BETRAYED AND BANISHED
How jealous courtiers took vicious revenge on Backstairs Billy – the Queen Mother’s flamboyant favourite servant... but did they steal his little black book of Royal secrets?
He said he knew about Diana’s affairs while she was married
William Tallon was more than just the Queen mother’s favourite servant. He rose from impoverished beginnings to become her confidant and close friend. as the first part of a remarkable new biography revealed last week, Tallon was also a predatory homosexual who breached Royal security by bringing young men back to Clarence House at night. and he made powerful enemies. Here, in the final extract of Backstairs Billy, we reveal that courtiers took their revenge by banishing him from the Queen mother’s side, shamefully disregarding her wish that he should be allowed to live at Clarence House for the rest of his life. and whatever became of his meticulous diary, the ‘black book’ of life with the Royals?
WITHIN days of Billy Tallon’s death i n November 2007, a small group of men were seen entering his flat in Kennington, South London. All Billy’s possessions were boxed up and put in storage.
There is no proof that things went missing, but the speed with which events occurred shocked his friends, one of whom said: ‘It was all very odd. Would you expect your former employer to visit your house and go through your things? We don’t know for sure, but that’s what we think happened – the Royal household had sent a team to go through Billy’s possessions before they were sold...’ BILLY TALLON would tell anyone who listened that the Queen Mother had promised him that his little gatehouse cottage at Clarence House would be his home for life.
‘I thought she had left instructions to that effect but I could hardly ask her to put it in writing to me,’ he said. ‘I suppose I was rather naive in thinking that a letter would survive if it meant everyone had to put up with me for a few more years. In some ways they were quite ruthless, you know.’
Some months after the Queen Mother’s death in March 2002, Billy received a short letter telling him that Gate Lodge had to be vacated. The deadline gave him little time, but he obediently packed his things and left. There was no leaving party, no letter of thanks, no formal goodbye. An official made sure he was out on time.
Billy didn’t find his new life easy. His 51 years of service had given him no time to learn how to live in the evenings and at weekends. For years he had organised lunches and dinners for the Queen Mother, but he had never had to make his own meals. Now his life of privilege was over: he shambled along to the shops like any other elderly single man. He began to eat irregularly and sometimes not at all. He was also shocked at the cost of a good bottle of wine. Billy had developed a taste for the finer things in life and he was suddenly cut off from them all.
But there were compensations. Billy was an amusing man with a remarkable history and he was invited to an endless series of parties, which gave him a faint glow of the life he had once enjoyed with the Queen Mother.
‘I go to these things because I find it so difficult to be on my own,’ he confessed. ‘I enjoy the parties, but would happily give them up if I could go back to my old life.’
Billy spent night after night in his local pub, The Dog House, where he would get drunk and invite all and sundry back to the flat – anything was better than being alone.
A friend recalled: ‘Billy sometimes went into terrible glooms that were alleviated only by alcohol. It was a habit he had got into at Clarence House. Alcohol restored some of his charm, his confidence and his wit. But the fact he was no longer drinking the finest wines in the finest company – as he saw it – took a lot of getting used to and he never really managed it.’
Despite being regaled as the grand old man of Royal service, his friends say that Billy became a humbler figure in exile. Power had corrupted him and he knew it. He had been beastly, he once said, to some of those who worked for him and I think he felt rather bad about it.
‘I was naive, I suppose,’ he said. ‘The household disliked me because I was too close to the Queen Mother. I remember one of the advisers saying, “Who on earth do you think you are?” I replied, “I’m a shopkeeper’s son from Coventry but I’m afraid my company is preferable to yours.” I enjoyed my little victory, but I can’t imagine he ever forgave me.’
In his most bitter moments, he recalled how, in the Queen Mother’s last months, when she was too confused to know what was going on around her, he became so frustrated by repeated refusals to let him see her that he became hysterical. He was told that if he did not calm down, the police would be called. ‘I was upset and they didn’t care,’ he said. ‘As far as the household was concerned, I was simply an ex-employee as if I’d worked in the Palace for six months washing bottles. It hurt, but the truth is some members of the Royal household enjoyed my unhappiness. It was time for their revenge. They knew the Queen Mother could no longer protect me so the knives were out. I suppose I was silly not to have known it would happen.’
Perhaps Billy, more than anyone, should have heeded the advice given to him by the Queen Mother, who told him at the beginning of their relationship: ‘Whatever you do, William, never trust anyone. Ever.’
Billy often told me he wanted to save his best stories for publication. The Royals, he explained, are very careful about what they say and do. But Billy knew their secrets. He knew, for example, or at least said he knew, that Princess Diana was having affairs while still married to Prince Charles and long before it was generally known that the marriage was in trouble. He also knew a great deal about the younger generation of Royals. Ironically, given his own lifestyle, he was scathing about the younger ones drinking and tumbling out of clubs at 2am.
A close friend of Billy’s said: ‘He was definitely writing something, which is perhaps why so many odd things happened after he died.
‘I’m sure that in the same way that someone probably destroyed the Queen Mother’s instructions that Billy should be allowed to stay on at Gate Lodge, they also destroyed whatever it was he had written about his life at Clarence House.’ When, some months after his funeral, Billy’s possessions came up for auction at a provincial sale room i n Colchester, Essex, they represented just a small part of his possessions. I know that because I visited the flat regularly. Another oddity is that not a scrap of written material survived the visit by the unidentified team of young men seen visiting his apartment, including the memoir he was thought to be writing – and especially his ‘black book’, as his diary was known.
His solicitor, who was also his executor, clearly felt a few letters and mementos were unlikely to fetch a fortune. In the event, however, it took more than ten hours to dispose of more than 700 lots that raised a total close to £500,000.
The highlight was a short, handwritten letter from the Queen Mother to Billy asking him to prepare for an outdoor lunch on a trip to Scotland. It finishes: ‘I think that I will take two small bottles of Dubonnet and gin with me this morning, in case it is needed.’ The letter went to an anonymous bidder for a £16,000.
But the assumption that these memoirs might have been especially revealing, vindictive or damaging to the Royal Family are probably wrong.
Billy felt uniquely privileged to have worked for so long in a job that he loved.
Backstairs Billy: The Life Of William Tallon, The Queen Mother’s Most Devoted Servant, by Tom Quinn, is published by Robson Press priced £20. Pre-order for £16 today at www.mailbookshop.co.uk – p&p is free for a limited time.