by John Matson
In 1908, a storm destroyed a number of trees on the estate. Some of these had stood between the Norwich Gates and the House, which now lay open to the public gaze. The King decided that the wall and gates should be moved 300 yards further from the House, which also meant altering the course of the road outside. Before the days of planning permissions, this was easily achieved.
One of the King’s greatest pleasures was to take his guests to visit the stud, where Persimmon, the horse that had won the Derby in 1896 had a special box of his own, and a groom all to himself. ‘Many a time,’ wrote Stamper, ‘as we have been driving past the paddock, there has been Persimmon out at exercise… the King would watch him with great pleasure and “Isn’t he beautiful?” he would say. “Isn’t he beautiful?”191 The Sunday tours continued with visits to the greenhouses or to look at the flock of Southdown sheep which were brought to a high state of perfection in special pens near Commodore Wood by the shepherd, Mr Moulding, and his son, John, who sometimes attended the shoots carrying the King’s cartridge bag.
In the early months of 1910, King Edward suffered violent fits of coughing and periodic bouts of bronchitis. Despite these, he continued to smoke his favourite cigars, but his health was being steadily undermined – to a point when his doctors strongly recommended that he should spend the winter abroad in a more congenial climate. But the King was worried by domestic crises and the growing threat of war, and was reluctant to leave. In the event, he was in France early in the new year, and spent much of March and April at Biarritz, where he remained in his rooms for days together. His retiring in a place where he had been known for his conviviality and affability necessitated an announcement that the King was indisposed. At the end of April he returned to London and two days later went to Sandringham. He walked slowly round the gardens before lunch, accompanied by the head gardener and his agent, inspecting work that had been done in his absence. The next day, a Sunday, he went to church, though he did not follow his customary routine of walking across the park, but went round by car. After lunch he walked round the gardens again, despite the cold driving rain. In the evening he worked at his papers with Sir Frederick Ponsonby. The following afternoon he returned to Buckingham Palace. For the next three days he continued to see visitors and sign papers in spite of sleeplessness, shortness of breath and feeling ‘wretchedly ill’. ‘I shall work to the end, he declared. ‘Of what use is it to be alive if one cannot work?’ By this time the King was suffering from terrible fits of coughing, when he would turn black in the face.
In the meantime, Queen Alexandra had heard, whilst on holiday in Corfu, that the King was unwell and decided to return, though she had no premonition that he was, in fact, close to death. He was not well enough to greet her at the station and she was shocked to see him on her arrival at Buckingham Palace, grey in the face and struggling for breath. She noticed an oxygen cylinder standing in the corner of his room. On the next day he dressed in order to receive Sir Ernest Cassel and lit a cigar, which he was, however, unable to finish. He spoke indistinctly, saying: ‘I am very seedy, but I wanted to see you.’192 He could eat little lunch and later he walked to the window of his room to look at his canaries. It was then that he collapsed and fell. Still he refused to go to bed. On being given the news that his horse Witch of the Air had won the 4.15 p.m. at Kempton Park the King replied, ‘Yes, I have heard of it. I am very glad.’ Soon afterwards he fainted and was assisted to bed. Before he lapsed into a coma, he realised that he was dying. He was heard to murmur, ‘I shall not give in. I shall work to the end.’193 It was then that the Queen showed in its fullest extent her generosity of heart, sending for Mrs Keppel that he might bid her farewell. In the evening, surrounded by his family, he lost consciousness and died peacefully a quarter of an hour before midnight.
Queen Alexandra wrote to Mary Drew, whose husband had died some three months before the King:
I have been wishing to write to you long ago to thank you for your dear letter of true sympathy in my overwhelming sorrow and misery, but somehow I could not summon up courage to do so sooner, which I know you will understand and forgive., Indeed all you say in your despair I feel in mine, and the world can never be the same again in our loneliness. It all seems still like a terrible dream, and I cannot realise that I shall never in this world see his blessed face again or hear his dear voice.194
He was sadly missed. Those who knew him recalled with affection his affability and charm, his extraordinary zest for life and untiring energy, his enjoyment of companionship and entertainment. They remembered his contented gurgle of laughter when amused and his kindness. Summing up his life, his biographer wrote:
King Edward was a thoroughly conscientious sovereign who made pleasure his servant and not his master after his accession to the throne. His private life, which was not free from what moralists could term blemishes, included an ideal relationship with his heir; and the dignity of his public life, his immense popularity and charm, and the zest, punctuality and panache with which he performed his duty forcefully and faithfully until the day on which he died, enhanced the prestige of the monarchy. The journey upon which he embarked in boyhood… may be compared with a voyage to the Antipodes. Safe havens were attainable from opposite directions; parents and tutors pointed one way but he found another; and he arrived.195
CHAPTER ELEVEN
KING IN A COTTAGE
King George and Queen Mary were confronted by many urgent and important issues in those first exhausting weeks of the new reign. The period between the death and funeral of King Edward VII had been unduly protracted, and now there were questions concerning the Royal residences which had to be addressed. Queen Alexandra, who ten years previously had never wanted to go to Buckingham Palace at all, now did not wish to be dislodged, and her often illogical mind needed some persuading that this was necessary. Somewhat reluctantly then, she moved the few yards down the Mall to Marlborough House and so returned to the scene of those heady days of the 1860s. At Sandringham, King Edward had left her the Big House for her lifetime and King George refused to listen to any suggestions that his mother’s intention of remaining there was unreasonable. Meanwhile, the King Emperor remained, while he was in Norfolk, in the cramped conditions at York Cottage. His children were growing up and the family and Household were as uncomfortable as possible, yet a few hundred yards away stood this enormous mansion almost entirely unoccupied. In this Queen Alexandra showed a quite extraordinary lack of consideration for the all-too-obvious needs of her son, the King. Her obstinacy and selfishness, contrasted with her impulsive but quite random kindnesses to anyone who crossed her path, made her seem not quite grown up. There is the well-recorded incident when one Christmas she chanced to meet a young Scottish footman standing pensively by a window. She brought him a pair of gold cuff-links saying; ‘Nobody must be lonely in my house. You will get your proper Christmas present later, but these are something personal to you from me.’196 Her lack of consideration to Princess Victoria was proverbial: she had effectively prevented the Princess’s marriage to the Earl of Rosebery. He was, said the Princess, the only man she had ever really loved; but her mother made it clear that she was needed at home. Queen Alexandra’s possessiveness was all too evident; as Princess of Wales she used to keep a bell by her side to summon her daughter. A cousin wrote:
Poor Toria was just a glorified maid to her mother. Many a time a talk or a game would be broken off by a message from my Aunt Alix, and Toria would run like lightning, often to discover that her mother could not remember why she had sent for her, and it puzzled me because Aunt Alix was so good.197
King George himself was not blind to her failings: ‘Mama, as I have always said, is one of the most selfish people I know.’198
So it was to York Cottage that the King and Queen returned during their visits to Sandringham, which were, alas, somewhat rarer than they had hitherto been. They were much occupied during the first year of the King’s reign, not least by preparations for his Coronation, while Qu
een Mary found relaxation from the many official functions in arranging the King’s family possessions at Buckingham Palace. After the ceremony, the King and Queen sailed to India to attend the Durbar – the meeting of the Indian Princes to pay homage to their Emperor. This accomplished, there were state visits to be paid in Germany and France. But already industrial unrest was threatening the country’s economic stability. The King and Queen visited the Welsh mining valleys, where they were received enthusiastically. This was followed by a tour of the Yorkshire Coalfield: while they were there an accident occurred underground, in which several miners lost their lives. They at once drove over to condole with the bereaved families and Queen Mary, usually so firmly controlled, could not restrain her tears. Their sympathy and readiness to share in this tragedy meant more to the community than any formal carriage drive and these tours were widely appreciated and set the pattern for the future, ultimately leading to the ‘walkabout’ later in the century. The contrast between the extraordinary splendour of the Durbar and a King who could talk to his subjects as man-to-man could not have been greater.
Further problems arose at this time over the Suffragette Movement whose activities, fast gathering pace, were to be interrupted only by the outbreak of war in 1914. The old way of life, the certainty of an established order of things, was imperceptibly changing. The King’s cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was being dragged towards war by the German military hierarchy. His attitude towards England was ambivalent: he once expressed the wish ‘that every drop of his English blood might be drawn from his veins’; he felt that his uncle, King Edward VII, had taken a condescending view of him: when he left Sandringham after attending the Edward VII’s birthday celebrations in 1902, the King commented, ‘Thank God he has gone.’199 Yet there had come an easier relationship with his cousin, King George, from which he hoped that the increasing rivalry between the two nations might yet be peacefully resolved. This hope was destroyed by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo and the punitive ultimatum delivered by Austria to Serbia. As the countries of Europe arranged themselves into two conflicting camps, there could be no alternative to Britain’s declaration of war against Germany on 4 August. It was the end of an era.
At Sandringham York Cottage, standing beside the lake in all its peacefulness, seemed far from the tumultuous events in which the King and Queen were deeply involved. On the night of 4 August, they were repeatedly summoned to the balcony of Buckingham Palace by huge and patriotic crowds. Standing there, on the newly finished balcony, they symbolised the stability and security of England herself, which no enemy forces could dislodge. Deeply saddened as they were by the turn of events, the King and Queen entered a period of intense activity, and there were times when York Cottage must have seemed very far away. Yet somehow they managed to pay fleeting visits when they could briefly recuperate from the constant strain of their public duties and where some semblance of permanence could be found.
Queen Alexandra – who, as we have seen, maintained a long-standing hatred of Prussia – retired to Sandringham on the edge of a nervous breakdown, after a hectic year in which she had thrown herself into the war effort with abandon, visiting hospitals and organisations connected with war work. On these occasions her deafness was no handicap, and her unpunctuality was forgiven, yet it cannot have been an easy task with her disability, and public appearances were becoming an increasing strain on her constitution. She grieved over the huge casualty lists, and only too often went to console tenants on the Sandringham estate who had lost a husband or a son. She left London accompanied only by Charlotte Knollys, declaring ‘I shall go mad if not left alone by myself.’200 Her hatred of the Germans was not untypical: belief in atrocities was widespread and, although her situation enabled her to be better informed than most, her deafness and simple nature scarcely allowed an intellectual approach to the conduct of the war. In any case, her dislike of Germany went back some fifty years to the Schleswig-Holstein affair, which in 1864 had ended disastrously for Denmark. When Zeppelins dropped bombs in the neighbourhood in January 1915, she wrote to ‘Jackie’ Fisher, the First Sea Lord, asking for ‘lots of rockets with spikes or hooks on to defend our Norfolk coast’. There was, at about the same time, an invasion scare on the coast, and a guard of Grenadiers was attached to the King and Queen after Christmas. One bomb dropped on the estate, on the Wolferton flats near The Wash; the crater was afterwards enlarged to form a haunt for wildfowl. The only casualties were at King’s Lynn, where four people were killed. Queen Alexandra, in this trying time, felt cut off, as indeed she was, from her family and home in Denmark. The strain of maintaining some contact with her relatives spread widely across Europe was considerable, but she found ways and means of keeping in touch with her nephew, King Christian X of Denmark, and she was able to warn her sister, the Empress Marie Feodorovna, mother of Czar Nicholas II of Russia, that the Germans intended to attack Warsaw, and hoped that she was aware of it.
Towards the end of 1915 the King came to Sandringham as an invalid. Whilst he was inspecting the Royal Flying Corps at Hesdigneul in October, three cheers were called while he was still only a few yards distant. The sound frightened his horse, which reared up: slipping, he fell back on top of the King. For a short time it seemed that he had suffered only minor injuries, and he was supported to his car, but further examination showed that he had broken his pelvis in two places, and he returned to England on a stretcher. For some months he was in considerable pain, and it seems that from this time, his health was never again quite the same. Despite the King’s injury, the family Christmas at Sandringham was a comparatively festive affair, with sing-songs at the piano, and all the fun of the gramophone, which was still something of a novelty. ‘In the evening after dinner I had to play accompaniment for comic songs,’ wrote Lady Bertha Dawkins, ‘sung by the Queen, Princess Mary & 3 Princes till we went to bed…. The King is ever so much better & looks very well indeed, but his leg still bothers him, as he gets neuralgia in it, & that makes him walk lame at times.’201
But there was a darker side, for in 1915 tragedy came to Sandringham. During the year the Allied forces had invaded Turkey in the Gallipoli peninsula, in a campaign that was doomed to failure from the outset and ended in a humiliating withdrawal after suffering heavy casualties. Among the units participating was the King’s Own Sandringham Company in the 5th Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment. It was a Territorial unit created in 1909 at the suggestion of King Edward VII, formed and commanded by Captain Frank Beck, the King’s agent and son of the Edmund Beck, who had been such a thorn in the side of Louise Cresswell. One afternoon in August, shortly after disembarking at Suvla Bay, the Company was ordered to advance: it was never seen again. Some, including Beck, were killed by shell-fire or machine-guns during the initial stages of the attack; it was assumed that, of the remainder, some at least had been taken prisoner. The effect on a small community of scores of telegrams arriving simultaneously and containing the ominous word ‘missing’ was profound. The King personally requested news of the Company but, as it gradually became clear that the Turkish prisoner-of-war camps did not contain any of its members, it was assumed that it had been annihilated. After the war it was revealed that those who had survived the initial advance had found themselves isolated from the rest of the battalion and surrounded, that they had almost certainly surrendered and had all been massacred at a farmstead where their bodies were found in a shallow ravine. How much of the disaster was reported to the Royal family is impossible to say; undoubtedly the sudden and unexplained loss of more than 150 men from local families must have darkened the lives of those living on the estate. In the context of the First World War it was unfortunately a situation which was tragically common to many communities, throughout the country, in the wake of the battles of Ypres and of the Somme. Characteristically, Queen Alexandra unhesitatingly visited all the bereaved families whose sons she had known and watched grow up on the estate.
Zeppelin raids continued intermittently
along the Norfolk coast. Early in 1916, Lady Bertha wrote to her daughter:
We were all, maids included, after tea sitting listening to the gramophone, when Sir Charles Cust put his head in & said: ‘Come, a Zepp can be heard’, so out of the front door we went into the dark, wrapped up in rugs & coats, the Queen in the King’s fur coat, & we did hear a distant dull thudding, but it must have been a long way off, so we came back into the house. Sir Charles had heard 3 bombs fall before he called us, & the detective, Spenser, heard 6. When we got in all the lights went out, & the King was frantic & somebody caught it!202
In September of the same year Queen Alexandra wrote to the King:
We have been living through some gruesome moments here – just a fortnight ago we had those beastly Zepps over us. At 10 o’clock that Saturday evening they began. We were all sitting upstairs in Victoria’s room when we were suddenly startled by the awful noise! and lo and behold, there was the awful monster over our heads. Everybody rushed up and wanted to go downstairs. I must confess I was not a bit afraid – but it was a most uncanny feeling – poor Victoria was quite white in the face and horror-struck – but we all wanted to see it – the house was pitch dark and at last Charlotte and I stumbled down in the darkness and found Colonel Davidson and Hawkins (the butler) scrambling about outside so I also went out, but saw nothing and for the time the Zepps had flown off somewhere but came back about four o’clock in the night and dropped bombs all over the place!203
After this raid, Queen Alexandra immediately went to Dodshill where the bombs had fallen, to commiserate with those whose homes had been damaged.