THE PRINCE OF WALES IS SAID ONCE TO HAVE EXPRESSED approval of the Nepali system of government, under which the Crown Prince took over the reins of power as soon as he was mature, the old monarch being relegated to formal duties.1 In 1929, with his father incapacitated, he found that Katmandu had come to London. He was a member of the Council of State, he received Foreign Office telegrams though not Cabinet minutes, he took over all the visible functions of the King. Even when his father had recovered sufficiently to return to Windsor the Prince was still thrust to the forefront. It was he who stood beside the Queen when the American Ambassador, General Dawes, outraged protocol by appearing at court in trousers rather than knee breeches – a misdemeanour which the Prince found singularly easy to forgive. It was he who had to receive the Russian Ambassador when the King refused to be in the same room as a representative of the murderers of his cousin.2 When the New York World made much of this story, the Foreign Office dismissed it as mischievous and false; the Prince they said had received all foreign representatives presenting their credentials in 1929. To Bruce Lockhart, however, the Prince confirmed that his father had indeed balked at this unsavoury task; he himself had been quite content to take it on since he had hardly known the Tsar and accepted the Soviet government as an inescapable reality.3
By the beginning of 1930 the King’s recovery was so complete that the Prince was able to resume his interrupted safari. The trip differed from its predecessor in that for much of it his current favourite, Lady Furness, was in attendance – Lord Furness, too, but inconspicuously. The Prince was always happier when all his attentions could be concentrated on one object – promiscuity distracted but never satisfied him. On safari ‘the Prince’s tent was always on one end of the line and mine next to his, and we shared a fire’, Thelma Furness wrote in her memoirs;4 a convenient arrangement which would not have appealed to Tommy Lascelles.
Lady Furness was on a cross-country drive with the Prince when he collapsed and had almost to be carried to his train. There he was found to have a dangerously high temperature and malaria was diagnosed. The Prince had objected strongly to having a personal physician in attendance on safari, but fortunately for him an eminent Nairobi doctor had been sent along by Grigg disguised as a chauffeur.5 When he got back to Nairobi he was still feverish and semi-conscious but his recovery was rapid and he was soon well enough to be exigent about his food – prunes and dates were all he would eat – and to devour all the picture papers that Lady Grigg could procure for him.6 Stamfordham wrote to Grigg to congratulate him on the Prince’s wonderful recovery: ‘It was very gratifying to read what you said of the niceness and charm which the Prince displayed.’7 Either Grigg had larded truth with tactfulness or the Governer and his Lady were not as one; in her diary Lady Grigg noted: ‘I see his charm but I think he is ungracious and terribly self-centred.’8
The more the Prince travelled, the less inclined he felt to return home and settle down to ‘princing’. He wrote to Freda Dudley Ward from the Upper Nile, feeling ‘sunk, and inferiority complex worse than usual’. He was dreading the return to London and ‘all the silly stunting, and I’m getting too old now for all that silly artificial nonsense. The older I get, the bigger fool I’m made to look, and God knows that’s not difficult.’9
As always, his failure to get on with his father was an important factor in his malaise. Towards the end of 1928 things had gone better. The Prince ‘is closer to his Father and Mother in every way than he has been – probably since he was a child’, Halsey told Wigram.10 Halsey went too far, but the Prince surprised himself by the warmth he felt towards his father when he returned from Africa to find him ‘a little, shrunken old man with a white beard; the shock was so great that I cried’.11 Baldwin reported that the doctors tried to bar the Prince from what they feared would be the King’s deathbed, but he ignored them. ‘The old King, who had for nearly a week been practically unconscious, just opened half an eye, looked up at him and said: “Damn you, what the devil are you doing here?” And from that moment he turned the corner.’12 The scene might have echoes of the dying Henry IV’s confrontation with Prince Hal, but George V knew only too well that his eldest son was not hankering after the crown. The first half of 1929 showed a real rapprochement between father and son, as the Prince took on many of the burdens of monarchy. He even gave up riding in point-to-points. But as the King grew stronger, so the frail reconciliation crumbled. The Prince made little attempt to disguise the situation. When he visited Ealing Studios to see a film being made he regretfully left early on the grounds that he had to call on his father at Buckingham Palace. Basil Dean remembered that the prospect seemed to make him irritable and nervous. ‘From his remarks it was clear that relations between them did not run smoothly.’13 Sometimes the Prince set out to annoy and too easily succeeded, more often he gave offence inadvertently. A typical example was the King’s first Christmas message to the nation in 1932. The Prince, who had heard the broadcast rehearsed several times already, disappeared into the garden when the moment came. ‘I confess I was rather hurt that you should have gone out to play golf just when I made my short broadcast,’ complained the King.14
In March 1932 George V had what was for him an extraordinarily long and intimate conversation with his son. He told the Prince that he was still worshipped by the public but that this would not survive the gradual revelation of his private life, in particular his liaison with Lady Furness. He asked his son whether he was really happy and whether he did not wish to have someone to whom he could turn for sympathy and true affection. How could he face the loneliness of the throne without a Queen with whom he could share it? The Prince admitted he was not happy but said the only woman he had ever wanted to marry was Freda Dudley Ward. It was in the course of this conversation that the King asked whether his son had considered marrying ‘a suitable well-born English girl’, and the Prince replied that he had never supposed it would be possible. Next day the Prince told Halsey that he had had ‘a very satisfactory interview’ with his father. He thought the King ‘was a bit old-fashioned, and rather resented HM’s remarks on his personal friends. Otherwise HRH generally admitted that the King’s criticism of his behaviour was fair comment.’15
Two years later Thomas announced hopefully that the King was ‘going to take some action with HRH, which would be excellent … It can’t do any harm but might do good.’16 Nothing came of it, however, and this conversation in 1932 seems to have been the last attempt the King made seriously to influence his son, or to talk him into marriage. There were suggestions that Princess Ingrid of Sweden might be a suitable bride, but though the Swedish King personally liked the idea it was never seriously contemplated in York House, or even Buckingham Palace.17 Mountbatten, he said at the Prince’s behest, prepared a list of seventeen European princesses who were theoretically possible, ranging in age down to the fifteen-year-old Thyra of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, but such ritual gestures were made increasingly without conviction. No one who knew the Prince of Wales at all well believed by the mid-1930s that it was possible he would ever marry.
The King retreated into resigned despair. The records abound of his dire prognostications. ‘After I am dead the boy will ruin himself within twelve months,’ he is supposed to have said to Baldwin – the boy then being forty.18 ‘What use is it, when I know my son is going to let it down,’ he retorted to Archbishop Lang, who had congratulated him on the high standing of the monarchy.19 ‘My eldest son will never succeed me. He will abdicate,’ he told the courtier Ulick Alexander.20 And finally, and most bitter, when within a few weeks of his death: ‘I pray to God my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne.’21 Such remarks may have been embellished by the hearer, or not have reflected the King’s considered views, but there can be no doubt that in the closing years of his reign he viewed the prospects of his successor with the utmost pessimism. Not all the Prince’s retinue would have agreed with Lascelles that the pessimism was well justified. His equerry, John Aird, for one, believed that the King was ill-informed about his son’s real nature and activities and that his concerns were for the most part illusory. ‘I have been told that HRH’s behaviour is killing the King,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘If so I am very sorry, but feel that it is not probable and quite unnecessary.’ The trouble, he felt, lay with the courtiers, the staff at York House not excepted, who eagerly retailed to the King ‘all the nasty gossip, which is very wrong of them and does no good’.22
As his brothers did what he had failed to do and married, so the Prince drifted away from them. The pattern of his life was not suited to the domesticity of the royal Princes. The inimitable Crawfie – Marion Crawford, who had been governess to the Princesses since 1932 – described in her book about the royal children how he would regularly visit the Yorks and romp in the children’s nursery after tea, but in fact he saw the Duke of York with increasing rareness and never penetrated to the nursery. Freda Dudley Ward’s two daughters were far more like nieces to him than the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. Prince Henry he rarely saw; when the future Duke of Gloucester became engaged in 1935 he did no more than express mild surprise that he could not remember having ever met his fiancée. ‘I am glad for Harry and hope they will be very happy,’ was the limit of his fraternal rapture.23
Prince George was both the closest to him and gave him by far the most cause for concern. After he left the Navy Prince George took up residence in York House. Intelligent, artistic and disastrously ready to sample any delight that might be laid in front of him, he quickly proved ill-equipped to look after himself in the jungle of London society. He was a constant source of anxiety to his parents, and one of the reasons why the Prince of Wales got on better with them in 1928 and 1929 was their shared anxiety about his brother. The trouble came to a head when Prince George fell into the clutches of an attractive American called Kiki Preston who introduced him to drugs. For several months the Prince tried to persuade both parties to break it off, then intervened heavily in the summer of 1929. Somehow he forced Mrs Preston to leave the country and to write to Prince George saying that she would henceforth live permanently abroad. As for his brother, he more or less incarcerated him in the country and personally took charge of his recuperation. He told Freda Dudley Ward how exhausting he found the work of ‘doctor, gaoler and detective combined’, but he was getting used to it. ‘I know I shouldn’t feel bitter and disappointed that my holiday with you has gone West and on the contrary should only be too delighted that the cure is going so well.’24 A month or so later he was still unable to fix up a meeting with her, ‘but the cure has reached rather a tricky and critical stage and it may be that I’ll be needed this next fortnight’. To soothe his nerves, he told her, he had taken up needlework, which he did while sitting in Prince George’s sickroom: ‘It would make you laugh and maybe cry a little too.’25
By the end of 1929 the worst was over and in mid-January 1930 the Prince was able to tell the King that he felt happier about the future: ‘It really is a terrible and terrifying thing to happen to anyone, and far worse to one’s brother.’26 In South Africa he discussed the case with his aunt Alice. ‘He really has given me an enormous amount of trouble and anxiety and I worry over him all the time, even while I’m away … The old saying “Boys will be boys” is all right until you get too old and should have known the form better.’27 A few weeks later he received a ‘long, pathetic and repentant’ letter from Prince George, but though every word in it was obviously sincere, he still had doubts about how permanent the cure was going to prove.28 He was right; in 1932 Prince George ran into Kiki Preston while in Cannes and had to be removed almost by force. ‘I was sorry for HRH as he took it so much to heart …’ wrote Aird. ‘I was very much impressed with the way he handled the situation.’29
His brother’s troubles undoubtedly caused the Prince real and lasting pain but he would have been superhuman if he had not felt a tremor of satisfaction when he told his mother how sad it was that somebody who possessed as much charm and intelligence as Prince George should be ‘such a bad “picker”, both as regards friends and the company he keeps. He seems to lack all sense of knowing what is so obviously the wrong thing to do.’30 For one who had so often been criticized for his selection of friends and his talent for doing the wrong thing, it must have been agreeable to be so conspicuously enrolled among the angels. The patience, the determination and the self-sacrifice that he showed in caring for his brother were of the highest order. Getting Prince George off drugs, wrote Bruce Ogilvy, was ‘a very good mark for the Prince, as I am sure he was largely responsible’.31 On this at least the King was equally approving: ‘Looking after him all those months must have been a great strain on you, and I think it was wonderful all you did for him.’32
In 1934 Princess Marina of Greece became engaged to Prince George. She had been a friend of Freda Dudley Ward, who had once suggested she might make a suitable wife for the Prince of Wales. The Prince liked her and appreciated her beauty, but was no more disposed to marry her than any other continental princess. He was startled when the engagement was announced. ‘Brother George was quick on the job, wasn’t he?’ he commented to Godfrey Thomas. ‘So d—d quick that one wonders how long it will last. You know my views on “Royal Marriages”, so that unless they really are fond of each other I’m sorry for both. However, marriage of some kind was the only hope for him, giving him some responsibility and a home of his own.’33 The wedding took place in Westminster Abbey, preceded by a Greek Orthodox service. At the latter the Prince of Wales caused a mild furore when he not only absent-mindedly pulled out a cigarette but lit it on a candle held by a priest.34 It did not take him long to conclude that his doubts were uncalled for. The Duke and Duchess of Kent, as they had now become, really were fond of each other. They became his closest friends and allies in the royal family and regular visitors at his homes.
The home to which they came most often was Fort Belvedere. This castellated folly – ‘a child’s idea of a fort,’ Diana Cooper called it35 – lay on the edge of Windsor Great Park above Virginia Water. The Prince had asked his father for the use of it in 1929. ‘What could you possibly want that queer old place for?’ asked the King. ‘Those damn weekends, I suppose.’36 It was more than that, it was a home, the first home he had ever had, the house he always said he loved more than any other material thing. With the help and advice of Freda Dudley Ward he redesigned the interior, put in extra bedrooms and bathrooms, built a swimming pool and a tennis court. But it was the garden and surrounding grounds that gave him the greatest joy. Inheriting a jungle of rhododendrons, laurels and scrubby birches, he set to work to carve great vistas and to open up the house. Whenever he had a spare hour he would plunge into the undergrowth. At lunch time, if there were no guests and sometimes if there were, the footman would bring him out an apple and a cup of tea. He would whistle to indicate his arrival, the Prince would whistle back, and eventually the two would stumble across each other. He would keep at his pursuit until the last moment and would then rush in, stripping as he advanced through the house, his shirt in the hall, his trousers in the doorway, until he arrived naked by the bath. Any guest was recruited to help in the work. ‘Prince of Wales has gone mad on gardening,’ noted Bruce Lockhart in his diary. ‘Taken to it 100 per cent like golf. Prince George wanted to bring Marina down. Prince of Wales put him off several times. At last agreed grudgingly, if George would bring a scythe. George had to cut grass all afternoon.’37
For the Prince it was the antithesis of Windsor Castle, of all that was formal or pompous. He flew from the tower not the Prince of Wales’s standard but the flag of the Duchy of Cornwall. Responsibilities and dignity fell away when he was there. Once a consignment of gramophone records was delivered, labelled unbreakable. Determined to test this boast to the uttermost he and the Duke of York took them on to the terrace and began to throw them around like discuses. Then the game was transferred indoors and only stopped when a particularly treasured lamp was broken.38 Meals were – by the standards of palace life – informal, clothes even more so. There was dancing after dinner, or sometimes not too taxing paper games. ‘Frank Estimations’ was briefly a favourite. In this game each person gave himself points out of ten for certain qualities, while the other players did the same and handed in their lists anonymously. The marks were then compared. On one occasion the Prince gave himself three for sex appeal against a popular verdict of four; six for good looks against eight; five for charm against eight; and ten for sincerity against a mere three and a half. He was indignant at this judgment. ‘Sincerity is the most important qualification I think I have,’ he expostulated.39
Secluded in the woods as it was, Fort Belvedere was an ideal site at which to practise the bagpipes. He had first learned to play this fearsome instrument at Oxford, had neglected it since, but now took it up with redoubled fervour. On a trip in the Mediterranean he even conceived a slow march, which he kept in his head and played to George V’s piper, Henry Forsyth. Forsyth set it down as music and the Prince’s career as composer attained its apotheosis when the pipes of the Scots Guards played ‘Mallorca’ at the Derby Day dinner in 1935.40 Not all his guests appreciated his prowess. When asked how he liked the pipes, Thomas Beecham replied candidly: ‘Not much, and then only on the other side of a mountain.’ His punishment was to be subjected to a barrage of music from his host and Piper Fletcher.41 His other musical speciality was the ukulele, on which he would strum away for hours. Once Godfrey Thomas brought his schoolboy son Michael to Fort Belvedere. Michael was exiled to the kitchen for supper. The Prince heard he was there, came downstairs, and sat on the table playing the ukulele while Michael ate.
The performance says more for his good nature than his musical appreciation. His contretemps with Rubinstein at Lady Colefax’s dinner illustrates both his limitations in this field and the problems of the biographer. Kenneth Clark records how the Prince, when Rubinstein was persuaded to play Chopin’s Barcarolle after dinner, was upset because he had expected the intermezzo from The Tales of Hoffman. When Rubinstein embarked on a Chopin Prelude at 10.15 p.m., the Prince rose to leave. The situation was only saved by Noël Coward, who took over the piano. Rubinstein left in dudgeon, escorted by Clark who murmured polite nothings about the philistinism of the British.42 Harold Nicolson tells much the same story, but puts the time of the Prince’s attempted departure at a more respectable 12.30 a.m. and has Rubinstein embarking on his fourth piece.43 Bruce Lockhart maintains that the Prince looked bored but made no attempt to leave.’44 Finally Rubinstein himself says that the Prince was an old friend with whom he had spent several uproarious evenings at the Embassy Club. It was a standing joke between them that the first time Rubinstein had played the piano at York House, a leg had broken and the instrument collapsed in ruins. He knew perfectly well that the Prince cared nothing for classical music and liked him none the less well because of it. The Prince had not, as Clark recorded, reproached Rubinstein with playing the wrong Barcarolle, but had not noticed the difference. Rubinstein had been amused but not in the least offended.45
If the problems of a biographer are so complex over an incident as trivial as the above, how much worse it is when it comes to deciding what an individual really thought about serious political or social issues. Not only does every witness tell a different story but the principal character himself will almost certainly prove fluctuating in his views and unclear in his own mind as to what at any given moment those views might be. The Prince of Wales’s opinions on international affairs were slow to take shape and not conspicuously consistent or coherent when they had done so. Before 1930 or thereabouts, he took no special interest in the world outside the Empire. Bruce Lockhart remembers him in 1926 sitting up until two and talking about Russia and Central Europe, but the chances are that he was determined to sit up until two and had to talk about something.46 But it was during this period that he shed the prejudices that had dominated him at the end of the First World War. Germany ceased to be the hated enemy, perhaps, in part, due to the influence of the Dudley Ward family who regularly took their holidays there and were fond of the people and the country. France ceased to be the favoured ally, as the memory of wartime comradeship faded. ‘The Franco-German situation looks mighty bad, doesn’t it?’ he wrote to his father in 1923. ‘The French really are impossible people, and so impetuous.’47 By the end of the 1920s his thinking was dominated by sharp fear of the communist threat from Russia, sympathy for Germany in its economic and political woes, and doubts about the good judgment of the French. It was his fear of the communists and doubts about the French that combined to make him view the future of Germany first with apprehension and then with hope.
The 1930s show him taking a more informed interest in foreign affairs. Harold Nicolson met him at dinner and discussed ‘America and diplomacy … He knows an astonishing amount about it all. ‘What can I do?’ he says. ‘They will only say, ‘Here’s that bloody Prince of Wales butting in.”’48 Duff Cooper was amused when the Prince began to interrogate an American shooting friend, Harry Brown, about the latest decision of the Supreme Court. Brown had to admit ‘that neither he, nor, so far as he was aware, any of his friends at Palm Beach had ever heard of the Supreme Court’.49 But the Prince’s interest was selective and depended on whom he had happened to meet or where he had been. In 1935 he put forward a project for a tour by yacht of the resort ports of Italy. ‘I fear you don’t read the newspapers much,’ wrote his father, ‘otherwise you would know that our relations with Italy at the moment are distinctly strained about Abyssinia.’50 The Prince in fact did know quite a lot about British relations with Italy, and had considerable sympathy with the Italian position, but he saw no reason why what he regarded as the mismanagement of the Foreign Office should disturb his holiday plans.
Increasingly his belief that communism posed the most important threat to the future of Europe coloured all his other convictions. Count Mensdorff, a former Austrian Ambassador in London and exceptionally well-informed about British affairs, called on him in November 1933 and was amazed how much sympathy the Prince expressed for the Nazi Party in Germany – ‘Of course it is the only thing to do,’ he said, ‘we will have to come to it, as we are in great danger from the Communists too.’ Mensdorff got the impression that the Prince had given little thought to the realities of National Socialism, or to the likely future for such a regime.51 But this did not stop him defending it publicly. About the same time he told Louis Ferdinand of Prussia that Germany’s internal affairs were its own business and added ‘that dictators were very popular these days and that we might want one in England before long’.52
It is important to put such remarks in the context of their times. The Prince saw the balance of power in Europe as lying between a degenerate and enfeebled France and a virile and resurgent Germany. He admired the achievements of National Socialism in the fields closest to his heart, of housing for the workers and of unemployment. He ignored, or paid little attention to, the thuggery and brutal authoritarianism which were the hallmarks of the regime. He was mildly anti-Semitic, in the manner of so many of his class and generation, but would never have condoned persecution, still less genocide. He believed the horror stories which were beginning to filter out of Germany to be at the best exaggerated and more often propaganda, based on communist disinformation. In all this he shared the views of a large proportion, possibly a majority, of senior Conservatives, and was far more moderate than some. He was encouraged in his attitude by some who within a few years were themselves to be the victims of German aggression. The future King Olav of Norway in December 1935 wrote to him deploring the fact that France had ‘doublecrossed the whole of the League and us all’, and said that the only hope for a secure Europe was ‘a close relationship between England and Germany’.53
A visit that he paid to Austria early in 1935 shows him in a different light. Walford Selby, the British Ambassador, thought that his presence gave support to the Austrians at a time when they were under much pressure from Hitler.54 Selby was perhaps professionally bound to think things like that. But the left-wing journalist G. E. R. Gedye praised the way the Prince insisted on visiting the model workers’ houses which were the legacy of the previous government and refused to go to the Rathaus. ‘Rathaus?’ he exclaimed, when his barber at the Hotel Bristol expressed surprise at this, ‘Good God no! What on earth would my workers think of me in London if I went to that place which the Fascists took away from the Socialists?’ According to Gedye, ‘Soon all underground Socialist Vienna was seething with admiration for the Prince.’55 If this was indeed the case, then their seething was far from justified; but if one is going to view this sort of story with scepticism, it is only fair to be equally sceptical about accounts which make the Prince out to be a crypto-Fascist and a would-be Jew-baiter.
The German government certainly attached great, perhaps exaggerated importance to his attitude. To have support in high places in London was one of their objectives, to find it in the man who must soon occupy the highest office in the realm was an unlooked-for bonus. Successive German Ambassadors were instructed to cultivate him; National Socialist sympathizers among his German relations were despatched with messages of good will from the Nazi leaders; the Duke of Brunswick was even asked to arrange a marriage between his seventeen-year-old daughter Frederica and the Prince. The Duke pleaded that the difference of ages was too great, and in the end she became Queen of Greece.56 There was no shortage of reports from the German Embassy to convince Hitler that the Prince was a useful ally. In April 1935 the Ambassador, Leopold von Hoesch, described him as being critical of the Foreign Office’s one-sided attitude on German affairs and said that he ‘once again showed his complete understanding of Germany’s position and aspirations’.57 In June of the same year Wigram told the King that Ribbentrop, Hitler’s principal adviser on foreign affairs, had met the Prince at a party given by Lady Cunard. Subsequently Ribbentrop telegraphed Berlin to report that the Prince had once again showed complete sympathy with Germany’s aspirations. ‘After all, he is half a German,’ he added in explanation.58 ‘I cannot believe there is any truth in this,’ Wigram told the King, but in fact he took the story seriously and he was probably not wrong to do so. In congenial surroundings the Prince was capable of startling indiscretions, and on most issues of international policy he felt that there was much right on the German side. He would have preferred it if there had been no Anschluss, if the Germans had not so overtly menaced Czechoslovakia, if they had been more restrained in their demands for the return of their colonies, but on all these issues he condoned German behaviour and encouraged the forces of compromise.
He made no attempt to conceal his views. At dinner at Lady Colefax’s in mid-1935 there was a long discussion of foreign policy. Brendan Bracken was ‘very anti-German and warlike’; Bruce Lockhart ‘rather anti-French and our own foreign policy’; the Prince ‘came out very strong for friendship with Germany: never heard him talk so definitely about any subject before’. After this episode Bruce Lockhart was accused of influencing the Prince in favour of the Germans. ‘Quite untrue,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘The Prince of Wales had been playing about with this pro-German idea long before our conversation.’59 There was much pro-German sentiment in Britain, reported the American Ambassador: ‘The Prince of Wales has become the German protagonist.’60
It was the German dream that the Prince might not only influence his fellow countrymen in favour of their position, but that he might one day intervene more directly in the machinery of government and himself shape British foreign policy. Though his information was admitted to be only at third hand, the German Ambassador in Washington reported the Prince as saying that he did not share his father’s view that it was the King’s duty meekly to follow the Cabinet’s bidding. ‘On the contrary, he felt it to be his duty to intervene if the Cabinet were to plan a policy which in his view was detrimental to British interests.’61 This too is not implausible, though it is unlikely that the Prince had given any thought to what he meant by ‘intervene’. Certainly he believed in strong government, and saw no reason why a monarch should not play a part in it. In Germany he felt the threat of communism had become so desperate that strong government was essential. In Britain it was as yet only desirable, but the need was growing every day. In May 1934 the Home Secretary buttonholed the Prince and told him how anxious he was about the fascist Blackshirt movement. Aird was in attendance. ‘Talking to HRH on the way back we agreed that, without knowing much about them, we both thought it quite a good movement except for Mosley.’62
The Prince’s views led him into conflict with the government in June 1935, when he addressed the British Legion and proposed that a group of its members should visit Germany: ‘I feel there would be no more suitable body … of men to stretch forth the hand of friendship to the Germans than we ex-Servicemen.’ This proposal was greeted with loud cheers, said The Times;63 the cheers were muted in the Foreign Office. The Prince claimed that the text had been cleared in advance through the Legion’s President, Sir Frederick Maurice; the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, Vansittart, denied that there had been any consultation.64 The Cabinet considered the matter a week later and were told that the Prince’s remarks had been ill-received in Paris and had complicated the Anglo-German naval conversations that were then going on. They concluded that the Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary should have been consulted. As a special exception it was agreed that the King could show the Cabinet conclusions to his son.65
The Prince was genuinely taken aback by the uproar. He told Hoesch that he had not wished ‘to get involved in the maelstrom of political events but had only expressed, entirely on his own initiative, an idea which had seemed to him right and useful’.66 The British public was largely unaware of the contretemps, but if they had known about it most people would probably have thought that he had done well. The delight with which the proposal was received by the Nazi leadership should, however, have suggested to him that he had handed them a propaganda weapon. Prince Henry of Reuss spoke for Hitler when he congratulated the Prince on his bold initiative: ‘All of us know perfectly well that You in Your exposed position would never have taken a step which would not have been felt deeply by Yourself … That’s good sport!’67 The British Legion party was welcomed effusively in Germany, their visit including, according to a refugee, a visit to the concentration camp at Dachau during which the inmates were herded underground and their places taken by SS guards dressed up as contented and well-fed prisoners. The visitors sent back telegrams to George V and the Prince, rejoicing in their ‘overwhelmingly friendly reception’.68
Almost immediately the Prince was in trouble again for a speech he made at Berkhamsted Boys School, in which he praised members of the Officers’ Training Corps for their excellent results in shooting. ‘It is always a mystery to me,’ he said, ‘that a certain number of misguided people – I will even go so far as to call them cranks – should feel that the only way in which they can express the feeling we all have of abhorrence of war … is by discouraging, and if they are in authority prohibiting, any form of healthy discipline and training.’69 The rearmament lobby, led by Churchill, who had deplored the British Legion speech, found nothing to criticize on this occasion; it was George Lansbury, the pacifist and socialist, who denounced it and said OTCs and all other paramilitary organizations should be abolished.70
Four considerations above all shaped the Prince’s thinking over this period. The first was that war was a prospect so horrible that almost any sacrifice was justified to avoid it. Alfred Munnings tells how the Prince once noticed in his studio a bronze statuette of an exhausted infantryman. He looked at it in silence, then said ‘Poor b—!’, and asked to buy it and meet the artist.71 The horror of the trenches, made all the more horrible by the fact that he had not been allowed to participate in it himself, always haunted him and dominated his mind whenever the risk of war seemed imminent. Second, he believed that the greatest safeguard against war was to remain strong oneself; on issues of rearmament he was at one with Churchill. Third, he felt Russia and international communism to be a greater threat to the future of Britain than fascism. And fourth, he was convinced that many of the claims of Germany, and for that matter of Italy, were justified, and that to satisfy them was not ignoble appeasement but a sensible acceptance of political realities.
The Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 illustrated his attitude. He believed that Italian pretensions were not unreasonable, and that it was anyway folly to alienate Mussolini over an issue on which he considered the British were virtually powerless to intervene. He deplored the fact that the Foreign Secretary, Samuel Hoare, was driven into resignation because of the deal he had struck with the French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval, which in effect gave Mussolini a free hand in Abyssinia. He attended the debate in the House of Commons at which Hoare made his resignation speech, and openly declared that he did not believe the imposition of sanctions on Italy could possibly achieve the intended aim. In this he once again reflected the opinion of a substantial section of the Conservative Party and must have been close to the private views of the Prime Minister and of his successor, Neville Chamberlain. It has been said that he did more than express approval of Hoare’s manoeuvrings. Fanciful accounts, based on the insubstantial testimony of Laval’s son-in-law René de Chambrun, allege that he flew to Paris in December 1935 to confer with Laval about the Abyssinian problem.72 It is evident from his personal records that it would have been extremely difficult for him to have squeezed in a visit to Paris at this period; if he did so his staff had no knowledge of it – a difficult trick for him to bring off; and it is anyway impossible to imagine what benefit could have been derived either by the Prince or by Laval from such a meeting. The report can safely be ignored. But the Prince did think that Hoare and Laval were right and that the policy of Hoare’s successor, Anthony Eden, was ill-conceived and ill-managed.
Outside Europe, the Prince’s interest centred on South America, an area which, in common with most British bankers and industrialists, he inexplicably believed was on the verge of an economic breakthrough. He toured the area in 1931, unashamedly with the aim of boosting trade. ‘I hope I may be able to help our industries a little,’ he told his mother. ‘That is my only desire, and if I can get some enjoyment out of it, so much the better.’73 Prince George came along and the two busily brushed up their Spanish on the way out. Aird marvelled at the way the Prince would complain bitterly about trifling impositions and yet work hard at something really troublesome, like learning a foreign language. He found a Spanish doctor on board and persuaded him to act as tutor, a role in which, Aird suggests, his efforts were seconded by an attractive Peruvian girl.74 The results were excellent; the Prince was already a competent Spanish speaker and quickly attained considerable fluency. He was proud of his prowess and in future never missed a chance to air his talent; Owen Morshead reported him taking a party of Argentine students round Windsor Castle, ‘talking in courageous and as it appeared to me adequately correct Spanish – at any rate it was faultlessly fluent’.75
The tour illustrated vividly the sort of pressures to which the Prince was subject on such occasions and the way in which he increasingly succumbed to them. It can be followed through the reports of the American diplomats along the route, who expressed themselves with a freedom that to their British colleagues would have smacked of lèse-majesté. All went swimmingly in his first stop, Peru. The American military attaché said that he made an excellent impression – ‘He was democratic and anxious to go out of his way to show small kindnesses to the poor’ – while the Ambassador praised his unsparing readiness to do all that was asked of him and marvelled at the amount he could drink while still preserving his dignity.76 In Chile the naval attaché reported that he created a tremendous amount of good will ‘by his willingness and desire to meet people’. He ‘made a very good impression’, confirmed the Ambassador. ‘He is endeavouring to subordinate himself to the task in hand, and he knuckles under and does quite a good job’ – ‘quite’, presumably, in the American sense and thus implying greater enthusiasm than would be deduced from the English usage. The Ambassador added a manuscript postscript on the Prince’s ‘extra-curricular activities; baccarat, roulette, double whiskey sodas and ladies with pasts were his favourites’.77
By Argentina the pace was beginning to tell. His informality, so successful when he was at his best, was less well received when he turned up at important functions two hours late, in the wrong dress and noticeably the worse for wear. He gave offence to many people who considered themselves important and some who really were. But nevertheless the American Ambassador concluded: ‘The Prince of Wales is still Britain’s great salesman, his cordial, carefree democratic manner wins even those who would go out of their way to criticize him, and it is because of his personality that we believe that Great Britain as a whole has gained by his visit here.’78
In Uruguay the scales had dipped the other way: ‘I regret to observe that His Royal Highness … appeared to be deeply tired, rather uninterested, and to have unfortunately lost a great deal of the personal charm which was so long the most engaging of his many delightful qualities.’79 Rio de Janeiro was disaster: the Princes insisted on meeting the wrong people, were rude and casual, invariably late for engagements. ‘Neither their suite nor the British Ambassador appeared to have any control over them, and their conduct was marked by a desire to gratify their personalities rather than to conform to the rules which usually guide distinguished foreigners.’80 Finally in Sao Paolo, with the end in sight, he pulled himself together. His visit ‘aroused great enthusiasm among everyone and the British are intensely proud of the two Princes and with reason, for they have won the good will of everyone with whom they have been in contact’. But the Ambassador noted with some amusement that, though the Prince urged everyone to buy British, he himself smoked Camels, used a Kodak camera, rode in a Lincoln and went to see an American film.81
Even at his worst, the Prince could do good work when the need was greatest. After his sojourn in Buenos Aires, Aird remarked that he did not know whether the British Ambassador ‘felt most relief at our departure or apprehension at the social consequences’. Yet at the opening of the British Empire Trade Exhibition, which was at the heart of his visit, ‘HRH put up a wonderful performance, making two speeches, one in English and the other in Spanish’. His speech to the Chamber of Commerce that evening was ‘one of the best I’ve ever heard him make, quite natural, obviously his own ideas and criticisms which were very good to my mind’.82 In Argentina he worked vigorously to promote the sales of British aircraft, flying everywhere in his own De Havilland Puss Moth, and ensuring orders for several of these at least; ‘and more will follow if I can get my way in London’.83 In a Senate Committee enquiry in Washington into the munitions industry, Mr Driggs referred to the Prince’s visit to Argentina. ‘He is their best salesman, they say, and creates good will, and it is a gesture of the royal family interesting itself in British business.’84
It was said of the Prince of Wales – and sometimes fairly – that he would be quick to take promising initiatives, but equally quick to abandon them when the going got rough or tedious. In the case of Latin America at least the charge was unfounded. He made a sustained if largely fruitless effort to persuade British manufacturers that the prospects for profitable trade were there but were being lost through inertia and complacency. He urged the Foreign Office and British news agencies to do more to improve the coverage of British affairs in South American newspapers. He sponsored the visit of a group of Oxford undergraduates to Argentina, and encouraged the popular historian, Philip Guedalla, to set up the Ibero-American Institute, under whose auspices the ‘Prince of Wales’s Scholarships’ were established to send postgraduate Argentine students to Oxford.85 When a high-powered Argentine mission visited Britain in 1933, the Prince urged his father to make a fuss of them: ‘You know how much I hate any extra official receptions … but I really do feel that it is worthwhile in this case.’86 He himself met them on arrival; gave a dinner for them; went to two other dinners given in their honour; got them invited to the Duke of Portland’s home, Welbeck Abbey, for the weekend and joined the house party; and had two or three of the delegation to stay at his own country house the following weekend.
Though ministers may from time to time have wished that the Prince would be more discreet, their views on foreign affairs were for the most part very similar to his. It is doubtful whether Ramsay MacDonald or Baldwin, Simon or Chamberlain, would have seen anything to criticize in his assessment of the threat of communism, of a renascent Germany and of an unstable France. He ardently supported the National Government formed in September 1931. ‘You were so right in realizing that the financial position of Great Britain had gone beyond the realm of party politics and politicians and their platforms,’ he told the King. His only fear was that the rump of the socialist party would fall into the hands of extremists: ‘We must hope that it will not be anybody too violent or ignorant of what the nation – not the TUC – needs just now.’87 The government valued his support. When Britain went off the gold standard the Prince lunched with MacDonald at Chequers. ‘I thought it would be advantageous if he stayed a day or two in London before proceeding to Balmoral,’ wrote the Prime Minister. ‘I considered that that would have a good effect on the country.’88
But though his sympathies were with the old guard, the Prince tried to keep his lines open to other politicians, who might think differently on foreign affairs but whose views on internal policies were often more in line with his own. Anthony Eden, who was to take Hoare’s place as Foreign Secretary after the latter’s resignation, had a long talk with him in November 1934. ‘South America was his favourite topic,’ he noted in his diary. On domestic politics, ‘he shows a shrewd appreciation of men and matters and is probably more receptive than the King. Very friendly and I liked him’.89 Churchill too, though the Prince increasingly doubted his judgment, remained an ally. The Prince was one of the 140 or so friends who clubbed together in 1932 to buy Churchill a motor car as a celebration of his recovery after an accident in New York.90
Harold Nicolson saw him as a ‘very right wing’ figure. When Nicolson described himself as ‘an evolutionary socialist’, the Prince appeared horrified.91 Yet when he diverged from the policies of the National Government it was increasingly over social issues. In April 1934 he told the American Ambassador, Robert Bingham, that there had to be a ‘change in conditions here, and a correction of social injustice among the English people which would relieve poverty and distress; that this must come and that it would come either wisely, constructively and conservatively, which would save the country, or it would come violently, which would destroy it …’ What Britain needed, he said, was leadership of the kind Roosevelt was giving to the United States.92 He was always strikingly open to opinions that to most Conservative politicians would have seemed revolutionary and seditious. He summoned the firebrand Clydesider David Kirkwood for a conversation, dismissing Kirkwood’s plea that he had no proper clothes with the brisk retort: ‘It is you, not your clothes, that I want to talk to.’ Kirkwood harangued him as if at a public meeting: ‘But the Prince of Wales egged me on.’ Kirkwood talked for fifty minutes, and at the end of their meeting, ‘I felt, as I feel when I see an expert engineer at work, that I had been in the presence of a man who had a big job to do, and is earnest, and determined to do his job well.’93
Unemployment, which reached epidemic proportions in the early 1930s, remained the Prince’s principal concern. Towards the end of 1927 he had become Patron of the National Council of Social Service; a somewhat amorphous organization which was intended to organize the plethora of voluntary organizations into some sort of loose federation, so as to eliminate muddle and duplication. He recognized that neither he nor the Council could do much to alleviate the economic malaise that was the root cause of unemployment, but believed there was still a great deal to be done by encouraging job creation and organizing social centres in the depressed areas. Addressing the National Council in January 1932 he called upon the whole country ‘to accept the challenge of unemployment as a national opportunity for voluntary social service, to undertake such services in the spirit of the good neighbour and, refusing to be paralysed by the size of the problem, to break it up into little pieces’. The response was overwhelming, more than seven hundred schemes were put forward to the Council in the course of 1932, many foolish but others practical and useful.94 One scheme which he personally introduced involved the employment of extra men in Windsor Great Park. Sufficient funds were raised to keep twenty-four men in work for four months at least. ‘This is being done in a lot of places, which is a very useful and helpful social activity,’ he told the Queen.95
In the three or four years during which unemployment was at its worst, the Prince made extensive tours of Tyneside, the Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales. He visited hundreds of working men’s clubs and schemes for the unemployed, seeking out the most sordid slums and inviting himself into the most miserable hovels. Occasionally, though rarely, he was angrily rebuffed, more often he was met by sullen apathy. The experience disturbed him, he was used to an enthusiastic welcome. He knew that the hope which he sought to rekindle in his hearers was faint and often illusory; ‘But I had the feeling that empty as was my mission, my appearance among them was in large measure appreciated and taken as a sign that the Monarchy had not forsaken them in their misfortunes.’96 George Haynes, the General Secretary of the Council, remembered vividly his ‘way of approach; his transparent interest and concern, and the immense regard people had for him. He had a charisma in those days which was unique.’97
Housing remained another of his concerns. The few shining examples of new working-class accommodation which he saw on his tours around the country convinced him that far more could be done. He invited Ramsay MacDonald and Chamberlain to dinner at York House with a dozen or so of those who were grappling with the problem; not much may have been gained but at least the Prime Minister and Chancellor were left in no doubt about the force of people’s feelings on the subject. He was struck by American ideas for mass-produced, low-rent housing, and raised the necessary financing for a development of this kind on his Kennington estates. Unfortunately part of the land involved belonged to the London County Council, and the project foundered on the reluctance of the bureaucrats to countenance an experiment that might have proved unsuccessful but was surely worth a try.
So far as one can tell, the setting up of a Silver Trust Fund to commemorate the Jubilee of 1935, which would be dedicated to the support of existing youth organizations and the encouragement of new ones, was entirely the Prince’s initiative. He proceeded cautiously: ‘Before inaugurating the Fund I am going to assure myself that it will be an idea favourable to all political views,’ he told his father, ‘that is essential or it would not be national in character.’98 The Cabinet gave the scheme their blessing and Lord Lieutenants and Mayors were summoned to a grand council in St James’s Palace. The appeal got off to a good start, reported Wigram,99 and promised to develop into something as long lasting as the King Edward VII Hospital Fund, but the idea ran out of steam when the Prince succeeded to the throne and other, more urgent considerations occupied his mind. More long lasting if on a more modest scale were the Feathers Clubs, centres providing some of the amenities of social life for the unemployed and, by extension, for many lower paid workers. The clubs were inspired by the Prince and turned into reality by Freda Dudley Ward; in their heyday eight branches flourished and the movement survives today. The Prince took a genuine interest in their progress and visited them often and with a minimum of formality. Each time a new one opened he would give Freda a tiny version of the Prince of Wales’s feathers in sapphires, rubies and diamonds to add to a gold bracelet which she often wore.100
Somebody will find reason to criticize any member of the royal family who expresses an opinion or hopes to get things done; mute inactivity is the sole recipe for safety. This Prince was neither mute nor inactive and he suffered accordingly. DeLisle Burns, a Reader in Citizenship at the University of Glasgow, complained that the Prince devoted disproportionate attention to the unemployed; what he should do was honour the employed.101 Burns was not alone in thinking that the Prince was unduly preoccupied with the unfortunate and the underprivileged, and indifferent to those who were generating the nation’s wealth. Even the generally loyal Aird commented that the Prince had spoken well when addressing a sales managers’ conference but wished that he would devote less of his energies to attacking employers, ‘who must be getting rather tired of being told what their faults are’.102 Another common line of attack was that he was stealing other people’s ideas or trespassing on their territory. When he tried to install a clothing depot for the relief of the destitute in a disused house on his Kennington estates, he met with sharp recriminations from those who were pursuing a similar idea elsewhere – ‘I can’t help feeling it must be one of those petty cases of jealousy which occur amongst those who occupy themselves with “good works”,’ he wrote sourly.103
Complaints of this kind do little more than confirm that the Prince was doing useful work. One cannot say the same about the strictures which were increasingly often heard, complaining that he was becoming more wilful and idiosyncratic in his ways, insistent that everything should be done in the way he wanted it, yet inconsistent and sometimes unreasonable in his demands. At a dinner of the Camden Society he rejected hors d’oeuvre, soup and fish, settled for a pair of cutlets and a salad, insisted on Perrier water, changed his mind and drank champagne, rejected the salad, and finally ordered another of a more arcane variety which arrived when everybody else was on their pudding. ‘I found him excellent company,’ said Lord Crawford, ‘talking with freedom and good humour, but on the whole too visibly engrossed in the menu: why, for instance, should he keep sending away the toast in order to get a new and very hot supply?’104 Aird, who was to attend him at the Lord Mayor’s reception, was telephoned at eight and told he was expected to dine à deux with the Prince before they set out, arrived half an hour later to find the Prince had already forgotten he was coming, and witnessed a ceremony of salad dressing so exotic that it put him in mind of life at the court of the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. The Prince sent away the cheese savoury and almost did the same with the beef. He told Aird he had a chef coming in to help with dinner the following night, then a few minutes later expressed surprise that Aird knew about this intention. ‘I have never seen HRH so odd before,’ wrote Aird, and again a few months later, ‘Personally I think HRH is going mad, and going mad faster each quarter.’105
Eccentricity as harmless as this, probably embellished in the telling, signifies little, but Aird went on, ‘… he is running a very bad show as his Staff (Admiral and Godfrey) are very unhappy and I fancy he is displeased with them. It is a most gloomy show in every way to work with, so if HRH can’t get a small show like his staff running well and happily, it does not look good for the future.’ Halsey and Thomas were indeed very unhappy, because they found their job increasingly impossible to perform with any credit, or even without scandal. Stories of the Prince’s misbehaviour in 1934 and 1935 are so plentiful that it is only a question of deciding which to select: Sister Toddie of the Royal Infirmary complaining bitterly about his behaviour during a visit to her hospital – ‘he had looked bored the whole time and had taken no interest whatsoever … He was in a savage temper and did not co-operate at all.’ When the Superintendent’s little dog jumped up, he kicked it;106 Lloyd George back from Caernarvon – ‘The Prince made a bad impression, evidently disliking the ceremonies he attended, and being unpunctual and ungracious in his appearances’;107 the Prince arriving late and after the King and Queen at the party he himself gave in their honour at the time of the Jubilee, noticeably distrait if not actually intoxicated.108 From such accounts the picture emerges of a moody and irresponsible egoist, wholly involved in his own personal problems, unable or unwilling to carry out even the minimum of the duties associated with the role.
And yet for every such instance one can find two in which the Prince is praised: Mary Shiffer, stillroom maid at the Hyde Park Hotel, testifying to his charm (if also to his frequent tipsiness) – ‘If he’d stayed there would never have been a republic in Ireland. He was worried about the poor. Always’;109 Hamar Greenwood at the Iron and Steel Federation Dinner delighting Aird by referring to the great role Aird’s grandfather had played in the industry. Aird wrote to thank him: ‘I want to make it clear,’ Greenwood replied, ‘that it was HRH who prompted me … it was a fine example of his thoughtfulness’;110 Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, dining with the Prince on one of the tours of depressed areas, praising his ‘irrepressible boyishness’ and ‘unusual tactfulness’ – ‘He likes popularity and seeks it. Since, however, he seeks it by the most honourable method in the world, ie public service, he deserves the popularity he wins … He is genuinely kind and unaffected.’111
This is the side of the Prince of Wales that most people saw, and for every Sister Toddie from the Royal Infirmary there were many more ready to swear that he was the most chivalrous, the most generous, the most compassionate, the best of men. Halsey and Thomas, however, had to live with the reality and to endure the unpunctuality and indifference to business. They tended, perhaps, to take for granted the many occasions that the Prince did his duty; they suffered agonizingly when he fell down on the job. Godfrey Thomas, who was closest to him and who had been his friend for more than twenty years, was the most embittered. ‘I’ve wasted hours and hours sitting here till late at night in the hope of seeing you,’ he wrote angrily in July 1935. ‘I don’t mind a bit working out of office hours if there’s any certainty of catching you, however late, but I can’t go on like this. You come up nowadays on such rare occasions, which means it’s always such a rush. You are practically inaccessible on the telephone and seem to resent it if one has anything to consult you about. I hate you being a laughing stock, but even your friends laugh behind your back when you make one of your speeches on “business efficiency” and “up-to-date methods”. They say you are the most unbusinesslike person in the world … And they only know half.’112 The letter exists only in draft. Possibly it was never sent. If it had been, the Prince would have been genuinely upset, not in the least resentful, resolved to do better in future. But he would not have mended his ways for long.
At the beginning of 1936 Halsey, in consultation with Wigram, drew up a Grand Remonstrance which he proposed Baldwin, MacDonald and Simon should lay before the Prince. His private life, Halsey said, had become his only life. It could not go on like that. The fate of the monarchy and the Empire depended on his carrying on the old traditions. The King’s health was being undermined by his worry over his son’s future. The Prince’s excesses were becoming the subject of common discussion and he was setting a bad example to the people over whom he would one day rule. ‘The value of the work done by HRH from 1918 to 1925, both in this country and in the Dominions, and also in foreign countries, had been incalculable, but during the last 6 or 7 years, entirely on account of his private life which had devalued his public life, it is beginning to be realized that he is not likely to be a fitting monarch.’113
Before ministers could consider the propriety of such a démarche, George V was dead and the Prince had become King. Probably their intervention would have made no difference anyway. ‘I can’t help feeling that he is too old now to follow Prince Hal’s example and change his entire way of life,’ Thomas had written the previous year. ‘If he had a wife I believe he could pull it off, but as things are I am afraid I am a pessimist.’114
It was not so much his not having a wife which was at the root of the trouble, as his having a mistress. His relationship with women, in the last two years his relationship with Mrs Simpson, dominated his private life – and as Halsey said, that private life had now become his only life.