King Edward VIII

The King had been convinced that even in comparatively temperate March the Prince would find the heat in the Canal Zone intolerable, but his son relished hot weather and was inspired by it to undertake still more strenuous physical exercise. He enjoyed the life in Ismalia, ‘strafing up and down the Canal’, visiting the troops and preparing a report on the supply system. On his first day at GHQ he went to hear General Birdwood address the Australian and New Zealand Brigades. His presence was announced to the men, ‘at which they gave 3 cheers, bloody fools!!’4 At first he had been slightly deterred by their reputation for drunkenness and indiscipline but he was quickly overwhelmed by their exuberance; they had committed undreamt-of atrocities in the red-light districts of Cairo and Alexandria, but ‘they have fought so d—d hard and are so keen, that it is hard to deal severely with them’. What moved him most was the ‘marvellous imperial spirit’ that had called them up, ‘for they aren’t fighting for themselves or their own country either; only for the Empire’. ‘As you know,’ he told his friend Captain Bailey, ‘I’m not often given to these highflown ideas, but really these Anzacs have impressed me so much!!’5 On the banks of the Suez Canal the Prince conceived a reverence for the idea of Empire that was to sustain him during the rigorous tours that lay ahead.

Not everyone reciprocated his enthusiasm. Among the many men he spoke to when he visited the Anzac troops at Tel-el-Kebir, was John Monash, a Brigadier General who had been one of the heroes of Gallipoli and was to become the most prominent Australian soldier of the First World War. ‘What he said to me was “M-m-m-m”,’ wrote Monash. ‘The fact was the youngster was completely bewildered, and most evidently ill at ease.’6 His was a minority voice, however; every other account of the visit was lyrical in tone. Birdwood maintained that the men took him to their hearts; the Prince’s equerry, Malcolm Murray, spoke of the warmth of their reception – ‘They would rush across to wherever the Prince was coming up, make a line for him and cheer time after time.’7 One eye-witness account was passed on at third hand to Queen Mary: ‘… the enthusiasm knew no bounds, and the cheering was perfectly overwhelming. Our friend said that men looked at him so intently that they forgot to salute! and added “I’m not exaggerating when I say that some of them gazed at him with tears rolling down their cheeks.”’8

The Prince of Wales had been in crowds many times before, but this was the first time that he had experienced the adulation that was so often to be his lot over the next twenty years. It could be argued that any young, personable and smiling prince would have had the same effect. The contrary can hardly be proved, but so many reports by men and women who prided themselves on being not easily impressed testify to the extraordinary potency of his personality that it is impossible to dismiss them all. To the seasoned veterans of Gallipoli his youth, charm, simplicity and friendliness, his patent sincerity and concern for their wellbeing, proved irresistible. Many millions were to find the same combination as effective in the future.

For the Prince it was exhilarating, disconcerting and slightly alarming. He for his part had no doubt that it was his royal blood and not his personal qualities which won him such applause. The idea displeased him. ‘Oh!! to be out here privately and not as the P of W,’ he moaned to Godfrey Thomas. ‘That’s what ruins my life and ever will!!!!’ This particular complaint was provoked by a projected visit to Khartoum. He had pleaded to be allowed to go there but typically at once began to have doubts once permission had been conceded. If he could have gone as a common tourist he would have been delighted, but he was travelling officially as heir to the throne: ‘You know how I hate all those bulls at any time, so think how odious it is to me in wartime!!’9 In the Governor – the Sirdar – Reginald Wingate, he found a man determined to milk the situation to the last drop: ‘A little snob,’ he called him in his diary; ‘He is HRHing the whole time and never relaxes a moment.’10 Yet he had to admit that Wingate knew his job superlatively well and that the pomp was well deployed to make the greatest possible impression on the Sudanese. ‘I am throwing my heart and soul into it all to make it a success, though it goes against the grain,’ he told his father.11 To Malcolm Murray it sometimes seemed that heart and soul were not as energetically deployed as might have been hoped for. The Prince, he complained to Stamfordham, ‘always wanted to efface himself, and hates any kind of formal thing. This is exactly what he wants practice in – he is rather naughty about going up to speak to people etc.’12

The Prince’s always weak stomach for sightseeing was quickly over-taxed. Even before he reached Luxor on his return journey down the Nile he was confessing in his diary: ‘I’m utterly fed up with visiting temples and never want to see another one again.’ He found an itinerant snake-charmer decidedly more interesting than Karnak by moonlight. The ancient and eminent Egyptologist Professor Le Grain lavished his learning on the young visitor but gained little gratitude for his pains. ‘I wasn’t sorry to see him go, for he … nearly killed me with his detailed descriptions.’13 It is unlikely, however, that the professor guessed how little pleasure he had given; the Prince’s manners rarely fell below excellence and he would have gone to great pains to put a good face on his sufferings. When Ronald Storrs conducted the Prince round Cairo a few days later, he wrote that he had never met a visitor ‘who entered more swiftly into the spirit of the place … I have met none with equal vitality or with more appreciation of Eastern life’.14 Perhaps Storrs was a more congenial cicerone than the professor, certainly the Prince found Cairo much jollier than the Upper Nile and agitated to be allowed to pay it a second visit. The King for some reason objected and the Prince wrote in injured innocence: ‘I don’t want to go galivanting about in Cairo, far from it. I’m not even going to ask you for a night there … just a few hours so that I may go to the bazaars and do some shopping for you and Mama.’15

In Cairo he met Lord Edward Cecil, a fellow Grenadier, shrewd judge of character and author of the exquisitely witty The Leisure of an Egyptian Official. ‘He is a nice boy of fifteen, rather immature for that age,’ Lord Edward wrote to his wife. ‘He cannot get in or out of a room except sideways and he has the nervous smile of one accustomed to float. I hope he will grow up, but he is leaving it till late. He is curiously decided, even obstinate, and happily there is no sign of weakness of character. His main terror is getting fat. He adores the Regiment and would talk all day about it, but beyond love of all military matters, an outspoken hatred of politicians and a very fine English accent when he speaks French, he has no apparent special characteristics. I think one day he will fall in love and then he will suddenly grow up.’16

He never got back to Cairo nor was he allowed to stay on in the Middle East after the onset of the hot season. Malcolm Murray direly prophesied sunstroke and probably enteric fever if he lingered on, and the King ordered his return: ‘You have had a nice change and have enjoyed some nice warm weather; think of the many thousands of poor fellows who are obliged to remain in France without a break …’17 The Prince might justifiably have retorted that he thought constantly about them, that he had done all he could to be treated like them, and that his return to a job on the staff would not improve their lot by an iota. Instead, he accepted his recall with moderately good grace. On the way back, in May 1916, he called on King Victor Emmanuel at his headquarters near the Italian front at Udine. He found the King a ‘dear and charming little man’ but it was the same story as in France; as soon as the royal party got anywhere near any scene of possible action, the cars would turn round and speed back to a safer section of the line.18

On his return he submitted a report on the supply and transport arrangements in the Canal Zone which Kitchener forwarded to the King; it did the Prince great credit, commented Kitchener, ‘and shows his grasp of details, and military knowledge’.19 ‘A really excellent report,’ George Arthur, then an official in the War Office, described it.20 The praise seems high for a somewhat cursory statement of the existing position, in twelve hundred words, with little detail and no recommendations, but it showed at least that he had kept his eyes open and not treated the expedition as a joy ride. The King had good reason to be pleased with his son’s performance. Wingate had written that the Prince’s visit had done enormous good in the Sudan; the GOC reported that the morale of the troops in the Canal Zone had been notably improved; it was not the sort of war the Prince wanted to wage, but this time even he had to admit that he had been of use.

Back in France the Prince rejoined Lord Cavan’s staff with the 14th Army Corps. He was no nearer having a proper job. ‘He holds a very junior appointment of course,’ commented the future Field Marshal Montgomery loftily, ‘and I can’t imagine that he does much real work.’21 Lord Newton, then a junior minister at the Foreign Office, found him ‘an undeveloped youth with pleasant and unassuming manners’ and ascribed his lack of any important staff job to the fact that he could not be induced to read.22 The charge of immaturity was certainly justified, but when the Prince was given something to do, he did it conscientiously. His complaint was that he was left in idleness or burdened with unnecessary and clearly improvised duties. After less than a week back in headquarters he was exclaiming bitterly that he was ‘thoroughly fed up’. ‘God knows how long the Lord Claud and I will be stuck here,’ he wrote to Captain Bailey; ‘it couldn’t be very long as I sh’d go mad after a few months … How I do grouse … !!’23

Claud Hamilton was at first his only real friend at Corps HQ. The Prince recognized that Hamilton’s military career was jeopardized by his absence from his regiment and readily agreed to make up his pay to the level it might have reached in other circumstances. ‘Of course I should hate not to help him as I ought to,’ he wrote to Stamfordham, ‘and am only wondering whether £150 is sufficient.’24 Hamilton repaid this generosity with loyalty and an unflinching readiness to tell his master the truth, however unpalatable it might be. One of the Prince’s more attractive characteristics was his readiness to accept any amount of criticism from those whom he liked and who, he believed, had his interests at heart. In May 1918 he ran foul of Hamilton over some unspecified matter, probably relating to an escapade with some women from the Voluntary Aid Detachment. ‘I have had a straight talk and said it must stop or I shall go,’ Claud Hamilton told Lady Coke. ‘He thoroughly realized he was in the wrong and promised to turn over a new leaf. Now it is much better.’25 Some months later he was still gossiping to his friends about ‘the Prince and the VADs, which, if known, would cause some trouble’, but the offence seems to have been in the past.26 Hamilton remained with the Prince for several more years, though in the end the two men decided they could not work together.

Early in 1917 Hamilton was reinforced by the arrival of Piers ‘Joey’ Legh, another Grenadier and a son of Lord Newton. Legh was to remain with the Prince for twenty years and accompany him into exile after the abdication. More than ten years again after that he was still talking of the man ‘whom he had loved and whose charm was so great that he would thrill with emotion if the Duke entered the room just now’.27 As with Claud Hamilton, the Prince accepted from him rebukes which a vainer or more touchy man would have resented. In June 1917 General Cavan told him off for devoting too much time to his interminable runs, neglecting the newspapers and paying no attention to world affairs. ‘Of course he is right really and I don’t attempt to be a P of W or prepare for being so,’ the culprit admitted ruefully, ‘but how I hate all that sort of thing and how unsuited I am for the job!!’ Yet he persisted with his runs. Legh spoke to him ‘like a father’, and threatened to report him to Cavan. The Prince continued to offend, whereupon Legh did report him and Cavan categorically forbade further runs. ‘That old shit Joey,’ the Prince wrote in his diary, ‘but I’m none the less fond of him and forgive him all as he’s only done it for my good …’28

Hamilton and Legh, the Prince told his mother, were ‘my 2 great friends who are and have been real friends to me; I’m devoted to them!!’29 Without their companionship he would have found intolerable the gloom and, as he saw it, uselessness of his life in Cavan’s headquarters; even with them his depression sometimes almost overcame him. One day when he had been refused a visit to the front line, he remained in his room, writing letters till 1 a.m. ‘I could not face … any company. I wanted to be alone in my misery!! I feel quite ready to commit suicide and would if I didn’t think it unfair on Papa.’30 He no doubt over-dramatized his misery, but he was an unhappy and frustrated man. More and more he dreaded the next ‘push’, when he knew there would be yet further massacres, more friends killed, more shame for him. He went to a staff meeting at which an attack was ordered on a certain hill. The General involved protested, but Cavan insisted the hill must be taken. ‘He must have hated doing this as I could see he was worried. Several people have told me that the whole plan of attack seems to them impossible and mad. Of course Haig doesn’t think of the poor buggers who will have to pay the price for this …’31 He tried to convince himself that a war of bloody attrition held the only hope of victory, but signally failed. ‘These continuous heavy casualty lists make me sick,’ he wrote during the battle of the Somme, ‘it all seems such a waste for of course it doesn’t matter if we don’t push on another few miles as regards the end of the war, we only push to kill Huns and help our allies. I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to look on the situation in such a big way; I can’t keep the wretched infantry being slaughtered out of my thoughts.’32

It was just before this battle that the Prince went with Cavan’s deputy, General Morland, to see the first ‘tanks’, a code word for ‘these new land submarines’. He was impressed by their ingenuity, admired the bravery of their crews, but was sceptical of their value: ‘They are good toys but I don’t have much faith in their success.’33 He told his father of his doubts and was duly crushed: ‘With regard to the “Tanks” which you scoffed at when you first saw them …’ retorted the King, reports were so good that several hundred had been ordered.34 The King was proved right in the end, but the performance of the tank in the First World War, at least before the battle of Cambrai more than a year later, did something to support the Prince’s scepticism.

The progress of the war over its last two years is marked by his ever growing respect for the fighting men; not just for the officers or the Guardsmen but ‘for the British conscript … for he hates the whole thing and isn’t fired with the same spirit as were the first hundred thousand’. And yet they managed to keep ‘so marvellously cheery’ and to prepare for each new scene of carnage with renewed determination. They were marvels, ‘it does make one feel so proud of being an Englishman’. More was being asked of them than had ever been asked of British troops before. And he felt humble as well as proud: ‘No one can realize what these … battles are like till they’ve been in one, and I don’t, as I never have.’35

He never stopped trying to get forward to the front line, never stopped hating it when he was there. In June 1917 he rose at 4 a.m. to go to the trenches: ‘and how I loathed it!! But frightened tho’ I am, I should honestly loathe it still more if I never went forward!!’36 Shortly before that he told Lady Coke that in recent months he had only once been within range of enemy shellfire since his return, ‘so you need have no thoughts for my safety’.37 The worst danger he had confronted was in October 1916, when he was at the front with General Gathorne Hardy. A shell fell forty yards in front, then one thirty yards behind. Fortunately the German gunners did not complete the bracket: ‘I’ve never been so near becoming a casualty before, though it did me worlds of good, frightening me properly.’38 Four days later they were still more comprehensively shelled. ‘That strafing we got has taught me more than anything ever has during my 2 years out here; it gives me a slight impression of what our men have to go through these days.’39

Gathorne Hardy was the last person with whom the Prince would have chosen to die; ‘he is so unfair to all his subordinates that I feel ashamed to be out with him!!’40 The Prince’s dislike for Gathorne Hardy had started one particularly cold and wet night when the Grenadiers were moving up to the front. A staff officer remarked, ‘Lord, I’m sorry for those poor devils going up.’ ‘Oh well, they’ve got their ground sheets,’ retorted Gathorne Hardy. ‘Pass the port.’41 The remark probably signified little, but to the Prince it showed unforgivable callousness. His respect for the fighting men would never have allowed him to speak of them so indifferently. Indeed he would never have made a First World War general; he was too soft-hearted, too squeamish, too concerned about the safety and comfort of the men. ‘I’m v keen on the fighting troops being made as comfortable as possible always …’ he told Wigram. ‘Poor devils, they have a bloody enough time in the trenches … they are absolutely marvellous and I’d do anything for them.’42

As a weapon of war, he rated the aeroplane far ahead of the tank. Early in September 1917 he visited the Cigognes, the crack French squadron which included Guinemeyer, the ace who had shot down over fifty German planes. ‘They are fine fellows,’ he told Lady Coke, ‘and all gentlemen, to put it snobbishly, which makes such a difference really.’ The visit was of particular interest to him because a few weeks before he had been given permission by the King to go up in an aeroplane himself, provided it was nowhere near the line. He had had his first flight on 17 July: ‘It’s a wonderful feeling up there,’ he wrote, ‘but I don’t feel I ever want to learn to fly.’43 In fact he was soon eager to do so, and though he took no steps to learn until long after the war, he went up quite frequently over the next two years. One account says that his permission to fly was withdrawn because he flew with a Canadian war ace who was photographed piloting the aircraft with one arm in a sling.44 There is nothing in the Prince’s diary about this, though in September 1918 he did fly up to 10,000 feet with a Canadian called Barker. ‘It is really the safest thing in the world, far safer than motoring!!’ he told his mother.45

After the exhilaration of flying, he found little to thrill him in the course he did with the Royal Artillery. It seems to have been a pointless exercise; the course was designed for officers who had done a year or more with an artillery battery, and, since he hardly knew one end of a gun from another, he understood nothing of what was going on. The drills were incessant and tedious, the other students uninspiring, the food disastrous. This last at least he could put right, with a weekly hamper from Fortnum and Mason containing a ham, two tongues and a Stilton. ‘You know I attach very little importance to my food,’ he told his mother, ‘and I have always taken the view that most people eat too much … But I must confess that I like the small amount of food that I eat to be good.’46 The contents of the hamper were shared out around the mess and the Prince’s departure was a cause for sincere regret.

At the end of 1916 Asquith fell and Lloyd George succeeded him as Prime Minister. Only six months before, the Prince had told his father that he did not care for Lloyd George ‘as a man, a statesman or anything’ but by December 1916 he had concluded that ‘everyone has gt confidence in him and feels that he is really out to win the war and that he has no thought for himself’.47 He welcomed the change, believing that a strong government was essential and that ‘old Squiff’ could never have provided the necessary leadership.48 He was particularly gratified that Churchill was not in the reformed government and disgusted when he reappeared as Minister of Munitions six months later – ‘I suppose he has silently wormed his way in again.’49 Grudgingly he admitted to the King that Churchill would probably do the job well and ‘perhaps it is safer to give him a job than to have him hanging around unemployed’.50

By this time hopes of a rapid victory had been dashed by the collapse of the Russian empire. ‘Let us hope that the new Govt will get the upper hand and smash the socialists,’ the King wrote to his son in April 1917. ‘I should imagine that a republic in Russia is an impossibility.’51 To the Prince the blow struck at the allied war effort by the defection of the Russians seemed more catastrophic than the murder of his relatives whom he had hardly met. ‘Oh! this —— war … I feel as if we are in for at least another 10 years of it!!’ The Russian revolution, followed by the crumbling of the monarchies at the end of the war, caused him to think about the future of the British royal family. ‘Ours is by far the most solid,’ he told his father, ‘tho of course it must be kept so and I more than realize that this can only be done by keeping in the closest possible touch with the people and I can promise you that this point is always at the back of [my] mind and that I am and always will make every effort to carry it out … I also feel that we have good reason to be confident of the good sense and calmness of our race, anyhow just now, tho of course one knows there are many and great dangers, and one mustn’t shut one’s eyes to them even if they don’t really become formidable till 2 or 3 years after the declaration of peace when the race will have got over the joy and novelty of “no war on”.’52

His relationship with his father had been better since his visit to the Middle East, and he wrote in his diary in March 1917 that ‘the parents are more charming to me than ever, and seem glad to see me again’.53 But though he was getting on well with his father, it was his mother with whom he felt closest. His letters and diary abound in references to cosy and confidential talks about every aspect of his life: ‘It’s so wonderful to feel that we can really talk things over now, and vital and intime things, and I can assure you, darling Mama, that this makes all the difference to me.’54 The Queen responded warmly: ‘I think I do understand and can enter into other people’s feelings,’ she wrote in mingled gratification and surprise.55

She seemed to relish the fact that she was closer than the King to her sons, and was not beyond making a little mischief to emphasize the difference. She complained to the Prince that she had not been present when important decisions were made about his future, ‘such a pity, as first of all I ought to know and secondly it makes it more difficult for me just to hear in a cursory way from Papa’. She urged her son to write his ‘secret and intimate views’ on a separate sheet of paper, so that the King should not realize he was being kept in the dark. She evolved an elaborate plot to get the Prince back on leave for Christmas: ‘I cannot help laughing to myself at the mystery which surrounds any new plan which … we have to put before Papa, it all requires such a lot of thought, writing, choosing the right moment etc, really comical in a way but so tiresome.’56 Yet though she would enter into conspiracy with her sons, an open confrontation with the King was still out of the question. Never did she doubt that his will must prevail.

One issue on which she consulted her son without reference to the King was the future of Princess Mary. The Prince constantly pressed the Queen to allow his sister friends of her own age and greater liberty to move around outside the palaces. Princess Mary bravely insisted that life at Buckingham Palace was not too bad: ‘You need not feel so sorry for me … The only things I object to are those rather silent dinners you know so well, when Papa will read the paper.’57 Her brother knew that she was lonely and, in everything except material terms, underprivileged. He joined eagerly in what his mother called the ‘all important matter’ of finding the Princess a husband who would be both socially acceptable and tolerable to live with.58 Hopefully he put forward the names of friend after friend, only to find that his mother always shrank from proposing them to the King. Princess Mary did not find a husband until 1922 and then it was by no doing of the Prince of Wales.