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