Authors: Dennis Friedman
Prince George may not have been the largest, oldest or strongest of the cadets aboard the
Britannia,
but it was not long before the hostility for which he had been notorious from the nursery onwards began to surface. His anger took a form that was perhaps overtly acceptable but covertly vicious. Described by sycophants as ‘having a keen sense of fun’, Prince George’s ‘fun’ was frequently at the expense of others. His practical jokes had sadistic undertones, especially when the vulnerable victim would
climb into his hammock at night to find two marlinspikes placed where they would do the most harm. If his father was hoping for one of his sons to be a leader, George was doing his best. He was not so much a leader, however, as a ringleader. Constantly challenging authority, he always took his punishment like a ‘man’. His training aboard
Britannia,
represented as an exercise in democracy, turned out to be an exercise in autocracy. Prince George learned that authority always triumphed over the ‘little people’, however much they might struggle to overturn it, and that authority also possessed a power he envied and which he showed by his rebelliousness that he wanted for himself. As an adult, King George ruled as an autocrat, if not over his subjects certainly over his family. Autocracy was also the aim of many of his fellow graduates. Fifty-six years later, two of them were Admirals of the Fleet, three were Admirals, six were Vice-Admirals and four were Rear-Admirals (Nicolson, 1952). When Prince George was fourteen he graduated from the
Britannia
and almost immediately joined the 3,912-ton steamship HMS
Bacchante
for a cruise that was to last for three years.
W
HEN
P
RINCE
G
EORGE
enrolled on the
Britannia
in 1877 he was the youngest of the six naval cadets on the training ship. He graduated in July 1879 having done well in most subjects, particularly mathematics and sailing. His success says as much for his ability to turn his crippling anger outwards and to sublimate it in physical activity as for his examination skills. A less physically robust boy might well have been damaged at the outset by having to adapt to such an abrupt and draconian change in environment. His brother Eddy, although almost two years his senior, coped less well in a milieu that was far removed from anything either of them had previously known.
At the age of twelve, and with little prior warning, Prince George found that he was no longer a big fish in a tiny pond, in which he had been treated with a deference he had taken for granted, but an insignificant fish in the vast and probably frightening pond of
Britannia.
By now he had come to accept that the attention paid to him by his parents was at best intermittent and at worst inconsistent, although his mother’s love for him and his for her was never in question. Princess Alexandra continued to make it clear to ‘ Georgie’ that he would always be her baby, that she hoped he would never grow up and that he would always be special to her. Prince George found it hard to reconcile his mother’s erratic behaviour towards him with her constant pledges of affection. Had he not had her letters to which he could refer from time to time to reassure himself of her feelings, he might well have doubted the veracity of her protestations of love. The intensity of his mother’s involvement with her son (‘quality time’), alternating with periods of neglect when family and constitutional pressures took her away from him, helped to produce an over-anxious and difficult
child who in adult life had difficulty in forming close relationships.
There is a tantalizing quality to such love, a hint to a child that were he not to cling to its source it might slip away. Having grown up to experience his mother’s feelings for him as either overwhelmingly loving or completely absent, Prince George’s reaction was to believe that people were either wholly for or wholly against him. At the outbreak of the Great War he was bewildered when his German family, whom he loved, turned against him. It took him until 1917 to accept that they were his country’s enemies. From then on he despised them. From the time he left home at the age of twelve until his death in 1936 he saw everything in black and white. There were few grey areas.
In 1879, when Prince George was fourteen, the all-or-nothing attitude to life with which he had been brought up was about to face a critical test. Having been banished for two years for training on the
Britannia,
he was about to be sent on a three-year world cruise, two years of which were to take him completely away from his home, his parents and everyone else (apart from his brother and his tutors) with whom he was familiar. Such a parting from a beloved mother must have been very hard for a fourteen-year-old boy.
In the 1870s opinion was not divided about the influence of boarding schools on children. Even the most liberal held the view that separating a child from his parents for five years and sending him to boarding school, or into the Navy, would make a man of him. But what sort of man? A man who would grow up to value discipline above love; a man trained to obey orders, to salute the flag, to respect uniforms and uniformity; a man who believed that it was more important to be correct than to be fair; a man accustomed to the company only of his own sex. Such a man would one day become His Majesty King George V.
Within a few weeks of leaving the
Britannia
and the friends they had made aboard her, Prince George and Prince Eddy bade their tearful farewells to their parents and sisters and embarked upon the corvette HMS
Bacchante.
Objections had been voiced by the First Lord of the Admiralty (Mr W.H. Smith) and the Prime Minister (Lord Beaconsfield), both of
whom were concerned that it was hazardous for the heir apparent and the heir presumptive to travel in the same ship. Queen Victoria was angry at the government’s attempt to interfere with the education of her grandsons, a matter which she insisted was a private family affair. She was more concerned with the ‘roughness to which the boys would be exposed’, not because it might do them harm but because the experience might be incompatible with eventual Kingship’. Not knowing for certain which of them was to succeed to the throne made her dilemma more difficult. In the end it was Prince Eddy, the heir, who gained least from the experience and Prince George – who was not expected to be King – who benefited most.
After much discussion with Mr Dalton and the entire Cabinet but neither of the two Princes, Queen Victoria eventually gave her consent. This, however, was not before she made absolutely certain that the
Bacchante
was seaworthy by demanding that the ship be sent out twice in a storm. Prince George’s long association with the Royal Navy had begun. It lasted for fifteen years, ending only with the sudden death of his brother Eddy, when George became the heir apparent.
On 17 September 1879 Prince Eddy and Prince George together with Mr Dalton and two other instructors, one to tutor them in mathematics and the other in French, left Spithead via Gibraltar for the Caribbean for the first leg of their journey. Eight months later the ship returned to Spithead and, after a short break, a three-week cruise was undertaken to Vigo and back. The third and final cruise, which lasted for just under two years, took in South America, Australia, China, Japan, Egypt and Greece (Dalton, 1886).
Although there were many letters to Prince Edward from Queen Victoria, concerning the importance of avoiding the ‘contamination’ likely to affect her grandsons if they stayed at home and became involved with the Marlborough House set, little concern was expressed for the feelings of either of the boys as they faced two years in exile.
In a letter sent from Cowes, where, on the day after the start of the cruise, the ship had put in because of bad weather, Prince George made his feelings known to his mother. Nostalgic and homesick after only a few
hours at sea, he wrote: ‘My darling Motherdear, I miss you so very much & felt so sorry when I had to say goodbye to you and sisters & it was dreadfully hard saying goodbye to Dear Papa and Uncle Hans [Prince Hans, Princess Alexandra’s uncle]. It was too rough yesterday to go to sea, so we stopped in here for the night … I felt so miserable yesterday saying goodbye. I shall think of you all going to Scotland tonight & I only wish we were going to [sic]. Lord Colville will take this letter & he has to go, so I must finish it.’
It was not only Prince George who found the separation hard. Although Princess Alexandra may well have had confidence in the Royal Navy, its ships and its officers, she knew that life at sea was not without its dangers. When the boys had left home two years earlier for the
Britannia,
in a letter to Queen Victoria she spoke of their departure as ‘a great wrench but must be got through … I trust to God that all may go well with them – and that their first step in the world by themselves won’t be a too difficult or hard one – poor little boys, they cried so bitterly.’ She knew how difficult it had been for the boys when they were on a shore-based training school not far from home and how Prince George suffered dreadfully from homesickness. It must have been all the more worrying for her to see her boys off for a cruise which in its later stages was to take them away from her for two years.
Although Princess Alexandra loved Eddy, it was not with the intensity of emotion that she felt for her second son of whom she was particularly fond. Her endearments, recorded in so much detail in her letters, imply an attachment that would now be considered excessive. At a time, however, when the main form of communication was by letter, Princess Alexandra and her second son would have had to confide all their feelings to paper. The permanency of the written word has a power that the spoken word has not. Read and reread, the often long-awaited letters with their messages of affection assumed an importance that was never forgotten. The central theme within them was clear. Mother and son loved one another and found no impediment in saying so. For a male adolescent any physical expression of love for the opposite sex parent is usually experienced as embarrassing
and uncomfortable and is generally avoided. This leaves the way clear for him later to transfer his loving feelings on to a more appropriate partner. The so-called ‘incest barrier’ never seemed to get in the way at least of ‘Georgie dear’s’ verbal caresses. His pre-pubertal language implied a reluctance to grow up and leave his mother. Even when he had reached adulthood he wrote: ‘think sometimes of your poor boy so far away but always your most devoted and loving little Georgie’.
With regard to Prince George’s emotional immaturity
vis-à-vis
his mother, it may have been that mother and son colluded to enable him to remain faithful to her. Perhaps the incest barrier had been suppressed by their need for one another in Prince George’s childhood, and it may be that it reappeared later to mar his marriage to Princess May of Teck. If this was the case, sexual contact between Prince George and the ‘mother’ his wife became when their first child was born would have been at best distasteful and at worst almost impossible. Whatever were his reasons for wanting to remain a child in relation to his mother, the effect of this on his subsequent relationships with women was in no doubt.
An interesting aspect of Prince George’s closeness to his mother is reflected in Princess Alexandra’s daily hair-brushing routine. Although it was his mother’s hair that drew them together, neither of them would have thought of her ‘crowning glory’ as the symbol of her femininity and her sexuality. Nevertheless her long hair, worn as was the custom dressed on the top of her head, needed a great deal of attention and Prince George always read aloud to his mother at this time. They both enjoyed their hair-brushing/reading interaction. It reassured them both of their love for one another.
It was not only Prince George to whom Princess Alexandra remained close. She had difficulty in allowing any of her children to grow up. Typically she celebrated her daughter Princess Louise’s nineteenth birthday with a children’s party. She was at her most happy when her children were babies. Her husband was in love with her and attentive to her needs. She was a beautiful icon representing the spirit of a Britain anxious to have done with the Victorian era, and above all it was before the episode of
rheumatic fever during her third pregnancy, which was not only permanently to affect her health but also to change her husband’s attitude towards her. From that time on, the couple’s boisterous and playful relationship with one another was to be replaced by Prince Edward’s exaggerated respect for, and sometimes resentment of, his wife’s invalid status.
The departure (in tears) of the two boys from their sheltered and privileged home for a life for which neither of them was psychologically prepared was marked with the pomp and circumstance peculiar to royal ceremonial. The Very Reverend Canon Dalton commented that: ‘When HRH the Prince of Wales determined to send his sons to sea, it was chiefly with a view to the mental and moral training they would receive as midshipmen in Her Majesty’s Navy.’ There were 450 men aboard the steamship
Bacchante
and, of the six naval cadets, two were the Princes. Their mental training was directed towards teaching them to control their feelings and learning the importance of the monarchical stiff upper lip. Nothing is known of the outcome of their moral training. Had Queen Victoria been aware that, years later, Winston Churchill was to describe life in the Navy as little more than ‘rum, buggery and the lash’, she would not only have been shocked but there would have been little likelihood of the two boys being educated at sea.
One can only speculate as to the effect a different system of education might have had on King George V and on the future of the monarchy. Had he not been a bullied adolescent, and abandoned – as he thought – by a mother whom he adored, he might have grown up to have been a more tolerant father. His heir, the Duke of Windsor, may not have needed to look for illicit love to compensate him for the absence of love in his childhood and may thus have avoided setting a trend, the ripples from which were to influence the sexual behaviour of some members of the Royal Family two generations later.