George VI and Elizabeth, page 54
But the message that would resonate across the decades was her “solemn act of dedication” at the end. “It is very simple,” she said. “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” Queen Mary listened at Marlborough House in London and thought the broadcast “perfect,” she wrote to Elizabeth. “There were the most charming articles in the papers, really moving, & of course I wept.” So did Lilibet’s mother and father, as well as Winston Churchill, never dreaming that in just five years, he would be her first prime minister.
Three days later, the royal party embarked on Vanguard for their voyage to England. The pace of their eleven-thousand-mile tour—from the Cape of Good Hope to the River Zambesi and back again—had been exhausting for everyone, even the Queen, who had carried off an impeccable performance at every step. The writer Enid Bagnold had watched with fascination the “delicate control” of Elizabeth’s facial muscles, the way she could “cast a small look” to “create a rain of pleasure.” Yet instead of being buoyed by the energy of the people, the Queen had often felt depleted. She told her sister May she had been so tired that she felt “quite sucked dry sometimes.”
It was worse for the King, whose nerves periodically frazzled under the pressure of the heat and confined quarters, compounded by his unceasing worry over conditions in Britain. Lascelles noted that these “internal storms” were “comparatively infrequent,” but they were nevertheless disquieting. Once during a long drive in the royal Daimler, the King kept up an “incessant tirade” from the back seat, unnerving the chauffeur. As the Queen tried to gently tamp down the outburst, the King’s equerry, Commander Peter Townsend, shouted, “For heaven’s sake shut up or there’s going to be an accident!” Before midnight that evening, the King summoned Townsend to his room and said, “simply and with complete sincerity, ‘I am sorry about today. I was very tired.’ ”
The tour was by all accounts a triumph for the British royal family. In the view of Tommy Lascelles, they had achieved their main objective, “to convince the South African people that the British monarchy is an investment worth keeping, and that the present royal family in particular can mean a good deal to them.” George VI told Smuts that the tour had “given me a new outlook on life after those terrible war years in Britain…. I shall now be able to return to my work in London with renewed energy.”
Elizabeth came away with equally vivid impressions, not only of South Africa’s many points of beauty, but also of the troubling undercurrents she had sensed. In a shipboard letter to her sister May, she wrote that “it is such a complex country, with the white races quarrelling & hating each other, and the black races growing enormously in numbers & at that dangerous moment of leaving savagery & being educated & yet not out of the jungle by a thousand years. But there are signs that the white people are beginning to come together & with intermarriage & a little toleration, one hopes that much will be achieved.”
Unfortunately for Jan Smuts, the royal tour likely hurt rather than helped his chances in the 1948 election. Nationalist sentiment was too strong. Smuts’s party was decisively defeated by Malan’s forces, whose bid to protect the white race led to the intolerable policies of apartheid that would last for nearly fifty years.
The most promising outcome of the tour was “the remarkable development of Princess Elizabeth,” wrote Tommy Lascelles. Faced with new responsibilities, she had emerged from her instinctive reticence to show “a perfectly natural power of enjoying herself without any trace of shyness.” She not only displayed “an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort,” she had become “extremely businesslike.” When necessary, Lascelles wrote, she even “tells her father off to rights.” But the most important impact on the young princess, unknown at the time, was her formative exposure to cultural and racial divisions she had never previously witnessed. What she saw and heard at age twenty-one would create a bedrock for her understanding of South Africa as queen, and her ability to maintain the integrity of the Commonwealth during testing times.
“Colour came back for a little while into the life of a people starved of visual inspiration.”
Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh after their marriage at Westminster Abbey on November 20, 1947.
THIRTY-FOUR
Sunlight and Clouds
After three weeks at sea, the royal family arrived at Portsmouth on May 12, 1947—by happy coincidence the tenth anniversary of the coronation. The Times said George VI’s tour “crowned a decade of unremitting public service by carrying through with flawless success a mission which he alone was qualified to undertake.” The newspaper took note of the “peculiar divisions and difficulties” of South Africa but said “it was not the function of the royal visit to provide political remedies.”
The return trip aboard Vanguard had been smooth, marred only by the King’s “slight chill” that kept him bedridden for three days. Given the quantities of food they had eaten in South Africa, he should have been “getting fatter,” he told his mother. Instead, he had dropped seventeen pounds in four months, an alarming loss from his already slender frame. It’s impossible to know, but his gaunt appearance may have been an indication that he was already afflicted with the coronary artery disease and lung cancer that would eventually kill him.
“We are all glad to have Their Majesties home again,” Clement Attlee said in the House of Commons. So too were the Londoners who gave their carriage procession a rousing welcome and cheered them on the Palace balcony. Three days later the King and Queen and princesses, along with Queen Mary and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, were out in the landaus again, en route to a luncheon at the Guildhall, “still showing the scars of its wartime adventures.”
In his remarks, George VI described the sweep of their travels and touched on South Africa’s “unique” task: “nothing less than adjusting, almost from day to day, the progress of a white population of well over two million, whose future must always lie in South Africa, with that of a far greater number of other peoples, very different in race and background—coloured, Indian, and above all African.” It was, at best, an attempt to paper over South Africa’s deep racial divisions that would draw growing condemnation within and beyond the Commonwealth in the decades ahead.
His twenty-minute speech—written by Tommy Lascelles, with crucial additions from Jan Smuts—was unusually long. The King was said to be suffering from laryngitis, and The Times noted that delivering it must have been “a miserable ordeal.” His voice grew hoarser as he went along, and his pauses weren’t prompted by his stammer but, rather more worryingly, by a persistent cough. Nevertheless, The Times concluded that “the tones were forceful and resolute, and it was one of his most effective utterances.”
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For Philip Mountbatten, waiting in the wings, those days offered a preview of the life he had marked out for himself. Lilibet had written to him “constantly” from her travels. According to Crawfie, she had kept his photograph on her dressing table or bureau at all times. During the four months they were apart, their commitment to each other had grown even stronger. Writing to the Queen a month after the royal family’s return, Philip said that while the delay had been appropriate, it was time to take the next step to a life with her daughter.
“This is one line to tell you very secretly [with additional underlining in wavy red pencil] that Lilibet has made up her mind to get engaged to Philip Mountbatten,” Elizabeth wrote to May Elphinstone on Monday, July 7, 1947. “I think that she is really fond of him, & I pray that she will be very happy.” The Queen emphasized his “interest in many things & ideas.” One surprising interest was artistic. Using his mother’s diamonds that his father had placed in a bank vault nearly twenty years earlier, Philip designed Lilibet’s platinum engagement ring made by the London jeweler Philip Antrobus, Ltd.
Two days later, the King and Queen announced the engagement “with the greatest pleasure.” “It is so lovely to know you so well,” the Queen wrote to Philip, “and I know that we can trust our darling Lilibet to your love and care.” But she couldn’t resist offering guidance on how he and the princess could provide “example & leadership.” Recognizing Philip’s tendency to be outspoken, she cautioned that their role would not be easy: “It often means remaining silent when one is bursting to reply, & sometimes a word of advice to restrain instead of to act! But I have great confidence in your good judgement.”
Philip and Lilibet made their first public appearance together at a Buckingham Palace garden party on July 10, 1947. Mabell Airlie—who had been so instrumental in the engagement of Bertie and Elizabeth twenty-four years earlier—was on hand with Queen Mary and watched the princess “flushed and radiant with happiness…. Prince Philip shook hands rather shyly. I noticed that his uniform was shabby—it had the usual after-the-war look—and I liked him for not having got a new one for the occasion…. Observing him I thought that he had far more character than most people would imagine.”
The five thousand guests on the lawn paused their strolling and lined up to get a good view of the bridal pair, indifferent to a light drizzle. “Everybody is straining,” Harold Nicolson noted, “irreverently and shamelessly straining.” In the evening, huge crowds congregated in front of the Palace railings, calling out for an appearance. At nine o’clock, they got their wish when Philip and Lilibet emerged on the balcony to greet the throng with smiles and waves. The King and Queen and Margaret joined them, and “the whole party stood smiling down at the cheering people.”
Philip fell in quickly with the royal family’s routines. The following week he traveled to Scotland for nine days with the princesses and their parents. It was a master class in royal touring that ran the gamut of duties he would be expected to carry out. They stayed in Holyroodhouse, where Philip and Lilibet joined the King and Queen at a presentation party for eight hundred guests. The next day Philip watched intently as his future wife received the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh, an honorary citizenship award. The couple attended two balls, and he accompanied her to the Hamilton Park races as well as the opening of a center for young leaders.
With the King and Queen, they traveled 150 miles by car through the Scottish borders, stopping at seven towns and shaking over one thousand hands. Lilibet strode confidently and greeted people with her mother’s ease. Philip appeared tentative but alert, learning to walk two steps behind Lilibet, left hand behind his back—a familiar gesture in the years ahead. He wore a well-tailored double-breasted suit similar to the King’s, a sign that he had already come up in the world. In Glasgow they visited homes for the elderly, and the King kidded the Queen, saying, “I have put our names down for one of these.”
Philip was in his element during the final two days of the busy program, when they spent a night on HMS Duke of York between two days inspecting the Home Fleet. From the royal barge they boarded five ships on the first day, and on the second they led a procession of torpedo boats for fifteen miles between two lines of one hundred ships. Back in London, they were on show again at the last Buckingham Palace garden party of the season, mingling with more than one thousand guests.
In August, Philip stayed with his future in-laws at Balmoral for ten days. “He is so nice & helpful,” the King wrote to his mother. They were busy with wedding arrangements, torn between something quiet and spare in keeping with the hard times, or what Churchill called “a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel.” The former prime minister’s view prevailed over the killjoys.
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Despite the prospects of a glittering wedding, George VI couldn’t shake gloomy feelings while he was in Royal Deeside. “Whenever I come here for a little peace & rest there seems to be more worry & unrest for me than when I am in London,” he wrote to Queen Mary in August. Scarcely a month later he shared his feelings of depression again with his mother: “I do wish one could see a glimmer of a bright spot anywhere in world affairs. Never in the whole history of mankind have things looked gloomier than they do now, & one feels so powerless to do anything to help.”
It was a genuinely concerning time for George VI. In March 1946, with President Truman sitting nearby, Winston Churchill had delivered a historic speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. His focus was the challenge posed by the Soviet Union’s “indefinite expansion of their power and doctrine”: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.” The “iron curtain” metaphor defined the new Cold War, and Churchill warned that Russia planned to consolidate its power further through “communist fifth columns” elsewhere in Europe.
George VI applauded the speech, especially Churchill’s call for an even closer “special relationship” between Great Britain and the United States. The King considered it the “statesmanlike” analysis that “the whole world has been waiting for.” Accepting the King’s congratulations in person a month later over dinner at Windsor Castle, Churchill told him his remarks had taken two months to prepare.
Equally troubling to the King was the fate of India, Britain’s “jewel in the crown” of colonies. He had been obsessed with Indian affairs for years. Throughout the Second World War, the King had quizzed every English official connected with India who visited him at Buckingham Palace.
He believed firmly that Britain had benefited India enormously over the years, and that “many Indians still want to owe allegiance to me as King-Emperor.” He mistrusted independence leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi—the latter a “humbug,” in the opinion of Lord Linlithgow, viceroy of India during the early war years. Gandhi “wants us out of India completely…. This we shall never do,” the King wrote in 1942. A year later, after another meeting with Linlithgow, he said, “We cannot leave Indians to govern themselves”—a view Churchill shared.
The arrival of the Labour government meant that such opinions mattered little. The agitation for independence was too strong, and Britain’s depleted treasury could no longer finance the government’s control of India from afar. Attlee’s choice for the twenty-ninth and last British viceroy was the King’s cousin Louis Mountbatten, who took charge in March 1947. It was no small irony that he was the great-grandson of Queen Victoria, the first empress of India, but his modern outlook made him ideal for the task. In the words of his daughter Patricia, he “was considered pink—very progressive.”
Nevertheless, Dickie Mountbatten went to the King to express his misgivings about the post. “You’ve got to do it,” George VI said. Dickie replied, “It will be awful if I make a muck of it. I will be letting the family down.” According to Dickie’s daughter Lady Pamela Hicks, the King insisted, “If you make a success, it will redound to the family. You must do it.”
With his customary determination, Dickie plunged into the task of transferring power into Indian hands, attempting to satisfy the antagonistic factions. His deadline for British withdrawal was June 1, 1948. When it became clear that Nehru and his opposite Muslim number, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, could not agree on the hoped-for unitary government, a partition creating two countries, one Hindu, the other Muslim, became inevitable.
As boundaries were drawn up, Parliament’s Indian Independence Bill became law on July 18, with two months allotted for the transfer of power. The split proceeded in hasty and acrimonious confusion when millions of people relocated in the border areas. As many as a half million people died in brutal fighting.
After two centuries of British domination and seventy years of direct rule under the British Crown, the Indian Empire ended on August 15, 1947, with the creation of India and Pakistan as self-governing dominions. Britain’s King now had a new signature duly noted by Queen Mary on the back of an envelope containing a letter from her son on August 18: “The first time Bertie wrote me a letter with the I for Imperator of India left out, very sad.”
Other former colonies also began breaking away, first Ceylon (later to be Sri Lanka), followed closely by Burma. But as the old British Empire crumbled, one source of reassurance for the King was the creation of a new commonwealth consisting of former British colonies in a voluntary alliance. It was nurtured by India’s new prime minister Nehru, whom the King ended up liking “very much” when they met in London in 1948.
With a fortuitous sleight of hand, Nehru managed to drop George VI as India’s king but to welcome the British monarch as head of the Commonwealth—“the symbol of the free association of its independent member nations.” This guiding principle would be enshrined in the London Declaration of April 27, 1949, agreed upon by the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and Ceylon—a group that would expand to fifty-four nations over the following decades.
Absent from the ranks of the Commonwealth was Ireland, the source of great acrimony and strife with England over the years. The Government of Ireland Act in 1920 had carved out the six counties of Protestant Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, with the island’s twenty-six primarily Catholic southern counties called the Irish Free State—also known as Eire. The King had been distressed when Eire remained neutral during World War II and denied Britain the use of its ports to combat German submarines. “The Southern Irish were patriots to Ireland but to nobody else,” he wrote in 1940. The ultimate insult came at the end of the war when Irish leader Eamon de Valera offered the German minister in Dublin his condolences on Hitler’s death.
