George VI and Elizabeth, page 19
Tommy Lascelles took seriously his mission to make Prince Edward fit for kingship, and he remained loyal even after he was beset by despair. He had a sense of duty, a strong streak of patriotism, and a high regard for the monarchy as an essential British institution. But he was not overawed by the royal family. His first cousin—the son of his father’s older brother—was Princess Mary’s husband, Harry Lascelles. His sister Blanche had been a maid of honor to Queen Alexandra since 1905. From an early age, Tommy had been a frequent guest in the great aristocratic houses of Britain and had dined at 10 Downing Street with Prime Minister Asquith.
Tommy had detested his boarding school, Marlborough College, whose students were the grandsons of “county cricketers,” while his own aristocratic ancestors and those of the boys at Eton (where he wished he had gone) were masters of foxhounds. But he came into his own at Trinity College, Oxford. He earned his degree in ancient history and philosophy, wrote in Greek, and readily turned a Latin phrase.
At Oxford he found his “own tribe” of young men who sought “liberty from the dour conventionality.” He had been “a lonely and damnably sentimental boy” with an “empty pedestal” that he filled with young men, but “never more than one at a time.” “What is to most people merely a sensual adventure has always been to me an act of devotion,” he wrote many years later to James Pope-Hennessy, the object of Tommy’s affection in the 1950s when “Jamesy” was writing the official biography of Queen Mary.
The first of Tommy’s lovers at Oxford had been Harold Nicolson, the future biographer of King George V. Even after Nicolson was supplanted on the pedestal, he and Tommy maintained an affectionate lifelong friendship. Nicolson went on to lead a discreet gay life within an unorthodox marriage to the writer Vita Sackville-West. “If their marriage is seen as a harbor,” wrote their son Nigel, “their love affairs were mere ports of call.”
During the First World War, Tommy served as a cavalry captain in Flanders and France, losing one friend after another in the trenches—including the celebrated war poet Julian Grenfell, another beloved “god” on his Oxford pedestal. Toward the end of 1916, Tommy was wounded and awarded the Military Cross for bravery. After the armistice he traveled to India, where at age thirty-two he fell in love with twenty-four-year-old Joan Thesiger, the eldest daughter of Britain’s viceroy, Lord Chelmsford. He had a coup de foudre when he watched her kill a nine-foot tigress in one shot.
Tommy said Joan “looked best in boots and breeches,” but what mattered most to him was the fine quality of her mind and her “natural and unaffected” manner. She also loved everything he loved, from books to music to shooting and riding fast on horseback. After their three-month courtship, they wed in New Delhi and honeymooned in Kashmir before returning to Britain.
Since the middle of the war, Tommy had envisioned “being a secretary to a Great Man,” who “must have a sense of humour and enthusiasm for whatever he is Great at…. I must be able to make a hero out of him. I can’t work for people I don’t admire pretty blindly.” Yet aside from hunting and steeplechasing, it is hard to imagine what Tommy Lascelles and the Prince of Wales had in common. And just as Prince Edward could not know the submerged experiences of Tommy’s youth, neither could Tommy fathom the extent of the Prince of Wales’s pathologies, especially with the women in his life.
What he could observe was Edward’s philistinism, immaturity, and superficiality, which must have been galling for someone of Tommy’s intellectual rigor and cultural refinement. But the Prince of Wales was a superlative charmer and a polished public performer—perhaps the full extent of his ability to be “great.” Tommy devoted eight years trying to create a “hero” in that mold. Like Prince Edward’s parents and siblings, he could for a time avert his eyes and excuse the character defects and bad behavior of the heir to the throne. Along the way, Tommy Lascelles accumulated unmatched knowledge of the royal family that would turn him into the monarchy’s indispensable courtier. The unforeseen irony was that the “Great Man” he would ultimately serve was the stammering but steadfast Prince Albert.
“It is like a very large Scotland—especially in the soft evening light.”
Bertie and Elizabeth on safari in East Africa, February 1925.
FOURTEEN
Out of the Welter
A political storm hit Britain in January 1924 with the arrival of Britain’s first Labour government under the premiership of Ramsay MacDonald amid rising unemployment and workers’ unrest. George V noted that the shift of power coincided with the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s death twenty-three years earlier. Despite his private affinity for the Conservative Party, the King took the practical view that the Labour leader would be a moderating advocate for workers as a hedge against the greater threat of Russian-inspired Bolshevism. MacDonald had even promised the King that he wouldn’t promote any extreme measures in Parliament.
Neither Prince Albert nor Elizabeth had shown much interest in the political scene. But on the advice of his father, Bertie joined David to watch the debate in the House of Commons that preceded the resignation of Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin. In so doing, he gained “first-hand knowledge of parliamentary procedures and personalities.”
Through the Industrial Welfare Society, Prince Albert had good relations with labor leaders and workingmen, but he was as instinctively Conservative as his father. At age twenty-four, Elizabeth was even more implacably Tory. She believed that Labour’s ambitions for a more egalitarian society posed a threat to the aristocratic way of life.
“I am extremely anti-Labour,” Elizabeth wrote to her aristocratic friend D’Arcy Osborne in March 1924. A lifelong bachelor, Osborne was an erudite and witty diplomat with whom Elizabeth could be playfully indiscreet, and in the following years he would become one of her most trusted confidants. She told him that Labour was far removed from “fairies and owls and bluebells & Americans & all the things that I like. If they agree with me, I know they are pretending—in fact, I believe everything is a pretence to them…. I think the Labour Party is narrow minded and snobbish.”
Scarcely a month later, on the Yorks’ first wedding anniversary, Elizabeth met MacDonald, a handsome Scot with a Highland brogue, when she was seated next to him during the soccer FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium. The last-minute two-goal win by Newcastle over Aston Villa caused “terrific excitement” for the crowd of over ninety thousand. Careful to cloak her Tory sympathies, she turned on her famous charm. MacDonald “talked a lot,” she noted in her diary.
It was otherwise a desultory winter and spring for the young royal couple. Bertie tramped around the country inspecting factory conditions in his role as president of the IWS. Ever dutiful, he spoke at length to men making everything from shoes and sausages to beef bouillon cubes and margarine boxes. At the Rutland Works in Sheffield, he was fascinated by the “pyrotechnics” in the “handling of molten metal.”
Elizabeth spent most of her time socializing with friends and family, as well as playing with their two new dogs, a golden retriever named Glen, and a Pekingese called Ping that had been given to her at the opening of the Ideal Homes Exhibition at Olympia. She was also laid up for several weeks in March with one of her periodic bouts of tonsillitis and flu.
That spring they had lunch with Princess Mary and Harry Lascelles at their opulent London home, Chesterfield House. Mary and Harry lived mainly at Goldsborough Hall on the Harewood estate in Yorkshire, and she was now pregnant with their second child, due in August. After lunch, the Yorks got a complete tour of the house, and Elizabeth exulted in mirror writing: “They have offered it to us for the summer.”
Shortly after Bertie and Elizabeth began their summer stay at Chesterfield House, they hosted a dinner dance for seventy guests, including Fred and Adele Astaire. “They danced a pas seul with their usual genius for savoir faire,” wrote Chips Channon. “The Yorks partnered them immediately after as a reward.” “Stopped dancing 3:15. Bed 4!” Elizabeth wrote in her diary.
She went to her first Trooping the Colour, a military spectacle dating from the eighteenth century that celebrated the King’s birthday on June 3. At age fifty-nine, wearing the red tunic of the Grenadier Guards, George V rode his dark brown charger from Buckingham Palace up the Mall in a mounted procession that included the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York.
On Horse Guards Parade, the King inspected the troops from the Household Cavalry and the five infantry regiments of the Brigade of Guards (Grenadier, Coldstream, Irish, Scots, and Welsh). He was then honored by bands marching in slow and quick time. The actual “trooping” of the “Colour” involved the crimson flag of the Grenadiers being carried aloft past the ranks of guardsmen. Watching from the window above the Horse Guards arch were the Queen and the Duchess of York, who proclaimed it “a very beautiful sight”—one that she would witness scores of times in the years ahead.
Two weeks later, Elizabeth joined the family for Royal Ascot, which she had dodged the previous year. Bertie and Elizabeth stayed at Windsor Castle from Monday, June 16, to the following Saturday, along with thirty-four other guests. For the first time Elizabeth rode onto the racecourse to the Royal Enclosure in “semi-state”: a procession of six open landaus, each drawn by four horses with two postilions in Ascot livery, and outriders in scarlet.
David and Bertie rode in the first carriage with the King—in black top hat and morning dress with a white carnation—and the Queen in a white dress trimmed with ostrich feathers, wearing her signature toque and sitting erect under a white parasol. The duchess and Harry Lascelles followed in the second carriage. Luncheon at the racecourse was served by footmen in the dining room at the rear of the royal box, its balcony decorated with flowers and the coveted Gold Cup.
Elizabeth recorded only the final day of her first Ascot with the royal family. After “breakie in bed as usual,” she wore her “pinky mauve chiffon” and walked in the paddock with Bertie. “We lost all our bets as usual!” The Prince of Wales bolted after tea, but the Yorks left with everybody else late Saturday morning.
They had a quick turnaround at Chesterfield House and headed to Polesden Lacey for one of Maggie Greville’s lively house party weekends. They played tennis after lunch and poker after dinner. Elizabeth was pleased to have won on both nights. In later years, she would look back on those weekends as “delectable & idle and rich and careless.”
Just five days later, on June 27, Bertie and Elizabeth were the guests of honor at a dinner for thirty-four hosted by the indefatigable Mrs. Greville in her Mayfair mansion at 16 Charles Street. Among the prominent names were Rothschild, Vanderbilt, Churchill, Northumberland, Sutherland, and Sassoon. For dancing afterward, Maggie had the Savoy Havana Band, along with entertainment by the Trix Sisters, a popular American vaudeville duo who danced, sang, and played the piano. The party lasted until two a.m.
Maggie gave Elizabeth an excellent seat next to forty-nine-year-old Winston Churchill. The well-connected politician and author was out of power at that moment, but he held Elizabeth spellbound as he recounted his travels in Africa seventeen years earlier. “Winston was extraordinary,” Elizabeth recalled when she was in her nineties. “He said, ‘Now look here, you’re a young couple. You ought to go out and have a look at the world. I should go to East Africa. It’s got a great future, that country.’ ”
With Bertie and Elizabeth’s encouragement, Churchill proposed to the government that they travel to East Africa. Bertie raised the idea with his mother, and by July 14 they had the King’s approval. “Marvellous,” Elizabeth wrote in her diary. She later said she had “always been grateful” to Churchill. “I don’t think we would have thought of going.”
At Glamis that autumn—both before and after their mandatory two-week stint at Balmoral—Elizabeth practiced shooting to prepare for their trip to Africa. She bagged rabbits and grouse, and even stalked roe deer with Bertie, honing her skills with a rifle as well as a shotgun. Elizabeth griped that their time at Glamis was spoiled by the presence of some Strathmore relatives—“the most awful people,” she wrote. “Mother nearly mad!!” She and Bertie mostly ignored them while dining with friends and playing cards. “The relations clustered coldly in corners,” she wrote.
At Balmoral, the Reverend Stirton observed during the Ghillies Ball that “the Duchess of York looked so pretty and she is greatly improved in manner—so quietly purposeful now and filling her high position so well. She sent for me and asked me to dance with her—the Circassian Circle—which I did and enjoyed it so much.”
Although the duke and duchess made their return to Glamis as planned in late September, the King summoned Bertie back to Balmoral at the end of the month for another week of stalking. “I am feeling very lonely, & am quite lost not seeing and hearing you in this room,” Bertie wrote to Elizabeth on his arrival in Royal Deeside. “I do hope you will not miss me too much, tho’ you will know I am always thinking of you. Don’t get frightened at night sleeping all alone darling in that enormous bed.”
Elizabeth replied, “I miss you dreadfully, and am longing for Monday, when I hope you will arrive here sunburnt, manly, & bronzed, bearing in your arms a haunch of venaison roti as a love offering to your spouse.” She wished him a “fine stalk, not to mention a fine stag at good old Immoral.” She ended by saying, “It seems all wrong that we shouldn’t be together, doesn’t it—from your very very loving E Xxxxxxxx kisses Ooooooooooo hugs.” Bertie assured her he would be back at Glamis in time for lunch: “Two lunches of course. One from you I hope darling in xxxxx etc etc & then an ordinary culinary one…. Goodbye & bless you my sweet. Ever Your very very loving Bertie.”
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The big event in the autumn of 1924 was the general election in which the Tories defeated Labour, returning Stanley Baldwin to the premiership. “The election news wonderful, already great conservative majority,” Elizabeth wrote in her diary on October 30. “Everybody relieved—hopes for a year or two of comparative peace.” That night she even set aside time to read the lists of winning candidates in the newspaper.
Bertie and Elizabeth spent those months preparing for their African adventure—seeing doctors and dentists, getting vaccinated against typhoid fever and other diseases, and buying safari clothing. They both needed a break from their royal life, and Elizabeth especially wanted respite from the climate that aggravated her persistent tonsillitis.
She was also concerned about the strain on Bertie that was evident in his eruptions over small matters. His outbursts had much to do with his stammer, and the accompanying anxiety over public speaking. Louis Greig had noticed him “grinding his teeth in rage,” which some courtiers referred to as his “gnashes.” One of Elizabeth’s strengths was her ability to defuse Bertie’s temper with soothing words and affectionate gestures.
They left for their African journey on Monday, December 1. From Sandringham, the King cautioned his son “never to be without a Doctor & you are not to run unnecessary risks, either from the climate or wild beasts.” In a farewell letter to his mother, Bertie said he felt “very sad having to say goodbye…. It is quite a long time to be away 5 months but I feel it will do us a lot of good.”
Elizabeth admitted apprehension about their African journey in a letter to D’Arcy Osborne on the night before they sailed from Marseilles on Friday, December 5. “I am feeling slightly mingled in my feelings,” she wrote. “I hate discomfort, and am so afraid that I shall not like the heat, or that mosquitoes will bite my eyelids & the tip of my nose, or that I shall not be able to have baths often enough, or that I shall hate the people.” Still, she believed it would be rejuvenating to “see a little LIFE.”
Elizabeth was overjoyed to greet her high-spirited friend Lavinia Annaly as they settled into the SS Mulbera. The duchess had designated the daughter of the sixth Earl Spencer as her lady-in-waiting for the trip. Lavinia was now married and the mother of one-year-old Patsy, who was Elizabeth’s goddaughter. But she was as mischievous as ever and would be a steady source of amusement during their travels. Accompanying Bertie was his comptroller, Captain Basil Brooke, and equerry, Lieutenant Commander Colin Buist. A valet and lady’s maid rounded out their small entourage.
They landed at the Indian Ocean port city of Mombasa in Kenya on December 22. The governor, Sir Robert Coryndon, introduced them to representatives of European and native communities. Bertie listened intently to what Sir Robert told him about Kenya’s prospects. “The place is growing steadily,” he told his father.
Their 325-mile train journey inland to Nairobi opened their eyes to the natural wonders of East Africa—“absolutely wild country; untouched as yet by man,” Bertie wrote to the King. They spotted snow-clad Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance, and as they neared their destination, they sat on a special seat in the front of the engine to see exotic animals in the wild for the first time: zebra, hartebeests, ostrich, baboons, and wildebeest.
They slipped into the silky pleasures of the Muthaiga Club, a low-slung pink stucco haven set amid broad lawns and ficus trees, where they dined and danced with aristocratic English colonials. They enjoyed the civilized ambience of Nairobi’s Government House for a brief Christmas holiday as their respective families were celebrating at St. Paul’s Walden Bury and Sandringham. Bertie went horseback riding on Christmas Eve, and at church the next morning, the Duke and Duchess of York heard “God Save the King” sung in Swahili.
