Darling Georgie (6 page)

Prince Edward was at once hero and rival to his sons. When Prince George was informed that he could not accompany his father on his state visit to India in the autumn of 1875, the almost ten-year-old Prince was
both disappointed and angry. It was some consolation to be told that he was being left behind to look after his mother. Already over-dependent on Princess Alexandra, Prince George remained ‘married’ to his mother for the rest of his life and after her death remained wedded to her memory.

Princess Alexandra was furious with her husband for leaving her at home. It was a slight that she never forgot and from which she possibly never recovered. Thirty years later, on Prince George’s visit to India, she wrote: ‘I do still envy you dreadfully having been there and seen it all when I was not allowed to go when I wished it so very, very much.’ Bored with her own company while Prince Edward was away, the Princess invited her parents King Christian IX and Queen Louise Wilhelmina to stay with her. Both the Princess and her parents were snubbed by Queen Victoria who, firmly on the side of Prussia in its dispute with Denmark, refused to invite the ‘Denmarks’ to Windsor for the christening of the Duke of Edinburgh’s son. She was angry with Princess Alexandra when she decided to return with her parents to Denmark for the winter, taking her daughters, the Princesses Maude, Louise and Victoria, with her.

Left once more, this time by both his parents, Prince George had yet again to be satisfied with distanced love. While he might have empathized at first with his mother’s visit to Denmark, since she too had been abandoned, when she revealed that she would not be back for three months – albeit in time for Christmas – his feelings towards her would have been ambivalent. Anger would have been appropriate, but he would have had difficulty in expressing it. Fearful that his mother might abandon him altogether if he offended her, and aware of his inability to cope on his own, he would have had to suppress his natural emotions and allow them to be replaced with feelings of longing and disappointment such as were to remain with him all his life. In the event, the two boys remained at Sandringham in the care of Mr Dalton.

When Prince George wrote to his mother in Denmark, he explained politely that he would quite understand if she was too busy to respond. Her long-awaited reply came from Marlborough House after her return to England on 6 December 1875. It was probably not what he was hoping for.

My own Darling Little Georgie,

Mother-dear was so delighted to get so many nice dear little letters from her little boy, and I should certainly have answered these long ago but you told me not to do so if I could not find time – which really was the case; and I was much touched by my little Georgie remembering how busy his Mother-dear very often is … I have just received your dear last letter and I too nearly cried that I should not see my darling boys tonight to give them a kiss each before going to bed. But now I am looking forward with delight to to-morrow afternoon. Sisters were delighted with their letters and meant to answer them. I have got some lovely presents from dear Papa which I shall bring to-morrow. Thank Mr Dalton very much for all his letters which I was very glad to get.

The Princess ends her letter: ‘and with love to all, ever darling Georgie’s own loving Mama’.

A similar letter from his father had arrived ten days earlier on 26 November. The Prince on board HMS
Serapis,
anchored off Goa in India, wrote:

My Dearest Eddy and Georgie,

As I have not time to write to you each a letter, I write to you both together and thank you very much for your letters of the 3rd from Sandringham. They were not quite so well written as the last ones and Eddy made several mistakes in spelling, so I hope you will be more careful next time. I had some wild-boar hunting last Tuesday, which is called in India ‘pig-sticking’. We all rode with heavy spears, and when a boar is seen, everybody rides up to him to try and spear him. I speared one and then General Probyn gave him another thrust which killed him. On Monday I shot a crane, just like the one that is near the kennels at Sandringham. I am so sorry to hear of poor old Nelly’s death. She has been buried near ‘old Tom’ I hear.

Now good-bye dear boys, and hoping soon to hear from you again, I remain, Your very affectionate Papa, A.E.

Best love to sisters.

What was Prince George to make of the letters from his absent parents? An overwhelmingly sentimental love letter from his mother on the one hand and a reprimand and description of the wilful destruction of wildlife by his father, in a letter that he had to share with his brother, on the other. At the time Prince George could not have appreciated the irony of any of it, but as an adult he was unable to trust women and had difficulty in controlling his temper, most often with his children. His son and heir, the Duke of Windsor, was known to faint when exposed to his father’s temper. Prince George always feared loss of control and as an adult was phobic about flying. Offered a flight in 1918, shortly after the formation of the Royal Air Force, he refused on the grounds that it was too dangerous, although in reality he probably feared handing over control to the pilot. His need to stay in control of his violent rages made it impossible for him to invest control in someone else.

Prince Edward was seldom happier than when killing animals. Black bucks and cheetahs, elephants and bears, jackals and tigers became targets for his gun and were substitutes for the many women, often similarly targeted by him, whom he had left behind in England. He told his sons with pride that in Nepal, with the help of 10,000 beaters provided by his host, he had personally shot six tigers in one day while seated on an elephant. Armed with his gun and penetrating their lairs from the safety of the
howdah
he took the animals quickly and by surprise. Surrounded by other guns, there mainly for his own protection, he was able to experience the illusion of power. By the time he was due to return to England the Prince had enough trophies, endangered plant species and stuffed animals (shot by himself) to furnish the gun room at Sandringham.

Twenty years later big-game hunting and shooting parties allowed Prince George similar outlets for his feelings of victimization. As Prince Edward had done before him, Prince George took out his anger at his neglect by his parents on defenceless animals.

Prince George’s childhood was both emotionally and physically disrupted. His mother, who constantly told him that she loved him, seemed content to leave him in the care of his tutor for months at a time; his father,
when not emotionally involved elsewhere, was occupied with converting Sandringham into a pleasure palace in which he could hold house parties and entertain his friends. This palace reflected Prince Edward’s hostility to his past (no antiques) and to his future (his children’s play areas were transformed into adult play areas, notably a billiard room and a bowling alley).

Mr Dalton was always there, always available and always supportive. He seldom took a holiday and, when he did, exchanged friendly letters with his charges on an almost daily basis. He never forgot his concern for them and his duties to them. His letters were appreciated by Prince George whose replies usually ended: ‘With much love to all, I remain your affectionate little Georgie.’

Prince George was accustomed from childhood to writing to his deaf mother. Despite the advent of the telephone in 1876, he continued to use the same form of communication to keep in touch with his former tutor. On his death in 1936, a large bundle of letters was discovered written to him by Mr Dalton, most of them in reply to the King’s own letters. Conditioned to rely on distanced communication for the exchange of affection, he was to remain quietly non-verbal – other than with his children – for the remainder of his life.

In 1877, when Prince George was twelve, Queen Victoria drafted a memorandum setting out the procedures she expected to be followed for the education of her grandsons. Determined not to follow his mother’s instructions, however, Prince Edward planned to remove the boys from what he felt was her unwarranted interference. He decided to cut short their home tutoring and send them away to boarding school, thus removing them from their grandmother’s influence over their education. Hoping to enhance the boys’ feelings of security, he banished them from home – where love was on offer in abundance but withheld whenever social or state duties demanded – to an environment peopled by strangers where they would be subject to harsh disciplines. In so doing he not only replicated his own arm’s-length mothering but ensured that his children’s eventual reactions to parental rejection would mirror his own.

Fortunately for the boys, the one immature and backward and the other not yet ready to abandon his clinging attachment to his mother – which suggested that he believed she still had much to give him – the scheme came to nothing. The Reverend Dalton tried to convince Queen Victoria that boarding school was entirely unsuitable, at least for the fragile and oversensitive Eddy, and that if her grandsons were to continue to be educated together then the training ship
Britannia
was an appropriate compromise.

Queen Victoria was opposed to the Royal Princes becoming naval cadets. Referring to Prince Eddy in particular, she said that ‘the very rough sort of life to which boys are exposed on board ship is the very thing not calculated to make a refined and amiable Prince, who in after years (if God spares him) is to ascend the throne’. It was in fact the very ‘roughness’ of naval discipline, with its emphasis on the group rather than on the individual, which in Prince George’s case at least was further to suppress the feelings of rage that as an adult he passed on to his children.

Queen Victoria expressed concern that as naval cadets the two boys might also be exposed to ‘undesirable’ companions. It was well known that what was referred to at the time as ‘unnatural practices’ were common among men denied female company for months or years at a time. Whether she had this in mind when she finally agreed that they could become naval cadets – but only if Mr Dalton accompanied them – is not known. Neither is it known whether Mr Dalton succeeded in his role as chaperone.

Prince George was pleased when the time came to be enrolled with his brother on the training ship
Britannia.
Not yet twelve years old, he was the youngest cadet aboard. Prince Eddy, who was recovering from typhoid fever, was rather less enthusiastic. Their father, however, was particularly delighted. It was his view that no one could be expected to rule unless first they had learned to obey. Presumably he had his heir in mind. Prince Eddy had other ideas. He learned neither to obey nor showed any real interest in his ultimate role. Prince George, although unaware of his destiny, was the ideal pupil, however. He settled in quickly and soon developed an aptitude for ships and their handling.

Although both boys had passed the two-day entrance examination some months earlier, they were later found not to be up to the standard of their classmates. It was Mr Dalton, promoted from tutor to governor, who took them to Dartmouth where they joined the
Britannia
. Their arrival was a unique event. Never before had an heir to the throne (and his brother) been allowed to mix freely with his future subjects. At first the two boys were in the strange position of experiencing positive discrimination. The other cadets, brought up with only fairy-tales as a source of information on Kings and Queens, were curious to know the facts about life in a royal home and interrogated the two boys about their life-style. Flattered at first by the attention, the boys were soon to become irritated by the curiosity of their shipmates. Their father had insisted that his sons be given no form of preference, and it was not long before more negative discrimination followed. Bullying is inevitable in any closed community and George was certainly the youngest cadet aboard, while his brother Eddy, his only possible ally, was fragile and effeminate. Years later Prince George commented to his librarian at Windsor Castle, Sir Owen Morshead:

It never did me any good being a Prince and many was the time I wished I hadn’t been. It was a pretty tough place and, so far from making allowances for our disadvantages, the other boys made a point of taking it out on us on the grounds that they’d never be able to do it later on. There was a lot of fighting among the cadets and the rule was if challenged you had to accept. So they used to make me go up and challenge the bigger boys – I was awfully small then – and I’d get a hiding time and again. But one day I was landed a blow on the nose that made my nose bleed badly. It was the best blow I ever took because the doctor forbade my fighting any more.

Most helpless victims of older bullies grow up to unload their feelings of humiliation and suppressed rage on to other helpless victims. The Prince’s treatment of his two oldest sons, the Duke of Windsor and King George VI, was later to confirm the validity of this truism.

At first it seemed that Prince George had found his
métier
in an environment disciplined but structured, unchanging and constant and which, above all, allowed him to escape from an insecure family hothouse peopled by unpredictable adults. For the first time in his life he knew what to expect from each day in which there were no painful separations and no boring lessons with Mr Dalton. His time phobia faded. It became obscured by the gradual realization that an equal amount of time was available to everyone and that he would not, as previously, be constantly kept waiting by his notoriously unpunctual mother. He found himself among equals. He was more or less with people his own age among whom he learned to fend for himself, and for the first time he developed a sense of self-sufficiency. In contrast with the life-style to which he had been accustomed, in the Navy there were no servants: no nursery maids, no house maids, no parlour maids. Prince George was intoxicated with a freedom that he had never before experienced. It was some time before he realized that he was in fact still in a prison but one in which he was no longer incarcerated with only his older brother for company. As the youngest cadet aboard the
Britannia,
he was surrounded by older ‘brothers’, his surrogate mother Mr Dalton was by his side and ‘Motherdear’ herself was with him in spirit. His letters to Princess Alexandra and hers to him were his lifeline. Presumably she also wrote regularly to Prince Eddy, but few of these letters survive. The Princess’s letters to Prince George were emotional in content and in style and continued to be so even when her son was a grown man. Prince George was aged twenty-five and already an officer in command of a gunboat when she ended a letter to him ‘with a great big kiss for your lovely little face’.