Darling Georgie (22 page)

Prince George’s view of himself as a father differed from that of his children. He considered himself to be fair and just, a disciplinarian who ‘knew what was best for his children’. He claimed to love them (although he never told them so), but the love he gave them was conditional upon
their obedience. Despite evidence that today would suggest the contrary, Prince George thought of his father as a good father and his fear of him did not seem incompatible with the belief that he was kind and loving and had a genuine concern for his children. He had no problem either with accepting that Princess Alexandra had been a good mother and that he was her favourite child. Yet he grew up to be shy, self-conscious, insecure, prone to outbursts of uncontrollable rage and dependent for approval not only on his peers and all authority figures but also on his children.

Prince George’s insistence that his children love him was exploitive. He was unaware of his character defects, and there was no evidence that he ever queried them. Had he done so he would certainly not have laid the blame for such defects at the door of his parents, whom he saw as above criticism and beyond reproach. This led him to subject his children to the same conditions as those in which he had grown up: absentee parenting, inadequate and sometimes cruel surrogates, poor tutoring and an insistence on the same life-style which had caused him and his brother to be so unhappy. The paradox of Prince George’s childhood was that, although he had been led to believe by his mother that he was her ‘darling Georgie dear’, he seemed not to have been sufficiently ‘dear’ for her to be there when he needed her most.

Prince George’s older son, Prince Edward (known as David), bore the brunt of his father’s frequent displeasure. Prince George had grown up in the shadow of an older son, the Duke of Clarence, whose needs had always taken priority over his own. His tutor Mr Dalton had had to proceed at the pace of Prince Eddy, and not only had his own education been held back but his career had been indirectly determined for him, since a naval academy, rather than a boarding school, had been selected as more suited to Prince Eddy. While he could not blame Eddy for deserting him by dying, he could (and eventually did) ‘blame’ his oldest son David, whom he saw as another Eddy.

Traumatic events, such as Prince George’s separation from his parents and his brother’s untimely death, are not always readily recalled, but the emotion associated with those events persists throughout life. In the Duke
of Windsor’s autobiography,
A King’s Story,
the eight-year-old Prince Edward (David) recalls how his father, in the winter of 1902, on his parents’ return from the world cruise that took them away from their children for eight months, added insult to injury by suddenly terminating ‘the feminine suzerainty’ of the nursery.

David and his brother Bertie were told abruptly one evening that they would be woken up the following morning by a man named Frederick Finch. David, who claimed to have no memory of an event which he seems conveniently to have blanked out, repeats a story that years later Finch had disclosed to a friend: Finch had described his master ‘as a handful or, if I might use the word, a “stubborn” character’. The Prince went on to recount an occasion

when [Finch] played the role of ‘rod in pickle’ to me. Evidently one afternoon when my sister was supposed to be taking a nap, I had invaded the nursery and on one pretext or another had kicked up a fuss. My father was out shooting, and no one dared disturb my mother. My sister’s harassed nurse ‘Lala’ Bill, stormed into Finch’s room crying, ‘That boy is impossible. If you don’t give him a thrashing, I will.’ Finch marched me off to the bedroom, laid me face down on the bed, and while I kicked and yelled, applied a large hand to the that part of the anatomy nature has conveniently provided for the chastisement of small boys. I yelled more out of hurt pride than pain; and, as Finch was leaving the room with the air of a man who had performed a distasteful but inescapable duty, I shouted after his receding back that I would get even with him. ‘You just wait!’ I cried. ‘I will tell Papa what you have done.’ Later that evening my mother heard the whole story from the nurse. I was summoned to her room; but instead of my being embraced and mollified I was admonished first for my bad behaviour in the nursery and next for my mistaken judgement that a servant had no right to punish me. I was sent back to Finch’s room to apologise for having been such a nuisance.

(Windsor, 1951)

Prince George’s oldest son had been so humiliated by his experience that understandably he chose to ‘forget’ it. He presumably also ‘forgot’ that his mother had not stood by him. David had already been the victim of physical abuse by his nurse Mary Peters, mainly because for three years his mother had failed to recognize what had been taking place under her nose.

While Prince George is frequently quoted as saying that the kind of education which he received was good enough for him and it must therefore be good enough for his sons, nothing was further from the truth. His own education was pitifully inadequate and the arrangements that he made for them ensured that that of his sons would be equally inadequate. As soon as the two older boys were out of the nursery, Prince George engaged Henry Hansell, a Norfolk man recommended by one of his shooting friends, as tutor to David and Bertie. Hansell had been educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and had worked as a schoolmaster for several years. He was, however, a poor teacher, who ‘without sharing Dalton’s intellectual appetite shared his humourless solemnity’ (Rose, 1986).

Both Hansell’s pupils thought that their father had made a poor choice. Their tutor turned out to be an indifferent teacher and without the charisma required to retain the attention of small boys. Neither of them liked him and as a result he was unable to inspire in them a desire to learn. Perhaps realizing his limitations, Hansell eventually told Prince George that the boys would be better off at a preparatory school. Having set his mind on David and Bertie being educated at home in the same way as he had been, Prince George disagreed. As an adult, David, by then the Duke of Windsor, wrote: ‘If he [Hansell] harboured strong views about anything, he was careful to conceal them. I am today unable to recall anything brilliant or original that he ever said. Looking back over those peculiarly ineffectual years under him, I am appalled to discover how little I really learned’ (Windsor, 1951).

Prince George’s own early experiences aboard the
Britannia
were painful ones. He had frequently been bullied and in his letters to his
mother he had described the feelings of sadness and homesickness he was obliged to endure during his long absences from home. None the less, as soon as David and Bertie were old enough to graduate from Mr Hansell’s efforts their father insisted they be enrolled as cadets in the Royal Navy.

David, like Prince George at a similar age, was growing up to be rebellious, and he was constantly being reprimanded for refractions of the rules laid down by his father. Neither of the boys was interested in the sports, games and other aspects of the curriculum introduced by Henry Hansell. But when they complained to their mother, who was more concerned with the tapestries on which she was working than the education of her children, Princess May told them to do as their father had instructed. David learned to sew, an interest that remained with him into adult life, probably because it was the only way he could guarantee being close to his mother. Such closeness, however, was illusory. As Duke of Windsor, he later wrote poignantly that he could only remember one parental embrace as a child. This had been in public when his grandparents had taken all the children to meet their parents on their return from their tour of Australia and the colonies. He also confessed that he never saw his mother alone without a servant or lady-in-waiting in attendance.

While Princess May more or less ignored her children, Prince George constantly, and often abrasively, involved himself in their development. His expectation that they blindly obey him frightened them and must have resulted in the suppression of their natural feelings. Harsh with both his sons – even when they were six and eight respectively they were expected to address him as ‘sir’ – Prince George seldom gave them so much as a peck on the cheek, preferring to shake hands instead. The Prince loved his children but seemed to be afraid of being too close to them (possibly for his benefit rather than for theirs) and used anger and formality to keep them at a distance.

The injunction to be ‘seen and not heard’ permeated the boys’ childhood. Bertie, who had developed a stammer soon after Prince George and Princess May returned from Australia and who had great difficulty in
expressing himself, was probably quite pleased not to be heard. He believed himself to have been doubly rejected, first by his parents when they left on their world tour and on his parents’ return by his grandfather to whom meanwhile he had become attached. While there may well have been some psychological factors in the development of his stammer, these were not addressed. There were, however, psychological reactions to his impediment on Bertie’s part. Mr Hansell added to his embarrassment at his inability to speak clearly by reporting him to his father when, not unnaturally, he was having problems with French and German conversation. ‘[He] had difficulty enough in expressing himself in his own tongue let alone in a foreign language – to his father. There followed one of those summonses to the Library where Bertie, his knees knocking together as he stood tongue-tied before his father, suffered bitter humiliation, anguish of spirit, self-pity, exhaustion and pure frustration’ (Wheeler-Bennett, 1958).

A summons to the library, a room furnished not with books but with guns, terrified David and Bertie. It invariably meant that they had done something of which either Mr Hansell or their father disapproved. They were expected to file in and stand to attention in front of Prince George’s desk until ordered to stand ‘at ease’. Hands in pockets were forbidden. Whenever they forgot this instruction Lala Bill had to stitch up the pockets on their suits. Their father’s command to attend the library was so frightening, particularly for David, that on occasion he was known to have fainted in anticipation.

Prince George may have thought that he was being jovial and friendly when he ‘chaffed’ his children. His sadistic sense of humour, however, had always been an outlet for his hostility and the children soon came to realize that ‘chaffing’, or sarcasm, was a form of wit that invariably discomfited them. The Duke of Windsor in his memoirs explains how much his father’s strict and bellowed instructions inhibited his development. The laws of behaviour, he says, as revealed to a small boy tended to be ruled by a vast preponderance of ‘don’ts’.

David was entered at the recently established Royal Naval College at
Osborne. A year later he was joined by his younger brother. On the day that he was escorted by his father to Osborne, at the age of twelve, tears were streaming down his face. Prince George’s message to his son as he began his four-year training course was: ‘Now you are leaving home, David, and going out into the world, always remember that I am your best friend.’ David could not be blamed if he doubted the veracity of his father’s message. When his brother Bertie arrived at Osborne, shortly after his thirteenth birthday, he was placed almost at the bottom of the intake. David said later that ‘quite apart from my Royal parentage and homes, the fact that I had never been to school before caused me to be regarded as a freak’.

Prince George insisted that his sons be treated in the same way as the other cadets. Their day started at 6.30 a.m. with a plunge into cold water. ‘It indicated no lack of respect that a royal or aristocratic bottom could be flogged by a petty officer wielding a bamboo cane, with a naval doctor in attendance to see fair play’ (Howarth, 1987). The beatings were neither fair nor playful but a further humiliation for two children whose parents had always demonstrated a lack of understanding of their needs. Other humiliations followed. The older cadets, looking for younger boys to bully, soon picked on David. Victims attract bullies and David had had plenty of experience at being a victim. On one occasion red ink was poured over his head just before the evening parade. On another he recalls a boy being strapped to a gymnasium horse and being severely beaten on the instructions of his father Captain Edwyn S. Alexander-Sinclair. David knew all about such fathers. His sense of injustice and his feelings of inferiority, compounded by his lack of height, were reinforced on a regular basis. He grew up only when his father died, by which time, having found someone to help him escape, he was able to summon up sufficient courage to turn his back on his family, his throne and his country.

As time passed David and his younger brother fared no better at Osborne. They both remained at the bottom of the class as they did later at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. The bullying continued at
Dartmouth with the senior cadets devising ever more sadistic ways of tormenting the younger boys and probably the two Princes in particular. The senior officers turned a blind eye to practices which they deluded themselves would ‘make men’ of their victims. Having undergone similar experiences in his own youth and knowing what his sons would be going through, Prince George also turned a blind eye. The Duke of Windsor, who on the whole preferred Dartmouth to Osborne, describes an especially disagreeable form of bullying by the cadet captains.

One evening while we were undressing in our dormitory, the cadet captain rang the gong for silence. He told us that we were a lazy bunch of ‘warts’ and that we needed a good shake-up. He went on to announce that henceforth the time allowed for undressing and putting on our pyjamas before running down to the wash-house would be reduced from one minute to thirty seconds. Although we were used to doing everything at the double and obeying orders unquestioningly, this order was the last straw. The inevitable result was a series of summonses to the washhouse after ‘lights out’ and a harsh application of the gong rope to any boy who had failed to meet the deadline.