Young Queen Elizabeth’s drawings appear on charming Christmas cards sent to her governess

A charming collection of hand-drawn Christmas cards from the young Queen Elizabeth II has been put up for sale for £12,000.

Princess Elizabeth created the festive correspondence throughout the 1930s from the age of six.

She gave them to her and Princess Margaret’s Scottish-born children’s teacher Marion Crawford, who they affectionately called ‘Crawfie’.

One card has Elisabeth’s drawing of a Christmas tree on the front, a horseshoe on the inside and the inscription ‘For Crawfie, from Lilibet’.

It is one of many cards with horse artwork, demonstrating her early love of animals.

Another card shows an idyllic snow-covered rural village, and another shows a young woman holding a Christmas pudding.

Elizabeth drew some cards and neatly colored others.

The collection of maps and photographs, split into 17 lots, was bequeathed by Crawford to her lawyer in Aberdeen after her death.

Four decades later they went under the hammer at the London auction house Spink & Son.

A spokesperson for Spink and Son said: ‘The cards show the close, trusting and intimate relationship between the princesses and their governess, who nicknamed her ‘Crawfie’.

“There were very few original items written by them to her on the collector’s market until these cards appeared.”

Crawford served in the royal household from 1932 to 1947. But she reportedly fell out of favor with the Royals after releasing the book ‘The Little Princesses’ in 1950, which told the story of her time with the Royals.

Neither the Queen nor any other member of the royal family would have spoken to her again. She died in 1988 at the age of 78 in Aberdeen.

When she died a lonely widow, neither the Queen, the Queen Mother, nor Princess Margaret sent a wreath to her funeral.

Yet Crawfie held a unique position in the lives of the three women for seventeen years.

It was this artless Scottish girl who guided the young princesses through the trauma of their uncle’s abdication, their father’s accession to the throne and the horrors of the Second World War as she took refuge with them in the dungeons of Windsor Castle as the bombers of the Luftwaffe roared overhead. .

She was there when Elizabeth met Philip at Dartmouth Naval College and was one of the very first visitors when the princess gave birth to Prince Charles, whom she described at four days old as “healthy and strong, and beautifully made, with a flawless, silky glow ‘. skin’.

But at the end of her service, the royal family interrupted her. She committed the unpardonable sin of writing a memoir – a memoir, it must be said, of such syrupy affection and sweetness that it borders on the sycophantic.

But Crawfie was never forgiven for her book and for generations ‘doing a Crawfie’ became a royal shorthand for an indiscretion or a peddle.

After her death in 1988, it was reported that she left her collection of memories of those years of royal duty to the Queen; she had always refused to sell them.

This treasure trove is said to contain photographs of the princesses in the royal nursery, birthday and Christmas cards from both girls, as well as letters from the then Queen.

But we can reveal that she hasn’t renounced everything. In her will, she left the contents of her detached home to the family of her lawyer, George Smith, whose wife and three children visited her regularly after she moved to a nursing home.

Among the fragments of her life found by the Smiths was a box containing a number of handmade Christmas cards, lovingly written by Elizabeth and Margaret to the teacher they adored, along with some more formal greeting cards.

Now this remarkable correspondence, which says so much about the intimacy that connected the stepdaughter of a sanitary engineer with her royal charges, will be sold by the London auctioneer Spink. The sale will take place on Thursday, October 26.