The Queen Mother (50 page)

F
OR
THE
NEXT
six months their home was a great ship, HMS
Renown
. Lead ship of a class of two fast 26,500-ton battlecruisers, she was launched in Glasgow in 1916. Designed by the Admiralty to have great speed, she served with the Grand Fleet in the North Sea during the remaining two years of the Great War. In 1919–20 she carried the Prince of Wales on a voyage to Australasia and America. Since then she had been extensively refitted to increase her protection against gunfire and torpedoes – and to carry the Duke and Duchess and their entourage around the world.

The tour was seen to be of great importance – not only to the government of Australia, which had inspired it, but also to the King. After they had put to sea the Duke wrote to his father, ‘This is the first time you have sent me on a mission concerning the Empire, & I can assure you that I will do my very best to make it the success we all hope for.’
¹

The British Empire was one of the most astonishing international organizations the world has ever seen. As we have noted, during the war a third of the troops that the mother country, Britain, had raised came from the Empire, and when the peace settlement of Versailles handed German colonies to the victors, the British Empire in the 1920s reached its greatest extent ever – it covered a quarter of the world. But the price of victory had been immense and the costs of administering the expanded Empire grew ever less easy for Britain to support. Throughout the 1920s, the imperial defence budget was continually cut. The rationale was that after the Great War Britain would not be involved in another major war for at least ten years and that no expeditionary force was required for that purpose. The armed forces were therefore principally to provide garrisons for India, Egypt and all
other territories under British control. Manpower became scarcer and controlling the increasingly restless colonies between the wars became more and more difficult. The arrogance of power gave way to hesitation as the self-confidence vital to any imperialist venture gradually diminished. But in 1927 the Empire seemed still to be a permanent part of the world order. The Duke and Duchess had no reason to doubt its lasting strength before they set out from Portsmouth and almost everything that happened to them from then on confirmed that view.

Despite the importance which both the Australian and British governments attached to the trip, they were constrained to operate it within a very tight budget. In October the Dominions Office had pressed the Treasury as to whether a government grant-in-aid would be voted to help the Yorks’ expenditure in undertaking the tour. The Prince of Wales, who was unmarried, had been given £25,000 for his tour of Canada, Australia and New Zealand in 1919–20. (When the King and Queen, as Duke and Duchess of York, had been to Australia twenty-five years before, they were allowed £20,000.)

In the difficult economic circumstances following the General Strike, the government felt unable to provide as much. Basil Brooke wrote to the Treasury in November 1926: ‘His Royal Highness wishes me to emphasise the fact that the assistance for which he is asking is solely to meet expenses connected with the official and extraordinary nature of the tour. The Duke is fully prepared to pay out of his own purse any charges which he and the Duchess would normally be called upon to bear in their daily routine.’
²
In the end the government offered £3,500 up front with another £3,500 promised in March 1927. Of this £175 was apportioned, as a clothes allowance, to each of the five male members of the staff, £125 to each of the Duchess’s two ladies in waiting and £325 for the Duke and Duchess between them. They had to spend a great deal more out of their own resources to cover the expenses of the trip. Even so, several Labour Members of Parliament objected to the £7,000 grant – the trip was referred to in Parliament as ‘a joy ride’. It was in fact arduous.

One of the Duke and Duchess’s duties was to represent the trading interests not just of Britain herself, but of the whole British Empire. The Duke agreed to carry on board the All British Campaign’s ‘Emblem of Empire Industries’. The British Industries Fair in Birmingham sent him a telegram of loyalty and support, referring to ‘the
valuable service HRH is always willing to render to the development [of] British Trade’.
³

They were not only to travel in
Renown
, but also to use her as their base for much of the tour of Australia. The officer in charge of fitting the ship out, Admiral Parker, had been a little nervous about just what to do. In August 1926 he had written to Basil Brooke wondering whether the Duchess’s request that all the cabins be painted entirely blue was wise. ‘I do think she will be tired of all Blue.’
⁴
But the Duchess was fairly determined and even rejected the first blues that the Admiralty suggested, as she did the suggestion of stripes.
⁵

Parker accepted the required blue, ordered more cushions and sent the ship’s barber to Trumper’s in Curzon Street, to learn how the Duke liked his hair cut. He worried that the ladies would be bored if they had nothing but their knitting to do on the long voyages, and arranged for the ship’s library to be supplemented – the Times Book Club agreed to loan the ship 120 books for a charge of twelve guineas.
⁶
The chosen selection very much reflected popular taste of the time: it included Edgar Wallace, P. G. Wodehouse and John Buchan – all favourites of the Duchess – John Galsworthy, Agatha Christie, Radclyffe Hall (whose notorious lesbian novel
The Well of Loneliness
she later described to a friend as ‘terrible’),
⁷
John Masefield, Arthur Conan Doyle and ‘Sapper’, the ultimate adventure-story writer.

Parkers of Piccadilly lent a selection of framed prints for the cabins in the hope that they would ‘help in some way to take away the bareness of the bulkheads and steel walls and make the suite a little more homelike for the cruise’.
⁸
Pathé Frères Cinema Ltd sent films for viewing on board – they included three comedies starring Harold Lloyd and Bebe Daniels
(Modes and Madness, Heap Big Chief, Hustling Harold)
, and two ‘song films with music’
(Swanee River, Coming thro’ the Rye).
⁹
Alfred Hays’ Gramophone Agency lent them an electric gramophone, while 78 rpm records were provided by the Gramophone Company and chosen according to Basil Brooke’s assessment of the Duke and Duchess’s tastes – they included a selection of Kreisler, the Brahms Hungarian Dances, some of the older Harry Lauder songs, Gilbert and Sullivan and some Chopin.
¹⁰
An Ampico Reproducing Piano was lent by Sir Herbert Marshall and Sons for shipboard dances. These clever machines reproduced foxtrots performed by some of the most celebrated pianists of the time. Like the gramophone, the piano
endured much damage from rough seas on the voyage and needed serious repairs afterwards.
¹¹

The scale of the floating cellar was impressive, even for a six-month voyage for the Duke’s party often. There were more than sixty cases of vintage champagne from various suppliers, fifty-eight cases of the Duke’s favourite whisky, Buchanan’s, twelve cases of brandy from Justerini and Brooks, twelve cases of Gordon’s gin, French and Italian Vermouth, forty cases of port and eighteen cases of sherry, as well as over thirty cases of claret.
¹²
The Duke and Duchess liked cocktails before lunch and dinner and often drank champagne throughout the meal. (In 1931, when they made an official visit to Paris, this had to be explained to their bemused hosts.) Bulgarian cigarettes were provided by the navy. The Duke enjoyed smoking.

The Duke and Duchess could not have realized the extent to which the tour was to plunge them into the limelight across the Empire as never before. It would do a great deal to develop their sense of their own public personalities. This was one of the first royal tours to be organized along modern lines with the interests of the media taken (at least partly) into account. There was an official photographer, W. J. Fair, and two movie cameramen were assigned to the tour. An official film was produced by the Commonwealth government of Australia and distributed by the European Motion Picture Company. A similar film was produced in New Zealand. Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world could thus share in the royal progress. Nor was the written word neglected. There was a writer in residence aboard
Renown
– an Australian journalist, Taylor Darbyshire, who produced a book of the voyage.

The King had appointed the Earl of Cavan
^*
as chief of staff for the tour. Cavan had commanded the Guards Brigade and then the Guards Division during the war and had served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1922 to 1926. His wife Joan was asked to be one of the Duchess’s two ladies in waiting. Lord Cavan had rather a formal manner, and neither Duke nor Duchess was immediately drawn to him, but he represented them well, often in unseen ways.

Cavan’s task was to see that everything ran as smoothly as possible and that all the protocols and formalities demanded by the King, an exacting if distant supervisor of the tour, were met. The King was
especially insistent that the Duke and Duchess should wear the correct dress for every different occasion. He sent frequent instructions, advice and complaints by coded telegram. (Fortunately, letters to and from London took weeks, sometimes more than a month, to arrive, which tended to diminish the urgency of some strictures.)

The Duchess’s other lady in waiting, Victoria Gilmour,
^*
was quite another matter. Known as Tortor, she proved to be a delightful companion and became a close and lifelong friend of the Duchess. Patrick Hodgson, the Duke’s Private Secretary, described her in a letter to Queen Mary, ‘Mrs Gilmour is also much liked and keeps us all amused. She is perhaps a little vague at times and has the most wonderful way of losing her own possessions which invariably are found in the one place “where she knows she never put them!” But these trifles are more than compensated for by her keenness and her companionship to the Duchess.’
¹³
Two equerries, Colin Buist and a newcomer, Major Terence Nugent,
^†
were also in the party, and the Duke was allotted a political secretary for the tour, Harry Batterbee,
^‡
as the official representative of the British government. The party’s health was in the hands of Surgeon Commander H. E. Y. White, a physician who was to show his worth.

On the voyage out they went the Atlantic route, via Las Palmas, Jamaica and then through the Panama Canal to the Pacific. The weather was at first quite disagreeable – there was a storm off Ushant and after the first night aboard the Duchess wrote in her diary, ‘Hardly slept at all last night, and kept on jumping up to put things away. Even the big gramophone fell over.’
¹⁴
The Duchess proved to be a hardier sailor than some of the others. She wrote to D’Arcy Osborne that the ship was ‘very beautiful in a clean large way’ and the food
was quite good. She begged him to write to her. ‘I already feel cut off.’
¹⁵

As the weather improved both Duke and Duchess made themselves popular with all ranks on board. The Duke made casual visits to the wardroom to talk to the senior officers, which pleased them. They dined with the junior officers in the gunroom and played charades and nursery games and danced the tango and Charleston with some of the midshipmen. The Duchess had time to rest and read and talk – and above all to miss her daughter. ‘Felt depressed – I miss the baby all the time, & am always wondering what she is doing,’ she noted in her diary.
¹⁶
This was a constant, if private, agony for her through the entire voyage. There were diversions – clay-pigeon shooting from the deck, the ship’s rifle range and squash court. Every Sunday there was a church service on board, at which the Duchess enjoyed the hearty singing of the crew.

On Monday 10 January they anchored off the Canary Islands in warm weather, but there was a heavy swell. Spanish officials in Las Palmas were supposed to come aboard but declined, saying that the sea was too rough. The Duke and Duchess were more adventurous. Indeed, the Duchess impressed all on board with her disdain for the waves. Lord Cavan wrote to the King that with ‘gazelle-like agility’ she managed to get aboard the barge to be taken ashore. It was hard to recognize the National Anthem as played by a local band. The British Consul and his wife were somewhat eccentric – he was very deaf and appeared very old while she, according to Lord Cavan, had ‘steadfastly refused to change her fashion of clothing – so I am told – since the age of small waists, large sleeves & a bustle!’
¹⁷

The next day
Renown
set sail for Jamaica. The first and relatively easy stage of the trip had gone well. But the criticism from the King had already begun. A telegram arrived from Clive Wigram, the King’s Assistant Private Secretary, warning Cavan that the King objected to some of the press coverage of the tour. Cavan responded robustly, saying that the telegram had caused ‘some little disturbance’. No offensive articles could have come from the journalists aboard because he personally vetted all messages they sent. Whatever caused upset in London ‘must therefore have come from some source for which I am not & obviously cannot be responsible’.
¹⁸

The King evidently complained also about descriptions of the Duchess’s clothing because Cavan insisted, ‘As regards “descriptions of
clothing” Her Royal Highness’s departure frock from London & landing frock at Las Palmas are all that have been passed by me – & I may observe that if the authorized Pressmen are not to send this information, the uncensored Press of every place of landing most certainly will. However our three men will not mention the dresses worn except at official functions & this the public absolutely demand.’
¹⁹