Antony Armstrong-Jones: The double life of Lord Snowdon

‘The least interesting thing about him is that he was married into the royal family’.

Princess Margaret and fiance Antony Armstrong-Jones in the grounds of the Royal Lodge, Windsor after announcing their engagement on February 27, 1960. Photo: Getty Images.

The discreetly elegant Kensington house sits back from the quiet road with its set of dozing speed bumps. It could be the immodest second home of a French hedge fund manager or the pay-off for an oligarch’s mistress. The sign on the door says: “Ring the bell in the basement”. It clangs like a retired fire engine. The door opens to ­reveal a dark little hall with a cheery lady doing the ironing.

This is not how the readers of Majesty magazine will imagine royalty living. But then Tony Snowdon isn’t royalty; he’s more important than that. We are let in by his daughter Frances. “Did he ever take your picture in the studio? Well, come and have a look.”

It’s a small suburban conservatory lean-to with a white wall and a lot of natural light. There’s a pile of records in the middle with Barbra Streisand smiling up from the top. “We had a party here,” she says, by way of explanation. At the back there’s a desk and a pinboard with photographs of his children and a smattering of homely clutter — the Book of Common Prayer, a guide to English table glass.

Next door there are the chairs Snowdon designed for the Prince of Wales’s investiture: simple, ­elegant, utilitarian, especially ­unEnglish, unstuffy, unposh, a brilliant, intense coral red. “I think it’s called Snowdon red,” says Frances. What, like Matisse blue? Or Barry White?

Down the corridor is the darkroom, now unused, the smell of fixative and developer gone, the red light extinguished. There is a flash of sadness in a bright darkroom. On a shelf is a stack of ledgers, the studio daybooks, a photographer’s version of a diary or a sketchbook, Polaroids of subjects, with an assistant’s annotation of times, stocks, exposures, addresses, phone numbers, agents.

They are an insight into a snapper’s technique. You instantly know these are Snowdon’s photographs — they have a distinctive look. He is, unusually for his generation, nationality and culture, a sympathetic and subtle photographer of men.

Snowdon sits at a little desk ­beside the window in a small, cosy, green breakfast room. I remember coming here to pick him up when we first worked together. He has been associated with The Sunday Times Magazine since its inception in the early 60s. Mark Boxer, the magazine’s first editor, made him artistic adviser and he went on to produce incisive reportage features that reflected his own interests. He was always much more than a portrait photographer.

I’d been warned that he could be prickly, mercurial, bloody difficult. I’d begun by asking him what he’d like me to call him. “Oh, Tony,” he smiled, as if the inquiry were unnecessary. “And how would you like me to introduce you?” “Ah, we might fudge that.” His smile became foxy. He could switch in an instant from Tony to Lord Snowdon, never for self-­aggrandising reasons or for a better table, but if Snowdon could get him the access for a better shoot, then he would appear.

If Tony was more congenial and put his subject at ease, then that was who you’d meet. It’s trite, but not wholly untrue, to say a great deal of Antony Armstrong-Jones’s life came out of the skilful double act of Tony and Snowdon, a mutual ventriloquism where one of them, and then the other, played the dummy.

He looks good, handsome, not just for his age, but any age. His hereditary bone structure and ­determined follicles have taken him from being a deb’s delight to a dowager’s delight. He is trim and neat: Turnbull and Asser shirt, striped tie, jacket, accessorised with chunky signet rings and a square watch. He looks up and grins. “How nice of you to come.” He has that conspiratorial, inclusive, wide-mouth smile that he shares sparingly.

“Drink?” It’s 11am and he’s on his first Bloody Mary. “No, I’m fine, thanks.” The answer doesn’t register. “Drink?” “I’ll have what you’re having.” Frances produces two prearranged Virgin Marys. On the table is the first copy of Snowdon: A Life in View, a big, beautifully produced collection of his work, with essays from ­people he has collaborated with over the years. I expect Rizzoli, the publisher, would call it a coffee table book but I doubt Snowdon has anything as gauche as a coffee table.

There’s a priceless snap of Princess Margaret in the bath wearing an elaborate tiara. It’s a rather ­ordinary bath, with a sponge and a non-slip mat. She smiles happily at the camera. “Nice picture of my foot,” says Tony. There, reflected in the mirror, is his naked foot, missing its lace-up suede boot. The portrait is a nod to the heraldic ­elephant in the room, but he has done so much more than be merely an accessory to the aristocracy.

“When he married, Cecil Beaton thanked Princess Margaret for removing his primary competitor,” says Frances. Tony waits a beat, then adds: “But she didn’t.” And anyway, Beaton was flattering himself. Tony Armstrong-Jones wasn’t competition; he was the future.

His early book on London was a collection of amused, observant reportage, views of the capital growing out of the dusty and ­decrepit city of the war into something new that wasn’t quite sure what it would be. Here is a lunchtime stripper in an East End pub, juxtaposed with Crufts dog show.

The crowds watching trooping the colour with mirrors on sticks, so their backs are to the Establishment. Nannies in the park pushing Peter Pan prams, and Cartier with its rubbish bins outside, an unambiguous comment on class and cash. “That’s all the waste diamonds in there,” he smiles.

The army of portraits includes one of the best taken of Laurence Olivier, as the comedian in John Osborne’s play The Entertainer. Olivier as an actor would become Zelig and disappear in front of cameras, but here his dazzling, mercurial power fizzes from the image. There is a lot of mannered and arch 1960s fashion photog­raphy. “Are you interested in fashion?” I ask. “No.” Though it didn’t stop him coming up with his own line of ski clothes. He looks at the rather impractical but elegant pictures. “Didn’t sell a single one.”

Tony got his interest in design from his uncle Oliver Messel, a flamboyant theatre designer who designed Princess Margaret’s house on Mustique. Messel’s style was highly ornate, mixing rococo with fairytale fantasy; Snowdon’s sensibilities were very different: practical, elegant, functional and modern. There is nothing extra­neous or humorous, no toying with fantasy, no extravagance or luxury. Snowdon made things where form rigorously served function.

He contracted polio as a child when every classroom in the country had a small inmate wearing medieval callipers. Most people would never notice but today he finds moving about testing. All his life he’s been an advocate for the disabled, getting the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables in Putney to change its dismal, pessimistic name to the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability.

Once, finding a woman in a wheelchair strapped into the guard’s van of a British Rail train (the only place for wheelchairs was with the livestock and the luggage), he arranged to interview the snobbish Sir Robert Reid, who was in charge. Reid thought he was going to talk about railway design with royalty. It is still a marvellous journalistic trainwreck of the best sort: Reid is left puffing, nursing his injured dignity; Snowdon’s anger on behalf of the disabled is cold and implacable.

Snowdon turns the page and there is a panorama of the Prince of Wales in his investiture at Caernarfon Castle in 1969. This was a huge national event for a country that had had few celebrations. It was all televised with pomp and circumstance, the equivalent of the Olympics opening ceremony, except that the Queen arrived without a parachute.

Snowdon was in charge of it all: he designed the lot, from the red chairs to Charles’s new crown; it was all modern, unlike any of the gothic, Victorian, sentimental trumpery that royal occasions usually came with. “It was marvellous, wasn’t it?” Yes, it was.

It was also an opportunity for the new generation of the royal family to be the first in 200 years to have its own elan and style, and a contemporary relevance to its citizens.

But Charles baulked at the ­opportunity and reverted to the comforting nostalgia of crafty ­ruralism. There is the famous picture Snowdon took of the Prince of Wales with Diana and their two boys and the pony.

“I hate this picture,” Frances says. Snowdon touches Diana’s face. “She was wonderful. She had no idea what to do with a horse, of course.”

There is a photograph of Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, one of the few unequivocally romantic pictures in the book. Tony unbuttons his shirt and pulls out a gold charm on a chain round his neck. It is an elegant bird, an eagle with spread wings. “This is pre-Columbian,” he says. “It was given to Princess Margaret by Margot.” Frances gives him a gimlet look and quietly corrects him. “I think she gave it to you? You’ve never, ever, taken it off.”

Snowdon worked as a photojournalist, not least for The Sunday Times Magazine. His immensely sympathetic eye was often a surprise to people who knew only his waspish tongue. He observed with a warm detachment the frailty, hope and pity of people.

In 1966, Snowdon did a piece on loneliness. He photographed an old man who followed the tide on Brighton beach. It turned out he’d been photographed by both Cartier-Bresson and Bill Brandt, a remarkable coincidence. Both of them had snapped him from ­behind, looking out to sea. Snowdon showed us his face, and act­ually spoke to him. “I realised he was a deaf mute. I spoke to him in deaf and dumb language I’d learnt at school. He said he’d lived in a bedsit and no one had spoken to him in 20 years.”

Some years ago he and I did a story on old age. He caught a ­moment, an old lady with dementia dancing with one of her carers. I don’t think I even noticed but Snowdon did.

During the 1960s and 70s he made television documentaries that won hatfuls of awards, but they are not what he is remembered for. What he did best was portrait photography. Pure, strong, uncluttered images were taken like someone gently tickling trout, waiting for the object of his attention to offer something intimate or telling about themselves. You can see some have been snapped by Tony and some by Snowdon. All have the same coolness that chooses the shutter ­moment with an unblinking lizard eye.

We stop at a photograph of ­Anthony Blunt, the treacherous spy who was also surveyor of the Queen’s pictures and an arch-member of the haute Establishment. The image has Blunt holding up a slide — the light projects the picture on to his eye. It is a strikingly theatrical photo of a man living a double life. “It was just luck,” says Snowdon. “I took it ­before anyone knew he was a spy.” But there is no luck in photog­raphy; it is all timing, observation, experience and cunning.

Snowdon too lived, not a double life, but perhaps parallel lives. The coolness, the manners, the archness that made him such a clever portraitist were also a protection against the Establishment, a life he could have been swallowed up by.

The detachment allowed Snowdon to be other things, so that now he is 84, the least interesting thing about him is that he was married into the royal family.

We get to the end of the book. “What am I doing next?” he asks. “You’re having lunch,” Frances says. “Where?” “In Maggie Jones’s” — a restaurant next to Kensington Palace, where he once lived.

“Oh, good. I like it there,” he says, and turns to me. “You remember why it’s called Maggie Jones’s, don’t you?” “After your wife.” “And me!” he adds with faux hurt. “Is there anything else about your life you’d like to add?” I ask him. “F — k all,” he grins.

The Sunday Times