King Edward VIII

Come back to us, Prince, as soon and as often as you can.108

8

India

‘I AM DELIGHTED AT THE PROSPECT OF AN UNINTERRUPTED twelve months in the Old Country,’ declared the Prince of Walesat a Guildhall luncheon shortly after his return from Australia; ‘– a treat I have not had for several years.’1 His parents’ view was that he should now have a badly needed rest, ‘free from functions and photographers’ and occupied by ‘ordinary country pursuits’.2 The Prince was delighted to dispense with functions and photographers and by no means averse to country pursuits – with the emphasis on hunting and steeplechasing; but nothing was going to make him go early to bed, or away from London if that was where Freda Dudley Ward was to be found. In fact his freedom from functions proved illusory; the Guildhall luncheon was only one of many such occasions. It was also typical in that it involved an acrimonious exchange with the King, who wanted his son to drive to the City in cocked hat and scarlet tunic. The Prince argued that, with fifteen thousand men still unemployed, this was the wrong moment for a display of military pomp.3 He carried his point. Lloyd George was due to speak at the same occasion. Grigg noted that his draft speech contained no reference to the King and, knowing how sensitive things were between father and son, urged that one be included: ‘As the happiness of the Prince does depend a great deal on keeping all well between the King and him, I feel you will forgive this reminder.’4

This year at home was an unhappy one for the Prince’s relationship with his father. It was tolerable in London, where they met only occasionally, but cooped up in Balmoral or Sandringham and cut off from Mrs Dudley Ward the Prince found the court routine more than he could endure. ‘It’s all terribly irksome and it’s such a gloomy atmosphere.’5 There was an explosion at Balmoral in October 1921. ‘I’ve turned Bolshie tonight,’ he told Freda, ‘as H M has been the absolute limit, snubbing me and finding fault sarcastically on every possible occasion. It really isn’t fair, darling, particularly as I’ve been playing up to him all I can since I arrived.’6 The Prince’s doubts about the forthcoming tour of India provided an extra cause for wrangling between the two. Once the Prince threatened to ask Lloyd George whether he really felt the visit essential. ‘I don’t care whether the Prime Minister wants you to go or not,’ retorted the King. ‘I wish you to go and you are going.’7

The Prince was not alone in wondering whether his visit was necessary or desirable. India was in disarray. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report, which had reiterated that the aim of the British government was to establish India as an independent democracy within the Empire, had signally failed to convince the Indian National Congress Party that British intentions were honourable. The unrest that followed led to the introduction of trial without jury for those accused of political crimes, and, in April 1919, to the massacre at Amritsar. Peaceful non-cooperation was Gandhi’s formula for India’s dealings with the British, but non-violence frequently led to violence, and Congress’s decision to boycott the Prince’s visit carried with it the threat of disorder and much personal risk for the visitor. Almost all the provincial governors, led by the experienced Lord Willingdon, concluded that the tour was unwise,8 while from a different point of view the private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas, E. M. Forster, felt that to the educated Indian ‘this ill-omened visit does seem an impertinence. You can’t solve real, complicated and ancient troubles by sending out a good-tempered boy; besides, this naive slap-on-the-back method, though the very thing for our colonies, scarcely goes down in the East.’9 Indeed, almost the only champion of the tour was Lord Reading, who was unshakeable in his conviction that the visit would pass off well, serve British interests in India and, above all, consolidate Britain’s relationship with the Indian princes. Since Reading was the Viceroy and Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, was his faithful ally, planning for the tour continued.

Montagu’s original idea, indeed, had been that the functions of executive ruler and Viceroy should be divided and the Prince himself serve for a few months as Viceroy.10 Lloyd George vetoed the idea, no doubt to the Prince’s considerable relief.11 But the project that survived seemed little better. ‘How I’m loathing and hating the thought of India …’ he told his mother. ‘But as I have to go, I must try and make the most of it.’12 Till the last moment he hoped that something would turn up to prevent the tour. ‘I’m afraid the trouble in India seems to be subsiding,’ he wrote to Freda, ‘and that there isn’t a chance of it stopping my going, damn it.’13 Against the wishes of most members of his staff, he insisted that Louis Mountbatten should once more be in the party – ‘to look after my private and personal comfort and do small and unimportant jobs for me,’ as he explained to Godfrey Thomas.14 Thomas was not pleased, nor was Lord Cromer, who was to perform in India the part played by Grigg in Australia. ‘We all deplore his inclusion in the Staff,’ Cromer wrote to another colleague, Colonel Worgan. The Prince had ruled that Mountbatten was always to have a room, however small, near his own. ‘You need have no scruples about a very literal interpretation of the Prince’s own words “however small”,’ instructed Cromer grimly.15 The real significance of the appointment lay in the light it threw on the Prince’s alienation from his regular staff. He told Grigg that he wanted Mountbatten to come along since ‘he now has no friends on his own staff except perhaps Legh’. ‘I gather that Halsey is no longer a friend!!’ commented Stamfordham.16 In fact the Prince was still close to Godfrey Thomas as well as Legh, and fond of a new recruit, Bruce Ogilvy, but in his black mood as he prepared to leave he could see nothing but enemies around him.

The Prince was convinced that the style which had worked so triumphantly in Canada and Australia would serve in India as well. If he was only allowed to be himself, then he could get through to the people and win their hearts. He was appalled by the dense thickets of ceremony with which the authorities seemed determined to hedge him round. Even before he landed, he told Mrs Dudley Ward, he was convinced ‘that all the official rot and pompousness is overdone and is quite unnecessary’. He was determined to break it down, ‘even though I’ll risk getting into trouble with the officials and powers that be’.17 And it was not just the stuffy British officials who were at fault; the semi-independent Indian princes were equally out of touch with the real people, ‘their ceremonies are so irritating and ridiculous’.18

The King was quite as certain that the sort of informality which had been so successful in the white Dominions would prove disastrous in India.19 Stamfordham rubbed in the argument – ‘I have impressed upon him the absolute necessity for a maintenance of strict dignity on all official occasions’20 – and Cromer battled valiantly to hold the line, complaining ruefully to Wigram that ‘it is not always easy to get HRH to adjust his mind as to what is suitable to certain occasions’.21 The old brigade was not wholly wrong. The Prince’s style did give offence to many British and a few Indians, some of them of real importance. But he won many more friends by his behaviour. Professor Rushbrook Williams, Director of Public Information at the time and official historian of the visit, told Frances Donaldson many years later that he ‘never knew an Indian who had met HRH who was not charmed by him – he was human, informal and genuinely interested in them. Again and again I heard the remark: “If only all you Europeans were like him!” … Above all, he wanted to meet and get to know Indians.’22

Professor Williams gives the Prince credit for more enthusiasm towards the Indians than in fact existed. As usual it was the serving soldiers and ex-service men who most appealed to him.23 He was quite as colour conscious as any of the British rulers of India; when Mountbatten reported a conversation with Mrs Besant in which that formidable lady revealed that the the Prince was a reincarnation of Akbar, his cousin was disgruntled at the idea of having been a ‘black man’ in a previous life.24 He had no doubt that the Indians and Burmese were wholly incompetent to run their own affairs and would be lost without the benevolent supervision of their colonial masters.25

And yet he did do his best, often in spite of the authorities, to get through to them. ‘I want to know you and I want you to know me,’ was a personal note that he grafted on to the formal message from the King Emperor which he delivered in Bombay. At Poona he horrified officials by walking around the stands after laying the foundation stone so that people could see him. They rose to their feet and cheered themselves hoarse.26 In Lucknow he went to see four thousand poor being fed. ‘I insisted on walking about amongst them despite the ruses of the officials and police to prevent me stopping and getting out of the car. I feel that I’m one up on them all for once!’27 He learned enough Hindi to exchange a few words with the many thousands of military pensioners whom he inspected: ‘It’s worth it every time, as these Indians do appreciate it and it makes it far more interesting for me too. And it’s a heart-breaking job going round these poor devils, many of them maimed and limbless, whose govt pensions are hopelessly inadequate and for whom I can do so little.’28 And when the Indians were there and he was allowed to move among them, he could work the same magic as in Canada or Australia. At a People’s Fair near Delhi he was mobbed by five or six thousand natives who surged round him, reported the military commander, General Rawlinson, ‘cheering him to the echo, salaaming and almost worshipping him. He was perfectly delighted …’29

The Prince believed that the police were overdoing his protection and cutting him off from the people who were ready to acclaim him. ‘Surely they can trust me not to make a BF of myself and do anything idiotic?’ he enquired indignantly of Freda Dudley Ward. The police always retorted that they were doing no more than they did for the Viceroy – ‘All I say is “God help the Viceroy”!!’ Everyone was working loyally and diligently but, ‘alas they are working in the wrong way and completely preventing this tour being of the slightest use as far as the natives are concerned, which is after all the real reason for my coming’.30

But it was not primarily the British authorities who thwarted his efforts to get through to the Indians; Gandhi and the Congress Party ensured that the crowds were rarely there to succumb to his blandishments. He was disappointed and dismayed when, in Allahabad, less than a thousand Indians were on the streets out of a total of 120,000 – ‘we go from cold to frost,’ commented Halsey.31 He was infuriated when, at Benares, the university authorities tried to cover up for a student boycott by filling the empty seats ‘with high school boys, boy scouts and Europeans; I suppose they hoped I would never get to hear … what a BF they had made of me’.32 He was outraged when the Chief Commissioner of the North West Frontier Province, Sir John Maffey, took alarm at threats to assassinate the Prince and redirected his procession through the back streets of Peshawar. Convinced that everyone would believe him a coward, he returned to Government House in what Mountbatten described as ‘the blackest rage I ever hope to see him in’.33 The Prince described the incident to Mrs Dudley Ward as ‘the worst thing that has happened to me in India’, and blamed himself for not overruling Maffey – ‘but then you know I’m not very good in a crisis, Fredie darling, and do lose my head all too easily’.34 Maffey, in a different sense, would have lost his head if he had stuck to the original plan and the Prince had been murdered. The police can hardly be blamed for their vigilance. There was real danger; the Prince’s staff knew of at least two cases in which people had been offered more than a thousand rupees to throw a bomb at the royal visitor.35

The Prince had no sympathy for the independence movement and blamed Edwin Montagu for fomenting it. His letters home are filled with denunciations of ‘that despicable man’ who had ‘given in and pandered to the natives’. Naturally the Indians wanted more, ‘which they can’t possibly have so long as we maintain the policy of governing and running India’. The result was ‘hopeless unrest’ and growing support for Gandhi: ‘It’s all very disgusting and very depressing.’36 He rejoiced when Gandhi was arrested and Montagu resigned, but feared it was too late. Montagu’s reforms had so far changed the atmosphere in India that ‘most Englishmen of Indian experience are dissuading their sons or any good fellow from coming out’. As a result the standards in the Indian Civil Service were slipping, ‘and, as you know, the natives are the quickest to size up a white man and can always recognize a gent, or anyway a “nature’s gent” which is even better’.37 Given what he saw as the incipient collapse of British rule in India, he felt that his own presence was a mere palliative, as irrelevant as applying a piece of sticking plaster to a gaping and mortal wound. His visit was unwanted by the Indians and of doubtful value to the British. His speeches, which were written for him by a member of the Indian Civil Service attached to his staff, struck Piers Legh as ‘really lamentable … claptrap of the worst description’.38 The Prince read them conscientiously but loathed them. The men who composed them, he considered, were ‘bureaucratic and behind the times. They can’t help it, poor brutes, as the Indian Govt is the same.’39

By mid-December he was in such despair that he contemplated abandoning the tour. He wrote to the Viceroy, bemoaning the fact that he was achieving nothing, meeting almost no Indians, strengthening support for the independence movement rather than diminishing it, causing the expenditure of vast sums of money to no good end.40 The letter exudes pessimism, but his true frame of mind is portrayed more vividly in the letter he wrote to Freda Dudley Ward a few days later:

My beloved, I couldn’t be more gloomy or depressed than I am tonight, and I’m oh! so desperately sad and lonely and missing and oh! wanting you and wanting oh! so badly my precious little Fredie!! I naturally want you most when I’m up against it all as I am now, sweetheart, as I do love you love you so, and although I loathe Xmas as a festival, yet it does somehow suggest happiness, and it’s so ironical everyone wishing me a happy Xmas … Surely they must know that I can’t possibly ever be in the teeniest way happy when I’m away from my Fredie?41

This was his blackest moment of the tour. Reading’s robust re-assurance that the visit was of immense importance and was ‘doing real good – infinitely more than you think’,42 came at a moment when the crowds had been responding more enthusiastically and the Prince’s morale was in some measure restored. The Viceroy reported in February that the Prince ‘really does feel that his trip has done and is going good’.43 He overstated his case. The Prince really did feel, and continued to feel, that the trip had been, on the whole, a futile enterprise. But he was ready to accept that some Indians had been favourably impressed, some British heartened. He even began to feel a modest measure of pride in his achievements.

As in Australia, physical exhaustion contributed to his depression. He slept badly during the interminable journeys by train, stayed up too late, ate too little, drank and smoked too much, as always overdid the exercise. ‘HRH’s present method of life,’ reported his doctor, ‘is such as may involve a complete breakdown of his whole nervous system.’44 One trouble was that, deprived of Freda Dudley Ward’s companionship, he got very little fun out of the tour. Confronted by the great archaeological finds at Taxila, he remarked gloomily to Lady Birdwood: ‘This place ought never to have been dug up.’45 The famous Buddha’s tooth at Kandy in Ceylon ‘isn’t a tooth at all, merely a sordid, dirty piece of bone. Then there was a ghastly procession of elephants which included native dancing and hideous noises, which was really native music.’46 Almost the only exception was the Taj Mahal. After the statutory visit by moonlight he told Queen Mary that it had ‘gripped me and I shall never forget what I’ve seen tonight’. He even paid a second visit – ‘a contingency,’ Thomas remarked, ‘against which I should have betted heavily’.47

‘One of the tragic things about this Tour,’ wrote Lord Cromer, ‘is that HRH is not really keen on big-game shooting or shooting of any kind.’48 Tragic is perhaps too strong a word, but to the Indian princes, who invested shooting with an almost mystic significance, the Prince’s indifference seemed inexplicable. In Nepal fortunes were squandered in setting up a big-game camp; the Prince preferred to wander around with a shotgun looking for jungle fowl, or better still, to exercise his polo pony in a nearby clearing. It was a great disappointment to the Maharaja, Piers Legh told his father. It was a great disappointment to Legh too. ‘Everything is sacrificed to polo, which the Prince is mad about,’ he wrote resentfully. ‘We consequently don’t get as much shooting as we should.’49 Polo, pig-sticking and steeplechasing were indeed the Prince’s greatest pleasures in India. Yet even on the polo ground he could not escape from his role: in Jodhpur the young players had been told to treat him gently and only on his insistence did they relax and ride roughly against him; in Mandalay his team won a competition, ‘though it’s become such a farce this cup business as somehow it’s always arranged that I should win … and I do loathe it!!’50

His morale was not improved by periodic carping from Buckingham Palace. George V was disconcerted to see photographs of the Prince wearing blue overalls with white tunic – ‘A most extraordinarily ugly uniform … The regulations ought never to have been altered without my approval.’51 He felt ‘little short of despair’ when he read that, at Lucknow, the Prince had taken over the drums in the band playing at a dance at Government House – ‘What will the natives think of the Heir Apparent assuming such a role?’ asked a shocked Lord Stamfordham.52 The band was playing in a gallery, invisible to the dancers, answered Cromer. The journalist who reported the news had been grossly indiscreet. ‘I have spoken to HRH about this and he quite understands the point.’53

‘The whole crux is whether the Prince of Wales makes the Indians feel he likes them,’ Lord Riddell told Cromer. ‘They are extraordinarily sensitive and they know intuitively, past belief.’54 The Prince did not like them; least of all did he like those to whom he came closest, the Indian rulers. He disapproved of the pomposity and lavishness of their way of life; their propensity to ape all the most unattractive features of European civilization; their determination to ingratiate themselves with the son of the King Emperor. In Nepal tigers were paraded before him so that it was almost impossible for him to miss them; in Mysore the Maharaja let him win at squash. After this last offence he raged vengefully against those ignoble potentates and cannot have left the Maharaja himself in much doubt about his feelings.55

Since the Prince at the time was suffering from insomnia, indigestion and what he described as ‘smoker’s heart’, his bile is perhaps explicable. His staff should have been able to jolly him out of such excesses. Unfortunately only Mountbatten was close enough to him to understand his moods, and Mountbatten was preoccupied with his own courtship of Edwina Ashley. The Prince luxuriated in his sense of isolation. His staff, he told Freda Dudley Ward, was ‘the finest ground possible for foul and bloody gossip and scandal!! … They do their utmost to make life hell for me instead of helping me.’56 Before the tour was over Halsey offered his resignation on the grounds that he felt he had lost the Prince’s confidence. ‘How right he is, isn’t he, my precious angel, though I said it was all rot … He knows better now than to say a word to me about TOI or anything private as he knows I would fire him on the spot.’57 Already the Prince’s reluctance to allow even the most trusted members of his staff to talk to him about what he considered his private life was becoming more marked. Godfrey Thomas no longer dared speak with the freedom he had enjoyed in the past, Claud Hamilton was to lose his job when he trespassed on forbidden territory. The Prince’s attitude, strengthened to the point of paranoia, was to make it impossible for those who worked for him to do their duty properly in the years before the abdication.

His alienation from his regular staff became more complete when Captain Edward ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe was recruited to look after the Prince’s polo and other equine diversions. Metcalfe was charming and impecunious; an Irishman who had won a good MC in the war and held important posts in three princely states. He was ‘very nice and irresponsible’, Thomas told the Queen.58 Halsey was still more censorious: ‘Metcalfe is not at all a good thing for HRH,’ he wrote. ‘He is an excellent fellow, always cheery and full of fun, but far, far too weak and hopelessly irresponsible. He is a wild, wild Irishman and’ – crowning horror – ‘no one knows anything about his family.’59 The Prince was seduced by his charm, his friendliness and his endearing habit of treating his new employer as an ordinary human being: ‘He always referred to me as “The Little Man”. People were sometimes shocked by the familiarity of his attitude towards me.’60 He became the nearest approach the Prince ever had to an intimate male friend. ‘Honestly, and you must know it by now,’ the Prince wrote to him a year or so after they first met, ‘I miss you terribly when you are away, and … I’m ever so grateful to you for being the marvellous friend to me you always have been.’61 Against his dulcet blandishments the stern voice of duty as enunciated by Halsey or Thomas seemed still less appealing. His coming placed a barrier between the Prince and those who should have been closest to him.

This catalogue of lamentations may make it sound as if the tour of India had been a total disaster. This would not be true. In the first port of call, Bombay, he achieved something close to triumph. The Viceroy rhapsodized about his ‘wonderful success’. ‘It represents solid truth,’ he told Montagu, ‘when I tell you that the Prince did receive a splendid reception … and by his unaffected manner and simple heartiness and friendliness to the people, won his way right into their hearts.’62 The Governor, Sir George Lloyd, told Cromer that the success was due ‘entirely to the chief actor, whose personality is amazing and whose gift of keen appreciation of every situation in a flash, of the perfect word to say and the perfect way to say it in, struck me tremendously’.63 Even the Prince, always first to doubt his own capabilities, told Freda Dudley Ward that he would have been driven mad by the tedium of the official receptions ‘except for the fact that I am having a real success here, my beloved, and I think I’ve managed to get these natives’.64

Gandhi’s campaign ensured that he was not usually so successful, but the Congress Party did not achieve as much as it had hoped. In Delhi, in particular, all went well for the visitor. ‘I feel as if I had lived a life time these last two days,’ Lady Reading told her family. ‘Such processing of troops, booming of guns. Royal salutes … acres of red carpet, hundreds of scarlet coats, thousands of decorations.’ The Vicereine did not realize it, but she was describing everything her visitor most disliked. Still, ‘the Prince was splendid and played up nobly’.65 By this stage in the tour, Reading believed that the Prince was much more satisfied with his visit and taking a real interest in India. ‘I … am glad to find that he is willing to take trouble to understand the difficulties of the situation here. He has, undoubtedly, shrewd perceptions and is not misled by the outward glamour …’66 He was not misled, either, by the Viceroy’s accomplished line in flattery. Proposing the royal visitor’s health at a banquet in Delhi, Reading ascribed every conceivable virtue to the Prince and spoke of the tour as if it had transformed the future of India. ‘You just can’t think how much that man has deteriorated,’ commented the Prince.67