The vast estates of the Duchy of Cornwall in London and the West Country gave him a chance to do something practical to help the unemployed and the homeless. He invested a large amount of money in new machinery for the Cornish tin mines, set up a farming concern run on cooperative lines and planted 250 acres of forest on the eastern side of Dartmoor. In London he regularly visited his estates in Kennington and the areas of the borough which he owned were conspicuously better furnished with houses than the parts for which the Council was responsible. At a public meeting the Mayor tried to blame his Council’s shortcomings on the policies of the Duchy. ‘Thereupon the whole Labour party who were in the hall rose and practically hissed the Mayor off the platform.’ The socialist leader in the borough later told Sydney Greville that the Prince, after the interview which he had given them, could do anything he liked with the Labour Party.29
His public life directly after the war was not restricted to the University of Wales, the Royal College of Music and the other pressing calls on his time that Stamfordham had enumerated. ‘Other men might be chained to their desks,’ he wrote wryly in his memoirs. ‘I was metaphorically chained to the banquet table.’30 A typical day in July 1919 saw him receiving Indian army and navy officers, attending a meeting of the Duchy Council, visiting the Australian YMCA, spending the evening at the Royal College of Music, moving on to a boxing display and ending up at the Embassy night club. In March he was initiated by the Duke of Connaught into the Household Brigade Lodge of the Freemasons. For once it seemed he might be spared a speech, since replies to toasts were traditionally limited to five words, ‘Worshipful Master, I thank you,’ but the rule was waived for the heir to the throne and the Prince had to hold forth about his ‘ardent desire to do his utmost to promote the principles of duty, loyalty and benevolence, on which Freemasonry rested’.31 Closer to his heart was his appointment the following year to be Honorary Colonel of the newly formed Welsh Guards. For one who was often to claim that this was the office which meant more to him than any other, his initial reaction was, however, hardly ecstatic. ‘Of course it is inevitable and is only right I suppose and I more than appreciate the honour etc. etc.!!’ he wrote to a friend. ‘But once a Grenadier always a Grenadier!!’32
But such diversions were no more than aperitifs to the daunting meal that was to come. It was Lloyd George who first conceived the idea that the Prince should embark on a series of tours around the Empire, ostensibly to visit the soldiers he had met during the war in Europe and the Middle East and to thank their governments and peoples for all they had contributed to the final victory. Lloyd George knew that demands for reform in the structure of the Empire, pent up during the years of fighting, would now be vigorously put forward. Difficult and probably acrimonious negotiations were inevitable. Anything that could be done to ensure that they were conducted in a spirit of unity, and against a background of harmony, would be of the greatest value. Otherwise the strains might prove too great and the Empire disintegrate. ‘The appearance of the popular Prince of Wales,’ Lloyd George maintained, ‘might do more to calm the discord than half a dozen solemn Imperial Conferences.’33
The King was not convinced that his son’s apparition would thus magically still the tempest, but he felt that at least it would be a useful stage in the education of a future monarch. Canada had asked first for a visit from the Prince, so Canada would start the series, the other Dominions and parts of the Empire would follow in the next few years. It was a prospect that exhilarated and alarmed the Prince. He longed to travel, but though he had no concept yet of how gruelling his tours would be, he knew well that they would be no joy ride. He would be constantly on parade, scrutinized in every detail of his behaviour, blamed if he were too solemn or too frivolous, criticized for his formality, rebuked for his informality. ‘Your visits to the Dominions will be made or marred according as you do and say the right thing,’ Lord Stamfordham sternly warned him. ‘The Throne is the pivot upon which the Empire will more than ever hinge. Its strength and stability will depend entirely on its occupant.’34 The Prince found it troublesome enough always to do and say the right thing in the restricted periods during which he was on duty in the United Kingdom; to have to do so for months at a time under the microscope that is trained upon a royal visitor would test him unreasonably hard. It was with grave qualms that he sailed from Portsmouth on 5 August 1919, on his way to the New World.
7
The First Tours
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
