by Andrew Rose
A memorandum prepared by Lascelles for Godfrey Thomas in 1922 gives a good insight into what they felt about their boss at the time of the crisis with Marguerite. The Prince failed to appreciate that his position as Prince of Wales was entirely reliant on popular support. ‘When you get down to bedrock,’ wrote Lascelles, ‘you have to admit that, in the long run, the Prince of Wales’s title, his estate, his income and his many little privileges all depend on public goodwill. You can’t afford to alienate that goodwill.’370 In a letter to Lascelles written a few years later, Godfrey Thomas also summarised the problems posed by a hedonistic Prince of no great intelligence or perspicacity. The Prince would always believe that provided he carried out his public duties, his private life is entirely his own concern.’371
With Stamfordham and Wigram very likely in the picture, the question arises whether the King was aware of what was happening and, in particular, of the risks connected with the Fahmy affair. Courtiers, presumably for reasons of security, at this time seemed reluctant to set down detailed accounts of problematic royal behaviour. Sir Brian Godfrey-Fausset was Equerry-in-Ordinary to the King. On 24 July 1923, two weeks after the shooting, Sir Brian joined the monarch for a morning walk in the garden of Buckingham Palace. ‘He was very interesting,’ noted the courtier, adding with maddening discretion, ‘and spoke to me about some confidential matters…’372 The ‘confidential matters’ were not specified and there the matter rests. More recently, the Registrar of the Royal Archives, having trawled through all items of potential relevance, found no material relating to the Fahmy trial.373
With one possible exception, the Prince’s surviving letters to Fredie Dudley Ward between July and November 1923 completely ignore the matters which were so sorely troubling his secretarial staff that summer. As we shall see, there is a reference to a ‘crazy physical attraction’ in a letter written from Balmoral probably at the end of August that year.374 Nevertheless, the Prince may – for once – have taken the advice of his secretaries and agreed not to put anything in writing about Marguerite (having made such a rod for his own back with those ‘bloody’ wartime love letters). Perhaps, however, he was simply playing the ostrich in a potentially disastrous situation.
In the days after the Savoy shooting, the Prince carried out his usual round of public ‘stunts’, including military inspections, unveiling war memorials, attending charitable garden parties and country fairs. On 25 July, the Prince once more showed his immature, neurotic side, feebly trying to explain why he had stormed out, effectively in a ‘hissy fit’, from a party given in London by Alistair Mackintosh. ‘Fredie darling,’ he wrote, ‘I do hope I’m asked to dinner on Friday … I’ve tried to get you on the ’phone 2 or 3 times, but was unlucky … I was very depressed last night at Ali’s party as you probably saw when you came in with Michael [Herbert]. I just wouldn’t stick it & fled the house!!’375 Given that Fredie’s equivocal involvement with Michael Herbert, noted already, dated back some five years and was well known to the Prince, his childish behaviour that night was ridiculous, though by no means unusual.
Back in London, the Prince resumed the round of parties, dances and nightclubs and, on 5 August, with Marguerite safely in custody, made what seems to have been his first trip to France since February 1919. Much of the intervening period had been taken up with the Empire tours and visits to the USA, but it is remarkable that he stayed away for such a long period from a country already familiar to him. As ‘Earl of Chester’, the Prince took train, ship, and train to Le Touquet, spending ‘a few days’ there, returning on 8 August.376
From the days of Queen Victoria, the royal family had decamped to Scotland in August. Reluctantly visiting his parents at Balmoral from time to time, the Prince would billet himself in castles, country houses and shooting lodges, some little better than the ‘wet, granite hovels’ of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline & Fall. A poor fisher and indifferent shot, the Prince would also try his hand at golf during the day, playing poker after dinner in the evening.
This year, on 15 August (shortly before Major Bald made his last recorded visit to Holloway), the Prince travelled to Scotland with Bruce Ogilvy as equerry. Just a week later, in circumstances discussed further on in this chapter, he abruptly changed his plans and returned to London. There are reasons for believing that this 500-mile journey was linked to a much longer journey from Egypt made by a British diplomat.
In Cairo, at the British High Commission, Archibald Clark Kerr (later Lord Inverchapel) was Acting Counsellor, second in command to General Allenby, the High Commissioner. Archie Kerr has been fulsomely described as an ‘attractive Highlander, unconventional, very entertaining and good company’.377 The son of John Kerr Clark (from a long line of Lanarkshire tenant farmers), Archie was born in Australia, where his father had made a fortune from ranching sheep on an industrial scale. Archie’s roots were in Scotland, where – rather like the whisky-rich John Bald – his father had provided the family with an ancestral home, the quaintly named Crossbasket Castle in Lanarkshire. After school in England in the obscurity of ‘Bath College’, Kerr joined the Foreign Office in 1906. Highly intelligent, with a robust sense of humour, Kerr (who inverted his last two names by deed poll in 1911) was a great networker, marked down as a high flyer from an early stage.
In 1910, Harold Nicolson, another rising Foreign Office man, met Clark, four years his senior. They always remained on close terms. Clark’s sister, Muriel, was romantically involved with Nicolson’s future wife, the writer Vita Sackville-West, thus creating a mixed foursome of some distinction. Kerr, who was proud of his Scottish ancestry, bought an estate of his own, Inverchapel, near Greenock, in which he installed his mother.
A dutiful son, Archie Clark kept up a very detailed correspondence with his mother for many years. Unfortunately, letters for the period July to October 1923, covering the Savoy shooting and its aftermath, appear not to have survived and his official correspondence is largely confined to political matters.378 In Scotland, Clark’s gregarious personality won him many friends, not least among the landed gentry. On leave from various diplomatic postings, Archie Clark was a welcome guest at weekend house parties and shoots. As in the case of Major Bald, Clark had overcome his middle-class background to become an honorary member of the Breed.
Archie Kerr’s Foreign Office credentials connect him to Algernon Hay and via Hay to Godfrey Thomas and the Prince, but this was by no means his only connection with royalty. He had visited Glamis in 1922, joining the roll-call of suitors for the hand of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. The parade of the lovelorn included Lord Gorrell, Lord Gage, ‘Christopher Glenconner, the Scottish chemicals heir’, and James Stuart, a future Cabinet Minister. The Prince’s younger brother, Prince Albert, later King George VI, finally secured the prize. Archie was left feeling ‘tired and battered and dismal’ on news of the royal engagement,379 but the episode illustrates how far he had clambered up the social ladder.
In July 1923, Allenby returned to England for three months’ furlough, thus avoiding the intense heat of the Egyptian summer at a date long before the introduction of air conditioning. His younger subordinates had to cope as best they might with the fierce temperature.
Although the High Commission had been much occupied earlier in the year in attempting to resolve problems created by nationalist leaders such as Saad Zaghloul, it has been said that a comparative relaxation in Egyptian political tensions meant that both Allenby and Clark Kerr were able to take some leave.380 The political situation was volatile, crises could flare up at any time, and in 1923 there were no jet aircraft available to fly people back in a matter of hours.
Kerr’s return to Britain was not flagged very far in advance. On 20 July (ten days after the Savoy shooting), Gerald Delaney, Reuters’ correspondent in Cairo and heard a rumour that Clark Kerr was going home in August.381 In 1923, the journey from Egypt to England took at least five days. One route was via steamer from Alexandria (the SS Helouan, used by Marguerite and her sister Yvonne the previous
November) to Trieste and thence by the Orient Express to Paris and London. Another was also by sea, from Alexandria to Marseilles and onward by train.
Archie Kerr was the only senior diplomat to have left the High Commission between Allenby’s departure in July and the much later return home of Kerr’s deputy at the Residency, Arthur Wiggin (with Owen Tweedy, Wiggin kept Kerr closely-informed of the Egyptian scene), who visited London during mid-September. Given the wealth of connections and coincidences, plus the pressing need for security at the highest level, Archie Kerr is the most likely bearer of the letters to England.
In yet another coincidence, Major Ernest Bald bowed out of the Royal Household’s secret enterprise, job done, on Thursday 17 August 1923, a day or so after Archie Kerr left Egypt. Earlier that month, as already noted, Marguerite faced no problems in writing or telegraphing to Maître Assouad with instructions about the letters, her communications duly monitored by Special Branch, who could confirm that Marguerite was keeping her side of the bargain. There would have been no difficulty for Algy Hay, head of the cipher department at the Foreign Office, wiring Kerr with a discreetly worded request to bring back a particular package. Indeed, Kerr may have already known, even in the latter part of July, that something was in the wind.
With Thomas and Lascelles careful to husband the Prince’s secrets in London, two clues support the view that knowledge of the affair was transmitted to Egypt that summer on a restricted basis, confined to a handful of senior officials at the High Commission.
The first marker is associated with Arthur Wiggin, who worked with Tweedy at the High Commission. In September, during his period of leave in England, and as we shall see later, Wiggin made a point of attending Marguerite’s trial at the Old Bailey.382 He wrote a vivid account of his experiences to Kerr, then far away in Inverchapel. This interest in the fate of Marguerite sits well with other evidence of special knowledge held by Kerr and close colleagues.
Another indication is found in the reply by Colonel Owen Tweedy, waggish liaison officer at the Residency, to an enquiry from Alexander Keown-Boyd, Director-General of the European Department of the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior. Tweedy, with Arthur Wiggin, enjoyed a very close relationship with Clark Kerr, even to the extent of sending the First Secretary a very vulgar (but extremely funny) limerick later that year as part of an official dispatch to his friend.383
Early in November 1923, Keown-Boyd had referred Tweedy to a month-old Egyptian newspaper report, alleging a relationship ‘of an intimate nature between “Madame Fahmy” and “one of the British princes”’.384 Tweedy replied that the story ‘came here from England originally in August’.385 Keown-Boyd, despite being in charge of British intelligence operations in Egypt, had clearly not been in the loop. The British colony in Cairo was tight-knit, gossip a way of life. The fact that the story was known to a few officials in the Residency during August and was kept confidential in the meantime emphasises the aura of secrecy surrounding the return of the letters. This also supports the contention that it was Kerr, armed with laissez-passer, who took the letters to England in the middle of that month.
Archie Kerr, presumed bearer of this most sensitive cache of letters, returned to London from Egypt on Tuesday 21 August.386 The Prince had spent the previous weekend at Glamis Castle, joining the Duke and Duchess of York, various other Bowes-Lyons, and his equerry, Bruce Ogilvie. Just a year before, the Visitors’ Book had included the name of Archie Kerr, who kept up a desultory correspondence with the Duchess despite the rejection of his suit. On Monday, the Prince motored over to the ancient Redcastle, near the Moray Firth, home of Colonel and Mrs Baillie of Dochfour, but in the event spent only one night there.
The Prince was driven to Nairn on Wednesday 22 August, where he unveiled a memorial to the Seaforth Highlanders and, after lunch, opened a bazaar. Evidently in relaxed mood, the Prince ‘made a humorous and effective little impromptu speech, which set everybody laughing’.387 Photographers snapped ‘Our Smiling Prince’.388 Later in the afternoon, apparently without any sign of distress, the Prince made a sightseeing trip around the nearby Cawdor Castle, guided by Lady Cawdor herself.
However, instead of proceeding with his usual round of Scottish summer engagements, the Prince – quite unexpectedly – boarded the overnight train from Inverness to King’s Cross, travelling straight to York House. He stayed there the following night, returning to Perth by the Friday overnight train from London. The Royal Household quickly put out an official explanation for this curious return journey and, on 24 August, The Times obediently reported:
The Prince of Wales arrived in London yesterday morning from Inverness to complete the arrangements for his Canadian visit and to settle details of various autumn engagements.
Eagle-eyed readers might have recalled that, only three days earlier, ‘The Thunderer’ had confirmed that ‘plans have now been completed for the forthcoming visit of the Prince to his ranch’, setting out a detailed timetable of a trip claimed (apparently without irony) to be ‘a complete rest after the strenuous series of engagements which he has carried out continually for many months now…’389
A story circulated in the Royal Household that the Prince had dashed down to London because he had ‘a pain in the tummy wh[ich] convinced him he had appendicitis and must be operated on immediately!’390 The popular press, unaware of any health concerns, seem to have been not wholly convinced by the official announcement. The Daily Express suspiciously reported the ‘flying visit’, while the Daily Mail headlined, more damagingly, ‘The Prince’s Hustle’.391 Whatever may have been the reason for this mysterious visit, the Prince returned to Scotland on the Friday night.
While the Prince could be impetuous and demand changes of plan at the last minute, accounts of this episode read oddly. On the afternoon of Wednesday 22 August, he was plainly in good spirits, making an amusing speech before touring Cawdor Castle. The pain and discomfort associated with a grumbling appendix must have come upon him very suddenly and, if there is any truth in the rumour, it is remarkable in such circumstances that he would have risked a long overnight train journey, bumping along railway tracks for some ten hours.
Doctors attend princes, not vice versa. Expert medical opinion was close at hand. The Royal Household in Scotland had several distinguished physicians and surgeons, most of whom could have attended at relatively short notice without the Prince having to make an arduous train journey of over 500 miles. Aberdeen, directly connected to Inverness by rail, accommodated Sir John Marnoch, Professor of Surgery, who had successfully removed the appendix of the Prince’s brother, the Duke of York, in 1914. The Prince visited his brother in the Aberdeen nursing home and would have been aware of Albert’s high opinion of the surgeon: ‘He is really a very nice man. One gets to know the surgeon so much better after the operation.’392
Attention to chronology suggests a third ground for those journalistic suspicions implicit in the Daily Mail headline, ‘The Prince’s Hustle’. On the footing that Archie Kerr had played postman for the Prince’s letters, acting as King’s Messenger from Cairo to London, the bundle of correspondence would have been in the Prince’s office at York House by Wednesday 22 August. That was not the end of the matter, prompting one burning question. Were these the letters written by the Prince to Marguerite during the war or might they be forgeries, with the genuine letters retained for some future demand? With knowledge of Marguerite’s past, anything was possible. Only the Prince himself could positively identify letters written so carelessly five or six years earlier.
The correspondence could have been brought up to the Prince in Scotland by one of the ‘handpicked team’, but the sudden arrival of someone like Lascelles or Legh from London might have drawn unwanted attention on the part of hosts, or servants, at Redcastle or the scene of the Prince’s next house party, Drummond Castle, home of the Earl and Countess of Ancaster. In any case, we know that the Prince was keen to destroy ‘those bloody letters’ which had plagued him for so long. ‘I j
ust must get all these letters back somehow,’ he had written in 1918.393 Their final destruction and long-delayed victory over that tiresome French ‘pol’ could be carried out more discreetly in the privacy of his own apartments than anywhere else.
Perhaps on the journey down from Scotland, the Prince, often prey to dyspepsia, his mind awash with thoughts of Marguerite and the impending crisis, suffered awkward abdominal twinges and demanded expert medical opinion after his arrival in London. In any event, stories about appendicitis emerging from St James’s Palace might serve to put people off the scent.
On the Thursday evening, before going north to Inverchapel, Archie Kerr met Harold Nicolson, his old friend. ‘Dine Archie Kerr & see him off to Scotland,’ wrote Nicolson in his diary.394 There is no record what was discussed at this intimate dinner, but there is strong evidence – as will be seen in the next chapter – that these two close friends talked about both the panic besetting York House during the past few weeks and the solution so recently achieved with Archie Kerr’s help. Nicolson, who knew some of the ‘handpicked team’ well, had no particular love for the Prince of Wales, descriptions of whose ‘red face’ and ‘little red hands flicking all the time about his neck-tie’ had been, as we have seen, acerbically noted in his diary.395
Despite the rigours of the overnight train journey and alleged groin strain, the Prince displayed the rudest of health that Saturday, playing golf at Gleneagles, morning and afternoon, before joining the Ancasters for an eventful week at Drummond Castle. Lady Ancaster was an American and something of a royal headhunter. ‘Eloïse goes in for royalties now,’ wrote Jean, Lady Hamilton in her diary, ‘and always has one, if not two, at every small party that she has…’396 Among the outgoing house party, whose members dutifully signed the Visitors’ Book, were the Duke and Duchess of York, in company with Edwina and Dickie Mountbatten (perhaps best described as ‘neo-royalty’).