Despite the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret's "Thirsty" Lifestyles, Two of Queen Elizabeth's Children Don't Drink at All, Per Royal Author
Author Robert Hardman shares that a surprising member of the Royal Family does not drink alcohol.
Mocktails are all the rage right now, and Princess Kate recently admitted that she doesn't drink much these days. But decades ago, it wasn’t as common to abstain from alcohol, especially within Britain. Queen Elizabeth enjoyed a gin and Dubonnet as part of her daily routine at Buckingham Palace, but her alcohol consumption came nothing close to the Queen Mother’s. Princess Margaret also was fond of a drink, but according to royal biographer Robert Hardman, Queen Elizabeth and her children didn’t follow their family members’ influence.
Describing her “tastes in both food and drink” as “unexotic,” Hardman wrote in his new biography of Queen Elizabeth that her “consumption” of everything was “careful” as compared to her sister, Margaret, and the Queen Mother.
“Her mother and sister were both famously thirsty,” Hardman wrote in Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. Her Story. He describes a 1988 luncheon when diarist Victor Stock witnessed the Queen Mother working “her way through two glasses of gin and Dubonnet, followed by champagne, white wine and claret before being offered a closing glass of Chateau d’Yquem.”
The Queen Mother was a devoted gin and Dubonnet fan.
Princess Margaret was "famously thirsty," per Hardman.
In reply, the Queen Mother, who lived to the age of 101, exclaimed, “Oh no, I really couldn’t drink any more. I’ll just have a glass of champagne.” Hardman noted that Queen Elizabeth “would have stopped after the first or possibly second gin and Dubonnet” and she and Prince Philip passed their “steely self-restraint” on to their children.
Per Hardman, King Charles, Princess Anne, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Prince Edward “eat sparingly while the middle two are also teetotal.”
Neither Andrew nor Anne drink alcohol, per Hardman.
It’s not surprising that no-nonsense Princess Anne prefers to keep her wits about her, but it might come as a shock that Andrew doesn’t partake in alcohol. According to one of Hardman's sources, the former Duke of York said, “I tasted it once when I was a teenager, and I didn’t like it.”
Instead, he will only drink “room-temperature water,” with the source noting that Queen Elizabeth “would always worry about him” because Andrew “was a seven-year-old who never grew up.”
