George VI and Elizabeth, page 24
Elizabeth’s parenting style mirrored her mother’s informality, maintaining a fluidity between the nursery and the rest of the house—a sharp contrast to the rigidity of the duke’s upbringing. Bertie and Elizabeth were openly demonstrative with their daughter and avoided the usual upper-class presentation of children at teatime. In the morning room, Elizabeth liked to pretend for Lilibet that the sofa was the clattering night train to Scotland. Bertie loosened up under his wife’s influence. He played in the garden with his daughter and splashed her at bath time.
Bertie and Elizabeth’s firstborn cast a particular spell on the irascible George V. Both he and Queen Mary singled out “Little Lilibet” as their favorite grandchild. They often insisted that Bertie and Elizabeth leave their daughter behind at Sandringham or Balmoral for weeks at a time, which enabled the Yorks to visit friends at their country estates. “She has been with us for over a month & I shall miss her dreadfully,” wrote George V in his diary when they relinquished the child at the end of January 1928. Queen Mary told Bertie that “I don’t think you & Elizabeth realize what a great joy your child is to us.”
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Now that they had become accustomed to the limelight, both the duke and duchess were learning to be canny about their images. Starting with their tour of Australia and New Zealand, they authorized a series of books about their lives. These accounts endured for decades as essential sources for future chroniclers.
Prince Albert took the first step, hiring fifty-one-year-old Taylor Darbyshire, born in England but raised and educated in Australia, to write the official record of their big tour. The Duke of York wrote the foreword for the book, which was published in September 1927.
He was so pleased with the result that he enlisted Darbyshire to write an authorized biography that appeared in the autumn of 1929. The title was a mouthful: The Duke of York: An Intimate and Authoritative Life-Story of the Second Son of Their Majesties The King and Queen by One Who Has Had Special Facilities, and Published with the Approval of His Royal Highness. While the book contained many fresh details about the duke’s life to that time, the headlines highlighted revelations about Lionel Logue’s work that led to Bertie’s “curing himself of a speech defect.”
Elizabeth recognized the merits of sanctioned books when she cooperated with Lady Cynthia Asquith for her own 228-page biography. Cynthia was a daughter of Hugo Charteris, the eleventh Earl of Wemyss, a Scottish title as storied as Strathmore. In 1910, she married Herbert “Beb” Asquith, the second son of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith.
By the time a publisher proposed in 1927 that she write the life of the Duchess of York, she had authored numerous books for children and adults. Elizabeth didn’t hesitate when Cynthia approached her. On their first meeting, Asquith “immediately fell under the spell of her charm, gentle radiance, delicate dignity, and that heaven-sent gift for setting others at their ease.” Not only did the duchess grant her interviews, she also asked her friends and family members to share letters and speak to her. Crucially, the aristocratic writer allowed the duchess to approve “every word” in the manuscript before publication.
H.R.H. The Duchess of York: An Intimate and Authentic Life-Story, Including Many Details Hitherto Unpublished, Told with the Personal Approval of Her Royal Highness made a splash in the autumn of 1928. The book contained personal vignettes as well as astute observations such as “whatever she undertakes is carried off with a gaiety and cordiality which cloaks the strength of her personality,” and “though she can express opinions very trenchantly and has a great love of argument, her manner is always gentle and disarming.”
No less effusive was the story the duchess entrusted to her longtime confidante, Beryl Poignand. Elizabeth and her mother were fiercely loyal to Beryl and supported her financially by hiring her for various jobs with the family. Not long after the Asquith biography was published, Beryl began working on a magazine article that turned into a slender book about Princess Elizabeth. She wrote under the pseudonym “Anne Ring,” who was “Formerly Attached to H.R.H. The Duchess of York’s Household.” Elizabeth assisted her wholeheartedly, supplying photographs and vetting the drafts.
“I have not altered anything except suggested a word or two,” Elizabeth wrote after reading the “charming” manuscript. She agreed that Beryl should “vary Nurse with Nanny,” as it is “much more friendly.” When Beryl embroidered the narrative with “a forlorn Highland pony” named “Daisy” that received “love, caresses and carrots” from the toddler princess, the duchess didn’t object. “It is a very harmless little invention,” she told Beryl.
When The Story of Princess Elizabeth was published in 1930, it bore the imprimatur “Told with the Sanction of Her Parents.” The New York Times previewed the U.S. publication in August 1931 with an article quoting “Anne Ring” on the little girl “who may some day be Queen of England” as “a sweet, unspoiled and perfectly lovable child.”
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In September 1928, the Prince of Wales had been home for nearly a year after returning from Canada with Prince George. David was possessed, as he had been many times previously, with a “mania” to travel. At age thirty-four, he set off for an African safari, this time with Prince Henry as his companion. Once again, David was a malign influence.
Twenty-eight-year-old Henry had been honored the previous March when his father made him the Duke of Gloucester. He was at once the tallest and dullest of the King’s sons. He squeaked through Eton, and his brief stint at Cambridge left no impression. But he found his niche at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and became a dedicated army officer in his regiment, the Tenth Royal Hussars.
Edward squired Henry around Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club, where the princes quickly got into trouble. By then the aristocratic English expatriates in Kenya, known as the “White Mischief” set, had a wild reputation. They entertained Edward and Henry with parties, polo, and thoroughbred racing. At a Muthaiga Club ball, Henry fell for Beryl Markham, a lissome blond horse trainer recently married to Mansfield Markham, a wealthy British coal magnate. She was also an aviatrix who would later become famous as the first woman to fly solo from east to west across the Atlantic.
In the autumn of 1928, she began an affair with Prince Henry. By some accounts she also shared her bed with Prince Edward. In early October, Henry set out on his own safari, accompanied by Beryl, who was about to turn twenty-six. David didn’t expect to see his brother again until early December in South Africa, where they planned to spend Christmas.
Accompanied by Tommy Lascelles, the Prince of Wales and his party traveled west to Uganda for an elephant hunt, back to Nairobi, and south to Tanganyika (modern-day Tanzania). There they shot rhino, buffalo, and lions before their planned trip down to Cape Town by steamer, automobile, and train.
On November 26, 1928, a coded telegram from London arrived in Dodoma, Tanganyika, where it was conveyed to the Prince of Wales’s safari camp. The message was the first in a series alerting Edward that his father was seriously ill. The safari party moved to Dodoma the next day to await further news. “The last and most urgent” telegram came from Prime Minister Baldwin, “begging” the Prince of Wales “to come home at once.” After deciphering the message, Tommy read it aloud to Edward. “I don’t believe a word of it,” said the prince. “It’s just some election dodge of old Baldwin’s. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
Lascelles later wrote that Prince Edward’s “incredibly callous behaviour” was “the last straw on my camel’s back.” For the first time in his eight years as assistant private secretary, Tommy Lascelles lost his temper. “Sir,” he said. “The King of England is dying, and if that means nothing to you, it means a great deal to us.” The Prince of Wales left without a word and “spent the remainder of the evening in the successful seduction of a Mrs. Barnes, wife of the local commissioner,” wrote Tommy. “He told me so himself next morning.”
The King’s health crisis had begun on the eleventh of November when he caught a chill during the Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph. After shooting in raw weather at Sandringham, he took to his bed ten days later at Buckingham Palace. His doctors diagnosed acute septicemia and an infection in his right lung.
Over the following days, the Queen recorded her fluctuating anxiety over the King’s condition. With David and Henry in Africa, and George on a trip to the United States, she had only Bertie, Elizabeth, and Princess Mary to rely on. At the first sign of George V’s sickness, Bertie returned to London from Naseby Hall, the Yorks’ rented weekend home in Northamptonshire, where he had been hunting.
Prompted at least in part by Tommy’s fury, the Prince of Wales made a “sensational dash” home. He arrived in Folkestone, where Stanley Baldwin accompanied him by train to Victoria station. Waiting on the platform that evening was Bertie, who warned his brother that he would find their father “greatly changed.” He also expressed concern about their mother, who “has never once revealed her feelings to any of us.” Bertie said that Queen Mary was “far too reserved; she keeps too much locked up inside of her. I fear a breakdown if anything awful happens.”
“At 10:30 David arrived to our great relief,” Queen Mary wrote in her diary on December 11. “I took him to G’s room, he recognized him & spoke to him quite clearly. G seemed more himself.” But the following day, the King lost consciousness. His lead doctor, Lord Dawson of Penn, extracted some infected fluid from his lung. In the evening, a surgeon removed one of the King’s ribs and drained the abscess causing the infection. George V’s illness receded, and he began a long and slow recovery. But he would never fully regain his health.
Prince Henry made his own dash over land and sea from Africa, and Prince George traveled from New York. They both arrived at Buckingham Palace in time to join the family for a subdued holiday gathering. On Christmas Eve, the King was “clearer,” Queen Mary observed. “We had a little talk…. All our children came to tea & sweet Lilibet.”
The Queen arranged all the presents in the Throne Room around a small Christmas tree. “We missed dear George dreadfully,” Queen Mary wrote, “but felt thankful he is improving at last.” On Christmas Day, the family attended a Communion service in the Palace chapel. Queen Mary gave a small dinner party attended by her four sons, Mary, and Elizabeth.
To help speed the King’s recovery, his doctors recommended that he move to Bognor on the English Channel “for the sea air.” He stayed at Craigweil, a sprawling house protected by trees and high walls on one side, with an expansive sea view on the other. In addition to the constant monitoring by doctors, the King had a stream of visitors at his seaside villa. The “most favoured” was Lilibet.
“She is looking forward wildly to digging in the sand and talks knowingly of pails & spades!” Bertie wrote his mother the day before his daughter’s trip to the seacoast on March 13—nearly a month shy of her third birthday. “I do hope that Lilibet will be good. She is very sensible really & understanding but like a piece of quicksilver nowadays!” The visit came at a convenient time. On the fourteenth, the Yorks traveled to Norway for the wedding of Bertie’s first cousin Prince Olav to Princess Martha, a niece of the King of Sweden.
Lilibet’s presence at Bognor delighted the King and instantly raised his spirits. The gardener created a sandpit on the lawn, and Queen Mary joined the King on a nearby bench to watch Lilibet play. At the end of their granddaughter’s second day at Craigweil, Queen Mary wrote, “I played with Lilibet in the garden making sand pies!”
The princess stayed with her grandparents for nearly two weeks. Queen Mary took her back to London by train on March 26, the day after her parents returned from Norway, and drove with her to 145 Piccadilly. Lilibet’s third birthday, usually celebrated with fanfare at Windsor Castle, was a more low-key occasion with her parents at Naseby Hall. In the United States, Time magazine gave her a rare gift: a story recounting her brief life and a cover image by Marcus Adams with the headline “P’incess Lilybet.”
When Bertie and Elizabeth visited the King at Craigweil in mid-April 1929, they had a memorable conversation that she recounted at least twice many years later. In a chat with biographer Kenneth Rose when she was seventy-nine, she said, “When the King was convalescing at Bognor, he said to us one day that he thought David would never take over from him. We were astonished, and hardly understood what he meant.” Fifteen years on, she added some detail while reminiscing with Sir Eric Anderson. She recalled that George V told Bertie, “You’ll see, your brother will never become King.” George V “must have seen something we didn’t, because I remember we thought, ‘how ridiculous,’ because then everybody thought he was going to be a wonderful King…. I remember we both looked at each other and thought ‘nonsense.’ ”
But George V knew more than Bertie and Elizabeth, as did his advisers and Prime Minister Baldwin. Accelerating disillusion had marked Tommy’s eight years of serving the Prince of Wales: from idolizing the man who “might have been a sculptor’s model” to viewing Edward as a man “both vulgar and selfish.” By early 1929, Lascelles could no longer serve someone who had “no comprehension of the ordinary axioms of rational, or ethical, behaviour,” and for whom “fundamental ideas of duty, dignity and self sacrifice had no meaning.”
On February 4, 1929, in a face-to-face meeting at St. James’s Palace that lasted nearly an hour, Tommy Lascelles informed the Prince of Wales he was resigning. He told the King’s heir “exactly what I thought of him and his whole scheme of life, and foretelling, with an accuracy that might have surprised me at the time, that he would lose the throne of England.” The prince “took Tommy’s scolding well,” and thanked him for his candor.
“I suppose the fact of the matter is that I’m quite the wrong sort of person to be Prince of Wales,” he said. Lascelles thought his words were “so pathetically true that it almost melted me.” The next morning the Prince of Wales accepted the resignation and gave his former counselor an automobile as “proof that we parted friends.” Lascelles immediately informed Prime Minister Baldwin of his conversation with the prince. “Whether what I said will have any permanent effect, I cannot of course say,” Tommy wrote.
After a two-year break in the Dorset countryside with Joan and their children—a son named John and a daughter called Lavinia—Lascelles again became a private secretary, this time for the Earl of Bessborough, the governor-general of Canada. Tommy liked the job well enough, and he had plenty of opportunity to pursue his passion for fishing. It was a four-year interregnum that opened a useful window into North America. He kept his friendships within the royal household, but he had little awareness of the dramas swirling around the royal family.
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While the King was recuperating in the late spring of 1929, he confronted unforeseen crises with both Prince Henry and Prince George. Shortly after Henry’s return to England from Africa, Beryl Markham followed. She was six months pregnant, and the besotted prince installed her in a suite at the Grosvenor Hotel near Buckingham Palace. After she gave birth to a son in February, the baby was sent to live with relatives elsewhere in England. Henry moved in with Beryl at the hotel, and the gossips moved into overdrive. Although the boy had been conceived before Beryl met Prince Henry, he was erroneously tagged as the father rather than her husband, Mansfield.
The King and Queen were alarmed by their formerly staid son’s outrageous behavior. They reacted by shipping him out to Japan at the end of March to attend the coronation of Hirohito as Emperor of Japan. Back in England in early July, Henry resumed his affair with Beryl.
Mansfield Markham was planning to file for divorce, and his older brother, Sir Charles Markham, hinted that Prince Henry could be named as corespondent unless he consented to “take care of Beryl.” By the end of 1929, lawyers for the royal family quietly arranged a settlement providing a trust fund that would pay Beryl £500 (some £32,000 at current values) a year until her death, which came in 1985. The King kept a close watch on Henry, and the following autumn sent him overseas again, this time as his representative at Haile Selassie’s coronation as Emperor of Abyssinia. By then, the romance had sputtered out.
The problems posed by Prince George that year were more severe. On leaving the navy in March 1929, the twenty-six-year-old moved into York House with the Prince of Wales. “Georgie,” as his mother (but not his father) referred to him, was known for his louche behavior, but his parents could not have anticipated how wild he would become in 1929. Rumors flew that he was having affairs with women and men, among them the playwright Noël Coward, who boasted about it. But George’s life darkened considerably when he took up with a wealthy American socialite named Kiki Preston. Known as “the girl with the silver syringe,” Kiki introduced George to cocaine and morphine, and he became addicted to the drugs.
Toward the end of July, George V’s diary entries reflected heightened alarm about his youngest son. The King was still in bad shape physically. He had left Bognor for Windsor Castle in mid-May, and shortly afterward had become feverish again. A fresh abscess had formed and broken through his old wound, which his doctors decided to leave open.
In the midst of his pain and weakness, George V had to navigate a new Labour government after the Conservative Party lost its majority in the general election on May 30—the first time women were allowed to vote. Once again, Baldwin was out, and Ramsay MacDonald was in. Both the old and new governments trooped out to Windsor Castle for the transfer of power. Wearing a yellow silk Chinese dressing gown, the King received the outgoing and incoming prime ministers in his bedroom at the castle.
