Darling Georgie (28 page)

What Kipling did not know was that King George and Queen Mary had also experienced a personal loss. Their sixth and last son, Prince John, born with brain damage and mentally retarded, at the age of four had been diagnosed as suffering from epilepsy, a disorder not only virtually untreatable but which carried considerable social stigma. Neither King George nor Queen Mary coped well with illness, and in 1917 they decided that Prince John should be removed for ever from his home, from his family and from the public gaze to a remote farmhouse on the Sandringham estate. In 1919, at the age of fourteen, the boy died suddenly in his sleep. Sad though Queen Mary undoubtedly was, she was able to rationalize her son’s death and commented in her diary: ‘For the poor little boy’s restless soul, death came as a great release.’ After a quiet service Prince John was buried in the graveyard at Sandringham Church. He had been cared for in life by the royal nannie, Lala Bill, who coped with her charge’s sudden death with the same loving concern that she had shown towards the older children while they were in her care. Queen Mary, who was good at concealing her feelings, was less overtly emotional. She had provided for her
son to the best of her ability and during his brief life, marred as it had been by frequent and difficult-to-control epileptic seizures, he had been well looked after. His death, which occurred barely two months after the end of the war when so many, including two of Queen Mary’s other sons, had been in mortal danger, came as an anticlimax.

One person, however, remained at the graveside when the other mourners had left. Queen Alexandra, Prince John’s grandmother, wept for her youngest grandson. Since her own Prince John had lived for only a few hours, she alone of the immediate family knew what it was to have lost a child. The two Princes were buried next to one another in the churchyard. Both Kipling and King George felt guilty about the deaths of their respective sons. Although Prince John had died two years after John Kipling, as far as King George and Queen Mary were concerned he could as well have died in 1917, which was the last time his mother saw him and the same year in which Kipling’s son was killed in action. The two fathers, neither of whom knew at the time of the other’s grief, were destined to become friends during King George’s sudden and near-fatal illness in 1928.

On 21 November 1928, while at Buckingham Palace, the 63-year-old King developed a fever and a cough and was in a state of near collapse. His doctor, Sir Stanley Hewitt, at once recognized the gravity of his condition and sent for Lord Dawson of Penn. Lord Dawson arranged for blood tests which showed the King to be suffering from streptococcal septicaemia. Following a portable chest X-ray (the first ever performed outside a hospital), the cause was found to be an abscess in the King’s right lung. Before the advent of antibiotics the prognosis was poor. Within three weeks the King’s physical condition had become so serious that, despite the best efforts of eleven doctors and five nurses, his death was considered imminent. On 5 December a bulletin that hardly reflected the seriousness of his condition was issued from Buckingham Palace. ‘His Majesty the King passed a quiet morning. Though the temperature is now 100.2 the slight improvement in the general condition noted in the last bulletin is maintained.’ The bulletin was signed by all five of the King’s consultants:
Stanley Hewitt, L.E.H. Whitby, E. Farquhar Buzzard, Humphry Rolleston and Dawson of Penn. One week later, on the afternoon of 12 December, the King slipped into a coma. The appropriate treatment would have been surgical drainage of the abscess, but X-rays had failed to reveal its exact location. It was now too late for an exploratory operation to be carried out, since the King would certainly have failed to survive the anaesthetic. On impulse, and certainly not before time, Lord Dawson inserted a needle into the chest. By a stroke of luck he found the abscess and aspirated some sixteen ounces of purulent fluid, with immediate improvement. A few hours later the King was well enough to be operated upon by Mr Hugh Rigby who removed a rib and inserted a drain into the abscess. It was not until the following March that the patient had recovered sufficiently to be allowed a cigarette! Two months later he developed an infection at the operation site and in July further surgery was needed to drain the original abscess, necessitating the removal of another rib. Full recovery did not take place until September 1929, ten months after the onset of illness.

There was inevitable criticism of Lord Dawson’s management of His Majesty’s illness, by both the uninformed and the informed. He was particularly blamed by certain members of the medical profession for not calling in Britain’s leading chest surgeon Mr Arthur Tudor Edwards. King George convalesced at a house loaned to him by Sir Arthur du Cros at Aldwick overlooking the English Channel near Bognor. Not unnaturally, the King found convalescence boring. He discovered little to divert him. He had always relied on external sources of stimulation to distract him and to keep depression at bay and had developed few internal resources to fall back on. He had never been reflective or introspective. As a child he had discovered that the best way to survive the prolonged absences from home was to deny his feelings. As time passed he had become adept at this and as a result had more or less lost contact with the pain of loneliness, other than when an incident reminded him of the sadness of separation. Queen Mary, who was always by his side, protected him against these feelings simply by being there for him. Irritability, always easily provoked, was
never ‘denied’ and was a feature of the King’s convalescence. One visitor, however, never failed to raise his spirits; this was his three-year-old granddaughter Princess Elizabeth. Her infectious enthusiasm and her obvious love for her grandfather dispelled his apathy. He asked her mother, Elizabeth Duchess of York, to bring the child to see him as often as she could.

During King George’s convalescence he and Rudyard Kipling became better acquainted. Although few visitors were allowed, Kipling was always welcome. They had much to discuss in their love for India, for the monarchy and for the country. Kipling kept King George well supplied with the few books he enjoyed reading, Edgar Wallace being one of the King’s favourite writers at the time. It is likely that Kipling was also able to make some occasional contribution to the sovereign’s speeches, as the author was later to do for his cousin, Stanley Baldwin, when he became Prime Minister. It was essentially the similarity of the two men, however, that allowed their friendship to prosper.

D
ESPITE THE PROBLEMS
that Britain had to face after the war, there were some indications that the British way of life, at least among the upper classes, had not been entirely eradicated. The return of tennis at Wimbledon, the Eton and Harrow match at Lords, racing at Epsom and, not least, the Trooping of the Colour on Horse Guard’s Parade were seen by some as evidence that the good old days were back. Within the next twelve months other signs of ‘normality’ began to appear. The King attended the Derby at Epsom, sailed his old yacht
Britannia
at Cowes and later in the year received the new German Ambassador to the Court of St James, with his comment that it was ‘the first time I have shaken hands with a German for six years’.

On 11 November 1920, when the second Remembrance Day after the war had ended, the Cenotaph in Whitehall was unveiled for the first time. After the two minutes’ silence, ushered in by the firing of maroons, the King attended the burial service for the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey.

With the pre-1914 days gone for ever, when divisions of class and gender were more clearly defined, the 1920s saw the emancipation both of the working man and of women. The industrial unrest, which began with rising unemployment figures, presaged an economic disaster. By 1925 coal mines were running at a loss and cheaper coal from European mines was being supplied to Britain’s customers abroad. British mine owners were obliged to cut wages, and the miners were ordered to work longer hours to stave off their competitors. The mine workers and the mine owners were on a collision course from which neither side would budge. A Royal Commission was convened and nine months later agreed with the
owners that wages must be reduced. The miners immediately came out on strike, whereupon the owners locked them out. Workers in other industries came out in support of the miners and at midnight on Tuesday 4 May 1926 a general strike, which divided the country, was declared. To the great relief of the King, who had been warned by Winston Churchill of the possibility of armed conflict, the strike lasted for nine days only and the miners were finally forced back to work having been in a state of near starvation for six months. A year later the Trades Disputes Act made all sympathetic strikes illegal.

On the political front, the Coalition Government had fallen owing to Lloyd George’s resignation in 1922. Party politics returned under Arthur Bonar Law as Prime Minister, but when he was forced to resign for reasons of health he was soon replaced by Stanley Baldwin. A few months later Bonar Law died from throat cancer. If King George was secretly relieved to see the Conservatives back in office, he was to be disappointed the following year when the Baldwin government was defeated. On 22 January 1924 he ‘entrusted Mr Ramsay Macdonald with the formation of a new government’ which Mr Macdonald accepted. The King noted in his diary that ‘Today [on 22 January 1901] dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour government!’ It was likely that his diary entry was more a reflection of his own opinion than speculation about Queen Victoria’s. None the less, King George’s attitude to Ramsay Macdonald was cordial and in fact no different from his attitude towards others who served him, whether personally or in government.

Against this background Edward Prince of Wales (David), the heir to the throne, began at last to assert himself. Having been in awe of his father for as long as he could remember, he took comfort from the fact that on his tours at home and abroad he had been enthusiastically received. By 1919 the 25-year-old Prince had become the darling of the gossip columnists. His slim build, pleasant smiling face and brilliant blue eyes were attractive to women everywhere. On a tour of North America in 1919 the American magazine
Vanity Fair
summarized in an eye-catching headline what American women thought of the Prince (Edwards, 1984). ‘Hats off
to the indestructible Dancing, Drinking, Tumbling, Kissing, Walking, Talking – but not Marrying – Idol of the British Empire.’ It was rumoured that the Prince was involved with one or another of several women. In reality he had fallen in love with Freda Dudley Ward, mother of two children and the divorced wife of a Member of Parliament. He remained devoted to Mrs Ward for fourteen years, until another ‘friend’ – Thelma, Lady Furness, Lord Furness’s American wife with whom he was also having an affair – introduced him at a dinner party in 1931 to another American, the twice divorced Mrs Wallis Simpson.

In his frequent need for reassurance from women the Prince of Wales was certainly not emulating his father, and neither did he emulate King George in his dress. The Prince dressed in a manner that his father considered unseemly. He wore plus-fours on the golf course, tied his tie in a double knot (the Windsor knot) and wore patterned sweaters and socks. When the King noticed that his son had turn-ups on his trousers, he asked David if it was raining. It was just as well perhaps that the King had not realized his son’s fly-buttons had been replaced by a zip fastener. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the Prince of Wales’s role model, as far as his behaviour was concerned, was not his father King George but his grandfather King Edward VII. Both the Prince and King Edward had rebelled against an upbringing that had deprived them of hands-on mothering. They both sought admiration from motherly women, they were both intent on being noticed and both had addictive personalities. King Edward sought gratification through eating, drinking, smoking, gambling and womanizing, whereas Prince Edward (David) sought similar gratification partly with alcohol but mainly through sex.

King George and Queen Mary had a more relaxed relationship with their two younger sons. They were less demanding of Prince Henry and Prince George, probably because they were far removed from the accession. If David or Bertie had been asked when they were growing up whether the family was a close one they would have probably said that it was. It was a closeness at best often heavily paternalistic. Attention was focused primarily on David, as his parents sought to prepare him for the
role ordained for him. The King’s view – perhaps not unreasonable since his subjects had been so impressed with his wartime leadership – was that if David modelled himself on his father he would not go far wrong. David admired his father and throughout the 1920s was content to follow his example by undertaking one tour after another, both at home and abroad. He was, however, unable to adopt the ‘regality’, the other-worldliness, the detachment of his parents as they carried out their duties. He found it impossible to follow the advice of courtiers who told him that only by allowing himself to be put on a pedestal and remain more detached from the public would he ensure the continuation of the royal mystique. His highly publicized indiscretions in London society, and to a lesser extent in politics, met with chilly disapproval from his parents.

Of the two, the Queen, essentially a private person, was possibly the more disapproving. Seldom, if ever, did she reveal her true feelings which she hid behind her upright posture, her armour-like clothing, her aggressive jewellery and her daunting toques. Her success in not giving anything of herself away enabled those who did not know her to form whatever opinion of her they chose. She exuded a regal otherness which was to be disrupted two generations later by her great-grandchildren with their ‘let it all hang out’ attitude. Giving nothing of herself away, Queen Mary was all things to all people and, chameleon-like, took on the colour of her surroundings. To some she epitomised a mother or a sister, to others a daughter or a wife. She seemed to belong to every family and because of this was much loved. It distressed her greatly to see her elder son bring the monarchy she loved into disrepute.