The vast estates of the Duchy of Cornwall in London and the West Country gave him a chance to do something practical to help the unemployed and the homeless. He invested a large amount of money in new machinery for the Cornish tin mines, set up a farming concern run on cooperative lines and planted 250 acres of forest on the eastern side of Dartmoor. In London he regularly visited his estates in Kennington and the areas of the borough which he owned were conspicuously better furnished with houses than the parts for which the Council was responsible. At a public meeting the Mayor tried to blame his Council’s shortcomings on the policies of the Duchy. ‘Thereupon the whole Labour party who were in the hall rose and practically hissed the Mayor off the platform.’ The socialist leader in the borough later told Sydney Greville that the Prince, after the interview which he had given them, could do anything he liked with the Labour Party.29
His public life directly after the war was not restricted to the University of Wales, the Royal College of Music and the other pressing calls on his time that Stamfordham had enumerated. ‘Other men might be chained to their desks,’ he wrote wryly in his memoirs. ‘I was metaphorically chained to the banquet table.’30 A typical day in July 1919 saw him receiving Indian army and navy officers, attending a meeting of the Duchy Council, visiting the Australian YMCA, spending the evening at the Royal College of Music, moving on to a boxing display and ending up at the Embassy night club. In March he was initiated by the Duke of Connaught into the Household Brigade Lodge of the Freemasons. For once it seemed he might be spared a speech, since replies to toasts were traditionally limited to five words, ‘Worshipful Master, I thank you,’ but the rule was waived for the heir to the throne and the Prince had to hold forth about his ‘ardent desire to do his utmost to promote the principles of duty, loyalty and benevolence, on which Freemasonry rested’.31 Closer to his heart was his appointment the following year to be Honorary Colonel of the newly formed Welsh Guards. For one who was often to claim that this was the office which meant more to him than any other, his initial reaction was, however, hardly ecstatic. ‘Of course it is inevitable and is only right I suppose and I more than appreciate the honour etc. etc.!!’ he wrote to a friend. ‘But once a Grenadier always a Grenadier!!’32
But such diversions were no more than aperitifs to the daunting meal that was to come. It was Lloyd George who first conceived the idea that the Prince should embark on a series of tours around the Empire, ostensibly to visit the soldiers he had met during the war in Europe and the Middle East and to thank their governments and peoples for all they had contributed to the final victory. Lloyd George knew that demands for reform in the structure of the Empire, pent up during the years of fighting, would now be vigorously put forward. Difficult and probably acrimonious negotiations were inevitable. Anything that could be done to ensure that they were conducted in a spirit of unity, and against a background of harmony, would be of the greatest value. Otherwise the strains might prove too great and the Empire disintegrate. ‘The appearance of the popular Prince of Wales,’ Lloyd George maintained, ‘might do more to calm the discord than half a dozen solemn Imperial Conferences.’33
The King was not convinced that his son’s apparition would thus magically still the tempest, but he felt that at least it would be a useful stage in the education of a future monarch. Canada had asked first for a visit from the Prince, so Canada would start the series, the other Dominions and parts of the Empire would follow in the next few years. It was a prospect that exhilarated and alarmed the Prince. He longed to travel, but though he had no concept yet of how gruelling his tours would be, he knew well that they would be no joy ride. He would be constantly on parade, scrutinized in every detail of his behaviour, blamed if he were too solemn or too frivolous, criticized for his formality, rebuked for his informality. ‘Your visits to the Dominions will be made or marred according as you do and say the right thing,’ Lord Stamfordham sternly warned him. ‘The Throne is the pivot upon which the Empire will more than ever hinge. Its strength and stability will depend entirely on its occupant.’34 The Prince found it troublesome enough always to do and say the right thing in the restricted periods during which he was on duty in the United Kingdom; to have to do so for months at a time under the microscope that is trained upon a royal visitor would test him unreasonably hard. It was with grave qualms that he sailed from Portsmouth on 5 August 1919, on his way to the New World.
7
The First Tours
THE PRINCE’S HAPPINESS, ALMOST HIS SURVIVAL, ON HIS gargantuan tours depended as much as anything on the people who accompanied him. For the trip to Canada Stamfordham recommended a man who, like Thomas and Legh, was to serve him until his reign was over. Admiral Halsey – ‘the Old Salt’ as he was derisively but affectionately nicknamed – was something of a Hansell; sound, honourable, humourless, unimaginative. He was ‘the ideal Chief of Staff’, the Prince told his mother, ‘and I know we are going to be a very happy family’. Needless to say they were not; friction in such a party was almost inevitable, and became completely so when Halsey was matched by a political adviser with unspecified responsibilities, the energetic and somewhat impatient Edward Grigg. Grigg, by family background as well as predilection, was destined to devote the greater part of his life to the service of the British Empire. He was ‘a very exceptional man’, the Prince went on, ‘so clever and able and he has such splendidly broad-minded and far seeing ideas, a great imperialist …’1 He was all that, but also assertive, suffered fools badly, and considered Halsey something of a fool. The prospects for harmony were not bright.
In a memorandum which Grigg prepared for the Colonial Secretary, Milner, he observed that the main object of the Prince’s visit was ‘to create an atmosphere. He will do this largely by natural tact and charm.’ But he would have to overcome the feeling in North America that the monarchy was no more than an ‘interesting feudal anachronism’. His speeches should emphasize his ‘appreciation of the political institutions of the Empire and of the very vital place which the Crown takes as the nodus of the whole web. That line is, I think, good for the Canadian as well as the American market.’ Lloyd George minuted dubiously: ‘There must be nothing that would look in USA like a challenge to republican institutions’; an indication of the many tightropes the Prince was going to be required to walk over the next few years as he teetered between America and Canada; Westminster and Dominion governments; federal capital and state capitals; French Canadian and Anglo-Canadian; Boer and rooinek.2
When he left Portsmouth, however, the Prince was looking not forward to such problems but backward towards Mrs Dudley Ward. At one point he had tried to persuade her to accompany him to Canada, or at least to meet him there. She had taken the possibility seriously enough to consult Piers Legh’s fiancée about it, but had wisely decided to stay behind.3 The Prince was disconsolate and only began to regain his spirits when the battle cruiser, HMS Renown, arrived at St John’s and the demands of the tour left less time for brooding.
‘No enthusiastic mob – seems a dead place on the whole,’ commented Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson gloomily. ‘Went ashore, but the only thing they seem to sell here is ice-cream.’4 He failed to note the Prince’s favourite feature of his arrival, the triumphal arch composed largely of drums of cod-liver oil and festooned with the carcasses of dried codfish.5 Nor was the Prince disturbed by the relatively meagre crowds, proudly describing his ‘rapturous reception’ to the King: ‘The fact that my first day in the Dominion was a success has given me confidence for the future.’6 What gave him greatest confidence was that he was performing well in public. Godfrey Thomas, who was also in the party, told the Queen, ‘I cannot describe … how well the Prince is speaking.’ The Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Bordern, had been ‘immensely struck and talked of nothing else after the St John visit’.7
The Prince was less struck by Sir Robert Bordern. ‘Quite pleasant, but rather a dull old stick,’ he described him to the Queen.8 Sometimes the Prime Minister was worse than that. When the Prince was about to make the most important speech of his Canadian visit, Bordern noted that he was nervous and distrait: ‘I endeavoured to divert his attention by recounting some amusing anecdotes,