Royal Transport. Peter Pigott

to read flag signals, keep watch, and run a picket boat. It wasn’t that his father had planned a naval career for Edward (he was, after all, going to accede to the throne) but that, as a former naval officer himself, George V thought it would teach him some concept of duty. Writing about the experience fifty years later, the Duke of Windsor recollected the voyage from Cowes to the Firth of Forth. He got to mix with boys his age, drink a glass of port on “guest nights,” and begin smoking cigarettes. It all ended in three months when he was summoned home to the library at Sandringham and told by his father that he was going to Oxford. “If I cannot stay in the Navy,” he is supposed to have begged his father, “please let me go around the world and learn about different countries and their peoples at first hand.” In the summer of 1913, he was sent on a tour of Europe to improve his languages, and also made an officer in the Royal Navy, his commission jointly signed by his father, Winston Churchill, the young First Lord of the Admiralty, and his relative Prince Louis of Battenberg, First Sea Lord.¹⁸

      Second sons in the royal family (such as both George V and Prince Albert, the Duke of York) were trained for a career in the Senior Service, the Royal Navy. It would thus be as a member of the crew of an old training ship, HMS Cumberland, that Prince Albert (Bertie to his family), the future George VI, first visited Canada in 1913. Known as Mr. Johnson by all on board, the seventeen-year-old had never even crossed the English Channel, let alone the Atlantic, and now he was stoking coal with the other middies (midshipmen), seeing exotic Tenerife, and drinking beer. With lifelong gastric problems, the Prince was never a good sailor and was plagued with seasickness throughout his life. Without his father’s authoritarian bearing and perpetually in the shadow of his older brother, Albert stammered and was remembered as too shy to meet the young ladies of Montreal. Interviews with the press terrified him even more. Harassed by North American reporters, he hired a shipmate to impersonate him. The Canadian tour was part of his education, and besides Halifax and Montreal, he visited Niagara Falls. On the way home, in Charlottetown, the Prince refereed a cricket match between the crew and the local team. HMS Cumberland would soon become a familiar sight to Canadians, since, because of the First World War, the 9,800-tonne armoured cruiser got a second lease on life, doing convoy duty between the U.K. and Canada until 1917. Three years after the Canadian visit, as a sub-lieutenant, the future George VI would take part in the Battle of Jutland on HMS Collingwood.

      Even before the war had ended, Prime Minister Lloyd George had conceived the plan for a whole series of Empire tours for the heir to the throne, to strengthen relations with the peoples of the Commonwealth. His Majesty approved them, as his father had approved his own worldwide tour in 1901. But now twenty-five, the Prince of Wales had been changed by the war and the gap between his generation and that of his father’s was becoming more obvious daily.¹⁹ His first Canadian tour was devised for him. On August 5, 1919, the Prince of Wales left Portsmouth for St. John’s, Newfoundland, on the battleship HMS Renown.²⁰ He was accompanied by a retinue of twenty-two, which included friends, clerks, valets, orderlies, and two detectives from Scotland Yard. The Renown was too large for the harbour at Charlottetown, and the Prince transferred to HMS Dragon, returning to the battleship for his arrival at Quebec City on August 21. Between Vancouver and Victoria, His Royal Highness sailed on the Canadian Pacific ferry Princess Alice, and the next year, when he returned, it would be the Princess Louise.

      MOD photo

       Prince Albert (later George VI) as a midshipman when his ship HMS Cumberland arrived in Canada in 1913.

      When George V went to France in 1923, instead of taking the Victoria and Albert III, he travelled rather bizarrely on the Southern Railway Steamship Biarritz, which flew a White Ensign, a Royal Standard, and an Admiralty flag. As for the royal yacht, the King used it for short cruises, like his father, going as far as the Mediterranean Sea. An escape from the rigours of the court and press, the yacht belonged intimately to the family, its symbolism never so obvious as in the 1920s, when Queen Mary threatened to ban the Prince of Wales from it as punishment for his unorthodox social life.²¹