In Saskatchewan on 25 May they were given another vociferous welcome at the provincial capital, Regina. Their host was the Lieutenant Governor, Archie McNab, who had to be reminded to remove his unaccustomed silk hat for the National Anthem. His homespun manner, the local press reported, ‘called forth a happy response from the sovereigns’.50 The royal train left Regina after a state dinner at Government House. Later, during a short stop in heavy rain at Moose Jaw, the King and Queen again faced a drenching in their open car as they drove through the town. In Calgary, home of the celebrated stampede, as the Queen wrote to Princess Elizabeth, ‘we saw a lot of Indians, and quite a lot of cowboys on “bucking broncos” who came dashing along with us’.51 They made an unscheduled stop at an Indian encampment on their drive through the city and shook hands with Duck Chief, head of the Blackfoot tribe. ‘R. Dimbleby, BBC announcer, gave an atmosphere broadcast, assisted by Interpreter Little Dog,’ the Calgary press reported.52 It was the first royal tour on which Richard Dimbleby, later one of the BBC’s most renowned correspondents, reported.
The seemingly endless journey across the prairies was enlivened by several incidents recorded by Wilfred Notley, the steward in the royal carriages. In his somewhat macabre words, a beautiful box not unlike ‘a child’s coffin’ was delivered to the King: it proved to contain a dozen ducks, frozen solid, a present from one of the lieutenant governors. ‘Remind me to have this man arrested for shooting game out of season,’ said the King to Notley.* In Banff, where the royal party were to spend the night at the Banff Springs Hotel, the train crew took some rare time off in the village while their charges went hungry: someone had forgotten to order dinner either at the hotel or on the train.53 A late dinner was eventually served at the hotel. The Queen wrote to Princess Elizabeth that the hotel was ‘boiling’ like all Canadian houses. ‘We opened every window, and I expect all the poor habitants will get pneumonia! This morning we climbed a mountain nearby which took about 50 minutes. It was very like Balmoral only much bigger, & the pine trees smelt delicious in the hot sun. This afternoon Papa & I went for a Buggy ride!! … Two nice grey horses & we rolled along on high old wheels – very wobbly but great fun.’
They watched a moose feeding on waterlily bulbs, and beavers building a dam, and also saw black bears and other animals. It was a relief to get away from ‘roaring crowds and incessant noise even tho’ one is glad that the people are pleased to see us’. The Queen felt that they were bearing up well and added that the next two weeks would be tiring but worthwhile work, ‘for one feels how important it is that the people here should see their King, & not have him only as a symbol’.54
Banff was supposed to be a day of rest from the press as well, but the King and Queen had long since learned the importance of good relations with journalists and allowed themselves to be photographed outside the hotel after lunch. They had held a reception in Ottawa for the eighty-strong press corps accompanying them on the tour in a pilot train, and the Queen later commented to Queen Mary that the journalists were ‘really very nice, and were so shy and polite! The Americans are particularly easy and pleasant, and have been amazed I believe at the whole affair. Of course they have no idea of our Constitution or how the Monarchy works, and were surprised & delighted to find that we were ordinary & fairly polite people with a big job of work.’55 Lascelles was delighted: ‘I hope people at home realise what a wow this adventure is being,’ he wrote. ‘It is on a crescendo rather than a diminuendo – I hope T[heir] M[ajesties] will be able to stand the strain for another 17 days.’56
In his diary, Mackenzie King recorded a frank dinner conversation with the Queen about the dangers of fascism and war. The Queen told him how much all those men who had died in the Great War were now missed; she felt that a great struggle had begun between right and wrong, but that right would win in the end. According to Mackenzie King, she agreed with him that Hitler himself probably did not want war and she still thought that Chamberlain had acted correctly; war would otherwise have been certain. ‘She said that England had done splendidly: had gone as far as she could in every way for peace. Was prepared to go to any length but to be strong to save the situation. She thought other nations were looking more and more to Britain for leadership. I was quite impressed with the earnestness with which she spoke.’ At the end of the meal she said, ‘I have been talking pretty freely. It is very nice to be able to say what you think.’57
Almost every day brought more bad news. ‘Europe seems to be moving dangerously nearer to war,’ Mackenzie King wrote on 25 May. He added, nonetheless, ‘I am not without hope that this visit may help to let the peoples of Europe see how firmly the democracies are standing together.’58
The King too was pleased with the trip, but became uneasy as they travelled ever further from Europe. Commenting on the situation to Alec Hardinge, he wrote, ‘I am glad Hitler & Mussolini are behaving fairly well but they may blow up again at any moment. I am longing for this visit to be over & to be back again.’59 His anxiety sometimes revealed itself in the outbursts of temper which his Household and family called ‘gnashes’ or sometimes ‘Nashvilles’. In the privacy of the royal train, to help him relax, the Queen would contrive opportunities for one particular Mountie, who amused the King, to take him cups of tea.60
Another twenty-four hours’ travel brought the King and Queen to a spectacular welcome in Vancouver on the morning of 29 May. As elsewhere, they were both praised for their spontaneity, making extra stops and talking impromptu to people. This was a skill which had come easily to the Queen since the earliest days of her marriage, and which the King had acquired under her influence. It was often remarked upon in Canada. ‘She dazzled me,’ wrote one guest at the civic luncheon in Vancouver. ‘As she greets you she seems as though she actually would like to know you.’61 That evening they left for the British Columbian capital, Victoria, on board the SS Princess Marguerite, passing through a formation of Indian war canoes at the Lion’s Gate. ‘She’s the most charming woman in the world’ was the verdict of the ship’s captain.62
The next day, 30 May, there were formal municipal and provincial welcome ceremonies; the press photographs show the Queen looking elegant in a slender, full-length pale-lilac dress, a spray of orchids pinned to the shoulder with a diamond bar, and, according to one reporter, the largest hat she had worn so far, of lilac straw. At the state luncheon which followed, the King made an eloquent speech referring to Victoria as ‘Canada’s Western gateway’, and to Canada’s role, looking as she did both east and west, in furthering friendly relations between the two hemispheres. A reporter watching the Queen noticed that she became tense and serious as he spoke; her eyes never left his face, while he exchanged glances with her at the beginning and end of the speech. Then she relaxed.63
After a ‘brilliant spectacle, the most heart-lifting scene that the King and Queen have participated in during their stay in Canada’, when the King presented colours to the Canadian navy in bright sunshine against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains and the deep blue of the Juan de Fuca Strait, their official engagements were over for the day. But another unofficial, Scottish gathering awaited the Queen. In the grounds of Government House, she met and was photographed with some fifty emigrant ‘men of Angus’, several of whom had worked on the Glamis estate.64
On 31 May they finally turned around and began the long train journey eastwards and homewards. Lady Tweedsmuir had stocked the train with books: the Queen enjoyed reading ‘all M. R. James’s Ghost Stories all over again!’65 From Jasper, where they stopped to spend a day in the National Park and a night in a log cabin at the Jasper Park Lodge, the Queen wrote to Queen Mary: ‘We arrived here this morning, and have just come in after a very beautiful drive & walk up to the Edith Cavell Glacier – where it was snowing!’ She wished that they could have had two days of rest there, ‘for we are working hard, and one day is really not much use for relaxation. However it’s better than nothing, and a great relief to get out of the train.’ For all the enthusiasm of
the welcome given them everywhere, she was not unaware of one sub-text of their tour, commenting: ‘We have had a most touching reception everywhere – it has really been wonderful and most moving. All Canada is very pleased at the way the French Canadians received us, and [they] are hopeful that the visit will bring lasting results in uniting the country. They are terribly divided in many ways – and the provincial Gov:ments especially are jealous and suspicious of the Federal Government. But they are so young that I expect they will achieve unity in the end.’66
Edmonton was the last provincial capital on the tour: once again the streets were thronged. ‘The volume of cheering equalled anything Edmonton has seen on sound newsreels of European crowds listening to some jaw-thrusting dictator talk about forests of bayonets and rivers of blood,’ reported one Canadian journalist. Twice the King and Queen made unscheduled stops, once to receive presents of beaded white buckskin from a group of Cree Indians, and then at the University Hospital, to talk to disabled ex-servicemen and child patients whose beds had been brought outside. ‘She’s a swell-looking girl,’ one veteran told a reporter, delighted that both King and Queen had shaken hands with him as they walked among the beds. Another paid her a compliment and was rewarded with a smiling word of thanks. ‘And did she smile! Oh boy – a million dollars’ worth, that’s all! I’ll never forget it.’67
At Saskatoon, where they made a two-hour stop on 3 June for the usual mayoral reception and drive through the city, the Queen met yet another former Strathmore employee, John Batterson, who had worked at Glamis in 1908–9, and whom she remembered. They made another impromptu break in their programme, mingling with the crowds at the station when the Queen asked to meet a group of First World War nurses there. At Melville later that evening, when the Queen, ever on the lookout for fellow Scots, stopped to talk to a police officer who had served in the Black Watch, the King laughed that it was a wonder that there were any Scots left at home.68
The next day the inhabitants of Sudbury, who twelve days earlier had stood silently by the track at 1 a.m. so as not to wake the King and Queen during their journey westwards, were rewarded with an hour’s visit. One banner proclaimed that its bearers had ‘Come 400 miles’.69 That evening there was an unscheduled addition to their programme: they were taken down a nickel mine clad in white oilskin coats and miners’ helmets and carrying torches. Over the next two days, in a letter to Princess Elizabeth, the Queen summed up their increasingly hectic progress, from the empty expanses of the west into the populous reaches of Ontario close to the American border.
Here we are flying along round terrific corners through quite wild and untouched country – along the side of beautiful lakes & thousands of miles of woods & bush. We left the cultivated land the day before yesterday, & have been travelling hard & without stopping except for little places where we water & coal. There are usually a large bunch of children who have probably come over a hundred miles by canoe down the lakes, as there are no roads up here …
June 6th
We have been almost continually ‘on show’ all today, passing through a very thickly populated part of Canada after Toronto, and at every hour there are thousands & thousands of people waiting at the various stops. They are so happy to have ‘the King’ with them, & sometimes I have tears in my eyes when one sees the emotion in their faces.70
At Windsor, Ontario, they made only a brief stop at the station on the evening of 6 June. Nonetheless, a crowd of almost half a million, swelled by a large influx of Americans reported to have been crossing the border at the rate of 30,000 an hour, had come to greet them. The throngs around the train were so dense that its departure was delayed while the track was cleared.71
The next day the temperature soared and the King suffered in the heavy uniform of a field marshal while the Queen raised one of her parasols. They smiled their way through six more receptions at stations along the route and a gymnastic display by 1,200 children at Hamilton. Finally, they drove from St Catharine’s to Niagara. ‘The roar of the Cataracts was hushed to a whisper’ by the cheering crowds, according to the local press. They had now been joined by Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British Ambassador to the United States, because the American part of their journey was about to begin.
At 9.30 p.m. the royal train left Niagara Falls; five minutes later, at the end of the suspension bridge, the Canadian officials (except the Prime Minister and his staff) stepped off and, as the official programme put it, ‘At this point the responsibility for the Royal Train will be accepted by the United States.’72 But the Queen, with the King’s support, insisted on keeping the Mounties with them.73
In a ‘dingy brick border station in a decrepit neighbourhood of Niagara Falls’ the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and a welcoming committee greeted the King and Queen.74 It was a historic moment: the first visit by a reigning British monarch to the United States. But it was fraught with potential hazards.
As Eleanor Roosevelt noted, President Roosevelt had invited the King and Queen to Washington in the hope of creating a bond of friendship between America and Britain.75 But throughout the United States memories of the First World War were still fresh. In 1935 Congress had passed the Neutrality Act, aimed at keeping the United States out of any European war. President Roosevelt had attempted to modify the act so as to allow the supply of munitions to Britain and France, but met fierce opposition in the Senate.
In these circumstances the royal visit might well have been regarded with suspicion. In order not to give the impression of embroiling the United States in an unwelcome alliance, Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, did not accompany the King and Queen, as he would normally have done. Indeed, the King had thought it best to take no minister in attendance at all. But he had reckoned without Mackenzie King, who was determined not to be cast aside at the frontier ‘like an old boot’, and won his fight to remain with the King throughout the tour.76 President Roosevelt saw no political disadvantage in the Canadian Prime Minister’s presence: he could be passed off as a frequent visitor to Washington and a personal friend.
For their part, the King and Queen could not expect an exuberant welcome from an American public still dazzled by memories of a popular and glamorous ex-king who had given up his throne for a bride from Baltimore. The President had received a disobliging assessment of the royal couple from the American Ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, who had met them during their state visit to France a year before. The ‘little Queen’, he wrote to Roosevelt, was ‘a nice girl’, whom he found ‘pleasant’ because she reminded him of the female caddies who carried his clubs at Pitlochry; he thought the President would like her, ‘in spite of the fact that her sister-in-law, the Princess Royal, goes about England talking about her “cheap public smile” ’ – not a remark the Princess Royal is likely to have made. Of the King he said, ‘The little King is beginning to feel his oats, but still remains a rather frightened boy.’77
American newspapers were not immediately enthusiastic; in Scribner’s Magazine, an article by Josef Israels II insisted that a large part of the USA believed that Edward VIII should still be king and that George VI, ‘a colorless, weak personality’ who allegedly suffered from epilepsy, was very much on probation. As for the Queen, she was ‘far too plump of figure, too dowdy in dress, to meet American specifications of a reigning Queen’.78 The Washington Evening Star commented that, despite official denials of a political agenda, the visit was a sensational piece of diplomacy for European consumption, planned by the British government to dramatize the natural ties between the British and American peoples. The New York Times called the visit ‘a pageant with a meaning’: whatever policy differences might exist, the two peoples stood together on fundamentals, and the least Americans could do was to give spiritual aid and comfort to sister democracies. The fact that the representatives of one of these democracies were called King and Queen was ‘a historical pleasantry. The British throne continues to exist because the British people regard it as a safeguard against tyranny … The
liberties of England could not be destroyed without danger to our own.’79
In London, The Times carefully and a little disingenuously underlined the non-political nature of the visit, describing it as ‘a brief and delightful diversion from the strenuous programme of the Canadian tour … No political motive has prompted the visit. The two Governments understand one another well enough, and have no need to ask King and President to interrupt the pleasures of social intercourse with business of State.’80
There were down-to-earth concerns. Lascelles wrote to his wife that the plans made by the American government were chaotic, ‘and how we shall get through the elaborate programme of the next few days without a series of the most hopeless “box-ups”, I don’t know’. He blamed the President’s ‘happy-go-lucky temperament’, adding that the British Embassy had been scarcely more efficient. The atmosphere on board the royal train was light-hearted, nonetheless. As the train rolled towards Washington it became the scene of a mobile investiture ceremony on foreign territory: the King, ‘giggling in a most disarming fashion’, knighted Lascelles, who had been appointed KCVO in the Birthday Honours, while Sir Ronald Lindsay and George Steward, the press liaison officer, were given the insignia of GCB and CVO respectively.81 At midnight the King and Queen went out on to the rear platform when the train stopped for a while at Buffalo, and talked to groups of spectators.
The train halted at Baltimore before arriving at Washington, and the King and Queen got off briefly. According to Joseph Kennedy’s diary of 21 July 1939, the Queen told him later that a woman looking exactly like the Duchess of Windsor came up to her with a bouquet. ‘I didn’t know what to think. I knew she came from Baltimore and after I realized it couldn’t be she, I thought it must be her sister. Anyhow, I had a few uncomfortable minutes.’82
At 11 a.m. on Thursday 8 June, the King and Queen arrived at Washington’s Union station, ‘in the most stupendous heat!’ as the Queen recorded. The temperature and humidity were made worse by their formal clothes, the King wearing the full-dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. The Queen was ‘looking cool’ according to the press, but evidently not feeling it, in a full-length pearl-grey dress and jacket with deep cuffs of fur, gloves and a hat. ‘I really don’t know how we got through those 2 days of continuous functions mostly out of doors, as it really was ghastly. It is very damp heat, & one could hardly breathe,’ she wrote to Queen Mary.83
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