Princess Margaret was well-known for her glamorous lifestyle—who could forget the photograph of her in the bathtub, wearing the Poltimore tiara? She was known to languish in bed until midday and then attend a formal lunch with the Queen Mother at Buckingham Palace. While her reputation as a glamour girl continues decades after her death, her close friend and former lady-in-waiting Lady Anne Glenconner revealed she was a “wonderful friend” with a remarkably down-to-earth hobby.
Ahead of her new book, Trunks & Tiaras: Journeys Through Life with Friends, Family and a Princess, Lady Glenconner revealed to Hello that Princess Margaret was not who everyone thought she was. “I really loved her and she was a wonderful friend to me,” she told Hello. “People said she was spoiled and difficult—I never found that. I just used to be amused,” Lady Glenconner said, before adding that “what people forget was that when she was young, her father was emperor of half the world, so her family was terribly grand.”
Away from the glitz and glamour of palace life, Princess Margaret could relax around Lady Glenconner. Whether she was visiting the Glenconner family’s Norfolk home or vacationing on Mustique—Lady Glenconner and her husband own the infamous island—Princess Margaret was allowed to be herself, and indulge in an unexpected hobby. “She loved cleaning my car and she had a huge pair of yellow Marigold gloves,” Lady Glenconner revealed.
The iconic yellow cleaning gloves, known as Marigolds in the U.K., are a far cry from Princess Margaret’s silk gloves that she wore with ballgowns and tiaras. “I had a chandelier and to my horror, she managed to get that down. I don't know how she did it,” Glenconner remembered. “She started taking off bits, and I said: ‘Well, ma'am, how do you know how to put it together again?’ and she was a bit taken aback, because she'd rather forgotten about that.”
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