1

Youth

If Ethelred was notoriously ‘Unready’ and Alfred ‘Great’, King George VI should bear the designation of ‘George the Dutiful’. Throughout his life he dedicated himself to the pursuit of what he thought he ought to be doing rather than what he wanted to do. Inarticulate and loathing any sort of public appearance, he accepted that it was his destiny to figure regularly and conspicuously in the public eye, gritted his teeth, largely conquered his crippling stammer and got on with it. Deeply conservative with a small ‘c’ and, if he had been free to vote, with a capital ‘C’ as well, he realized that he must work with the Labour ministers of 1945 and win their trust and respect. Ferociously short-tempered, he learned not merely to suffer fools gladly but to remain calm in the face of what he sometimes felt was almost intolerable provocation. Home-loving and not deriving from travel the intellectual stimulus which some people find in it, he nevertheless resignedly undertook laborious journeys around the world in the service of his country. A passionate imperialist, he presided with only muted complaint over policies which he realized must lead to the disintegration of the British Empire. It was, in many ways, a ghastly life; yet at least he could tell himself that he had never failed to do his duty.

Like many of Britain’s more estimable monarchs, he was not born to be king. He was a second son, doomed by his royal birth to occupy a prominent position yet spared the ultimate burden of the crown. And on 14 December 1895, when Prince Albert Ferdinand Arthur George was born at York Cottage, a house in the grounds of Sandringham in north Norfolk, that burden was indeed heavy. The powers of the monarchy had been dwindling for several hundred years but its influence was still formidable. Queen Victoria, the baby prince’s great-grandmother, took it for granted that it was her right to be informed of any development of importance in her realm and was affronted if her opinion was ignored. She was grandmother to half the crowned heads of Europe and presided over the most extensive and richest empire that the world had ever seen. In the long years of seclusion that had followed the death of her beloved husband, Albert, the monarchy had to some extent lost favour with the people but now, in her extreme old age, the rare appearances of that tiny dumpy figure, swathed always in the blackest mourning, commanded extravagant respect and interest. That tired old cliché – ‘a legend in her own time’ – might have been coined for Queen Victoria.

To be the great-grandson of a living legend is a daunting proposition. Bertie, as he was generally called, had further problems. His grandfather, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, was mildly alarming but on the whole benevolent. His father, then Duke of York and eventually King George V, was a more daunting figure: a martinet of limited intelligence and negligible imagination who had spent his most formative years in the Royal Navy and never shed the rigid mindset and conventional ideas that are traditionally associated with military service.

Bertie got off to a bad start when he was born on the day on which Prince Albert had died in 1861. His parents expected outraged protests from the queen and apologized nervously for their solecism: to their relief she took the matter calmly and even wrote in her diary that she felt it might be ‘a blessing for the dear little boy and may be looked upon as a gift from God!’ She thoroughly approved the proposal that the baby should be named Albert, consented to act as godmother and even gave him a bust of the Prince Consort as a christening present.

Bertie’s mother had been born Princess Mary of Teck – a family grand enough by most standards but insignificant when compared to the British royal house. She was better educated than her husband and possessed what to most people seemed a dominant personality, but her father, the Duke of Teck, was not deemed to be of royal blood and she was acutely conscious of the fact that she was descended from a morganatic marriage. As a result, she viewed her husband’s family connections with exaggerated deference. She had previously been engaged to the Duke of York’s elder brother, Prince Eddy, an effete and debauched profligate who, luckily both for her and for his country, developed pneumonia and died in 1892. Princess Mary’s hand in marriage and, as it fortunately turned out, her affections, were briskly transferred to the younger brother. The marriage was a complete success; the only pity was that her reverence for the British monarchy led to her rarely standing up to her husband and allowing him to set the tone in their relationship with their children.

The results were regrettable. The Duke of York was neither cruel nor unfeeling and while his children were infants he treated them with almost doting affection. As they grew up and began to show signs of independence, however, the martinet took over. As a midshipman he had been subjected to the strictest discipline, denied luxuries or even modest comforts, expected to conform in every way. He treated his children as midshipmen, both before they had attained that status and long after they had put it behind them. Fortunately for them he was able to devote relatively little time to their affairs; few children in upper-class families saw much of their parents, royal children saw less than most.

His wife dutifully followed his example. The Duchess of York in later life earned the reputation of being remote and somewhat chilly. Her elder son, as Duke of Windsor, did all he could to promote this view. ‘I am afraid,’ he wrote after she died in 1953, ‘the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they are now in death.’¹ But the letters he wrote to her when he was a young man tell a different story: he spoke of ‘cosy and confidential talks … It’s so wonderful to feel that we can really talk things over, and vital and intime things.’² Her problem was not that she lacked feeling but that she was bad at showing it. Reticent by nature, her inhibitions were reinforced by her husband’s conviction that displays of emotion should be reserved for the strictest privacy or, better still, eschewed altogether. Her relationship with her children tended to be formal: Bertie respected his mother, in a way loved her, but did not feel towards her the instinctive warmth that can be taken for granted in most such relationships.

He was, from the start, outshone by his elder brother. David was quicker, funnier, more attractive and very conscious of the fact that he was the senior. When, two years later, a daughter, Mary, was added to the family, Bertie receded still further into the background. He was not unhappy as a result but he signally failed to grow in confidence. Whether this lack of confidence caused him to stammer or his stammer fed his lack of confidence, it was at this stage in his life that he developed the crippling handicap that was to make much of his life so burdensome. It did not help that he was naturally left-handed yet, as was the custom of the time, was forced to write with his right hand. In speech, certain letters or syllables regularly defeated him: he could see them coming, desperately sought circumlocutions to avoid them, usually failed and became bogged down in interminable pauses as he tried vainly to bring out the offending word. For anyone it would have been a torment; for Bertie, knowing that he was bound to spend much of his life in the public eye, it was doubly horrible. His father made matters worse by treating the affliction as a weakness which could be overcome with a little determination. ‘Get it out, boy!’ he would bark angrily as the wretched child struggled to complete a sentence. When to this trouble were added knock knees, which were countered by forcing him to wear splints – uncomfortable at best, painful at worst, and in either case degrading – the miracle is that Bertie grew up not a yammering imbecile but a determined, lively and on the whole well-balanced boy.

Most of his childhood was spent at York Cottage. Harold Nicolson uncharitably described it as a ‘glum little villa’.³ A villa it was perhaps, but it is large enough today to provide spacious estate offices, storage rooms for the Sandringham shop and five decent-sized flats. It was cosy and unpretentious: qualities which suited the Duke of York. Nor, for Bertie, was it in the least ‘glum’: for him it was home – a concept which he found difficult to attach to the ever more palatial residences in which he was destined to spend his life.

At first he was in the charge of governesses; then, in 1902, the year after Queen Victoria died and his father became Prince of Wales, it was decided that it was time for him and his brother to put aside childish things. A tutor was imported to supervise the process: Henry Hansell, a schoolmaster by profession. Hansell was honourable, diligent and kindly but with only the most rudimentary sense of humour and almost entirely without imagination. He represented everything that was most philistine and blinkered about the English upper-middle classes. Prince Bertie would never have been an intellectual or an aesthete, but under different direction he might at least have been alive to a world not wholly circumscribed by games, shooting and the demands of daily life. Even in imparting the rudiments of an academic education, Hansell was deficient. Bertie was consistently bottom or very near the bottom in every examination that he had to take. He was far from being a fool – he possessed common sense and a fine ability to distinguish between the trivial and the important, the spurious and the authentic – but under Hansell’s well-meaning guidance he grew bored and restless and learned to identify education with everything that was most tedious and stultifying. To be fair to Hansell, he realized his own limitations and went as far as he dared in urging that his charges should be sent to some elite preparatory school. The Prince of Wales would have none of it: he had enjoyed private tutors himself and look how well he had turned out! If Bertie was not profiting by the regime, then it must be because he was stupid or idle, perhaps both. Anyway, his future was marked out and left no place for irrelevancies like preparatory or public schools. He was to serve in the Royal Navy. In January 1909, a few weeks after his fourteenth birthday, Prince Bertie was enrolled as a cadet in the Royal Naval College of Osborne on the Isle of Wight.

For any child to leave home for the first time must be a daunting experience. For a fourteen-year-old who had met scarcely any boys of his own age to be thrust into a world inhabited almost exclusively by his contemporaries must have added a touch of agony to the experience. To be a grandson of the king put the cap on it. The instructions were that Prince Albert was to be treated exactly like any other cadet. In practice his fellow pupils viewed him as a freak. On the one hand they itched to put him in his place, to show him that, at Osborne, being royal counted for nothing. On the other, they were uneasily aware that the divinity that hedged a king reflected some glory too on the king’s grandson and, more practically, that his acquaintanceship might prove very valuable in the future. His older brother, with his quick wits and easy charm, had survived the experience without too much stress; for Bertie, gauche, shy and stammering, his first months at Osborne must have been almost unbearable.

He bore them because he knew that he had to. It is doubtful that he ever conceived the idea of giving up – if he had done so he would at once have dismissed it as being a dereliction of duty too outrageous even to contemplate. He weathered the storm because he was so obviously unassuming and anxious not to play the prince; because he was good at games, which won him the respect of his contemporaries; and because he was of a friendly nature and always ready to think the best of anyone. He was never going to excel, to head the list in any popularity poll or be voted ‘cadet most likely to succeed’, but he was accepted as a decent and straightforward boy whose curiosity value soon wore off and who was generally felt to have fitted in.

To be accepted by his contemporaries was one thing; to meet the demands of the college was another. The fruits of Hansell’s disastrous schooling were now evident. Prince Albert could write clear and comprehensible English, he knew a smattering of history and enjoyed learning more about the doings of his ancestors, but when it came to the skills with which Osborne was particularly concerned – mathematics, science and the like – he was conspicuously incompetent. Again and again he came bottom or almost bottom of the class, his inadequacy on paper being compounded by his stammer, which left his masters thinking that he was not merely ill-informed but slow-witted as well. It was almost inconceivable that a prince of the blood royal, still less one who was so high in the line of succession, should be dismissed from Osborne. If he had been anyone else, however, it is at least possible that he would have been judged inadequate and sent packing. Probably in such an event he would have ended up in the Brigade of Guards, where intellectual ability was not deemed a high priority for would-be officers.

It was some way into his second year at Osborne that his grandfather, King Edward VII, died suddenly and unexpectedly. Prince Albert was with his elder brother in London at the time, staying at Marlborough House, and the first news he had of his grandfather’s death came when he saw the Royal Standard over Buckingham Palace flying at half mast. He mentioned this to his father, who muttered, ‘That’s all wrong’ and ordered that the Standard should be transferred to Marlborough House and flown ‘close up’. Edward VII might be dead but George V was now on the throne – the king lived. Prince Albert had been fond of his grandfather but the relationship had never been close; he felt grief, certainly, but the transformation of his father into king was something far more immediate and awe-inspiring.

With the funeral of King Edward VII behind him, Cadet Prince Albert returned to Osborne to prepare for the exams that he would have to take before he moved to Dartmouth on the next stage of his naval career. For most cadets they were something of a formality, but as the testing time approached it became alarmingly evident that the prince was not going to do well and might fail altogether. Not merely did he know very little; under the pressure of examination he found it difficult to concentrate and to assemble what he did know on paper. The reports on his progress were ‘not at all satisfactory’, protested his dismayed father. ‘You don’t seem to take your work at all seriously, nor do you appear to be very keen about it. My dear boy, this will not do.’⁴ He was currently ranked seventy-first out of seventy-one. He seems temporarily to have made matters better, but the improvement did not last. Sixty-eight boys passed into Dartmouth and of these Prince Albert was sixty-eighth. Whether, if he had been anyone else, only sixty-seven boys would have passed into Dartmouth will never be known; this anyway was the nadir of his academic life. He made a poor start at his new college but never sank quite to the bottom and did progressively better as his stay at the naval college wore on.

It is only fair to say that he had to grapple with distractions which would not have affected any other cadet. One such was his father’s coronation. Prince Albert, in naval uniform, rode in a carriage with his elder brother. The pomp, the circumstance, the realization that this was not just an English, not just a British, but an imperial occasion, affecting vast territories all around the world, strongly appealed to the impressionable prince. Not many people, contemplating that phlegmatic exterior and the apparent lack of interest in what was going on around him, would have suspected that he was deeply moved by the occasion; yet as the crown was placed on his father’s head he experienced a sensation of awed excitement which surprised him by its potency. The occasion, too, lent a new dimension to his feelings for his brother. He had always acknowledged David’s superiority – in charm, in ability and by right of birth; now, as King George V was crowned, he accepted that his brother, in future Prince of Wales, was a man apart. They would continue to be close friends, they would communicate with total freedom, but nothing could alter the relationship between them: for Prince Albert, henceforward, his brother would enjoy a flavour of the divine.

After such solemnities, returning to the parish pump activities of the naval college must have seemed unexciting. Prince Albert, though, buckled down with commendable zeal to making up for lost time and ensuring that he left Dartmouth, not in glory certainly but also not in disgrace. His final ranking – sixty-first out of sixty-seven – was hardly impressive but was significantly better than anything he had achieved before. Though those around him were hardly aware of it, he had turned a corner. The next six months, in which he completed his term as a naval cadet, were among the most formative of his life. In the final training cruise aboard HMS Cumberland he for the first time put behind him the routine of lectures and classrooms that he had found so irksome. He was doing work he enjoyed and for which he was fully competent; both physically and spiritually he throve in this novel atmosphere. The trip, however, provided less welcome reminders that though he was, in theory, a cadet like any other, in practice he was also a son of the king. In the West Indies and still more in Canada he was not allowed to shelter in the anonymity of the cadets’ mess room but was forced to accept the well-meant but unwanted attentions of the local dignitaries. His captain did his best to shelter him but could not succeed entirely without causing grave offence. Shy and reticent, the prince found the experience disagreeable, but, as he had done in the darkest days at Osborne, he accepted that there was no escape. He lacked, and was always to lack, his brother’s social charms but he found that he could do well enough; his success fed his self-confidence and gave him a new maturity which was immediately apparent to his father when he got back to England. The king visited Cumberland at the end of the naval manoeuvres which followed the tour. To the officer responsible for overseeing Prince Albert’s progress he said simply: ‘Thank you. I am pleased with my boy.’

On 15 September 1913 Prince Albert was appointed midshipman. His training was at an end. He was now to embark on his career as a naval officer which, he assumed, would be at the centre of his future life.