Going Home
When the King and Queen woke the next morning, they found the Royal Blue train’s tough-looking American police guards had been replaced by the familiar scarlet-coated Mounties. The temperature had also dropped sharply, thanks to an overnight storm that amounted to a minor cyclone. Their first stop back on Canadian soil was Sherbrooke, Quebec, known as the capital of the Eastern Townships, where one hundred thousand people turned out to meet them and proceeded to give them a welcome that would convince them they were once more back among their own. “The Americans are a fine lot of people and they gave Their Majesties a fine reception, but it’s to us that the King and Queen belong,” one patriotic Canadian told a reporter.1
A few more stops followed. After one in Rivière-du-Loup, the King invited Mackenzie King to his room; the latter found the monarch sitting on the sofa, reporter’s notebook in hand. The King had written up in longhand an account of his conversations with Roosevelt and wanted to check with the Canadian that both had understood the President the same way.2
What did Mackenzie King think of Roosevelt’s intentions? the King asked. Mackenzie replied that “it was clear to me that the President was anxious to do everything he possibly could to be of help, short of committing his country to a war”.
The King concurred. “What a fine fellow he is,” he said.
The King also noted how Roosevelt had made clear that he was “trying to educate the American people to appreciate what it would mean for them if Germany were to win a war, and the French and British forces to be wiped off the seas. They would then lose entirely their export market, and if they were given a chance to import into these countries, it would be wholly on the terms of the dictators themselves.”
Reflecting on the American section of the trip, Mackenzie King assured the King it had surpassed all expectations. This had been apparent from the positive reaction of the crowds, which was “personal to himself and the Queen as well as expressive of sympathy with the British ideals of freedom and peace”.
“This trip has made a great deal to me, and a great deal to the Queen,” the King replied. He said it had been all about developing a “new idea of kingship” which was more in tune with the people and their interests – “no more the high-hat business, the kind of thing that my father and those of his day regarded as essential, as the correct attitude, that certain things could not be done, everything was to be just in such and such a way”.
Mackenzie King thought the King should trust his own instinct in such matters. The trip, he said, “ought to give him an assurance with regard to freedom of action and [he should] not allow himself to be circumvented by Court restrictions”.
Perhaps because of the informality of the setting, the King opened up on other matters, repeating his concerns about the possibility of Churchill eventually succeeding Chamberlain – a prospect he was not keen on himself and which he feared would not go down well with Roosevelt. He also described how uncomfortable he had been made to feel by Anthony Eden, who had resigned as Foreign Secretary the previous year, during audiences: whenever he asked him a question, the minister would reply by reading from a piece of paper rather than talking to him frankly man-to-man. Mackenzie King put it down to the superior manner Eden acquired at Oxford.
Most revealing, though, were the insights the King gave into his attitudes to the throne. “When my father was alive, he filled an important place, was much before the public,” he told Mackenzie King. “My brother was equally prominent before the public. I was kept in the background. My father used to tell me I could never do anything because I could not speak.” Indeed, before George V’s death, when he could see the way things might go, he had gone to Sandringham with a view to telling his father he would not accept the throne – but never did so. That being said, he revealed that George V had always been worried about how Edward would behave, especially after his performance during his two trips to America.
In the event, the future George VI had had no choice when his brother abdicated; but even then, more than two years into his reign, he clearly still felt insecure; he told Mackenzie King that “the press were continually saying that he knew very little about affairs; that he could not speak; was merely filling a place”.
Mackenzie King, clearly touched, then mentioned the speech the King had made the previous evening and how it had gone so well he felt like standing up and cheering at the end. He told the King he should take advantage of chances that had presented themselves on the trip to speak whenever he wished. “If he did not feel like it, to say nothing, but if he did, to get up and say what he wished to say.” The King smiled and said he “thought he could manage it”.
The more they talked, the more it became clear how much of an impression the tour had made on the King – so much so that he revealed he was thinking of embarking on another, though this time to South America. His idea was that a ship similar to the Empress of Australia should be fitted out so he could use it whenever he wished to travel to any corner of the Empire, accompanied by appropriate officials able to brief him on the areas he visited. Mackenzie King was enthusiastic, though what the King’s own government back in Britain would make of such a plan, with all its potential implications for royal interference in foreign policy, was not clear. In any case, events intruded and it never happened.
Later that day, as the Royal Blue train was running through the last of French Canada, the King sent Roosevelt a telegram thanking him for the welcome they had been given.
THE PRESIDENT.
GEORGE R.I.3
The next day was spent in New Brunswick, with stops at Newcastle, Fredericton, St John and Moncton. The following morning, 14th June, they crossed the nine-mile-wide Northumberland Strait to Prince Edward Island – to which the King had paid a three-day visit in 1913 when he was a naval cadet. The heat that had characterized the American leg of their journey was now a distant memory: the rain was so heavy that those attending a garden party at Government House in Charlottetown were obliged to don overcoats and mackintoshes. From there it was back across the strait to Pictou, a little harbour town whose population was almost entirely Scottish, and then a drive of a few miles to New Glasgow, where, just after eight o’clock, they boarded the Royal Blue for what was to be their last night.
Early the following morning, they made a brief stop in Truro, a settlement of eight thousand people. There they picked up Lord Tweedsmuir, who accompanied them for the final sixty-mile stretch of their journey to Halifax, where the Empress of Britain was waiting to carry them home. More than one hundred thousand people, crowded onto the dockside and along the streets of the city, broke into thunderous cheers as a twenty-one-gun salute crashed out from the fortress of Citadel Hill.
The time had come to leave the train. After a round of farewells to those who had served them during their journey backwards and forwards across Canada, the King and Queen set off by car on a one-mile drive through the brilliantly decorated streets of the city for a lunch at Province House. Then, speaking into three golden microphones hidden among the table decorations, the King made a farewell speech that was broadcast across the Empire. In it, he thanked the people of Canada – and of the country’s “great and friendly neighbour to the south” – for the reception he and the Queen had received.
“You have given us a welcome of which the memory will always be dear to us,” he said. “Our hearts and minds are full. We leave your shores after some of the most inspiring and illuminating weeks in our lives.” The King also praised the Americas as “a large part of the earth where there is no possibility of war between neighbours, whose peoples are wholly dedicated to the pursuits of peace, a pattern to all men of how civilized nations should live together”, adding, with a nod to the worsening situation in Europe: “By God’s grace yours may yet be the example which all the world will follow.”4
That evening, after another trip through the city and a private tea with the lieutenant governor, they drove down to the dockyard under a white archway emblazoned with the words “Goodbye to Nova Scotia” and boarded the ship. After the final farewells, the red-carpeted gangplank was removed, the hawsers were cast off and just after seven o’clock the ship began to move away. A cheer went up from the shore, and as the vessels in the harbour blew their sirens, the King and Queen went to the bridge to wave goodbye. And with that the great liner glided into the smooth waters of Halifax Harbour.
Waiting for them on the ship was a letter from Roosevelt:
I cannot allow you and the Queen to sail for home without expressing once more the extreme pleasure which your all too brief visit to the United States gave us.
The warmth of the welcome accorded you everywhere you visited in this country was the spontaneous outpouring of Americans who were deeply touched by the tact, the graciousness, and the understanding hearts of your guests.
I shall always like to think that you felt the sincerity of this manifestation of the friendship of the American people.
Mrs Roosevelt joins me in parting felicitations to Your Majesties and best wishes for a safe and pleasant voyage.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
(Initialled) FDR5
The crowds that greeted the King and Queen as they docked in Southampton on 22nd June and then travelled on to Waterloo were just as enthusiastic as they had been on the other side of the Atlantic, although a lot more deferential. The Britain to which they returned was one sliding inexorably towards war. Air-raid shelters were being dug and hundreds of barrage balloons had already been manufactured; preparations were well under way to evacuate children from London and other major cities.
That afternoon, Parliament met to pass an address of “loyal and affectionate welcome” to the King and Queen, prompted by Neville Chamberlain. The Prime Minister declared that the reception they had been given by the Canadians had shown how “loyalty to the Crown in the abstract has been translated into personal feeling of affection for Their Majesties”. He was also keen to point to the warmth of their greeting by the Americans, which he claimed “both as a personal tribute to the King and Queen and as a striking proof of the sympathy and friendship which animate the feelings of the peoples of the United States and the United Kingdom”.6
Arthur Greenwood, the deputy leader of the opposition Labour Party, went further: “If there be some who believed that this far-flung Empire with the King as its symbolic head is a myth, the visit of Their Majesties must have dispelled that view,” he said. As for the welcome given the royal couple in America, “No words of mine are adequate to express what I believe to be the real significance of this visit. It may have more far-reaching results in maintaining peace and friendliness in the world than we know. For that we greet them back home amongst us”.7
Both Houses then adjourned to allow members to hurry to the places that had been reserved for them in Parliament Square to watch the King and Queen make their way in an open landau the two miles from Waterloo to Buckingham Palace. Around a million people lined the route. According to one observer, the scenes “recalled those of the coronation, except that the people were much jollier, and the King and Queen seemed more happy and self-assured than ever before. The acclamation of the crowds, too, had a new depth of feeling, doubtless born of the tour’s success and the adventures through which Their Majesties had passed.”8
Back in Buckingham Palace, the King and Queen, along with their two daughters, came out onto the balcony and acknowledged the cheers from tens of thousands of people gathered outside. They stayed out five minutes before making a final wave and retiring inside. The crowd, just as had been the case in Canada and America, showed little sign of being ready to go home, however, and called for the King and Queen to come out again. Their patience was finally rewarded at 8.40 p.m., when they reappeared, the King in a double-breasted dinner jacket and the Queen in a blue evening gown.
The spectators stayed on for another three hours or more in the hope of catching a final glimpse of the royal couple. They were disappointed: instead, they saw Chamberlain arrive at half-past nine and stay for almost two hours to discuss the trip. By half-past eleven, the lights had gone out; after more than six weeks away, the King and Queen had finally gone to bed in their own home again.
The King needed his rest. The next day he was due to make a speech at a lunch at the Guildhall.9 It was seen as a significant one, and its contents had been a major preoccupation for him during his tour. The King had cabled Logue from the ship the previous day to come to the Palace on the morning of the address. To Logue, he initially seemed nervous, but once he started to talk about the trip, he relaxed and broke into his characteristic grin. “He was most interested in Roosevelt – a most delightful man he called him,” Logue wrote.
Some seven hundred of the great and the good were there to hear the King speak. They were treated to an eight-course lunch, washed down with two brands of 1928 champagne and vintage port. “It is a great pity that a colour film was not made of the scene,” commented the Daily Express. “It would have preserved for posterity a close-up of the entire executive power of Britain, tightly packed on a few square yards of blue carpet.”
Most of the speech was devoted to the Canadian chapter of the trip, with the King describing how the visit had underlined the strength of Britain’s links with its Dominion. “In Canada, I saw everywhere not only the mere symbol of the British Crown; I saw also, flourishing strongly as they do here, the institutions which have developed, century after century, beneath the aegis of that Crown,” he told his audience, who interrupted him several times with loud cheers. The great Commonwealth of Nations of which both countries were a part existed as “a potent force for promoting peace and goodwill among mankind”, he noted.
Surprisingly perhaps, given its significance, the King made little mention of the American leg – an omission that Logue had pointed out during their run-through that morning, by which time it had been too late to change the text. Nor did he mention Roosevelt by name. He did, though, reflect on the warmth of the welcome he had received in America and noted the interest shown in the copy of the Magna Carta on display at the World’s Fair in New York, which he said revealed “how closely interwoven are the threads of our own story with those of the development of that newer continent across the sea”.
In the weeks that followed, the sense grew that a war was coming, especially after the signing on 23rd August of a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union that was to give Hitler a free hand to invade Poland and then turn his forces to the west. Three days later, Britain signed a treaty with the government in Warsaw pledging to come to Poland’s assistance if it were attacked. Chamberlain nevertheless continued to negotiate with Hitler, even though he turned down the King’s offer to write a personal letter to the Nazi leader. For many people, though, the worst thing was the uncertainty.
So what had the royal trip actually achieved? The immediate reaction in the American media was overwhelmingly positive, thanks largely to the King and Queen’s warmth and easygoing style. A summary of American press reports sent by Ronald Lindsay to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax on 20th June had noted with appreciation the sheer quantity of royal coverage and tracked how the wariness that had been expressed in some quarters ahead of the visit had given way to largely unbridled enthusiasm.10
The King and Queen had shown “how democratic and wholesome are the symbols of the constitutional monarchy that is Britain’s”, wrote Arthur Krock, the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington-bureau chief as the royal couple arrived at Hyde Park. In another report summing up the visit, published as the royal couple left the United States two days later, the same paper described the warm welcome they had been given as “a genuine tribute [...] as much to the British people as to their sovereigns”. It added: “We like the British because we understand them better than most foreigners. And, after all, why shouldn’t we? They gave us our speech, our manners and our customs, and, after a little persuasion by the continental army, our country itself.” The Washington Post was equally effusive in its praise: “To say that the King and Queen were received here with open arms would be an understatement,” it said. “It was into the hearts of the population that they were taken, and taken without reservation.” For the Christian Science Monitor, meanwhile, “the old bond between the democracies has taken on higher, warmer, yes, friendlier qualities than it ever had before.”11
Other papers took a similar line, although there were some dissenting voices: Lindsay noted the attitude of the papers in the Midwest and on the Pacific coast had been “noticeably cooler” than in the East. Coolest of all was the Chicago Tribune, which, out of hostility to Roosevelt, had from the start sought to pour cold water on the visit and “ridiculed those who attended the various ceremonies in Washington”. The real aim of the visit, the newspaper claimed, had been to lure America out of its isolation into some form of alliance with Britain – a suggestion dismissed as ludicrous by most other papers. “Our isolationists can sleep just as soundly at night this week as they are accustomed to do when British heads are not in our midst spinning imaginary webs of entanglement,” said the Washington Star. “The King and Queen are come to us purely and simply bearing the olive branch of a comradeship that has endured unbroken for nearly a century and a half.”12
The Chicago Tribune’s carping apart, Ambassador Lindsay could therefore be pleased with what he read – and had witnessed. “The Royal visit which ended last night can only be characterized as a complete success,” he wrote to Halifax. “There can be no doubt that the visit has made [sic] profound impression on the whole country and has deepened and fixed already existing feelings of friendliness. Coming at a crucial moment, it is of capital importance in the history of Anglo-American relations and its effects will not wear off.”13
Sir Godfrey Haggard, the Consul General in New York, was also full of praise for what he called “the remarkable success of the royal visit”. Thanks to their “natural friendly yet dignified bearing” the pair had revealed “British royalty in a guise which has surprised and delighted the man in the New York street”, he wrote. “That there is a brain underneath Her Majesty’s becoming hats, and genuine feeling behind His Majesty’s handshake is a discovery that is going to promote a better understanding of Britain’s system of government and Britain’s problems, and help to consign to limbo legends current since the Abdication.”14
There was also no doubting the positive effect that the enthusiastic response received by the royal couple had on the King’s self-esteem. “The trip nowhere had more influence than on George VI himself,” noted Time magazine in a report published several days after his return. “Two years ago he took on his job at a few hours’ notice, having expected to play a quiet younger brother role to Brother Edward all his life. Pressmen who followed him around the long loop from Quebec to Halifax were struck by the added poise and self-confidence that George drew from the ordeal.” Despite the difference in age and culture between the hosts and their guests, both couples had bonded. The Roosevelts, the magazine noted, had “developed a father-&-motherly feeling towards this nice young couple”.15
Writing almost two decades later, the King’s official biographer, John W. Wheeler-Bennett, agreed on the positive effect it had on him. The trip had “taken him out of himself, had opened up for him wider horizons and introduced him to new ideas”, he noted. “It marked the end of his apprenticeship as a monarch, and gave him self-confidence and assurance. No longer was he overawed by the magnitude of his responsibility, the greatness of his office and the burden of its traditions. Now at last, he felt, he could stand on his own feet and trust his own judgement.”16
It was one thing for the American press – and officialdom from the President downwards – to warm to their royal visitors. Persuading Congress, and Americans as a whole, to give up isolationism in favour of a potential alliance with Britain in the forthcoming conflict was a completely different matter, as Lindsay and others involved on the British side readily acknowledged. Despite the warmth of the reception given to the royal couple, the “results in the immediate future specifically as regards legislation on neutrality are more doubtful”, Lindsay admitted, noting that a hard core of isolationists in the Senate would remain determined to resist attempts by the administration to pass amendments to the Neutrality Act. “But it is quite certain that the royal visit will have greatly increased the pressure in the opposite direction [...] In other words, while we cannot at present feel certain of receiving an immediate dividend we can be assured that our hidden reserves have been immensely strengthened.”