The Jubilee was a much greater success than anyone, in particular the King, had dared to hope. Indeed it was in every way a vindication of the King’s low-key but steadfast approach to his task, his devotion to his duty, his acceptance of political change and his strategy of reaching out to his people.
On 6 May, the actual anniversary of the King’s accession, the four Yorks led the royal carriage procession to St Paul’s for the thanksgiving service. The King wrote in his diary, ‘A never to be forgotten day, when we celebrated our Silver Jubilee. It was a glorious summer’s day 75° in the shade. The greatest number of people in the streets that I have ever seen in my life, the enthusiasm was indeed most touching.’ After returning to Buckingham Palace he was gratified to be cheered by an enormous crowd. ‘By only one post in morning I received 610 letters. At 8.0 I broadcast a message of thanks to the Empire. After dinner we went out on the balcony again & there must have been 100,000 people.’193
Every night that week, the King and Queen appeared on the Buckingham Palace balcony and every night it was the same. Every day he and the Queen were driven in an open coach through London. In all the poorest areas – Lambeth, Whitechapel, Battersea, Kennington, Limehouse – they were greeted by rapturous crowds. Hordes of children waving flags and shouting, their parents smiling, laughing and clapping, greeted the dignified elderly couple everywhere. Houses were exuberantly decorated with streamers, flags and bunting and the King remarked in his diary that all this decoration had been put up ‘by the poor’. The King’s official biographer, Harold Nicolson, noted later that students of mass behaviour were ‘fascinated and perplexed’ by this popular rejoicing. Among the reasons he gave were deep affection for the King, pride that Britain’s monarchy, unlike so many others, had survived, reverence for the Crown as a symbol of patriotism, and more. ‘Comfort in the realization that here was a strong benevolent patriarch personifying the highest standards of the race. Gratitude to a man who by his probity had earned the esteem of the whole world.’194
Dedicated left-wingers like the distinguished radical sociologist Beatrice Webb disliked what they saw. More flexible ones rejoiced. George Orwell suggested that it was possible to see in the expressions of loyalty ‘the survival, or recrudescence, of an idea almost as old as history, the idea of the King and the common people being in some sort of alliance against the upper classes.’195 The Jubilee gave a great fillip to thousands of charities which launched Jubilee appeals and enlisted different members of the Royal Family in their causes. The King’s Fund sold £11,000 worth of seats at Jubilee processions. Canada raised £250,000 for a Silver Jubilee Cancer Fund within weeks of its being launched. All over the Empire Jubilee contributions came pouring in.196 The King was surprised and moved by it all. After one happy drive through the East End, he said to his nurse Sister Black, ‘I’d no idea they felt like that about me … I am beginning to think they must really like me for myself.’197
The Yorks played their part in the celebrations. On 9 May they went with the rest of the family to Westminster Hall where the King received loyal addresses. There were 2,000 people there – they sang the National Anthem robustly and cheered wildly. The next night the Duke and Duchess took the night train to Edinburgh to assist in Scotland’s own Jubilee festivities.
The celebrations continued until early June. On the 8th (the day after Ramsay MacDonald resigned as prime minister on grounds of health, and Stanley Baldwin was sworn in) the King and Queen made the last of their triumphal drives around London. The emotion and enthusiasm engendered by such an event as the Jubilee produce many monuments. One of the most important from 1935 was King George’s Jubilee Trust, a national appeal headed by the Prince of Wales to ‘promote the welfare of the younger generation’. A total of £1 million was quickly raised and distributed between existing youth organizations and the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides.
Soon after the Jubilee Trust was launched, Punch published a cartoon of a man in uniform looking angry as he read in the Daily Mail the news of the ‘King’s Call to Youth’ and saying, ‘I thought I had the best youth movement in Europe, but I begin to think I am mistaken.’ The uniformed man was Adolf Hitler.198
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THROUGHOUT MOST of the ‘long weekend’, successive British governments of the early 1930s had encouraged the people to believe that another appalling war could be best avoided by the magic of collective security. The League of Nations, created with great optimism in 1919, was portrayed by most people as by far the best hope of avoiding the cataclysm of war. Mutual restraint and the spirit of co-operation under the aegis of international law were offered as the best deterrents to aggressors. Such hopes were completely understandable given the horrors of 1914–18 but, after the rise of the dictators, less and less realistic. In Britain governments and most people believed that, after Passchendaele and the Somme, no one would ever wish to go to war again. They failed to reckon with the fascist mentality, which derived an entirely different lesson from the Great War – that their countries had not been ruthless enough.
In September 1930 the German people, terrified by the economic crisis and the threat of runaway inflation, awarded Hitler’s National Socialist Party 107 seats in the Reichstag. In January 1933 Hitler was invited to form a national government and the Reichstag fire a few weeks later gave him an excuse to arrest all communist deputies; that summer he asserted that Nazism was now the only legitimate force in Germany. His dictatorship was established. In March 1935, he defied the Treaty of Versailles by introducing conscription. As Harold Nicolson put it, ‘to attentive ears there came, in the last months of George V’s life, the distant grumble of the thunder of a second war.’199 But not everyone wished to hear it and those, like Winston Churchill, who heard it most clearly were often denounced as selfish warmongers.
Soon after Hitler seized total power, Käthe Kübler, who had been the Duchess’s governess at Glamis from 1913 until the outbreak of war in 1914, had written to her former pupil protesting that the British press was horribly biased against Herr Hitler and assuring her that the stories attacking him were completely untrue.200 No reply from the Duchess has been found, but Fräulein Kübler may have come to regret her pro-Hitler views. Queen Elizabeth said later, ‘She was the headmistress of a big school in Munich and then those horrible Nazis discovered she was a Jew and she was out in a day. She was sacked.’201*
More influential with the Duchess was undoubtedly her friend D’Arcy Osborne, still at the British Embassy in Washington. By early 1934 he was increasingly alarmed by the breakdown of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism in Europe. Nazism appalled him: ‘what a nauseating and ridiculous affair it all is with its spurious Aryanism and its Germanic theology.’ He evidently shared the Duchess’s misgivings about Germany. ‘Apparently the Germans are miserable unless they can be drilled and driven like a mob of halfwits. I would dearly like to wipe Germany and Japan off the map of the world with two neat smudges of the thumb and I am sure we would all be a lot better off.’202 In another letter he asked if she was as depressed about the world as he was. ‘What are we going to do to stop the Germans from planning and making a new war in their own good time?’203
On this matter the Duchess and the King were not far apart. George V had always distrusted and disliked both Mussolini and the Nazis. He talked of ‘those horrid fellows, Goering and Goebbels’. He detested the Nazis’ Jew-baiting and the brutality with which the fascists achieved power. In April 1934 he warned the German Ambassador that his country’s massive rearmament was threatening Europe with war and ‘ridiculed’ the Ambassador’s explanation.204 In September 1934 the British Ambassador to Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, wrote to the King predicting that the regime would not change – ‘The Nazis have their hands on every lever now; besides, and this also is important, large numbers of Germans regard Hitler with a species of mystic adoration: some pick up the earth upon which he treads to keep as a precious souvenir.’205*
The King understood. A few months later, in January 1935
, his Private Secretary Sir Clive Wigram wrote to the Ambassador saying the King felt that ‘we must not be blinded by the apparent sweet reasonableness of the Germans, but be wary and not taken unawares.’206 But, like millions of his subjects, the King dreaded the prospect of another war. In May 1935 he told Lloyd George, ‘I will not have another war. I will not. The last one was none of my doing and if there is another one and we are threatened with being brought into it, I will go to Trafalgar Square and wave a red flag myself sooner than allow this country to be brought in.’207
As the joy of the Jubilee celebrations faded, the King and his government were compelled to spend more and more time contemplating the threats from the dictators. In October 1935, deriding the notions of collective security and international law, Mussolini declared war on and invaded Abyssinia.† The King was more concerned about the future than ever; he repeatedly consulted the new Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, who later wrote, ‘I believe that it was the anxieties of Abyssinia, coming as they did on the top of the Silver Jubilee celebrations, that killed the King.’208
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ON 6 NOVEMBER Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was to be married to Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott, who became one of the most dedicated and beloved members of the Royal Family. She was the sister of the Duchess’s girlhood friend Mida (Lady Margaret Ida Montagu-Douglas-Scott). The two Princesses were to be bridesmaids. The bride and maids were dressed by Norman Hartnell; and the Duchess took her daughters to his shop for a fitting. ‘I noticed then, for the first time,’ Hartnell wrote in his memoirs, ‘the intentionally measured and deliberate pace of Royal ladies. With lovely smile and gracious movement the Duchess of York acknowledged on either side the reverences of the women present and very slowly moved on and out of sight.’209 She liked Hartnell’s ideas and he subsequently became one of her most important dress designers. Alice Scott’s father, the Duke of Buccleuch, died shortly before the wedding; instead of postponing the ceremony, the families decided that it should take place privately in the chapel at Buckingham Palace. ‘Now all the children are married but David,’ the King recorded laconically in his diary.210
On 29 November the Duke and Duchess of York left London on the Golden Arrow for Paris. There they were to attend the annual banquet of the Caledonian Society of France, which wanted to make a special Silver Jubilee occasion of its annual dinner on St Andrew’s Day.211 They had accepted on condition that there was no general election taking place in Britain at that time and that the political situation in France was quiet.212
In the event the expected election had taken place on 14 November – the National Government, led by Stanley Baldwin, was returned. As for the French political situation, the British Ambassador, Sir George Clerk, advised that Prime Minister Laval might well fall before the end of November, but that this would not necessitate cancelling the visit. ‘The only doubt that would arise would be if the Italo-Abyssinian situation leads to fresh unjustifiable attacks upon our policy in the French press, and Anglophobia shows its head again.’ He would watch out for this.213
In Paris they stayed at the British Embassy, and had a full three-day programme. The Duchess had time to order some dresses from Lanvin. Afterwards the Ambassador reported to the King through Sir Clive Wigram on the success of the visit. Sir George was loud in his praise of the Duke. ‘Such contacts with our Royal Family do an immense amount of good and I personally have every reason to be grateful, for they are a real help to me in my work … The Duchess was of course her charming self, and won every heart. To you, who know her, I need not, and indeed I cannot say more.’214
The visit encouraged the Duchess in her somewhat wry love for France. She gave her friend D’Arcy Osborne a vivid description of its high points. She was particularly struck when at one dinner an ‘enormous’ Frenchman:
practically sank on to his knees beside me, & gurgled ‘If only we had people like you both in France’ etc etc whilst I pretended that it was quite O.K. to have a Huge Frenchman with a Légion d’Honneur in his buttonhole kneeling violently beside one. They don’t mean a word they say, but they are so nice, & so nasty. I like their sense of humour – it’s so delicious, & yet, how can one trust them? They are so unsentimental when it comes to politics, & horribly straight seeing. What do you think of them?215
They returned to London on 2 December, a sad night – the King’s beloved sister Princess Victoria died at Coppins. The King was grief-stricken – they had supported each other through every year and talked to each other every day. For once he allowed his personal feelings to come before his duty and cancelled the state opening of Parliament due to take place later that day – he simply felt he could not endure this very public occasion while assailed with such sorrow.216
By the middle of December, the Duchess had come down with a serious attack of flu while at Royal Lodge. Her daughters were upset, and Princess Margaret wrote to her from London, ‘Darling Mummy, I hope you are better today. You must be better for Xmas. When will the doctor let you come to LONDON? XXXXXX.’217 Her doctors were in fact very concerned; the influenza developed into pneumonia and her temperature soared to 103 degrees. There was no question of her being able to go to London, let alone Sandringham, for Christmas. The two Princesses travelled to Norfolk with the King and Queen on 21 December and the rest of the family, including the Prince of Wales, the Kents and their new baby Edward and the Gloucesters, and other guests arrived on Christmas Eve.
The Duke and Duchess had to spend Christmas at Royal Lodge, separated from their children. While she stayed in bed, he worked in the garden, moving many of the rhododendron bushes. The children’s nurse Alah Knight, Jean Bruce, a lady in waiting to Queen Mary, and others at Sandringham kept the Duchess informed about the children and the Duchess and her daughters wrote each other cheerful letters. According to Jean Bruce, Princess Margaret sat through a long sermon ‘looking adorable and minute’ between Queen Mary and Lord Athlone.218 Alah took them to see the King in his room every morning at 9.15 and they saw him again at teatime. Both girls had fun playing in a snow storm, dressed in their new pink coats and velvet hats.219
The Duchess wrote to Princess Elizabeth saying she hoped she was having a lovely time and being very polite to everybody. ‘Mind you answer very nicely when you are asked questions, even though they may be silly ones … Give Margaret some GREAT BIG KISSES from me, and a great many to your darling self. Good bye angel, from your very loving Mummy.’220 Princess Margaret wrote, ‘I hope you will be better tomorrow. And ask the doctor to let you come. It is all white mist out and you cannot see. We have millions of cards. We made a lovely Xmas tree – lots of things on it. I love your letter.’221 The Duchess sent Princess Elizabeth news of their corgi, Dookie, and said that as soon as she was better she would come to Sandringham ‘& I shall give you and Margaret such an ENORMOUS HUG, that you will be quite squashed.’222
She wrote to Queen Mary to say how absurd it seemed to be spending Christmas in bed, ‘& poor Bertie ploughing through a turkey all by himself poor darling’.223 To the King, she sent an affectionate end-of-year letter recalling the joy of his Jubilee celebrations; she must have been feeling better because she ended it with a joke, ‘Have you heard what the Abyssinian soldier said about Mussolini? “He is my enema the Douche.” ’224 In continued good humour she wrote to her fellow Windsor Wet Dick Molyneux:
I am much better, but the doctor told me this morning that I can’t get up just yet. It is too sickening, but apparently I’ve had that old fashioned flu that has pneumonia with it, and it’s very slow to get rid of. I expect that when I am well again I shall be VERY well. Oh Boy. Well, be good if you can, which I doubt, and I should stay away from Abyssinia if I were you just for a bit. I know it’s very tempting, but make it one of your New Year resolutions & stick to it. I couldn’t give you better advice – remember what happened last time. A very happy New Year to you from your suffering President Elizabeth.225
The King was not able to go shooting any more; he coul
d manage only short walks to the stables and the stud – even then he constantly had to pause to take his breath. He made his Christmas broadcast with considerable difficulty. The Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead, who was at Sandringham, wrote to his wife, ‘I didn’t like his colour at all, and gather that his circulation is bad. In fact I believe the machine is worn out, and I seriously doubt if we shall ever come here again … Poor dear man; he was ever so friendly and kind, but clearly tired out.’226 Only his grandchildren now seemed to rouse his interest. ‘Saw my Kent grandson in the bath,’ he recorded.227 He gave Princess Margaret a silver box that had belonged to Princess Victoria. After thanking him nicely, Princess Margaret said, ‘Grandpapa I’ve got such a good idea – if you filled the box with chocolates I could eat them in the morning when I wake up.’228
By Thursday 16 January the King’s condition was worse; he wrote in his diary that he ‘didn’t feel very grand’.229 The Queen was worried and sent at once for the Duke of York. The Duchess was still feeling wretched but she agreed he must go that afternoon. The Duke did not yet understand the full seriousness of his father’s condition. Travelling up to Sandringham by train, he met Tommy Lascelles, who had just been appointed assistant private secretary to the King. Lascelles wrote to his wife that the Duke was ‘very amiable … I thought him much changed for the better since I last saw him 8 years ago.’230 Over the next few days Lascelles became much less cheerful about the behaviour and attitudes of the Prince of Wales; indeed, his misgivings about the Prince, which had led to his resignation from his staff in 1928, were reinforced.231
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