Since there was, in those days, no question of children, let alone infants, accompanying their royal parents on such a tour, this would mean that they would be parted from their daughter for at least six months. The Duchess was dismayed by this prospect. There was another anxiety. Both the King and Bruce were anxious that the Duke might not be able to sustain all the pressures of such a tour. In particular there was apprehension – which the Duke himself shared – that his stammer would make it impossible for him to deliver all the speeches that a formal tour would require.88 Bruce was said to be appalled by the inhibitions that the Duke’s speech defect would necessarily impose upon him.89 For the Duke himself the crisis was far worse. Despite the support and reassurance of the Duchess, he had begun to despair about his stammer and his failure to conquer it. According to his official biographer, he had even begun to fear that the problem might be a mental rather than a physical one. But help was at hand.
The Duke’s first broadcast speech at Wembley had been heard by an Australian therapist named Lionel Logue. He had originally trained as an engineer, but he later discovered he had a power of healing and had taken up speech therapy in order to help Australian soldiers traumatized in the First World War. In 1924 he had come to Britain and taken rooms in Harley Street in which to practise. He was recommended to the Prince’s Private Secretary, Patrick Hodgson. The Duke himself was not keen to try yet another therapist; he had had his hopes raised too many times, always to be dashed. It was the Duchess who persuaded him to have ‘just one more try’.90
Lionel Logue recorded this impression of the Duke’s first appointment with him on 19 October 1926. ‘He entered my consulting room at three o’clock in the afternoon, a slim, quiet man, with tired eyes and all the outward symptoms of the man upon whom habitual speech defect had begun to set the sign. When he left at five o’clock you could see that there was hope once more in his heart.’91 Logue evidently did have an extraordinary gift. He saw his first task as being to persuade stammerers that there was nothing ‘wrong’ or fundamentally different about them, that they were normal people with a common affliction which could usually be cured.
The first stage of his treatment was to teach patients to breathe correctly. He showed the Duke how to regulate his lungs and breathing so as to enable himself the better to relax. He had to do exercises at home, lying on the floor and reciting devilishly difficult tongue-twisters. The Duchess encouraged him in the whole process. She often went with him to Logue’s Harley Street rooms or to his flat in South Kensington for his sessions. But in the end he could only cure himself and Logue said later that the Prince was ‘the pluckiest and most determined patient I ever had’.92
It is hard to exaggerate the almost instant, indeed superb effect Logue had upon the Duke’s self-confidence. As the tour of Australasia loomed closer, his fear of it diminished rather than grew. This was remarkable and deeply heartening for him, and for his wife. Shortly before he left, he wrote to Logue, ‘I must send you a line to tell you how grateful I am to you for all that you have done in helping me with my speech defect. I really do think you have given me a real good start in the way of getting over it & I am sure if I carry on your exercises and instructions that I shall not go back. I am full of confidence for this trip now.’93
Before they left there was still much to do. They had finally found a house in place of White Lodge. Number 145 Piccadilly was perfect, a stone-built house, close to Hyde Park Corner and facing south with a view over Green Park towards Buckingham Palace. They were able to lease the house, and in return White Lodge was leased out by the Crown.
The new house needed a great deal of attention. Queen Mary was, naturally, keen to be deeply involved in all the works. She insisted on inspecting the house early on, declaring, ‘I should like to see it before the improvements are commenced as it is always interesting to see a house before & after it has been done up.’ She also warned her son not to mention to the King loans of furniture to them belonging to the Crown, ‘because the dear soul does not understand about these things’.94 She thought they should keep all the furniture they wanted from White Lodge and she promised them a cheque for £750 to do up a room at her expense. She found them some chandeliers at Osborne and the King lent them another from Balmoral.95 Other furniture, including a walnut bureau and an octagonal card table, came from Lady Strathmore. The Duchess was grateful for all help – like everyone moving house she found the expense much greater than she had anticipated. None of the curtains from White Lodge were big enough for the windows at 145 Piccadilly – she had to get fourteen new pairs, all four or five yards long – and she found that decent material cost more than £1 a yard. ‘However if it is good wearing stuff, we shall be able to move it and use it for years and years,’ she told her mother.96
For the Duchess, moving home was a diversion from the thought of parting from her baby for the tour. Princess Elizabeth was the object of her parents’ adoration. ‘I am longing for you to see her,’ the Duchess wrote to Nannie B. ‘She is growing so big and is as sharp as a needle, & so well. She sleeps beautifully, and has always got a smile ready.’ She asked Mrs Beevers to visit them at Bruton Street, where they were busy preparing for ‘this horrible trip’.97 Perhaps nothing before had brought home to her so clearly the conflict between duty and family, work and pleasure. She told Major Walsh, ‘by next June I shall be old & worn & grey after our Australasian tour. You must prepare for a cynical & hardened old woman of the world by the time I’ve finished with the Aussies.’ She thought she would have to come to Africa, to recover. ‘I’ll bring my gramophone and my ’275, & we’ll vary the Charleston with a little letting off at crocs & other four-legged animals.’98
They stayed at Sandringham House for Christmas that year for the first time, returning to London soon afterwards to make final preparations for their departure to Australia and New Zealand at the end of the first week in January. As the date approached everything became more hectic. ‘I don’t dare think of the 6th it is so awful,’ the Duchess confessed.99 She felt in a complete whirl and all the arrangements she had to make reduced her brain, she said, to ‘chaos’.100
They spent New Year’s Eve, as they preferred, with her family at St Paul’s Walden. On the first day of 1927 the men went shooting and she had ‘a lovely long lie in!’ reading a thriller by Edgar Wallace. ‘Mother and I had lunch and talked hard’ – her way of recording in her diary that she and her mother, on whom she still relied a great deal, had a serious conversation. On Sunday they went as usual to the Church of All Saints. The vicar, Mr Whitehouse, ‘boomed’ at them and after lunch they drove back to London where she found Catherine Maclean, her maid, exhausted from the packing. That night she had a typhoid inoculation and, unusually for her, she had a bad reaction – she hardly slept and felt ill next morning.101
As the departure date grew closer, the Duchess became ‘more and more miserable’.102 ‘The baby was too delicious having her bottle & playing & being naughty,’ she wrote in her diary.103 One of her friends supposed that the child would spend the time with Lady Strathmore in the country, but there were other claims upon her, as the Duchess explained. ‘I expect I shall have to divide her! You see the Queen wants to have her for at least three out of the six months.’104
On Tuesday 4 January, the Duchess tried on clothes and had ‘dozens of questions to answer & decide at home’. James Stuart came to lunch and then she and her sister Rosie went to Heal’s to buy nursery things. That evening the Prince of Wales threw a farewell party for them. Many of their friends came to say goodbye, including Fred Astaire and his sister Adele. The Plantation Orchestra played ‘marvellously’. It was a moment for abandonment: ‘I did a Charleston with David [the Prince of Wales] for nearly 20 minutes!! Home at 3.30! Bed 4. Oh Lord.’105 Wednesday was another day of goodbyes; George Gage came to see her; so did Adele Astaire, who brought her a gramophone record and a book. She ‘felt ill all today’.106 The paediatrician to whom she was entrusting the Princess, Dr George F. Still
, came to talk to her about his charge and promised to send her regular reports. They dined with her parents and the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace.
On the morning they had to leave, she awoke and rose early. ‘Feel very miserable at leaving the baby. Went up & played with her & she was so sweet. Luckily she doesn’t realize anything.’107 When they were finally ready to depart, Alah Knight brought the baby downstairs for the final goodbye. The Duchess was very emotional. Watching Princess Elizabeth play with the buttons on her father’s uniform ‘quite broke me up’.108 The Duke was miserable too and felt that his daughter ‘will be so grown up when we return’.109 The Duchess knew she had to drag herself away and so she ‘drank some champagne & tried not to weep’.110
At Victoria station Queen Mary saw that her daughter-in-law was being as brave as possible, and so she said nothing about the little Princess – as she put it in a letter, ‘I purposely did not allude to yr leave taking of yr angelic baby knowing only too well you would be bound to break down.’111 After long farewells on the platform, the special train drew them away on the start of their journey towards the furthest reaches of the Empire.
At Portsmouth Harbour the Duke and Duchess had a rousing send-off from large, enthusiastic crowds. One of the officials with them wrote next day, ‘If you wanted evidence that the country was not going Bolshevik, you could not have had better proof than was afforded yesterday.’112
* Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor (1879–1964). Born Nancy Langhorne in Virginia, USA, she married Waldorf Astor, second Viscount Astor, in 1906. A prominent and controversial politician and society hostess, in 1919 she became the first woman to take a seat in Parliament.
* The King and Queen did not move into Sandringham House until 1926. Both were sad to leave York Cottage, despite its cramped rooms, uninspiring furnishings and cooking smells, for they had lived there for thirty-three years. But they soon came to appreciate the advantages of the main house.
* Anne Beevers (1862–1946), née Greaves, born in Clayworth, Nottinghamshire, daughter of a carpenter from Yorkshire. Her husband died following a rugby accident, leaving her with a small son. After training as a midwife at the London Hospital, she became a much loved private maternity or monthly nurse employed by many society families, and the Duchess remained in touch with her until her death in 1946.
* This practice had been established following the rumours, probably untrue, that a baby had been substituted for the rightful heir to King James II and his second wife, Queen Mary of Modena. The custom was suspended during the Second World War, and King George VI, who thought it ‘archaic’, later abolished it.
† Sir Henry Simson (1872–1932), obstetric surgeon at the West London Hospital. He had attended Princess Mary at the births of her two sons.
‡ Dr Walter Jagger (1871–1929), physician. He also attended the Duchess of York during bouts of influenza after the birth of Princess Elizabeth.
§ Sir George Blacker (1865–1948), obstetric physician at University College Hospital.
* The first grandchild of King George and Queen Mary was George, the elder son of Princess Mary and Lord Lascelles, who had been born on 7 February 1923. A second son, Gerald, was born on 21 August 1924.
* The nurse carrying the Princess was Nannie B. She stayed with the family for about two months; in July the Duchess wrote to her to say she was glad she had been so happy, and hoping that ‘the next time’ would be the same. She sent a gold wristwatch as a memento of ‘us three here who are so fond of our dear Nannie B’. (Duchess of York to Nannie B, 7 and 9 July 1926, private collection)
CHAPTER EIGHT
AN AUSTRALASIAN ASSIGNMENT
1927
‘I could never have done the tour without her help’
FOR THE NEXT six months their home was a great ship, HMS Renown. Lead ship of a class of two fast 26,500-ton battlecruisers, she was launched in Glasgow in 1916. Designed by the Admiralty to have great speed, she served with the Grand Fleet in the North Sea during the remaining two years of the Great War. In 1919–20 she carried the Prince of Wales on a voyage to Australasia and America. Since then she had been extensively refitted to increase her protection against gunfire and torpedoes – and to carry the Duke and Duchess and their entourage around the world.
The tour was seen to be of great importance – not only to the government of Australia, which had inspired it, but also to the King. After they had put to sea the Duke wrote to his father, ‘This is the first time you have sent me on a mission concerning the Empire, & I can assure you that I will do my very best to make it the success we all hope for.’1
The British Empire was one of the most astonishing international organizations the world has ever seen. As we have noted, during the war a third of the troops that the mother country, Britain, had raised came from the Empire, and when the peace settlement of Versailles handed German colonies to the victors, the British Empire in the 1920s reached its greatest extent ever – it covered a quarter of the world. But the price of victory had been immense and the costs of administering the expanded Empire grew ever less easy for Britain to support. Throughout the 1920s, the imperial defence budget was continually cut. The rationale was that after the Great War Britain would not be involved in another major war for at least ten years and that no expeditionary force was required for that purpose. The armed forces were therefore principally to provide garrisons for India, Egypt and all other territories under British control. Manpower became scarcer and controlling the increasingly restless colonies between the wars became more and more difficult. The arrogance of power gave way to hesitation as the self-confidence vital to any imperialist venture gradually diminished. But in 1927 the Empire seemed still to be a permanent part of the world order. The Duke and Duchess had no reason to doubt its lasting strength before they set out from Portsmouth and almost everything that happened to them from then on confirmed that view.
Despite the importance which both the Australian and British governments attached to the trip, they were constrained to operate it within a very tight budget. In October the Dominions Office had pressed the Treasury as to whether a government grant-in-aid would be voted to help the Yorks’ expenditure in undertaking the tour. The Prince of Wales, who was unmarried, had been given £25,000 for his tour of Canada, Australia and New Zealand in 1919–20. (When the King and Queen, as Duke and Duchess of York, had been to Australia twenty-five years before, they were allowed £20,000.)
In the difficult economic circumstances following the General Strike, the government felt unable to provide as much. Basil Brooke wrote to the Treasury in November 1926: ‘His Royal Highness wishes me to emphasise the fact that the assistance for which he is asking is solely to meet expenses connected with the official and extraordinary nature of the tour. The Duke is fully prepared to pay out of his own purse any charges which he and the Duchess would normally be called upon to bear in their daily routine.’2 In the end the government offered £3,500 up front with another £3,500 promised in March 1927. Of this £175 was apportioned, as a clothes allowance, to each of the five male members of the staff, £125 to each of the Duchess’s two ladies in waiting and £325 for the Duke and Duchess between them. They had to spend a great deal more out of their own resources to cover the expenses of the trip. Even so, several Labour Members of Parliament objected to the £7,000 grant – the trip was referred to in Parliament as ‘a joy ride’. It was in fact arduous.
One of the Duke and Duchess’s duties was to represent the trading interests not just of Britain herself, but of the whole British Empire. The Duke agreed to carry on board the All British Campaign’s ‘Emblem of Empire Industries’. The British Industries Fair in Birmingham sent him a telegram of loyalty and support, referring to ‘the valuable service HRH is always willing to render to the development [of] British Trade’.3
They were not only to travel in Renown, but also to use her as their base for much of the tour of Australia. The officer in charge of fitting the ship out, Admiral Parker, had been a
little nervous about just what to do. In August 1926 he had written to Basil Brooke wondering whether the Duchess’s request that all the cabins be painted entirely blue was wise. ‘I do think she will be tired of all Blue.’4 But the Duchess was fairly determined and even rejected the first blues that the Admiralty suggested, as she did the suggestion of stripes.5
Parker accepted the required blue, ordered more cushions and sent the ship’s barber to Trumper’s in Curzon Street, to learn how the Duke liked his hair cut. He worried that the ladies would be bored if they had nothing but their knitting to do on the long voyages, and arranged for the ship’s library to be supplemented – the Times Book Club agreed to loan the ship 120 books for a charge of twelve guineas.6 The chosen selection very much reflected popular taste of the time: it included Edgar Wallace, P. G. Wodehouse and John Buchan – all favourites of the Duchess – John Galsworthy, Agatha Christie, Radclyffe Hall (whose notorious lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness she later described to a friend as ‘terrible’),7 John Masefield, Arthur Conan Doyle and ‘Sapper’, the ultimate adventure-story writer.
Parkers of Piccadilly lent a selection of framed prints for the cabins in the hope that they would ‘help in some way to take away the bareness of the bulkheads and steel walls and make the suite a little more homelike for the cruise’.8 Pathé Frères Cinema Ltd sent films for viewing on board – they included three comedies starring Harold Lloyd and Bebe Daniels (Modes and Madness, Heap Big Chief, Hustling Harold), and two ‘song films with music’ (Swanee River, Coming thro’ the Rye).9 Alfred Hays’ Gramophone Agency lent them an electric gramophone, while 78 rpm records were provided by the Gramophone Company and chosen according to Basil Brooke’s assessment of the Duke and Duchess’s tastes – they included a selection of Kreisler, the Brahms Hungarian Dances, some of the older Harry Lauder songs, Gilbert and Sullivan and some Chopin.10 An Ampico Reproducing Piano was lent by Sir Herbert Marshall and Sons for shipboard dances. These clever machines reproduced foxtrots performed by some of the most celebrated pianists of the time. Like the gramophone, the piano endured much damage from rough seas on the voyage and needed serious repairs afterwards.11
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