And so the pompous ritual of departure was enacted once again, the Prince forlorn among the beribboned dignitaries – ‘In a little tight naval uniform which clung close to his figure he did not look above 15,’ wrote Curzon, ‘quite a pathetic little person.’60 Mountbatten was quickly set to his principal duty. ‘Poor chap, with all these hundreds of people round him he’s as lonely and homesick as he can be and is at present HATING this trip!’ he told his mother. ‘He says he’ll cheer up later. But then he is very, very badly smitten, I think.’61 Of those aboard, only Mountbatten understood the extent of his gloom; the Prince joined in the traditional shipboard romps with good will, and gave every appearance of enjoying himself as he inadvertently flooded Halsey’s cabin with a power hose. The hose was too powerful for Grigg’s peace of mind: ‘I had visions of HRH, who does not weigh much in a state of nature, being projected into the Atlantic by a sudden jet of salt water.’62
The Renown travelled by the Panama Canal, with stops in the West Indies on the way. In Barbados he found the inhabitants disturbed by rumours that some of the islands were to be sold to the United States. ‘I need hardly say that the King’s subjects are not for sale to other governments,’ the Prince reassured them loftily. ‘Their destiny as free men is in their own hands.’63 At Bridgetown the Governor’s lady had prepared an immense ball of flowers which was supposed to disintegrate and shower the Prince with blossoms as he passed. Fortunately she lost her nerve and pulled the string too soon; the ball, welded into a congealed mass, fell heavily into the road and would have reduced the Prince to pulp if released at the proper time.64
It soon became obvious that the Prince was not going to allow his pining for Mrs Dudley Ward to deprive him of all diversions. At a ball in Balboa he danced almost exclusively with a particularly pretty girl, who turned out to be the daughter of the local storekeeper – ‘and a very good thing too,’ commented Grigg, ‘but the local dignitaries felt mournful that their more patrician daughters had not been preferred.’65 Swimming at midnight, Sub-Lieutenant Hutchinson approached a raft crewed by three nubile American girls. ‘Is that you, Teddy?’ one enquired. Hutchinson denied the charge but boarded the raft nevertheless, to be joined a few minutes later by the Prince of Wales. They returned to Renown at 2 a.m. and tiptoed to the Prince’s cabin for a whisky. ‘Don’t wake the baby,’ whispered the Prince, pointing to Halsey’s adjoining cabin.66 There was much junketing at San Diego, including a Mayoral Ball. Among those present was an American air force officer, Earl Winfield Spencer, and his wife Wallis. No doubt gatherings of this kind were enjoyed by the locals, wrote Halsey disdainfully to the King, ‘but one has to be extremely careful at these sorts of places where one meets all sorts of conditions of people’.67
The Australian Prime Minister, William Hughes, had originally insisted that the Prince must visit Australia before New Zealand, even though the opposite would obviously have been more sensible: ‘To ask the poor Prince to imagine glorious Alpine views in a howling blizzard, and to spend days tossing about in Antarctic gales looking for noble fjords hidden in rain and mist, is really a little too much,’ wrote Amery.68 Lloyd George agreed, and Australia was told that it would have to wait its turn. The visit to New Zealand had been envisaged as an important but relatively relaxed rehearsal for the main task ahead. The authorities of both Dominions had been told that the Prince wanted no ceremonies before 10 a.m., three half-days a week for recuperation, and at least one large public reception in every city to allow him to meet the people.69 However, when the representatives of the two governments joined the ship at Suva it was found that they had ignored their instructions. Programmes of impossible complexity and arduousness had been prepared – ‘I do not believe any human being could go through with all that was proposed,’ wrote Halsey.70 He and Grigg set to work and managed to cut back the Australian programme to something physically possible, but it was too late to do more than nibble at the edges of what had been planned for New Zealand. ‘I cannot understand the Governor General having passed it,’ Godfrey Thomas told the Queen, ‘unless the object was to break the Prince down and make it impossible for him to do justice to himself in Australia.’71
Lord Liverpool, the Governor General in question, was to be held responsible for almost everything that went wrong in New Zealand. ‘A pompous, interfering ass who has been dogging not only my own footsteps but also never leaves the Admiral and Grigg alone,’ the Prince described him to his father. ‘He rubs everybody up the wrong way and … is most unpopular throughout the dominion.’72 The Prince was habitually quick to denounce British governors, ambassadors, or others in positions of authority, but on this occasion Halsey, Grigg and Thomas all echoed his views. Liverpool could hardly be blamed for the railway strike which threatened to disrupt the visit, but even this, Grigg complained, he handled with notable incompetence, behaving ‘one minute as if the end of the world had come, the next as if there was nothing to worry about’.73 The strike had been fomented by a group of Sinn Fein supporters who dominated the union executive. Fortunately for the royal party the most prominent of the Irishmen found the strain too much and suffered a nervous breakdown. Without his leadership the strike collapsed. Grigg’s preoccupation had been to keep the Prince out of the dispute, whether he were presented as taking the side of the management or the strikers. He succeeded, though the Prince could not resist one bland remark in a speech in Wellington: ‘Somehow or other the trains were not running very well last week, but mine could not have run better.’74
In spite of the taxing programme, the tour of New Zealand went extremely well. Neither the nature of the people nor the size of the population made possible the sort of mass hysteria the Prince had witnessed in Toronto or New York, but his reception was never less than enthusiastic. He remained downcast, however. Grigg found him reading, ‘with an air of profound dejection’, an article in the Wanganui newspaper which referred to him as ‘the coping stone of Imperial federation’. ‘I never saw a coping stone in worse condition,’ Grigg commented drily.75
New Zealand might have its striking railwaymen, but Australia traditionally possessed the most left-wing and militant working class in the British Empire. The Prime Minister had broken with most of his Labour colleagues in 1916 to form a national government, and his action had caused as much bitterness among those who felt themselves deserted as Ramsay MacDonald was to experience in Britain ten years later. The Prince had to step gingerly between these rancorous groups. But this was not the only Australian problem which required diplomatic handling. The federal and state governments were perpetually at loggerheads; the relationship between the state Governors and the Governor General was little more harmonious. The Prince found himself a particularly savoury bone of contention between the warring elements; anything he did to please one was certain to offend another. ‘One Governor suggests that the destiny of the Empire depends on HRH spending three extra days in his State,’ wrote the Governor General, Munro-Ferguson. ‘Another deprecates the Prince enjoying a kangaroo hunt … and the masterful little Prime Minister has decided views on all questions and never forgets he is the supreme authority.’76
Any fears that the Australians might receive the Prince with less exuberance than he had found elsewhere were quickly dispelled. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how amazingly enthusiastic the Melbourne people are,’ he told his mother, ‘and they’ve kept it up ever since I landed and it’s really frightfully touching, and I do appreciate it all so much. It beats anywhere in Canada.’77