The plant in my room is called George V, not because there were four plants called George that preceded it but because it is named after the monarch (1910-1936). It is the centenary of his accession this year (the king, not the plant), yet apart from commemorative stamps and coins there has been little mention of it. As a collector, George V might have been pleased about the stamps at least. King George V isn’t a big presence in our history lessons or national consciousness - he’s certainly not a Henry VIII or Queen Victoria (he was her grandson - and our Queen’s grandfather - if you want to place him that way). His reign consists, in popular culture/public awareness, of forsaking his Russian cousin and hiding away his sickest and youngest son.
That he was King during the First World War and the General Strike seldom comes across in thoughts or accounts of the events. Few directors of TV dramas will imagine that George V can serve as enough of a signifier of the period to merit any mid-montage shots of him looking aghast at it all. Dramas rarely mention him in a throwaway line of dialogue – you know, the clever way they’ll have a fishwife say something about ‘old queen Vic’ or ‘Edward and that Simpson woman’ to jolt us into remembering that Queen Elizabeth II isn’t the monarch.
George V did appear in the television adaptation of My Boy Jack (not the original play). He stood silently as David Haig’s Rudyard Kipling recited poetry at him. But then the audience at home only wanted to see Harry Potter in a serious drama/army uniform anyway. YouTube clips of it generate comments like: ‘i like the moustache guy’ (that would be Mowgli’s dad) and ‘who’s the other guy in the room?’ (That would be the King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India).
The young Prince George wasn’t considered as likely to be future King. He only became second in line at 26, upon the death of his elder brother, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence [1]. Incidentally, Prince Albert Victor’s easily exaggerated lifestyle continues to get him imagined in all sorts of situations. The most obvious example being the claims that he was Jack the Royal Ripper, or Jack the bastard child fathering/vengefully syphilitic Royal Ripper…or at least the reason why it was a physician ordinary to Queen Victoria who done it, à la Alan Moore’s From Hell.
As for George V, the only highly-likely-to-be-false claims against him were that he was a bigamist and a drunkard. The former was ambiguously suggested by a number of publications before French journalist E. F. Mylius offered more details (soon disproved) and got twelve months for criminal libel. That the largely abstemious King was imagined a drunkard owed to his looks. Red of face and at times loud voiced, as an ex-sailor he could be Monty Python’s rough, tough, jolly sort of fellow (don’t follow that quote to the end) [2].
His looks also excite people because of his seemingly uncanny resemblance to Tsar Nicholas II (personally, I think it’s just the beards and hairline). One Internet user posted a picture of them together, and - judging from their comments - clearly managed to confuse ‘inbreeding’ and ‘being cousins’ (Their mothers had the same father, isn’t that gross?). Of course, having married Princess May of Teck, George V was wedded to his second cousin once removed. Perhaps that isn’t as much fun as comparing inter-cousinly beards for recessive genes.
The better-known things about George V appear during the First World War. Most obviously this was when the Russian Imperial family was executed, but the conflict also saw the European monarchs, with all the bloodshed of their subjects, become cousins at war. Of course, with Wilhelm II being a rather hands-on German Emperor and George V the monarch of a parliamentary democracy they had quite different roles in the conflict. What the King did do was visit and honour:
Related to the cousinly theme, this was when the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha prudently became the House of Windsor. You can mention the war, but don’t mention the Germans. Kaiser Bill, on hearing of the name change, proclaimed his desire to see a performance of The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Rose, p.174).In four years of war he undertook 450 visits to troops, 300 to hospitals, almost as many to munitions factories and shipyards. With his own hands he conferred 50,000 awards for gallantry’(Rose, p.179).
As for the next decade of George V’s reign, the 1920s saw four general elections and five changes of prime minister, which at times gave the King an increased political role. When Conservative prime minister Andrew Bonar Law retired after a cancer diagnosis in 1923, the King (with advice from ministers and officials) picked Stanley Baldwin to replace him (Rose, pp.266-273). Between 1923 and 1937 the premiership was to be exchanged exclusively between Baldwin and Ramsey Macdonald (prime minister of the first Labour government in 1924). In August 1931 the Great Depression facing Labour government divided over cuts to public expenditure, particularly unemployment benefit. The King, having heard the advice of both Baldwin and Sir Herbert Samuel (acting leader of the Liberal Party), encouraged Macdonald to lead a National Government (Rose, pp.374-6).
The only thing near a scandal (for we must have a scandal) in George V’s involvement with the government came a few months into his reign. In November 1910 the King (reluctantly) made a rather partisan secret pledge to create Liberal peers, should Herbert Henry Asquith’s House of Lords-reforming Liberal government require him to. It was hoped that, when threatened with Liberal peers, the Lords would agree to lose their power of veto. As the relevant bill passed the pledge never had to be fulfilled. Semi scandal (Rose, pp.115-130).
I read Kenneth Rose’s book on King George V and discovered what was there all along. George V was a simple man in the King’s role, a role that he carried out pretty accurately. He did not cause much of a stir, which is a consequence, and perhaps not a definition, of the operation of the British constitutional monarchy. A level of distance from the government’s decisions, with only (only!) advice, concerns and vigilance offered. Dotted Is, crossed Ts and - if you must - gooey eyed BBC pomp and pageantry. Fodder for Keep Calm and Carry On branded ephemera.
He was a sailor with a belated and incomplete royal education; he spoke no foreign language (his wife, however, was able to hear from radio broadcasts how bad Hitler’s German was); his ministers liked that he was unable to question policy as intrusively as other rulers might; he wanted to be a country squire and go shooting; his home life was more middle class than upper; he strove for smaller royal residences and had a ‘flight of fancy’ of tearing down Buckingham Palace and selling the land off as a public park; he had quite a sense of humour; he was a stickler for sartorial detail and royal protocol (though he did make allowances for the first, less flush Labour Government). Like everyone, some of George V’s personal opinions were good (he deplored colour bars in colonial India) and others stank (‘I always thought people like that shot themselves’, he said of a gay former Cabinet Minister) [3].
Commenting after the King’s death, Harold Laski said that George V had a superficial concern for the problems of social and industrial welfare (Rose, p.229). Superficial here is not, perhaps, just for show superficial, but thin/not thorough superficial. George V lived his royal life, and had little idea of the plight of his poorest subjects, or that of workers. He was, however, concerned - and sought to help - as and when he saw evidence of such a plight. J'y pense et puis j'oublie.
I think that gives you some of what lies behind the unsmiling, uptight and haunted thing that sometimes appears in TV dramas as George V, a portrayal that might be seen again later this year. The King’s Speech centres on George VI (played by Colin Firth) and his stammer. Michael Gambon will be George V it seems, and Helena Bonham Carter Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother - I can’t wait for the anticipatory outcry from armchair casting directors). I cynically imagine George V will be used as the old, gruff monarch with which they offset the new, young and more human George VI (more human - a trendy phrase, but surely rather reminiscent of racist discourse that imagines a human hierarchy). But there is always hope, and I hope Michael Gambon, and those realizing the script, give us a little more of George V than normal. Finally, in 1932 George V recorded the first Christmas speech, doing so on the BBC’s Empire Service (eventually the World Service) (Rose, p.394):
I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them…=============================================================================
(Words by Mowgli’s dad.)
[1] BBC History, Historic Figures: George V <http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/george_v_king.shtml>
[2] Kenneth Rose, King George V, (London: George weidenfield & Nicolson Ltd, 1983) pp.81-87.
[3] The information that informed this list was taken generally from Rose, and specifically: p.163 (Hitler anecdote), p.95 (demolishing Buckingham Palace), p. 348 (colour bars in India) and p.366 (on homosexuals shooting themselves).
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