Childhood at Court, 1819-1914 (25 page)

Almost two years after the accession of King Edward VII, George was born on 20 December 1902. He learnt to read quickly, and soon gave promise of being the most academically minded of the family. He was taught French by Mlle Bricka, and took to it immediately, speaking it better than the rest. Although untidy and reputedly the naughtiest of the family, with his charm he was forgiven more readily than the others.

Some two and a half years later, on 12 July 1905, the youngest son, Prince John, was born. John has been the subject of much misinformed comment, allegedly a skeleton in the royal cupboard, and said to be mentally handicapped. In fact he was normal at birth and his mother recovered rapidly from her confinement. His charm manifested itself in quaint remarks. ‘She kissed Papa,
ugly
old man,’
¹¹
he was heard to mutter as a three-year-old on holiday at Abergeldie, when he watched his mother greet his father affectionately after returning from a day’s stalking. A well-behaved child, he became Mrs Bill’s favourite.

Sadly, he began to have epileptic fits at the age of four, and the doctors could do nothing to help. Nevertheless, at first the seizures were not severe enough to prevent him from taking part in normal family life, though he was watched protectively. He appeared regularly in photographs, on his own and with family groups, for several years. To all outward appearances he seemed quite normal.

Edward was fortunate in suffering from no physical handicaps during childhood. The rest all had knock-knees; Albert was the worst afflicted. To help correct the condition in his case, splints were devised by Sir Francis Laking, his father’s physician-in-ordinary. For a while the boy had to wear them for part of the day and night, and though they were painful he accepted them as a necessary evil. One night he wept bitterly, pleading not to have to wear them again. Finch, whose duty it was to see that they were properly adjusted, took pity on him. When Laking reported this act of mercy to the Prince of Wales, he summoned Finch to the library, asked him to explain, then stood up and drew his trousers tight against his legs. ‘Look at me,’ he barked. ‘If that boy grows up to look like this, it will be your fault.’

However, the boy persevered, writing with dogged determination to his mother in February 1904 that he was sitting in an armchair, with his legs in the new splints: ‘I have got an invalid table, which is splendid for reading but rather awkward for writing at present. I expect I shall get used to it.’
¹²
At first Mr Hansell found that in the schoolroom the splints caused his pupil such agony that concentration was severely impaired, but after a while they proved so successful that Laking advised they need only be worn at night. After a while it was found that they had indeed served their purpose.

In addition, Albert was also afflicted with a bad stammer from the age of about seven. Like his stomach disorders, it was to cause him trouble throughout his life, though as a young adult a therapist helped him to keep it under control. Naturally left-handed, he was forced to use the right, resulting in a condition known in psychology as a ‘misplaced sinister’, which probably affected his speech. Sensitive by nature, easily rebuffed and prone to take his weaknesses and faults to heart too much, he was slower and less articulate by nature than his elder brother, and he was intimidated by his father’s regular admonitions. Tongue-tied and less able to answer for himself, he found himself increasingly cut off from his parents, brothers and sister, who outpaced him with their quicker level of repartee.

Driven in upon his own resources, he was prone to spells of dreamy abstraction, during which others – particularly Hansell at lesson-time – found it difficult to make him concentrate, and outbursts of excitement, sometimes exuberant, sometimes of passionate weeping and depression. As a child, like the ‘Bertie’ of an earlier generation, in his earliest years he probably gave his parents and tutor more difficulty than the others put together.

More than his brothers and sister, he inherited his great-grandmother’s abiding love for Scotland. Something about the Highland landscape, the rural tranquillity of the Cairngorms and River Dee, struck a chord in him, and it was noticed that, in Scotland, he shed the inhibitions which hampered him in the more formal routine of life at Sandringham and London.

In 1902 Mrs Bill was put in charge of Henry. Already he was showing signs of the family temper. An unnamed observer recalled being at a family party with tutor and governess at Frogmore House with the Prince of Wales, while the elderly Grand Duchess Augusta of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was staying. Towards the end of the meal a door opened, and a sulky-looking small boy in a stiff white petticoat was pushed in. The Princess of Wales called him to her side and he stood glowering between her and the Grand Duchess. His mother could see that he was ‘evidently put out about something’, but she tried to soothe him and make him speak politely to her guest. At last the Grand Duchess bent her face down and asked him if he could not say anything to her, would he not at least give her a kiss. He would not. Instead there was the sharp sound as a small hand administered a petulant slap on her cheek.

Mary, now five, was entrusted to the care of Else Korsukawitz. A plump, good-tempered, cheerful German, she became the girl’s governess, and Mlle Jose Dussau her tutor. The sharptongued Mademoiselle was always ready to reporting any lapses of behaviour on the Princes’ part, and no petty misdemeanour that came to her notice went unreported in detail to their parents. Mary, no rebel, cheerfully accepted discipline, and relished conformity – if not teasing. The threat to her high-spirited brothers of ‘I’ll tell Mama’, though rarely carried out, acted as a powerful deterrent. Her greatest passion was for riding, in Hyde Park when in London, in Windsor Great Park when the court was in residence at the castle, but whenever possible in the open countryside around Sandringham.

Mary’s history lessons were brought to life by visits to the Tower and Hampton Court, and geography was taught with large-scale models. She also studied French and German, making good progress in both, and great emphasis was placed on her deportment. A keen botanist, she made and developed a collection of plants and seaweed indigenous to the Sandringham area. She took cheerfully to her lessons. ‘What a pity it’s not Mary,’ her eldest brother was once reported to have said when reminded of his destiny, ‘she is far cleverer than I am.’
¹³

After a morning of lessons she took her lunch at 1.00 p.m. with Mrs Bill, Finch, and one of the tutors, then did sewing and painting for an hour. She became proficient with the needle, starting with making clothes for her dolls, and later for her mother’s various charitable guilds. The rest of her day was set aside for outdoor activities, usually riding on her own, or cycling with her brothers, and sometimes an improvised game of cricket under the watchful eye of Hansell. She also enjoyed lawn tennis, angling and swimming.

At the age of six she was given her first donkey, called Ben, on whom she doted. The others saw that she had the makings of a first-class horsewoman, and Albert later remarked that ‘My sister was a horse until she came out’. Edward admiringly commented that ‘her yellow curls concealed a fearlessness that commanded our respect’.
¹⁴
She eagerly devoured the boys’ adventure stories of R.M. Ballantyne, H. Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson, and shared most of her brothers’ activities. This did not stop her from ‘wielding a sweet tyranny’ over her brothers’ lives, with Mademoiselle ever in support.

Though in awe of her gruff father, she found him less intimidating than her brothers did, and he was not so strict with her. She grew up very like her mother in personality, and inherited her low-pitched voice. Musically talented, she took singing lessons at Frogmore, while her brothers lurked beneath the music-room window, making noises imitating the midnight serenades of a lovesick tomcat. She also became an accomplished pianist, though her father’s indulgence did not extend to her regularly playing scales within earshot. She therefore had to use the piano at the ‘big house’, Sandringham, where her increasingly deaf grandmother was not disturbed at all. As a young woman Queen Alexandra had enjoyed music herself, and she would have been the last to discourage such talent in her grandchildren.

Like her brothers, Mary led a very isolated childhood. For perhaps weeks at a time, she saw no other girls at all; the only women with whom she came into contact were her tutors and female members of her staff. Else was her closest friend and personal confidante, and she would talk to her as a sister. Even so, there were doubtless times when she missed having no female companions of her own age.

As the two elder boys approached their teens, Edward was becoming too old for such confined educational instruction, and Albert began to resent his elder brother’s superiority. The presence of one, Hansell thought, was acting as ‘a sort of “red rag” to the other’.

Edward had been destined from birth for the Royal Navy. The only condition enjoined on his tutors by his father was that the boy should be taught enough to be able to pass the entrance examination. Latin and Greek were not required at sea, therefore the Prince of Wales saw no point in his learning them. Neither did Mr Hansell have any illusions as to the shortcomings of his tutoring under such tightly controlled conditions. If he was ever to be able to hold his own with his contemporaries, Hansell warned, the Prince ought to go to a good preparatory school. ‘What I suspect he most feared for me was that, in consequence of my being deprived of the communal habits of thought and behaviour that are absorbed at an early age in a private school,’ wrote the Prince, ‘I was bound at first to feel lonely and insecure when brought into close association with my contemporaries.’ Such theories carried no weight with the Prince of Wales. Neither he nor his brother had ever been to a preparatory school; ‘the Navy will teach David all that he needs to know’.
¹⁵

In spring 1907 Edward was enrolled as a cadet at the Royal Naval College, Osborne. Henry, now aged seven, joined the schoolroom, and Albert was grandly promoted to the ‘position’ of head boy.

It had been decided that he, too, would go to Osborne in due course. He was weak at and hated mathematics, but thanks to his tutor Martin David, and supreme persistence on his part, he made sufficient progress in the subject to face the Examining Board in November 1908. The six members of the board agreed afterwards that he was the most shy and nervous candidate to come before them, but he showed his capacity of rising to the occasion, which was to stand him in good stead many years hence. Though he began by stammering badly, he mastered his nerves and answered the questions ‘brightly and well’. Had he been a costermonger’s son, one of them remarked, there would not have been the slightest hesitation in passing him. He took the written entrance examination in December, and achieved good marks in English, history and French.

The intentions of the authorities to treat the Princes much as they would the other boys were difficult to put into practice. The end of the summer term 1909 was enlivened by preparations for a state visit by Tsar Nicholas II and his family, who were to arrive at Spithead in the imperial yacht on 2 August. Edward, Albert and Mary were to act as companions for the Grand Duchesses and the Tsarevich Alexis. While staying with his parents at Barton Manor, Albert caught a cold, subsequently developed whooping-cough, and had to be kept in quarantine until after the imperial guests had departed. The risk to the haemophiliac Tsarevich Alexis of catching the infection and rupturing a blood vessel from prolonged bouts of coughing was too great, and it was left to Edward to show his uncle around Osborne, while Mary was to be a playmate for the Grand Duchesses.

Though the young generation of Romanovs spent less than a day on British soil, they remembered it for the rest of their unhappy lives. Life at home, at Tsarskoe-Selo, near St Petersburg, was a gloomy business. The four Grand Duchesses, aged between thirteen and seven at the time of the Osborne visit, led an oddly isolated existence. They were not allowed female companions, as the Tsarina dreaded them having the companionship of ‘over-sophisticated young women of the aristocracy’ brought up on a diet of gossip in an apparently decadent society. The girls adored each other and never quarrelled among themselves. This could be taken for lack of personality; it more probably resulted from the perpetual anxiety which overshadowed their lives and those of their parents. Their tutor, Pierre Gilliard, was intrigued to see the Tsarevich dropping in on their lessons from time to time, then disappearing for days at a time. Everyone, he noticed, would be smitten with the deepest depression, and his sisters would only tell him cryptically that he ‘was not well’. Not for years did Gilliard find out the real reason. The Tsarina’s health was shattered by the strain of watching her son suffer, and the Tsar was perpetually ‘completely run down mentally’, in his own words, by worry over her health, in addition to his other problems.

At Osborne, briefly away from such anxieties, and able to see once more the island home where she had shared holidays with her mother as a small girl, and later been taken under the protective wing of her grandmother, the Tsarina was almost a different person. When not being shown round Osborne, the Grand Duchesses played on the beach, looking for seashells, buying postcards and rock, which they eagerly offered later to their parents. Meanwhile Prince Louis Francis of Battenberg, or ‘Dickie’, was enjoying a rather more relaxed childhood than his peers. Eight years younger than his brother George, at the time of his birth his sisters were aged fifteen and eleven respectively. With this difference in ages, he grew up a rather solitary child. According to his aunt Princess Anna, when the Battenberg children came to tea, George and their sister Louise sat sedately at table, while Dickie settled in a corner, conducting an animated conversation with an invisible friend.

Left to entertain himself, he developed an imaginative streak. One day his Uncle Ernie, Grand Duke of Hesse, saw him drawing a picture of a cow with an extraordinary head and five legs. When he pointed out that this was hardly a lifelike cow, Dickie said indignantly that it was not a cow, it was a ‘Katuf’. The name was henceforth adopted for family use to describe any sort of fanciful animal. He loved reading, especially the novels of Edith Nesbit, and works of fantasy such as
Alice in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
, and
The Wizard of Oz
.