2

Duke of York

Within a year of Prince Albert’s appointment Britain was at war with Germany. Over the next few years he would be trying to kill a strikingly large number of his cousins, and equally they would be trying to kill him. The reflection does not seem seriously to have disturbed him: he had met quite a lot of his German relatives but none was among his closer friends, his command of the language was no more than adequate, he had never been to Germany and felt no real affinity with its culture. His feelings at the outbreak of war seem to have been those of most young men at the time: excitement, a measure of apprehension, an assumption that it would all be over in a matter of months. Army officers leaving for France took with them evening dress so that they would have something suitable to wear when they got to Berlin. As a midshipman aboard the battleship HMS Collingwood Prince Albert could hardly have hoped to share this experience, but the question that most preoccupied him was whether he would have a chance of seeing action before the war came to a rapid end.

Even if the war lasted long enough, he had other obstacles to overcome. While at Dartmouth he had been plagued by a series of gastric complaints which had been at best uncomfortable and debilitating, at worst crippling. He dismissed them as being no more than a temporary inconvenience and did his best to carry on as usual. Then, after only three weeks of war, he retreated to the sickbay with pains so violent that he could hardly breathe. Appendicitis was diagnosed and he was put ashore at Aberdeen to be operated on. All went smoothly and he hoped that he would quickly be back on normal duties, but it soon became obvious that his recovery was no more than partial and that it was by no means certain that he would ever be able to return to sea. At any time this would have been a blow to him; in wartime, when almost every young man of spirit longed to be actively engaged against the enemy, his fate seemed to him uniquely pitiable. ‘I am longing and have been longing for centuries to get back to my ship,’ he told his father’s equerry, Bryan Godfrey-Faussett. As a consolation he was given a desk job in the Admiralty. This at least meant that he was allowed to wear uniform, but it did not appease his chagrin at being safely on land while his contemporaries on Collingwood were at sea with the prospect of engaging the enemy at any moment. Prince Albert was not outstandingly heroic – he felt the pangs of fear as acutely as any of his contemporaries – but his wish to be allowed to fight and if necessary die alongside his fellow midshipmen was unfeigned and passionately held.

He got his way. In February 1915 he was at sea again. It proved to be only a fleeting respite. For a few months, all went well; he thought his medical troubles were behind him, but the gastric problems returned, it was a return to hospital, in the view of the doctors he should never serve at sea again. The view was not one that he shared and his father sympathized with his feelings. In the end, a compromise was agreed – the prince would remain ashore, doing as much as he felt able to, but if the Fleet put to sea in circumstances which made a naval battle seem probable, or at least possible, then he would be allowed to rejoin Collingwood. To the Prince of Wales, fuming at GHQ while his friends and fellow officers were butchered on the Western Front, he seemed unfairly privileged. ‘Oh God, it is unbearable to live this usual life of ease and comfort,’ the prince protested, ‘while you my dear old boy, and all naval and army officers, are toiling under unpleasant conditions, suffering hardships and running gt risks with your lives, for the defence and honour of England.’¹

Prince Albert was less sure; he suspected that when the moment of truth arrived and Collingwood went into battle he would be betrayed and left behind. Perhaps, if his senior officers had known what was going to happen, they would indeed have contrived to keep him ashore. Fortunately for him, they did not. He was at sea at the end of May 1915 when the German fleet unexpectedly came out of port to confront the Royal Navy in the only serious naval battle of the war. Jutland was not a glorious victory – in terms of ships lost it could even be described as a defeat – but after it the Germans retreated to their base and never ventured out again. Prince Albert was not required to play a heroic or even active role. He was, indeed, little more than an observer. Collingwood emerged from the battle unscathed. She had been under fire, though; her guns had damaged a German battlecruiser; the prince could properly claim that he had taken part in a naval battle and had been in danger of his life. He felt particularly pleased that he had felt no fear himself: ‘It was certainly a great experience to have been through,’ he noted proudly in his diary.

His months of fretfulness on shore yielded at least one dividend in that, for the first time, he really got to know his father. By this time the relationship between the king and the Prince of Wales was frosty if not hostile. The prince found life at court insufferably starchy and boring and went there as little as possible. The king thought that his elder son was frivolous and potentially a libertine. Prince Albert’s loyalties were divided. He admired his brother excessively and half agreed with him in his assessment of family life: Buckingham Palace, he wrote, was ‘an awful prison … The parents have got funny ideas about us, thinking we are still boys at school.’² But he also revered the king and knew at heart that he was far closer to him than he was to his more volatile and self-indulgent brother. The king and Prince Albert shared an unwavering devotion to duty and a sense of the obligations they owed the nation. From time to time the prince might mildly deplore the existence of this burden but, unlike his older brother, he never seriously questioned the fact that he was destined to bear it throughout his life. ‘You have always been so sensible and easy to work with,’ the king told him, ‘and you have always been ready to listen to any advice and to agree with my opinion … that I feel we have always got on very well together (very different to dear David).’³ He was different to dear David and the differences were to become ever more apparent over the next decade.

His life was still blighted by recurrent bouts of gastric illness. Finally, at the end of 1917, the doctors decided to adopt what to many had for years seemed the most obvious course of action: to conduct a major operation. It worked: there was always to be a slight question mark over his health but for the next thirty years he was able to lead a full and normal life. From the point of view of his career it was just in time. Only a few weeks before the operation he had transferred to the fledgling Royal Naval Air Service. It was a bold decision, for it was only fourteen years since the Wright brothers had made their epoch-making first flight and set the science of aviation going. Flying, to most people, still appeared a most hazardous means of progress; for a member of the royal family to indulge in it was surprising, if not unseemly. To the mild chagrin of his elder brother – who considered that he was the adventurous member of the family – Prince Albert learned how to fly and in due course received his wings; from his point of view the only flaw in this achievement was that he was forbidden to fly solo. He never enjoyed flying – he found it both alarming and uncomfortable – but he felt that it was something that he ought to do and stuck at it until he achieved success.

By now the war was over. What should he do next? Left to himself he would probably have stayed with the navy and returned to sea, but he was not left to himself and never would be. He must, his father declared, take on the duties of a prince. ‘My brother is so overwhelmed with work that I am going to help him with it,’ he told a naval friend. ‘It is really the best thing to do.’⁴ Even the king admitted, however, that the pitifully inadequate education Prince Albert had received, followed by a few years in the wartime navy, was not a satisfactory preparation for the sort of challenge he would henceforth be facing. The prince should spend a year at Cambridge, studying history and economics. Unfortunately, the king then took measures to ensure that this enlightened decision yielded the smallest possible results. Prince Albert would be accompanied by his younger brother, Henry, future Duke of Gloucester – thus ensuring that he would be constantly in the company of the only undergraduate in the University of Cambridge less interested than he in academic matters. Worse still, the two princes were to live not in college but in a private house a mile away: a provision that the king thought would give them greater freedom but, in fact, removed any possibility that they would make stimulating friends. So far Prince Albert had viewed life solely from the perspective of the palace or an officers’ mess; his father’s ill-judged decision meant that the chance to broaden those horizons had been lost.

Indeed, almost the only benefit that he gained from his time at Cambridge came from the companionship of Louis Greig. Greig was a Scottish doctor, some ten years older than the prince, whom he had first met at Osborne and who had remained close to him ever since and accompanied him to Cambridge as equerry. Greig was no more likely than the prince’s few undergraduate acquaintances to open his mind to new and challenging ideas but he was a man of strong character, patient, honourable and resolute. He was genuinely fond of the man who was both his master and his charge but saw too the frailties that threatened to cripple the prince’s development: the explosively bad temper which would suddenly overtake him and render him almost incapable of civil intercourse; his inability to accept defeat gracefully; his black depression in the face of minor setbacks. ‘My principal contribution was to put steel into him,’ Greig once observed.⁵ The steel was there already, but it needed a firm yet friendly hand to polish it and to ensure that it showed always to best advantage.

The time had come for the prince to lend a hand in the work of monarchy. The gruesome fate of the Russian royal family had reminded everyone that the monarchical order was under extraordinary challenge. The republicans were vociferous; it was high time, H. G. Wells told readers of The Times, that the country rid itself of ‘the ancient trappings of throne and sceptre’.⁶ In Britain, at least, republicanism was more noisy than effective; what evidence there is suggests that only a very small proportion of Britons would have chosen to dispense with the monarchy. The king, however, took the threat most seriously and his disquiet infected the rest of the family. When the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns swiftly followed the Romanovs into oblivion, alarm grew close to panic. The Prince of Wales was despatched on a series of tours around the empire to improve his understanding of his future subjects and generally to boost the royal cause; Prince Albert was assigned to the home front.

The home front needed attention. Lloyd George’s pledge to make Britain ‘a land fit for heroes to live in’ showed few signs of being fulfilled: working conditions in many of the factories were primitive, housing was overcrowded and insalubrious, hospitals and schools inadequate. Industrial relations became the prince’s speciality and he proved to be both quick to learn and characteristically assiduous in his studies. He toured the country, endlessly enquiring and, by asking the right questions, provoking the right responses from the employers. ‘Of all the many visitors we had here,’ said one surprised factory manager after a royal inspection, ‘I never met one who asked more sensible questions or showed greater understanding of our fundamental problems.’⁷

His interest was genuine; so also was his patently sincere belief that the gap between capital and labour, between employer and employed, was dangerously great and should as far as possible be reduced. He was no revolutionary. He believed that, in general, God had intended the rich man to be in his castle and the poor man at his gate. But that was no reason why the rich man should not treat the poor man with proper consideration and that there should not be regular intercourse between gate and castle. Particularly this was the case where the young were in consideration: Prince Albert believed that the young of all classes and income groups should be encouraged to mix together. Having reached this conclusion, he decided to do something about it. He conceived the idea of annual camps at which a hundred or so working-class boys would be invited to join the same number of public schoolboys at a site near the sea where they could swim, work, play games and, above all, get to know each other. He had to leave the organization and day-to-day running of the camps to others but he promoted the idea of them enthusiastically, raised money for them and paid them regular visits. If there is one image of the duke at this point which identifies him most clearly in the public mind it is the one which shows him in shorts and open-necked shirt sitting amid a crowd of boys, singing lustily and making the appropriate gestures that accompanied what became the signature tune of the camps, ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree’. It was home-spun stuff, far less sophisticated than anything the Prince of Wales would have considered undertaking, but it marked Prince Albert as the people’s prince, decent, unpretentious, socially aware. It was a reputation which one day was to stand him in good stead.

On 3 June 1920 he was created Duke of York. ‘I know that you have behaved very well in a difficult situation for a young man and that you have done what I asked you to do,’ his father told him approvingly.⁸ It became every day more apparent that, among the royal children, he was the one whom the king felt was closest to him and conformed most closely to his own image. It was an impression that was to be reinforced when, a few years later, the duke married a woman whom his father not merely felt was suitable but took enthusiastically to his heart.

It was probably the most important decision he made in his life, and certainly one of the most successful. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (the hyphen came and went according to the whim of each member of the family) was the penultimate (and ninth) child of the Earl of Strathmore. The Strathmores were very grand. They had been living in their extravagantly be-turreted castle of Glamis since the fourteenth century and the 14^th Earl, though he was far too good-mannered to say so, probably considered the Hanoverian immigrants who inhabited Buckingham Palace to be nothing very special in the way of breeding. His daughter, Elizabeth, was intelligent, vivacious and exceptionally attractive. Like most upper-class girls of her generation her education had been erratic and individual: asked whether she could spell long words, she offered as examples of her knowledge ‘capercaillie’ and ‘ptarmigan’.⁹ Unlike most upper-class girls, however, she was encouraged to read and did so omnivorously; poetry, in particular, was important to her throughout her life.

She was just eighteen when the First World War ended and it was not until 1920 that the London season got under way again. Her impact was immediate and electric: she loved dancing and was exceptionally good at it; she relished company and enjoyed meeting new people; her radiant enthusiasm made her the sort of girl that everyone, however unsuited to the social scene, wanted to talk to and have as a friend. For the Duke of York she was the ideal companion; it did not take him long to conclude that she was also the girl he wanted to marry.

If he had been heir to the throne there might have been hesitation – for the future king to marry a commoner, however socially eligible, would have been an alarming precedent. For a second son, however, she was deemed entirely suitable. All the doubts were on her side. The duke proposed and was rejected; Lady Elizabeth saw too clearly the sacrifice of liberty she would have to make if she joined the royal family. In due course he tried again. ‘You are one of my best and most faithful friends,’ Lady Elizabeth assured him. ‘I am too miserable about it.’ Being a faithful friend was not at all what the duke had in mind. A less determined man might have abandoned the quest at this point but once again he demonstrated his resolve to achieve whatever he felt was right and proper. In the end he prevailed; Lady Elizabeth put aside her doubts and concluded that he was indeed the man with whom she wished to spend her life. They were married with much pomp in Westminster Abbey on 26 April 1923; everyone who was anyone was there, including fifty-two working-class boys, mainly from the East End, invited at the insistence of the duke.

After his death the Queen Mother, as she was from then onwards generally styled, used indignantly to protest whenever it was suggested that without her the duke would not have been able to carry out the duties imposed upon him. She was right in that, however painful he found it, the duke would have forced himself to carry on. But the cost to his health, both physical and mental, would have been enormous, he might have broken down under the strain – at the very least he would have done what he had to do with less ease and grace. She gave him confidence, she gave him strength; the supreme test was not to come for another thirteen years or so, but even in the period before his brother’s abdication her role was of inestimable importance.

They began their married life at White Lodge, a substantial mansion in the heart of Richmond Park. In theory this offered the attraction of being secluded yet accessible to central London; in practice it was inconveniently far from those parts of the capital where most of their engagements took place and embarrassingly open to the scrutiny of friendly but importunate sightseers. The duke disliked it from the start, but it was four years before he managed to exchange it for a home in central London – 145 Piccadilly – where he was to remain until he came to the throne. It was from White Lodge that they set off on their first official tour overseas – to Belgrade for a royal christening and wedding – and it was still their base when, in 1927, they spent six months on a mammoth and gruelling tour of Australasia.

Excursions of this kind were doubly onerous for the duke because of the stammer, which still made public speaking an agonizing burden. It was never wholly cured: the author remembers, as a boy in the late 1930s, listening to the king on the radio painfully struggling to get out some difficult word, with the whole nation willing him to succeed. The handicap, and the gallantry with which he challenged it, in fact won him vast sympathy and admiration, but to him it spelled only humiliating failure. Painfully apparent though it still was, however, it was by then clearly far less crippling an affliction than it once had been. In 1926 the duke had put himself into the hands of Lionel Logue, a more or less self-taught Australian speech therapist who had set up shop in London. ‘He entered my consulting room,’ wrote Logue, ‘a slim quiet man with tired eyes and all the outward symptoms of the man upon whom habitual speech defect had begun to set the sign. When he left at five o’clock, you could see that there was hope once more in his heart.’¹⁰ There was no miraculous overnight cure, but Logue taught him how to control his breathing and convinced him that, if he worked at it, improvement was not only possible but inevitable.

The duke and his elder brother had grown further apart during the inter-war years; in so far as he mixed at all with members of his family, the Prince of Wales was more likely to choose his youngest surviving brother, George, who in 1934 became Duke of Kent. There was no quarrel between the brothers, merely recognition of the fact that their tastes had little in common, and that they viewed life, both public and private, from a very different point of view. The Prince of Wales found Bertie decidedly dull: worthy, no doubt, but not stimulating company. The gulf widened after the duke’s marriage: the Duchess of York liked and, up to a point, enjoyed the company of her brother-in-law and shared her husband’s admiration for him, but she knew that they and the duke were on different paths and had no doubt that theirs was the better one. They grew no closer when the Yorks produced a family: Princess Elizabeth in April 1926 followed by Margaret Rose in 1930. The popular press portrayed the Prince of Wales as a regular visitor at 145 Piccadilly, romping with his infant nieces in the nursery. ‘Uncle David in our nursery!’ exclaimed Princess Margaret many years later. ‘I don’t think he ever got there. Well, perhaps once he did.’¹¹

From the point of view of the Duke of York the most worrying feature of his brother’s life was his failure to marry and produce an heir. This was something that was going to affect his daughter far more than him. He and the Prince of Wales were of much the same age; the prince seemed the more healthy of the two – even if the elder brother remained a bachelor and died first there was no reason to believe that the younger would long survive him. For Princess Elizabeth, however, the threat of many years on the throne was very real. To some, no doubt, that would have seemed not a threat but an inviting prospect. The Duke of York, however, believed that he himself would be inadequate for the role and that to expect his daughter to become queen would be to lay an intolerable burden on her shoulders.

The only satisfactory solution was for the Prince of Wales to find a suitable wife and thus secure the succession. But the chances of this happening seemed ever more remote. The duke had rather liked his brother’s first serious mistress, Freda Dudley Ward, but quite apart from the fact that she had a husband living she was clearly out of the question as a future queen. Since then things had gone downhill. Thelma Furness, pretty, sprightly, frivolous and born a Vanderbilt, was even more impossible. Her friend and successor as maîtresse en titre, Wallis Simpson, presented what must surely be the pinnacle of horror, by having not only a husband living but a divorce in her past as well. She surely would not last but what, the Yorks must have asked themselves, would come next? Shades of the throne were beginning to close around the mercifully unaware princess.