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Yet the Viceroy was not just being sycophantic. It was no smooth-tongued statesman, but the police officer attached to the Prince, Mr Stead, who said that he had at first been opposed to the tour but by the time it had finished he was convinced he had been wrong. ‘It had gone infinitely better than he had thought possible, and … the good that it had done was incalculable.’68 A question was put down in the House of Commons suggesting that the Prince should have conferred on him the title of ‘Prince of India’. The King opposed the idea and it was dropped.69 If he had not done so, his son would have proved even more reluctant. But the idea was not altogether foolish.
The rest of the trip, though longer than the Prince wished, was less taxing. For one thing, he did not have to cope with a hostile independence movement; for another, he was on the way home. He had badly wanted to visit China. ‘It does seem very hard,’ he told the King, ‘that when one has come all this long way to the Far East … I shouldn’t be able to go to Pekin, Shanghai, and other places of interest, all far more interesting than Japan, and the Chinks are much nicer people too.’70 The Foreign Secretary, Curzon, vetoed the idea however, and the Prince got no nearer than Hong Kong.
His determination not to find Japan interesting lasted throughout his stay there. The Ambassador, Sir Charles Eliot, noted with regret that he showed no curiosity in the institutions or government of the country and seemed bored by any discussion of the issues of the moment – ‘I think that really he was mentally fatigued and that his mind and nerves had not recovered from the strain of his journey in India.’71 Eliot also realized how dull everything must appear on a royal tour: ‘Princes must think that red carpets and flags are a kind of vegetation that grows everywhere like grass or trees. It certainly makes all places look the same, and the welcome organized by the police was also monotonous.’72 But even allowing for the bland and homogenized aspect of the country which was offered him – royalty’s equivalent of the tourist proceeding from Hilton Hotel to Hilton Hotel – the Prince does seem to have been over-ready to transmute Japanese gold to lead. Even the famed scenery he despised: ‘I don’t take much interest in it at any time and none at all sans TOI,’ he told Freda Dudley Ward, ‘and having been to Lake Louise and the Canadian Rockies with Scotland thrown in, I can’t ever hope to see anything better.’73
His indifference to the charms of Japan did not blind him to the fact that the Japanese were ‘a very great power in the World and their navy and their infantry is amazingly efficient’.74 He told the King that the Japanese navy was copied from the British, the army from the Germans and the press from the Americans. ‘And how wise they are from the viewpoint of a young nation, which can never hope to emulate ourselves, but who are rapidly, if they haven’t done it already, coming up to the level of a continental power!! And I should add the Yanks!!’75
This greatness, he considered, had been achieved in spite of rather than because of the imperial family. The Prince surveyed his hosts with bilious disapproval. The Emperor he never met, since he was insane and confined to his palace; with the Empress conversation was conducted through an interpreter and confined exclusively to the weather and the cherry blossom.76 In the absence of the Emperor, he was entertained most frequently by the young Prince Regent, Hirohito, who would try to talk French though he had no understanding of the language. The journalists tried to depict the two young princes as bosom friends but Eliot reported ‘the idea that he felt any real friendship for the Prince Regent is a pure myth, though perhaps the latter felt a sort of timid affection for him’.77
‘My God, one has to be careful what one says unless one can be quite quite sure one is alone,’ the Prince told Freda Dudley Ward.78 He managed generally to keep his feelings under control. He ‘got on excellent terms with all those with whom he could converse,’ wrote Thomas, ‘and generally gave the impression that Tokyo was the one place he had set out from England to see’.79 Eliot clearly felt him hypercritical, yet admitted ‘he never failed in charm and courtesy when brought face to face with any Japanese’.80 He was equally successful with the press. Incensed by the plethora of restrictions imposed upon them by the Japanese authorities, the journalists accompanying the tour decided in future to boycott it. The Prince called them together and talked them round. One correspondent who had been most active in advocating a press boycott ‘rose and said that after hearing HRH’s remarks he had entirely changed his views. He was now in favour of giving a full and favourable account of the Prince’s doings.’81
The Japanese courtiers were much struck by the way the Prince mixed informally with mere commoners. There was debate as to whether Hirohito should do the same and tremendous excitement was caused when the Prince Regent was observed personally to thank the landlord of the hotel where the Prince of Wales was staying at Hakone. So very condescending a gesture was unprecedented in the history of the imperial family. Eliot noted how the Prince’s presence breathed life into the atrophied court, ‘even the Empress became slightly skittish’.82
Informality could, however, become indiscretion. The Prince forgot his own remarks about the keen hearing of the Japanese, and though he kept his opinion of his hosts to himself, he aired his views on other subjects with disconcerting freedom. Lord Reading, he told Eliot, was clever but not at all the man to be Viceroy. Aware of the attentiveness of those around him, the Ambassador had to beg the Prince to remember that many Japanese spoke English.83 He was apt too to change plans at the last moment or cancel expeditions for which elaborate and expensive arrangements had been made. When called to order by the senior members of his staff he would be penitent for a while, but soon transgressed again. Eliot remembered one occasion aboard Renown when he and Halsey together tried to persuade the Prince to mend his ways. ‘HRH was sitting in a large high-backed chair close to the wall and as the sermon proceeded gradually wriggled upwards until he squatted on the top of the back and from that elevation regarded his two elderly monitors with a most impish and incredulous smile.’84
Eliot and Halsey might note his imperfections, a few of his hosts might have suffered from his whims and unpunctuality, but to the vast majority of the Japanese who encountered him or followed his doings he seemed little short of perfection. Piers Legh told his father that the Prince had ‘made as great an impression here as he had ever done before. His reception everywhere has been nothing short of marvellous, and he has apparently completely captured the country by storm. People who live here say they have never seen anything to compare with it. I know it is going to do an enormous amount of good here.’85 In spite of his reservations about some aspects of the Prince’s behaviour, Sir Charles Eliot would not have dissented from that opinion.
And so it was home again at last. ‘How splendidly HRH has done – a true Ambassador of Empire,’ Sir Reginald Wingate wrote to Cromer. ‘I do hope the Public will now let him take a rest and holiday from these endless functions which must be terribly wearing.’86
9
‘The Ambassador of Empire’
THE PRINCE OF WALES GOT BACK FROM THE FAR EAST IN July 1922. It was not until April 1925 that he completed his imperial tours with a visit to South Africa. Between those dates, however, he twice visited Canada and once the United States. The second of those two voyages was to prove something of a turning point in his life.
‘I always feel that I have a right to call myself a Canadian because I am, in a small way, a rancher,’ he told the Canadian Club at the end of 1922.1 To the Prince the ranch was more than just a plaything, as her dairy was to Marie Antoinette; it was the only piece of land which he actually owned himself and it represented reality in a world which he found increasingly artificial. He corresponded regularly with the ranch manager, took an intelligent interest in the building up of the stock and prided himself in particular on the excellence of his shorthorns. When he visited Canada in the autumn of 1923 it was above all to inspect his ranch and spend some weeks there.
He could not escape without some junketing in the great cities. ‘The Prince gets here on Tuesday,’ Ernest Hemingway told Ezra Pound from Toronto. ‘Prince Charming, the Ambassador of Empire, the fair haired bugger.’2 There was an awful sameness about the ceremonies, so much so that when a provincial mayor lost a page of his speech and yammered helplessly after: ‘Not only do we welcome Your Royal Highness as the representative of His Majesty the King, but we …’, the Prince obligingly completed the hallowed phrase, ‘also welcome you for yourself’.3 But some events were unscripted. In Quebec he danced all night with an attractive woman, only to discover next morning that she was a journalist from New York. ‘I was had for a mug,’ he told Freda Dudley Ward, ‘but she was quite nice about it and said she wouldn’t say too much despite the fact that she had got off with me. I think she’s a sport.’4 She was, but the Prince was to discover a year later that not all journalists were equally sporting.
There were no journalists on the ranch, and the general public, or what little there was of it in rural Alberta, left the Prince in peace. He threw himself with zest into his role as rancher, riding around the fences of his four thousand acres, inspecting the stock, ordering new equipment. ‘I’ve even helped to muck out the cow house,’ he told the King, ‘and I chop and saw up wood and I can assure you that it’s very hard work indeed.’5 His staff were delighted to see him so contented and harmlessly employed, though less enthusiastic about the nature of their occupations – ‘Our conversation is largely of sheep-dips, shorthorns and stallions,’ Godfrey Thomas reported gloomily.6 Nor did the Prince pretend that it was more than a temporary role: ‘It’s a fine healthy life and a real rest for the brain … But of course one couldn’t stick it for very long.’7
It had been an honour and a joy to entertain him, wrote the Governor General, Lord Byng of Vimy, and the thought that the Prince planned to come again the following year filled him ‘with the pleasantest anticipations’.8 He might have revised his views a year later. In mid-1924 the Prince announced he would visit his ranch again in the autumn, stopping in New York for a few days to watch the international polo. In the event he spent nearly three weeks in New York and less than a week on the ranch. The King had originally wanted Halsey to go on the tour, but the Prince insisted that on a holiday of this kind the Admiral would be superfluous.9 He told his mother that Halsey’s illness prevented him joining the tour, but the Admiral assured the King that he was perfectly fit. ‘What a pity the dear boy should invent a story like that simply because he didn’t want to take him and tell you a regular untruth,’ the King commented to Queen Mary.10 Instead, the Prince was accompanied by Metcalfe and a new recruit to the household, Brigadier G. F. Trotter, known to everyone as ‘G’. Trotter was ‘a wonderful friend and so understanding and sound too’, the Prince told Godfrey Thomas. ‘Thank God I didn’t bring the Admiral. He would have sent me dippy on the voyage, let alone in the States.’11 ‘Sound’ was the last word to describe Trotter. He was, said Bruce Ogilvy, ‘a right old rip’, an amiable roué whose function was to facilitate the Prince’s pursuit of pleasure.12 Everybody liked him; nobody, except perhaps the Prince, trusted him. He and Metcalfe together acted as siren voices leading their master on to ever more perilous rocks. The only voice in the party suggesting that the Prince would do well to plug his ears to their dulcet chorus, or at least bind himself to the mast, was that of the assistant private secretary, Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles – and Lascelles, as the British Ambassador, Esmé Howard, told the King, was ‘excellent in every way but … too young to have any great authority’.13
Long before the visit began there had been suggestions that all would not go easily. Having set up the Prince as an immaculate hero in 1919, the American press was more than ready to redress the balance. In the intervening years the papers had been filled with gossip, linking his name with various women of the demi-monde and, more convincingly, with Mrs Dudley Ward. ‘Quite regardless of the looseness of its own sexual standards,’ wrote the British Ambassador to Curzon in 1922, ‘this country loves to be shocked and pained by what it is pleased to regard as the peculiar licentiousness of Princes, and the Prince was so successful on his visit here that he has naturally made our enemies desirous of showing that he is not what he was thought to be.’ In 1919 society women had gushed about the Prince as a ‘charming boy’, now he had sunk, or perhaps graduated, to the status of ‘a gay young man’.14 Some at least of the journalists who accompanied him when he sailed to New York in the Berengaria seemed intent on reducing him yet further to ‘reckless libertine’. ‘These Yank pressmen are b – s,’ the Prince told Thomas. ‘… one does resent their d – d spying so and they get so tight!! It seems a mean shame having them around when one is on a holiday trip.’15
Unfortunately he gave them plenty of material to work with; beginning with his departure, when he boarded the liner at 2.30 a.m. and kept everybody up awaiting him: ‘a most undignified proceeding,’ the King dubbed it, ‘and then refusing to come on deck or see anyone until she sailed, although thousands of people had come to the docks to see him off, was very rude.’16 Once arrived, he took up residence in the palatial home of Mr James Burden and settled down to divert himself in the intervals of watching polo. There was no shortage of hostesses eager to oblige him; his visit, wrote the columnist Cholly Knickerbocker, became an endurance test, ‘with the bank balances of the refulgent chieftains of the Long Island set pitted against His Royal Highness’s health … Never before in the history of metropolitan society has any visitor to these shores been so persistently and so extravagantly fêted.’17 Over-excited newspaper reports did more than justice to the Prince’s train of life and were forwarded to Buckingham Palace for gloomy perusal.
Nor was it only journalists. An English businessman, unnamed but described by the Prime Minister’s private secretary as ‘an important source in America’, wrote to Downing Street to complain that Metcalfe had arranged for the Prince to be entertained by ‘social outcasts and parvenus’ like Cosden, the oil speculator, and Fleishman, the yeast king. He had insulted one eminent hostess by asking that the Dolly Sisters – ‘notorious little Jewish actresses who have never been received anywhere’ – should be invited to a ball given in his honour, and by failing to attend himself when his request was refused. Twice he had been so drunk in public that he had had to be taken home. The impression he gave ‘was that of a desperately unhappy, wilful, dissipated boy without much brain, who could be very charming when he chose, but who was always seeking to avoid the duties of his position’.18 The businessman was probably Frederick Cunliffe-Owen, who wrote in very similar terms to Lord Stamfordham and was described by the British Ambassador as ‘a tiresome busy-body who cuts no ice’.19 Thomas was shown his letter and replied in fury that it was ‘a tissue of malicious and probably deliberate falsehoods’. Metcalfe had made no arrangements for the visit; the Prince had hardly met Fleishman; he had only made a brief appearance at Cosden’s dance because Mountbatten and the organizer of the British polo team, Lord Wimborne, had asked him to; he had not even known the Dolly Sisters were in New York. The writer of the letter had clearly been affronted because he had himself not been invited to some party.20
Certainly the charges were grossly exaggerated, but the Prince’s hectic hedonism caused some concern to Tommy Lascelles.
[Troubles are beginning,] he told Thomas we hadn’t been in the house two hours before a new comet blazed across our sky and Honey’s wagon was firmly hitched to it. Since then we haven’t seen much of him. The comet, unluckily, is not in the best Long Island constellation; the lorgnettes of the other stars are already fixed on its activities with strong disapproval, and it is of course only a question of time for the telescopes of Hearst to pick it up …
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