Across the Atlantic
Thousands of people lined the shores of the Solent in Portsmouth as King George VI and Queen Elizabeth stepped on board the Empress of Australia at 2.30 p.m. on 6th May 1939, for the journey of more than three thousand miles across the Atlantic to Quebec. The royal couple had brought their two daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, on board to show them their quarters. Then they and other members of the royal family who had come to see them off posed for a photograph outside the purser’s office.
The royal couple had originally planned to travel on Repulse, a battlecruiser which had spent almost six months from November 1938 being refitted for its special role. But as the day of their departure neared, there were misgivings about taking one of the Navy’s most powerful men-of-war so far from home waters. One suggestion by the Foreign Office was that the Repulse take the King and Queen to America but then return immediately, leaving them to come back on a US warship. This would also have the advantage of showing the world – and Hitler and Mussolini in particular – the strength of relations between Britain and America. Meanwhile, there were suggestions in the American press that the tense international situation meant the trip would simply have to be cancelled.
The British government was determined that the visit should go ahead, although with just eight days to go there was a change of plan: it was decided they would travel instead on the Empress of Australia, a Canadian Pacific liner, which was chartered and redesignated as a “royal yacht” for the occasion. The Repulse would nevertheless still accompany them halfway across the Atlantic. Naval authorities were worried that the liner might be intercepted by the German battleship Deutschland, which was cruising in Spanish waters, leaving the King and Queen in danger of capture.
There followed a frantic operation in which some five hundred men worked day and night to prepare the ship. It was repainted both inside and out, and separate royal suites, each with a drawing room, bedroom and veranda overlooking the sea, were created: the King’s on the port side, the Queen’s on the starboard. The smoking room was turned into a private dining room, in which was placed the King’s plain mahogany dining table, set for sixteen people.
Special fittings and furniture were brought from the royal yacht, Victoria and Albert, which was lying at Portsmouth, and provisions for the royal table were sourced: among them were wines from the cellars of Buckingham Palace, pigeons flown in by plane from Bordeaux, a hundredweight of Wiltshire bacon and fifty live crabs. The Queen brought along forty trunks, containing sixty different dresses and ensembles, the details of which had been kept secret. Before leaving on the tour, she had warned the dressmaker that if any details were leaked to the press, she would cancel the order. The King made do with a more modest wardrobe – which, among the various pieces of formal and informal wear, contained three different uniforms: those of Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal and Marshal of the Royal Air Force. A new crew had to be recruited and taught the strict rules of royal protocol. As one contemporary observer noted, “When the King travels by sea he does not dispense with the formalities of the royal household.”1 All was done secretly under the supervision of Special Branch officers.
The King, meanwhile, had been making preparations of his own. There had been some discussion as to whether Logue should accompany him on the trip, which was to contain some important speeches – chief among them one to be delivered in Winnipeg on Empire Day. As had been the case with his visit to Australia in 1927, it was decided that the King would manage without his speech therapist – which was fine by Logue. “My wonderful patient goes on wonderfully well, and should have a marvellous time in Canada,” he wrote to his brother-in-law, Rupert. “Don’t think there is any need for me to go.”2
The King was nevertheless keen for some advice, and so, the day before departure, Logue was summoned to Buckingham Palace to run through the speeches he was due to make in Canada. “The King did them splendidly,” Logue recorded in his diary. “If he does not get too tired I am certain he will do wonderfully well. As I was going, I wished him all sorts of good luck and he thanked me and said, ‘Many thanks Logue, for all your trouble, I am very lucky to have a man who understands voices and speeches so well.’”
Led by the Repulse and another escort ship, the Empress of Australia reached the open channel around the Isle of Wight by 5 p.m., from where it was seen off by two lines of seventeen ships of the Home Fleet that had come to do the farewell honours. A band aboard the Rodney played the national anthem, the warship fired salvoes and a squadron of Royal Air Force planes came swooping down, dipping their wings in a salute.
By 6.30 p.m. the review was over, the liner increased its speed to seventeen knots, and the King and Queen, who had been watching proceedings from the bridge, went to their cabins. Later, as the sun was setting over a tranquil sea, they dined quietly with members of the royal suite, and afterwards listened to a concert of light music played by the ship’s eleven-member orchestra. “The ship is quite comfortable, the food is good, but there are too many stewards & liftboys & messengers about – one falls over them at every turn,” the Queen wrote to her mother. “But they are so obliging & eager to do anything that we haven’t the heart to send them away, poor things.”3
The King settled down to work, dealing with the state messages received through the radio room, while the Queen got down to some reading, including, surprisingly, Hitler’s Mein Kampf. “It is very soap-box, but very interesting,” she wrote to Queen Mary. “Have you read it Mama?”4 There were also cinema shows in the main dining room, which the King and Queen attended almost every day, together with those members of the ship’s company who were not on duty; at times there were as many as 350 of them. The royal couple so enjoyed Polar Trappers, a Donald Duck cartoon set at the South Pole released the previous year, that they had it shown twice in the same week.
The weather quickly took a turn for the worse: early on the 8th, they ran into a belt of fog, rendering the escort vessels almost invisible and forcing the captain to slash the speed; it lifted later that day, only to be replaced by strong winds. The next day, the Repulse turned for home, taking back with it mail – among which was a short note penned by the Queen to Princess Elizabeth. “I hated saying goodbye to you & Margaret but know that you will be happy with Miss C [Marion Crawford, their governess] and Alah [Clara Knight, their nanny],” she wrote. “Goodbye my Angel, give Margaret a HUGE kiss, & an ENORMOUS one for yourself from your very loving Mummy.”5
By then, a half-gale was blowing, giving the Empress a serious battering. “Sometimes she would sweep upwards, hover for a moment in the air, and come down into the sea again with a crash,” described Gordon Young, a correspondent for the Reuters news agency, one of the three journalists on board who turned his account of the royal tour into an instant book. “The next moment another great wave would seem to knock her sideways. After each battering she would lie still in the sea for a few moments, as though recovering from the shock. Then up she would go again and come crashing down into the sea.”6
There was worse to come: by the 11th, the wind had given way to thick fog, and the ship’s wireless began to receive reports of icebergs. The captain cut the speed to five knots and then stopped completely. The Empress was at a standstill for almost twenty-four hours, before finally getting under way again. Then, the next day, three sharp blasts on the ship’s whistle announced a sudden reversal in the engines. The lookout had spotted an iceberg straight ahead. A slight rift in the fog revealed whole fields of them on the starboard side, an alarming sight given that it was close to this spot that the Titanic had gone down in 1912. Yet the royal couple seemed remarkably unfazed. “It’s almost like being an Arctic explorer,” observed the Queen as she watched the icebergs drift past.7
“You can imagine how horrid it is,” she wrote in a letter to Princess Elizabeth.
One cannot see more than a few yards, and the sea is full of icebergs as big as Glamis, & things called “growlers” – which are icebergs mostly under water with only a very small amount of ice showing on the surface. It is very cold – rather like the coldest, dampest day at Sandringham – double it and add some icebergs, & then you can imagine a little of what it is like. We are all trying to behave like Guides & “smile under difficulties” – and as whatever the conversation [it] usually comes back to ice & god, it gets a little worn sometimes.8
Sailors on board described the fog and ice as the worst they had encountered in twenty years, and the ship was falling behind, causing potential havoc with the tightly timed schedule of the royal visit. But the captain, A.R. Meikle, a veteran of many an Atlantic crossing, was not taking any chances. As Young noted drily, another person who must have “felt a special interest in our progress through the ice region” was William Lucas, a bedroom steward, who had been among the survivors of the Titanic disaster.9
With the ice floes bumping and scraping against the side of the hull, Meikle reluctantly changed course southwards on the morning of the 14th, pointing the ship in the direction of Florida. It proved a wise decision: by that afternoon, they had finally passed the worst of the weather and were able to turn again and head back full speed towards Canada. Early the next day, they finally spotted land – the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, the last relics of the French empire in North America. Aircraft were sent from Southampton and Glasgow to report on ice conditions in the St Lawrence River. Everything was fine.
Escorted by two Canadian destroyers, they made their way at a steady nineteen knots along the river, dropping anchor off the Île d’Orléans, three miles east of downtown Quebec City on the evening of the 16th – two days behind schedule. “I am afraid the Press will have made the most of our eventful voyage to Canada,” the King wrote to his mother. He, however, seemed to have remained quite unperturbed by the icebergs. “As a matter of fact I have been able to have a good rest on the voyage, & the two extra days are all to the good for me, but I should not however have chosen an ice field surrounded by dense fog in which to have a holiday, but it does seem to be the only place for me to rest in nowadays!!”10
While the King and Queen were at sea, a storm of another sort was brewing – courtesy of the Duke of Windsor, whose presence was to loom over the trip just as it did over most of what his younger brother did during the first years of his reign. The Duke had already provided ammunition for his critics with his visit to Germany eighteen months earlier. On 8th May, after a tour of the battlefields outside Verdun, scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of the First World War, he made a broadcast on America’s NBC network – the first such public speech since his farewell message from Windsor Castle on 11th December 1936.
Speaking “simply as a soldier of the last war” and making clear his views did not reflect those of the British government, the Duke voiced a vigorous warning to the world against the horrors of another such conflict. “I break my self-imposed silence now only because of the manifest danger that we may all be drawing nearer to a repetition of the grim events which happened a quarter of a century ago,” he said. “The grave anxieties in which we now live compel me to raise my voice in expression of the universal longing to be delivered from the fears that beset us and to return to normal conditions.”
No one wanted war, the Duke continued – the Germans as little as the British and the French – but the world seemed to be drifting inexorably towards it. For that reason, statesman should act as “good citizens of the world, not only as good Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Americans or Britons”; he also urged the discouragement “of all that harmful propaganda which, from whatever source it comes, tends to poison the minds of the people of the world”.11
The ten-minute speech, which the Duke revealed later he had written himself with the help of the Duchess, struck a chord: after the broadcast, the couple appeared at a third storey window of the building from which it had been transmitted to receive the cheers of the crowd. He was soon inundated with letters of appreciation, from listeners not just in America but also in France, Holland and Poland, where the speech had been relayed. They came from Britain too, even though the BBC, on the advice of the Palace, had decided not to carry his words. (Britons who wanted to hear the broadcast had to tune their radios to the French broadcast or to the shortwave one from America, although the newspapers printed extracts from it.)
The contents were innocuous enough, a reflection of the Duke’s naive hope that, even at this stage, war might yet be averted. For critics, he was misguided to make any equivalence between the attitudes of Britain and France, on one side, and Germany and Italy on the other. The timing, too, was deemed unfortunate. The Daily Mail commended the BBC’s decision not to carry the speech, saying “a broadcast of the Duke’s voice so soon after the departure of the King might have led to entirely false assumptions”. It added: “The issue would probably not have presented itself as a delicate problem if the court had been in London.” America’s United Press news agency, meanwhile, said it seemed as if the Duke were “beginning to act up as soon as the King is out of the country”.
The reaction in the Palace to the Duke’s proposals was even more critical. Alexander Hardinge, the King’s private secretary, found “the idea that it can possibly do the slightest good simply ludicrous”. The King’s brother, the Duke of Kent, was scathing: “What a fool he is and how badly advised; and everyone is furious he should have done it just before you left,” he wrote to the King. “If he had mentioned you in it, it wouldn’t have been so bad.”12