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Martin Charteris 1933.
Martin Michael Charles Charteris was
born in London in 1913, and his father,
Lord Elcho, was killed in action serving
with the Gloucestershire Hussars in
1916. Educated at Eton, Charteris was
commissioned in 1933 into the King’s
Royal Rifle Corps. He later regretted not
going to university but, as he remarked,
his mother thought Sandhurst would
tidy him up, ‘and it did’. Most of his war
service was in the Middle East, including
a spell instructing at the Staff College in
Haifa, where he livened up his lessons
with ‘how to’ scenarios. One included
a scene where he played a flamboyant
Mexican general paying a surprise visit
to a brigade headquarters. He married in
Jerusalem in 1944 and, after the war, remained in Palestine as a senior intelligence officer, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and being awarded the OBE.
By 1949, Charteris was back in the UK and bored with barrack life when a friend, John ‘Jock’ Colville, private secretary to Princess Elizabeth, informed him that he was resigning and would he like the job. At first ambivalent to this new potential career, Charteris changed his mind after being dazzled by the young princess when she interviewed him. Resigning from the army, he became assistant private secretary to the Queen when she ascended the throne in 1952. Working firstly for the fearsome ‘Tommy’ Lascelles and then for the old-fashioned and rather stuffy Michael Adeane, Charteris was a breath of fresh air in the palace. Slightly dishevelled, with inevitable traces of snuff on his shirt front, he was a natural gossip, unlike the ultra-discrete Adeane.
It was Charteris who met with Lord Altrincham, in an episode highlighted in the Netflix series The Crown, and agreed that the monarchy was out of tune with the times. As a result, he told Her Majesty: ‘Your job is to spread a carpet of happiness’. He also persuaded her to allow her 1957 Christmas message to be televised and commissioned
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