The Queen Mother (84 page)

73.
The King and Queen en route to St Paul’s Cathedral for a service to celebrate their Silver Wedding, 26 April 1948.

74.
The Queen presenting the King with a cup for the best Aberdeen Angus at the Royal Norfolk Show, May 1950.

75.
Four generations of the Royal Family at the christening of Princess Anne, 21 November 1950. Left to right: Queen Mary, the King, Princess Elizabeth holding Princess Anne, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles, the Queen.

76.
The three Queens awaiting the coffin of King George VI, February 1952.

‘I
AM
STARTING
to read the unexpurgated edition of “Mein Kampf”,’ wrote Queen Elizabeth to Queen Mary, who may have been rather startled to be asked, ‘Have you read it, Mama?’
^1
*

The letter to Queen Mary was written on 8 May 1939 from the Canadian Pacific liner
Empress of Australia
. The King and Queen were at the start of the journey to Canada and the United States which was to take them away from the tense and anxious atmosphere in Europe for the next six weeks. The Queen’s choice of reading matter showed where her concerns lay. The King had been reluctant to leave Britain as it became ever clearer that Hitler could not be appeased. But the government’s advice was that war was not yet imminent, and that the international crisis rendered the tour more, rather than less, advisable. The visit would both demonstrate and strengthen the solidarity of the Empire against the threat to world peace, and boost Anglo-American friendship.

A tour of Canada had first been proposed by Lord Tweedsmuir,
^†
the Governor General, in early 1937 and was promoted by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, when he came to London for the Coronation. President Roosevelt encouraged the idea of combining the tour of Canada with a trip to the United States. The
President invited the Princesses too, but the King felt that they were too young.
²
The announcement of the visit was well received, particularly in Canada. ‘People talk about nothing else,’ Lord Tweedsmuir reported. ‘I suggest a very informal and unofficial visit to the United States, as being far more likely to please the American people. That I know is President Roosevelt’s own idea, which he confided to my Prime Minister.’
³

This cautious, indeed downbeat, approach to the American visit was Roosevelt’s preference for both political and personal reasons. He could not afford to antagonize the isolationists in Congress and the press who believed that the United States should remain outside any European conflict. But, certain that war between Britain and Germany was inevitable, he hoped that the presence of the King and Queen on American soil would strengthen the friendship between the two English-speaking nations and sway Congress towards Britain. As his wife Eleanor later wrote, Roosevelt thought that ‘we all might soon be engaged in a life and death struggle, in which Great Britain would be our first line of defence’.
⁴
The American part of the tour was thus of enormous significance, but it was also important to Canada that the King’s journey should be seen to be primarily for the benefit of Canadians.

Much has been written about this tour.
^*
Despite the hopes of Canadian officials, the American visit came to outweigh the Canadian journey because of the personal relationship the King was able to form with President Roosevelt and the effect this, as well as the public success of the tour, had upon American attitudes to the war when it came. But the visit to Canada was especially significant. Not only was it the first visit by a British sovereign to an overseas dominion, but King George VI was the first sovereign to be crowned king of Canada, since the 1931 Statute of Westminster had established the status of Canada and the other Dominions as autonomous dominions under the Crown. From Britain’s point of view, furthermore, the visit was vitally important in guaranteeing the support of Mackenzie King and Canada in the event of war, for the Canadian Prime Minister had been a convinced appeaser, determined to keep Canada out of any European hostilities.

The trip also gave both King and Queen their first opportunity to gauge, in person, the feelings of the people of the wider Empire towards them – and that in a country where King Edward VIII had acquired popularity through his visits as Prince of Wales and his purchase of a ranch in Alberta.
^*
The challenge was political as well as personal: there were isolationists in Canada as well as in the USA – the support of French Canadians for the British cause could not be taken for granted. In the event, they succeeded beyond all expectation and for Queen Elizabeth this tour was the beginning of a long and affectionate relationship with Canada; she would visit it more than any other country, returning thirteen times.

They were to have travelled in the battlecruiser HMS
Repulse
, but the King considered it unwise to deprive the navy of a warship at this dangerous time. So it was in the liner
Empress of Australia
that they set sail on 6 May from Portsmouth, accompanied by a suite of ten. The two Princesses, aged thirteen and eight, came to see them off, together with Queen Mary and other members of the Royal Family. ‘I hated saying good-bye to you & Margaret,’ their mother wrote to Princess Elizabeth next day. ‘I shall miss you horribly, but be good & kind,’ she said, adding, ‘P.S. My handwriting is very wobbly, because the ship is shivering like someone with influenza! P.P.S. Papa is writing to Margaret.’
⁵

Their first few days afloat were not improved by rough seas and by what looked like a deliberate attempt by the Duke of Windsor to cause trouble. He accepted an invitation to broadcast an appeal for peace to the American people direct from the First World War battlefield of Verdun. The timing was not entirely of his choosing and his speech was an uncontroversial plea to statesmen to do all they could to avoid war. But it was tactless to make the broadcast while the King was on his way across the Atlantic. The Queen could only have seen it as an attempt to steal her husband’s thunder. ‘I see on the news bulletin today, that David is going to broadcast to America this evening,’ she wrote to Queen Mary on 8 May. ‘I do wonder whether this is true, and if it is, how troublesome of him to choose such a moment.’
⁶
The Duke spoke fluently and his speech was well received by many listeners;
⁷
but it did seem to be a gesture of appeasement
designed to upstage the King. The Duke of Kent agreed with the Queen, and Alec Hardinge, writing to the King, commented that it was ‘ludicrous’ of the Duke to think that such a speech could do any good.
⁸

Three days later the Duke seemed a minor irritant – the whole journey suddenly appeared to be in jeopardy. The ship was enveloped in thick fog and surrounded by icebergs. She stopped, not for a few hours, but for days. The Queen wrote home to her daughter:

The blasts of the ship’s foghorn echoed off the icebergs ‘like the twang of a piece of wire. Incredibly eery,’ she told Queen Mary. ‘We very nearly hit a berg the day before yesterday, and the poor Captain was nearly demented because some kind cheerful people kept on reminding him that it was about here that the Titanic was struck, &
just
about the same date!’ It was an alarming experience: ‘one kept on imagining that a great iceberg was bearing down on the ship, & starting up at night with a beating heart,’ the Queen wrote.
¹⁰
The fog finally cleared on 14 May, ‘and we saw the sea covered with floating ice, a few big bergs, and a great mass of pack ice hemming us on three sides. We went round it for a bit, and then ploughed through one side of the pack into open water. It was an amazing sight,’ she reported.
¹¹

Tommy Lascelles, the King’s acting Private Secretary for the trip,
^*
faced with reorganizing the beginning of the tour, commented that it was a near-run thing: any longer delay would have thrown the entire programme off track. Thanks to ‘ingenious juggling’, condensing the
Ottawa visit from four days into two and a half, ‘we have re-mosaic’d the first four days so that nothing is left out.’ And there was a silver lining – the delay had provided the King with a longer rest: ‘it is the only really idle & irresponsible spell he has had since he acceded; there has been nothing for him to do, & Hitler has hardly been mentioned since we left England.’
¹²

On the morning of 17 May, in fine weather, the
Empress of Australia
and her British and Canadian naval escorts finally steamed up the St Lawrence to L’Anse du Foulon – Wolfe’s Cove – where the royal party was to disembark. The cliffs above the harbour were lined with thousands of spectators who had been gathering since early morning. At 10.30 Prime Minister Mackenzie King and the Justice Minister Ernest Lapointe went on board to welcome the King and Queen. Mackenzie King’s diary, recording their conversation, showed that the Queen was well aware of the personal contribution she could make to the success of the tour as a Scottish queen: she spoke at once of Scotland’s links with France, and the number of Scots who had come to Canada.
¹³
Nor were Canadian Scots about to forget this. The demands for her attention from émigré Scots became a leitmotif of the tour.

A few minutes later they came ashore. The King was wearing the full-dress uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, the Queen was elegant in a pale-grey dress of light wool, with long slit sleeves edged with fur and a hat with a becomingly upswept brim. She stepped off the gangway first, remarking as she did so that this was the first time she had set foot on Canadian soil.
¹⁴
(It was the King’s second visit: he had been to Canada as a naval cadet in 1913.) After being presented with a long line of dignitaries, they were driven to the Quebec Parliament to receive provincial and municipal addresses.

Both the luncheon which followed and dinner that night were held at Château Frontenac, the grandiose Canadian Pacific Railway hotel whose towering green roof still dominates the Quebec skyline. The lavish luncheon was followed by a speech by Mackenzie King expressing pride that Canada had been chosen for the King’s first visit to his Dominions and stressing, for the benefit of French Canadians, that the King and Queen had come ashore at the same spot as the French founders of Canada. The King’s reply, beginning in English and ending in French, betrayed his nerves but was well received. ‘When the King began to speak, he was certainly moved and it was a little difficult to
understand him,’ wrote one of the French Canadian officials organizing the trip. ‘He quickly recovered himself and continued his address in a firm voice. He was warmly applauded.’
¹⁵