The Peoples King (11 page)

Edward's personality would have been remarkable, observed the
historian John Grigg, even if he had not been royal. 'Allied to his
princely status it was irresistible.' There was about him, he added, 'the
indefinable aura known as star quality'.
¹⁵
This 'star quality' shone
brightly during a visit to the Home Fleet at Portland in November
1936, in the week before Edward's visit to South Wales. He arrived
exhausted. The day before, he had been to the Cenotaph in the morning
for Armistice Day, and at the Albert Hall in the evening. He then
caught a midnight train to Portland, which arrived in the middle of a
storm at four o'clock in the morning. But despite this fatigue, reported
a naval commander who was there, the King's words and manner
went straight to the hearts of the men.
¹⁶
Edward was accompanied by
Samuel Hoare, First Lord of the Admiralty, an old friend from Oxford
days. He noticed that Edward managed to make every officer and
seaman in the fleet feel that he knew them personally. On one evening,
at a smoking concert in an aircraft carrier, the underdeck was packed
with thousands of seamen. In his long experience of mass meetings,
said Hoare, he had never seen one so completely dominated by a single
personality:

At one point he turned to me and said: 'I am going to see what is happening
at the other end.' Elbowing his way through the crowd, he walked to the end
of the hall and started community singing to the accompaniment of a seaman's
mouth-organ. When he came back to the platform, he made an impromptu
speech that brought the house down. Then, a seaman in the crowd proposed
three cheers for him, and there followed an unforgettable scene of the wildest
and most spontaneous enthusiasm.
¹⁷

'Here, indeed', observed Hoare, 'was the Prince Charming who could
win the hearts of all sorts and conditions of men and women and
send a thrill through great crowds.'
¹⁸
No wonder that so many people
wrote to tell him of their love. 'When I go to the pictures or see your
photo in books,' said one woman, 'I have bought them and loved
them and you don't know what a sensation I have I almost want to
shout out to you.'
¹⁹

This massive popularity with the general public did not make
Edward popular with his father, George V. When George came to the
throne in 1910, Edward was sixteen. To the very natural dislike that
a very conventional man often feels for an adolescent,' commented
Diana Mosley, 'was added in this case an equally natural grain of
jealousy of the physical beauty and winning manners of the Prince.'
Many things about Edward annoyed the King, but 'above all his
undoubted popularity'.
²⁰
Prince Albert, Edward's brother, noticed this
too. 'Papa seems to think that anything you do which he doesn't like
has been influenced by Fredie,' he wrote to him in 1920, referring to
Edward's lover at the time, Freda Dudley Ward. 'This of course is due
to the great popularity which you have everywhere, and Papa is merely
jealous.'
²¹

Edward had first met the ordinary men of Britain during the Great
War, for much of which he served at the front. He joined up as an
officer in the Grenadier Guards in 1914, at the start of the war. He
had just completed two years at Oxford University and the president
of Magdalen, his college, watched his departure for the army with
regret:

The Prince, and this is what he would have wished, has suffered the common
lot of his compeers. Like two-thirds and more of the men with whom he was
up, like ever so many 'second year' men of 1914, he was swept off into the
service of his country, and his second year of Oxford has proved his last.
²²

It was a terrible war, most of it fought from the trenches cut deep into
the ground of the battlefield by both sides and protected by barbed
wire and machine-guns. Many of the soldiers lived in these filthy,
rat-infested trenches. Every so often they would be ordered to climb
'over the top' of their trench and advance over no man's land towards
the enemy's trench, in an attempt - usually useless - to capture it. On
just the first day of the Battle of the Somme, nearly twenty thousand
men were killed and nearly sixty thousand were wounded. The death
toll was increased by the epidemics that swept through the trenches.
From 1916, all able-bodied British men between the ages of eighteen
and forty-one had to go into the army, replacing the injured and
the dead.

Edward had been determined to fight, but this was flatly forbidden
on the grounds that he might be captured by the enemy. 'If I were sure
you would be killed, I do not know if I should be right to restrain
you', said Lord Kitchener, the Secretary for War. 'But I cannot take
the chance of them ever taking you prisoner, which always exists.'
Edward, though, was obsessed with the desire 'to be found worthy
and to share in the risks and struggles of men'.
²³
He could not bear to
stay safely behind the line while his compatriots were dying in their
tens of thousands. Ziegler has recorded that he never stopped trying
to get to the front line and never stopped hating it when he was there
- he found the shelling terrifying and was ready to say so.
²⁴
After
spending his first night in the trenches in July 1915, Edward wrote to
his father:

My impressions that night were of constant close proximity to death, repug­nance for the stink of the unburied corpses . . . and general gloom and
apprehension. It was all a real eye opener to me, now I had some slight
conception of all that our officers and men have to go thro!! The whole life is
horrible and ghastly beyond conception.
²⁵

Edward was horrified at the ineffectiveness of the Allies' strategy, with
its repeated fruitless attacks, achieving at best the occupation of a few
trenches.
²⁶
During the Battle of the Somme he wrote that, 'These
continuous heavy casualty lists make me sick ... I can't keep the
wretched infantry being slaughtered out of my thoughts.'
²⁷
His ad­miration of the fighting men and a sense of his own inadequacy made
him reluctant to wear the war decorations he was given. In 1916 he
was awarded the Military Cross, which he felt he had not deserved.
²⁸
He eventually got himself posted to the staff of the British
Expeditionary Force's commander in France. Whenever possible, he
moved to the battle zone, and had a narrow escape visiting positions
at the front before the Battle of Loos. However, he did not take
unnecessary risks, according to General Sir Ian Hamilton: 'He
did
take risks, but they were always in the line of duty. We
did
worry
about him . . . but not because of any insubordination on his part.'
His most important role in the war was to boost the morale of the
soldiers - a job at which he excelled. One soldier later wrote to him a
letter of thanks for his encouragement:

Our King, I saw you in the trenches in front of Arras in March or Feb 1917.
The [Battalion| did not know you were there, it was your youth that made me
recognise you, being 17 myself I wondered at you looking so young & your
face 8c medals flashed a photograph into mind that I had seen of you in
uniform 8c I knew & I worried & pondered, you should not have been there.
But it gave me courage to carry on when sometimes all hope had fled."
³⁰

In 1916 the Prince went on a morale-boosting visit to the Canal Zone
in the Middle East, where he met Australians and New Zealanders
evacuated from the battle of Gallipoli.

The Aga Khan, the leader of the Ismaili sect of Muslims and a very
wealthy and cosmopolitan man, also met Edward during the war. He
recalled later that he knew 'the man who has said so poignantly and
so truly ... "I learned about war on a bicycle" - endlessly trundling
his heavy Army bicycle along the muddy roads of Flanders, to places
like Poperinghe and Montauban and the villages around Ypres.'
Edward's spirit, added the Aga Khan, was stamped forever by the
slaughter and waste of those years of trench warfare.
³¹

During his four years on the Western Front, Edward achieved a
'quite novel popular touch' by rubbing shoulders with thousands of
ordinary people in the trenches, observed Lloyd George.
³²
An Amer­ican soldier said that his 'manner was so simple and unassuming - he
was simply one soldier among a group of soldiers - that he won the
liking and respect of all of us.'
³³
Soldiering brought to the Prince of
Wales, as to many other fighting men of the ruling classes, contact
with men outside their own narrow circles. 'The First World War', he
wrote later, 'had made it possible for me to share an unparalleled
human experience with all manner of men.'
³⁴
In a letter written from
Belgium at the end of the war, he told Freda Dudley Ward that, 'One
can't help liking all the men & taking a huge interest in them.'
³⁵
Harold Macmillan, who came from a very wealthy family and also
served with the Grenadier Guards, made the same point after the war:

By the daily life, working in close contact with the men in one's platoon or
company, we learnt for the first time how to understand, talk with, and feel
at home with a whole class of men with whom we could not have come into
contact in any other way. Thus we learnt to admire their steadfastness, enjoy
their humour, and be touched by their sentiment.
³⁶

The young Prince of Wales may have been disappointed that he was
not allowed actually to go 'over the top' with the other soldiers. But
he saw far more of the war and of the servicemen than did his brother
Albert, who was a midshipman on the battleship HMS
Collingwood
when war broke out. After just three weeks, Albert was brought home
by an attack of appendicitis, to his bitter disappointment. This was
the start of three years of almost constant sick leave, caused by a
gastric ulcer.
³⁷
To his great relief, he had rejoined the
Collingwood
when it opened fire in the battle of Jutland; and although he was then
in the sick bay, he insisted on going to his battle station. But he fell ill
again soon afterwards. He spent most of the war working at the
Admiralty - a tedious job, which he endured without complaining.
³⁸
This was a humiliating experience for Albert: men who did not fight
were generally regarded as cowards, and white feathers were sent to
them in the post. Edward understood how badly he felt. He wrote to
his mother on
6
December 1918 to suggest that 'Bertie' stay as long
as possible in France after the Armistice. 'By remaining with the armies
till peace is signed,' he told her, 'he will entirely erase any of the very
unfair questions some nasty people asked last year as to what he was
doing, you will remember.'
³⁹