King Edward VIII

This letter, which the Prince described as ‘marvellous’, and the enforced tranquillity of Sandringham, together worked wonders. ‘I’m feeling a new and completely sane man,’ he told Thomas. ‘I promise to take things easily and not make a B F of myself any more.’51 Rest, and the attentions of those who cared for him, almost always sufficed to rescue the Prince from the blackest of his depressions. But Thomas recognized his extreme fragility and was alarmed by it; under the stresses of the Australian tour, with Freda Dudley Ward ten thousand miles away, might he not crack more seriously, perhaps even irrecoverably? It was a distant but daunting menace.

Back in London, the Prince first tried to defer the tour by three weeks on the plea that Renown could not be ready in time – an argument which the Under Secretary at the Colonial Office, Leo Amery, disposed of with alacrity52 – and then engaged in a wrangle with Amery and the Prime Minister over the composition of his staff. Halsey, said Amery, was incompetent to handle the most important aspects of the tour, he was ‘difficult to deal with, indifferent to political considerations and indeed incapable of appreciating them. He upset the Press badly on the Canadian tour.’53 The Prince liked Halsey and had serious reservations about Grigg, whom Amery wanted to put in charge: ‘We are not in any way kindred spirits and for this reason I do not regard his presence on my staff [as being] of any value whatsoever.’54 He argued that, since his was not a political tour, there was no need for it to be managed by an expert in politics. ‘Its consequences are of the highest political importance both to the Throne and the Empire,’ retorted Lloyd George. Grigg must have complete control over the programme and relations with the press.55 In the end the Prince and the Prime Minister met in Downing Street, with Stamfordham, Halsey and Grigg to act as referee and seconds. ‘If you are one day to be a constitutional King,’ said Lloyd George, ‘you must first be a constitutional Prince of Wales.’56 The Prince swallowed his medicine, but it did not make him any the more cheerful about the prospects for the tour.

One other important change was made to the staff which had accompanied him to Canada. The Prince’s young cousin, Louis Mountbatten, was added; in theory as Flag Lieutenant to Halsey, in practice as companion and confidant to the Prince. ‘Such a charming boy, and he cheers me up,’ the Prince told the Queen.57 Cheering up the Prince was, indeed, Mountbatten’s main function. He got some idea of what was in store for him when he found his cousin in tears just before the formal departure. ‘Have you ever seen a Post Captain cry?’ the Prince asked. Mountbatten admitted that he had not. ‘Well, you’d better get used to it, you may see it again.’58 But few except his intimates realized the strain that he was under. He dined with the Asquiths in January. ‘The Prince has excellent manners, and has come on immensely in ease and savoir faire,’ wrote his host. ‘He talked quite amusingly of his experiences in America, and I think is not sorry to be off again in March, even to so dismal a goal as Australia.’59

And so the pompous ritual of departure was enacted once again, the Prince forlorn among the beribboned dignitaries – ‘In a little tight naval uniform which clung close to his figure he did not look above 15,’ wrote Curzon, ‘quite a pathetic little person.’60 Mountbatten was quickly set to his principal duty. ‘Poor chap, with all these hundreds of people round him he’s as lonely and homesick as he can be and is at present HATING this trip!’ he told his mother. ‘He says he’ll cheer up later. But then he is very, very badly smitten, I think.’61 Of those aboard, only Mountbatten understood the extent of his gloom; the Prince joined in the traditional shipboard romps with good will, and gave every appearance of enjoying himself as he inadvertently flooded Halsey’s cabin with a power hose. The hose was too powerful for Grigg’s peace of mind: ‘I had visions of HRH, who does not weigh much in a state of nature, being projected into the Atlantic by a sudden jet of salt water.’62

The Renown travelled by the Panama Canal, with stops in the West Indies on the way. In Barbados he found the inhabitants disturbed by rumours that some of the islands were to be sold to the United States. ‘I need hardly say that the King’s subjects are not for sale to other governments,’ the Prince reassured them loftily. ‘Their destiny as free men is in their own hands.’63 At Bridgetown the Governor’s lady had prepared an immense ball of flowers which was supposed to disintegrate and shower the Prince with blossoms as he passed. Fortunately she lost her nerve and pulled the string too soon; the ball, welded into a congealed mass, fell heavily into the road and would have reduced the Prince to pulp if released at the proper time.64

It soon became obvious that the Prince was not going to allow his pining for Mrs Dudley Ward to deprive him of all diversions. At a ball in Balboa he danced almost exclusively with a particularly pretty girl, who turned out to be the daughter of the local storekeeper – ‘and a very good thing too,’ commented Grigg, ‘but the local dignitaries felt mournful that their more patrician daughters had not been preferred.’65 Swimming at midnight, Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson approached a raft crewed by three nubile American girls. ‘Is that you, Teddy?’ one enquired. Hutchinson denied the charge but boarded the raft nevertheless, to be joined a few minutes later by the Prince of Wales. They returned to Renown at 2 a.m. and tiptoed to the Prince’s cabin for a whisky. ‘Don’t wake the baby,’ whispered the Prince, pointing to Halsey’s adjoining cabin.66 There was much junketing at San Diego, including a Mayoral Ball. Among those present was an American air force officer, Earl Winfield Spencer, and his wife Wallis. No doubt gatherings of this kind were enjoyed by the locals, wrote Halsey disdainfully to the King, ‘but one has to be extremely careful at these sorts of places where one meets all sorts of conditions of people’.67

The Australian Prime Minister, William Hughes, had originally insisted that the Prince must visit Australia before New Zealand, even though the opposite would obviously have been more sensible: ‘To ask the poor Prince to imagine glorious Alpine views in a howling blizzard, and to spend days tossing about in Antarctic gales looking for noble fjords hidden in rain and mist, is really a little too much,’ wrote Amery.68 Lloyd George agreed, and Australia was told that it would have to wait its turn. The visit to New Zealand had been envisaged as an important but relatively relaxed rehearsal for the main task ahead. The authorities of both Dominions had been told that the Prince wanted no ceremonies before 10 a.m., three half-days a week for recuperation, and at least one large public reception in every city to allow him to meet the people.69 However, when the representatives of the two governments joined the ship at Suva it was found that they had ignored their instructions. Programmes of impossible complexity and arduousness had been prepared – ‘I do not believe any human being could go through with all that was proposed,’ wrote Halsey.70 He and Grigg set to work and managed to cut back the Australian programme to something physically possible, but it was too late to do more than nibble at the edges of what had been planned for New Zealand. ‘I cannot understand the Governor General having passed it,’ Godfrey Thomas told the Queen, ‘unless the object was to break the Prince down and make it impossible for him to do justice to himself in Australia.’71

Lord Liverpool, the Governor General in question, was to be held responsible for almost everything that went wrong in New Zealand. ‘A pompous, interfering ass who has been dogging not only my own footsteps but also never leaves the Admiral and Grigg alone,’ the Prince described him to his father. ‘He rubs everybody up the wrong way and … is most unpopular throughout the dominion.’72 The Prince was habitually quick to denounce British governors, ambassadors, or others in positions of authority, but on this occasion Halsey, Grigg and Thomas all echoed his views. Liverpool could hardly be blamed for the railway strike which threatened to disrupt the visit, but even this, Grigg complained, he handled with notable incompetence, behaving ‘one minute as if the end of the world had come, the next as if there was nothing to worry about’.73 The strike had been fomented by a group of Sinn Fein supporters who dominated the union executive. Fortunately for the royal party the most prominent of the Irishmen found the strain too much and suffered a nervous breakdown. Without his leadership the strike collapsed. Grigg’s preoccupation had been to keep the Prince out of the dispute, whether he were presented as taking the side of the management or the strikers. He succeeded, though the Prince could not resist one bland remark in a speech in Wellington: ‘Somehow or other the trains were not running very well last week, but mine could not have run better.’74

In spite of the taxing programme, the tour of New Zealand went extremely well. Neither the nature of the people nor the size of the population made possible the sort of mass hysteria the Prince had witnessed in Toronto or New York, but his reception was never less than enthusiastic. He remained downcast, however. Grigg found him reading, ‘with an air of profound dejection’, an article in the Wanganui newspaper which referred to him as ‘the coping stone of Imperial federation’. ‘I never saw a coping stone in worse condition,’ Grigg commented drily.75

New Zealand might have its striking railwaymen, but Australia traditionally possessed the most left-wing and militant working class in the British Empire. The Prime Minister had broken with most of his Labour colleagues in 1916 to form a national government, and his action had caused as much bitterness among those who felt themselves deserted as Ramsay MacDonald was to experience in Britain ten years later. The Prince had to step gingerly between these rancorous groups. But this was not the only Australian problem which required diplomatic handling. The federal and state governments were perpetually at loggerheads; the relationship between the state Governors and the Governor General was little more harmonious. The Prince found himself a particularly savoury bone of contention between the warring elements; anything he did to please one was certain to offend another. ‘One Governor suggests that the destiny of the Empire depends on HRH spending three extra days in his State,’ wrote the Governor General, Munro-Ferguson. ‘Another deprecates the Prince enjoying a kangaroo hunt … and the masterful little Prime Minister has decided views on all questions and never forgets he is the supreme authority.’76

Any fears that the Australians might receive the Prince with less exuberance than he had found elsewhere were quickly dispelled. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how amazingly enthusiastic the Melbourne people are,’ he told his mother, ‘and they’ve kept it up ever since I landed and it’s really frightfully touching, and I do appreciate it all so much. It beats anywhere in Canada.’77 Always it was the ex-service men who were to the fore; even when he was in the comparative safety of a car he might find himself plucked from the back seat and ‘tossed cheerfully about the streets’ by the excited ‘diggers’.78 It was gratifying, it was exhilarating, but it was also alarming. One drive to the Town Hall, scheduled to take five minutes, lasted an hour. The folded hood was torn off the back of the car and the running boards trampled away by a crowd determined to get near its Prince.79 To see him from close quarters was desirable, to touch him best of all; he was prodded, patted, slapped on the back, shaken by the hand, so that by the end of each day his body was covered with bruises and his hands swollen and aching. The Prince had worked like a slave, Halsey told the King, and had been totally successful. ‘On every hand I hear most wonderful things as a result, such as people who, before his arrival, refused to have anything to do with his reception or allow their children to take part in the various functions, completely coming round and being, if possible, more enthusiastic than any of the others.’80

Such experiences were as emotionally draining as they were physically demanding. When coming on top of the endless formal banquets, receptions, parades, receiving of addresses, hospital visits, balls and relentless speechifying, it is small wonder that the Prince should have been worn out by the time he had finished at Melbourne. Things were a little easier when he left the great city centres and travelled by train thousands of miles across the Australian plains, but even there he could rarely relax for long since at every suggestion of a station scores or hundreds of locals would gather, some of them having travelled thirty or forty miles by cart to see the Prince pass. They could not be disappointed. When he occasionally failed to appear, as at Gilgandra, he was ‘counted out’ by the indignant crowd, who chanted from one to ten and ended with a resounding ‘OUT!’, a traditional Australian way of registering disapproval. On the return journey he made sure to present himself and the forgiving inhabitants counted him in again.81

He never slept well in a train and the lack of sleep added to his cumulative exhaustion. His morale was not improved when the royal train was derailed in the depths of Western Australia. The only casualties were the Prince’s doctor, who cut his leg, and the pride of the Minister of Works, who was trapped in the lavatory, but if the accident had occurred a hundred yards further on, where the embankment was steeper, it could have been far more serious. The Prince preserved admirable sang-froid; as he clambered from the wreckage he remarked cheerfully: ‘Well, anyway, at last we have done something which was not on the official programme.’82 But though his entourage thought that he was unscathed by the incident, he admitted to his mother that he had been badly shaken: ‘I live so much on my nerves nowadays that they get very easily upset and I just loathe a train now and have “the wind up me” the whole time!!’83

Brisbane was the city the Prince most dreaded visiting, for Queensland was ‘bolshie or rather full of Sinn Feiners and the Labour premier is a hot Irish RC’.84 In the event, not a red flag was to be seen and the crowds were as welcoming as any in Australia. The Acting Premier, who at one point had threatened to boycott the visit, became almost embarrassingly fond of his visitor and in his determination to say goodbye chartered a special aircraft to pursue the Prince to the frontier and, missing him there, continued the chase many miles into New South Wales.85 For Grigg, the most memorable feature of the stay at Brisbane was the Shakespearean Ball, at which a gentleman dressed as Shakespeare presented a series of his characters to the Prince: ‘It was a very mixed show, and Shakespeare himself became somewhat confused at times, introducing Othello as Julius Caesar until corrected by the indignant Moor in question.’86 It is unlikely that the Prince would have been much the wiser if Othello had been presented as Ancient Pistol or one of the witches from Macbeth.

Adelaide should have been something of a rest cure, since the programme was less onerous than elsewhere and the Governor’s wife, Lady Weigall, was a woman of common sense and great kindness as well as a close friend of Freda Dudley Ward. ‘It cheered him up no end,’ Godfrey Thomas wrote thirty years later, ‘to have found in Australia someone with whom he could talk freely about his lady-love.’87 Lady Weigall mothered and cosseted him, at a time when he craved for such treatment; when he left Adelaide he wrote to thank her for having done so much to boost the morale of ‘a very worn out little boy, who really was beginning to think the whole show too big for him and too much to go thro with’.88 But though the therapy was effective she undid much of the good by encouraging him to stay up every night until 3 or 4 a.m. cooking buttered eggs in her boudoir.89 The Prince left Adelaide more cheerful but little more rested than he had been on his arrival.

As a result he teetered permanently on the edge of extreme depression. ‘I feel fit enough,’ he told Philip Sassoon in early August, ‘but mentally I’m absolutely worn out. Thank God it’s all over bar the shouting now as I really don’t think I could carry on much longer without the top of my head cracking like an egg and making a mad house my only possible [word omitted] for the remainder of my natural life.’90 In such a state of mind, trials which normally he would have borne lightly seemed intolerably burdensome, pleasures became pains, inoffensive companions were categorized as the lowest of the low. He had hardly seen a pretty woman yet, he told Sassoon, they were ‘a hen-faced crowd and make me tired’.91 He confused cause and effect; it was because he was tired that they seemed hen-faced. Similarly, the journalists who accompanied the party were not ‘virulent scum’, ‘absolutely spoilt’ and ‘bloody rude to my staff’;92 they were, as he would have agreed when in sounder mind, professionals doing a difficult job with considerable competence – and on the whole giving a most favourable account of all his doings.

Certainly they were sympathetic when, in mid-July, the Prince had something close to a complete breakdown. He lost his voice, rambled off the point in speeches, appeared wan and disconsolate even to those who did not know him well. ‘Renewed sign of nerve strain … very disturbing,’ cabled The Times correspondent; ‘Use utmost influence to save Prince continuance of the terrible strain imposed by many months of public appearances,’ the Morning Post representative urged his editor. ‘Situation at any moment may become serious … He is game to the backbone, but there are limits within sight.’93 His staff were at one point so alarmed that they insisted the programme be postponed by a week, allowing the Prince a chance to recuperate.

Such messages, suspiciously similar in phrasing, may have been inspired as part of an orchestrated campaign to change the dates of the Prince’s next tour abroad. One of the most pressing causes of his gloom was the knowledge that he would hardly be back in Britain again before he had to set out on an even longer tour of India and Japan. His separation from Freda Dudley Ward would have lasted nearly a year. Even before he left for Australia he had suggested to Lloyd George that Prince Albert should replace him on the Indian tour. The King was displeased when he heard that the matter had been discussed in Downing Street before his son had raised it with him; Frances Stevenson noted with some amusement that he treated Lloyd George coldly at the station when the Prince departed.94 The Prince was mainly alarmed lest he be ‘unconsciously drawn into a conflict between “monarch and premier”. Of course that’s the last thing I want as it w’d probably end in a row between father and son.’95 The question was temporarily dropped.

When reports began to come in of the strain the Prince was under, the King was unsympathetic. ‘Papa naturally said it was all your fault doing too much,’ wrote Prince Albert, or as he had recently become, the Duke of York, ‘but he doesn’t understand how difficult things are now.’96 Grigg and Halsey also argued the perils of sticking to the original schedule – ‘The Prince … is only a human being and not a machine,’ wrote Halsey, ‘and he cannot continue at high pitch indefinitely.’97 The King began to feel alarm. From Adelaide Weigall wrote to say that the Prince was ‘weary in mind and body’. Milner saw the letter and told Lloyd George that he had not mentioned it at court ‘because I happen to know that the King is very touchy about the Prince’s possibly not going to India’. His own view was that unless the Prince were given a decent rest at home before his next tour, ‘we shall have a disaster’.98 Lloyd George braved the wrath of the King and found that his opposition had already crumbled. At the end of July, to his immense relief, the Prince was told that his visit to India was postponed until the autumn of 1921.

The King made it plain he expected a quid pro quo. In the period between the tours the Prince should lead a ‘strictly normal life’, rest, more food, more sleep, less exercise; otherwise ‘you will give cause to numbers of people who are disappointed, to say that the plea of health is not genuine’.99 To this not unreasonable condition the Prince responded with an indignation which showed how overwrought he must have been. ‘The lecture you gave me in your last letter made me rather sad,’ he told his father. His health was perfectly good, the strain was only mental. ‘You may find it very difficult to see my point of view, perhaps you never will, but such is my case.’ What he needed was a normal life, but not the normality that the King envisaged; his life must include much sport and exercise, ‘and after a month or two lots of work, which every man should have!!’100 To Philip Sassoon he ranted about his father’s ‘foul’ letter. ‘It’s odd how inhuman a lot of people (and big people) are, and I haven’t much use for them.’ The King was determined to treat him like an invalid but ‘You know just as well as I do that invalids don’t go down with the British public, there’s no room for them nowadays so forget them!! Nobody is going to make me play the invalid!!’101

The Prince reacted with the same intemperance to relatively mild rebukes from home. The King deplored a photograph of his son and Mountbatten in a swimming pool – ‘You might as well be photographed naked, no doubt it would please the public.’ He objected to the wearing of a turned-down collar in white uniform with a black tie, ‘anything more unsmart I never saw’.102 ‘His father’s letters might be the letters of a Director of some business to his Assistant,’ commented Mountbatten.103 The remark was not wholly unjustified, George V did find it hard to communicate affection. But the affection was there, and the Prince must have known it was. Nor did the letters contain only criticism. Three weeks before Mountbatten made his comment, the King had written to say how the Queen and he rejoiced ‘at the splendid success of your tour and the way in which you have won all hearts by your hard work and your own personality. I must say we are very proud of you. You are doing untold good for the Empire.’104

Not everything went to plan on the tour, nor was the Prince’s behaviour always impeccable. He caused offence to several ladies of eminence by preferring to dance with the prettier of the – evidently not so hen-faced – Australian girls. He upset one family who had taken endless pains to prepare for his reception by brusquely cancelling a visit at the last moment on the flimsy pretext that the roads were impassable.105 He sometimes looked bored at the stuffier public performances or snapped angrily at slow or incompetent servants. But these were minor blemishes on an otherwise almost flawless performance. The visit had been a tumultuous success.

There had been moments when his staff had doubted whether he could carry it through. Grigg told Lord Cromer what an immense relief it was to have reached the end of the Australian programme: ‘HRH has done splendidly from first to last, though working hard against the collar for the better part of the time.’106 Any minor complaints were forgotten in the paean of praise that greeted the accomplishment of his mission. More important than the views of his own staff were the feelings of the Australians. Billy Hughes, the Prime Minister, had been determined not to be impressed by any mere princeling. The fact that the princeling was English was an additional reason for suspicion. Yet he had succumbed totally to his visitor’s charm and simplicity. His valedictory letter to the Prince of Wales might be ascribed to politeness, if almost on the same day he had not spoken to Grigg ‘most touchingly of the Prince’.107 There is no reason to doubt that he meant what he wrote:

When you first came amongst us we welcomed you as a Prince who is one day to be our King; but we part from you as a dear friend who has won our affections and whom we love. Your visit has provoked demonstrations that in their spontaneous enthusiasm are unique in our history.

The Australian people see in you all that our glorious Empire stands for, that deathless spirit of liberty, of progress, that distinguishes it from all other Empires, ancient or modern …