Now good-bye dear boys, and hoping soon to hear from you again, I remain, Your very affectionate Papa, A.E.
Best love to sisters.
What was Prince George to make of the letters from his absent parents? An overwhelmingly sentimental love letter from his mother on the one hand and a reprimand and description of the wilful destruction of wildlife by his father, in a letter that he had to share with his brother, on the other. At the time Prince George could not have appreciated the irony of any of it, but as an adult he was unable to trust women and had difficulty in controlling his temper, most often with his children. His son and heir, the Duke of Windsor, was known to faint when exposed to his father’s temper. Prince George always feared loss of control and as an adult was phobic about flying. Offered a flight in 1918, shortly after the formation of the Royal Air Force, he refused on the grounds that it was too dangerous, although in reality he probably feared handing over control to the pilot. His need to stay in control of his violent rages made it impossible for him to invest control in someone else.
Prince Edward was seldom happier than when killing animals. Black bucks and cheetahs, elephants and bears, jackals and tigers became targets for his gun and were substitutes for the many women, often similarly targeted by him, whom he had left behind in England. He told his sons with pride that in Nepal, with the help of 10,000 beaters provided by his host, he had personally shot six tigers in one day while seated on an elephant. Armed with his gun and penetrating their lairs from the safety of the howdah he took the animals quickly and by surprise. Surrounded by other guns, there mainly for his own protection, he was able to experience the illusion of power. By the time he was due to return to England the Prince had enough trophies, endangered plant species and stuffed animals (shot by himself) to furnish the gun room at Sandringham.
Twenty years later big-game hunting and shooting parties allowed Prince George similar outlets for his feelings of victimization. As Prince Edward had done before him, Prince George took out his anger at his neglect by his parents on defenceless animals.
Prince George’s childhood was both emotionally and physically disrupted. His mother, who constantly told him that she loved him, seemed content to leave him in the care of his tutor for months at a time; his father, when not emotionally involved elsewhere, was occupied with converting Sandringham into a pleasure palace in which he could hold house parties and entertain his friends. This palace reflected Prince Edward’s hostility to his past (no antiques) and to his future (his children’s play areas were transformed into adult play areas, notably a billiard room and a bowling alley).
Mr Dalton was always there, always available and always supportive. He seldom took a holiday and, when he did, exchanged friendly letters with his charges on an almost daily basis. He never forgot his concern for them and his duties to them. His letters were appreciated by Prince George whose replies usually ended: ‘With much love to all, I remain your affectionate little Georgie.’
Prince George was accustomed from childhood to writing to his deaf mother. Despite the advent of the telephone in 1876, he continued to use the same form of communication to keep in touch with his former tutor. On his death in 1936, a large bundle of letters was discovered written to him by Mr Dalton, most of them in reply to the King’s own letters. Conditioned to rely on distanced communication for the exchange of affection, he was to remain quietly non-verbal – other than with his children – for the remainder of his life.
In 1877, when Prince George was twelve, Queen Victoria drafted a memorandum setting out the procedures she expected to be followed for the education of her grandsons. Determined not to follow his mother’s instructions, however, Prince Edward planned to remove the boys from what he felt was her unwarranted interference. He decided to cut short their home tutoring and send them away to boarding school, thus removing them from their grandmother’s influence over their education. Hoping to enhance the boys’ feelings of security, he banished them from home – where love was on offer in abundance but withheld whenever social or state duties demanded – to an environment peopled by strangers where they would be subject to harsh disciplines. In so doing he not only replicated his own arm’s-length mothering but ensured that his children’s eventual reactions to parental rejection would mirror his own.
Fortunately for the boys, the one immature and backward and the other not yet ready to abandon his clinging attachment to his mother – which suggested that he believed she still had much to give him – the scheme came to nothing. The Reverend Dalton tried to convince Queen Victoria that boarding school was entirely unsuitable, at least for the fragile and oversensitive Eddy, and that if her grandsons were to continue to be educated together then the training ship Britannia was an appropriate compromise.
Queen Victoria was opposed to the Royal Princes becoming naval cadets. Referring to Prince Eddy in particular, she said that ‘the very rough sort of life to which boys are exposed on board ship is the very thing not calculated to make a refined and amiable Prince, who in after years (if God spares him) is to ascend the throne’. It was in fact the very ‘roughness’ of naval discipline, with its emphasis on the group rather than on the individual, which in Prince George’s case at least was further to suppress the feelings of rage that as an adult he passed on to his children.
Queen Victoria expressed concern that as naval cadets the two boys might also be exposed to ‘undesirable’ companions. It was well known that what was referred to at the time as ‘unnatural practices’ were common among men denied female company for months or years at a time. Whether she had this in mind when she finally agreed that they could become naval cadets – but only if Mr Dalton accompanied them – is not known. Neither is it known whether Mr Dalton succeeded in his role as chaperone.
Prince George was pleased when the time came to be enrolled with his brother on the training ship Britannia. Not yet twelve years old, he was the youngest cadet aboard. Prince Eddy, who was recovering from typhoid fever, was rather less enthusiastic. Their father, however, was particularly delighted. It was his view that no one could be expected to rule unless first they had learned to obey. Presumably he had his heir in mind. Prince Eddy had other ideas. He learned neither to obey nor showed any real interest in his ultimate role. Prince George, although unaware of his destiny, was the ideal pupil, however. He settled in quickly and soon developed an aptitude for ships and their handling.
Although both boys had passed the two-day entrance examination some months earlier, they were later found not to be up to the standard of their classmates. It was Mr Dalton, promoted from tutor to governor, who took them to Dartmouth where they joined the Britannia. Their arrival was a unique event. Never before had an heir to the throne (and his brother) been allowed to mix freely with his future subjects. At first the two boys were in the strange position of experiencing positive discrimination. The other cadets, brought up with only fairy-tales as a source of information on Kings and Queens, were curious to know the facts about life in a royal home and interrogated the two boys about their life-style. Flattered at first by the attention, the boys were soon to become irritated by the curiosity of their shipmates. Their father had insisted that his sons be given no form of preference, and it was not long before more negative discrimination followed. Bullying is inevitable in any closed community and George was certainly the youngest cadet aboard, while his brother Eddy, his only possible ally, was fragile and effeminate. Years later Prince George commented to his librarian at Windsor Castle, Sir Owen Morshead:
It never did me any good being a Prince and many was the time I wished I hadn’t been. It was a pretty tough place and, so far from making allowances for our disadvantages, the other boys made a point of taking it out on us on the grounds that they’d never be able to do it later on. There was a lot of fighting among the cadets and the rule was if challenged you had to accept. So they used to make me go up and challenge the bigger boys – I was awfully small then – and I’d get a hiding time and again. Bu
t one day I was landed a blow on the nose that made my nose bleed badly. It was the best blow I ever took because the doctor forbade my fighting any more.
Most helpless victims of older bullies grow up to unload their feelings of humiliation and suppressed rage on to other helpless victims. The Prince’s treatment of his two oldest sons, the Duke of Windsor and King George VI, was later to confirm the validity of this truism.
At first it seemed that Prince George had found his métier in an environment disciplined but structured, unchanging and constant and which, above all, allowed him to escape from an insecure family hothouse peopled by unpredictable adults. For the first time in his life he knew what to expect from each day in which there were no painful separations and no boring lessons with Mr Dalton. His time phobia faded. It became obscured by the gradual realization that an equal amount of time was available to everyone and that he would not, as previously, be constantly kept waiting by his notoriously unpunctual mother. He found himself among equals. He was more or less with people his own age among whom he learned to fend for himself, and for the first time he developed a sense of self-sufficiency. In contrast with the life-style to which he had been accustomed, in the Navy there were no servants: no nursery maids, no house maids, no parlour maids. Prince George was intoxicated with a freedom that he had never before experienced. It was some time before he realized that he was in fact still in a prison but one in which he was no longer incarcerated with only his older brother for company. As the youngest cadet aboard the Britannia, he was surrounded by older ‘brothers’, his surrogate mother Mr Dalton was by his side and ‘Motherdear’ herself was with him in spirit. His letters to Princess Alexandra and hers to him were his lifeline. Presumably she also wrote regularly to Prince Eddy, but few of these letters survive. The Princess’s letters to Prince George were emotional in content and in style and continued to be so even when her son was a grown man. Prince George was aged twenty-five and already an officer in command of a gunboat when she ended a letter to him ‘with a great big kiss for your lovely little face’.
Prince George may not have been the largest, oldest or strongest of the cadets aboard the Britannia, but it was not long before the hostility for which he had been notorious from the nursery onwards began to surface. His anger took a form that was perhaps overtly acceptable but covertly vicious. Described by sycophants as ‘having a keen sense of fun’, Prince George’s ‘fun’ was frequently at the expense of others. His practical jokes had sadistic undertones, especially when the vulnerable victim would climb into his hammock at night to find two marlinspikes placed where they would do the most harm. If his father was hoping for one of his sons to be a leader, George was doing his best. He was not so much a leader, however, as a ringleader. Constantly challenging authority, he always took his punishment like a ‘man’. His training aboard Britannia, represented as an exercise in democracy, turned out to be an exercise in autocracy. Prince George learned that authority always triumphed over the ‘little people’, however much they might struggle to overturn it, and that authority also possessed a power he envied and which he showed by his rebelliousness that he wanted for himself. As an adult, King George ruled as an autocrat, if not over his subjects certainly over his family. Autocracy was also the aim of many of his fellow graduates. Fifty-six years later, two of them were Admirals of the Fleet, three were Admirals, six were Vice-Admirals and four were Rear-Admirals (Nicolson, 1952). When Prince George was fourteen he graduated from the Britannia and almost immediately joined the 3,912-ton steamship HMS Bacchante for a cruise that was to last for three years.
• 4 •
None of us could speak, we were all crying so much
WHEN PRINCE GEORGE enrolled on the Britannia in 1877 he was the youngest of the six naval cadets on the training ship. He graduated in July 1879 having done well in most subjects, particularly mathematics and sailing. His success says as much for his ability to turn his crippling anger outwards and to sublimate it in physical activity as for his examination skills. A less physically robust boy might well have been damaged at the outset by having to adapt to such an abrupt and draconian change in environment. His brother Eddy, although almost two years his senior, coped less well in a milieu that was far removed from anything either of them had previously known.
At the age of twelve, and with little prior warning, Prince George found that he was no longer a big fish in a tiny pond, in which he had been treated with a deference he had taken for granted, but an insignificant fish in the vast and probably frightening pond of Britannia. By now he had come to accept that the attention paid to him by his parents was at best intermittent and at worst inconsistent, although his mother’s love for him and his for her was never in question. Princess Alexandra continued to make it clear to ‘ Georgie’ that he would always be her baby, that she hoped he would never grow up and that he would always be special to her. Prince George found it hard to reconcile his mother’s erratic behaviour towards him with her constant pledges of affection. Had he not had her letters to which he could refer from time to time to reassure himself of her feelings, he might well have doubted the veracity of her protestations of love. The intensity of his mother’s involvement with her son (‘quality time’), alternating with periods of neglect when family and constitutional pressures took her away from him, helped to produce an over-anxious and difficult child who in adult life had difficulty in forming close relationships.
There is a tantalizing quality to such love, a hint to a child that were he not to cling to its source it might slip away. Having grown up to experience his mother’s feelings for him as either overwhelmingly loving or completely absent, Prince George’s reaction was to believe that people were either wholly for or wholly against him. At the outbreak of the Great War he was bewildered when his German family, whom he loved, turned against him. It took him until 1917 to accept that they were his country’s enemies. From then on he despised them. From the time he left home at the age of twelve until his death in 1936 he saw everything in black and white. There were few grey areas.
In 1879, when Prince George was fourteen, the all-or-nothing attitude to life with which he had been brought up was about to face a critical test. Having been banished for two years for training on the Britannia, he was about to be sent on a three-year world cruise, two years of which were to take him completely away from his home, his parents and everyone else (apart from his brother and his tutors) with whom he was familiar. Such a parting from a beloved mother must have been very hard for a fourteen-year-old boy.
In the 1870s opinion was not divided about the influence of boarding schools on children. Even the most liberal held the view that separating a child from his parents for five years and sending him to boarding school, or into the Navy, would make a man of him. But what sort of man? A man who would grow up to value discipline above love; a man trained to obey orders, to salute the flag, to respect uniforms and uniformity; a man who believed that it was more important to be correct than to be fair; a man accustomed to the company only of his own sex. Such a man would one day become His Majesty King George V.
Within a few weeks of leaving the Britannia and the friends they had made aboard her, Prince George and Prince Eddy bade their tearful farewells to their parents and sisters and embarked upon the corvette HMS Bacchante. Objections had been voiced by the First Lord of the Admiralty (Mr W.H. Smith) and the Prime Minister (Lord Beaconsfield), both of whom were concerned that it was hazardous for the heir apparent and the heir presumptive to travel in the same ship. Queen Victoria was angry at the government’s attempt to interfere with the education of her grandsons, a matter which she insisted was a private family affair. She was more concerned with the ‘roughness to which the boys would be exposed’, not because it might do them harm but because the experience might be incompatible with eventual Kingship’. Not knowing for certain which of them was to succeed to the throne made her dilemma more difficult. In the end it was Prince Eddy, the heir, who gained least from the expe
rience and Prince George – who was not expected to be King – who benefited most.
After much discussion with Mr Dalton and the entire Cabinet but neither of the two Princes, Queen Victoria eventually gave her consent. This, however, was not before she made absolutely certain that the Bacchante was seaworthy by demanding that the ship be sent out twice in a storm. Prince George’s long association with the Royal Navy had begun. It lasted for fifteen years, ending only with the sudden death of his brother Eddy, when George became the heir apparent.
On 17 September 1879 Prince Eddy and Prince George together with Mr Dalton and two other instructors, one to tutor them in mathematics and the other in French, left Spithead via Gibraltar for the Caribbean for the first leg of their journey. Eight months later the ship returned to Spithead and, after a short break, a three-week cruise was undertaken to Vigo and back. The third and final cruise, which lasted for just under two years, took in South America, Australia, China, Japan, Egypt and Greece (Dalton, 1886).
Although there were many letters to Prince Edward from Queen Victoria, concerning the importance of avoiding the ‘contamination’ likely to affect her grandsons if they stayed at home and became involved with the Marlborough House set, little concern was expressed for the feelings of either of the boys as they faced two years in exile.
In a letter sent from Cowes, where, on the day after the start of the cruise, the ship had put in because of bad weather, Prince George made his feelings known to his mother. Nostalgic and homesick after only a few hours at sea, he wrote: ‘My darling Motherdear, I miss you so very much & felt so sorry when I had to say goodbye to you and sisters & it was dreadfully hard saying goodbye to Dear Papa and Uncle Hans [Prince Hans, Princess Alexandra’s uncle]. It was too rough yesterday to go to sea, so we stopped in here for the night … I felt so miserable yesterday saying goodbye. I shall think of you all going to Scotland tonight & I only wish we were going to [sic]. Lord Colville will take this letter & he has to go, so I must finish it.’
Darling Georgie Page 5
