to be so; instructive and not a bore; moral and not a prig; high spirited and not reckless. It would be an interesting task for a young man with imagination.’100 The King preferred horses to imagination. He chose William Cadogan, a gallant and honourable soldier who was almost wholly without intellectual interests and whose chief function was to persuade his charge to hunt. ‘Not a very exciting sort of chap,’ commented the Prince when they first met.102 As if this entourage did not sufficiently separate him from the common herd, the Prince was settled in his own suite of rooms, furnished by the Queen with Sheraton pieces of furniture and good watercolours. Odder still for Oxford, he had his own bathroom. It may not have been very luxurious – ‘a cold, converted torture chamber’ one of his contemporaries described it102 – but it still set its owner apart from his fellows.
The real problem, however, was summed up by Cosmo Lang, then Archbishop of York. The object of the Prince going to Oxford, he assumed, was that he should enter ‘naturally and simply’ into college life. His life might be simple but would never be natural if his friends were selected for him. Yet if something of the sort was not done, the best men in college would hang back in the fear that they might seem royal toadies, while less desirable companions, ‘often agreeable and plausible enough’, would thrust themselves forward. The solution must be to persuade a few of the ‘leading and best men’ to ease the Prince’s passage into college society.103 Derby’s son Stanley should obviously be a member of any such group.
On the whole the system worked. The Prince was still shy. Lord Grantley remembered his ‘characteristic way of coming into a room, jerking forward from the hips and fingering his tie the whole time … It looked as if it was torture to him to meet strangers.’104 He was further handicapped by the fact that most of his contemporaries had moved on in a group from their respective public schools, while there were few if any naval cadets at Oxford. ‘The junior common room is something like a gunroom,’ he noted nostalgically in his diary. ‘At 7.00 I dined in hall … I got on fairly well, only my drawback is not knowing anyone. It lasted 1⁄2 hour and then Stanley and a chap called Higham sat in my room till 9.45. They are very nice and we talked about many things.’105 It was not easy at first, but he was friendly and ready to become sociable. He forced himself out of his shell, attending the celebrated entertainments in the common room and marvelling at the amount people drank. ‘We were all pretty dead at the end and I had almost a drop too much. However, I managed all right … It is a good thing to do as one gets to know people.’106 After the first few nights he spent almost every evening in the rooms of one of his friends, smoking, singing, talking or playing cards. Barrington-Ward, a future editor of The Times, remembered him calling in on his rooms when an impromptu concert was in progress. A number of cardboard trumpets were lying around. ‘The Prince promptly took one and made as much noise as anyone. He said he liked a “good row”. So we had a ragtime, comic songs and choruses, and he joined in merrily like a man … It was impossible not to like him. He is clean-looking and jolly, with no side at all.’107
The friends he made, however, were not necessarily those whom his father or Hansell would have chosen. His opinion of Stanley varied from day to day, but his considered judgment in 1916, by which time they had become close friends, was that Stanley had greatly improved but that he had never really liked him as an undergraduate. ‘I wish you had rooms opposite mine, it would be great,’ he wrote to an old naval friend. ‘As it is, I have that chap Stanley, who I don’t know very well, and who is coshy!! That is the worst of all crimes!!’108 Coshy meant stuck-up, putting on airs. Lord Cranborne was ‘very nice’ but Lord Ednam – who, as the Earl of Dudley, was in time to become one of his closest friends – was undoubtedly coshy; a period in a gunroom would have done him good.109 The Prince’s friends tended to be more home-spun, people who would have fitted naturally into the Royal Navy. One or two were intellectuals; in February 1913 he dined for the first time with a man who was to play a critical role in his life, ‘the President of the Union debating society, W. Monckton, a very nice man’.110 A few were deemed unsuitable. Hansell and Cadogan warned him against one in particular: ‘They say that Ronnie is a bad lot, he is a gt friend of mine and of course this is a gt blow to me. However I shall in no way chuck him but merely not be seen about with him.’111 Unfortunately he made the mistake of inviting the delinquent Ronnie to meet his brother Prince Harry when the latter visited Oxford. Hansell ‘was very sick with me … I am an awful failure in this life and always do the most idiotic things.’112
Such moods of contrition became more frequent after his first few months at Oxford. The Prince did nothing very wicked but for the first time in his life he found it possible to slip his leash, and it would have been surprising if he had not celebrated the fact with mild excess. Many years later he told the American journalist Cy Sulzberger that he had found Oxford quite agreeable ‘because we were drunk all the time’.113 He exaggerated, but though not drunk all the time, he managed it not infrequently. On 10 November 1912 he drank too much port, fell, made his nose bleed, and had to be put to bed by two friends who distracted Hansell while he got undressed. But he had the resilience of youth. He was walking round the garden by 7.30 the following morning and apologizing to his friends not long afterwards – ‘They were awfully nice about it.’114 Usually there was more noise than alcohol: ‘There were 25 of us and we went up to Somerville’s rooms where we danced and made a row … It was a great evening.’115 He eschewed the chic world of Evelyn Waugh’s Bollinger Club baying for broken glass. He was elected to the Bullingdon – in its own eyes at least the most elite of Oxford dining clubs – went to a dinner, was made to drink too much, and retired furious and the worse for wear: ‘I will have nothing more to do with the filthy riding men, they are a beastly set.’116
He never joined the set, but within a few months of making this entry in his diary he had become a riding man himself. His father considered that this was a part of his education quite as important as learning French or studying the constitution. ‘If you can’t ride, you know, I’m afraid people will call you a duffer,’ he told his son. Hunting was the only way to learn properly. ‘The English people like riding and it would make you very unpopular if you couldn’t do so.’117 Cadogan was in charge of the training and found his pupil at first recalcitrant. A year before, the Prince had hunted near Sandringham and had stood about all day ‘soaked through and petrified with cold. And then they wonder why one does not like hunting!’118 Now he grumblingly let himself be dragged off to ride in the neighbourhood but showed plainly that he thought it a bore – ‘deadly as usual’.119 To his surprise he found that he was beginning to enjoy the riding more and more. He went out with the South Oxfordshire hunt, was in the saddle for seven hours without falling off, was awarded the brush and enjoyed his day.120 ‘Until a few months ago I was terrified of riding and loathed the sight of a horse,’ he told a friend, ‘but it suddenly came to me, and under Cadogan’s instruction and tuition, I have now plenty of confidence and jump everything!!’121 Some time that spring he graduated to that horseman’s nirvana, the Pytchley hunt. The King’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, congratulated him with all the gravity befitting so august an occasion. ‘I solemnly believe that few things will tend more to endear you to the people who some day by God’s will will be your subjects.’122
Riding was only one of the Prince’s sporting pursuits. He golfed, played squash and went for gruelling runs. He played cricket at Radley, made a duck, and commented sourly: ‘It’s a poor game.’123 He was a regular member of the Magdalen football second XI, and appeared occasionally in the first. He shot from time to time on estates near Oxford. Lord Crawford met him in October 1913 with the Wantages at Lockinge. ‘The Prince of Wales seems overburdened with his duties which he performs with meticulous precision,’ he noted. ‘Poor boy, somehow he made me feel very sorry for him … If only he would bolt with a ballet girl, say for twenty-four hours!’124 The poor boy still found time to gamble several evenings a week, though he rarely lost or won more than £10 or so; to acquire and drive a 39-horse-power touring model blue Daimler; to learn the bagpipes with Pipe-Major Ross of the Scots Guards. He joined the Officers’ Training Corps, whose adjutant was the future Field Marshal Jumbo Wilson, and scored 96 out of 100 shooting at a static