Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (17 page)

The boy must have been heartily thankful that his father took such comments less seriously than his late grandfather would have done, though when he became a father himself, Prince George would view tutors’ reports on his own offspring as gravely as any parent of the Victorian age.

* The same story has been told about the Queen’s eldest grandchild, Prince William of Prussia. It is more likely to relate to Prince George. With his deformed left arm, William would have had great difficulty in taking off his clothes unaided.

P
rincess Helena possessed no remarkable qualities. Plain and homely in appearance, uncomplicated in character, she became a stabilizing influence in the gloomy family circle where, at times, Queen Victoria hardly allowed her children to show any signs of cheerfulness lest they be misinterpreted as disrespect to their late father. Patient, with a no-nonsense attitude to life and quiet sense of efficiency, she became her mother’s prop, and a useful secretary. If she was to get any freedom at all from her mother’s beck and call, she realized, it would have to be in marriage. In 1865 she was introduced to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. Like her, he was no catch. Penniless by royal standards and balding, he appeared much older than his thirty-four years. Nevertheless, he was kindly, easy-going, a close friend of the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, and above all he harboured no objections to making his home in England near his mother-in-law as she considered her daughter much too useful to lose.

Helena and Christian were married on 5 July 1866, six weeks after her twentieth birthday. She was the first of the Queen’s daughters to be granted the freedom of a honeymoon abroad, and they visited Paris, Interlaken and Genoa. On their return they moved into Frogmore House, and on 14 April 1867 she gave birth to her first son, named Christian Victor, at Windsor Castle. He was followed by a brother, Albert, in 1869, and two sisters, Helena Victoria in 1870 and two years later, shortly after a move to Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park, Marie Louise. A third son, Harold, was born in 1874 but only lived for eight days, and a stillborn child followed the next year.

Despite these tragedies, Prince and Princess Christian’s marriage was one of the most successful among Queen Victoria’s children. The unambitious, unpretentious partners might have been made for each other. Unlike the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, they were not doomed to wait years for a throne until it was too late to reap the benefit; unlike the Prince and Princess of Wales, there was no incompatibility between their characters which made the marriage little more than one in name; and they never knew the unhappiness which would result in virtual separation between the as yet unmarried Prince Alfred and Princess Louise and their spouses.

The children enjoyed a relatively simple upbringing, notwithstanding the fact that their grandmother was their Queen. As Prince Christian was in effect unemployed, he had plenty of time to supervise their upbringing. He had always been devoted to children and he made an excellent father, teaching them German and giving them nightly lessons through the medium of German fairy tales. From their father, it was said, they learned ‘the three lessons of the Persian boy of old, to ride, to shoot straight, and to tell the truth’. Others were sometimes called upon to assist in the educational process. ‘I am so much obliged to you for telling me about that Nursery Governess,’ the Princess wrote to Lady Bridport (7 January 1873), ‘and I am sure had I wanted one, she might have suited – I think our boy too young yet to require a governess in the house – we have someone in to teach him for an hour in the day.’
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Healthy outdoor children, they learned to shoot at an early age. They were devoted to dogs and had two dachshunds, named Waldmann and Waldine. ‘Other early amusements of ours,’ recalled their son Albert, ‘were hockey and cutting down trees in the park, in which we were much interested and constantly took part.’
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They played with the children of the household and of workers on the estate. They were taught cricket when they were about six by one of their father’s footmen, and played with the sons of Colonel Gordon, their father’s comptroller. Other early playfellows were Arthur Wellesley, son of the Dean of Windsor, and Edward Murdoch, son of Mr Charles Townshend Murdoch of Buckhurst, Wokingham, a veteran of the Rifle Brigade in the Crimea, and later MP for Reading. As they grew older, they took cricket and other organized games more and more seriously, bringing in a number of boys who were employed, or children of those employed, about the Great Park.

Prince and Princess Christian were very literary-minded. He loved poetry, and she had already translated her father’s papers for an official memoir. For their sons’ first tutor, in 1876, they engaged the poet F.W. Bourdillon, who commented on the boys’ intelligence and on the depth of family affection he saw at Cumberland Lodge.

Though their daughters had their own personal maids, they were taught to dress themselves, fold their own clothes and tidy their own rooms. They dressed very simply; in winter they wore straight, blue-serge dresses and over these, in the schoolroom, Holland aprons bound with red or blue were worn. In the evening they had to change into left-over summer frocks, with high bronze-coloured kid boots buttoned up almost to their knees, and they always wore gloves out of doors. The latter were a source of some resentment, and in old age Princess Marie Louise thoroughly disliked having to wear gloves. Every summer they were put into plain white dresses, usually embroidered with broderie anglaise, and worn with a sash. The changeover invariably took place on 1 May, regardless of the temperature.

The Princesses were taught by French and German governesses, in order to improve their familiarity with both languages. When they were older a Frenchwoman, Madame de Goncourt, came twice a week to discuss French literature and European contemporary history with them, in French.

They also attended dancing classes in the Albert Institute at Windsor on Wednesday afternoons, where they were taught to dance and to have physical drill, considered so vital for their health and deportment. Prince Christian laid great stress on this aspect of his daughters’ upbringing. They had to learn how to stand, rise, sit down gracefully, walk, above all how to curtsey and greet people and crowds with a little wave of the hand, a smile, and that vital slight inclination of the head.

Music played an important part in the Christians’ family life. As an adult, Helena had outgrown the heavy-handedness on the piano which Miss Anderson had taken such pains to correct when she was smaller, and her musical friends included the singers Jenny Lind and Dame Clara Butt. The children were introduced to music and singing at an early age, and with his love of playing the piano it was evident that Christian Victor had inherited his mother’s musical ear.

As part of their service to others, the children were encouraged to take an interest in medical and welfare work. Princess Christian was one of the original members of the Red Cross in Britain, and she was instrumental in initiating the State Registration of Nurses. Her sons and daughters took a close interest in medical work for the army, and even the young Marie Louise played her part with the others in 1877–8, rolling bandages to be sent out to the sick and wounded in the Russo-Turkish War.

The horrors of war rarely impinged on the consciousness of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren in England, but for their cousins in Prussia, during the decade of Bismarck’s conflicts, it was a different matter. Vicky dreaded the influence of Prussian militarism on her children, especially on her eldest son William, who showed evident signs of growing up in the old-fashioned Teutonic mould. She relished the chance to bring her children over to stay in Britain whenever possible.

Prince William’s handicapped left arm was a severe trial, the effects of which were compounded by thoughtless treatment from so-called specialists. As a boy he was made to lift heavy weights with fingers that could barely grip an object at all, subjected to electric shocks mistakenly supposed to bring life to dead or imperfectly formed muscles, and strapped into a cage for an hour a day to correct the sideways tilt of his head caused by the different weight of his arms. None of these methods had any positive effect; on the contrary, they terrifed the young patient. Vicky and Fritz only allowed him to be subjected to them as they felt it held a chance, no matter how slender, of success.

What the boy really needed was to be surrounded by people who would accept his deformity and try to make light of it – as the Prince Consort would have doubtless done, had he lived long enough. The first stage occurred almost by accident, when as a boy of seven he was staying at Balmoral. One afternoon he wandered into the ghillies’ room, where the men were cleaning the guns. He attempted to pick up a gun, but found it too heavy to lift with his good hand. Most of the men roared with laughter at his clumsiness, and he was about to scream with fury when one of them took the small rifle that had been the first gun of the Prince of Wales, put it in the boy’s hand, and began to show him how to use it. From that day, William was taught that his bad arm need not be the insuperable barrier that everyone had supposed.

Queen Victoria always had a special place in her heart for this eldest grandchild. One of his fondest childhood memories was of an incident when he was twelve years old, and staying with her at Osborne House. One day Admiral Foley, a senior officer at Portsmouth, was invited to luncheon. A sailing frigate had recently been salvaged and towed into harbour, and the Queen wanted to know all the details. After they had exhausted this rather gloomy subject, she asked him how his sister was. Being rather deaf, he did not realize that the subject of conversation had changed. Still obsessed with the ship, he replied emphatically that he was going to have her turned over, take a good look at her bottom and have it well scraped. The Queen put down her knife and fork, and went into fits of hysterical laughter that soon had the rest of the family at table equally convulsed with mirth. The servants who were handing round dishes put them down and promptly hid behind the screen round the serving table, while the elderly admiral looked bewildered, wondering what all the amusement was about.

‘Prussian pride’ was a sin that had to be checked, but sometimes the Prussian children imbibed the wrong lessons from their mother. Princess Charlotte, on a visit to Balmoral in September 1871, haughtily refused to shake hands with John Brown, on the grounds that ‘Mama says I ought not to be too familiar with servants’.
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Whether the girl had been told not to be ‘too familiar with servants’ in general or not may be doubted. Yet Vicky, in common with most of her brothers and sisters, had no time for Brown, whose rude manners towards everybody were threatening to make the Queen, nicknamed behind her back ‘the Empress Brown’, a figure of ridicule.

Vicky never enjoyed the same rapport with her elder children as she did with the younger ones, all born after she had been able to assert herself and have more of a say in their upbringing. The younger ones (excluding her third son Sigismund, who died of meningitis at the age of twenty-one months) all enjoyed their English holidays with ‘Grandmama’ at her homes almost as much as their mother. Her youngest son Waldemar (‘Waldie’) was a particular favourite, and Vicky had high hopes for him. Of all the Queen’s grandchildren, he was the one most interested in hunting for minerals and fossils on the Isle of Wight. He made a fine collection including fragments of fossilized coniferous wood, ammonite, and an iguanodon’s tooth, all carefully labelled and deposited by his mother in the Swiss Cottage Museum.

By this time the museum had long since outgrown its modest accommodation in the cottage, and an adjacent building was erected in 1862 to house the ever-growing collections.* Beside Waldie’s minerals could (and still can to this day) be seen foreign antiquities collected or preserved during royal tours, oriental
objets d’art
, statuettes, as well as minerals and archaeological specimens, granite from Balmoral, porphyry from Cornwall, fluorspar and quartz brought back from Weardale and parts of Durham by Affie in 1857, granite, vitreous sponges, shells, sharks’ teeth and stalactites he found in Malta and Bermuda a few years later, and malachite, lapis lazuli, amethyst and jasper collected by him, Bertie and Arthur as boys. One of the most poignant displays in the museum is of Bulgarian children’s costumes as worn by Johens and Georgy, two small boys rescued by Captain Hyde Parker of the Royal Navy at Kustendjeh while fleeing from the Turks in 1854. Brought back to safety in England, they were taken care of and educated by Queen Victoria, and they subsequently joined the Navy.

Affie’s two eldest daughters, Marie and Victoria Melita, were particularly captivated by the fan shells, all tantalizingly beyond reach behind locked glass doors, safe from their busy fingers. Sometimes the custodian would unlock the door, and for a brief moment they would be allowed to hold one of the prize exhibits, a shell which was ‘mysterious dark red but marked like tortoise-shell and of all marvels, it was double and had little spikes all over it.’ To Marie, it was ‘pure bliss’ to be allowed to touch such a precious object.
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Waldie was devoted to animals and pets, on one occasion with unforeseen results. On a visit to Buckingham Palace, he arrived with a baby crocodile called Bob, which he let loose in the Queen’s room one day while she was busy at her papers. Her reaction at such an unexpected sight can readily be imagined, and her shrieks brought servants rushing in. None of them dared to pick Bob up, and Waldie had his share of helpless laughter at their expense before he agreed to put Bob back in his box.

He also showed a most un-Prussian devotion to cats and dogs, and after his death from diphtheria at the age of eleven, a loss from which his mother never really recovered, his favourite tabby cat showed a particular affection towards her. Sadly this did not save the animal from a brutal end. One morning a Prussian
jäger
saw her sitting in the garden, shot her, hung her body against a tree and cut off her nose. Her younger daughters, as bitterly distressed as she was, found some solace in burying the body in the garden beside a favourite dachshund. William, who evidently dismissed such love for pets as a ridiculous English sentiment, showed her no sympathy, thinking the
jäger
was showing laudable zeal as cats might harm pheasants. Queen Victoria was horrified: ‘how distressed I am about your cat! it is monstrous – and the man ought to be hung on the tree’.
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