AT THE END OF 1920 ALAN LASCELLES JOINED THE PRINCE of Wales’s staff as assistant private secretary. ‘He won me completely,’ he wrote after their first meeting. ‘He is the most attractive man I’ve ever met.’1 Eight years later Lascelles resigned, a disillusioned man who was henceforth to be among the harshest critics of his former master. Though it is far from being the whole story, the Prince’s relationship with Tommy Lascelles epitomizes his evolution over these eight years.
It was Lascelles’s contention that the Prince never grew up. ‘For some hereditary or physiological reason,’ he told Godfrey Thomas, ‘his mental and spiritual growth stopped dead in his adolescence, thereby affecting his whole consequent behaviour.’2 Stanley Baldwin made the same point: ‘He is an abnormal being, half child, half genius … It is almost as though two or three cells in his brain had remained entirely undeveloped while the rest of him is a mature man.’3 To be childlike is in many ways attractive. The Prince never lost his enthusiasm, his curiosity, his freshness of outlook, his open-mindedness. But the word also carries with it connotations of volatility, irresponsibility, self-indulgence, an inability to establish a mature relationship with another adult. With all these the Prince can fairly be charged. At one moment urbane, charming, putting men of far greater intellectual distinction at ease, he could at the next be gauche and nervous. ‘He seemed to be quite as frightened of me as I was of him, although he was seven years older than me, and fidgeted his way through dinner,’ wrote Helen Hardinge, wife of King George V’s assistant private secretary.4
His restlessness and inability to concentrate was the despair of his staff. John Aird was recruited as equerry more or less at the time Lascelles resigned. ‘He had a most curious mentality …’ he wrote in his diary. ‘His mind is so active that unless nature eases it off he will have many moments of great depression.’5 That activity of mind leads to depression is something that many psychiatrists would dispute, but the Prince did suffer from bouts of depression so cruel as to be virtually incapacitating. Mountbatten described how the fits would come upon him like a flash and ‘he’d shut himself in his cabin for days, alone, face drawn, eyes brooding’.6 He wrote to Freda Dudley Ward to apologize for his behaviour the night before: ‘But I just couldn’t help it; the black, black, mist came down and enveloped me irrevocably … and it wasn’t any good making an effort to cheer up.’7
Writing of the ecstatic reception the Prince had received in Canada, Lord Rosebery hoped that he would not become spoilt, ‘for such adulation might turn the head of anyone’.8 No young man could be so fawned upon and indulged as was the Prince without beginning to feel that everything was his as of right. He did expect special treatment, assume that hostesses would meet his every whim, treat any personable woman as a likely prey. Feeling tired after a long day of visits and inspections he cried off a ball at Lord Revelstoke’s house at two hours’ notice – forgivable, no doubt, but inconsiderate given the trouble to which his host had gone.9 He telegraphed at the last minute to cancel his attendance at a ball in Fife because of court mourning for the Duchess of Albany. ‘It is felt that he is stretching family etiquette too far,’ wrote Lord Crawford. ‘It is a pity that the impression grows prevalent that he shows ill-concealed boredom with his public engagements.’10 When his chauffeur refused to take a short cut by driving the wrong way down a one-way street there was an ‘awful scene … the Prince jumped about in the car with rage’.11 Yet though he took his privileges for granted, he never came to believe that he himself was anything extraordinary. He did not have a conceited idea in his head, wrote Aird.12 He was ‘terribly modest about himself’, noted Robert Bruce Lockhart, author and editor of the Londoner’s Diary column in the Evening Standard. ‘He has an inferiority complex.’13 Certainly he seemed to find pleasure in abusing himself. ‘If only the British public really knew what a weak, powerless misery their press-made national hero was,’ he told Freda Dudley Ward, ‘they would have a nasty shock and be not only disappointed but d—d angry too.’14
‘Don’t … imagine that we weren’t with it when we were younger,’ he said in an interview when he was an old man. ‘In fact I was so much with it that was one of the big criticisms that was levelled against me by the older generation.’15 He rejected the exaggerated formality of court life and the pompous trivialities which plagued his appearances in public – a very proper urge to modernize and cut out unnecessary frills, would say his admirers; a refusal to take the minimum of trouble to conform to the rules of his profession, was the opinion of his critics. Both were right and both wrong. No one could reasonably complain when he asked the Duke of Sutherland not to lay on any elaborate junketings for a weekend at Sutton Place – ‘Don’t make it all too formal as I do hate all that sort of thing so much’;16 yet when he visited Magdalen College he should have consented to dine at High Table given that (or, perhaps, in spite of the fact that) the Archbishop of York was there as well.17 When in the mood he could go through the ritual hoops with grace and good will. Aird felt sorry for him as he stood for over an hour at a levee bowing to passers-by, yet ‘he looked extremely well and impressive’.18 His sense of propriety could be unexpectedly strong, particularly when the victims of the First World War were in some way concerned. He was dismayed when the King proposed that the Prime Minister should unveil the memorial to the dead of the British Empire in Westminster Abbey. ‘I do suggest that it’s absolutely a stunt for you or, if you can’t make it, for me as second best,’ he remonstrated with his father. ‘It’s absolutely not a stunt for the P.M. with all the Dominion Premiers present … I hate worrying you in this way, but I really do feel it’s important.’19
He found the demands of security as bad as if not worse than those of ceremony. A proposal that plain-clothes police should follow him around affronted his passionate desire for privacy. In August 1922 there was a scare over an IRA murder plot. ‘Winston is first on the list to be murdered … and your poor little parpee is the second!!’ he told Freda Dudley Ward.20 Halsey discussed the problem with the Home Secretary, Edward Shortt, and agreed to various additional precautions. The Prince indignantly disavowed them. ‘Please issue no further orders … as regards my so-called … protection,’ he wrote to Shortt. ‘I will not stand for having a car following me.’ He absolved Shortt from all responsibility. ‘So please don’t worry any more. If anybody wanted to kill me all the CID in the world won’t stop him.’21 The Home Secretary could hardly stop worrying about a threat to assassinate the heir to the throne; in the end the Prince compromised and grudgingly stayed away from London during the most dangerous period.
In everything he tried to distance himself from the more traditional manifestations of the Establishment. He became known as something of a sartorial innovator, but almost always his departures from the accepted style were in the direction of simplicity and comfort – a dinner jacket instead of a tail coat, soft white collars, the abandonment of gloves for dancing. When he did introduce something more extravagant – loud check suits, twotoned shoes – it was usually done to annoy his father. His excesses sometimes dismayed his more conventional brother. ‘We ought to conform to what he does, really,’ the Duke of York wrote dubiously to Lord Londonderry, ‘but this is often difficult knowing that he is in the wrong.’22 He took trouble over his clothes but did not like to waste time with them; his valet, Crisp, estimated that he could undress, take a bath, and be on the way downstairs in tails and Garter star within three minutes. Similarly, he took great pains over the decoration of York House but the style he affected – chintzes, light panelling – was notably unregal. Aird disapproved. ‘The hall and staircase have just been scraped and look very moderate. The Secretary’s room is quite decent … upstairs the Equerry’s room is like a French brothel only there are no ladies.’23 His mother proved more enthusiastic – ‘really very nice and in good taste,’ she commented24 – but wished he had reserved his efforts for Marlborough House. His parents wished fervently to see him installed in that draughty mausoleum; the Prince regarded it with a horror almost equal to that which he felt for Buckingham Palace and resolutely refused to move.
He could be touchingly considerate and appreciative of his staff. Once at Balmoral he found himself deprived of a private secretary. ‘It’s very good for me,’ he told Lascelles. ‘I open everything and so am getting a pretty good insight of all the drudgery and toiling that you and Godfrey do for me and for which I may not appear grateful. But I am I can assure you.’25 But he did not have the gift of running a happy ship. Trotter, Legh and Halsey all vied for his favours, and squabbled over who was responsible for the small quantity of work that there was to do. ‘No one likes going away for fear the other supplants him,’ wrote Aird. Trotter had the most influence with the Prince but Godfrey Thomas did all the work that mattered, ‘which I should say for the sake of the work was a good thing’.26
Aird’s first impression, to some extent corrected when he went on tour, was that the Prince’s reputation for being a hard worker was a myth. He rarely rose before eleven, played squash or golf for much of the day, and spent part at least of most nights in the Embassy Club or the Grafton Galleries.27 But his capacity to work hard and play hard when he had to remained phenomenal. After an early start and a gruelling day of official visits at Nottingham, Aird dropped the Prince at 7.45 p.m. at a block of flats. He heard him come back to York House at 4.30 the following morning. ‘What energy!!’28 Though he drank little or no alcohol during the day, from the early evening onwards his intake was considerable. He had a strong head, but not strong enough. Many sightings of a noticeably intoxicated Prince of Wales were recorded, some exaggerated, some not. He wrote to Mrs Dudley Ward in contrition from Biarritz in 1926: ‘I know I’m not leading a life to be very proud of here, though not very bad really, and it’s hard to keep out of casinos and all the rottenness they involve. Still, I’m not being very bad.’29
Such excesses did nothing to impair his almost absurdly youthful looks or his public image. Duff Cooper saw him at the State Opening of Parliament in 1924, ‘looking most like a fairy prince, his pink face and golden hair rising out of ermine, beautiful as an angel’.30 Beatrice Webb thought him like a hero of one of Shaw’s plays: ‘Was it the Dauphin in St Joan or King Magnus in The Apple Cart?’31 One photograph showed him ‘in naval uniform … glancing upwards with a radiantly happy smile’.32 It was reproduced on innumerable chocolate or biscuit boxes, turned into hundreds of thousands of postcards, adorned the window ledges of countless housemaids, nestled in the blotters of a whole generation of susceptible schoolgirls. It was the image of Prince Charming, and it made its subject sick.
He did not want to be a fairy prince, that was certain, but did he want to be a prince at all? It was a question he never ceased to ask himself. He was not pretending to be overworked, he told Godfrey Thomas in the spring of 1927:
It’s just the chronic state of being the P of W – of which I’m so heartily and genuinely fed up. It’s just so nerve-racking and distracting sometimes, Godfrey, that I could really go mad, and that wouldn’t be suitable, would it? … I can put up with a certain amount of contact with officials and newspapers on official trips, when one is obviously on the job. It’s when they get in on my private life and trips that I want to pull out a gun and kill … I’ve got a lot older lately and don’t look for excitement the way I used to. And I believe I’m more serious and conscientious over the less artificial side of my stunting than I was. But I have to go through with too many artificial ‘bulls’. I suppose some of it is inevitable, still I rebel against it and I find it tricky.33
Again and again in his private letters the same refrain occurs: he was not cut out to be Prince of Wales.
But did he seriously contemplate a future in which he would not be King? Chips Channon, a shrewd observer, believed in 1925 that he ‘would not raise a finger to save his future sceptre’ and quoted the Prince’s intimate friends as saying he would be happy to renounce the succession.34 Lord Strathmore, father-in-law to the Duke of York, is said to have predicted that he would never succeed to the throne.35 Yet there is no evidence from the Prince’s own writings or quoted conversations that he felt more than a generalized distaste for the appurtenances of his job. What he wanted was to be Prince, and eventually King, without the pomp and circumstance which traditionally enveloped the holders of these offices. As Prince he knew he could never do more than alleviate the burden of his life, as King he believed he would be able to rewrite the rules, to create a new, streamlined monarchy which would allow him the privacy and the liberty that he desired. A time was to come when even this would not be enough, but in the 1920s it seemed to offer the prospect of a tolerable existence. He must from time to time have played with the idea of a retreat from the succession, but it was no more than idle dreaming. He had been born to be King, he had been trained to be King, and King he would one day be.
Every year, however, it became more clear that his concept of that office differed alarmingly from that of his father. Given the personalities of the two men, it was inevitable that the differences should result in mutual suspicion and sometimes even rancorous dislike. ‘There must be a happier condition of affairs between the King and his eldest son,’ Stamfordham wrote despairingly to Thomas. It was quite wrong to think the King did not appreciate the Prince’s achievements on his tours abroad, on the contrary he was ‘grateful for and proud of his son’s remarkable, nay unique performance’. The trouble was that the King found it hard to show his appreciation, and the Prince was quick to take offence at what he saw as a deliberate slight. If only the two men could be brought to see the affection and respect which each one held for the other, then all would be well.36 Stamfordham’s conviction that the King rejoiced in his son’s successes was not supported by other members of the family. The Duke of York, in particular, remained critical of his father’s motives. Only a few weeks before Stamfordham’s letter to Thomas he had told his brother: ‘His great complaint against you, of course, is due to jealousy … He knows too well what a success you have been … and I must tell you that at times his jealousy is quite apparent.’37
Family Christmases can be a test for even the most affectionate relations, Christmas at York Cottage was a feast of acrimony. The King, the Prince told Freda Dudley Ward in December 1922, was ‘as sour and costive as could be because Henry and I arrived late for dinner. How I longed to tell him that it’s d—d nice of us to come at all and that we couldn’t loathe it more.’38 No doubt the King was unnecessarily irritable, equally his sons knew how unpunctuality upset him and might have taken the trouble to arrive on time. Inevitably things got worse. ‘An atmosphere of restriction, killjoy pompousness, mystery, artificiality and the most complete and utter boredom,’ the Prince represented it a few days later. ‘And all that doesn’t half describe how ghastly it is.’39
Even the loyal Stamfordham admitted that the King was too censorious, and that it was difficult for the Prince always to ‘do what was right’.40 There was no need for George V to take his son to task for wearing a kilt jacket of too light a grey for church; nor did he have to reprimand him in front of guests when he appeared at tea still in his shooting clothes, or instruct him not to appear at balls in future unless he was wearing gloves.41 But equally it was not necessary for the Prince always to keep his father in the dark about his plans, or to treat it as a joke when he mistakenly shot a presentation red deer from Alberta which was kept as a pet in the grounds of Balmoral.42 Could not the Prince, pleaded Stamfordham, ‘just be a little tactful, as HM does if I may say so need a little management’?43 At times the atmosphere improved: in 1923 the Prince reported ‘a friendly but heart-to-heart talk with HM … which has cleared the air’;44 in 1928 George V told the Queen, ‘I have had several talks with David, all quite satisfactory, and I have got on capitally with him’;45 but the very fact that these instances were five years apart and were presented as something remarkable, shows how frosty the relationship usually was.
‘I’m not going to be wet-nursed or interfered with any more,’ the Prince had announced defiantly in 1920. ‘I ought to have put down the barrage ages ago, but as I haven’t it’s got to be done now. And what is more, I’ve got to win and come out on top or it’ll be the end of me.’46 Despite this somewhat melodramatic announcement, it was a long-drawn guerrilla campaign that the Prince waged rather than open battle. The one person who could have worked on both parties for the better was the Queen, but with the advent of Freda Dudley Ward she had forfeited most of her influence over her son. The Prince lost confidence in his mother’s readiness to help when she failed to talk to George V about the possible marriage of their daughter Mary. ‘I’m so annoyed with her that I haven’t been near her for over a week,’ he told Lady Airlie. ‘You know how I always used to sit with her for half an hour before dinner, but I’ve given that up now.’47 Lady Airlie besought him to accept the fact of his mother’s love for her children and make allowances for her difficulties in expressing it, but had as little success as Lord Esher did with the Queen – ‘I asked her did she never go and sit on his bed and have a chat with him as mother and boy, and she said she could not do it.’48 On minor issues she could sometimes smooth the way, as when she forestalled a likely row over some rooms formerly occupied by Princess Marie-Louise which the Prince had appropriated without permission – ‘I am thankful I spoke of it or there would have been a rumpus’49 – but on the central issues she felt there was no contribution that she could make.
The marriage of Princess Mary to Lord Lascelles, the future Earl of Harewood, had removed one source of irritation between father and son. The Prince had long felt that his sister was a victim of the King’s craving for a well-ordered and secluded life. He was in India when the news of her engagement reached him and was delighted. ‘I only hope it isn’t too much arranged,’ he told Freda Dudley Ward. ‘It really is marvellous, isn’t it, my beloved, to think that that poor girl is going to be free and let out of Buckhouse prison. Of course Lascelles is too old for her and not attractive, is he, my darling? But anyway he’s rich, and I’m afraid that is a very important thing for poor Mary. I hope to God he’ll make her happy, as she does deserve that if anyone does.’50 He could not be back in time for the wedding, a deprivation which he faced with equanimity. ‘I have an inordinate dislike for weddings …’ he told the Queen. ‘I always feel so sorry for the couple concerned.’51
The Duke of York remained the Prince’s closest ally among his siblings. ‘There is a dreadful blank in my life directly you leave on one of your tours,’ the Duke wrote,52 and again when trouble threatened, ‘I am not going to let you fight your battles alone with the family.’53 But though the Duke remained devoted, the Prince, absorbed by his relationship with Mrs Dudley Ward and impatient of his brother’s slower wits and more phlegmatic nature, grew distant from his sibling. The two men were very different, and as they grew older it began to become apparent that the younger son was in spirit much closer to his father. ‘You have always been so sensible and easy to work with,’ wrote the King to his second son, ‘and you have always been [so] ready to listen to any advice and to agree with my opinions about people and things, that I feel that we have always got on very well together (very different to dear David).’54 The Duke of York was not unconscious of this growing rapport. When the Prince came back from the Far East his brother told the Queen that he was sure the old atmosphere of trust and intimacy could be restored. ‘We must all help him to get him back to our way of thinking.’55 It would not have been ‘our’ way even a year before.
At the beginning of 1923 the Duke of York became engaged to Elizabeth Bowes Lyon. His brother had been sceptical whether he would ever bring it off. ‘Little Elizabeth Lyon, the future Duchess of York, I don’t think …’ he had referred to her some time before.56 At one point the papers announced that she was to marry the Prince of Wales and drove the Palace into issuing an official denial.57 They had got the wrong prince, and the putative fiancé was delighted when the true facts of the engagement became known. He had no such reservations as he had felt over the marriage of Princess Mary. ‘Splendid news about Bertie and Elizabeth … She is a very sweet girl … I am delighted,’ he wrote to his mother.58 He grew even more fond of her with the years. She was ‘the one bright spot’ at Buckingham Palace, he told Diana Cooper. ‘They all love her and the King is in a good temper whenever she is there.’59 He spent a few days at her Scottish home, Glamis Castle: ‘I’m so fond of Elizabeth, she is too sweet for words and she was the life and soul of the party.’60
The new Duchess reciprocated his affection and took his part in the family rows. Though she herself found the King easy to get on with, she realized how different it must be for a son. From a holiday in Africa she wrote to tell him:
I know now your feelings of relief and freedom when you get away from England on your own – away from the petty little annoyances and restrictions that drive one crazy … I hate the thought of coming home – no, I love coming home, but I hate being always under the eye of a narrow-minded autocrat … Dear David, I hope your affairs are going well, and that neither your heart nor your staff are giving you cause for worry. Those two seem to give you most trouble in life, and also of course you are very, very naughty, but delicious.61
In the same year Prince George rallied to the common cause. He was going to stand up to the King when he got back, he wrote from the Fleet in the Far East; ‘and have no more being told off without answering back. I’m sure it’s the only way … as he’s so impossible.’62
In April 1926 the Yorks had a daughter. ‘I’d have voted for a boy myself!!’ the Prince told Piers Legh, ‘but they all seem very pleased and very well so I guess it’s muy bien.’63 The fact that his brother had produced a child to some extent relieved the pressure on him to marry and provide an heir to the throne. A son would have been even better, but that no doubt would happen in due course. Yet he knew he could never escape the conviction of his parents and his people that his own marriage had been too long deferred, and that it was his duty to maintain the dynasty. At various times his name had been linked with a bevy of European princesses, most conspicuously the daughter of the Queen of Italy. Gossip about the match reached such a point that Lloyd George took advice on the reaction of British Roman Catholics to the possibility. He was told that, if the Princess renounced her religion to marry the Prince, no Catholic would appear at court. Without such a renunciation, the marriage, of course, could never take place. ‘So that is off,’ wrote Frances Stevenson. Not that it had been on anyway. ‘The Prince himself is not the least inclined to marry,’ she went on, ‘and is very obstinate on the point.’64 In Tokyo he had made it clear to Embassy staff that he was not in love with the Italian Princess, and that he would only marry for love.65 This did not curb newspaper speculation. In 1927 the King of Spain forbade his daughter Beatrice to visit London because of rumours linking her with the Prince,66 while American journalists at intervals married him off to at least nine continental princesses, least probably Princess Eudoxia of Bulgaria, thirty-nine years old, hefty and a musician.67
In 1920 Lloyd George is said to have told the King that the country would not tolerate the Prince marrying a foreign princess.68 A few years later J. H. Thomas, the trade union leader, declared that the Labour Party would not tolerate the Prince marrying anyone else: ‘Of course a Cavendish would have done but there are now none left.’69 Confronted with such divergent counsels the Prince might reasonably have concluded that any marriage would be worse than none. In fact he professed himself ready in principle though reluctant in practice. ‘I’m getting quite an old bachelor now and a more confirmed one each year,’ he told Mountbatten in 1924, ‘tho’ I suppose I’ll have to take the fatal plunge one of these days, tho’ I’ll put it off as long as I can, ’cos it’ll destroy me.’70 When Godfrey Thomas married later the same year, he wrote: ‘It must be … rather frightening, I’d say. Such a big change in one’s old bachelor life, tho’ I guess it’s all right if you love.’71
When in South Africa in 1925 he talked to the Athlones with unusual freedom. He admitted that he was lonely but stressed that ‘in his position he could not make a mistake and must find someone who would be both agreeable to him and suitable for the duties she would be called upon to perform’.72 What he dreaded most of all was overt pressure from the King. ‘Any pushing of his marriage by George would be absolutely fatal and will drive him into a most obstinate course,’ Princess Alice told the Queen. ‘You will just have to stop George about that.’ She was certain he was ‘ripe for being married and he is evidently turning it over in his mind’.73 He may have been turning it over, but it is hard to believe that he took the possibility seriously, if for no other reason than that he still felt himself committed to Freda Dudley Ward. He wrote to her when she was in Paris with her current admirer, the American socialite and polo player, Rodman Wanamaker: ‘My God – it’s so damned silly that you and I aren’t married, my angel. I absolutely know that you’d be far happier with me now than with any bloody Pappapacker. Their kind may be all right for an affair but I guess that’s about all … Anyway, we love each other, nothing can change that, can it?’74 Something was to change it, but in the meantime any potential bride had to be weighed in the balance against Mrs Dudley Ward and was invariably found wanting. The King restrained himself from proffering any advice on the subject, but though his reticence may have saved a few unnecessary quarrels it can have made little difference on the essential issue. Neither his speech nor his silence would sensibly have affected his son’s determination.
He made more impression on other issues. The role of Fruity Metcalfe in the Prince’s life was a subject of frequent and acrimonious debate. When the Prince got back from his Far Eastern tour Metcalfe was still in attendance: ‘The two are inseparable and all the Prince’s staff and his family are furious about it,’ noted Frances Stevenson.75 The Prince was devoted to his new friend. When he went to Balmoral in the autumn of 1922 he wrote to say how much he loathed having to ‘leave you behind the first time in nearly a year … I’m not going to write a soppy letter though I insist on your driving out of your silly old head any ideas or thoughts of returning to India when your year’s leave is up … I’m just not letting you go back to that godforsaken country and life and insist on you staying with me (officially) to run my stables etc, but actually to … well, to carry on being what you’ve always been to me and are now, my greatest man friend.’76
It did not take the King long to conclude that Metcalfe was a thoroughly pernicious influence. ‘He has been given the credit for encouraging His Royal Highness in his escapades,’ wrote Wigram; in his drinking, in his night club excursions, worst of all in his reckless riding in point-to-points and steeplechases.77 George V told his son that Metcalfe must go, the Prince fought tenaciously to retain his friend. ‘Had a talk with D on getting home about Metcalfe. I found him very obstinate,’ noted the King gloomily in his diary.78 The climax came when the Prince wanted to include Metcalfe in his party for South Africa in 1925. After much argument he was satisfied that too many people would be offended if he stuck to his guns and that anyway Metcalfe’s career would be damaged beyond repair if he stayed longer away from the Army. Regretfully he gave way. He tried to get Metcalfe transferred to a cavalry regiment in England, but the powers that be were able to thwart this project. Metcalfe must return to India. Before he was due to leave, however, he became engaged to Lord Curzon’s daughter Alexandra. ‘I’m awfully glad that Fruity has at last pulled it off, and now that he is fixed up I feel less bad about having had to give him the push,’ the Prince told Lascelles.79 The two men were not going to remain separated for very long.
Metcalfe’s standing in the eyes of the King was above all affected by his association with another cause of conflict between father and son – the Prince’s riding. It was ironic that the recreation which the King had forced upon his reluctant son before the First World War should now give rise to so much disagreement. Riding had become one of the Prince’s greatest pleasures: ‘All his thoughts and passions seemed centred on the horse,’ wrote Wigram.80 The King at first had no objection to what could have been a harmless obsession. He loved riding himself, and whenever they were together at Windsor he would lead his sons and other guests in a stately progress through the park. He disliked being passed, so the Prince and the Duke of York would drop behind, make a great circle, jumping everything they met, cross the royal path too far ahead to be seen and end up dutifully behind their father.81 The King no doubt knew what was happening but preferred not to notice.
He equally made no attempt to interfere with the Prince’s hunting. Addressing a dinner of the Farmers’ Union at Leicester, the Prince referred to hunting as ‘the best and healthiest of sports’.82 He no doubt tailored his sentiments to his audience, but he still spoke from the heart. He first patronized the Duke of Beaufort’s hunt but moved on to Leicestershire after two years, according to Bruce Ogilvy because the 9th Duke objected vociferously to the Prince’s over-riding hounds and the Duchess had designs upon him for her daughter.83 Installed at Melton Mowbray, he began to hunt with the Quorn, the Cottesmore and the Belvoir. For him hunting was competitive and intensely exciting. ‘I’ll hunt flat out just as long as I still want to jump fences in front of other people,’ he told Metcalfe. ‘The moment I don’t, I’ll stop.’84 He won a reputation for courage, determination and a fair measure of skill. Guy Paget, for a book he was writing, canvassed thirty or so of the best men across country in the shires, huntsmen included, on the riders they most admired. The Prince was on every list of those who ‘took their own line, rode as a sportsman should, and always got to the end of the hunt’.85 ‘He was a real sportsman,’ wrote Paget, ‘taking the rough with the smooth, scorning all privileges, and ever ready to take his turn at the chores of the hunting field … He was as brave as a lion, and bore pain without a sign.’86 From time to time he got into trouble, but Paget did not believe he took more falls than any other bold rider: ‘He is such a good thruster in the hunting field that he is bound to come to grief,’ wrote Wigram, ‘… everyone says that he goes very well but just lacks judgment and takes too many risks.’87
Such risks the King could accept, with resignation if not equanimity. It was a different matter when it came to riding in point-to-points. The Prince was a better than competent rider, with horses of high quality, but when he was racing his recklessness pushed him into hazards beyond the technical ability of himself or his horse. He claimed that he took no more risks and fell no more frequently than other riders of his calibre, but the daemon which drove him on was exposed in an unhappy letter he wrote to Freda Dudley Ward in 1923: ‘Thank God I’ve got 2 races tomorrow as I must do something desperate, which is just what race-riding gives one.’88 By the time he wrote these words, the King was already urging him to abandon the dangerous sport. ‘He must be tactfully informed that I’m not going to promise never to ride in pt to pts again,’ the Prince told Thomas, ‘I’m sorry but I’m obstinate.’89 He was always obstinate, but rarely tactful. The King’s indignation mounted as his son broke his collar bone, blacked his eyes, and suffered concussion with what seemed alarming regularity: ‘It is too bad that he should continue to ride in these steeplechases,’ he wrote to the Queen. ‘I have asked him not to on many occasions.’90 The Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was recruited to the campaign. ‘Pray do not put me down as an interfering person who having no zest in life himself wishes to knock it out of others,’ he wrote. But would the Prince please not take unnecessary risks? ‘No one in these days can do more good than you, sir, to your people and, through them, to the world, and were a serious mishap to come upon you, who could take your place?’91 All such appeals were ignored; it was to be several years later and only after the almost fatal illness of his father, that the Prince renounced his hazardous hobby.
The air provided some of the same excitement, though without the fierce competitive thrill. After his visits to Australia and New Zealand he predicted that Britain would soon possess ‘a great air organization on the same lines as our mercantile marine’ and looked forward to the day when he would be able to do a Dominion tour without recourse to slow-moving ships.92 It was several years before he was allowed even to tour Britain by air, but by the end of 1927 the King had grudgingly agreed that the Prince could use a plane in exceptional cases when a tight schedule made it essential. The exception soon became the norm. The following year a personal pilot was appointed and the Prince darted happily from appointment to appointment around the country. By mid-1929 he was grumbling about the intolerable delays whenever the weather or other circumstances forced him to use the train.93 Once in the air, he was always for pushing on, however dire the weather forecast. On one occasion he insisted that his plane must take him from Castle Bromwich to Cardiff, even though there were storms ahead. The pilot disappeared, then came back and led the puzzled Prince to a telephone. Down the line boomed the voice of the legendary father of the Royal Air Force, Air Marshal Trenchard. ‘Good morning, Group Captain. I am giving you an order. You are not to fly on to Cardiff.’94
To sit behind a pilot did not satisfy the Prince for long. ‘I’ve bought a Moth, and flying is my latest craze,’ he told Lascelles in October 1929.95 It was not for another six months, however, that his father agreed he could learn to fly, and a year later he was still refused permission to fly solo. The Prince was very depressed, noted Aird; ‘It struck me as almost sad that he should get upset over such a childish and small thing.’96 It was not small or childish to the Prince, but another illustration of the fact that he was swaddled always in a cocoon of protective restrictions, never allowed to behave like a man. In the end he made an illicit solo flight, with only a mechanic and his pilot, Flight-Lieutenant Don, watching apprehensively from below. ‘He was as excited as a Cranwell cadet,’ said Don.97 The Prince had been enormously impressed when Lindbergh made his first trans-Atlantic flight in 1927 – ‘Chaps who make those kind of stunts make me feel sillier than I already do.’98 He had no illusions that he was a second Lindbergh but he felt a little less silly after his solo flight.
The magazine Air said that the Prince’s example had done as much as any other single factor to popularize air travel in Great Britain.99 The devotees of golf might have said as much about their pastime. His passion was slow to mature. ‘I hate golf,’ he had told the King in 1922, when he was trying to escape from some ceremonial occasion at St Andrews.100 A few years later, however, and he was ‘crazy keen’, boasting to Joey Legh that he had ‘some kind of a permanent swing now’ and at least knew what he was doing wrong.101 He used to take a cottage in Sandwich Bay, which served the double purpose of being near three championship golf courses and the holiday home of Mrs Dudley Ward. He never became as good as he wanted to but by 1929 he was well above the average, beating Bruce Lockhart level at three and two when in previous years he had been given a handicap and had still lost: ‘He now plays really well and hits the ball as far as anyone.’102
He did not show the same tenacity in intellectual pursuits. He virtually never read a book, and if he went to the theatre at all chose musicals or the lightest of comedies. At the Academy Dinner in 1923 he held forth eloquently about the importance of the arts – ‘We have only to turn the pages of history to realize that a nation’s art is the mirror of its inner mind’ – but it was not he who had turned the pages; the voice was the Prince’s voice, but the hands were the hands of Tommy Lascelles.103 In 1930 he joined the board of the National Gallery. Lord Crawford, who had a low opinion of him, wrote with some contempt of his first attendance: ‘He fairly amazed us. About halfway through our proceedings, which happened to be extremely important, he got bored and began to smoke … The cigarettes … enlivened the Prince and he began to talk to his neighbours, Sassoon and D’Abernon … Sassoon … with his raucous Syrian voice and his acute desire to “honour the King” chattered away – and between them the two made business practically impossible … So far as I could make out, the chatter was chiefly about racing and society.’104 Lord Lee was the chairman. ‘Poor Arthur Lee is in despair,’ wrote Crawford after a later meeting,105 but in his own account Lee said that he at first thought the appointment ‘foolish and flunkeyish’ but later changed his mind. The Prince, he wrote, showed real interest and set great store by his membership.106
Whether Lee or Crawford was more nearly right, all the pundits agreed that the Prince was singularly ignorant. ‘Is this by one of the painters they call a Primitive?’ he enquired, when a picture by Hieronymus Bosch was being discussed.107 ‘What does a picture cost?’ he asked Kenneth Clark.108 The latter question, at least, sounds improbably naive; the Prince may have been ignorant but he was no fool. Clark’s low opinion of the Prince as art critic must be set against Godfrey Thomas’s equally extreme judgment that, as a guide to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna he was ‘as good as any professional’.109 The truth lies somewhere between the two. The Prince did not enjoy looking at works of art and had little knowledge of them, but he had a quick mind, a retentive memory, and could put up a tolerable show of enthusiasm if he felt in the mood. He rarely did, and would have retorted if taxed with this delinquency that a Prince of Wales could only concentrate on a limited range of things, and that the artistic affairs of the nation did not rate high in his scale of priorities. What ranked higher must be the subject of a separate chapter.