George VI and Elizabeth, page 53
When King George II of Greece (Prince Andrew’s nephew) fled his country with the rest of his family during the German invasion in 1941, Alice remained in Athens, at times verging on starvation. She risked her life by heroically shielding a Jewish family from the Gestapo in her home, saving them from the death camps. Prince Andrew died of a heart attack at age sixty-two in December 1944. Like Princess Alice, he was a pauper, leaving his son a suitcase filled with worn clothes, an ivory shaving brush, and a gold signet ring that Philip would wear for the rest of his life.
With neither a mother nor a father to guide him, Prince Philip relied on Dickie Mountbatten and his grandmother, both of whom ensured he received a good education in England. From the age of nine, he attended two British boarding schools, Cheam in England and Gordonstoun in Scotland, followed by the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where he had first spent time with Lilibet in 1939. Once that spark had been struck, Dickie Mountbatten worked every angle he could to ensure that the King and Queen saw Philip in the most positive light.
Throughout the war, George VI had closely followed the fate of his Greek royal relatives, particularly King George II, who headed a government-in-exile first in London, then in Cairo. George VI periodically met the exiled king at Buckingham Palace and invited him to stay at Sandringham and Windsor. The King felt a personal commitment to help George II “get back to his country,” which eventually happened in 1946 after a plebiscite returned him to the throne.
At some point after Prince Philip’s Christmas visit to Windsor in 1943, George II learned of his cousin’s romantic interest in the heiress presumptive and mentioned it to George VI and Elizabeth, who told Queen Mary. The King’s mother already had a high opinion of Philip, whom she had met when he visited Marina (also his cousin) and the Duke of Kent on holidays from Gordonstoun before the war. “He’s very handsome,” she told Mabell Airlie. “He seems intelligent, too. I should say he has plenty of common sense.” Queen Mary had followed his “brilliantly successful” career in the navy and had even knitted him several scarves and sweaters while he was deployed overseas.
In the spring of 1944, George VI and his mother had a flurry of correspondence about Philip and Lilibet. Queen Mary wrote to say she thought he was a suitable prospect for marriage. The King agreed with his mother about the prince’s intelligence, adding that he “has a good sense of humour and thinks about things in the right way.” But he and the Queen felt that at age eighteen, Lilibet was too young to make a decision and needed to meet more young men of her own age. Queen Mary concurred, but added, “P. sounds extremely nice.” She liked the idea of an old-fashioned dynastic alliance that was also a love match. Having suffered her own share of slights and cruel judgments as a poor relation before marrying the heir to the British throne, Queen Mary had a special affinity for Philip’s circumstance.
There the matter rested until his return to England early in 1946. At Sandringham, Queen Mary spoke to Mabell Airlie about the situation for the first time. “They have been in love for the last eighteen months, in fact longer I think,” she said. The King and Queen still felt that at nineteen Lilibet was too young to get engaged. “They want her to see more of the world before committing herself.” Yet Queen Mary knew that Lilibet “would always know her own mind. There’s something very steadfast and determined in her—like her father. She won’t give her heart lightly, but when she does it will be for always.”
None of the aristocratic guards officers the King and Queen invited to Windsor, Sandringham, and Balmoral had turned their daughter’s head. Lilibet kept a photograph of Philip on her mantelpiece, and when Crawfie cautioned it might lead to gossip, she simply replaced it with one of the prince with the beard he had grown while on duty in the Far East. “I defy anyone to recognize who that is,” said Lilibet.
That June, Philip wrote to thank the Queen for a weekend at Windsor, apologizing for the “monumental cheek” of having invited himself. “However contrite I feel there is always a small voice that keeps saying, ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’—well I did venture and I gained a wonderful time.” Elizabeth, whose own correspondence sparkled with sly wit and colorful observations, recognized the same qualities in Philip. “You certainly can write a letter!” she once told him. “Which alas is a rare thing nowadays, & so delightful & important.”
The King and Queen bowed to the inevitable, and in early September 1946 they invited Philip to Balmoral for a two-week stay. The King made no note of Philip’s presence in his diary. All he wrote was, “We have had several young people to stay. Some had never seen a grouse or a stag.” Philip may well have been among the “some.” Growing up, he had shot pheasants at his uncle Dickie’s country estate, but his exposure to field sports was limited.
On an unspecified day and at an undisclosed place—most likely on a walk through the heather on the Royal Deeside hills, Philip proposed, and Lilibet accepted. Together, they announced their betrothal to her parents. The King gave the engagement a conditional blessing. He and his family were scheduled to make a tour of South Africa for three months the following year, and he asked that Philip and Lilibet postpone a final decision until their return in May—after she had turned twenty-one.
Tory diehard Queen Elizabeth was said to have mistrusted Philip’s liberal opinions, prompting him once to apologize for “a rather heated discussion.” He reassured her that he was not “violently argumentative and an exponent of socialism.” He also showed her a more sensitive side during his first Highlands visit by confiding that he “had always played a lone hand,” compelled to stand up for himself without parental support. In his effusive letter of thanks to the Queen for her hospitality, he wrote that he had “fallen in love completely and unreservedly.” At last, he said, his life “had a purpose.”
To help smooth the path to marriage, Dickie Mountbatten worked with Philip on his application for British citizenship, which meant renouncing his Greek royal title (Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark) and his sixth place in the line of succession to the Greek throne. His service in the Royal Navy gave him the right to be naturalized, with the approval of George VI and the prime minister. Dickie met with Attlee in November 1946 for the go-ahead, which included the King’s offer of the title “H.R.H. Prince Philip.” But Philip declined to be named a British prince. He preferred to be a simple subject, and took as his surname Mountbatten, the anglicized version of his mother’s Battenberg—an expression of humility that pleased George VI.
Within the list of some eight hundred newly adopted British citizens published in The London Gazette on March 18, 1947, was Philip Mountbatten, “Serving Officer in His Majesty’s Forces.” An ironic twist was that the citizenship process was actually unnecessary. Under a 1705 British law, Philip was, through his mother, a direct descendant of King George I and therefore automatically British.
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By going to South Africa in 1947, George VI and Elizabeth intended to strengthen the connection between the monarch and his African dominion, to thank its people for fighting with Britain during the Second World War (more than two hundred thousand had joined the Allied armies, and over eleven thousand had died), and to promote reconciliation amid persistent interracial tensions and the stark divisions between the two “distinct white races”—the Dutch Afrikaners and the British. They also wanted to show solidarity with the prime minister, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, who was facing reelection. They revered him as a shrewd internationalist who at age seventy-six had become a sort of “philosopher-king.” George VI considered him a “real friend of England’s” and a source of optimism during some of the war’s darkest days.
The royal couple equally viewed the tour as an important rite of passage for their daughters, especially for Lilibet as heiress presumptive. With the secret and unofficial betrothal in the air, it was the last opportunity for “us four” to spend extended time together.
At the same time, the King and Queen felt guilty about leaving Britain at an especially difficult moment. Austerity had bitten more deeply than ever, and the country was experiencing record-breaking cold weather. The King ended his diary on Thursday, January 30, 1947, two days before their departure on Saturday, February 1. In his penultimate entry, he described an hour-long conversation with Winston Churchill at Buckingham Palace in which they “discussed everything.”
The King made clear to his former prime minister his exceedingly dim view of the Labour government: “I told him I was doing my best to warn them that they were going too fast in their legislation & were offending every class of people who were ready to help them if they were asked to, but were swept aside by regulations etc.”
As the royal family left Portsmouth, the “dawn lightened the sky,” and they steamed south for three weeks aboard the battleship HMS Vanguard that Lilibet had dedicated two years earlier. At first, they were hit by such strong gales that the royal standard was torn to ribbons and had to be replaced. The waves broke over the quarterdeck, and the royal family kept to their cabins. When they reached calm waters and a warm climate, the Queen said, “It’s like being stroked.”
All along their route, the King received grim telegrams from Clement Attlee about conditions in Britain. Everyone was suffering under freezing temperatures and blizzards, followed by floods. An extreme coal shortage forced the government to ration gas and electricity. The King worked himself into such a swivet of remorse that he offered to fly back to Britain to share the travails with his people. Attlee prudently told the King he thought “it would only make people feel that things were getting worse.” The prime minister “was not anxious for him to come back.” But the King kept fretting, nonetheless.
The King and Queen understood the tensions and complexities of South African life. They knew the trip would be diplomatically tricky and perhaps even uncomfortable. Among the King’s many obligations was opening the parliament with a speech aimed at both political factions and including several sentences in Afrikaans. To that end, he and the Queen were tutored in the language, and she wrote down phonics to help guide their conversations.
In 1910, the Union of South Africa had been created as a self-governing British dominion with the British monarch as its head of state. The South African provinces consisted of former British colonies and the two former Boer (Dutch) republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, that had been defeated by British forces during the Boer Wars at the turn of the twentieth century.
The white minority governed at every level, while black and mixed-race people—the country’s overwhelmingly majority population—were segregated and discriminated against politically, economically, and socially. Under long-standing policies, only whites could vote in South Africa. The country had two capitals—Cape Town for the parliament and Pretoria for the administrative government—two national flags, and two national anthems, “God Save the King” and a Dutch song that omitted the name of the monarch.
Jan Smuts’s principal opponent, Daniel Malan, and his National Party were avowedly pro-white and sought to tighten segregation further with their newly named policy of apartheid. Smuts was less doctrinaire on race relations and had implemented some minor concessions on wages and social mobility for blacks. Facing a general election in 1948, Smuts hoped a visit by the King and his family would help the prospects of his United Party. As a longtime friend of the British royal family and adviser to the British government, the Afrikaner-born but pro-English Smuts was an avowed monarchist. Malan and his Afrikaner allies wanted South Africa to become a republic, eliminate the British monarch as head of state, and leave the British Commonwealth.
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It was 105 degrees when the royal party landed in Cape Town on Monday, February 17, 1947. Smuts greeted the King and Queen of South Africa as their official host. The crowds were unexpectedly large and enthusiastic throughout the day. That evening the royal foursome attended a state banquet for five hundred people in suffocating heat.
“In 30 years of public dinners, I can’t recall one that caused me greater misery,” Lascelles wrote. But the King spoke well and pleased all the guests. To Tommy’s surprise, “the royals had enjoyed it & thought it great fun—especially the young ones.” He noted that Lilibet was “delightfully enthusiastic & interested.”
They were all overwhelmed by the “staggering amounts” of food, the tables “piled high with grapes & peaches & pears & beautiful flowers,” Elizabeth wrote to Queen Mary. But the “serious racial problems” were evident to the Queen as well. The routes of their motorcades reflected the divisions: whites on one side of the street, blacks and mixed-race “coloureds” on the other.
The King opened the parliament on February 21, their fifth day in Cape Town, with a simplified version of the ceremony in Westminster. All parties in both Houses attended “in full force,” wrote The Times. George VI was in a white uniform, and Elizabeth wore a white gown with a short train. Her massive tiara had been made for Queen Mary with diamonds she had been given during a royal tour in 1901.
Unexpectedly, George VI had “repeated spasms of stage fright” before the ceremony. The problem was not the short speech, which he delivered faultlessly, but rather the prospect of having to declare the session open in Afrikaans as well as English. He ultimately “got out his few sentences of Afrikaans to his own satisfaction and that of all who heard him.” But the episode gave Tommy Lascelles “much trouble.”
That afternoon they boarded the “White Train” of fourteen coaches that extended a third of a mile. For long stretches of their ambitious tour over the next ten weeks, the luxurious train—with its white-and-gold-painted exterior and paneled and air-conditioned interior—served as their home. They spent thirty-five nights on board and traveled nearly seven thousand miles by rail alone, with another four thousand miles flying and driving.
The train stopped frequently so the royal family could greet crowds assembled at small stations and road crossings, much as George VI and Elizabeth had done in Canada. When these encounters occurred late in the evening, the Queen and the girls would wear jewelry over their nightgowns to simulate evening dresses. On their periodic stays at government residences and hotels, they found relief in horseback rides at dawn, tennis matches, swimming, and picnics.
The tour was a kaleidoscopic experience of cities (Durban, Pretoria, Johannesburg), spectacular countryside (the Drakensberg mountains towering above Natal National Park), historic battlefields, and the thrilling sight of steenboks, wildebeest, giraffes, zebra, hippos, and more in the Kruger game reserve. The royal family wore white overalls and helmets to descend seventy-eight hundred feet into the shaft of a mine. They cut feathers at an ostrich farm, attended elegant garden parties, and watched tens of thousands of ululating and dancing natives. A group of Bantu schoolchildren sang in exquisite harmony, with “the basses coming in like an organ, wild and sad.” At one indigenous gathering, the chiefs all wore European clothes, “lest the King should think we are naked savages.” Elsewhere, on the slopes of steep green hills, Zulu warriors did their tribal dances with sticks and shields, clad only in leopard skins.
The King and Queen felt most apprehensive about their reception in the heavily Afrikaner Orange Free State. But as Elizabeth wrote to her niece Elizabeth Elphinstone, “even the old Boer farmers who have been brought up Republicans & to look upon England as an enemy have come to greet us, so simply & kindly.” Afrikaner politician Colin Steyn told Tommy Lascelles that he was “astounded” by the fervor of his fellow countrymen for the British royal family.
On Easter Sunday, they visited Jan Smuts’s modest farmhouse outside Pretoria to have tea with the prime minister’s wife, Ouma, and twenty-four family members. But their real purpose was a clandestine visit with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and Princess Olga and their three children, who had been living as disgraced exiles in Johannesburg. Despite objections from both Attlee and Churchill, George VI and Elizabeth had long since forgiven Paul’s doomed alliance with the Axis powers during the war, and were determined to see their friends. Knowing of Paul’s chronic depression, Smuts had arranged the secret meeting.
After tea, the royal family met with Paul and Olga in Smuts’s study for over an hour. “Olga very pretty & Paul hardly changed at all,” Bertie reported to his mother. “They were very pleased to see us again but their life is dull as they cannot go about much.” Princess Marina wrote to Elizabeth of her “deep happiness” over the reunion. She thanked her sister-in-law for describing the meeting with “details I longed to know & you write so sweetly of my beloved Olga…such a noble person.” The visit was the first step in the eventual rehabilitation of the beleaguered couple.
During their ten-day visit to Southern and Northern Rhodesia, the family spent three nights in the Victoria Falls Hotel and were awed by the massive waterfall discovered by Scottish explorer David Livingstone in the mid-nineteenth century. On their last day, the family turned its attention to the speech Lilibet was scheduled to broadcast on her twenty-first birthday.
The remarks had been drafted by Dermot Morrah, a Times journalist who moonlighted as a royal speechwriter as well as the official chronicler of the South Africa tour. Tommy Lascelles “lavished much care” on the speech, but the most important contributors were the King, Queen, and Lilibet. They correctly recognized its importance, and they spent two hours huddled in deck chairs on the lawn behind the hotel, fine-tuning the words. Under the direction of the BBC’s Frank Gillard, Princess Elizabeth rehearsed and made a recording to serve as a backup in case the radio transmission failed on the appointed day.
Early in the evening of April 21, 1947, Lilibet sat before a microphone at Government House in Cape Town and delivered her profoundly moving coming-of-age address in a live radio broadcast to an estimated two hundred million people around the world. In a confident yet palpably emotional voice, she spoke of her bond with the people of the Commonwealth, and of feeling “at home” in South Africa despite being six thousand miles from “the country where I was born.” She asked young people to “take some of the burden off the shoulders of our elders, who have fought and worked and suffered to protect our childhood.” She called for her listeners to go forward with “a high courage and a quiet heart” to make the Commonwealth “more free, more prosperous, more happy…and an influence for good in the world.”
