Darling Georgie (14 page)

P
RINCE
G
EORGE’S INTEREST
in stamps began during the 1880s while he was serving in the Navy. His uncle Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean fleet, himself a collector, encouraged his nephew in what at first was simply a pastime while the Prince was under his command on HMS
Thunderer.
Uncle Alfred took the view that since as a sailor Prince George would be travelling the world, he would have every opportunity to collect the stamps of the countries he visited.

Prince George enjoyed spending his shore leave with the Duke and his family at San Antonio Palace on the Island of Malta, not only because their shared interest brought him close to his uncle but also because he was attracted to his uncle’s thirteen-year-old daughter Princess Marie, who took little or no interest in him.

The Prince may also have been drawn to what was later to become his hobby for less obvious reasons. Uncommunicative, and obliged by Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra to regard the Navy as his career, he accepted the distanced communication of letter-writing as the only means of keeping in touch with his parents. The stamps on the envelopes he received would at first have been of lesser interest than the enclosures, mainly from his mother, contained within. As time passed, the stamps themselves became of interest.

After the introduction of the penny post in Britain in 1840, the leisured Victorians became a nation of letter writers. In the first year alone 132 million letters were delivered in England and Wales; in 1870 the number was 704 million, and by 1913 it had risen to 2,827 million. In the City of London, by 1890, a letter was often delivered within four
hours of posting, and there were as many as twelve deliveries a day (Browne, 1993).

Stamp-collecting was a hobby available to everyone, but few, other than some ladies of leisure, took advantage of it.
Punch
noted in 1842: ‘A new hobby has bitten the industriously idle ladies of [Victorian] England … They betray more anxiety to treasure up Queen’s heads than Harry the Eighth did to be rid of them.’ Prince George was not in fact the first British monarch to collect stamps. Queen Victoria had always displayed a fascination and respect for the Post Office and the postal system and, unlike any other British monarch since, always paid for her stamps. She was also a stamp collector and it was her enthusiasm that fired her grandson, in 1896, to become President of the London Philatelic Society.

Although Prince George began as a general collector, by 1906 he had focused his attention on the stamps of Great Britain and the British Empire which bore the portraits of either his grandmother or his father and were reminders of his own future status. By 1910 every stamp in his collection bore his image, a gratification unique to the King. When the Duke of Edinburgh died in 1900, King Edward VII, who had always encouraged Prince George’s interest in philately, bought his brother’s stamp collection and presented it to his son. Collecting postage stamps (together with the letters they embellished) appealed to Prince George’s methodical and conscientious nature. His obsessional personality which had served him well in the Navy, where precision and concern for detail can make a difference between life and death, came to the fore in his major leisure interest. Reluctance to throw anything away, or to give anything up, is a trait, needless to say, common to collectors.

A large quantity of letters to Prince George from his mother, from his tutor and from all those concerned for him, whether as servant or friend, were discovered on his death in 1936. All were neatly packaged in bundles and clearly labelled. Prince George also kept a diary, almost without a break, from 1878 until three days before his death. As with every child, communication was of great importance to him. What was less usual was the fact that his mother had difficulty in hearing him, that his tutors had
impressed on him the importance of being seen and not heard and that he was forced to rely on letter-writing to communicate his deepest feelings to his mother as an adolescent. It was hardly surprising that as an adult he found it easier to write to his diary and to commune with his image on his stamps than to articulate his love for his wife.

Prince George was a creature of habit, and at the age of six, as soon as his tutoring began, the pattern of his life became apparent. He preferred to know what he was doing at every moment of the day and confided to his diary where he had been and how he felt. Knowing what he had done and what he was about to do made him feel more secure. As he grew older, perhaps as a reaction to his experience in the Navy when time was used to control him, he used time to control others. As King, perhaps as a faint echo of the rigid feeding patterns of his childhood, he would enter the breakfast room each morning between the nine strokes of Big Ben. Luncheon was served at 1.30 p.m. and tea at five o’clock. After dinner King George either read or examined his stamps and he retired to bed at 11.10 p.m. precisely. Uncertain of the shifting sands upon which he stood, he felt safer upon the firm ground of familiarity.

In addition to collecting stamps and preserving his letters, Prince George collected pictures of young children. This may have been to remind him of the time in his life when he had received the most attention from his parents, but was possibly also because as an adult the child still present within him felt more at ease with other children. For a similar reason – or perhaps simply as a reminder of the carefree time when he had been unaware of the responsibilities that lay ahead – he also acquired a number of mechanical toys, although he claimed they were for his children (Smith, 1910).

Later, when he had children of his own, he dealt with his overwhelming love for them by keeping them safely at arm’s length. Easily moved to tears, both of sadness and of joy, it was only in old age, when he was able to embrace his grandchildren, that he ceased to guard his feelings. His interest in carrier pigeons, second only to his stamp collection, also reflected, as did the letters that bore the stamps, the
silent communication to which he had to resort with his mother.

In 1881, when the
Bacchante
visited Australia, Prince George was particularly fascinated by the carrier pigeons used by a newspaper reporter from the
Adelaide Observer.
The Prince himself sent off four of the birds. The first carried a message to his mother, the second a message to Government House and the third some private instructions. In the case of the fourth bird, Prince George said: ‘We will let this poor little thing go without any message, it will arrive at home all the sooner.’ It was probably the Prince who was the ‘poor little thing’ whose dearest wish was to fly home to his mother.

Prince George read and reread every word of his mother’s letters. Unlike the ephemeral spoken words used by most mothers to their sons, Princess Alexandra’s intimate written messages to Prince George were to remain with him for ever, keeping her constantly by his side. The stamp, later to bear King George V’s head, was a reminder to Princess Alexandra of the son she had once banished, while King George V’s almost mute relationship as a child with Princess Alexandra ensured his continuing interest in alternative forms of communication. As an adult, King George V had very little to say to those around him. On Christmas Day 1934 this man of few words was to become the first monarch to communicate with his people over the air, albeit by reading a message written for him by his friend Rudyard Kipling. The words of others compensated him for the paucity of his own and he discontinued reading aloud to Princess May only after his accession, by which time his words had acquired the panoply of status and like him were at last accorded recognition.

By the time of his death in 1936, by dint of zealous collecting, King George V had acquired the finest stamp collection in the world. Three hundred and twenty-five volumes bound in Moroccan leather were needed to house it. The King was never happier than when he was in the stamp room at Buckingham Palace, oblivious to his surroundings, in the company of his friend, adviser and collaborator Edward Bacon. Edward Bacon – later Sir Edward – took the same train from South Croydon, three times a week, to mount the King’s stamps, to discuss his most recent
acquisitions and to take lunch with him. In 1913, within a few months of his appointment, Edward Bacon (by sad coincidence) became, like Queen Alexandra, profoundly deaf. Unfortunate though this obviously was for Mr Bacon, his affliction enhanced his companionship with a man brought up with little to say because (as he believed) no one had listened to him. Closeted together in the stamp room, insulated from all sounds and distractions, the two friends retreated from the outside world. They were so absorbed in their mutual interest that time went unnoticed. When the King entered his stamp room, the page and footman in attendance knew that their services would not be needed. In all the years in which they had worked for him, when the King was occupied with his stamps they had been sent for only twice.

Probably as early as 1890 King George V began to collect stamps seriously. It was not until his marriage to Princess May three years later, however, after he had focused his attention on the stamps of Great Britain and the Empire, that he joined the Philatelic Society and was immediately elected to Honorary Vice-President. Three years after this he was elected President. His fellow members of the society added significantly to his collection by giving him a present of postage stamps as a wedding gift. Since wedding presents are usually intended for both bride and groom, it is not known whether Queen Mary felt snubbed by the partisan nature of the gift. Although she showed little or no interest in her husband’s hobby, she was probably grateful that when the King was occupied with his stamps he was able to find some relief from the pressures of his constitutional duties.

The stamps became a ritual, compulsive in nature and addictive in quality. Both before and after his marriage the King spent three afternoons a week in the stamp room. Since his only companion was Edward Bacon, who was unable to hear him, it represented a comforting return to the peaceful, quiet period in his life when little or nothing was expected of him. He was fascinated by his stamps and by the facsimiles of the crowned heads of Europe which put him in touch once again with some of the relatives with whom he had grown up. In the privacy of the
stamp room, where no one was allowed to disturb him, the King arranged and rearranged his collection. His stamps satisfied his obsessional need for order, reflected his concern with how others saw him, nourished his narcissistic self-sufficiency and, ultimately, fulfilled his expectation of loneliness.

A study of the books King George V read, first as a child and later as an adult, provides a picture of his hopes and aspirations for the future and his curiosity about the past. In the same orderly manner that he was later to classify his stamps, he made a list of all the books he had read since 1890 (Gore, 1941). He was interested not so much in the historical past as in his own (royal) past, and among the many biographies were that of his grandmother
Queen Victoria
by her Private Secretary Sir Arthur Ponsonby, Grace Williams’s
The Patriot King
(William IV), E.F. Benson’s
Edward VII, King Edward and His Times
by André Maurois,
Victoria the Widow and Her Son
by Hector Bolitho and Sir George Arthur’s
Queen Alexandra.
It is not given to everyone to read biographies of their parents and not everyone would wish to do so. It is probably fair to say that the happier one’s past the less need there is to re-examine it. King George was fascinated by his past, however, and could not learn enough about it.

Another interest that was reflected in the King’s reading was his passion for hunting and shooting. His involvement in blood sports rivalled that of his father King Edward VII, and when, in the last few years of his life, his days of shooting were coming to an end he exchanged violent sport for violent and macabre novels. On his bookshelf were kept
The Massacre of Glencoe
(John Buchan),
The Murder of the Romanovs
(Paul Bulygin) and David Lloyd George’s
War Memoirs.
He might also have sought a better understanding of women from reading
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(D.H. Lawrence) or from
The Story of My Life
by his cousin Marie, Queen of Rumania, the first girl to whom he had been attracted but who had not reciprocated his feelings.

King George V overcame the disability of his crippling shyness by his determination to excel in his leisure pursuits. In the last shooting season before the Great War King George, who was one of the finest game shots
in the country, fired 1,760 cartridges in a single day. On another day he brought down thirty-nine birds with thirty-nine consecutive cartridges. His attachment to shooting was such that sometimes his family complained that he loved his shooting companions more than his children. This passion for shooting, this sublimated anger, this attempt to right the wrongs of childhood by ‘fighting back’ leads us to ask whom he was targeting. Surely not his parents? His mother’s protestations of love, however, obscured the fact that she and Prince Edward may have been the real targets for his aggression. He did, in all fairness, give the birds a chance to escape; sportingly allowing them to fly almost out of range before he shot them down, he gave them an opportunity which, as a fledgeling, had not been offered to him.

On his shore leaves during his naval training Prince George had frequently taken part in the sporting facilities provided by his hosts. He shot kangaroos and peacocks in Australia, wild buffalo and elk in Ceylon and turkey buzzards and other wildfowl in Argentina. He was never happier, however, than when he was shooting on the Sandringham estate, close to his childhood home.

While aboard the
Bacchante
Prince George had engaged Henry Feltham to teach him how to box. It was not long before the tutor realized that it was not so much boxing in which the Prince was interested as in ‘having a go’. Mr Feltham, it is recorded, had to use a certain amount of force to terminate the Prince’s aggression towards him. Although Prince George had been brought up to have an exaggerated respect for his superiors during his naval training, this did not prevent him from ‘playfully’ taking every opportunity to act out his hostility towards authority. He made apple-pie beds for his senior officers and enjoyed playing practical ‘jokes’ on them.