The Peoples King (13 page)

The 'man in the street' was certainly encouraged by Edward's visit
to Wales. The President and Secretary of the United French Polishers'
London Society wrote that his organization admired the King's interest
in the Special Areas 'and your Majesty's promise "Something will be
done" to relieve them'.
⁶¹
The genuine sympathy which he had recently
displayed in South Wales, wrote a woman to the King from a village
near Manchester, 'is only one of countless actions by which you have
forged a bond between yourself and your people.'
⁶²

But other sections of the population were nervous about Edward's
trip to Wales. 'Peers and politicians who resented his "demagogic"
interest in labour', commented an American magazine, 'watched his
trip nervously.'
⁶³
The statement that 'something must be done' was
seen as particularly offensive because it carried an implicit criticism of
Government policy and Government practice - and it was reported in
this way in much of the national press. Ramsay MacDonald, who was
Lord President, expressed his annoyance with the King in his diary.
Referring to a meeting on 21 November with Sir George Gillett, the
newly appointed Commissioner for the Special Areas, MacDonald
recorded that they 'talked Distressed Areas & King's visit to S. Wales
which has roused expectations; and the promises he has made will
embarrass the Govt. These escapades should be limited. They are an
invasion into the field of politics & should be watched constitution­ally.' Members of the royal family, he added, were supposed to be
above politics.
⁶⁴

It was not just the ministers of the National Government who were
irritated by Edward's visit to South Wales. Dismay was felt across the
whole matrix of the Establishment - that is, the groups of men and
women who ruled Britain by reason of their traditional prominence
or their wealth. The Establishment represented a very powerful alli­ance of the Conservative party, the Church of England (which was -
and still is - the official or 'established' church) and the Tory press,
especially
The Times
, the
Telegraph
and the
Morning Post.
H. G.
Wells mocked these groups by describing them as 'the Bishops and the
Court people and the Foreign Office and the Old Gentry and Bath and
Cheltenham and Blimpland and all that.'
⁶⁵

At the centre of the Establishment was 'Society' - the exclusive circle
of upper-class men and women who were closely tied to each other
by birth, marriage and culture. Society was a tiny fraction of the
population, but enormously influential in terms of social and political
power. At its apex was the royal family, supported by the senior
functionaries of the court.
⁶⁶
It was understood that either you were
'in' Society, or you were 'out'. If you were 'in', then you shared with
other members of Society a horror of anything vulgar - the word
'common' was used to express contempt. If you were 'out', then you
simply did not belong. Businessmen were mostly 'out', unless they
came in through the door of Conservative politics. Baldwin tried to
imagine, said Beaverbrook, 'that he had the mind and habits of a
country squire'.
^6-
But in fact his family had made their money in iron
and steel.

Going to public school, then to Oxford or Cambridge, was the
standard route to adult life for men of Society. For women it was
necessary to be a debutante and to 'come out': some eight thousand
women were presented to the monarch each year at the four courts
held in Buckingham Palace. Social barriers were starting to break
down in the 1930s, but the power structure of British society was
overwhelmingly monolithic.

On behalf of the Establishment, the editor of
The Times,
Geoffrey
Dawson, was determined to set things straight on the matter of
Edward's visit to South Wales. Dawson, in his early sixties, was a
severe-looking man with thinning silver hair. A graduate of Eton and
Magdalen College, Oxford, he was a Fellow of All Souls and a member
of the Beefsteak Club, the Travellers Club and the Athenaeum, exclu­sive London clubs where he lunched and dined and discussed national
affairs with other members of the male elite. In a written account of
the period in which Edward went on his tour of the Welsh valleys, he
objected that the
Daily Mail
had made a 'monstrous attempt to
contrast his Majesty's solicitude for the unemployed in South Wales
with the indifference of his Ministers.'
⁶⁸
He wrote a short leader on
the impropriety and danger of this attitude which appeared in
The
Times
on 24 November 1936. 'The King's Ministers are His Majesty's
advisers,' it insisted, 'and to contrast his personal and representative
concern for the well-being of a section of the people with the adminis­trative slips of his advisers is a constitutionally dangerous proceeding
and would threaten, if continued, to entangle the Throne in politics.'
⁶⁹
But as far as the King was concerned, he had simply responded to
the tragic situation he found at Dowlais. 'I was quoted', he explained
years later in his memoirs, 'as having said in the midst of some dismal
scene of ruined industry, that "something must be done" to repair the
ravages of the dreadful inertia that had gripped the region.'
⁷¹
But this
statement, he added, 'was the minimum humanitarian response that I
could have made to what I had seen.'
⁷¹
It was motivated not by a
political aim, said Edward, but by a simple humanity. This was exactly
how the visit was perceived by many of the ordinary people of Britain.
'When . . . King Edward came to Wales and said, "something must be
done," he got into trouble for saying that, but he was not wrong. I
would have said the same thing myself', observed a man who grew up
in the Glamorgan town of Penarth in the 1930s.
⁷²

The Government could not afford to ignore the King's visit to South
Wales. A 'wife and mother' observed in a letter to the
Daily Mirror
that although it was not the King's job to pay any attention to the
suffering of the long-term unemployed, 'he had to do it before anything
was done by the politicians.'
⁷³
Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of
the Exchequer, felt obliged to alter a speech he delivered in Leeds on
20 November, a couple of days later, to acknowledge the problem of
the Special Areas. The Government was continuously studying the situ­ation in those areas, he insisted, and searching for new ways to help
them. But he admitted that in South Wales, in particular, the situation
was no better than it was when they had begun to look at the problem.
He warned that the Government could not promise any 'spectacular
plan which in a trice would solve one of the most obstinate, baffling
problems that has ever faced a Government in this country.'
⁷⁴

On their own, Edward's democratic leanings might have been
ignored. But combined with his massive popularity they were a cause of
grave concern to the Government. Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative
Prime Minister of the National Government, made it clear to a col­league that he was increasingly perturbed about 'the delicate situation
created by the personality of the new King'.
⁷⁵
Clement Attlee, the
leader of the Labour Party, noticed Baldwin's anxiety at a meeting of
the Accession Council after the death of George V.
⁷⁶
Chamberlain had
his own doubts about the new King. 'I do hope he "pulls up his
socks",' he wrote in some notes, 'and behaves himself now he has
such heavy responsibilities, for unless he does he will soon pull down
the throne.' It was known, according to Montgomery Hyde, writing
in his biography of Chamberlain, that he

drafted a memorandum for Cabinet circulation, urging that the King should
'settle down', wear conventional clothes, work at his 'boxes' and not make
remarks in public, which were apt to be reported in the newspapers, about
such topics as the slums and unemployment. It is also known that the Prime
Minister thought it wise to suppress this memorandum.
⁷⁷

Geoffrey Dawson was horrified by the popularity of King Edward.
He knew that he would have to take this into serious consideration
when thinking about 'the possible value of publicity' in any cam­paign to force the King's hand on the matter of Mrs Simpson. On
12 November
1936
,
in the period leading up to Edward's visits to the
Home Fleet and South Wales, Dawson noted in his diary that if
'newspaper criticism were to begin before these engagements it might
be taken as an attempt to undermine HM's popularity in advance; if
immediately after them, as an attempt to minimize his influence. It
was a very difficult problem, on which SB [Stanley Baldwin] professed
himself quite unable to give advice.'
⁷⁸

Many of the leading members of the Government belonged to a
different generation from the King. In 1936 Edward was forty-two,
whereas Baldwin was sixty-nine and Chamberlain sixty-seven. But it
was not simply a matter of years. More importantly, it was a matter
of experience: Baldwin's generation had not seen the horrors of the

First World War at first hand. Indeed, this generation would not have
been so dominant in Westminster and Whitehall, had it not been for
the deaths in battle of so many young men. 'It is only at times you
notice it,' wrote the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson in
1930,

but when you do it comes as a shock to realize that a whole generation has
dropped out of the House of Commons. In the seats of the mighty in all parties
are the men over sixty. The criticisms come from the under or early forties.
And of the intermediaries, the men who should be bridging the generations
there are just a scattered few, the survivors of the Great War.''

These survivors, all over Britain, were haunted by grief and terrible
memories - of violent death, of the continuous and useless carnage at
battles like Passchendaele, and of the dreary and terrifying reality of
trench life. They had a comradeship and a shared knowledge that
nobody else could ever understand.
⁸⁰