Gandhi’s campaign ensured that he was not usually so successful, but the Congress Party did not achieve as much as it had hoped. In Delhi, in particular, all went well for the visitor. ‘I feel as if I had lived a life time these last two days,’ Lady Reading told her family. ‘Such processing of troops, booming of guns. Royal salutes … acres of red carpet, hundreds of scarlet coats, thousands of decorations.’ The Vicereine did not realize it, but she was describing everything her visitor most disliked. Still, ‘the Prince was splendid and played up nobly’.65 By this stage in the tour, Reading believed that the Prince was much more satisfied with his visit and taking a real interest in India. ‘I … am glad to find that he is willing to take trouble to understand the difficulties of the situation here. He has, undoubtedly, shrewd perceptions and is not misled by the outward glamour …’66 He was not misled, either, by the Viceroy’s accomplished line in flattery. Proposing the royal visitor’s health at a banquet in Delhi, Reading ascribed every conceivable virtue to the Prince and spoke of the tour as if it had transformed the future of India. ‘You just can’t think how much that man has deteriorated,’ commented the Prince.67
Yet the Viceroy was not just being sycophantic. It was no smooth-tongued statesman, but the police officer attached to the Prince, Mr Stead, who said that he had at first been opposed to the tour but by the time it had finished he was convinced he had been wrong. ‘It had gone infinitely better than he had thought possible, and … the good that it had done was incalculable.’68 A question was put down in the House of Commons suggesting that the Prince should have conferred on him the title of ‘Prince of India’. The King opposed the idea and it was dropped.69 If he had not done so, his son would have proved even more reluctant. But the idea was not altogether foolish.
The rest of the trip, though longer than the Prince wished, was less taxing. For one thing, he did not have to cope with a hostile independence movement; for another, he was on the way home. He had badly wanted to visit China. ‘It does seem very hard,’ he told the King, ‘that when one has come all this long way to the Far East … I shouldn’t be able to go to Pekin, Shanghai, and other places of interest, all far more interesting than Japan, and the Chinks are much nicer people too.’70 The Foreign Secretary, Curzon, vetoed the idea however, and the Prince got no nearer than Hong Kong.
His determination not to find Japan interesting lasted throughout his stay there. The Ambassador, Sir Charles Eliot, noted with regret that he showed no curiosity in the institutions or government of the country and seemed bored by any discussion of the issues of the moment – ‘I think that really he was mentally fatigued and that his mind and nerves had not recovered from the strain of his journey in India.’71 Eliot also realized how dull everything must appear on a royal tour: ‘Princes must think that red carpets and flags are a kind of vegetation that grows everywhere like grass or trees. It certainly makes all places look the same, and the welcome organized by the police was also monotonous.’72 But even allowing for the bland and homogenized aspect of the country which was offered him – royalty’s equivalent of the tourist proceeding from Hilton Hotel to Hilton Hotel – the Prince does seem to have been over-ready to transmute Japanese gold to lead. Even the famed scenery he despised: ‘I don’t take much interest in it at any time and none at all sans TOI,’ he told Freda Dudley Ward, ‘and having been to Lake Louise and the Canadian Rockies with Scotland thrown in, I can’t ever hope to see anything better.’73
His indifference to the charms of Japan did not blind him to the fact that the Japanese were ‘a very great power in the World and their navy and their infantry is amazingly efficient’.74 He told the King that the Japanese navy was copied from the British, the army from the Germans and the press from the Americans. ‘And how wise they are from the viewpoint of a young nation, which can never hope to emulate ourselves, but who are rapidly, if they haven’t done it already, coming up to the level of a continental power!! And I should add the Yanks!!’75
This greatness, he considered, had been achieved in spite of rather than because of the imperial family. The Prince surveyed his hosts with bilious disapproval. The Emperor he never met, since he was insane and confined to his palace; with the Empress conversation was conducted through an interpreter and confined exclusively to the weather and the cherry blossom.76 In the absence of the Emperor, he was entertained most frequently by the young Prince Regent, Hirohito, who would try to talk French though he had no understanding of the language. The journalists tried to depict the two young princes as bosom friends but Eliot reported ‘the idea that he felt any real friendship for the Prince Regent is a pure myth, though perhaps the latter felt a sort of timid affection for him’.77
‘My God, one has to be careful what one says unless one can be quite quite sure one is alone,’ the Prince told Freda Dudley Ward.78 He managed generally to keep his feelings under control. He ‘got on excellent terms with all those with whom he could converse,’ wrote Thomas, ‘and generally gave the impression that Tokyo was the one place he had set out from England to see’.79 Eliot clearly felt him hypercritical, yet admitted ‘he never failed in charm and courtesy when brought face to face with any Japanese’.80 He was equally successful with the press. Incensed by the plethora of restrictions imposed upon them by the Japanese authorities, the journalists accompanying the tour decided in future to boycott it. The Prince called them together and talked them round. One correspondent who had been most active in advocating a press boycott ‘rose and said that after hearing HRH’s remarks he had entirely changed his views. He was now in favour of giving a full and favourable account of the Prince’s doings.’81
The Japanese courtiers were much struck by the way the Prince mixed informally with mere commoners. There was debate as to whether Hirohito should do the same and tremendous excitement was caused when the Prince Regent was observed personally to thank the landlord of the hotel where the Prince of Wales was staying at Hakone. So very condescending a gesture was unprecedented in the history of the imperial family. Eliot noted how the Prince’s presence breathed life into the atrophied court, ‘even the Empress became slightly skittish’.82
Informality could, however, become indiscretion. The Prince forgot his own remarks about the keen hearing of the Japanese, and though he kept his opinion of his hosts to himself, he aired his views on other subjects with disconcerting freedom. Lord Reading, he told Eliot, was clever but not at all the man to be Viceroy. Aware of the attentiveness of those around him, the Ambassador had to beg the Prince to remember that many Japanese spoke English.83 He was apt too to change plans at the last moment or cancel expeditions for which elaborate and expensive arrangements had been made. When called to order by the senior members of his staff he would be penitent for a while, but soon transgressed again. Eliot remembered one occasion aboard Renown when he and Halsey together tried to persuade the Prince to mend his ways. ‘HRH was sitting in a large high-backed chair close to the wall and as the sermon proceeded gradually wriggled upwards until he squatted on the top of the back and from that elevation regarded his two elderly monitors with a most impish and incredulous smile.’84
Eliot and Halsey might note his imperfections, a few of his hosts might have suffered from his whims and unpunctuality, but to the vast majority of the Japanese who encountered him or followed his doings he seemed little short of perfection. Piers Legh told his father that the Prince had ‘made as great an impression here as he had ever done before. His reception everywhere has been nothing short of marvellous, and he has apparently completely captured the country by storm. People who