With a private secretary came an independent household. The Prince insisted that, at twenty-five, he could no longer live under his parents’ roof. ‘I must be free to live my own life,’ he told Lady Airlie.15 The King took the line that the roof of Buckingham Palace was quite large enough for two – or twenty for that matter – but he grudgingly gave way and in July 1919 the Prince moved into York House, not so much a house in fact as a fragment of the great complex of St James’s Palace, which grew or shrank according to the needs and pretensions of the occupant. It was not ideal, few good rooms and those north-facing, dark, antiquated, but it suited the new owner’s needs and gave him the privacy and independence he so much desired.
And so, in his new premises, he set up in business as Prince of Wales. Lloyd George still presided over a coalition government elected with a large majority at the end of 1918, but though his personal prestige was high the overwhelming Conservative preponderance in the alliance meant that his position was far less strong than it seemed. The Prince’s views at the time of the election were much as might have been expected from a serving officer: ‘One dreads to think of the Labour people returning a greater number of members … and then all these crazy women candidates; however Lloyd George seems to be all right just now, tho’ one can’t trust him a yard.’ Wigram had been sending him the Scotland Yard reports on the state of opinion among the working classes and he read them with alarm: ‘I’m afraid I’m always a pessimist but the situation looks pretty black just now, tho’ it’s not half as black as it will be in a year’s time, perhaps less than that.’16 The problems were going to start when the soldiers were demobilized and expected employment and a decent standard of living. Only radical action could avert disaster: ‘Oh! we’ve got funny, or, rather, serious times before us, but they’ve got to be faced and in the right and proper way and to hell with precedents!! They won’t wash nowadays!!’17 He agreed wholeheartedly with his mother when she rejoiced at the defeat of the more extreme socialists in the general election and concluded her letter: ‘If only the Coalition Govt will now hurry up and get the much needed reforms (which the working classes need) passed, they can take the wind out of the sails of the extremists, and I trust they will be wise enough to realize it.’18
He returned to a Britain that was riven by class antipathies and violent industrial disputes. ‘One can’t help seeing the work people’s point of view,’ he told the Queen, ‘and in a way it’s only human nature to get as much as one can out of one’s employer.’19 He soon found that he sympathized with Lloyd George and the more radical wing of the government and resented the intransigent callousness of the hard-faced men who had done well out of the war. ‘I look on [Lloyd George] as the only possible man living to be PM and feel that if he goes a Labour govt is bound to come in. I have the greatest confidence in him now, tho’ I didn’t use to!!’20 That the accession to power of a Labour government would be an evil seemed as obvious to him as it did to 99 per cent of the upper classes, but that the injustices of society required drastic redress and that, if nobody else would do it, it would have to be done by the socialists, seemed quite as evident. ‘It is a very sad and depressing thought that there are so many desperately sad and sordid homes this Christmas,’ he wrote in 1921, ‘destitute men (thousands of them ex-service men) and consequently still more starving women and children.’21 Such sentiments are easily voiced, but less easily acted on. The Prince of Wales was no crusader and was disinclined to concern himself with any problem which was not thrust forcibly on his attention. But the unemployment and destitution among so large a part of the population were thrust on his attention, and the issues preoccupied him for many years.
In June 1919 he made the first of the provincial tours which were to be so conspicuous a feature of his public life and were to give him a deeper understanding of British industry and working men than any monarch or heir to the throne had enjoyed before him. He spent four days in south Wales, was taken through the least salubrious slums, and in his speeches laboured constantly ‘the welfare of our ex-service men and the improvement of housing conditions, both of which I have very much at heart’. He went down Cymmr pit in the Rhondda Valley and found chalked on a wall a thousand feet down: ‘Welcome to our soldier Prince. Long may he live.’ He borrowed a piece of chalk and wrote below the slogan: ‘Thank you. Edward, Prince.’22
Until his Commonwealth tours were behind him he was not to be put to the task of doing something practical to implement his sincere but vague benevolence. He did, however, manage to fit other provincial visits into the gaps between his voyages abroad. Glasgow, traditionally the most republican and fiercely left-wing of British cities, was a tough assignment. The first day he met with boos or sullen silence, but his patent good will, humility and charm gradually prevailed. ‘It’s with the greatest possible relief and gratitude to the people of Glasgow that I can tell you that I’m more welcome here now than I was yesterday,’ he wrote proudly to Freda Dudley Ward. ‘I’ve driven miles through the streets of this vast city today and the people … have been divine to me and were very kind and enthusiastic. Even the men cheered and far more took off their caps than yesterday and there were only 1⁄2 dozen boos.’ Next day was even better; ‘a large crowd gave me a marvellous send off tonight. To TOI, and TOI only, I say that I do feel I’ve been able to do just a little good propaganda up there and given Communism a knock.’ But he did not delude himself that the royal touch could miraculously cure economic ills: ‘I’m afraid the effect of my visit won’t last very long. Things have gone too far, darling, on the Clyde and I take a very gloomy view of the whole situation.’23
In Cardiff three months later he was flabbergasted by the warmth of his reception. ‘They’ve all been divine to me today,’ he told Freda, ‘and I’ve seen hundreds of ex-service men and they were the nicest of the lot. Christ only knows why, for they are all having a real bad time and one is so terribly sorry for them.’24 One of his problems was that the local dignitaries sought to swaddle him in pompous formalities, while his pre-occupation was to meet and be seen by as many people as possible. In Lancashire in 1921, for example: ‘Old Lord Derby has organized this tour marvellously, and I’m able to put in an occasional human touch or stunt of my own, so that I think it’s going well, though I’m afraid my ultra-democratic spirit has annoyed him a few times.’ He had his own way over the programme: ‘No waste of time, such as laying foundation stones and opening things, it was all just driving through miles and miles of crowded streets and stopping at groups of ex-service men and schoolchildren.’ But, as he found still more markedly on his tours abroad, the strain of constantly giving himself to the people, exuding warmth and enthusiastic interest for eight or nine hours on end, was sometimes cripplingly oppressive: ‘I’m down to bedrock, my angel, and Christ only knows how I’m going to scrape through the next 2 days.’25
Painfully, he acquired the art of public speaking. Churchill appointed himself his coach. Don’t be ashamed to read a speech, he wrote, but in that case ‘do it quite openly, reading it very slowly and deliberately’. Of course it was better to memorize a text or talk from notes. To accommodate the notes, he advised, take a tumbler, put a finger bowl on top of it, put a plate on top of that, and then arrange the notes on top of the plate, ‘but one has to be very careful not to knock it all over, as once happened to me’. This advice was given before a banquet for the allied leaders in July 1919. Whether the Prince followed Churchill’s somewhat alarming system is uncertain. He memorized the speech, however, and evidently delivered it well. ‘You are absolutely right to take trouble about these things,’ wrote Churchill approvingly. ‘With perseverance you might speak as well as anybody in the land, and naturally and gracefully besides.’26 The Prince never learned to speak as well as that but he mastered the technique of seeming sincere and spontaneous: ‘He talks very simply,’ wrote Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s personal secretary and future wife, ‘just like a schoolboy – saying little things that come into his head as he goes along, and then coming back again to the prepared speech. He charms everyone.’27 But he never enjoyed making speeches. On another occasion Frances Stevenson congratulated him on his success. ‘He told me he would never get used to speaking in public