Lady Penn, loyal friend of Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret and lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother – obituary
Lady Penn, who has died aged 97, was a close friend of the late Queen and Princess Margaret, and a former lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother; she was the widow of Sir Eric Penn, one time Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, and thus lived at the very heart of Palace life for more than 70 years.
Prue Penn’s life mirrored the Queen’s to a considerable degree. They were born 12 weeks apart, married in the same year, had their children more or less at the same time and both had nine great-grandchildren.
The Penns served the sovereign for 65 years. Eric Penn’s uncle Arthur had been a groom-in-waiting to King George VI on his accession in 1936 and then private secretary and treasurer to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother; Eric Penn joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Office in 1960. Their son David was a page of honour to the Queen, as was their grandson, Rory Penn. Lady Penn became a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother in 1994 and served until her death.
She was born Prudence Hilary Wilson on January 12 1926 in Australia, taking the name Stewart-Wilson in 1937. Her father was Aubyn Wilson, of Westerlee, St Andrews, Fife, and her mother Muriel, later Mrs Stewart-Stevens, was the 10th Lady of Balnakeilly, Perthshire, from a Scottish family tracing their lineage back to Neil Stewart, of Foss House on Loch Tummel, Perthshire, in 1559.
Prue had two brothers, Colonel Ralph Stewart-Wilson, MC, and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Blair Stewart-Wilson, Deputy Master of the Household to the Queen. By her mother’s second marriage, she acquired a step-brother, the fashionable newspaper and magazine man, Jocelyn Stevens.
Her father’s family, the Wilsons, were originally from Co Antrim. (Sir) Samuel (1832-95) went out to Australia and made a fortune in the goldfields, he and his brothers purchasing stations in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. Later he returned to England and became MP for Portsmouth.
Prue had another relation called Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Wilson (1865-1914), who, when he was at Eton in 1882, leapt on a man who was threatening to shoot Queen Victoria as she got into her coach at Windsor Station en route for the Castle.
The Queen sent for him the next day to thank him and asked what she could do for him. He said he wanted to join the Household Cavalry after leaving school. She arranged it, and he ended up commanding the Blues. His wife, the famous Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill, was – like her nephew, Winston – a war correspondent in the Boer War, and succeeded in terrifying the Boers.
Prue was living in Scotland when war broke out in 1939. As the family walked to church, the children in kilts, she remembered her mother saying: “Well at least our children are too young to fight.” Two years later, however, Prue’s elder brother was fighting with the Rifle Brigade in North Africa. She was removed from her Dorset boarding school and educated by a governess with the children of four other Perthshire families. Her last year at school was spent at Woodleys, in Oxfordshire.
There she learnt typing and shorthand, which secured her a job at the Foreign Office. This turned out to be MI6, working in an office in Ryder Street with Kim Philby, later exposed as a spy. One summer weekend, she and Philby made a home movie together; sadly it does not survive.
During the war Prue and her friends went to restaurants, but they were used to being shuffled into air raid shelters. She would hear the V-1 “Doodlebug” flying bombs and wait for the explosion. One Sunday morning she was eating a sandwich in St James’s Park when a soldier in a Jeep told her to go no further. The Guards Chapel had been bombed. Many friends were killed.
One night she went to the 400 Club with a young Grenadier. At the end of the evening she said goodbye to him at Liverpool Street station; two weeks later he was killed when his tank crossed the Nijmegen Bridge with the Guards Armoured Division.
She met Eric Penn, another Grenadier Guards officer, at a dance in 1946, at which she wore a dress she had made herself from curtain material. He had been adopted and raised by his bachelor uncle, Sir Arthur Penn, a close friend to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Eric Penn was therefore already a friend of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret and thus Prue came into the world of the Royal family.
One evening after the theatre, she sat next to George VI. She was terrified, but he soon put her at ease by listening intently to her wartime experiences. Her early introduction to royal life sometimes created hazards. She once dropped a deep curtsy to Mabell, Countess of Airlie, at a wedding reception in St James’s Palace, under the misapprehension that she was Queen Mary, an easy mistake to make.
Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) and Princess Elizabeth attended the Penns’ wedding at St Mark’s, North Audley Street, on January 27 1947. Rationing was still in place. Her wedding dress was made from family lace and the bridesmaids’ dresses from what she called “nasty champagne-coloured rayon” curtain material. The reception was held at the Dorchester, after which the Penns set up home at Sternfield House, Saxmundham, Suffolk.
A young woman of great allure, Prue Penn was soon taking a full part in the social life of London, sitting on numerous charity committees, including supporting a ball in aid of the Sunshine Fund for Blind Babies and Children, at which Gertrude Lawrence auctioned various gifts.
In those days it was normal that a Grenadier Guards officer would not think of his young wife taking a job. Instead she worked in a voluntary capacity in the world of music which she loved. She was close to Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Sir Frederick Ashton and Raymond Leppard.
Sitting on a care committee for a church school in Camberwell, part of the Trinity College Cambridge Mission, she looked after the welfare of the children, making home visits, sitting in on their medicals and, if a child came to school without shoes, investigating why.
In 1960, Eric Penn joined the Royal Household as Assistant Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office under Sir Norman Gwatkin. He was Comptroller from 1964 until he retired in 1981, and those were the days when the people in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office paid meticulous attention to small details and got them right. They could also be forbidding and austere to outsiders.
When in London, the Penns lived in an apartment at St James’s Palace, and in 1964 Prue was one of the godmothers to Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, daughter of Princess Margaret, when she was christened in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace.
Sir Eric gave her the number plate PRU 365 because he loved her every day of the year. In 1993, aged 77, he died. As a new widow, Prue asked the Queen Mother: “Does it get better?” To which the Queen Mother replied: “No, it never gets better. But you get better at it.”
Lady Penn’s proximity to the Royal family made her privy to many royal secrets. These she guarded zealously, though some slipped out to her annoyance in places like the diaries of Kenneth Rose, the biographer and celebrated Telegraph columnist.
From time to time she appeared in royal documentaries, not always to her liking, though she spoke well in them, and was a considerable help when the more reliable biographers consulted her.
She lived close at hand through the many vicissitudes of the life of Princess Margaret. Prince Charles confided to her his concerns at marrying Lady Diana Spencer, while more happily she loved to watch him with the Queen Mother, noting that when he came to lunch at Clarence House, he would kiss her hand and then all up her arm, saying: “Your gracious Majesty, such an honour…”, a greeting mutually enjoyed.
She was a natural choice to be appointed a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother in 1994, soon after Sir Eric died. One of her jobs was to read the more or less illegible letters that Kenneth Rose sent on the anniversary of the Queen Mother’s marriage. The Queen Mother was not taken in: “Poor old Kenneth so longs for a knighthood. I must see if we couldn’t perhaps swing a Victorian Order.” The matter was dropped.
Sometimes Lady Penn despaired of the young equerries. In 1997 one equerry said he was making a study of art. She told him that Clarence House had a room full of Pipers. “Scots Guards pipers?” he asked. And when she told him that the Queen Mother was to visit some almshouses, he asked: “What sort of arms do they make there?”
The Queen and Prince Philip sometimes stayed the weekend in Suffolk. The Queen, Prince Philip, the Princess Royal and Princess Alexandra attended her 90th birthday party at Bellamy’s in 2016. She remained close to the Queen, even talking to her on the telephone 10 days before the monarch died.
Lady Penn was a great admirer of the present King, confiding to a friend on his Accession: “Have you noticed how our new Sovereign seems to have grown in stature overnight? He looks every inch a king. I am devoted to him and know that he will take on the mantle with sensitivity, wisdom, and strength.”
She was appointed LVO in the 2002 demise honours list. An enthusiastic adopter of email in her later life, she called herself “a techno-granny”.
Lady Penn is survived by her two sons and a daughter.
Lady Penn, born January 12 1926, died November 20 2023
