Read Backstairs Billy for Free Online

and beautifully kept scrapbooks bulged with cuttings from newspapers and magazines. The old photograph-filled Picture Post magazine was a special favourite and where some boys spent their pocketmoney on sweets and Hotspur magazine, Billy tracked down and bought every publication that included photographs of the latest royal visit.
    For Billy it didn’t matter which royal it was – he collected them all, including pictures and stories about George VI, crowned in 1937, but also Mary of Teck, the late king George V’s consort who was to die in 1953. He even collected pictures of Belgian, Spanish and Swedish royalty.
    The main focus of Billy’s attention was undoubtedly the King and Queen. He knew Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had married Albert Frederick Arthur George, the future George VI, in 1923, in Westminster Abbey. The wedding was one of the great events of that year with crowds filling Parliament Square, Whitehall and Victoria Street, but, as we have seen, no one at that time had ever imagined that Albert would become king.
    Albert was famously shy and retiring; he was a man with an intense dislike of public speaking – he had an appalling stammer – and the various high-profile duties of a monarch filled him with dread. It was the scandal of his brother Edward’s relationship with Wallis Simpson and subsequent abdication in 1936 that led to an extraordinary change in the young royal couple’s life.
    The young Billy was fascinated by this turbulent history, which was still relatively recent news when he was a young man. It was still the greatest scandal of the age.
    Meanwhile, as his tiny bedroom walls filled up with grainy black and white photographs and news stories cut from every publicationhe could lay his hands on, Billy developed what amounted almost to an obsession with the royal family. He would go as far as to fish old magazines out of dustbins to check to see if he had missed a story. In the days when Picture Post dominated magazine sales at the newsagents he made sure he secured copies that remained unsold since at that time magazines were ordered on what was called firm sale (rather than sale or return) so Billy knew that if they were not sold by the newsagent they were likely to be thrown away.
    By the time he was fifteen Billy had amassed a detailed dossier – almost a miniature library according to one contemporary – of royal lives. The dossier eventually also included stories about distant relatives of the immediate royal family – including stories about the Russian royals – and it covered a period of more than five years.
    Billy’s interest in the royals was in marked contrast to his interest in school lessons. But then he would have guessed that no amount of study at Barker’s Butts would rescue him from his fate. He needed another way out, and so he channelled his considerable intelligence into his royal collection and, by the age of eleven, he knew he wanted to work for the royal family.

    W HEN THE COMPTROLLER of the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace received a carefully written, if slightly clumsily composed letter postmarked Coventry andaddressed directly to George VI, he must have been tempted to throw it into the waste paper basket.
    The letter would have arrived in 1947 or early 1948. It explained that the writer was a huge fan of the royal family, was intelligent and hardworking, loyal, conscientious and honest. The writer explained all his good qualities and then asked if he could have a job – any job – at the palace.
    Having sent that letter the young Billy Tallon waited, desperately hoping for a positive reply. The King’s office almost certainly did reply, but it was inevitably a gentle brush off, as Billy was too young to leave school. Undaunted, Billy wrote every six months or so from then on, always politely suggesting that as soon as he was able to leave school he would like to work in the royal household.
    At school, as the time for leaving aged fifteen approached, the