d screwed up the tape and he had to ring Margaret and say: ‘Sorry - the tape’s gone blank…’ ‘Oh that can happen to any of us, come back and let’s do it again,’ came the reply…”

“I met her a couple of times,” says Tim. “When I was writing the Prince Philip book (The Duke: A portrait of Prince Philip) I had lunch with her and the Queen Mother and there was a corgi at their feet and Margaret said: ‘I think he wants to be stroked.’ I said: ‘I’ve heard about those dogs - I don’t think I want to go near him.’ She thought it was terribly funny.

“One crime writer I know had been at dinner with Margaret and they’d all had instructions about not talking to her unless she spoke to them – you know, the usual thing.  But this woman paid no attention; with the result they had a wonderful evening together. But the gentlemen around remained silent and must have thought it was all a terrible bore.”

I asked Tim why he’d chosen Princess Margaret as a subject: “I’d done Philip before and I was at a loss. I thought, I’m not going to do Wayne Rooney or anyone like that - I don’t want a 12-year-old footballer with nothing to say. And when Margaret’s name was mentioned I thought: what has this woman done to attract quite such hatred? 

“There were friends of hers writing things making her out to be completely wonderful, and then there were people knocking her for six.  

“It’s quite amazing going through all the papers,” Tim went on. “It’s a sort of an obstacle race. For one thing you realise what a glamorous person she was. There’s one stunning picture where the Lord Mayor of London is giving her lunch and in the street below there are hundreds of men looking up and worshipping her. ‘Every man-jack in the Royal Navy fell in love with her, and so did I,’ is what one old admiral said to me. She was obviously fabulously glamorous. 

“But there must have been moments when she was really tiresome. I have met people who got fed up with her – often people who had to stay up late at night at some house ‘do’ or other because convention said no one must go to bed before the royal guest. And she could stay up until dawn and often did. 

“But she was very loyal and very generous. Margaret had very close friends and, for instance, one of their sons had AIDS - Margaret not only went around to the house, but used to seek him out to give him a big hug.

“Then there were the men in her life. Men like Roddy Lewellyn – in later years she got on really well with his wife and he is still fantastically loyal to her. The same with Group Captain Peter Townsend (who she famously planned to marry at one time).”

Tim Heald in a bar in Malacca, Western Malaysia

I asked how the author had managed to track down all the details inherent in this most complex and colourful of lives. 

“I was given special privileges,” he shrugged. “I was invited to ring this bloke I’d never heard of and he turned out to be an assistant private secretary to the Queen and he said: ‘Hello, how nice to hear from you – thank you for your enquiry and as a result I’m delighted to be able to tell you Her Majesty has given you special permission to look at the archives’.

“I still don’t know how that happened,” Tim laughs. “People ask if I’m the official biographer or not – and I truthfully have to say I don’t know. 

“The archives are at Windsor – which is fantastic - absolutely stuffed with documents. It’s all there in that big round tower. I thought I’d spend a couple of days there – and they said: ‘It will take a little longer than that’. There were enormous numbers of papers and it’s taken years.” 

“I think the most telling thing anyone said to me about Margaret was when I had lunch with Lady Antonia Fraser and she provided a little photo that she’d taken on a Box-Brownie. Nobody had ever seen it before and it was of Margaret imitating a Balinese dancer. 

“Antonia said: ‘She was so beautiful - and such a show off’ – and I think that’s exactly how she probably was.”

Princess Margaret: A Life Unravelled by Tim Heald, was published by Weidenfeld on July 5 at £20.

Tim Heald with a rum punch in the Caribbean

Tim, rear left, in the rain with his wife Penny on a Caribbean river