Authors: Dennis Friedman
One of King George’s great strengths, which was valued highly by his subjects in the rapidly changing post-war years, was his stability. His constancy of manner, his unaltered mode of dress, his insistence on punctuality, the predictable unpredictability of his mood, his keen sense of duty, his insistence on the preservation of social values were reminders not only of what once was but of what he hoped in vain still might be. His dependable appearance reassured those who mourned the loss of a past in which life, for the privileged classes at least, appeared to have been rosy and in which
the senseless slaughter of young men on the horrendous scale of the 1914–18 war was as yet unknown.
The King’s disapproval of David did not extend to his brother Prince Albert (Bertie) whom on 5 June 1920 he created Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, Baron Killarney. In thanking his father for so honouring him Bertie told him that he hoped he would be able to live up to the title that once had been his father’s. The King wrote to his son, in headmasterish tones, to tell him to think of his father as his ‘best friend’. He did not add ‘because I’m your father and I know what’s best for you’, but the implication was there and Bertie, far from disagreeing with his father, believed him to be correct. The fact that his son was so compliant endeared him to the King. Obedience to a ‘commanding officer’ had been so instilled into him that he valued it highly in others. Bertie had always tried to please his father but often with a singular lack of success. His need for his father’s approval was so intense that when it was withheld the recurring bouts of depression that were a feature of his adult life were exacerbated.
Although David and Bertie were fond of one another, the two brothers were very different in temperament. David had asserted himself somewhat late in the day and as a young adult, prone to adolescent behaviour, had rebelled against the
modus vivendi
to which his father was so committed. Bertie, on the other hand, was more timid. Far from rebelling, he had long ago realized that King George’s love for him was conditional on his obedience to his wishes, and he did whatever he could to please his father. When, despite his best efforts, he failed to do so, he experienced feelings of bereavement. Since King George had left his children for long periods so often during their childhood, it was hardly surprising that Bertie grew up to believe that if he were to disobey his father he might abandon him for good.
After his near-fatal illness in 1928 King George never fully recovered his strength. Although his recovery had been slow, it was welcomed by his subjects who over the years had grown to appreciate him. The King’s courage, his attention to detail, his insistence on correctness, his self-discipline,
his regard for his subjects both at home and overseas and his genuine concern for the health and vigour of a nation in turmoil in the immediate post-war years all endeared him to them.
The ‘all for one and one for all’ spirit that typified the war years had dissipated. While many supported the growing concern for the welfare of the working man, many others were still wedded to the idea that the past, with its archaic class structure, should be preserved at all costs. Conservatives blamed the King for not playing a more active role in stemming ‘the swelling Socialist tide’, and Socialists complained that the monarchy was spending too much money on ceremonial state visits abroad. While the King was certainly unimpressed with socialism since the murder of his Russian relatives in the revolution of 1917, he could not see what, if anything, could be done about it.
The King had barely recovered from his illness when a new General Election was fought in 1929. The government elected in 1924 had almost come to the end of its statutory term and when the King received Ramsay Macdonald and invited him to form a government he was not yet well enough to leave his bedroom at Windsor. The new Labour government lasted for only two years. The Great Depression of October 1929, the massive increase in unemployment and the collapse of American credit were eventually to lead to its fall. In 1931, at a time when the economy had all but collapsed, Ramsay Macdonald, no longer having an overall majority, was persuaded by the King to form a Coalition government. The Labour Party turned against the Prime Minister on the grounds that by forming an alliance with the old enemies of the party he had become a traitor to the socialist cause. Macdonald had to face a run on sterling, the suspension of the gold standard, a 25 per cent devaluation of the pound, a 10 per cent cut in the salaries of the civil service, as well as a reduction in unemployment benefit. This last was a particularly hard decision at a time when unemployment was running at around the five million mark. With the support of the King, Macdonald managed to survive until 1935, despite Labour’s dislike of his policies. With the Prime Minister’s great oratorical powers gone, his memory failing and his speech inarticulate, he
continued in office until increasing signs of dementia put an end to his career. He was then succeeded by Stanley Baldwin.
The King began once more to take a keen interest in both home and foreign affairs. Having been made conscious of his mortality by his illness, it was as if he wanted to make his mark in politics while there was still time. His long association with India, where the Raj reigned supreme, and his love for the country which had in 1911 had so warmly welcomed him, led to feelings of sadness as India moved inexorably towards independence. His great wish was for India to remain within the British Empire and he thought back to the time when after his departure from Bombay work had begun on the triumphal arch on the waterfront. The monument had been built not only to commemorate his visit but – as he saw it – to welcome through it both him and his descendants as Emperors. Indian nationalism had, however, found a powerful voice in Mahatma Gandhi who was achieving remarkable success in the non-cooperation movement, a form of passive resistance in which no one would be hurt.
The King’s nostalgia for the Indian subcontinent and his wish to return to it in the role of favourite son was in naïve contrast to Gandhi’s more intellectual approach to the apparently insoluble problem of Indian independence. In no way was India calling her surrogate son home from across the seas, as the King would like to have believed. She was calling rather to her own sons to grow up and take responsibility for themselves. Gandhi was in touch with the teachings of the psychoanalytic movement, and his concept of independence was very different from that of King George V who saw it as an abrupt and painful divorce, with little hope of reconciliation and with both parties going their separate ways. His own separations (from his biological mother) had been abrupt and had been caused by long journeys overseas. They were, as a consequence, painful. In 1925 Gandhi’s search for independence through peaceful coexistence took him to a meeting of the Calcutta psychoanalytic society where a solution to the ever-present problems of Hindu—Muslim cooperation was discussed (Kakar, 1997).
Unlike Gandhi, King George sought not a coexistence between equals
but, as always, the perpetuation of a parent—child dependency between Mother India and ‘darling Georgie’. In 1935, at a conference in London which echoed the verbal violence that the King had been used to, both in the school room and as a naval cadet, he warned Gandhi that he would not tolerate any form of terrorism. He showed no understanding of Gandhi’s well-known insistence on non-violent forms of protest.
Other than the slow disintegration of the British Empire, more sinister events were gradually becoming apparent, not least of which was the erosion in the fabric of the League of Nations. Following the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Germany had withdrawn from the League of Nations when the Disarmaments Committee had refused their demands for military parity with France. In 1932 Japan had already done likewise after she had illegally seized possession of Manchuria. The King’s interest in what was going on around him allowed for some forthright although undiplomatic responses. Never one for small talk, and occasionally at a loss with big talk, he was, however, familiar with the bluntness of the ward room. At a meeting with the German Ambassador in 1934 he told him that Germany was the peril of the world and that if she went on at her present rate, there could be a war within ten years. King George knew how to deal with bullies. He had had plenty of experience. The King took an immediate dislike to Hitler. Unlike some of his ministers who believed that it might be possible for an accommodation to be reached with the German dictator in the interests of avoiding conflict, King George, no more prescient than they, saw in Adolf Hitler a reminder of the tyrant that he had discovered his cousin the Kaiser to be, another German hate object which allowed him to focus all the violently angry feelings that less than twenty years earlier he had had to suppress in the interests of family unity. The cold politics of appeasement were not for him. In the last two or three years of his life he had found in Adolf Hitler an appropriate outlet for the bottled-up rage of his over-controlled upbringing.
Despite the occasional feeling that gloom and despair were once again on the move over Europe, Britain was pleased to be diverted by the kind of
ceremonial distraction that had so pleased the nation when King George and Queen Mary had married twenty-five years earlier and with which as a child the King had been familiar when separation had been in the air. A military band at the quayside, however, was not going to heal the rifts in Europe any more than it had healed the rifts when Prince George’s personal world was falling apart. Neither the King nor the Queen could have known that four years after their accession in 1910 the First World War was to break out: neither could they then have predicted that twenty-five years later and four years after the celebration of their Silver Jubilee another world war would be initiated by Germany, involving more or less the same protagonists.
The Silver Jubilee of King George and Queen Mary was celebrated on 6 May 1935, a warm summer’s day. On his return from the Jubilee Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s Cathedral the King, together with the Queen, stood on the balcony of the palace. Looking down at the welcoming crowds with amazement, he said: ‘[This is] the greatest number of people in the streets that I have ever seen in my life.’ In the evening the King spoke to his people on the wireless. Many of his listeners stood in silence and to attention while he spoke. For a man who normally eschewed public emotion he was unusually outspoken. As if he was aware that within seven months he would be dead, he thanked the people of Britain for the love they had shown him, a love he probably thought he deserved but which none the less he was touchingly gratified to receive.
The King may have had greatness thrust upon him, but on his sometimes faltering journey through life he had made his way without recourse to psychotherapeutic help to enable him to unravel his dysfunctional upbringing. It would have occurred to him neither to disclaim accountability for his own shortcomings nor to blame his parents for their haphazard attention to his emotional needs. Familiar with the name of Freud, but probably not with the significance of his discoveries, he would have been intolerant of any intrusion into the privacy of his thoughts or of any suggestion that others might have been to blame for his adult behaviour. The King had risen through the ranks from cadet to commander, from child to adult. In the end
he was a better commander than he had been a cadet. He had inherited an image. His subjects recognized before he did that, as with all icons, the more one looks at them the more of their hidden treasure they reveal.
Less than three months before his death the King, although already frail, had one last pleasant duty to attend to. On 6 November 1935 his third son, Prince Henry the Duke of Gloucester, married Lady Alice Christabel Montagu-Douglas-Scott. The ceremony was a private one, not only because of King George’s failing health but also because of the recent death of Lady Alice’s father, the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury. The ceremony took place in the chapel at Buckingham Palace. In possibly the last letter the King wrote, he informed his new daughter-in-law that he ‘would try to take [her father’s place] & would do anything to try to help her’. Although he had done his best during his lifetime, he had not shone as a father. He tried to make up for this both as a grandfather and as a surrogate ‘father’ to anyone who needed him.
King George V died at his home at Sandringham on 20 January 1936 with his children dutifully gathered around the bedside. For two days crowds of well-wishers had been gathering outside Buckingham Palace to read the bulletins posted on the gates. The first hint of imminent disaster came at 3.30 p.m. on 18 January. A bulletin signed by Sir Frederic Willans, Sir Stanley Hewett, Lord Dawson of Penn and the cardiologist Sir Maurice Cassidy stated that ‘His Majesty the King had had some hours of restful sleep. The cardiac weakness and the embarrassment of the circulation have slightly increased and give cause for anxiety.’ Lord Dawson of Penn’s final bulletin was broadcast at midnight. ‘Death came peacefully to the King at 11.55 p.m.’
Fate had it that the nation would mourn not only the King but the poet Rudyard Kipling whose love for one another was a brotherly one and continued until the end. ‘The King is dead,’ the newspapers declared, ‘and has taken his trumpeter with him’. The two men who met in 1922 among the war graves in the presence of death and whose friendship flourished through the sadness of their mutual loss were parted in death fourteen years later.
It is said that Dawson hastened to end the King’s suffering by injecting his jugular vein with morphine and cocaine (he was already in a coma) so that his patient’s death would occur before midnight. Thus it would be first reported in the morning rather than in the less prestigious evening papers (Watson, 1986). The King had never been over-impressed with Lord Dawson since his handling of his near-fatal illness in 1928. He would most probably have been amused by the acid wit of Margot Asquith – the widow of his first Prime Minister and a woman addicted to outrageous flights of fancy – who commented in old age: ‘The King told me he would never have died if it had not been for that fool Dawson of Penn’ (Longford, 1989).