They sailed in driving rain to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and the planned garden party at Government House was washed out, but the island’s people turned out in their thousands nevertheless. When the King and Queen rejoined their train that evening after sailing back to the mainland for two more mayoral receptions, a display of temper by the King showed that the strain of the tour was telling on him. As he stood with the Queen on the rear platform waving goodbye to a large crowd at New Glasgow station, the train failed to move. The engine was missing. Going back inside the train, the King – who was in naval uniform – flung his sword down the passage in disgust, narrowly missing the steward, Wilfred Notley, who told the tale in his memoirs. ‘The poor Queen’, meanwhile, was ‘left outside waving her handkerchief and the people standing in the rain and the pipes piping away’.124
At Halifax on Thursday 15 June, the last day of the Canadian tour, the King and Queen were greeted once again by the Governor General, Lord Tweedsmuir, and his wife, who had sailed down from Quebec in the Empress of Britain for the farewell ceremonies. The streets were thronged and the sun shone as they toured the city, watched a children’s pageant and talked to disabled ex-servicemen. After lunch the King and Queen both made farewell speeches, which were broadcast throughout the Dominion. The Queen’s speech, ‘delivered with graceful ease and lucidity’ according to the Montreal Gazette, described her delight in seeing Canada; ‘but what has warmed my heart in a way I cannot express in words’, she said, ‘is the proof you have given us everywhere that you were glad to see us.’ She ended, ‘Au revoir et Dieu vous bénisse.’125 At 8.20 that evening the Empress of Britain sailed away from Halifax to the blaring of whistles from accompanying craft and the shouts of thousands lining the harbour.
Amid all the favourable comment, Mackenzie King was not the only one to see the tour as a much needed boost to national unity: a Canadian lawyer remarked that the country had seemed to be in danger of falling apart, but the royal visit had awakened dormant patriotism. ‘I think the Empire will find us in our proper place if and when trouble arises.’ Another observer commented that, if war should come, the royal visit might mean far more volunteers from Canada and ‘a sympathetic USA which won’t stay out nearly so long as the last time’.126
It was not quite the end. Newfoundland, the oldest English colony and not yet a province of Canada, lay on their route home. On 17 June, in the capital city of St John’s, the King and Queen stood on the spot where Sir Humphrey Gilbert had staked a claim to the island in the name of Queen Elizabeth I in 1583. It was a day of great excitement for the population of fishermen, farmers and miners who gathered along their route and in the capital. The King made a broadcast tribute to the courage and resilience of Newfoundlanders, both in the First World War and in the severe economic stress of recent years. At the end of the eight-hour visit the weather turned threatening, and the return journey to their ship via the three Royal Naval vessels escorting them, which the King and Queen had arranged to visit, was something of a challenge. In heavy seas they jumped from a trawler to a launch, and thence to another, becoming drenched from head to foot in the process.
As the Empress of Britain set sail, Lady Tweedsmuir watched on the shore while the crowds cheered and the figures of the King and Queen became smaller and smaller and were lost to sight. ‘The line from Antony and Cleopatra came into my mind. I tried to push the thought away, but it kept coming back: “The bright day is gone and we are for the dark.” ’127
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ON BOARD, AS the Empress sailed east and homewards, the King and Queen could finally rest. The voyage home was uneventful; there were cinema shows in the evening and a cricket match between the army and the navy, in which the Queen played for the navy. Five days later, in Yarmouth Bay on the Isle of Wight, there was a joyous reunion: the two Princesses came aboard to join their parents for the last two hours of their voyage. They had a family lunch party at which they all sang favourite songs, including ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree’ and ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’.128 And then the triumphal progress home began.
Flotillas of pleasure steamers, yachts and small boats crammed with cheering people accompanied the ship up the Solent and Southampton Water; more crowds gathered on the shore. Queen Mary came to meet them at Southampton, with the King’s sister and two brothers and their spouses. The train track to London was lined with more well-wishers; at Waterloo they were greeted by the Prime Minister. The route to Buckingham Palace was thronged, and they were given a tumultuous reception; the Members of both Houses of Parliament were assembled in Parliament Square to welcome them home. Harold Nicolson recorded that when the Royal Family came into the Square, ‘We lost all dignity and yelled and yelled. The King wore a happy schoolboy grin. The Queen was superb. She really does manage to convey to each individual in the crowd that he or she has had a personal greeting.’ Then, echoing Lady Tweedsmuir, he added, ‘she is in truth one of the most amazing Queens since Cleopatra.’129
Outside the Palace, where the King and Queen came out twice on to the balcony, tens of thousands of people cheered, waved flags and sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘God Save the King’ all evening. Then they chanted ‘We want the King’ and ‘We want the Queen’ and out the family came on to the balcony overlooking the Mall, and still the cheering went on and on – and they had to come out again.
The next day, 23 June, their return was celebrated with a luncheon at Guildhall. The tour had opened the King’s eyes to a wider world and new ideas, and given him new confidence in himself and in his role as monarch. He spoke movingly and effectively, celebrating Canada and Britain, their shared institutions and their love of liberty. The enthusiastic welcome given to him and the Queen by Canadians was, he thought, ‘an expression of their thankfulness for those rights of free citizenship which are the heritage of every member of our great Commonwealth of Nations’. He and the Queen had undertaken their journey to foster such ideals and to show that the Crown could be ‘a potent force for promoting peace and goodwill among mankind’. If they had in some sort succeeded, that would be ‘a source of thankfulness to us all our lives long’.
The speech brought tears to the eyes of the King’s audience and was seen at home and abroad as a declaration that Britain would defend her democratic way of life.130 Mackenzie King read it in Canada and cabled to Tommy Lascelles: ‘I am sure that no Sovereign has ever uttered words fraught with greater good for mankind.’ Lascelles replied that the King’s performance had indeed been remarkable and that even ‘hardened experts’ like Churchill, Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury had been much moved. The King himself recognized with obvious pleasure that public speaking was no longer ‘hell’ for him.131
If the tour had marked the King’s coming of age as a monarch, for the Queen also the warmth and admiration with which she had been received came as a great psychological boost. ‘This has made us,’ both King and Queen said of the tour.132 The Queen had grown confident in her role, not only in the more formal and ceremonial mode expected of her at home, but also in the hail-fellow-well-met ambiance of the North American continent. At the time of the abdication the Queen observed that King Edward VIII had lost ‘the common touch’ and was cut off from ‘ordinary human feeling’.133 In Canada and the United States in 1939 she and the King demonstrated that they were different. They showed themselves able to shed formality and take a close interest in all sorts and conditions of men, and the King began to speak explicitly of forming a more open and flexible idea of kingship than that of his father.134 As he put it to Mackenzie King, it should be built on first-hand knowledge of his peoples and of their affairs.135 It was a concept in which his wife was well qualified to support him.
The timing of the voyage, at this moment of great international tension, had also given the Queen a strong sense of the value of the Commonwealth. Writing to Lady Tweedsmuir after their return, she said: ‘Our chief emotion is one of deep thankfulness that [the tour] was such a success, for more & more
one feels that a united Empire is the only hope for this troubled world of today. Sometimes I wonder whether we are not already fighting a War. A war of love & right thinking against the forces of evil.’ She acknowledged that they had dreaded returning to the ‘horrible feeling’ of acute anxiety that had sapped their strength before their departure for Canada; but, she continued, ‘We find everybody very calm, very determined, and beginning to lose patience with the Nazi leaders, who seem determined to put a wrong construction on whatever any of our leading politicians say, and are still, I fear certain that England will not fight. We must continue to pray that some means of preserving Peace will be found, and that Germany will realize that aggression & cruelty lead to destruction.’136
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THE SUMMER TO which they returned was balmy. Holiday trains had standing room only. Beaches were packed. But gas masks were carried now. There was a feeling in the air that war could not be far away and that the last minutes of peace must be enjoyed. On 19 July the King and Queen gave a ball at Buckingham Palace for Prince and Princess Paul of Yugoslavia, who had arrived at short notice for a private visit – Prince Paul was now regent of his country, during the minority of the fifteen-year-old King Peter (the godson whom the Duke of York had held nervously on a cushion at his christening in 1923). Some 800 people came to dance to Jack Jackson’s orchestra, and the ball went on until dawn; even Queen Mary stayed until 2.30 a.m.137 It was the last ball at the Palace before the war.
Two days later the King and Queen, with the Princesses, embarked in the royal yacht Victoria and Albert for a brief holiday which included a visit to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where the King had studied. The Queen’s old friend Freddy Dalrymple Hamilton was still Captain of the College and their host. They were given an enthusiastic reception; in the dining hall all 500 cadets ‘leaped to their feet & cheered themselves to a standstill for about 3 minutes. A quite unrehearsed item & shook me to the core!’ Dalrymple Hamilton recorded.138 The King amused the cadets by reading out his own misdemeanours from the College Punishment Book.139 This visit was often said to be the occasion of Princess Elizabeth’s first meeting with Prince Philip of Greece, now a cadet at the College, but they had already met at the Duke of Kent’s wedding in 1934 and at family gatherings since then.
The King had been longing to get back to Balmoral and at the beginning of August they were at last able to go north.140 He had decided to hold this year’s Duke of York’s Camp in the grounds of Abergeldie Castle, near Balmoral; it was in full swing on the banks of the Dee and, the Queen thought, going very well. After a day or two it was impossible to distinguish the industrial boys from the public school boys, she told Queen Mary.141 The King himself acted as camp chief and took the boys on expeditions each day; the Queen and the Princesses came to supper at the camp and the boys were invited to tea at Balmoral. On the final night the King lit the traditional bonfire and his pipers played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the National Anthem. It was to be the last such camp.
The march to war compelled the King to return south to inspect the Reserve Fleet at Weymouth. He was impressed and, back at Balmoral, wrote to his mother, ‘It is wonderful the way in which all the men have come back for duty at this time, & I feel sure it will be a deterrent factor in Hitler’s mind to start a war. If we can only get through these 2 months without a crisis all would be well.’142 Hoping against hope, the King and Queen invited a series of shooting parties to Balmoral later in August and early September – ‘with, let us pray, no warlike interruptions this year’, wrote the Queen to Queen Mary.143
That was not to be. On 22 August the astonishing and awful news broke that the Soviet Union and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact. Almost everyone realized that the war which they had tried so long to avoid was now imminent. This embrace between the two most deadly dictatorships in the world would allow Hitler to launch an assault first on Poland and then on the West. At the same time, the Soviets could seize eastern Poland and hope that the Germans and the West would then fight each other to destruction. (The Soviet Union was later to be praised for the enormous sacrifice she made in the defeat of Hitler; such praise tended to ignore the crucial fact that had Stalin not allied his country with Hitler in August 1939, much of this sacrifice might never have been called for.)
In London the Cabinet met for three and a half hours; Chamberlain recalled Parliament, and the King at once took the night train back to London, leaving his wife and children in Scotland. On 25 August the government signed a formal treaty of alliance with Poland which committed Britain to her defence if attacked. From Sandringham Queen Mary wrote to the Queen: ‘I feel deeply for you too I having gone through all this in Aug. 1914 when I was the wife of the Sovereign.’144
Desperate negotiations with Berlin continued to the end. The King sent the Queen copies of Chamberlain’s final letter to Hitler and Hitler’s reply. The German leader had, he told her, made yet another offer to Britain. ‘We have no idea as to its nature but in the meantime we are working out counter proposals if the offer is not too outrageous … All hope has not gone anyhow for the moment.’ He ran out of space at the bottom of the page and so wrote across the top, ‘All my love Angel, & I wish I were with you. Ever your very loving Bertie.’145
Last-minute appeals for peace were sent to Berlin and Warsaw by Pope Pius XII, by President Roosevelt and by many others. Mackenzie King argued that the King and Queen could save the situation by making a direct appeal to Hitler. And he urged that the Queen’s name should be associated ‘in an appeal on behalf of women and children who would become innocent victims in any world conflict’.146 Such suggestions fell on fertile soil: the King and Queen were still deeply anxious to try to prevent another war. On 27 August the King again suggested to the Prime Minister, as he had a year before, that he write a personal letter to Hitler. Once again Chamberlain demurred, arguing that the right psychological moment had not yet come.147
The problem of what to do with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the event of war now loomed. The King wrote to tell Queen Mary that he had provisionally arranged for them to return to England. The Duke would be given ‘a civilian job under the Regional Commissioner for Wales. They would both stay in Wales.’148 Neither his mother nor his wife wished to see the Duchess of Windsor; Queen Mary told the Queen that she thought she was dangerous.149
On the night of 28 August the Queen kissed her children goodbye and took the night train to London. She hated being parted from them, but wanted to wait on events before risking their coming back to the capital. If war did break out they would go to Birkhall, in case Balmoral was targeted by bombers. She also wrote to her eldest sister Rose asking her to look after the Princesses in the event that something befell her and the King. Rose replied promising that in such circumstances, ‘I would give up everything to try & make the two darlings happy, & try my very best to smooth their lives … I have always loved them.’150 In London the Queen found her husband ‘very calm and cheerful’ despite all the anxieties. She wrote to Queen Mary, ‘It is indeed terrible that the world should be faced with a War, just because of the wickedness and sheer stupidity of the Nazis. One can only go on hoping & praying, that a solution will be found.’151
On the last day of August, the evacuation of three million mothers and children was announced. Railway stations were thronged with families, labels tied around the necks of the children; parents were weeping. Sandbags were piled around government buildings and Buckingham Palace. The most valuable paintings in the National Gallery were packed up for distribution to secret hiding places around the country. People finally began to realize that the unimaginable was happening – in this beautiful summer weather the world that they loved was about to come to an end.
Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle began their own sombre preparations. The King and the Prime Minister had decided that both should be kept open, but the Palace with only a skeleton staff.152 Many in the Royal Household departed for military service; most of the remaining staff st
arted to move out of London to Windsor. Beds and bunk beds had to be brought into the Castle and rooms found for scores of people. The Castle windows were sandbagged, lights on the Long Walk were extinguished, visitors were barred, steel shelters were erected for the sentries, everyone was rehearsed in air-raid drill. The carriage horses in the Buckingham Palace Mews were sent to Windsor and put to work on the farms. The finest pictures and other works of art in both Palace and Castle were removed and stored underground at Windsor. Display cases were emptied of miniatures, gems, porcelain and glass; furniture was turned to face the wall. The great cut-glass chandeliers which illuminated the state rooms at Windsor were lowered to three feet from the floor so as to diminish the impact of any fall. Blackout restrictions were severe; all the skylights were covered in black paint, turning into gloom the splendour of the Waterloo Chamber, King Charles II’s dining room and the Grand Staircase. The windows of the rooms still being used were covered with a lacework of glue and wire netting.
All hopes evaporated on 1 September 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland. The following day Britain issued an ultimatum: if Hitler withdrew his troops, the British government would endeavour to broker peace between Germany and Poland. On the morning of Sunday 3 September the British Ambassador to Berlin delivered a final note to the German government stating that unless Germany undertook to withdraw her troops from Poland by 11 a.m., Britain would declare war.
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