By the spring of 1919, nine months had elapsed since the Tsar and his wife and children had been shot in a scene of astonishing mass brutality, and a horse had been killed over the grave of Nicholas in violent emphasis of the hatred his assassin had felt for him. The Prince of Wales was aware that this multiple act of violence had shaken his father’s confidence in ‘the innate decency of mankind’.
Nicholas’s mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, had escaped the serial murder of her family but had been stranded in Yalta, living in fear for her life. The Dowager Empress was the sister of George’s mother, Queen Alexandra, and George felt he should offer his help. A British warship, HMS Marlborough, under the command of Captain Johnson, was sent to Yalta. Until then the Dowager Empress had resisted all offers to bring her to safety, but Captain Johnson had brought a letter from Alexandra urging her to come to England. The invitation from her sister finally induced the Dowager Empress to leave. Twenty members of the imperial family boarded the ship, together with their closest servants. On the high deck fifty passengers, thirty-eight of whom were women, watched their homeland recede as four hundred members of the Russian Imperial Guard slowly circled the Marlborough in a British sloop. First Lieutenant Francis Pridham listened as the Russian voices drifted, unaccompanied by music but in perfect harmony, across the water, singing the now redundant words of the Russian imperial anthem, ‘God Save the Tsar’. Standing alone was the slight but still beautiful figure of the Dowager Empress, motionless and silent as she listened to the familiar words. Pridham realised that ‘none other than that beautiful old tune rendered in such a manner could have poignantly reflected the sadness of that moment’.
Addressing his feelings about another first cousin, the King had begun to confess publicly to a loathing of all things German, telling Franklin D. Roosevelt on the Assistant Secretary of the Navy’s visit to Britain in 1918, ‘I have never seen a German gentleman.’ He had written in his diary on the day of the Kaiser’s abdication: ‘I look upon him as the greatest criminal known for having plunged the world into this ghastly war.’ In 1917 in order to distance the British royal family from his German cousins the King had changed the family’s surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. The new name, he felt, with its homely associations, would be infinitely more appealing to the British people. The Kaiser heard about the change while on his way to the theatre and jokingly announced that he was about to see a performance of’The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’.
Up and down the country this loathing of all things German remained intense. After the war previously withheld stories about the dreadful things the enemy had done continued to filter out. Not only had the Germans been responsible for the deaths of husbands, fiancés, brothers and husbands but they had torpedoed hospital ships, and caused unbelievable suffering with chemical gas. They had, in Barbara Cartland’s words, ‘disregarded the accepted rules of war’. In the final days of the fighting Philip Gibbs was told by one officer: ‘If I had a thousand Germans in a row I would cut all their throats and enjoy the job.’ During the election campaign crowds had filled the streets yelling out ‘Hang the Kaiser’ and ‘Get Rid of Enemy Aliens’. At the beginning of December 1918 a special meeting was held in Hackney to discuss demands for all ‘enemy aliens to be thrown out of the country on the conclusion of peace’. Lloyd George’s suggestion that the Kaiser be tried at Dover Castle and if convicted be exiled to the Falkland Islands came to nothing. But the tone of the suggestion was in line with the British wish for recrimination.
On 5 January, a week-long Communist-inspired demonstration had taken place in Berlin and, running out of control, had resulted in a terrifying and violent battle and the loss of 1,200 lives. The appalling suffering of the German people both during and after the war made little impact on the general level of anger in England; three quarters of a million Germans were estimated to have died from malnutrition between 1914 and 1919. A particularly gruesome and hugely popular film, Behind the Door, showed the skinning alive of a German submarine commander who had seized the wife of a German-American merchant marine captain.
Some found the prejudice directed at Germany distressing. They had not forgotten the pro-German sensibility that had existed in British society from Victorian times. Fifty-three thousand Germans had lived happily in Britain before the war. During Victoria’s reign, under the influence of her German husband Albert, it was not uncommon at a grand dinner party for conversational exchanges to be made in three languages, the guests picking their way between English, French and German, even in one sentence. An enquiry about a trip abroad demanded an agile game of linguistic hopscotch, ‘Vous étes allés chercher a change of air among die schönste boulevards?’ The streets of London were filled with itinerant German music makers and restaurants like Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street were always fully booked at lunchtime.
But the virulence of feeling against the enemy intensified in 1915, when the Lusitania, the British passenger liner, was sunk by a German torpedo, and a thousand civilians were drowned. The act was viewed as unforgivable and unforgettable. Anyone with a German name was targeted. In Salford a jeering crowd including many women attacked a shop belonging to Mr Herman Pratt, a respected and popular pork butcher. Breaking down the door, they threw everything they could lay their hands on into the street. Out went pork joints, crockery, chairs and bedding and finally the piano, until the remaining wreck was set on fire. There was looted bacon for breakfast in many poor homes the following morning.
During the war the Kaiser was blamed for everything possible that went wrong. Victoria Sackville, enraged by reading in the newspaper of a price rise in milk, pushed the article from her in disgust. ‘Ce sale Kaiser – voila qu’il a upset the milk.’ Even after the war, everyone from the King downwards remained vocal in hatred of the Germans. Cinemas and newspapers disseminated the prejudice. An advertisement in Vogue asked its readers, ‘Why drink German Hocks or Moselles when France our ally offers us the produce of her choicest vineyards at the Moseloro estate, superior in quality to German Hocks and Moselles shipped to this country before the war?’ Nicknames in frequent use by both ex-soldiers and civilians for the German people included Squarehead and Boche, from the French word Caboche, meaning Cabbage Head. The British press ran headlines repeating Lloyd George’s objective that the Germans should be squeezed until ‘the pips squeak’. As the troops sat out the long wait for demobilisation papers, propaganda continued to strengthen the feeling against the defeated enemy. The film Shoulder Arms starred Charlie Chaplin, dressed in khaki instead of the more familiar tramp outfit, trying to capture the Kaiser while disguised as a tree. The film was shown in stables and village halls across France wherever a screen could be erected.
A story by Rudyard Kipling written in 1915 entitled ‘Mary Post-gate’ continued to enjoy popularity. In the story a woman watches as a German airman dies of thirst in front of her as she refuses him water. Kipling’s approval of her behaviour is left in no doubt. But one curious anomaly in this hostile view of all things German was found in the post-war passion for breeds of German dog. The Times noticed that it was ‘as easy to buy an Alsatian as to rent a house or flat in London’. Some of the best-trained dogs had been looted from German prisoners, and their vigilance, fidelity and suspiciousness towards strangers were attributes highly prized by lonely widows and people of a nervous disposition.
Most people, including the King, looked forward to the restrictions and conditions that the Peace Conference would impose on the country they had been fighting for the last four years. By the end of the war, as a result of harassment and deportation, the number of Germans left in Britain had dropped to 22,000, under half the pre-war figure.
The feelings shared by the King and his subjects on the future fate of Germany did not extend to Russia, the country so recently ruled by George’s cousin Nicholas. The powerful influence of the revolutionary movement was growing by the week. British grievances were undercut by an incipient sympathy with the men whom
many thought of as their Russian ‘comrades’. Talk of the Bolshevik threat was known in the popular press as the Red Scare, while Communist sympathies were referred to in the army and in hospitals as going ‘Bolo’.
The red threat (red was the colour of the Communist flag) was on the increase in America too. In December a bomb had exploded in the New York apartment of the Acting Superintendent of Police while the oblivious owner was asleep. Captain W. B. Mills woke up amazed to find himself ten foot from his bed, and sprawled in the corridor of the apartment where he had been hurled by the explosion. A few months later a maid at the home of a Senator in Seattle opened a package addressed to her employer. The bomb that was contained inside blew off both her hands.
Back in England the Bishop of Durham was convinced that England was already ‘making its first advance towards the dictatorship of the proletariat’. The remaining monarchies of Europe, and in particular the murdered Tsar’s English cousin, continued to shudder at the thought of what might happen next.
6
Hopelessness
Spring 1919
Queen Mary was distressed to notice that her hair had begun to turn grey. The first few months after the end of the war had been difficult. Unlike almost every family in the country, she had been spared the death of a close relation but she had an instinctive fear of suffering and of illness. The appearance of so many of the wounded men that she had visited in hospital during the ‘single long dark winter’ of the last four years had filled her with sadness. And the tip of her husband’s beard, she also noticed, but withholding comment, was starting to gleam white.
Mary was conscious of her tendency to withdraw from any engagement with life and, when under the strain of events she was persuaded to go to bed for the day, she was liable to refuse all food and to lose her voice. This was a dangerous state of mind for Mary who tried to ensure that she was constantly occupied, whether with charity work or reorganising and shopping for additions to the collections of furniture, paintings, silver and porcelain that had been stored at Windsor during the war. Her fascination with and passion for the acquisition of ‘things’, and her much praised eye for unusual and lovely decorative objects, helped physically and symbolically to fill spaces in her life. She began to discover that if she lived in the present and concentrated on ‘things’ while blotting out the past she had a better chance of getting through the day.
Friends or even complete strangers were wary of the Queen’s visits to their houses and her propensity to covet their possessions. In advance of her arrival they would hide anything that suggested itself as remotely enviable or indeed small enough to be carried away. The Queen would stand in front of an object that had caught her attention. ‘I am caressing that little jug with my eyes,’ she would say to her host in a voice that with years of practice now succeeded in being both factual and full of yearning.
Mary continued to defer to her husband’s preference that she should dress as she always had, in the fashions set at the end of the last century by his own mother. An experimental phase of wearing wide-brimmed hats instead of the tight-fitting affairs she had made her own received a cursory look of disapproval from her husband and was swiftly abandoned. And although she had started taking dancing lessons from a master of movement, Sir Frederick Ponsonby, who was also Keeper of the Privy Purse, this innocently rebellious gesture of interest in the new rage for dance came to a halt when one day the King walked in on the lessons, the displeasure on his face unmistakable. Only with her close friend Lady Airlie did Mary feel able to have fun, laughing with her over cartoons in Punch, and sending her slightly risqué comic postcards concealed in an envelope, and posted to Ashley Gardens, Lady Airlie’s Westminster flat. If Mary’s eldest son had come into the drawing room at Windsor to find these two middle-aged women singing ‘Yes We Have No Bananas’ at the top of their voices, or seen his mother, dressed in green and white brocade, assuming momentarily the character of a grasshopper while jumping round the room playing the rhyming and guessing game of Dumb Crambo, he would have been astonished.
On Saturday 18 January 1919, the day on which the world’s politicians and heads of state sat down to start negotiations for the Peace Treaty at Versailles, death burst in upon the very core of Mary’s life. The Queen had spent the early days of the month happily at York House in Sandringham with her family around her as relaxed as the royal family had ever been. She had even transformed the ballroom into a temporary cinema. Noting the state of the weather, as she unfailingly did at the beginning of her daily diary entry, she remarked that Saturday had been a lovely day and that she had walked over to see her new tenants at the Mill House, a local vicar and his wife, before being driven back by her daughter to York House for lunch. At half past five, just after tea, the telephone rang. Mary answered. Lalla Bill, the nanny who cared for her youngest son Prince John, was calling in a state of terrible distress.
‘Our poor darling little Johnnie had passed away suddenly after one of his attacks,’ Mary wrote in her diary in her firm hand that evening. ‘The news gave me a great shock.’
Johnnie, an epileptic, was thirteen and a half. As a very young child he had been known as the mischievous one, the family jester, whose behaviour endeared him to many but exasperated his disciplinarian father. Johnnie was in the habit of putting glue on door handles and pins on chairs. He would daub himself like a Red Indian with paint from his paint box. He loved to go shopping and relished an outing to see a Punch and Judy show. But his ebullience had given way to concern as his academic progress slowed down and the unpredictable fits increased in frequency. For the first few years of his life he had always been included in family photographs, grinning impishly in a sailor suit, but since the outbreak of war Johnnie had been kept out of the public eye. The shame of having a sick child was compounded by George V’s view that illness was an inappropriate state for a member of the royal family.
Johnnie went to live near Sandringham House in Norfolk, under the care of his nanny, Charlotte Bill, whom he called Lalla. She cherished the small boy, encouraging him in his love of music and drawing, and taking him out for long walks, although she made sure that the other end of the long rope that he wore round his waist was firmly attached to her hand, in case he should fall into a sudden fit. And although Mary visited her youngest child whenever she could, wartime demands meant that neither of Johnnie’s parents saw him very often and the violence of his fits distressed his brothers and sister so much that they kept away from him. But the devotion of Lalla, and the quiet companionship of his lonely, widowed grandmother Queen Alexandra, had sustained him. On the afternoon of Johnnie’s death his mother found Lalla ‘very resigned but heartbroken’.
The British press, from whom the true nature of Johnnie’s illness had been kept since its diagnosis nearly ten years earlier, were full of sympathy for their Queen when the news of his sudden death was broken to them. Queen Mary’s energy and dedication to the injured and bereaved during the war years had been consistently noted and appreciated. Monday’s edition of the Daily Mirror devoted its entire front page to the death of the Prince.
Johnnie was buried in the graveyard at Sandringham three days later. Years of restraint even in her private diary meant that Mary only allowed herself to write that the funeral was ‘awfully sad and touching’; she ‘missed the dear child very much indeed ...’ A suppression of the natural instinct to weep at the loss of life during the past few years and now even at the loss of her own son had become instinctive. As the country’s figurehead she had adopted the national way of dealing with grief – life must go on. To register more would be to unleash the restraint that made it possible to go on. And this national restraint, this setting an example, was also her own particular private habit. She had learned to suppress.
Death had not yet finished with the survivors. An influenza virus more deadly even than the war itself was on the loose. It attacked and killed within the day.
When the virus first appeared in the summer of 1918, it prod
uced only the old familiar indicators of flu, including sweats, headaches, pain in the eyes, back and limbs. But unusually these signs were followed by a sense of immense depression and at this stage the flu became unrecognisable from previous incarnations. When the virus entered the body it was transformed into something almost invariably fatal. The drama of the sickness was reflected in an explosion of colour. First the skin turned a vivid and almost beautiful purple, reminiscent of the heliotrope flower or of polished amethyst. Then the lungs and all the other major organs became filled with a thick scarlet jelly that choked the afflicted. Death occurred as the victims drowned in their own blood and bodily fluids. Even if a sufferer recovered, the illness could leave behind a lingering sense of misery and hopelessness.
The massive operation of sending the Allied forces home meant that millions of young men were dispersing all over the world. Thousands were carrying the flu virus picked up in the fatal incubating grounds of the trenches. Spain was the first country to report massive casualties of the epidemic. In the very act of welcoming a soldier home from abroad, a family was often unknowingly embracing the bearer of a new kind of fatality. Although troop movement was the main agent of the spread of the disease, the huge crowds that gathered together in celebration at the end of the war had undoubtedly encouraged the infection.
The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age Page 11