Darling Georgie (23 page)

The Duke goes on to describe the chaos as the terrified boys ‘tripped in the passage and fell up the stairs in [our] frantic struggles to reach the dormitory and get undressed and pass the cadet captain, standing by, watch in hand, under the gun. Every evening produced a few minor casualties; and we fell into bed panting and scared, waiting for the delinquents to be called for punishment’ (Windsor, 1951).

Humiliating and degrading rituals are commonplace in enclosed environments such as prisons, boarding schools and the armed services. These rituals are exaggerated examples of earlier parental bullying which the perpetrator has to offload on to others before he can feel free to move on into adult life. The rituals may serve a useful purpose for the aggressors but do nothing for their victims. At the end of the twentieth century
bullying seems to have changed little from David’s graphic description of it three generations earlier. British newspaper headlines in September 1987 – ‘Army bullies jailed for torment of new recruits’ and ‘Ex-soldiers gaoled for degrading rites’ – drew readers’ attention to a story concerning sexual initiation rites in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Two former soldiers had admitted to ordering recruits ‘to get on top of one another and have sex’ and forcing them to sit in a cold bath containing urine and human excrement. The recruits were also put into a cupboard in which CS gas was released. The defence lawyers at the court-martial said that the two accused had themselves been through initiation ceremonies and believed that ‘there was no harm in it’.

Prince George must have experienced similar ceremonies and also concluded that ‘there was no harm in it’. Unable and presumably unwilling to abuse his children as he was once abused, he allowed his feelings of victimization to be passed on to his children ‘by proxy’. Like other children who have been humiliated and degraded, David would have felt too embarrassed to tell his parents of his ordeal. He did, however, hint in one of his letters to his mother that ‘there is an awful rush here, and everything has to be done so quickly’. If he had hoped that his mother would read the heartache between the lines he was disappointed. In her reply Queen Mary merely reminded him to leave time to clean his teeth at night.

Knowing what makes a bad parent is as important as knowing what makes a good one. Without an understanding of their own childhood to guide them, parents may bring up their children in the same way as they themselves were brought up. Neither Prince George nor Princess May could have had any insight into their own upbringing. Indeed they both probably idealized their respective childhoods and glossed over the defects if ever they became aware of them.

Awareness of the effects of bad parenting often seems to skip a generation. King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra were bad parents but good grandparents. The same could be said of King George V and Queen Mary. Nothing pleased King George V more than to play with Bertie’s daughter
Princess Elizabeth. She was devoted to her grandfather whom she referred to as ‘Grandpapa England’ because he told her that the national anthem (‘God save the King’) was his song. While recovering from his penultimate illness King George asked for Princess Elizabeth who he said was a ‘tonic’ for him. Pretending to be a pony so that she could ride on his back, he would encourage her to pull his beard. No adult had played so with him when he was a child, and neither had he played with his male children in such an uninhibited manner. The essential warmth within him, which had until now been denied expression, had at last found an outlet.

A
S THE REIGN
of King Edward VII slowly wound down and Prince George prepared himself for the ordeal ahead, the political views of the heir to the throne were becoming increasingly rigid and conservative. Not only did he abhor change but he was more interested in the past than in the future. Too much unfinished business, left over from his own past, prevented him from relinquishing the anger that kept him attached to his childhood and from concentrating on what lay ahead. Whether the Prince had any insight into the cause of the intense rages that often overwhelmed him is not known. The balance of probability suggests that he did not.

In the early part of the twentieth century, despite – or more likely because of – the increasing influence of Sigmund Freud, such introspection was unfashionable. Freud’s professed atheism, and his insistence that a general shift towards secularism was afoot, would have little appeal to the scion of a family whose life-style was heavily slanted towards dogma, ritual and the spiritual values of Christian belief. Prince George’s anger was acted out rather than thought out. He shut his eyes to the ‘all or nothing’ love of his mother and the totally inadequate education which had been thought fit for him. His search for a father figure, on to whom he could (inappropriately) unload some of his pent-up rage, brought him into conflict with his long-time confidant, Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fisher of Kilverstone.

He had been a seventeen-year-old midshipman on the
Bacchante
when in 1882 he first came into contact with Captain J.A. Fisher. Three years later he met him again while undergoing a training course aboard HMS
Excellent.
Captain Fisher, Commandant of the
Excellent,
was the same age as
Prince Edward and it was not long before Prince George bonded with the older man.

In a letter to Queen Victoria, when her grandson had completed his training course, Captain Fisher wrote:

Madam, Having received your Majesty’s commands through Sir Henry Ponsonby to write to your Majesty about Prince George I have the honour to report that during his six months’ stay on board the
Excellent
under my command his attention to his work and the manner in which he has performed all his duties has been all that your Majesty could desire. He has with great tact and good judgement and quite of his own accord declined many invitations kindly meant to give him pleasure, but which would have taken him too much from his work besides bringing him more prominently into public notice than Your Majesty might have thought desirable under the circumstances. His Instructors have reported to me that his aptitude for the practical work of his profession is very good, and Your Majesty may perhaps consider this is the chief point, as it will not probably fall to his lot to write learned reports or make mathematical investigations. Quite incidentally, this morning I heard the remark made by one of his late mess-mates that it was a subject of general regret that Prince George had left the
Excellent
and his pleasant and unassuming manner has been a matter of general notice. Trusting your Majesty will pardon me if I have written at too great length, I have the honour to be Your Majesty’s most humble and grateful servant and subject, J.A. Fisher, Captain. HMS
Excellent.

On the following day Prince George was promoted to Lieutenant. Also on the following day Captain Fisher, whose sycophantic letter to the Queen was, to say the least, patronizing about her grandson’s lack of literary skills and his inability to make mathematical investigations, wrote to Sir Arthur Bigge, the Assistant Private Secretary to Queen Victoria, passing on more of the same. ‘Prince George only lost his first class at Pilotage by 20 marks. The yarn is that one of his examiners, an old salt-horse sailor,
didn’t think it would do to let him fancy that he knew all about it.’ It was clear that Captain Fisher was unimpressed with the Prince’s intellect, but none the less Prince George and Fisher continued to correspond with one another for the following twenty years.

As Prince George became increasingly constrained by the demands that his inheritance was imposing upon him, his almost phobic urge to break out caused him to lash out at those who in one way or another he felt were responsible for his anxieties. One of these was his old mentor, Sir John Fisher. By 1904 the Prince’s rationalization for his anger took the form of disapproval of Sir John’s naval policies and of the ruthless manner in which the Prince believed he implemented them. One issue on which he disagreed with the now Second Sea Lord was the latter’s plan to increase the strength of the Home Fleet by reducing the strength of the Mediterranean Fleet in the event of an attack by Germany. Generally acknowledged to be well ahead of his time, Fisher had made an effort to keep on the right side of the Prince by informing him of the changes he proposed making in such matters as the training of officers and the development of the submarine. He did his best not to antagonize Prince George, although he had never been particularly impressed with his old pupil’s judgement. The Prince alternated between his desire to please the Second Sea Lord and his irritation with the responsibilities thrust upon him in the lead-up to his accession. He told Fisher that he saw an enormous future in submarine warfare, although others in the Admiralty and elsewhere saw its ‘sneaky invisibility’ as ‘unethical’.

In a letter addressed to Sir John Fisher in August 1904 and headed ‘Private’, the Prince wrote:

Many thanks for your letter and the preamble on the new designs of fighting ships which I have read with great interest and shall, of course, keep secret. I am sure that they will be splendid fighting machines and I so agree with you about the increase of speed. I don’t think you will get the Foreign Office to accept the Merchant Ship with the White Ensign &
the Maxim gun.Why not build a very large destroyer with good speed for this kind of work, which also would be useful with your fleet. Of course the ‘Snail’ and Tortoise’ classes ought to be abolished; they are utterly useless for anything … I much appreciate that you say you will show me everything & tell me everything later on. I will certainly try and give you my best advice & be quite frank always & tell you exactly what I think the King will say. Believe me, Always most sincerely yours, George.

The tone of the Prince’s letters to Fisher, child-like in their effusiveness and in their desire to please, and bearing more than a hint of wanting to play one authority figure off against another, are very much those of a son to a mildly exasperated father. In a letter to his own son Cecil, written on 10 April 1903, Fisher had said he had promised the Prince that he would burn all his letters ‘directly I have read them, as then he says, he feels he can write freely, which he certainly does!’ Fisher’s attitude to the Prince – many of whose letters he neglected to burn – and his views, with which he was only too familiar from his time on the
Excellent,
finally provoked the Prince into an open hostility that never completely disappeared. The more fragile his father became, the more his anger seemed to increase. As he anticipated the demise of King Edward it was as if he was at last in touch with the suppressed anger of his childhood. He had been left then and feared, as his father grew older, that he would be left again before he was ready to stand on his own feet.

Apart from antagonizing John Fisher Prince George also succeeded in antagonizing Lord Curzon (with whom he had fallen out on the India tour), Herbert Henry Asquith and Lloyd George. Growing up in the political conservatism of the Victorian era, and accustomed to the deference paid to him by successive conservative Prime Ministers, he found the views of the Liberals, elected in 1906, not entirely to his taste. His outspoken and often needlessly offensive attacks on ministers such as Asquith, whom he referred to as ‘not quite a gentleman’, and Lloyd George, whom he disparaged as ‘that damned fellow’, did not endear him to a government wrestling with topical issues, not the least of which was the Irish question.

Prince George’s hostility to the Liberals, the party that represented change, with which the insecure Prince was unable to cope, was infamous. Following an anti-Liberal outburst at the home of Lord Londonderry, the poet and literary critic Edmund Gosse was heard to say that the Prince was ‘an overgrown schoolboy, loud and stupid, losing no opportunity of abusing the government’. Gosse might also have had a view on why the Prince’s sons were also the victims of their father’s abuse and were to remain so until his last illness robbed him of some of his aggression. In 1907 Gosse, who could be said to be an expert on schoolboys, had anonymously published the prize-winning
Father and Son,
an intimate account of his own early life.

The Prince acquired a reputation more for outspokenness than for diplomacy. He could be very dictatorial and, despite the lip-service he paid to democratic values, in his dealings with his family he was anything but a democrat. As far as he was concerned only one person in the Royal Household had rights – himself. All others were expected to be dutiful and unquestioning. No issues were ever debated with his children, and his absolute authority had to be obeyed, with questions neither asked nor answered.

As Prince George’s anxiety, which amounted almost to a sense of impending doom, increased, Princess May, who hitherto had remained in the background as far as the children’s upbringing and their welfare was concerned, did her best to protect them against their father’s increasingly frequent outbursts of temper. Her first duty, however, was always to her husband and to the monarchy. ‘I always have to remember,’ she once said of her sons, ‘that their father is also their King.’ Prince George, who was dependent on Princess May, was comforted by the knowledge that his wife would always support him. None the less he began to suffer from what was described as ‘frayed nerves’, which was manifested both in physical as well as psychological symptoms. His physicians were no more able to ‘cure’ his chronic indigestion – perhaps a symptom of the malignant anxiety that was ‘eating him up’ – than they were his sense of inferiority manifested by his fear of speaking in public. This was particularly severe
when he felt that the members of the audience were of superior intellectual status. He accepted an invitation to be guest of honour at the annual dinner of the Royal Academy in 1908 but absolutely refused to address them, although clearly expected by his hosts to do so.

Two years later the news that Prince George was dreading finally came. On 6 May 1910 his father, King Edward VII, died from the effects of chronic lung disease. His death took place in the presence of Mrs Alice Keppel, his long-term mistress. Queen Alexandra looked tactfully out of the window while they made their farewells.