by Edna Healey
Correct dress was also excessively important to both King George V and Queen Mary: it was as though they needed the rigid carapace of royalty to protect their vulnerability.
When, in 1924, the first Labour government had taken office, many of the new ministers felt that their clothes were symbols of what they were, and were unwilling to conform. When the new Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, led his team to the Palace to kiss hands, Court officials were apprehensive. What would these new men wear? Ministers were expected to receive their seals of office from the King wearing frock coats and top hats. Some Labour ministers had such an outfit; Fred Jowett and John Wheatly felt they had to make a gesture and went to the Palace in their best ordinary clothes, wearing a felt cap and a bowler hat respectively. It was said that this shocked Ramsay MacDonald more than the King, who probably sympathized with their obstinate refusal to change or pretend: if that was their uniform, then they should wear it. So, as Lady Airlie wrote,
The King and Queen adapted themselves without difficulty to the new Labour Government, rather to the surprise of members of their entourage who remembered sulphurous speeches on the subject of the monarchy during the General Election … but King George was too fair and openminded to harbour personal prejudices.72
In fact the King and his new ministers got on surprisingly well. It must be remembered that the King had met a wide variety of his people during the war; and when Queen Mary entertained the ministers’ wives to tea in the Palace she could draw on a long experience of those who lived on the other side of the tracks: Mary MacArthur and her friends had given her a new insight into trade union and Labour people. There were many traditionalists in the Labour Party who found the sight of their colleagues in court garb, wearing swords, shocking. On 12 March 1924 photographs appeared in the newspapers of the new Labour ministers at their first levee. MacDonald was shown in a
long cloak beneath which appeared the tip of a sword. He was wearing trousers with a broad stripe. Two future peers, Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr. Noel Buxton, were very obviously wearing breeches. Mr. Tom Griffiths wore the same style of dress as the Prime Minister with a plumed hat.73
The Member for Pontypool, who had earned 4d. a day at a tin-plate works, and his colleagues were perfectly prepared to wear fancy dress if they had to – provided it did not cost much, for MPs received no salary at this time. After all, the hats were no funnier than helmets or other working gear. But the photographs created excessive resentment from both sides of the social and political divide.
Nevertheless, although the war had broken down some of the barriers between classes, the King certainly would have had no desire to create a classless society. There were deep, old wounds that would never heal. The miners of South Wales would never forget Churchill’s bellicose insensitivity during their strike. Nor did the King forget the Russian Revolution, as Lady Airlie remembered:
Mr Sokolnikov, the first Soviet Ambassador to be appointed to the Court of St James since the Russian Revolution, presented his credentials. The King bitterly resented having to receive him with other ambassadors at a Levée. I was sitting next to his Majesty at dinner in the spring of 1930 when someone rather tactlessly referred to the new appointment. The King burst out with “What do you think it means to me to be forced to shake hands with a man of the party that murdered my cousin?” Neither Ramsay MacDonald, nor Snowden, or even Henderson, would receive him in their houses, but they let me in for it.74
The Queen and Lady Airlie treated the new ministers of each government and their wives with unfailing courtesy and genuine kindness. When Elizabeth, Duchess of York, was expecting her second child in the summer of 1930, she decided it should be born at her old home, Glamis Castle in Scotland. The Home Secretary, J. R. Clynes, and the official civil servant, Harry Boyd, by tradition, were expected to be present at the birth. As Clynes told Lady Airlie in some agitation, ‘This child is in direct succession to the Throne, and if its birth is not properly witnessed its legal right might be questioned. It has happened before in history.’ Then he showed Lady Airlie ‘a book which he had brought with him from the Home Office … giving an account of the birth of the son of James II and Mary of Modena’.
Rather than allow the two ministers to stay in a cheerless hotel, Lady Airlie invited them to stay with her in her castle near Glamis Castle. A telegraph wire linked the two castles and dispatch riders stood by: but the baby, which was due on 6 August, did not arrive until 21 August. Meanwhile Lady Airlie learned to admire Clynes: ‘He was enraptured with the countryside and as his shyness wore off, I discovered under his homely exterior a deeply sensitive mind, touchingly appreciative of beauty.’
Finally the call came – they had only an hour to get there. Boyd was frenetic with agitation.
But Mr. Clynes was calmly waiting at the door in his big coat and Homburg hat… a lovely sunset was breaking. He pointed to the sky, ‘Just look at that, Boyd, “In such a night did Dido from the walls of Carthage …” ’ He continued the quotation with great feeling till Boyd pushed him into the car. They arrived at Glamis with nearly half an hour to spare.75
So Princess Margaret’s birth, on a summer night, was witnessed by a Labour minister, preceded by a, somewhat garbled, Shakespearian quotation.
Not all the courtiers had Lady Airlie’s intelligent understanding. Many an amusing story – true and apocryphal – went the rounds. They were all the more humorous when told in a Cockney accent, without aitches. One wife was reported to have said at a grand reception at Buckingham Palace: ‘Me shoes is tight, me corsets’s tight, me ‘usband’s tight, and I want to go ’ome.’ For those who had never met a Labour politician socially before, laughter was a protection: the unfamiliar was disturbing.
Lady Airlie was more discriminating. She had met some of the Labour leaders and their wives at a dinner given for the King and Queen by Lady Astor in 1923 and had been instinctively drawn to Mrs Philip Snowden. Just as Queen Mary had been impressed by the radiant Mary MacArthur, so her Lady-in-Waiting was attracted by the vivid, colourful personality of Ethel Snowden. Like Lady Airlie, she loved music.
Behind her rather dusty untidy appearance and schoolma’am mannerisms was a noble generous nature. I liked her exuberance, her passionate enthusiasms and violent hatreds. I could never forget her bitterness when she described the poverty of the mining village and the scenes of hardship and misery which she had witnessed as a girl in Wales. ‘You people, with your marble tiled bathrooms and your soft towels, can you ever imagine what it meant to a man to have nowhere to wash himself when he came up from the pit except in the street or in the kitchen, stripped naked on a winter day.’76
So too she recognized in Mrs James Brown, the wife of the Ayrshire miners’ leader, a woman of intelligence and natural dignity. When her husband was appointed Lord High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland and ‘they exchanged their miner’s cottage at Annbank for the royal state of the Palace of Holyrood, Mrs Brown took up her position with a natural dignity that silenced the snide remarks of supercilious courtiers’.77
Throughout the years, successive monarchs and their consorts have been influenced, sometimes for ill, but often for good, by their Private Secretaries and Ladies-in-Waiting. Lady Airlie’s long and close friendship with Queen Mary was of inestimable value. Not only did she give comfort to the Queen, so isolated in the gilded cage of royalty, but also she listened with understanding and a sympathetic ear to unfamiliar voices in strange accents. Through Queen Mary, who was herself always ready to listen, Lady Airlie’s observations reached the King.
Apart from the garb of Labour ministers there were many other unusual costumes seen at Buckingham Palace, particularly during the ‘Round Table Empire Conference’ in 1931 on the future of India, but none more sensational than that worn by the Mahatma Gandhi. The Indian leader had twice before been His Majesty’s guest – but then in British prisons in India. In his non-violent campaign for Indian independence, Gandhi had always insisted on wearing the humble dress of the poor
est Indian. Now the man the King called ‘this rebel fakir’ was his guest in his Palace and still simply dressed. The Duke of Windsor remembered:
The scene was the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace. The screen of black morning coats suddenly parted; and I descried an extraordinary figure: a bald wizened Indian clad in a dhoti and sandals advancing towards my father. It was Mahatma Gandhi. Only nine years before, when I was in India, the Viceroy had thrown this man into jail for sedition. Now the King Emperor was shaking his hand. Standing with me … were a group of jewelled Indian Princes with whom I had played polo … one of them murmured ‘This will cost you India.’78
The King did not mince his words. At the end of the meeting he said, ‘Remember, Mr Gandhi, I won’t have any attacks on my Empire.’ To which the Indian leader replied courteously, ‘I must not be drawn into a political argument in your majesty’s palace, after receiving your majesty’s hospitality.’
King George V did not have the breadth of tolerance of Queen Victoria, but he did strongly condemn the colour bar as practised in India. He and Queen Mary had been powerfully moved by their visit to India when they were Prince and Princess of Wales and he felt strongly his duty to India and the Empire, just as George III had felt towards his American colonies. The King considered Gandhi a dangerous if somewhat misguided figure; nevertheless, like other members of his family, he could not help being impressed by the magnetic personality of the Mahatma.
In the election of 1929 the Labour Party had been returned to office. The King sent for MacDonald, who formed the second Labour government – this time with a woman, Miss Margaret Bondfield, as Minister of Labour. When in June the Cabinet ministers went down to Windsor to be sworn in as Privy Councillors, he greeted her with surprising warmth, saying how pleased he was to receive the first woman Privy Councillor.
The new government had scarcely got into its stride before it had to face the world financial crisis of 1931, the subsequent economic crisis in Britain, and a run on the gold and currency reserves. In August 1931 the King called another all-party Buckingham Palace Conference, with MacDonald, with Sir Herbert Samuel representing the Liberal Party, since Lloyd George was ill, and Baldwin for the Conservatives. ‘I am determined,’ he wrote to the Duke of York, ‘to do everything and anything in my power to prevent the old ship running on the rocks.’79
The King’s own wish was for a national government headed by MacDonald, but the cuts in unemployment benefits demanded by the New York bankers who were funding the rescue were too much for nine of the Labour members of the government to accept. MacDonald was on the verge of resignation, when the King sent for him to come to the Palace late on Sunday night. Somehow, in that meeting with the King, MacDonald was persuaded that he was the only man to lead the country in its hour of crisis.
The next morning the three party leaders met in the Indian Room at the Palace, among the symbols of imperial glory. The King, as Rose has written, ‘in his best quarterdeck manner impressed on the three party leaders that before they left the Palace there should be a communiqué to end speculation at home and abroad. Then he withdrew to his own rooms to let them get on with it.’80
So the decision was taken: there would be a national government, led by MacDonald, which would make stringent economies, including the disagreeable 10 per cent cut in the unemployment benefit. Only three of MacDonald’s Labour colleagues agreed to join him, and it was a gloomy new Prime Minister who returned from a meeting at 10 Downing Street to ‘kiss hands’ at the Palace. ‘You look as if you were attending your own funeral,’ the King joked. In a sense it was, as far as the Labour Party was concerned: MacDonald was branded as a traitor, and remained so in Labour Party mythology.
The political and constitutional rights and wrongs of these events have been much discussed elsewhere. The interesting facts from the point of view of the history of Buckingham Palace are that the King had hosted once again crucial conferences at the Palace; significant decisions had been taken there, rather than at 10 Downing Street; a complete financial bankruptcy had been avoided; and above all the King had made it clear that his deepest desire was to reign over a united kingdom.
The King was no political theorist, but he had sense and could show authority when necessary. Years before he said, about his son, ‘The Navy will teach him all he needs to know,’ and in his view that had certainly been true for him: the Navy had taught him not only the need for authority and discipline but also the importance of working together. Once again he showed his readiness to share sacrifice: he reduced his own income from the Civil List by £50,000.
But the stress of the crisis and long hours of hard work were beginning to take their toll on the King; as they did on Ramsay MacDonald, who, on 7 June 1935, resigned on the grounds of ill health. Baldwin took his place. The King bade MacDonald a sad and affectionate farewell:
I hoped you might see me through … but I do not think it will be very long. I wonder how you have stood it, especially with the loss of your friends and their beastly behaviour … You have been the Prime Minister I have liked best … you have kept up the dignity of the office without using it to give you dignity.81
These last words might have been used to describe King George V himself.
On 6 May that year the King and Queen had celebrated their Silver Jubilee. As they drove from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s Cathedral with the royal family, they were overwhelmed by the immense crowds that cheered them all along the way. Chips Channon watched the procession from St James’s Palace.
… the Speaker … passed at a walking pace in a gorgeous coach. Then came the Prime Ministers of the Dominions, led by Ramsay MacDonald, seated with his daughter, Ishbel. He looked grim and she dowdy. No applause. Then the Lord Chancellor, wig and all; then the minor Royalties – a few cheers. Then masses of troops, magnificent and virile, resplendent in grand uniforms, with the sun glistening on their helmets. Then thunderous applause for the royal carriages. The Yorks in a large landau with the two tiny pink children. The Duchess of York was charming and gracious, the baby princesses much interested in the proceedings, and waving. The next landau carried the Kents, that dazzling pair; Princess Marina wore an enormous platter hat, chic but slightly unsuitable. Finally the Prince of Wales smiling his dentist smile and waving to his friends, but he still has his old spell for the crowd. The Norway aunt who was with him looked comic, and then more troops, and suddenly, the coach with Their Majesties. All eyes were on the Queen in her white and silvery splendour. Never has she looked so serene, so regally majestic, even so attractive. She completely eclipsed the King. Suddenly she has become the best-dressed woman in the world.
‘ “It was,” the King said simply, “the greatest number of people in the streets that I have ever seen in my life.” And, later, “I did not realise they felt like this.”‘82
Millions of his subjects had heard his voice on the radio since the BBC first recorded his speeches in 1924. In 1932 he had been persuaded to give the first Christmas broadcast from Sandringham, for which Kipling had drafted the text: ‘I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all…’ On Jubilee Night he broadcast from Buckingham Palace with even deeper emotion:
I can only say to you, my very very dear people that the Queen and I thank you from the depths of our hearts for all the loyalty and – may I say so – love, with which this day and always you have surrounded us. I dedicate myself anew to your service for all the years that may still be given me.83
Throughout these critical years Queen Mary was a tower of strength. On the twentieth anniversary of his accession King George V had written to the Queen, ‘I can never sufficiently express my deep gratitude to you, darling May, for the way you have helped and stood by me in these difficult times … This is not sentimental rubbish but what I really feel.’84
During the last years of his life, King George V was weighed down by a multiplicity of worries. Abroad, war clouds threatened. The Nazis were on the march in Germany, Il Duce and the Fascists in Ital
y; at home there was industrial unrest. But behind all these worries there was one growing concern: the future of the Prince of Wales.
In the last years of King George V’s life the Prince of Wales’s home was at Fort Belvedere, ‘a castellated conglomeration on Crown Land’85 bordering Windsor Great Park near Sunningdale, Berkshire. His brother, The Duke of York, and the Duchess (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) had a house near by at Royal Lodge in the Great Park. The King was aware that the Prince of Wales had had many love affairs in the past, but since 1934 he had obviously become deeply in love with a chic American, Mrs Wallis Simpson, who was a frequent visitor at the Fort.
Mrs Simpson had divorced her first husband, a lieutenant attached to the US Navy, with whom she had spent some time in China, and was now living in London with her second, Ernest Simpson, a quiet, intelligent Englishman who worked in his father’s shipping business. Her elegant dinners at their small flat became famous and gradually she attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales. He noticed her
at a Court in Buckingham Palace, being presented to my parents. I was as usual standing behind their gilt thrones as Wallis approached in the slowly moving line of women, brilliant in Court feathers and trains. When her turn came to curtsey first to my father then to my mother, I was struck by the grace of her carriage and the natural dignity of her movements.86
Wallis described the event to her Aunt Bessie in Baltimore, who after her mother’s death had become her confidante and later her chaperone. That night, Wallis told her, she wore a ‘large aquamarine cross’ – imitation, she confessed, but effective.