IT CANNOT BE PRETENDED THAT THE PRINCE’S NORMAL working day was arduous. Even if Aird’s portrait of a leisurely rise at eleven, followed by squash or golf and ending up at a night club, was far from typical, he frequently had only one or two official appointments in a day and his ‘stunts’ were relatively infrequent. A week picked at random in November 1923 has him acting as pall-bearer at Bonar Law’s funeral on Monday, receiving Smuts and dining with the Overseas League on Tuesday, spending a day of official visits in Winchester on Wednesday, lunching with the Child Emigration Society on Thursday and receiving a group of Indian dignitaries followed by the opening of Chatham House on Friday. Weekends were usually sacrosanct, though in this week the annual armistice ceremony at the Cenotaph took place on Sunday. Even this gentle routine was not conducted without protest – Bonar Law’s funeral deprived him of a day’s hunting. In fairness it must be said that these were only the public engagements, the Prince wrote many letters and interested himself in a variety of matters which would not figure in the official calendar. On Tuesday, for instance, he spent an hour discussing the affairs of the Duchy of Cornwall and had a long meeting with Lascelles and Thomas about a forthcoming visit to the north. But there was still plenty of time left over for whatever private diversions he chose to pursue.
What should not be forgotten, however, is that he could have done a great deal less. Beyond the few formal obligations which his position in the state imposed upon him it was entirely up to him how he spent his time. If he had chosen to devote himself exclusively to his own entertainment, his staff would have grumbled to each other and the King might from time to time have issued some remonstrance, but nobody could have done anything about it. In fact he devoted much time and energy to the causes which he had at heart, and used his very considerable influence to good effect on their behalf.
‘I can never speak too strongly or too often of the great debt that the Empire owes to its soldiers and sailors who fought and won the Great War,’ he had declared at the Mansion House in 1919. ‘I want all ex-service men in every part of the Empire, and particularly in the Old Country, to remember me as an old comrade-in-arms, one who wants them always to look on him as a comrade-in-spirit.’1 The ex-service men must have, he was convinced, if not a land fit for heroes, then at least a tolerable existence. That meant, above all, guaranteeing them a house to live in and a job to do. It should also mean education for their children, proper hospital treatment and all the desirable appurtenances of life in the twentieth century, but though he dutifully visited schools and hospitals, they were not his prime concern. Unemployment and housing were and remained the focus of his most serious efforts.
Many of the servicemen who returned after the First World War found no job waiting for them and little prospect of one in the future. 1.2 per cent of the work force had been unemployed in 1913; in 1920 the comparable figure was 9.8 per cent. Things were gradually to improve before fresh disaster struck the economies of the world in 1929, but wherever he went in the British Isles the Prince was confronted by evidence that his old comrades were suffering grievously, in body as well as mind. What he could do beyond the utterance of consoling bromides was the problem that exercised him most. Early in 1921 Sir Robert Horne, President of the Board of Trade and future Chancellor of the Exchequer, lunched with him. ‘I’m going to have it out with him about the unemployment,’ the Prince wrote stoutly to his mother.2 But though he could occasionally let off steam to ministers, he was conscious of the limitations of his knowledge as well as of his power. Esher taxed him with being unduly modest: ‘You certainly know quite as much as anybody else knows, and that is next to nothing.’3 But the Prince had no vestige of economic lore and a deep lack of confidence when it came to embarking on arguments with those whom he believed to be better qualified. All he could do was plead with the employers to be as expansive as they could and himself support well-intentioned institutions like the National Relief Fund: ‘The Prince of Wales,’ wrote Sir George Arthur, ‘in addition to his fine work in inaugurating the Fund, seems to have stumped up nearly £4000 for wages of the clerical staff.’4 In time the National Council of Social Service was to provide a framework in which he could fit his activities, but it was not until the 1930s that this organization began to have any noticeable effect.
On housing, equally, he would show endless interest, make encouraging noises, take every opportunity to visit slum areas and to deplore the things he saw, yet he had no effective power. ‘I don’t think there would be much discontent if only the people were housed properly,’ the Queen wrote to him in 1930.5 The Prince agreed. He did at least set a good example by rehousing the more shabbily accommodated of the Duchy’s tenants in London, and bringing farm workers’ houses on his estates in the West Country up to an acceptable standard, but this was little enough. A Prince of Wales need not inevitably be bound by such restrictions. If he had been a different man, more pertinacious, more able to concentrate, better qualified to master a brief and chair a committee, he might have made a more positive contribution to the housing and employment of the nation’s poor. He could have provided the public voice which the expert, however well-meaning, can so rarely find for himself; he could have goaded the great landlords and employers, city councils, the government itself, into taking steps to mitigate what he saw as being a national scandal. But neither by education nor by temperament did he have it in him. As it was, his periodic outbursts were taken as evidence of amiable eccentricity which could safely be ignored. His good will was boundless, his stamina and diligence less impressive.
Where he showed to best advantage was in the tours he under-took of the industrial north and the other great centres of population. ‘I’m all for touring the provinces and visiting industries a lot and not getting tied down to a lot of useless pompous dinners and engagements in London,’ he told Thomas.6 The concept was admirable, but he found that dinners were quite as useless and pompous in the provinces, and that the emotional demands of a great crowd in Glasgow or Newcastle were as taxing as any in Melbourne or Toronto. On the eve of a five-day tour of Yorkshire he confessed to his mother that he was dreading the prospect; ‘it is all such a terrible strain nowadays and it wears one to a shred’.7 Yet wherever he went he received a spectacular welcome. In 1926 he went to Birmingham with the young Conservative member of parliament Victor Cazalet. For five miles into the city centre crowds massed along the route: ‘It is amazing how popular he is,’ wrote Cazalet, ‘even the ordinary workmen come out and cheer lustily, and of course the women worship him. What an asset such a Prince is!’8
By hard work he had turned himself into a more than competent speaker, having the greater part of his speeches prepared by Lascelles or Thomas but adding remarks of his own – ‘usually very shrewd’ said Bruce Ogilvy.9 On a journey to Cardiff to unveil a war memorial he asked Lloyd George for a phrase in Welsh to round off his speech. Lloyd George suggested: ‘They will never be forgotten as long as the breeze blows over their grave.’ The Prince was delighted. ‘He pronounced it very well at the ceremony and it produced a tumult of cheering.’10 Lord Rosebery said of him that his quality could be seen in his public speaking: ‘He is a charmer. But he is more. I tell you … he will yet rive the bonnet of all you professional orators.’11
His radicalism and disapproval of social injustice were real enough, but he was still to the right politically. He rejoiced at the overwhelming victory of Baldwin’s Conservatives in 1924, on the grounds that it ‘must mean a little peace and a settled year or two anyway’.12 But though he was perhaps exaggeratedly conscious of the threat of communism, he did not, as many Tories did, lump all socialists and communists in a common revolutionary bloc. The King and the Prince of Wales, J. H. Thomas once declared, ‘knew their people … they recognized that patriotism, love of Empire, service, and duty were not the gift or monopoly of a class or creed’.13 In a conversation in the autumn of 1925 the Prince praised the Labour leaders for knowing their own people in a way no Conservative could hope to do. ‘I think the Labour people give me of their best,’ he went on, ‘and recognize that I am trying to understand their difficulties.’14
His support for the Conservative Party was in large part based on the affection and admiration he felt for the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. His letters in the mid-1920s are filled with laudatory references: ‘I’ve got great faith in Baldwin’s human personality and soundness’; ‘What a charming man, I like him so much’; ‘He’s absolutely straight and fair with no axe to grind or political stunts to pull.’15 Their intimacy was engineered by Godfrey Thomas and Baldwin’s secretary, Ronald Waterhouse, who set up a series of informal meetings at which everything and anything was held to be on the agenda. Both men enjoyed their talks and felt that they were of mutual benefit.16 By the time foreign competition impelled the pit-owners to try to impose harsher terms of employment on the coal-miners and the resultant imbroglio led to the General Strike of 1926, the Prince’s letters to the Prime Minister were couched in terms which Baldwin’s biographers described as demonstrating ‘affection, at times near veneration’.17
Whatever his reservations about the social and economic policies which had led the British working man to turn upon the government, the Prince was in no doubt that the General Strike was a threat to the realm which had to be resisted. He went out with the police, lent his car and chauffeur to transport the British Gazette to Wales, and resented the fact that he could do nothing directly himself to combat the communist agitators whom he believed to be behind the trouble.18 He put forward a proposal for a provincial tour but met with the response that, while many ‘would applaud the energy and public spiritedness of the enterprise’, it would pose serious security problems and would inevitably involve him in striking political attitudes and ‘taking sides’.19 But though he had no doubt where his loyalties lay, he did not see the issue as one of right and wrong, white and black. It had been ‘an amazing and wonderful week’, he told Fruity Metcalfe, ‘but disastrous at the same time as victorious’.20 He welcomed the conciliatory tone of Baldwin’s broadcast to the nation in May 1926 – ‘It’s wonderful and will help a lot, I’m sure’21 – and was strongly opposed to any measure that smacked of vengeance on those who had led the strike.
The Prince’s letter of congratulation was received by Baldwin within half an hour of the broadcast. Next day the Prime Minister showed it to Tom Jones, his confidant and deputy secretary of the Cabinet. ‘The PM was obviously much moved at receiving so promptly so cordial a message,’ wrote Jones.22 William Bridgeman, the First Lord of the Admiralty, later told the Prince how near to complete breakdown Baldwin had come; ‘I found that the words of sympathy he had received from you had done more to keep him up than anything else during those two or three days of terrific anxiety.’23
As the Depression began to bite and unemployment rose dramatically, the Prince’s tours of the industrial areas inevitably took on a political connotation. One of the most controversial was to the coal-mining areas of Durham and Northumberland early in 1929. Before he started Baldwin rather nervously asked him under whose auspices he was making the visit. The Prince replied that it had been suggested by Sir Alexander Leith, a pillar of the Conservative Party. Baldwin expressed great relief. ‘I was somewhat puzzled as to the precise difference between Conservative and Socialist humanitarianism,’ the Prince noted drily.24 He was accompanied on his tour only by Godfrey Thomas and Noel Curtis-Bennett, then in charge of the Coalfields’ Distress Organization, and he deserted the well-trodden ways to visit some of the smaller mining villages and call on the miners in their homes. He wrote to Baldwin on the return journey: ‘One really does have to see the conditions of housing, squalor and distress which exist to have any idea of what they have been ‘sticking’, many of them ever since the war, and the most striking impression that I retain is their amazing bravery and friendliness despite the ghastly times they are existing through.’ The most pathetic thing, he concluded, was that they ‘weren’t at all complaining, seemed glad to see one, and only told of their troubles when asked’.25
The tour, he believed, had done something to cheer the benighted. Curtis-Bennett went further; a tremendous success, he called it, ‘indeed from a human sympathy point of view it was probably the most remarkable event of recent years. His Royal Highness’s energy, enthusiasm and above all sincerity won all hearts and there can be no doubt that his visit brought a ray of happiness and hope to thousands of our unfortunate countrymen.’26 Lord Londonderry, immensely rich coalmine-owner and member of Baldwin’s government, saw things differently. The visit had been ‘very unfortunate from every point of view’. The Prince’s remarks about the ‘appalling’ or ‘perfectly damnable’ conditions had won most undesirable publicity. He had been hoodwinked by carefully contrived evidence of misery and destitution and had formed a ‘thoroughly stage managed point of view’. The miners would undoubtedly benefit by the Prince’s remarks when they next sought ‘further to exploit the community’.27
There can be no doubt that the Prince’s sympathy for the victims of the Depression was as sincere as Curtis-Bennett suggested. His cousin, Prince Christopher of Greece, said that he came back from the north looking tired and depressed. ‘I can’t get those poor fellows out of my mind,’ he said. ‘It’s terrible to see the despair in their eyes.’28 To the South African, Thomas Boydell, he fulminated about the unemployment and ‘hellish’ housing conditions: ‘It was obvious he was deeply conscious of the social and economic wrongs, and resented them with every fibre of his body.’29 How long the impression lingered, and how much he did once back in London to follow up these generous impulses, are harder to establish. Probably not much. But Lord Londonderry’s indignation shows that the Prince’s comments caused some alarm among the pit-owners and strengthened the hands of the miners. This alone was enough to justify the visit. And though the hopes which Curtis-Bennett said had been kindled in the hearts of the miners might not have been realized, surely it was better that they should believe someone in high places was concerned about their plight than that they should feel themselves totally neglected? The government had reason to feel grateful to him for having reminded people that all authority was not oppressive and all the rich were not indifferent to their woes.
It is sometimes said that Baldwin was discomfited by the success the Prince enjoyed on trips like these and tried to curb his freedom to tour the country. There is no evidence that he did so, or that he thought the views of men like Londonderry anything but self-interested and short-sighted. His opinion of the Prince was still extremely favourable. The friendship between Prime Minister and Prince was at its warmest before and during the tour of Canada in 1927. The ostensible object of the visit was to open the International Peace Bridge over the Niagara River between the United States and Canada. Baldwin came along because he thought it was high time a British prime minister visited Canada and also, no doubt, because he wanted to get to know his future King better than their occasional meetings in London permitted. The programme began with five hectic days of junketing in the cities of the east – ‘a frightful week of princing,’ the Prince described it to Freda Dudley Ward, with endless ceremonies by day and hospitality by night. ‘“Burning the candle”, etc, and I’m too old to make it now.’30 To his father he complained about the interminable speeches; ‘Of course the Canadian politicians love them. A speech to them is like a good day’s shooting to you.’31 The premier, Mackenzie King, was particularly long-winded. ‘He’s the limit and altogether very tricky and I can’t take to him at all,’ the Prince told Thomas, though after a long conversation after dinner in Ottawa he did admit that King became ‘less – well, bloody is the only word that comes to hand’.32
Tommy Lascelles, who was in attendance, had started off in a mood of considerable irritation with his employer, ‘as a stagemanager might feel if his Hamlet persisted in breaking off the play and balancing the furniture on the end of his nose’. He was particularly put out when the Prince dropped what Lascelles felt was the key sentence from a speech in Ottawa and substituted a funny story, ‘not an unsuitable one for, say, the Commercial Travellers’ Festival Banquet, but utterly out of place at the Govt of Canada’s ceremonial board’.33 After that things went better, however, and at his farewell dinner in Montreal, Lascelles reported, he ‘spoke better than I ever remember hearing him do – with no hesitation, with conviction and with weight and gravity’.34 And even when he had been misbehaving, Lascelles wrote ruefully, ‘damn him, he is so affectionate to me that I find it terribly hard to nourish vipers in my weak bosom’.35
The Prince himself seems to have been sublimely unaware that he had caused Lascelles any anguish. ‘Princing,’ he told Freda Dudley Ward, was much easier abroad: ‘Guess it’s because one isn’t hit up with a lot of old-fashioned and boring people and conventions. One feels somehow that people are so much more genuine out of England.’36 (The comment was echoed three years later by John Aird when the Prince spoke particularly well at the Spanish Club. ‘He seemed very happy, which I notice is always the case when he is with foreigners. He seems much more at ease with them than with the British.’37)
The actual ceremony on the Peace Bridge got off to an unfortunate start since the Prince, through no fault of his own, kept the American Vice President waiting for two hours. To increase the tension still further, Sacco and Vanzetti, the left-wing agitators, were due to be executed the following day for a crime which many believed they did not commit, and the Americans were in a panic because of threats that the Vice President would be assassinated by way of retaliation. ‘To emphasize the fact that we king-ridden Britons had really reached the land of the brave and the free,’ wrote Lascelles, ‘quantities of policemen, armed to the teeth, did a ceaseless ladies’ chain through the crowd all the time the ceremony was in progress.’38 Their pains were rewarded, Vice President and Prince were unmolested, the tape was cut, and the bridge duly opened.
The Prince and the Baldwins then set off westwards, travelling together as far as Alberta. In his memoirs the Prince was to claim that on this trip he first detected in Baldwin signs of the arrogance and John Bullish nature which were to become so much more apparent to him when he was King. There are no traces of this revelation in his letters of the period. To the Queen he reported that the Baldwins had been ‘most charming travelling companions … The PM has been absolutely wonderful …’39 ‘Absolutely marvellous,’ he wrote to Godfrey Thomas. The Prime Minister had made ‘some d – d good speeches … Mrs B has been wonderful too … A very nice family indeed and I’m glad to have got to know them.’40 Baldwin reciprocated this approval. The warmth of the Prince’s welcome had been a revelation, he wrote, the popular enthusiasm was extraordinary. ‘The Prince of Wales was at his best and it was a real pleasure to be with him.’41
It is hard to equate this feast of mutual congratulation with the response that Lascelles claimed to have received when he took advantage of a tête-à-tête with Baldwin to pour out his doubts about the development of the Prince and the future of the monarchy. He summarized his feelings in a letter to Godfrey Thomas: ‘The cold fact remains that, as Joey and I both agree, it would be a real disaster if, by any ill chance, he was called on to accede to the throne now and that neither of us see any prospect of his fitting himself any better, as time goes on, for what is, ultimately, his job in life, and ours – ie making a good, or at any rate, a safe king.’42
When he expounded this thesis to Baldwin, the Prime Minister is supposed to have appeared unsurprised, and to have given the impression that he had suspected it all already. If true, he kept his suspicions to himself; certainly nothing he said at this stage to the Prince gave any indication that he did not look forward to the next reign with sunny confidence.
Lascelles was the most rigidly high-principled of the Prince’s household. Himself a man of total integrity, he despised any shortcomings in lesser mortals. He attached the greatest importance to intellectual ability, and condemned sloppy thinking and judgments swayed by prejudice or sentiment. Though himself in fact one of the most emotional of men, he abhorred and feared it as the basis of activity in others. He saw humanity in black and white. Once he had extravagantly admired the Prince; now that he was disillusioned he found it hard to believe that the qualities he had applauded were all still there. His perception of his employer’s weaknesses increasingly blotted out any objective assessment of pros and cons. It was inevitable that the two men could not continue to work harmoniously together. A tour of Africa the following year brought about their separation.
The Prince had long wanted to go on safari in East Africa, more to observe the game than to destroy it, since as Lascelles warned Edward Grigg, political adviser to the royal tours of Canada and Australia and now Governor of Kenya, he was ‘definitely bored by shooting and fishing’.43 Amery, the Colonial Secretary, pleaded with him to give as much notice as possible: ‘His own preference would be to dash off without notice.’44 The Prince agreed, but refused to be tied down to an inflexible schedule on what he insisted was primarily a holiday trip. Lascelles urged Grigg to humour this wish. The Prince throve on the improvised and the unexpected, wilted when trapped into a formal ritual: ‘I can say with perfect truth that I have never seen the P do such good work, or play his part with greater advantage to himself and the Brit. Emp. than on those occasions when he had no set programme and has himself fixed up a plan of campaign with the man on the spot.’ There was also nothing to be done, he said, about the Prince’s refusal to bring dress uniform: full dress meant pomp and formality, formality would ensure that he did not do his best, ‘and his best is such a good best, that my own belief is that it outweighs the harm done by abrogating that outward regality to which we have all been accustomed in his predecessors’.45
The plan was for the Prince and Prince Henry to travel out together in September 1928, to pursue their separate safaris, then to join up and, if the rains permitted, continue overland to South Africa where they would spend Christmas with the Athlones. The two Princes diligently studied Swahili on the way out – ‘and are rather boring about it,’ commented Lady Grigg resignedly after their arrival46 – and enjoyed a preview of the seamier side of Kenyan life through the presence on board of Gladys, Lady Delamere. The Prince admitted to Freda Dudley Ward that he saw a lot of Lady Delamere, ‘but only faute de mieux … I guess she’s a bit keen but as I just couldn’t be less she has to be content with a little dancing for exercise.’47 He protested too much or too early; Gladdy Delamere was to play a conspicuous part in his sojourn in Nairobi.
Kenya was consumed by excitement at the Prince’s arrival. The ballroom at Government House was hurriedly completed, the roads round Nairobi were put in order, the shops burgeoned with new hats and dresses. ‘The English are completely crazy over their royal family,’ commented the writer Isak Dinesen – Baroness Blixen – in surprise, but soon she was as crazy as anyone. ‘The Prince is really absolutely charming, and I am so much in love with him that it hurts.’ He invited himself to a native dance at Isak Dinesen’s farm, spoke Swahili to the chiefs, and had an electrifying effect upon the natives.48 John Arthur, who had worked with the natives in Kenya for more than twenty years, told Grigg that his protégés were overwhelmed by the Prince’s ‘humility and his approachableness’. When the rain came and he turned up his collar like any other mortal they collapsed with astonishment. He aroused a spirit of ‘loyalty and real affection’ for what had been a remote institution. ‘It seems to me an absolutely vital change, fraught with infinite prospects for good.’49
All this Lascelles could applaud, but he found it hard to condone the more frivolous side of the visit, revelry by night and high jinks at that mecca of the more social settlers, the Muthaiga Club. ‘The Prince never likes going to bed before 3 a.m. I do wish I was in England,’ he remarked plaintively to Lady Grigg.50 Lady Delamere was at the centre of the merry-making, throwing herself at the Prince and, in the view of most beholders, making a considerable impression. At supper at the Muthaiga Club she bombarded him with pieces of bread, incidentally giving Isak Dinesen a black eye with a misdirected volley, and finished up by rushing at him, overturning his chair and rolling him around on the floor. ‘I do not find that kind of thing in the least amusing,’ commented Isak Dinesen.51 Lady Grigg did not find that the Prince improved on acquaintance. By the time the visit to Nairobi was over, she was describing him as ‘the most unpleasant and uncivil guest I have ever had in my house’. Yet only a few days before she had written of his ‘sweetness and charm. I simply adore the Prince,’ and when they next met she was to describe him as ‘a perfect host and so sweet’.52 It is striking how often those who condemned the Prince at one moment for frivolity or licentiousness, forgave him the next for his humility, his sweetness of nature, his eagerness to make amends.
The Prince told Freda Dudley Ward that he did not enjoy his stay in Nairobi, which he portrayed somewhat disingenuously as an unbroken series of ‘official stunts’ such as dinner and garden parties.53 He never felt at ease with Grigg, though he sympathized with his problems, caught as he was between the Colonial Office, who believed that in the long run Kenya should be ruled by its black inhabitants, and the white settlers, who felt still more emphatically that it should not. The Prince took the part of the settlers: ‘Why should they who have been pioneers in Kenya for 30 years, who have taught the natives everything they know, and who know them far better than any official ever could, why should they submit to a policy of equal rights with the natives and Indians which would change their position of “bwana” or master out here to that of merely the white section of the population?’ It was India over again; Montagu had ruined the proudest jewel in the imperial crown, now the Colonial Office, egged on by ‘labour and other political influences’, was moving on the lesser targets.54
The safari proper began in mid-November, with the great white hunter, Denys Finch Hatton, in charge of the operation. ‘We have been fairly good here – fairly,’ was Lascelles’s final judgment on the visit to Nairobi.55 At Malisa the Prince shot an elephant and thought it poor sport, easy and unexciting. He revised his view a few days later when a one-tusked elephant, which he had previously scorned as a target, erupted from the forest and charged the party. The Prince and Lascelles politely debated which of them should have the privilege of shooting the elephant, until it came to within about twenty feet, at which point Peter Pearson, of the Uganda Game Department, pushed the Prince into the comparative safety of a thorn bush and the professionals in the party opened fire. The elephant veered away when only eight feet from its enemies. ‘Does that often happen?’ asked the shaken Prince. ‘No, sir,’ replied Pearson irascibly. ‘We don’t usually go assing about arguing who is going to shoot the elephant!’56
The holiday was dramatically disrupted when ‘G’ Trotter suffered an almost lethal heart attack. The party was on the Upper Nile at the time and for a day he lay below in his cabin, on the fringes of death, with the doctor twice giving him up as lost and, in Lascelles’s words, ‘the Prince crying like a frightened child on deck’.57 ‘I nearly went mad,’ the Prince told Freda Dudley Ward. ‘… it’s been just one of the very longest days of my life and it would have been so ghastly if he had died.’58 Trotter survived, but clearly could not continue the trip beyond Kampala. Lascelles stayed with him until he could be loaded aboard a ship for England; ‘The Prince would have stayed too, but they have prepared this elaborate camp for him and the Governor was terribly anxious that he should not miss it, so we made him go.’59 This was only the first of the misfortunes which overtook the expedition. On 27 November 1928, when the Prince was beginning to think of joining up with his brother and heading for South Africa, a cypher telegram from Baldwin informed him that the King was dangerously ill. ‘We hope that all may go well,’ cabled the Prime Minister, ‘but if not, and you have made no attempt to return, it will profoundly shock public opinion.’60 Lascelles later recorded the scene in vivid detail, and though his description may have owed something to the animosity that he increasingly felt towards his former master, the story has the ring of truth. ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ was the Prince’s first reaction. ‘It’s just some election dodge of old Baldwin’s.’ Lascelles lost his temper: ‘Sir, the King of England is dying, and if that means nothing to you, it means a great deal to us.’ The Prince looked at him, went out without a word, and spent the remainder of the evening in the successful seduction of the wife of a local British official. ‘He told me so himself next morning,’ wrote Lascelles.61 According to another account, the Prince explained to a friend who expressed some surprise at his behaviour that this was the best thing to do after suffering a shock.62
He had suffered a shock, and coming on top of Trotter’s near death, it threw him totally off balance. He was not and never would be callous, but the death of the King would have meant not only the loss of a father but also his abrupt accession to the throne. The prospect was a dreadful one. The Duke of York told him of ‘a lovely story going about’ that the reason for his hurried return home was his fear that ‘I am going to bag the Throne in your absence!!!! Just like the Middle Ages.’63 The Prince was in no mood to be amused. He barely made sense in the first few days after the news reached him. Once he had accepted that his father’s life was really in danger, he wanted to return by air but was talked out of what would have been a decidedly hazardous enterprise. Instead he rushed to Dar-es-Salaam where a cruiser picked him up. The heavy luggage had gone on to South Africa, so he was still in his safari clothes when he arrived at Brindisi. Godfrey Thomas met him with something more suitable to wear and Mussolini’s special train hastened him on to England. At Brindisi he was also handed a letter from the Princess Royal rejoicing at his return: ‘You don’t realize what a help it is to Mama as she says she feels rather lost without being able to consult Papa and was so anxious to have you back.’64 And at Folkestone the Prime Minister told him that the King was weak and his life still in danger, even if he survived the Prince would have to shoulder much of the burden of monarchy in the coming year. He was thirty-four years old. Shades of the prison house had at last closed upon him.
From Uganda, in October, Lascelles had written that the Prince had not been doing at all badly but ‘I am thoroughly and permanently out of sympathy with him … His personal charm has vanished irretrievably so far as I am concerned, and I always feel as if I were working, not for the next King of England, but for the son of the latest American millionaire.’65 He could endure the work in London, he remarked a fortnight later, but he found the tours intolerable. And there was no reason to hope that these would diminish in number: ‘Only two things keep him at home now – riding races and F.W. Both those sheet anchors may part any moment; hunting, as opposed to pt to pts has already faded out of the picture, and he himself admits that F.W. won’t last for ever.’66 Shortly after their return to England Lascelles resigned. He profited by the occasion to tell the Prince exactly what he thought of him and his way of life. The Prince, wrote Lascelles, ‘heard me with scarcely an interruption, and when we parted, said, “Well, goodnight Tommy, and thank you for the talk. I suppose the fact of the matter is that I’m quite the wrong sort of person to be Prince of Wales” – wh was so pathetically true that it almost melted me.’ The Prince gave Lascelles a car as a leaving present, invited him to stay with him at his country house and treated him thereafter with his usual friendliness.67
Lascelles was not the only member of the household to feel dissatisfaction and distress. Thomas told him that he too was planning to resign: ‘My reasons are obviously the same as yours. I have for some time past ceased to do my job to my own satisfaction.’68 Halsey announced that he would go too: ‘Going out into Society is getting more and more difficult as one gets attacked on all sides about HRH’s shortcomings and general way of behaviour, and I have now become a professional liar.’69 But neither Thomas nor Halsey did resign. Partly, no doubt, this was because they were older men than Lascelles and would have found it harder to get another job. Even more, though, it was because they were still devoted to the Prince and believed that, when the time came, his good qualities would come to the fore and his weaknesses fall away. Lascelles could not feel loyalty towards an employer whom he did not thoroughly respect; Thomas and Halsey, Piers Legh too, could criticize and complain yet retain their allegiance towards and affection for their maverick master.
Thomas summed up the problem when he told Lascelles that, ‘HRH, knowing so little English history, alas, will always go on believing that, provided he carries out his public duties to the satisfaction of the Press and the man in the street, his private life is entirely his own concern. I’m terribly sorry for him, but unless someone can succeed in disabusing him of this idée fixe, I see nothing but disaster ahead.’70 In a memorandum that he wrote at this time he said that he thought ‘HRH’s high watermark had been in about 1922, since when he had shown a steady decline, with a sharper drop in the last two years’.71 Sadly Stamfordham agreed that the Prince’s stock had fallen, ‘not only among the Victorians, the old frumps like myself, but even the young and frivolous, to say nothing of the upper classes: … even the Eastenders and the Labour Party’. He longed, he said, to see the Prince ‘get into touch with a wider circle … remember his grandfather who never let go dignity, not be bored with state functions and all the “outward and visible” signs of monarchy’.72
The criticisms of the courtiers must be seen in perspective. Whatever Stamfordham may have believed, there is precious little reason to think that the Eastenders or the Labour Party, or for that matter the middle classes or the country gentry, felt that the stock of the Prince had fallen. Gossip about his drinking or his love affairs was confined to a small section of London society; complaints about his informality or his indifference to tradition were heard only from an old-fashioned and perhaps blinkered elite. But the circle of those who felt the Prince to be less than perfect widened by the day; and those who were losing faith in him were the very people with whom he would have to work in the forthcoming years. Their disapproval augured ill for the next reign.