The Prince was convinced that the style which had worked so triumphantly in Canada and Australia would serve in India as well. If he was only allowed to be himself, then he could get through to the people and win their hearts. He was appalled by the dense thickets of ceremony with which the authorities seemed determined to hedge him round. Even before he landed, he told Mrs Dudley Ward, he was convinced ‘that all the official rot and pompousness is overdone and is quite unnecessary’. He was determined to break it down, ‘even though I’ll risk getting into trouble with the officials and powers that be’.17 And it was not just the stuffy British officials who were at fault; the semi-independent Indian princes were equally out of touch with the real people, ‘their ceremonies are so irritating and ridiculous’.18
The King was quite as certain that the sort of informality which had been so successful in the white Dominions would prove disastrous in India.19 Stamfordham rubbed in the argument – ‘I have impressed upon him the absolute necessity for a maintenance of strict dignity on all official occasions’20 – and Cromer battled valiantly to hold the line, complaining ruefully to Wigram that ‘it is not always easy to get HRH to adjust his mind as to what is suitable to certain occasions’.21 The old brigade was not wholly wrong. The Prince’s style did give offence to many British and a few Indians, some of them of real importance. But he won many more friends by his behaviour. Professor Rushbrook Williams, Director of Public Information at the time and official historian of the visit, told Frances Donaldson many years later that he ‘never knew an Indian who had met HRH who was not charmed by him – he was human, informal and genuinely interested in them. Again and again I heard the remark: “If only all you Europeans were like him!” … Above all, he wanted to meet and get to know Indians.’22
Professor Williams gives the Prince credit for more enthusiasm towards the Indians than in fact existed. As usual it was the serving soldiers and ex-service men who most appealed to him.23 He was quite as colour conscious as any of the British rulers of India; when Mountbatten reported a conversation with Mrs Besant in which that formidable lady revealed that the the Prince was a reincarnation of Akbar, his cousin was disgruntled at the idea of having been a ‘black man’ in a previous life.24 He had no doubt that the Indians and Burmese were wholly incompetent to run their own affairs and would be lost without the benevolent supervision of their colonial masters.25
And yet he did do his best, often in spite of the authorities, to get through to them. ‘I want to know you and I want you to know me,’ was a personal note that he grafted on to the formal message from the King Emperor which he delivered in Bombay. At Poona he horrified officials by walking around the stands after laying the foundation stone so that people could see him. They rose to their feet and cheered themselves hoarse.26 In Lucknow he went to see four thousand poor being fed. ‘I insisted on walking about amongst them despite the ruses of the officials and police to prevent me stopping and getting out of the car. I feel that I’m one up on them all for once!’27 He learned enough Hindi to exchange a few words with the many thousands of military pensioners whom he inspected: ‘It’s worth it every time, as these Indians do appreciate it and it makes it far more interesting for me too. And it’s a heart-breaking job going round these poor devils, many of them maimed and limbless, whose govt pensions are hopelessly inadequate and for whom I can do so little.’28 And when the Indians were there and he was allowed to move among them, he could work the same magic as in Canada or Australia. At a People’s Fair near Delhi he was mobbed by five or six thousand natives who surged round him, reported the military commander, General Rawlinson, ‘cheering him to the echo, salaaming and almost worshipping him. He was perfectly delighted …’29
The Prince believed that the police were overdoing his protection and cutting him off from the people who were ready to acclaim him. ‘Surely they can trust me not to make a BF of myself and do anything idiotic?’ he enquired indignantly of Freda Dudley Ward. The police always retorted that they were doing no more than they did for the Viceroy – ‘All I say is “God help the Viceroy”!!’ Everyone was working loyally and diligently but, ‘alas they are working in the wrong way and completely preventing this tour being of the slightest use as far as the natives are concerned, which is after all the real reason for my coming’.30
But it was not primarily the British authorities who thwarted his efforts to get through to the Indians; Gandhi and the Congress Party ensured that the crowds were rarely there to succumb to his blandishments. He was disappointed and dismayed when, in Allahabad, less than a thousand Indians were on the streets out of a total of 120,000 – ‘we go from cold to frost,’ commented Halsey.31 He was infuriated when, at Benares, the university authorities tried to cover up for a student boycott by filling the empty seats ‘with high school boys, boy scouts and Europeans; I suppose they hoped I would never get to hear … what a BF they had made of me’.32 He was outraged when the Chief Commissioner of the North West Frontier Province, Sir John Maffey, took alarm at threats to assassinate the Prince and redirected his procession through the back streets of Peshawar. Convinced that everyone would believe him a coward, he returned to Government House in what Mountbatten described as ‘the blackest rage I ever hope to see him in’.33 The Prince described the incident to Mrs Dudley Ward as ‘the worst thing that has happened to me in India’, and blamed himself for not overruling Maffey – ‘but then you know I’m not very good in a crisis, Fredie darling, and do lose my head all too easily’.34 Maffey, in a different sense, would have lost his head if he had stuck to the original plan and the Prince had been murdered. The police can hardly be blamed for their vigilance. There was real danger; the Prince’s staff knew of at least two cases in which people had been offered more than a thousand rupees to throw a bomb at the royal visitor.35
The Prince had no sympathy for the independence movement and blamed Edwin Montagu for fomenting it. His letters home are filled with denunciations of ‘that despicable man’ who had ‘given in and pandered to the natives’. Naturally the Indians wanted more, ‘which they can’t possibly have so long as we maintain the policy of governing and running India’. The result was ‘hopeless unrest’ and growing support for Gandhi: ‘It’s all very disgusting and very depressing.’36 He rejoiced when Gandhi was arrested and Montagu resigned, but feared it was too late. Montagu’s reforms had so far changed the atmosphere in India that ‘most Englishmen of Indian experience are dissuading their sons or any good fellow from coming out’. As a result the standards in the Indian Civil Service were slipping, ‘and, as you know, the natives are the quickest to size up a white man and can always recognize a gent, or anyway a “nature’s gent” which is even better’.37 Given what he saw as the incipient collapse of British rule in India, he felt that his own presence was a mere palliative, as irrelevant as applying a piece of sticking plaster to a gaping and mortal wound. His visit was unwanted by the Indians and of doubtful value to the British. His speeches, which were written for him by a member of the Indian Civil Service attached to his staff, struck Piers Legh as ‘really lamentable …