Читать книгу King Edward VIII - Philip Ziegler - Страница 13

THE PRINCE’S HAPPINESS, ALMOST HIS SURVIVAL, ON HIS gargantuan tours depended as much as anything on the people who accompanied him. For the trip to Canada Stamfordham recommended a man who, like Thomas and Legh, was to serve him until his reign was over. Admiral Halsey – ‘the Old Salt’ as he was derisively but affectionately nicknamed – was something of a Hansell; sound, honourable, humourless, unimaginative. He was ‘the ideal Chief of Staff’, the Prince told his mother, ‘and I know we are going to be a very happy family’. Needless to say they were not; friction in such a party was almost inevitable, and became completely so when Halsey was matched by a political adviser with unspecified responsibilities, the energetic and somewhat impatient Edward Grigg. Grigg, by family background as well as predilection, was destined to devote the greater part of his life to the service of the British Empire. He was ‘a very exceptional man’, the Prince went on, ‘so clever and able and he has such splendidly broad-minded and far seeing ideas, a great imperialist …’¹ He was all that, but also assertive, suffered fools badly, and considered Halsey something of a fool. The prospects for harmony were not bright.

In a memorandum which Grigg prepared for the Colonial Secretary, Milner, he observed that the main object of the Prince’s visit was ‘to create an atmosphere. He will do this largely by natural tact and charm.’ But he would have to overcome the feeling in North America that the monarchy was no more than an ‘interesting feudal anachronism’. His speeches should emphasize his ‘appreciation of the political institutions of the Empire and of the very vital place which the Crown takes as the nodus of the whole web. That line is, I think, good for the Canadian as well as the American market.’ Lloyd George minuted dubiously: ‘There must be nothing that would look in USA like a challenge to republican institutions’; an indication of the many tightropes the Prince was going to be required to walk over the next few years as he teetered between America and Canada; Westminster and Dominion governments; federal capital and state capitals; French Canadian and Anglo-Canadian; Boer and rooinek.²

When he left Portsmouth, however, the Prince was looking not forward to such problems but backward towards Mrs Dudley Ward. At one point he had tried to persuade her to accompany him to Canada, or at least to meet him there. She had taken the possibility seriously enough to consult Piers Legh’s fiancée about it, but had wisely decided to stay behind.³ The Prince was disconsolate and only began to regain his spirits when the battle cruiser, HMS Renown, arrived at St John’s and the demands of the tour left less time for brooding.

‘No enthusiastic mob – seems a dead place on the whole,’ commented Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson gloomily. ‘Went ashore, but the only thing they seem to sell here is ice-cream.’⁴ He failed to note the Prince’s favourite feature of his arrival, the triumphal arch composed largely of drums of cod-liver oil and festooned with the carcasses of dried codfish.⁵ Nor was the Prince disturbed by the relatively meagre crowds, proudly describing his ‘rapturous reception’ to the King: ‘The fact that my first day in the Dominion was a success has given me confidence for the future.’⁶ What gave him greatest confidence was that he was performing well in public. Godfrey Thomas, who was also in the party, told the Queen, ‘I cannot describe … how well the Prince is speaking.’ The Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Bordern, had been ‘immensely struck and talked of nothing else after the St John visit’.⁷

The Prince was less struck by Sir Robert Bordern. ‘Quite pleasant, but rather a dull old stick,’ he described him to the Queen.⁸ Sometimes the Prime Minister was worse than that. When the Prince was about to make the most important speech of his Canadian visit, Bordern noted that he was nervous and distrait: ‘I endeavoured to divert his attention by recounting some amusing anecdotes, but he quite frequently consulted his notes.’ In spite of his no doubt well-intentioned sabotage, the speech, Bordern concluded, was ‘admirable in every way’.⁹

The Prince’s next important stop, Quebec, introduced him to what he had been told would prove the greatest impediment to a successful tour, the hostility between anglophone and francophone Canada. Expecting the worst, he was pleasantly surprised. ‘They are a curious people and very touchy, but they seemed quite pleased and certainly gave me a good welcome,’ he wrote of the French Canadians to the King.¹⁰

In Montreal, speaking half in French and half in English, he claimed that the union of the two races was more than a matter of political convenience, ‘it was, and will always remain, an example of the highest political wisdom’.¹¹ The French Canadians, an anonymous lady assured the King, likened the Prince to ‘L’Enfant Jésus’.¹² One may doubt whether many French Canadians spotted the similarity but the Prince went down well with a public disposed to be critical and captious.

It was Toronto which offered the most turbulent welcome. The Prince’s stay there, Thomas told the Queen, ‘were the most extraordinary days I have ever seen’. Things began relatively quietly, enthusiasm mounted by the hour, and the scenes when he drove through the city on his final day made Thomas think ‘that half the people had taken leave of their senses’.¹³ To the Prince it was overwhelming. For the first time he tasted the heady, dangerous wine of mass adulation. ‘The most wonderful days of my life,’ he described them, ‘… amazingly marvellous. People seemed to go quite mad.’¹⁴ An unidentified lady in Toronto wrote to a friend in England and at third hand her letter came to the Queen. ‘He has won all hearts, and the demonstration here was personal love for him,’ wrote the lady. She had been to hear him speak: ‘He was very boyishly shy and very pink, but the dearest, sweetest and most bewitching creature. He really looked as if he were going to cry and bit his lip, but imagine, he faced a crowd of 50,000 people, who rose of course and yelled and screamed and cheered, never was there such a greeting. He spoke beautifully and to the point and looked sweet, his lovely complexion and blue eyes are the admiration of everyone.’¹⁵

There was a physical price to pay for this glorification, beyond the exhaustion that followed a day among the crowds. He was jostled and buffeted, his right hand so bruised by constant shaking that he had to use his left. The King saw photographs of his son being mobbed and deprecated the loss of dignity. ‘It isn’t my fault,’ protested the Prince. ‘You just can’t think how enthusiastic the crowds have been, and they just go mad and one is powerless!!’¹⁶ Grigg described ‘his happy way of making crowds no less than individuals feel that he meets them half way. It is always quite obvious somehow that the huge masses of people who have thronged his movements everywhere feel that his heart goes out to them as much as theirs to him, and the effect is (I use the word literally) indescribable.’¹⁷

By the time that the Prince had visited all the main centres of the east, he was close to collapse. ‘HRH really does work very very hard,’ Halsey reported. What tired him most were visits to hospitals, ‘especially as he talks to practically every soldier who is bedridden, and his sympathy with them is so genuine that of course he finds it extremely hard to go on for any length of time’.¹⁸ Some at least of his exhaustion was brought on by his refusal to rest when he had a chance. As he grew more tired, so he would insist on staying up later and later, talking, smoking, feverishly restless. No one else could have stood the strain so wonderfully, said Thomas, ‘but he could give himself much more chance if he would only be sensible and occasionally sit down in a chair or go to bed at a normal hour’.¹⁹ The strain was not eased by interminable official banquets without even a solitary glass of wine to ease his nerves or dull the pain of other people’s orating. The Prince deplored prohibition, not just because of the personal inconvenience it caused him, but as being ‘the very worst form of class legislation’. There was plenty of liquor to be had, but only for those who were prepared to pay the exorbitant prices. ‘It’s the women’s vote which is the trouble, otherwise prohibition couldn’t last.’²⁰ On those occasions when liquor was available, things were bad in a different way. Thomas described a dinner at Calgary where he knew things were beginning to warm up when a Justice of the Supreme Court tottered to his feet and sang ‘Another little drink couldn’t do us any harm’. ‘It is a very remarkable thing now that the country has gone dry, the appalling effect of liquor on everybody when they manage to get some.’²¹

The Prince would certainly have preferred an orgy like the one in Calgary to the more formal functions of eastern Canada. He thought the Governor General, the Duke of Devonshire, though in a ‘hopelessly narrow groove’, was at least ‘a d—d good fellow and has no side’, but the Duchess was ‘hopelessly pompous … she plays the ‘Queen stunt’ far more than Mama would, and that doesn’t go down on this side’.²² The Duke gallantly did his best to be one of the boys, but found the effort uncongenial. ‘There is a good deal of regard for what is called ‘a real sport’,’ he told Stamfordham. ‘It is an odious term. After I had been to a hockey match I was described as ‘a real sport in spite of his white hair’.’²³ The Prince, he recognized, was ‘a real sport’ par excellence; he refrained from criticism but contrived to leave the impression that he felt the performance hardly becoming the heir to the throne.

It was with some relief that the battered and enervated Prince escaped from all this to the space and relative tranquillity of the west. ‘I came to Canada as a Canadian in mind and spirit,’ he declared in Calgary, ‘I am now rapidly becoming a Westerner.’²⁴ He was impressed by the immense potential of the prairies and saw the west as the ‘country of the future … It is up to the Empire and particularly to the UK to see that its population is British and not alien!!’²⁵ He told his mother that he would love to work on a ranch for a few months – ‘That’s a real life.’²⁶ Such wishes are habitually voiced by those who know there is no risk that they will become reality, but the Prince did something to forward his ambition when for £10,000 or so he bought a small ranch in Alberta. The King was doubtful about the purchase as an investment and feared too that his son would be under pressure to do the same when he visited the other Dominions.²⁷ He left it to the Prince to decide, however, and he went ahead – to the great pleasure of the Canadians. In spite of the King’s fears, there is no record of the Prince being asked to buy a farm in the Australian outback or the South African platteland.

In all his major speeches, the Prince hammered home his creed that he was not primarily a Briton and only secondarily a Canadian: ‘On the contrary, I regard myself as belonging to Great Britain and to Canada in exactly the same way.’²⁸ This was not just rhetoric reserved for public consumption. He told the Queen that the royal family must keep closely in touch with Canada and pay regular visits. ‘We belong to Canada and the other dominions just as much as we do to the UK.’²⁹ The King warned him that if he called himself a Canadian in Canada then he would have to be an Australian in Australia and a New Zealander in New Zealand. And why not? asked the Prince. ‘Of course in India there would be no question of it as I happen to have been born a white man and not a native.’³⁰

‘I do like all these Canadians so much,’ the Prince wrote after a few weeks. ‘They are charming and so kind and hospitable if one takes them the right way and if they take to you, and the latter means success or total failure.’³¹ No one can doubt that the Canadians had taken to him and that his first tour abroad had been not merely a success but a triumph. ‘It almost takes one’s breath away,’ a Canadian wrote to Grigg. ‘It is not mere loyalty to the Crown, but the expression of a deep, spontaneous affection for the young man who is heir to the oldest throne in the world … The Prince has something to offer that can come from no other human being. He symbolizes the unity of the whole Empire, and does it with the joyousness and courage that belongs to youth.’³² Even courtiers as loyal as Stamfordham admitted that George V offended by his constant carping at the Prince and decrying of his accomplishments. Sometimes the complaint was justified but on this occasion his praise could hardly have been more generous. ‘I offer you my warmest congratulations on the splendid success of your tour,’ he wrote in mid-October, ‘which is due in a great measure to your own personality and the wonderful way you have played up. It makes me very proud of you.’³³

‘When I go down to the United States next week,’ said the Prince on his way back through Toronto, ‘I shall regard myself as going there not only as … a Britisher, but also as a Canadian.’³⁴ He almost missed going in any capacity. The King had been against the visit from the start – mainly, believed the Prince, because of his anti-American views.³⁵ When the President, Woodrow Wilson, fell seriously ill, King George V at once insisted that the tour must be called off.³⁶ The Prince, supported strongly by Grigg, felt that the cancellation of the visit would give the Americans the impression that he had leapt at any excuse not to go: ‘I realize the spirit in which the American public has welcomed the proposed visit too highly not to regard any such possibility with deep dislike.’³⁷ The King held to his view, but left the matter to the government to decide, and the Foreign Secretary felt the visit should take place.³⁸ The Prince went to Washington and dutifully visited the President on his sickbed. He also managed to attend a dance or two which Grigg had arranged: ‘He holds very strongly that he can influence American feeling even better by dancing with Senators’ daughters than by talking to Senators, and I am sure he is right.’³⁹

There was still greater doubt whether the tour should be extended to New York. Godfrey Thomas felt that the risk of a hostile reception from the Irish more than outweighed any possible advantage, and the King fully shared his doubts.⁴⁰ The Prince, though, was determined to go, the American Ambassador in London supported him, and the Cabinet concluded that ‘a good deal of the magnificent results to be expected from the visit might be thrown away’ if it seemed he was avoiding contact with ‘the real American people’.⁴¹ The American press then published stories announcing that the Prince was planning to stay at notoriously opulent Newport, with the still more notoriously opulent Mrs Vanderbilt, and that lavish entertainments were being planned. The Secretary of the Interior took the rumours seriously enough to raise the matter with the British Ambassador, and the Acting Counsellor urged that the Prince should steer clear of the Newport crowd which was synonymous with ‘all that is most extravagant and frivolous in American life’.⁴² ‘There never was the faintest intention of the Prince going to Newport,’ Stamfordham reassured the Counsellor. ‘It was a pity that the American press almost exceeded itself in concocting absolutely fabulous stories of what HRH was going to do and of the different young women that were to be submitted to his choice as his future wife!! It is difficult to conceive how newspapers can give way to such vulgarity.’⁴³ The Prince nevertheless contrived to see something of New York’s young women; at least one ball was given in his honour and he never returned to the ship before two or three in the morning.⁴⁴

New York gave him the same almost hysterical welcome as he had received in Toronto. ‘It was not crowd psychology that swept him into instant popularity but the subtle something that is personality,’ wrote the New York World.⁴⁵ Whether New York’s love – traditionally fleeting – would matter in the long run, was a difficult question to answer. Edward Grey, then British Ambassador in Washington, believed it would. ‘It has done more good than any number of political speeches,’ he reported to the Foreign Office. ‘His Royal Highness has created in New York a feeling of personal affection so strong that, though it may have no direct influence on politics, it must do something to create kindly feeling in New York itself.’⁴⁶ British Ambassadors must be expected to laud the prowess of their future monarch; M. Jusserand, the French Ambassador, had no such axe to grind. ‘Son succès a été complet auprès des gens les plus divers,’ he wrote to the Quai d’Orsay, ‘les Anglais n’ont jamais rien fait qui ait pu si utilement servir à effacer les anciennes animosités.’⁴⁷ Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson was amazed when he saw the size of the crowd that assembled to see the Prince depart. ‘The Yanks seem quite enthusiastic about him,’ he wrote in his diary, a laconic understatement that did not conceal the immense pride the crew of Renown took in the Prince’s triumph.⁴⁸

The Prince was to spend only three months in England before he set off on his next, still longer, tour to Australia. He was exhausted and flat after his efforts, and distraught at the thought that he would so soon be separated again from Freda Dudley Ward. The last straw was that he found himself expected to sacrifice three weeks of this precious interval to stay with his parents at Sandringham. On Christmas Day 1919 he wrote in desperation to Godfrey Thomas:

A sort of hopelessly lost feeling has come over me and I think I’m going kind of mad!! … I’m simply not capable of even thinking, let alone make a decision or settle anything!! I’ve never felt like this in my life before, and I’m rather worried about it and feel incapable of pulling myself together … How I loathe my job now and all this press ‘puffed’ empty ‘succès’. I feel I’m through with it and long and long to die … You’ll probably think from this that I ought to be in a mad house already, tho’ this isn’t necessary yet: I’m still quite sane and very much in earnest, but I don’t know for how much longer!! Of course I’m going to make a gt effort to pull myself together, and it may only be that I never realized how brain weary I returned from the ‘Other Side’ … But my brain has gone and I can hardly think any more … What you must think of me, and you and all the staff have been and are working so desperately hard for me … How can I even try to thank you, my dear Godfrey?⁴⁹

Thomas had received many such cris du coeur in the past, but this struck him as worryingly unbalanced. He replied with a dose of robust common sense. The Prince was not destined for a mad house, but he would find himself in a nursing home if he did not change his idiotic train of life. ‘It is inconceivable to me that anyone who has got such sound, if perhaps somewhat exaggerated ideas about health from the point of view of exercise … should be so utterly insane and unreasonable about the elementary rules of health as regards other things. How you survived Canada I cannot imagine … You are highly strung and nervy to begin with. You never allowed yourself a moment’s rest the whole time. You sat up every night, often quite unnecessarily, till godless hours … You smoked far too much and you drink a great deal too much whiskey.’ Only a change of heart would ‘stop you being thoroughly bloody minded, irritable and impossible when you start for Australia (a nice prospect for your Staff) and [you] will crack up by the time you reach the Panama Canal’. He would do better if he sometimes let off steam ‘and got cross and irritable instead of pathetic’. Of course his was bound to be ‘a more or less bloody life, but give it a chance. It’s certainly a life worth fighting through, not one to chuck away.’⁵⁰

This letter, which the Prince described as ‘marvellous’, and the enforced tranquillity of Sandringham, together worked wonders. ‘I’m feeling a new and completely sane man,’ he told Thomas. ‘I promise to take things easily and not make a B F of myself any more.’⁵¹ Rest, and the attentions of those who cared for him, almost always sufficed to rescue the Prince from the blackest of his depressions. But Thomas recognized his extreme fragility and was alarmed by it; under the stresses of the Australian tour, with Freda Dudley Ward ten thousand miles away, might he not crack more seriously, perhaps even irrecoverably? It was a distant but daunting menace.

Back in London, the Prince first tried to defer the tour by three weeks on the plea that Renown could not be ready in time – an argument which the Under Secretary at the Colonial Office, Leo Amery, disposed of with alacrity⁵² – and then engaged in a wrangle with Amery and the Prime Minister over the composition of his staff. Halsey, said Amery, was incompetent to handle the most important aspects of the tour, he was ‘difficult to deal with, indifferent to political considerations and indeed incapable of appreciating them. He upset the Press badly on the Canadian tour.’⁵³ The Prince liked Halsey and had serious reservations about Grigg, whom Amery wanted to put in charge: ‘We are not in any way kindred spirits and for this reason I do not regard his presence on my staff [as being] of any value whatsoever.’⁵⁴ He argued that, since his was not a political tour, there was no need for it to be managed by an expert in politics. ‘Its consequences are of the highest political importance both to the Throne and the Empire,’ retorted Lloyd George. Grigg must have complete control over the programme and relations with the press.⁵⁵ In the end the Prince and the Prime Minister met in Downing Street, with Stamfordham, Halsey and Grigg to act as referee and seconds. ‘If you are one day to be a constitutional King,’ said Lloyd George, ‘you must first be a constitutional Prince of Wales.’⁵⁶ The Prince swallowed his medicine, but it did not make him any the more cheerful about the prospects for the tour.

One other important change was made to the staff which had accompanied him to Canada. The Prince’s young cousin, Louis Mountbatten, was added; in theory as Flag Lieutenant to Halsey, in practice as companion and confidant to the Prince. ‘Such a charming boy, and he cheers me up,’ the Prince told the Queen.⁵⁷ Cheering up the Prince was, indeed, Mountbatten’s main function. He got some idea of what was in store for him when he found his cousin in tears just before the formal departure. ‘Have you ever seen a Post Captain cry?’ the Prince asked. Mountbatten admitted that he had not. ‘Well, you’d better get used to it, you may see it again.’⁵⁸ But few except his intimates realized the strain that he was under. He dined with the Asquiths in January. ‘The Prince has excellent manners, and has come on immensely in ease and savoir faire,’ wrote his host. ‘He talked quite amusingly of his experiences in America, and I think is not sorry to be off again in March, even to so dismal a goal as Australia.’⁵⁹

And so the pompous ritual of departure was enacted once again, the Prince forlorn among the beribboned dignitaries – ‘In a little tight naval uniform which clung close to his figure he did not look above 15,’ wrote Curzon, ‘quite a pathetic little person.’⁶⁰ Mountbatten was quickly set to his principal duty. ‘Poor chap, with all these hundreds of people round him he’s as lonely and homesick as he can be and is at present HATING this trip!’ he told his mother. ‘He says he’ll cheer up later. But then he is very, very badly smitten, I think.’⁶¹ Of those aboard, only Mountbatten understood the extent of his gloom; the Prince joined in the traditional shipboard romps with good will, and gave every appearance of enjoying himself as he inadvertently flooded Halsey’s cabin with a power hose. The hose was too powerful for Grigg’s peace of mind: ‘I had visions of HRH, who does not weigh much in a state of nature, being projected into the Atlantic by a sudden jet of salt water.’⁶²

The Renown travelled by the Panama Canal, with stops in the West Indies on the way. In Barbados he found the inhabitants disturbed by rumours that some of the islands were to be sold to the United States. ‘I need hardly say that the King’s subjects are not for sale to other governments,’ the Prince reassured them loftily. ‘Their destiny as free men is in their own hands.’⁶³ At Bridgetown the Governor’s lady had prepared an immense ball of flowers which was supposed to disintegrate and shower the Prince with blossoms as he passed. Fortunately she lost her nerve and pulled the string too soon; the ball, welded into a congealed mass, fell heavily into the road and would have reduced the Prince to pulp if released at the proper time.⁶⁴

It soon became obvious that the Prince was not going to allow his pining for Mrs Dudley Ward to deprive him of all diversions. At a ball in Balboa he danced almost exclusively with a particularly pretty girl, who turned out to be the daughter of the local storekeeper – ‘and a very good thing too,’ commented Grigg, ‘but the local dignitaries felt mournful that their more patrician daughters had not been preferred.’⁶⁵ Swimming at midnight, Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson approached a raft crewed by three nubile American girls. ‘Is that you, Teddy?’ one enquired. Hutchinson denied the charge but boarded the raft nevertheless, to be joined a few minutes later by the Prince of Wales. They returned to Renown at 2 a.m. and tiptoed to the Prince’s cabin for a whisky. ‘Don’t wake the baby,’ whispered the Prince, pointing to Halsey’s adjoining cabin.⁶⁶ There was much junketing at San Diego, including a Mayoral Ball. Among those present was an American air force officer, Earl Winfield Spencer, and his wife Wallis. No doubt gatherings of this kind were enjoyed by the locals, wrote Halsey disdainfully to the King, ‘but one has to be extremely careful at these sorts of places where one meets all sorts of conditions of people’.⁶⁷

The Australian Prime Minister, William Hughes, had originally insisted that the Prince must visit Australia before New Zealand, even though the opposite would obviously have been more sensible: ‘To ask the poor Prince to imagine glorious Alpine views in a howling blizzard, and to spend days tossing about in Antarctic gales looking for noble fjords hidden in rain and mist, is really a little too much,’ wrote Amery.⁶⁸ Lloyd George agreed, and Australia was told that it would have to wait its turn. The visit to New Zealand had been envisaged as an important but relatively relaxed rehearsal for the main task ahead. The authorities of both Dominions had been told that the Prince wanted no ceremonies before 10 a.m., three half-days a week for recuperation, and at least one large public reception in every city to allow him to meet the people.⁶⁹ However, when the representatives of the two governments joined the ship at Suva it was found that they had ignored their instructions. Programmes of impossible complexity and arduousness had been prepared – ‘I do not believe any human being could go through with all that was proposed,’ wrote Halsey.⁷⁰ He and Grigg set to work and managed to cut back the Australian programme to something physically possible, but it was too late to do more than nibble at the edges of what had been planned for New Zealand. ‘I cannot understand the Governor General having passed it,’ Godfrey Thomas told the Queen, ‘unless the object was to break the Prince down and make it impossible for him to do justice to himself in Australia.’⁷¹

Lord Liverpool, the Governor General in question, was to be held responsible for almost everything that went wrong in New Zealand. ‘A pompous, interfering ass who has been dogging not only my own footsteps but also never leaves the Admiral and Grigg alone,’ the Prince described him to his father. ‘He rubs everybody up the wrong way and … is most unpopular throughout the dominion.’⁷² The Prince was habitually quick to denounce British governors, ambassadors, or others in positions of authority, but on this occasion Halsey, Grigg and Thomas all echoed his views. Liverpool could hardly be blamed for the railway strike which threatened to disrupt the visit, but even this, Grigg complained, he handled with notable incompetence, behaving ‘one minute as if the end of the world had come, the next as if there was nothing to worry about’.⁷³ The strike had been fomented by a group of Sinn Fein supporters who dominated the union executive. Fortunately for the royal party the most prominent of the Irishmen found the strain too much and suffered a nervous breakdown. Without his leadership the strike collapsed. Grigg’s preoccupation had been to keep the Prince out of the dispute, whether he were presented as taking the side of the management or the strikers. He succeeded, though the Prince could not resist one bland remark in a speech in Wellington: ‘Somehow or other the trains were not running very well last week, but mine could not have run better.’⁷⁴

In spite of the taxing programme, the tour of New Zealand went extremely well. Neither the nature of the people nor the size of the population made possible the sort of mass hysteria the Prince had witnessed in Toronto or New York, but his reception was never less than enthusiastic. He remained downcast, however. Grigg found him reading, ‘with an air of profound dejection’, an article in the Wanganui newspaper which referred to him as ‘the coping stone of Imperial federation’. ‘I never saw a coping stone in worse condition,’ Grigg commented drily.⁷⁵

New Zealand might have its striking railwaymen, but Australia traditionally possessed the most left-wing and militant working class in the British Empire. The Prime Minister had broken with most of his Labour colleagues in 1916 to form a national government, and his action had caused as much bitterness among those who felt themselves deserted as Ramsay MacDonald was to experience in Britain ten years later. The Prince had to step gingerly between these rancorous groups. But this was not the only Australian problem which required diplomatic handling. The federal and state governments were perpetually at loggerheads; the relationship between the state Governors and the Governor General was little more harmonious. The Prince found himself a particularly savoury bone of contention between the warring elements; anything he did to please one was certain to offend another. ‘One Governor suggests that the destiny of the Empire depends on HRH spending three extra days in his State,’ wrote the Governor General, Munro-Ferguson. ‘Another deprecates the Prince enjoying a kangaroo hunt … and the masterful little Prime Minister has decided views on all questions and never forgets he is the supreme authority.’⁷⁶

Any fears that the Australians might receive the Prince with less exuberance than he had found elsewhere were quickly dispelled. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how amazingly enthusiastic the Melbourne people are,’ he told his mother, ‘and they’ve kept it up ever since I landed and it’s really frightfully touching, and I do appreciate it all so much. It beats anywhere in Canada.’⁷⁷ Always it was the ex-service men who were to the fore; even when he was in the comparative safety of a car he might find himself plucked from the back seat and ‘tossed cheerfully about the streets’ by the excited ‘diggers’.⁷⁸ It was gratifying, it was exhilarating, but it was also alarming. One drive to the Town Hall, scheduled to take five minutes, lasted an hour. The folded hood was torn off the back of the car and the running boards trampled away by a crowd determined to get near its Prince.⁷⁹ To see him from close quarters was desirable, to touch him best of all; he was prodded, patted, slapped on the back, shaken by the hand, so that by the end of each day his body was covered with bruises and his hands swollen and aching. The Prince had worked like a slave, Halsey told the King, and had been totally successful. ‘On every hand I hear most wonderful things as a result, such as people who, before his arrival, refused to have anything to do with his reception or allow their children to take part in the various functions, completely coming round and being, if possible, more enthusiastic than any of the others.’⁸⁰

Such experiences were as emotionally draining as they were physically demanding. When coming on top of the endless formal banquets, receptions, parades, receiving of addresses, hospital visits, balls and relentless speechifying, it is small wonder that the Prince should have been worn out by the time he had finished at Melbourne. Things were a little easier when he left the great city centres and travelled by train thousands of miles across the Australian plains, but even there he could rarely relax for long since at every suggestion of a station scores or hundreds of locals would gather, some of them having travelled thirty or forty miles by cart to see the Prince pass. They could not be disappointed. When he occasionally failed to appear, as at Gilgandra, he was ‘counted out’ by the indignant crowd, who chanted from one to ten and ended with a resounding ‘OUT!’, a traditional Australian way of registering disapproval. On the return journey he made sure to present himself and the forgiving inhabitants counted him in again.⁸¹

He never slept well in a train and the lack of sleep added to his cumulative exhaustion. His morale was not improved when the royal train was derailed in the depths of Western Australia. The only casualties were the Prince’s doctor, who cut his leg, and the pride of the Minister of Works, who was trapped in the lavatory, but if the accident had occurred a hundred yards further on, where the embankment was steeper, it could have been far more serious. The Prince preserved admirable sang-froid; as he clambered from the wreckage he remarked cheerfully: ‘Well, anyway, at last we have done something which was not on the official programme.’⁸² But though his entourage thought that he was unscathed by the incident, he admitted to his mother that he had been badly shaken: ‘I live so much on my nerves nowadays that they get very easily upset and I just loathe a train now and have “the wind up me” the whole time!!’⁸³

Brisbane was the city the Prince most dreaded visiting, for Queensland was ‘bolshie or rather full of Sinn Feiners and the Labour premier is a hot Irish RC’.⁸⁴ In the event, not a red flag was to be seen and the crowds were as welcoming as any in Australia. The Acting Premier, who at one point had threatened to boycott the visit, became almost embarrassingly fond of his visitor and in his determination to say goodbye chartered a special aircraft to pursue the Prince to the frontier and, missing him there, continued the chase many miles into New South Wales.⁸⁵ For Grigg, the most memorable feature of the stay at Brisbane was the Shakespearean Ball, at which a gentleman dressed as Shakespeare presented a series of his characters to the Prince: ‘It was a very mixed show, and Shakespeare himself became somewhat confused at times, introducing Othello as Julius Caesar until corrected by the indignant Moor in question.’⁸⁶ It is unlikely that the Prince would have been much the wiser if Othello had been presented as Ancient Pistol or one of the witches from Macbeth.

Adelaide should have been something of a rest cure, since the programme was less onerous than elsewhere and the Governor’s wife, Lady Weigall, was a woman of common sense and great kindness as well as a close friend of Freda Dudley Ward. ‘It cheered him up no end,’ Godfrey Thomas wrote thirty years later, ‘to have found in Australia someone with whom he could talk freely about his lady-love.’⁸⁷ Lady Weigall mothered and cosseted him, at a time when he craved for such treatment; when he left Adelaide he wrote to thank her for having done so much to boost the morale of ‘a very worn out little boy, who really was beginning to think the whole show too big for him and too much to go thro with’.⁸⁸ But though the therapy was effective she undid much of the good by encouraging him to stay up every night until 3 or 4 a.m. cooking buttered eggs in her boudoir.⁸⁹ The Prince left Adelaide more cheerful but little more rested than he had been on his arrival.

As a result he teetered permanently on the edge of extreme depression. ‘I feel fit enough,’ he told Philip Sassoon in early August, ‘but mentally I’m absolutely worn out. Thank God it’s all over bar the shouting now as I really don’t think I could carry on much longer without the top of my head cracking like an egg and making a mad house my only possible [word omitted] for the remainder of my natural life.’⁹⁰ In such a state of mind, trials which normally he would have borne lightly seemed intolerably burdensome, pleasures became pains, inoffensive companions were categorized as the lowest of the low. He had hardly seen a pretty woman yet, he told Sassoon, they were ‘a hen-faced crowd and make me tired’.⁹¹ He confused cause and effect; it was because he was tired that they seemed hen-faced. Similarly, the journalists who accompanied the party were not ‘virulent scum’, ‘absolutely spoilt’ and ‘bloody rude to my staff’;⁹² they were, as he would have agreed when in sounder mind, professionals doing a difficult job with considerable competence – and on the whole giving a most favourable account of all his doings.

Certainly they were sympathetic when, in mid-July, the Prince had something close to a complete breakdown. He lost his voice, rambled off the point in speeches, appeared wan and disconsolate even to those who did not know him well. ‘Renewed sign of nerve strain … very disturbing,’ cabled The Times correspondent; ‘Use utmost influence to save Prince continuance of the terrible strain imposed by many months of public appearances,’ the Morning Post representative urged his editor. ‘Situation at any moment may become serious … He is game to the backbone, but there are limits within sight.’⁹³ His staff were at one point so alarmed that they insisted the programme be postponed by a week, allowing the Prince a chance to recuperate.

Such messages, suspiciously similar in phrasing, may have been inspired as part of an orchestrated campaign to change the dates of the Prince’s next tour abroad. One of the most pressing causes of his gloom was the knowledge that he would hardly be back in Britain again before he had to set out on an even longer tour of India and Japan. His separation from Freda Dudley Ward would have lasted nearly a year. Even before he left for Australia he had suggested to Lloyd George that Prince Albert should replace him on the Indian tour. The King was displeased when he heard that the matter had been discussed in Downing Street before his son had raised it with him; Frances Stevenson noted with some amusement that he treated Lloyd George coldly at the station when the Prince departed.⁹⁴ The Prince was mainly alarmed lest he be ‘unconsciously drawn into a conflict between “monarch and premier”. Of course that’s the last thing I want as it w’d probably end in a row between father and son.’⁹⁵ The question was temporarily dropped.

When reports began to come in of the strain the Prince was under, the King was unsympathetic. ‘Papa naturally said it was all your fault doing too much,’ wrote Prince Albert, or as he had recently become, the Duke of York, ‘but he doesn’t understand how difficult things are now.’⁹⁶ Grigg and Halsey also argued the perils of sticking to the original schedule – ‘The Prince … is only a human being and not a machine,’ wrote Halsey, ‘and he cannot continue at high pitch indefinitely.’⁹⁷ The King began to feel alarm. From Adelaide Weigall wrote to say that the Prince was ‘weary in mind and body’. Milner saw the letter and told Lloyd George that he had not mentioned it at court ‘because I happen to know that the King is very touchy about the Prince’s possibly not going to India’. His own view was that unless the Prince were given a decent rest at home before his next tour, ‘we shall have a disaster’.⁹⁸ Lloyd George braved the wrath of the King and found that his opposition had already crumbled. At the end of July, to his immense relief, the Prince was told that his visit to India was postponed until the autumn of 1921.

The King made it plain he expected a quid pro quo. In the period between the tours the Prince should lead a ‘strictly normal life’, rest, more food, more sleep, less exercise; otherwise ‘you will give cause to numbers of people who are disappointed, to say that the plea of health is not genuine’.⁹⁹ To this not unreasonable condition the Prince responded with an indignation which showed how overwrought he must have been. ‘The lecture you gave me in your last letter made me rather sad,’ he told his father. His health was perfectly good, the strain was only mental. ‘You may find it very difficult to see my point of view, perhaps you never will, but such is my case.’ What he needed was a normal life, but not the normality that the King envisaged; his life must include much sport and exercise, ‘and after a month or two lots of work, which every man should have!!’¹⁰⁰ To Philip Sassoon he ranted about his father’s ‘foul’ letter. ‘It’s odd how inhuman a lot of people (and big people) are, and I haven’t much use for them.’ The King was determined to treat him like an invalid but ‘You know just as well as I do that invalids don’t go down with the British public, there’s no room for them nowadays so forget them!! Nobody is going to make me play the invalid!!’¹⁰¹

The Prince reacted with the same intemperance to relatively mild rebukes from home. The King deplored a photograph of his son and Mountbatten in a swimming pool – ‘You might as well be photographed naked, no doubt it would please the public.’ He objected to the wearing of a turned-down collar in white uniform with a black tie, ‘anything more unsmart I never saw’.¹⁰² ‘His father’s letters might be the letters of a Director of some business to his Assistant,’ commented Mountbatten.¹⁰³ The remark was not wholly unjustified, George V did find it hard to communicate affection. But the affection was there, and the Prince must have known it was. Nor did the letters contain only criticism. Three weeks before Mountbatten made his comment, the King had written to say how the Queen and he rejoiced ‘at the splendid success of your tour and the way in which you have won all hearts by your hard work and your own personality. I must say we are very proud of you. You are doing untold good for the Empire.’¹⁰⁴

Not everything went to plan on the tour, nor was the Prince’s behaviour always impeccable. He caused offence to several ladies of eminence by preferring to dance with the prettier of the – evidently not so hen-faced – Australian girls. He upset one family who had taken endless pains to prepare for his reception by brusquely cancelling a visit at the last moment on the flimsy pretext that the roads were impassable.¹⁰⁵ He sometimes looked bored at the stuffier public performances or snapped angrily at slow or incompetent servants. But these were minor blemishes on an otherwise almost flawless performance. The visit had been a tumultuous success.

There had been moments when his staff had doubted whether he could carry it through. Grigg told Lord Cromer what an immense relief it was to have reached the end of the Australian programme: ‘HRH has done splendidly from first to last, though working hard against the collar for the better part of the time.’¹⁰⁶ Any minor complaints were forgotten in the paean of praise that greeted the accomplishment of his mission. More important than the views of his own staff were the feelings of the Australians. Billy Hughes, the Prime Minister, had been determined not to be impressed by any mere princeling. The fact that the princeling was English was an additional reason for suspicion. Yet he had succumbed totally to his visitor’s charm and simplicity. His valedictory letter to the Prince of Wales might be ascribed to politeness, if almost on the same day he had not spoken to Grigg ‘most touchingly of the Prince’.¹⁰⁷ There is no reason to doubt that he meant what he wrote:

When you first came amongst us we welcomed you as a Prince who is one day to be our King; but we part from you as a dear friend who has won our affections and whom we love. Your visit has provoked demonstrations that in their spontaneous enthusiasm are unique in our history.

The Australian people see in you all that our glorious Empire stands for, that deathless spirit of liberty, of progress, that distinguishes it from all other Empires, ancient or modern …

Come back to us, Prince, as soon and as often as you can.¹⁰⁸