Dame Frances Campbell-Preston, who died last month aged 104, was one of the last witnesses to a vanished age. Not only was she the Queen Mother’s oldest surviving lady-in-waiting—she served Queen Elizabeth from 1965 until her death, in 2002. She was also the actress Joyce Grenfell’s sister-in-law, and her husband, Patrick Campbell-Preston, was in Colditz prison with the legless R.A.F. flying ace Douglas Bader.
It was in 1965 that she was suddenly asked to be a woman of the bedchamber—or a lady-in-waiting—to the Queen Mother by Sir Martin Gilliat, Patrick Campbell-Preston’s fellow prisoner of war, who became the Queen Mother’s private secretary. Frances was entirely unprepared. For her first meeting with the Queen Mother, she wore one of Joyce Grenfell’s old dresses. “At one point, I borrowed a dress out of the children’s dressing-up box,” Frances told me.
