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Detail of photo from page 92.

“People criticize the expense of the Royal Yacht Britannia,” Lord Mountbatten once remarked. “But when the Queen arrives, no matter where it is, she brings not just a ship but part of the Court of St. James, part of Buckingham Palace with her. She comes in, this beautiful ship with its escort . . . and it is a tremendous and majestic way of arriving.”¹⁴ When he heard the media attacking the expenditure on Britannia, Prince Charles said, “It’s not a sort of private yacht. It goes with the position. It is part of the process of representing Britain abroad.” But who had the use of a yacht almost the size of a small ocean liner for a honeymoon?

Private collection

Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert II. After Prince Albert’s death, it was rarely used by Queen Victoria.

The history of royal yachts can be traced to 1660, when the Dutch East India Company presented Charles II with a fifty-foot miniature man-of-war called Mary. After the death of her consort, Queen Victoria had no use for the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert II, an old paddlewheel steamer, and it was only in 1899 that the third of the royal yachts of that name was launched. The government of the day had convinced Her Majesty that, as both the Kaiser and Czar had royal yachts, Britain could not be left behind, and a royal yacht, the larger the better, was an absolute necessity. At its completion in 1901 (delayed after design problems arising from confusion over Imperial and metric measurements), Victoria and Albert III was the largest royal yacht in the world (4,700 tonnes, 380 feet long, and with a crew of 367 officers and ratings). Besides its crew, it also took a staff of thirty personal servants for the royal family. Queen Victoria was never destined to sail in her, as she had died seven months before the launch, but the yacht would serve three future sovereigns.

Her son Edward did sail in the new yacht annually, cruising the Mediterranean every April and returning to London in May to preside over the social season, which culminated at Ascot in June. His most historic voyage was to France in 1904, when His Majesty’s diplomacy sealed the Entente Cordiale between the two nations, effectively checking Germany’s ambitions in Europe until after the King’s death. But as Prince of Wales and King, Edward was much happier and more relaxed on HMY Britannia, a racing yacht that had been built for him as Prince of Wales. The fastest in its class in the world, in 1895 alone Britannia won thirty-eight of fifty regattas she took part in, and in 1897, to the glee of the Prince, she even outraced Meteor, the yacht owned by his nephew, German Kaiser Wilhelm II, and winning the Challenger Cup. The next year, when the Kaiser’s yacht Meteor II avenged this defeat at Cowes,¹⁵ the Prince of Wales sold Britannia and concentrated on golf. But as king, he was able to have Britannia bought back and, although it had lost its racing edge, the King’s sons crewed the yacht several times, as did his grandchildren.

Private collection

The brand new Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert III, then the largest royal yacht in the world.

During the Great War, the yacht was laid up, and, although it was overhauled in the 1920s, with its one-mast gaff rig it was no longer able to win races. Re-rigged in 1926 and again in 1930, it managed win a final few, but it never attained its pre-war status as the fastest yacht in the world. Rather than have it broken up, His Majesty George V willed that, on his death, Britannia be taken out to sea and scuttled, and this occurred on July 9, 1936.

For Canada, royal visits by sea began on March 16, 1901, when Prince George and Princess Mary, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York — later King George V and Queen Mary — embarked from Portsmouth on a Royal Tour. The general intention was to thank as many of the colonies as possible for their aid in the Boer War, and specifically to open the first Parliament of the new Commonwealth of Australia. Two weeks before they left, Edward VII returned to England from a European tour on the brand new Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert III. The Duchess of York knew the yacht well, having launched her at Pembroke Yard on May 9, 1899. But it was unsuitable for a long voyage, and an Orient Line steamship, RMS Ophir, was hired for the world tour, with the Royal Navy providing the destroyer HMS St. George as an escort. Built by Napier & Son, Glasgow, in 1891, the Ophir was 6,814 gross tonnes, with twin funnels, two masts, and a twin screw, and she cruised at eighteen knots. Named appropriately from the John Masefield poem “Cargoes,” she was well-suited for the tour, as she regularly sailed between London, Suez, Melbourne, and Sydney.

The stopovers of the tour ranged from tiny naval bases like Gibraltar, Aden, and Singapore, to the major dominions of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The King was not in favour of his son undertaking such a long and arduous trip so soon after the death of his grandmother, Queen Victoria. Besides, Prince George had already been away, having served as captain of HMS Thrush in 1898. But the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was convinced that, after the Boer War, the tour was the ideal way to strengthen the bonds of Empire. As for the young couple themselves, both Prince George and Princess Mary found the separation — from their parents and from their four children, Edward, Albert, Mary, and Henry — very hard to bear. George and John were not yet born.

Besides the Duke’s three closest friends (and future equerries), the party on the Ophir included Major Derek Keppel, (the brother-in-law of Mrs. Alice Keppel, at that time the mistress of the King) and Prince Alexander of Teck. The younger brother of Princess Mary, Alexander was soon to marry Princess Alice, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and, as the Earl of Athlone, one day would be Governor General of Canada. As the King wanted a visual record of the trip, there were for the first time a number of photographers on the Ophir.

In Canada, Prince George and Princess Mary undertook a two-month visit from the east coast to the west, using a specially fitted-out rail carriage provided by the Canadian Pacific Railway. They performed the duties typical of a royal visit to Canada: watching a lacrosse match, reviewing troops, even attempting a lumberjack’s hearty meal of pork and beans outside Ottawa. As during future Royal Tours, they ensured that the accompanying press would not have any juicy tidbits to report.¹⁶ When the couple visited British Columbia and travelled from Vancouver to Victoria on October 1, they sailed on the Canadian Pacific’s latest ship, the Empress of India. The royal party returned to Vancouver on October 3, and the Duke was so impressed by the ship and its captain, O.P. Marshall, that he made him an Elder Brother of Trinity House. Through the years, many members of the British royal family favoured the Canadian Pacific’s ships for transport, but Empress of India was the first to be so honoured.

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The royal party from the Ophir. Front row (L to R): Earl of Minto, Duke of Cornwall and York, Duchess of Cornwall and York, Countess of Minto. Back row (L to R): ?, Hon. Mrs. Derek Keppel, Lady Mary Lygon, others unidentifiable. Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, October 16, 1901.

The Canadian tour was a good test for Prince George, who on his return to England was created the Prince of Wales. From October 1905 to April 1906, the Prince and Princess would visit India and Burma on the battleship HMS Renown, and in 1908, His Royal Highness returned to Canada on the battleship HMS Indomitable to celebrate the tercentenary of Quebec City. The former temporary Royal Yacht Ophir was sold by the Orient Line in 1913 and during the Great War was commissioned as an Armed Merchant Cruiser and later a hospital ship.

On wishing his son and daughter-in-law farewell in 1901, Edward VII must have recalled pleasant memories of his own tour to Canada. In 1860, as Prince of Wales, the nineteen-year-old had arrived in North America on the latest British battleship, HMS Hero, disembarking at Quebec City on August 18. The object of the tour was to rebuild the Anglo-North American transatlantic ties that had become somewhat strained during the American Civil War. His Royal Highness threw himself into this as a goodwill ambassador and visited Ottawa, the lumber town on the Ontario-Quebec border that had been chosen by his mother to be Canada’s capital, where he laid the cornerstone for its parliament buildings.¹⁷ Travelling by wood-burning locomotive, by ship, and carriage, the Prince charmed crowds from St. John, New Brunswick, to Windsor, Ontario — even breaking the royal prohibition by dining publicly. His mother had never been seen to eat in public, and the last British monarch to do so had been George IV in 1821. Edward met an ancient Laura Secord and the last surviving veterans of the war of 1812, drove in the last spike on the Victoria Bridge that connected Montreal with the South Shore of the St. Lawrence, and hunted and fished. Gifts of stuffed moose and birds were presented to him, and he was danced off his feet by Montreal matrons. The Prince went as far west as Niagara Falls, where he watched the French acrobat Charles Blondin cross the raging waters by a tightrope. His Royal Highness presented Blondin with a bag of gold coins, and when Blondin offered to take him across in a wheelbarrow, the Prince readily agreed to do so — until dissuaded by his entourage. Easily his most memorable experience on the Canadian tour was running the Chaudière timber slides on a raft during the Ottawa portion of the visit. When he returned from the tour on November 15, Queen Victoria noticed that he had become more talkative, and even the politicians who had previously depreciated his strengths agreed that the Prince of Wales had found his metier, and that henceforth, foreign visits by members of the royal family were to be encouraged.

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Prince of Wales’s visit to Canada. Shooting the rapids on the Nipigon River, Ontario, September 5-7, 1919.

Edward VII’s eldest grandson, whose full name was Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David (he was called David by his family), first went to sea as a seventeen-year-old. In August 1911, Edward served as a midshipman on the old battleship Hindustan and learned how to read flag signals, keep watch, and run a picket boat. It wasn’t that his father had planned a naval career for Edward (he was, after all, going to accede to the throne) but that, as a former naval officer himself, George V thought it would teach him some concept of duty. Writing about the experience fifty years later, the Duke of Windsor recollected the voyage from Cowes to the Firth of Forth. He got to mix with boys his age, drink a glass of port on “guest nights,” and begin smoking cigarettes. It all ended in three months when he was summoned home to the library at Sandringham and told by his father that he was going to Oxford. “If I cannot stay in the Navy,” he is supposed to have begged his father, “please let me go around the world and learn about different countries and their peoples at first hand.” In the summer of 1913, he was sent on a tour of Europe to improve his languages, and also made an officer in the Royal Navy, his commission jointly signed by his father, Winston Churchill, the young First Lord of the Admiralty, and his relative Prince Louis of Battenberg, First Sea Lord.¹⁸

Second sons in the royal family (such as both George V and Prince Albert, the Duke of York) were trained for a career in the Senior Service, the Royal Navy. It would thus be as a member of the crew of an old training ship, HMS Cumberland, that Prince Albert (Bertie to his family), the future George VI, first visited Canada in 1913. Known as Mr. Johnson by all on board, the seventeen-year-old had never even crossed the English Channel, let alone the Atlantic, and now he was stoking coal with the other middies (midshipmen), seeing exotic Tenerife, and drinking beer. With lifelong gastric problems, the Prince was never a good sailor and was plagued with seasickness throughout his life. Without his father’s authoritarian bearing and perpetually in the shadow of his older brother, Albert stammered and was remembered as too shy to meet the young ladies of Montreal. Interviews with the press terrified him even more. Harassed by North American reporters, he hired a shipmate to impersonate him. The Canadian tour was part of his education, and besides Halifax and Montreal, he visited Niagara Falls. On the way home, in Charlottetown, the Prince refereed a cricket match between the crew and the local team. HMS Cumberland would soon become a familiar sight to Canadians, since, because of the First World War, the 9,800-tonne armoured cruiser got a second lease on life, doing convoy duty between the U.K. and Canada until 1917. Three years after the Canadian visit, as a sub-lieutenant, the future George VI would take part in the Battle of Jutland on HMS Collingwood.

Even before the war had ended, Prime Minister Lloyd George had conceived the plan for a whole series of Empire tours for the heir to the throne, to strengthen relations with the peoples of the Commonwealth. His Majesty approved them, as his father had approved his own worldwide tour in 1901. But now twenty-five, the Prince of Wales had been changed by the war and the gap between his generation and that of his father’s was becoming more obvious daily.¹⁹ His first Canadian tour was devised for him. On August 5, 1919, the Prince of Wales left Portsmouth for St. John’s, Newfoundland, on the battleship HMS Renown.²⁰ He was accompanied by a retinue of twenty-two, which included friends, clerks, valets, orderlies, and two detectives from Scotland Yard. The Renown was too large for the harbour at Charlottetown, and the Prince transferred to HMS Dragon, returning to the battleship for his arrival at Quebec City on August 21. Between Vancouver and Victoria, His Royal Highness sailed on the Canadian Pacific ferry Princess Alice, and the next year, when he returned, it would be the Princess Louise.

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Prince Albert (later George VI) as a midshipman when his ship HMS Cumberland arrived in Canada in 1913.

When George V went to France in 1923, instead of taking the Victoria and Albert III, he travelled rather bizarrely on the Southern Railway Steamship Biarritz, which flew a White Ensign, a Royal Standard, and an Admiralty flag. As for the royal yacht, the King used it for short cruises, like his father, going as far as the Mediterranean Sea. An escape from the rigours of the court and press, the yacht belonged intimately to the family, its symbolism never so obvious as in the 1920s, when Queen Mary threatened to ban the Prince of Wales from it as punishment for his unorthodox social life.²¹