The King's Speech - Mark Logue [23]
The two boys and Prince Mary, who arrived in 1897, followed by Prince Henry, born in 1900, Prince George in 1902 and Prince John in 1905, spent most of their time in one of two rooms upstairs: the day nursery and the slightly larger night nursery, which looked out over a pond to a park beyond where deer roamed.
Like other English upper-class children of the day, Bertie and his siblings were brought up for the first years of their lives by nurses and a governess who ruled the area beyond the swing door on the first floor to which they were largely confined. Once a day, at tea time, dressed in their best clothes and hair neatly combed, they would be brought downstairs and presented to their parents. The rest of the time they were left entirely in the hands of the nurses, one of whom was later revealed to be something of a sadist. She was jealous of even the little time each day David would spend with his parents and, it was later claimed by the Duke of Windsor in his autobiography, would pinch him hard and twist his arm in the corridor outside the drawing room so he was crying when he was presented to them and quickly taken out again.
At the same time, she largely ignored Bertie, feeding him his afternoon bottle while they were out riding in the C-spring Victoria, a carriage notorious for its bumpy ride. The practice, according to his official biographer John Wheeler-Bennett, was partly to blame for the chronic stomach problems that he was to suffer as a young man. The nurse later had a nervous breakdown.
It was not surprising the children’s relationship with their parents was a distant one. Matters were not helped by their father’s approach to child rearing. The future King George V had enjoyed what for the era had been a relatively relaxed upbringing, thanks to his father Edward VII, who had been reacting against the strictness with which his parents, Victoria and Albert, had behaved towards him. As a result, whenever she had contact with her grandchildren, the Queen expressed horror at their wayward behaviour.
Far from bringing up his own offspring in an equally liberal way, George did precisely the opposite: the Prince, according to his biographer Kenneth Rose, was ‘an affectionate parent, albeit an unbending Victorian’. Thus, although he undoubtedly loved his children, he believed in inculcating a sense of discipline from an early age – influenced in part by strict obedience to authority that had been instilled in him during his and his brother’s adolescence in the navy. George wrote a telling letter to his son on his fifth birthday: ‘Now that you are five years old I hope you will always try & be obedient & do at once what you are told, as you will find it will come much easier to you the sooner you begin. I always tried to do this when I was your age & found it made me much happier.’18
Punishment for transgressions was administered in the library – which, despite its name, was devoid of books, the shelves being filled instead with the impressive stamp collection to which George devoted his leisure time when he was not shooting or sailing. Sometimes the boys would get a verbal dressing down; for serious offences, their father would put them over his knee. The room, not surprisingly, was remembered by the boys largely as a ‘place of admonishment and reproof ’.
The children’s lives changed dramatically following the death of Queen Victoria