Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (24 page)

The Coronation was postponed when the King was taken ill three days before the ceremony was scheduled, and underwent an emergency operation for appendicitis. An impatient but slimmer and fitter King was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 9 August. Before leaving Buckingham Palace for the abbey that morning, his grandchildren were speechless as they gazed at him in his finery with awe. ‘Good morning children, am I not a funny-looking old man?’ he asked them genially, keen to break the ice.

King Edward’s love of small children was legendary. Although he spared himself little in affairs of state during his nine-year reign, he was always at ease in the company of youngsters, whether they were his own family or the children of courtiers.

One particular favourite was Sonia, the little girl of his last mistress and trusted confidante, Alice Keppel. Born in 1900, the year before his accession to the throne, Sonia’s earliest memories were of being dressed up by her nanny and given firm injunctions to be sure to curtsy to the King. Shyly, she hardly dared to raise her eyes above the gentlemen’s midriffs, and she sometimes curtsied to Sir Ernest Cassel, the similarly wide-girthed Jewish banker and close friend of the King, by mistake.

The King allowed Sonia to call him ‘Kingy’, and when he came to tea with her mother, a special game was devised. With a fine disregard for the condition of his trousers, she recalled, he invited her to put two bits of bread and butter, the latter side down, side by side down his leg. ‘Then, bets of a penny each were made (my bet provided by Mamma) and the winning piece of bread and butter depended, of course, on which was the more buttery. The excitment was intense while the contest was on. Sometimes he won, sometimes I did. Although the owner of a Derby winner, Kingy’s enthusiasm seemed delightfully unaffected by the quality of his bets.’
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The lives of the Prince of Wales’s children no longer revolved around York Cottage. As Prince of Wales, their father was granted two additional residences, Frogmore, at Home Park, Windsor, and Abergeldie, at Balmoral. Frogmore, where they stayed for the first time in the weeks leading up to the Coronation, had little in the way of modern conveniences, and lacked electric light and modern heating. All the same, it provided the children with additional outdoor premises to play in, especially the limitless expanse of the Great Park, and the vast roof of the castle itself, all the more fascinating as it was officially forbidden territory.

To the younger generation Frogmore, like Osborne (which the King handed over to the Royal Navy as a training college shortly after Queen Victoria’s death), had the air of a family necropolis. Among the marble busts and lifesize statues that lined the corridors was one of Edward, Duke of Kent. The boys were fascinated by it because their great-great-grandfather looked exactly like one of their parents’ footmen, Mr Smithson. The resemblance became even more pronounced after they placed Smithson’s off-duty cloth check cap on the head of the bust. They could not resist inviting their mother to come and look. Although much amused, she lectured them gently on the impropriety of making fun of one of their illustrious ancestors, and also on holding up one of their servants to ridicule. Was she afraid that jokes might lead to rumours about his ancestry? Where the ‘ridicule’ argument was concerned, they knew better. One day when she was out, they put the cap on the bust again, and called Smithson to see. Far from being offended, he beamed with pleasure, agreed the likeness was striking, and not long afterwards the youngsters noticed him standing admiringly before the bust.

After the excitement of the Coronation, the Prince and Princess of Wales took their family to Abergeldie for the summer. Like previous royal generations, the children were fascinated by the wild Deeside scenery, ‘in sharp contrast to the noble, well-tended beauty of Windsor and the wooded tranquillity of Sandringham; and the gurgling of the swift-running river splashing over the granite boulders scattered along the length of its shallow bed filled the rooms of the old house with a sound I [Prince Edward] loved to hear.’
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While their father spent his days making the most of the season’s sport, their mother took them for carriage rides along the forest roads with a picnic tea that they brought in a basket and spread out on the heather in some suitably picturesque spot, when weather permitted. Unfortunately the elements were not on their side in Scotland that summer. They had arrived at Abergeldie in pelting rain, which continued for several days on end. The Princess of Wales, expecting a fifth child at the end of the year, was tired and exhausted after the festivities in London. She did not share her in-laws’ enthusiasm for Balmoral, and the damp dreary days did nothing to raise her drooping spirits. With his customary sense of slightly barbed humour, her husband remarked lightly that he would soon have a regiment, not a family.

With the end of that eventful summer came their return to York Cottage, and for the two elder boys, the beginning of their serious education. According to Prince Edward, Mr Hansell ‘combined a mild scholarship with a muscular Christianity, accentuated by tweeds and an ever-present pipe’.
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He took his breakfast and lunch with the boys every day, but dined with their parents and members of the household in the evening.

Like Birch and Gibbs before him, he thought the boys should have the chance to grow up in a normal, more rigorously competitive environment with others of their own age. When his suggestion that the Princes should go to preparatory school was vetoed, he attempted to create a schoolroom atmosphere in a room on the second floor at York Cottage. A classroom was fitted with two standard desks, a blackboard, a set of wall maps, and shelves stocked with the standard text books in arithmetic, history and grammar. After being woken by Mr Finch at 7.00 a.m., they would be at their desks from 7.30 to 8.15 a.m. for preparation, or homework. Breakfast was followed by further preparation from 9.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m. (with an hour’s break for play), then lunch, followed by a walk in the woods or the chance to kick a football around. Between tea and supper there were lessons. Sometimes informal and immature football matches would be organized by Hansell, the Princes being joined by boys from the village school.

The educational regime laid down for the Princes sounds almost like a carbon copy of that practised by Birch and Gibbs for King Edward VII as a boy and his late brother Alfred.* If Hansell expected them to be shining paragons of virtue, he was disappointed. They were disobedient, enjoyed fooling around, became frustrated when their work seemed difficult; in short, they were wearisomely normal. His weekly, sometimes daily, reports to the Prince of Wales make predictable reading. ‘Both boys must give a
readier
obedience,’ he noted solemnly on 20 September 1902. ‘I often describe them to myself as obedient boys at the second time of asking.’ Fisticuffs were common, as shown in a report of 16 January 1904: ‘I am very sorry to say that Prince Albert has caused two painful scenes in his bedroom this week. On the second occasion I understand that he narrowly escaped giving his brother a very severe kick, it being absolutely unprovoked & Finch being engaged in helping Prince Edward at the time.’
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Mr Hansell assumed the ‘position’ of headmaster, and secured the services of a small teaching staff under him. Mr Walter Jones helped to organize games, as well as taking the boys for walks in the Norfolk countryside and passing on his love of local flora and fauna. M. Hua, who had taught (or tried to teach) the young Prince George of Wales French, and later became a master at Eton, and Professor Oswald, both taught languages, while Mr Martin David, a mathematics master at Tonbridge School, looked after the other essential subjects. Professor Oswald evidently had little sense of discipline. When he complained to the Prince of Wales of Albert’s inattention and was asked for details, he explained with embarrassment that not only did His Royal Highness not pay attention, but when scolded just pulled his beard.

All the assistant masters were encouraged to write any details of bad work or misconduct in a report book, which Mr Hansell would note and deal with accordingly. Lapses on the boys’ part resulted in a summons, usually delivered by a footman, that ‘His Royal Highness wishes to see you in the Library.’ The library was regarded as their father’s ‘Captain’s Cabin’. Sometimes the message was delivered merely because he wanted to show the children some new stamps he had just acquired and was particularly pleased about, or to make them a present of some curio that he had obtained on his travels. More often than not, though, it foretold a dressing-down. No words were more calculated to strike terror into their hearts than the announcement that they were wanted in the library.

The children saw few of their contemporaries, except in the rare games of cricket and football. When Edward was nearly nine, the Princess of Wales decided to remedy the situation. While they were at York House in London, she suggested that they should be taught how to dance. A class of twenty or more boys and girls was organized, with a lady at the piano providing the music, while a very stout yet surprisingly nimble Miss Walsh showed them the steps of the polka, the waltz, and the Highland
schottische
. The boys wore Eton suits, with the girls attired in short dresses pulled tight at the waist with silk sashes, and a bow tied at the back. There was never anything spontaneous about these classes, but ‘they lifted us out, if only briefly, from our walled-in-life in London and brought us together with children of our own age’.
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Once transferred to the care of Mr Finch, the boys had to observe a strict dress code. Kilts and sailor suits were regarded by the Prince of Wales as the only appropriate dress for children. Even at the age of nine, on a visit to Balmoral, Edward was given constant admonitions in his father’s letters: ‘Take care and don’t spoil [the kilts] at once as they are new. Wear the Balmoral kilt and grey jacket on weekdays and green kilt and black jacket on Sundays. Do not wear the red kilt till I come.’
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The Princes were always ‘on parade’. If they appeared before him with their Navy lanyards a fraction of an inch out of place, or with their dirks or sporrans awry, there would be an outburst worthy of the quarterdeck of a warship. When one of them was seen with his hands casually stuffed into his trouser pockets, Mrs Bill was immediately ordered to bring her needle and thread to make sure that such slackness would never be possible again.

In every sense of the word, Edward considered, it was ‘a buttoned-up childhood’. On occasions when the Princes were forced to wear their starched Eton collars, these invariably cut into their necks, as they were often old and frayed. The idea of one of them appearing in shirt sleeves and an open-necked collar was unthinkable. If they were doing hot work outside, they were allowed to roll up their sleeves, but never loosen their collars or take their coats off. Even with shorts they wore long stockings, ‘with never a thought of anything so indelicate as bare knees – except in a kilt’.
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In terms of dress, the Prince of Wales’s children had far less freedom than earlier generations. Edward looked wistfully at Winterhalter’s portraits of his grandfather, as a boy of six wearing a sailor suit with – horror of horrors – his hands deep in his pockets. At Windsor he gazed ruefully at Gainsborough’s paintings of King George III’s sons wearing blouses wide open at the neck.

Yet there was freedom enough to deal with priggish elder cousins. Ena of Battenberg thoroughly disliked Edward, probably because she suspected that when he was born he had displaced her in Queen Victoria’s affections. One day at Sandringham when she was aged sixteen and he ten, she told him angrily that he was ‘perfectly horrid’, and she wanted ‘nothing to do with rude little boys who did not behave themselves’. He apologized, and suggested they should go for a walk together. Prepared to make her peace with him, she agreed, and bent down to look closely at a flower-bed where he said he had something to show her. He promptly dropped a worm down the back of her dress.
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At the turn of the century rail and steamship were the chief means of transport. The royal children travelled between Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral by train, while they crossed the Solent to Osborne in a small steamer from Portsmouth. It was a novelty to sleep on the train to Aberdeen, travelling in a ‘bed-carriage’ which stretched across the seats, linked for the purpose with a close-fitting stool with an upholstered cushion. Journeys to Wolferton Station, near Sandringham, were ‘an enjoyable picnic’. As there were no dining-cars en route, they took a well-stocked luncheon basket, and when the train stopped at a suitable station, they were given coffee from a trolley on the platform. On returning from Sandringham, each guest or member of the household would be supplied with his own luncheon-basket, packed in the royal kitchen. When emptied, the baskets were left on the train at St Pancras, cleaned and washed up by the Great Eastern Railway, and returned to Marlborough House or later to Buckingham Palace.

At home they still drove in horse-drawn carriages – wagonettes as a rule, brakes, dog-carts and pony-carriages. Their childhood coincided with the invention of the ‘safety bicycle’, a distinct improvement on the rather precarious penny-farthing of the previous generation. Until then, the Prince of Wales’s children had to ask their nurse or tutor for a carriage and coachman from the royal stables if they wanted to go any further than the grounds of Windsor or Sandringham. When King Edward VII gave Prince Edward his first bicycle, said the latter, ‘my life was transformed’. In no time he and his brothers were virtually living on bicycles outside; they could get away on their own, racing against each other and going for ten-mile rides on the comparatively traffic-free roads. At last they could see something of the world outside the gardens and grounds where they lived, and at their own pace.

At the end of the previous century, the motor-car – or ‘horseless carriage’ – was introduced. Edward had his first ride in one during the autumn of 1902, on the occasion of the planting of an avenue of trees to commemorate his grandfather’s Coronation. The two-mile ride, at a speed of 20 m.p.h., seemed at the time like an adventure that was never to be forgotten.