70 Drinks a Week for 50 Years — How Was She Still Alive?

Here's what the Queen Mother drank on a typical Tuesday. At noon — always noon — a gin and Dubonnet arrived. Two parts Dubonnet, one part gin, over ice with a slice of lemon. She'd have two of those. Then champagne with lunch. Not supermarket champagne. Krug, or Veuve Clicquot. Two, sometimes three glasses. Late afternoon brought a dry martini — one of the strongest standard cocktails you can make. Wine with dinner, which was always a formal, multi-course affair. And after the plates were cleared, port. Every day. Seven days a week. For over fifty years. One man poured nearly all of it. His name was William Tallon. Everyone called him Backstairs Billy. He arrived at Clarence House in 1951, a teenager from a working-class family in Coventry, hired as a lowly steward's boy — the very bottom of the royal domestic ladder. He was seventeen years old. The Queen Mother was fifty-one, newly widowed after King George VI's death on February 6, 1952, and settling into a grief that briefly threatened to swallow her whole. Tallon would serve her for the next fifty-one years, rising from steward's boy to Page of the Backstairs, a title that sounds quaint but carried enormous practical power. The Page of the Backstairs controlled physical access to the royal employer. He decided who got through the door and who didn't. He managed the private quarters, oversaw the daily domestic rituals, and — crucially — he mixed the drinks. Every single day.