One person, however, remained at the graveside when the other mourners had left. Queen Alexandra, Prince John’s grandmother, wept for her youngest grandson. Since her own Prince John had lived for only a few hours, she alone of the immediate family knew what it was to have lost a child. The two Princes were buried next to one another in the churchyard. Both Kipling and King George felt guilty about the deaths of their respective sons. Although Prince John had died two years after John Kipling, as far as King George and Queen Mary were concerned he could as well have died in 1917, which was the last time his mother saw him and the same year in which Kipling’s son was killed in action. The two fathers, neither of whom knew at the time of the other’s grief, were destined to become friends during King George’s sudden and near-fatal illness in 1928.
On 21 November 1928, while at Buckingham Palace, the 63-year-old King developed a fever and a cough and was in a state of near collapse. His doctor, Sir Stanley Hewitt, at once recognized the gravity of his condition and sent for Lord Dawson of Penn. Lord Dawson arranged for blood tests which showed the King to be suffering from streptococcal septicaemia. Following a portable chest X-ray (the first ever performed outside a hospital), the cause was found to be an abscess in the King’s right lung. Before the advent of antibiotics the prognosis was poor. Within three weeks the King’s physical condition had become so serious that, despite the best efforts of eleven doctors and five nurses, his death was considered imminent. On 5 December a bulletin that hardly reflected the seriousness of his condition was issued from Buckingham Palace. ‘His Majesty the King passed a quiet morning. Though the temperature is now 100.2 the slight improvement in the general condition noted in the last bulletin is maintained.’ The bulletin was signed by all five of the King’s consultants: Stanley Hewitt, L.E.H. Whitby, E. Farquhar Buzzard, Humphry Rolleston and Dawson of Penn. One week later, on the afternoon of 12 December, the King slipped into a coma. The appropriate treatment would have been surgical drainage of the abscess, but X-rays had failed to reveal its exact location. It was now too late for an exploratory operation to be carried out, since the King would certainly have failed to survive the anaesthetic. On impulse, and certainly not before time, Lord Dawson inserted a needle into the chest. By a stroke of luck he found the abscess and aspirated some sixteen ounces of purulent fluid, with immediate improvement. A few hours later the King was well enough to be operated upon by Mr Hugh Rigby who removed a rib and inserted a drain into the abscess. It was not until the following March that the patient had recovered sufficiently to be allowed a cigarette! Two months later he developed an infection at the operation site and in July further surgery was needed to drain the original abscess, necessitating the removal of another rib. Full recovery did not take place until September 1929, ten months after the onset of illness.
There was inevitable criticism of Lord Dawson’s management of His Majesty’s illness, by both the uninformed and the informed. He was particularly blamed by certain members of the medical profession for not calling in Britain’s leading chest surgeon Mr Arthur Tudor Edwards. King George convalesced at a house loaned to him by Sir Arthur du Cros at Aldwick overlooking the English Channel near Bognor. Not unnaturally, the King found convalescence boring. He discovered little to divert him. He had always relied on external sources of stimulation to distract him and to keep depression at bay and had developed few internal resources to fall back on. He had never been reflective or introspective. As a child he had discovered that the best way to survive the prolonged absences from home was to deny his feelings. As time passed he had become adept at this and as a result had more or less lost contact with the pain of loneliness, other than when an incident reminded him of the sadness of separation. Queen Mary, who was always by his side, protected him against these feelings simply by being there for him. Irritability, always easily provoked, was never ‘denied’ and was a feature of the King’s convalescence. One visitor, however, never failed to raise his spirits; this was his three-year-old granddaughter Princess Elizabeth. Her infectious enthusiasm and her obvious love for her grandfather dispelled his apathy. He asked her mother, Elizabeth Duchess of York, to bring the child to see him as often as she could.
During King George’s convalescence he and Rudyard Kipling became better acquainted. Although few visitors were allowed, Kipling was always welcome. They had much to discuss in their love for India, for the monarchy and for the country. Kipling kept King George well supplied with the few books he enjoyed reading, Edgar Wallace being one of the King’s favourite writers at the time. It is likely that Kipling was also able to make some occasional contribution to the sovereign’s speeches, as the author was later to do for his cousin, Stanley Baldwin, when he became Prime Minister. It was essentially the similarity of the two men, however, that allowed their friendship to prosper.
• 19 •
The King is dead and has taken his trumpeter with him
DESPITE THE PROBLEMS that Britain had to face after the war, there were some indications that the British way of life, at least among the upper classes, had not been entirely eradicated. The return of tennis at Wimbledon, the Eton and Harrow match at Lords, racing at Epsom and, not least, the Trooping of the Colour on Horse Guard’s Parade were seen by some as evidence that the good old days were back. Within the next twelve months other signs of ‘normality’ began to appear. The King attended the Derby at Epsom, sailed his old yacht Britannia at Cowes and later in the year received the new German Ambassador to the Court of St James, with his comment that it was ‘the first time I have shaken hands with a German for six years’.
On 11 November 1920, when the second Remembrance Day after the war had ended, the Cenotaph in Whitehall was unveiled for the first time. After the two minutes’ silence, ushered in by the firing of maroons, the King attended the burial service for the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey.
With the pre-1914 days gone for ever, when divisions of class and gender were more clearly defined, the 1920s saw the emancipation both of the working man and of women. The industrial unrest, which began with rising unemployment figures, presaged an economic disaster. By 1925 coal mines were running at a loss and cheaper coal from European mines was being supplied to Britain’s customers abroad. British mine owners were obliged to cut wages, and the miners were ordered to work longer hours to stave off their competitors. The mine workers and the mine owners were on a collision course from which neither side would budge. A Royal Commission was convened and nine months later agreed with the owners that wages must be reduced. The miners immediately came out on strike, whereupon the owners locked them out. Workers in other industries came out in support of the miners and at midnight on Tuesday 4 May 1926 a general strike, which divided the country, was declared. To the great relief of the King, who had been warned by Winston Churchill of the possibility of armed conflict, the strike lasted for nine days only and the miners were finally forced back to work having been in a state of near starvation for six months. A year later the Trades Disputes Act made all sympathetic strikes illegal.
On the political front, the Coalition Government had fallen owing to Lloyd George’s resignation in 1922. Party politics returned under Arthur Bonar Law as Prime Minister, but when he was forced to resign for reasons of health he was soon replaced by Stanley Baldwin. A few months later Bonar Law died from throat cancer. If King George was secretly relieved to see the Conservatives back in office, he was to be disappointed the following year when the Baldwin government was defeated. On 22 January 1924 he ‘entrusted Mr Ramsay Macdonald with the formation of a new government’ which Mr Macdonald accepted. The King noted in his diary that ‘Today [on 22 January 1901] dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour government!’ It was likely that his diary entry was more a reflection of his own opinion than speculation about Queen Victoria’s. None the less, King George’s attitude to Ramsay Macdonald was cordial and in fact no different from his attitude towards others who served him, whether personally or in govern
ment.
Against this background Edward Prince of Wales (David), the heir to the throne, began at last to assert himself. Having been in awe of his father for as long as he could remember, he took comfort from the fact that on his tours at home and abroad he had been enthusiastically received. By 1919 the 25-year-old Prince had become the darling of the gossip columnists. His slim build, pleasant smiling face and brilliant blue eyes were attractive to women everywhere. On a tour of North America in 1919 the American magazine Vanity Fair summarized in an eye-catching headline what American women thought of the Prince (Edwards, 1984). ‘Hats off to the indestructible Dancing, Drinking, Tumbling, Kissing, Walking, Talking – but not Marrying – Idol of the British Empire.’ It was rumoured that the Prince was involved with one or another of several women. In reality he had fallen in love with Freda Dudley Ward, mother of two children and the divorced wife of a Member of Parliament. He remained devoted to Mrs Ward for fourteen years, until another ‘friend’ – Thelma, Lady Furness, Lord Furness’s American wife with whom he was also having an affair – introduced him at a dinner party in 1931 to another American, the twice divorced Mrs Wallis Simpson.
In his frequent need for reassurance from women the Prince of Wales was certainly not emulating his father, and neither did he emulate King George in his dress. The Prince dressed in a manner that his father considered unseemly. He wore plus-fours on the golf course, tied his tie in a double knot (the Windsor knot) and wore patterned sweaters and socks. When the King noticed that his son had turn-ups on his trousers, he asked David if it was raining. It was just as well perhaps that the King had not realized his son’s fly-buttons had been replaced by a zip fastener. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the Prince of Wales’s role model, as far as his behaviour was concerned, was not his father King George but his grandfather King Edward VII. Both the Prince and King Edward had rebelled against an upbringing that had deprived them of hands-on mothering. They both sought admiration from motherly women, they were both intent on being noticed and both had addictive personalities. King Edward sought gratification through eating, drinking, smoking, gambling and womanizing, whereas Prince Edward (David) sought similar gratification partly with alcohol but mainly through sex.
King George and Queen Mary had a more relaxed relationship with their two younger sons. They were less demanding of Prince Henry and Prince George, probably because they were far removed from the accession. If David or Bertie had been asked when they were growing up whether the family was a close one they would have probably said that it was. It was a closeness at best often heavily paternalistic. Attention was focused primarily on David, as his parents sought to prepare him for the role ordained for him. The King’s view – perhaps not unreasonable since his subjects had been so impressed with his wartime leadership – was that if David modelled himself on his father he would not go far wrong. David admired his father and throughout the 1920s was content to follow his example by undertaking one tour after another, both at home and abroad. He was, however, unable to adopt the ‘regality’, the other-worldliness, the detachment of his parents as they carried out their duties. He found it impossible to follow the advice of courtiers who told him that only by allowing himself to be put on a pedestal and remain more detached from the public would he ensure the continuation of the royal mystique. His highly publicized indiscretions in London society, and to a lesser extent in politics, met with chilly disapproval from his parents.
Of the two, the Queen, essentially a private person, was possibly the more disapproving. Seldom, if ever, did she reveal her true feelings which she hid behind her upright posture, her armour-like clothing, her aggressive jewellery and her daunting toques. Her success in not giving anything of herself away enabled those who did not know her to form whatever opinion of her they chose. She exuded a regal otherness which was to be disrupted two generations later by her great-grandchildren with their ‘let it all hang out’ attitude. Giving nothing of herself away, Queen Mary was all things to all people and, chameleon-like, took on the colour of her surroundings. To some she epitomised a mother or a sister, to others a daughter or a wife. She seemed to belong to every family and because of this was much loved. It distressed her greatly to see her elder son bring the monarchy she loved into disrepute.
One of King George’s great strengths, which was valued highly by his subjects in the rapidly changing post-war years, was his stability. His constancy of manner, his unaltered mode of dress, his insistence on punctuality, the predictable unpredictability of his mood, his keen sense of duty, his insistence on the preservation of social values were reminders not only of what once was but of what he hoped in vain still might be. His dependable appearance reassured those who mourned the loss of a past in which life, for the privileged classes at least, appeared to have been rosy and in which the senseless slaughter of young men on the horrendous scale of the 1914–18 war was as yet unknown.
The King’s disapproval of David did not extend to his brother Prince Albert (Bertie) whom on 5 June 1920 he created Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, Baron Killarney. In thanking his father for so honouring him Bertie told him that he hoped he would be able to live up to the title that once had been his father’s. The King wrote to his son, in headmasterish tones, to tell him to think of his father as his ‘best friend’. He did not add ‘because I’m your father and I know what’s best for you’, but the implication was there and Bertie, far from disagreeing with his father, believed him to be correct. The fact that his son was so compliant endeared him to the King. Obedience to a ‘commanding officer’ had been so instilled into him that he valued it highly in others. Bertie had always tried to please his father but often with a singular lack of success. His need for his father’s approval was so intense that when it was withheld the recurring bouts of depression that were a feature of his adult life were exacerbated.
Although David and Bertie were fond of one another, the two brothers were very different in temperament. David had asserted himself somewhat late in the day and as a young adult, prone to adolescent behaviour, had rebelled against the modus vivendi to which his father was so committed. Bertie, on the other hand, was more timid. Far from rebelling, he had long ago realized that King George’s love for him was conditional on his obedience to his wishes, and he did whatever he could to please his father. When, despite his best efforts, he failed to do so, he experienced feelings of bereavement. Since King George had left his children for long periods so often during their childhood, it was hardly surprising that Bertie grew up to believe that if he were to disobey his father he might abandon him for good.
After his near-fatal illness in 1928 King George never fully recovered his strength. Although his recovery had been slow, it was welcomed by his subjects who over the years had grown to appreciate him. The King’s courage, his attention to detail, his insistence on correctness, his self-discipline, his regard for his subjects both at home and overseas and his genuine concern for the health and vigour of a nation in turmoil in the immediate post-war years all endeared him to them.
The ‘all for one and one for all’ spirit that typified the war years had dissipated. While many supported the growing concern for the welfare of the working man, many others were still wedded to the idea that the past, with its archaic class structure, should be preserved at all costs. Conservatives blamed the King for not playing a more active role in stemming ‘the swelling Socialist tide’, and Socialists complained that the monarchy was spending too much money on ceremonial state visits abroad. While the King was certainly unimpressed with socialism since the murder of his Russian relatives in the revolution of 1917, he could not see what, if anything, could be done about it.
The King had barely recovered from his illness when a new General Election was fought in 1929. The government elected in 1924 had almost come to the end of its statutory term and when the King received Ramsay Macdonald and invited him to form a government he was not yet well enough to leave his bedroom at Windsor. The new Labour
government lasted for only two years. The Great Depression of October 1929, the massive increase in unemployment and the collapse of American credit were eventually to lead to its fall. In 1931, at a time when the economy had all but collapsed, Ramsay Macdonald, no longer having an overall majority, was persuaded by the King to form a Coalition government. The Labour Party turned against the Prime Minister on the grounds that by forming an alliance with the old enemies of the party he had become a traitor to the socialist cause. Macdonald had to face a run on sterling, the suspension of the gold standard, a 25 per cent devaluation of the pound, a 10 per cent cut in the salaries of the civil service, as well as a reduction in unemployment benefit. This last was a particularly hard decision at a time when unemployment was running at around the five million mark. With the support of the King, Macdonald managed to survive until 1935, despite Labour’s dislike of his policies. With the Prime Minister’s great oratorical powers gone, his memory failing and his speech inarticulate, he continued in office until increasing signs of dementia put an end to his career. He was then succeeded by Stanley Baldwin.
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