The Queen Mother (39 page)

O
N
27 J
UNE
1924 the Duchess had sat next to Winston Churchill at dinner and had an ‘interesting conversation’ with him.
¹
They talked about Africa – Churchill had his own personal experience as a guide. He had made an East African journey himself in 1907, as under secretary of state at the Colonial Office in the Campbell-Bannerman government. He described the trip in his book
My African Journey
and one can imagine that at dinner he excited her interest with his vivid memories.

Recalling her own African tour seventy years on, Queen Elizabeth explained, ‘Winston was extraordinary. I remember sitting next to him at dinner just after we were married and he said, “Now look here, you’re a young couple. You ought to go and have a look at the world. I should go to East Africa,” he said. “It’s got a great future, that country.” So we did … And I have always been grateful to him, you know, because I don’t think we would have thought of going.’
²

Her memory of his intervention was quite correct. Churchill followed up their conversation. On 10 July, he wrote to her to say he had approached Edward Marsh,
^*
private secretary to J. H. Thomas, the Colonial Secretary, about ‘Your Royal Highness’s wishes & plans about a tour in East Africa and Uganda’. Marsh had reported back that Thomas was ‘vy favourably impressed with the idea’. But he added that Thomas wanted to see how the couple’s forthcoming trip to Ulster went before committing himself to a full-scale colonial tour.
³
Like everyone else, he was unprepared for the extraordinary success of the Irish visit, due in good measure to the personality of the Duchess herself.

Quite apart from securing the permission of the government, there was also the small matter of the King, whose acquiescence could never be taken for granted. The Duke seems – not for the first time – to have approached his irascible father through his more sympathetic mother. On 14 July the Duchess’s diary has a rare entry in her husband’s hand: ‘Good day.’ The reason is soon clear. While the Duchess was replying to Churchill’s letter, the Duke went to see the Queen ‘about our winter trip’, and that very evening they received the King’s consent. ‘Marvellous,’ the Duchess wrote.
⁴

Over the next few months she had the pleasure of looking for clothes, and the discomfort of being inoculated against many diseases. The King and Queen offered to give the Duke as a Christmas present something that he needed for the trip; their son asked if they would pay for the tin cases he had had to get – these, he said, would cost ‘certainly not more than £20’.
⁵

The prospect was thrilling. For the Duchess, the first year of marriage had meant learning to live under the watchful eye of both the public and the Royal Family; apart from their winter weekends in Northamptonshire she and her husband had had little time alone together. And for a passionate sportsman like the Duke the idea of a big-game safari had immense appeal. This was the heyday of such adventures. Firms like Safariland Ltd of Nairobi and London were practised in supplying tents and equipment. White hunters were there to guide and protect inexperienced and nervous travellers, and numerous African trackers, gun-bearers, porters, cooks and ‘boys’ were provided to ensure that life was as comfortable in the bush as could be managed. In Kenya the building of the Uganda Railway (1895–1903) from Mombasa to its terminus on Lake Victoria had opened up the untouched interior of a country which teemed with wildebeest, buffalo, zebra, eland, giraffe, oryx, gazelle, waterbuck, lions, cheetahs, leopards and hyenas. Plentiful opportunities for duck shooting and fishing existed. In Uganda there was the extra attraction of elephant and white rhino, while the Sudan held out the prospect of sailing down the Nile aboard a comfortable paddle-steamer, with exciting expeditions ashore after more elephant, antelope of all kinds and even crocodiles.

Many young women of the Duchess’s background might have
been daunted by the prospect of four months in the wilderness. She had never been out of Europe before; travelling in Africa even with the service they would enjoy still held elements of risk and unpredictability; and although most of the trip was to be holiday, she and the Duke would still at all times be representing the British Crown. She did have misgivings, writing to D’Arcy Osborne, ‘I am feeling slightly mingled in my feelings about going to Africa, as I hate discomfort, and am so afraid that I shall not like the heat, or that mosquitoes will bite my eyelids & the tip of my nose, or that I shall not be able to have baths often enough, or that I shall hate the people. On the other hand I think it is good for one to go away and see a little LIFE, and then think how pleased I shall be to get home again.’
⁶
She need not have been concerned. This was to be one of the formative experiences of her life.
⁷
She took from it a great affection for Africa and a sense of astonishment at the achievements of the British Empire.

The Empire had been called upon to make substantial sacrifices for Britain during the First World War – almost 150,000 white troops from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa had lost their lives. So had an estimated 54,000 Indians. Of African losses there are no reliable figures, but some 40,000 black Africans served as labourers and porters with the British armies in France – their casualty rates are likely to have been high.
⁸

The war inevitably weakened loyalties and raised doubts about the basis of empire. Nonetheless, at Versailles, American ideas of self-determination were largely superseded by a new division of colonial territories and the British Empire actually grew. Since the British navy had switched from coal to oil, influence over the oil-producing countries and the Suez Canal was more important than ever. The Germans had made the Middle East a theatre of war and their defeat meant that Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine now became British ‘mandates’ while Syria and Lebanon were handed to France. In Egypt an end to the British protectorate was demanded – and dismissed. Instead the British installed a monarchy there, as they did in Iraq and Transjordan.

Britain took over the German colonies of Togoland, Cameroon and German East Africa (Tanganyika). Altogether almost two million more square miles were now coloured red on the map and thirteen million more people found themselves to be subjects of the King. But the strains of holding the Empire together were growing inexorably.
The costs that Britain had incurred in defeating Germany (estimated at some £10 billion) were only slowly counted, but from the early 1920s onwards their effect was real. The imperial economy was hard to sustain; after the wartime boom, demand for British products diminished sharply. The Dominions were developing their own industries and Britain’s share of world markets had begun a fall which was never really to be reversed. At the same time America and Japan were dramatically increasing their output and exports – and their power. British industrialists found themselves barely able to meet such new realities and responded only by demanding longer working hours or lower wages. As we have seen, industrial relations became increasingly bitter as strikes and lock-outs spread and became frequent and intense.
⁹
All of this made it harder and harder actually to pay for the Empire.
¹⁰
By the mid-1920s there were more criticisms and doubts but, at least on the surface, Britain’s sway was still extraordinary and exhilarating.

The most difficult of the countries the Duke and Duchess were to visit was the Sudan. Britain had first occupied the Sudan and Egypt in 1882 but a revolt against British rule, led by the so-called Mahdi (Guided One), culminated in the fall of Khartoum and the murder of General Gordon in 1885. The Mahdi created a strict Islamist state but the British re-established their control over the Sudan following General Kitchener’s victory in 1898 at the Battle of Omdurman. In 1899 Anglo-Egyptian rule was established, but in effect the Sudan was administered as a British colony.

The Sudan Civil Service, created by the British Colonial Office, became one of the finest in the world, but British rule also stoked nationalist resentment in both Egypt and the Sudan. In 1924 a group of Sudanese military officers led an uprising against the British, and Sir Lee Stack, the Governor General of the Sudan, was assassinated in Cairo on 19 November. This revolt was put down by the British army, but tension remained high when the tour of the Duke and Duchess was being planned. In Whitehall there was considerable discussion about whether the country was too dangerous for them to visit. The Chief Secretary of the Sudan government, H. A. MacMichael, asked that the Sudan should not be mentioned in the public announcement of the tour, as he feared that the Egyptian press would ‘start howling, & will attribute some low motive to the trip’; they would assume that it was connected with the current political negotiations between Britain and Egypt.
¹¹
During the tour the Duke’s Private Secretary kept in
touch with the Colonial and Foreign Offices in case it became necessary to rearrange the route to avoid the Sudan. By the end of the year the official view was that the journey could go ahead as planned, but that a final decision would be taken in early February.

*

T
HE
D
UKE AND
Duchess set off on Monday 1 December 1924, having taken leave of their families, who were concerned about the voyage. The King warned them never to be without a doctor and not to run unnecessary risks ‘either from the climate or wild beasts’.
¹²
Queen Mary wrote that she ‘hated saying “good bye” to you two beloved children’, but she hoped they would have a delightful and enjoyable tour. ‘God bless you both, my precious children.’
¹³
Lady Strathmore found saying farewells even harder, and so the Duchess had written to her from White Lodge, ‘My darling Sweet, Alright, I won’t come round, as I also hate saying goodbye. I expect the time will pass very quickly and you won’t worry about me will you darling, as I will take great care of myself in every way, I promise you … Au revoir Angel, from your very very loving Elizabeth.’
¹⁴

To avoid the high winter seas of the Bay of Biscay, they had decided to board their ship, the SS
Mulbera
, at Marseilles. This had the added advantage of allowing them to travel by train via Paris; the Duchess told her mother that she was looking forward to buying an evening dress there.
¹⁵
They stayed in Lord Derby’s apartment on the Avenue d’Iéna and enjoyed themselves, despite the fact that they were followed everywhere by two French detectives – actually, the Duchess found them amusing. Apart from shopping, there was tea at the Ritz and dinner at the British Embassy; they also visited the Casino de Paris, ‘where for the first time in my life I saw ladies with
very
little on, & somehow it was not in the least indecent’. They danced in rather risqué nightclubs, including Les Néants, where ‘we drank off a coffin, surrounded by skeletons & exchanging very vulgar badinage with a man carrying a huge Bone. Then to a Russian place where I enjoyed myself
so
much being very fast, & throwing balls at rather a nice American, & then to a tiny place with several Negroes with delicious voices who sang &
sang
.’ They strolled in the gardens at Versailles, ‘so lovely & forlorn & empty’.
¹⁶
All in all, she noted, ‘We had great fun in Paris and feel very well.’
¹⁷

On the evening of 4 December they were driven to the railway
station at Pierrefitte, north of Paris, where the P&O Express made a special stop to pick them up. After the overnight journey they arrived in Marseilles at noon. Their party consisted of their Comptroller Captain Basil Brooke, the Duke’s equerry Lieutenant Commander Colin Buist, Lavinia Annaly, the Duchess’s childhood friend, who was acting as her lady in waiting, the Duke’s valet Victor Osborn and the Duchess’s maid Catherine Maclean. When they embarked on the
Mulbera
they discovered that they had been wise to come by train; the ship’s voyage across the Bay of Biscay had been very disagreeable.
¹⁸
But the Mediterranean was calm and, after six restful days on the ‘Old Mulberry’ as the Duchess called her, they steamed through the Suez Canal. She and the Duke arose at dawn to see ‘the marvellous early light’ across the desert. They were happily surprised to pass HMS
Wryneck
, the destroyer which had carried them to Belfast in July. ‘They turned out & cheered us. It was quite a homesick feeling!’
¹⁹

They sailed south and arrived at the British port of Aden on 16 December.
^*
There they were met by the British Resident, General Scott, who took them on a tour of the town. Surrounded by people, ‘we saw Cain’s tomb, & the place where the Queen of Sheba embarked, & the Water Tanks made by King Solomon’, the Duchess recounted to her mother; later they met a magnificently attired sultan over tea at General Scott’s residence.
²⁰
Further south shipboard rituals became more exotic. There was a fancy-dress ball, judged by the Duchess, who was dressed in a red Spanish shawl with a floppy hat and a rose. Lavinia Annaly, decked out as a cowgirl, played the violin in a band, which she had organized for the occasion. The Duchess was relieved to be able to avoid a ducking in the Crossing the Line Ceremony – her husband was not spared – but she was nonetheless awarded a certificate of allegiance to King Neptune and the Order of the Old Sea Dog.
²¹

Two days later, on 22 December, they landed in Africa. ‘It was a lovely sight in the early morning with the sun astern, seeing native huts and tropical vegetation. Our first view of Kenya,’ recorded the Duke as the
Mulbera
approached Mombasa.
²²
This was the first royal
visit to East Africa since 1910
^*
and crowded on the quayside with the Governor, Sir Robert Coryndon, and other officials were large numbers of people from the British colony, as well as Kenyans, Somalis, Indians and Arabs, all of whom helped to cheer them ashore.