A Brief History of the House of Windsor by Michael Paterson Read Free Book Online

Service at a very young age (Eddy was thirteen and George twelve). Because they worked best whilst together, they stayed together in the Service. Instead of learning about the world through geography lessons in a schoolroom, they would see it for themselves. Rather than receiving their education entirely from tutors in a ‘class’ that consisted only of themselves, they would have the company of boys their own age, a largely random collection of youngsters with whom they would live on equal terms and whose respect they would have to earn through their ability to carry out the same tasks. It was, for the time, a remarkably democratic upbringing and it gave them common ground with their grandmother’s people in a way that very few other experiences could have done.
    Their naval careers began at Dartmouth. This training facility – later renamed Britannia Royal Naval College – is today a substantial and imposing collection of buildings overlooking Dartmouth harbour in Devon. At that time it was a fifty-year-old wooden warship – HMS
Britannia
, a veteran of the Crimea – moored in the same harbour, aboard which aspiring officers received instruction. It was as cramped and claustrophobic as being at sea. Dalton joined the ship with his two charges, for he had been appointed chaplain. He would continue to supervise the progress of one or both of them for many years to come.
    Following training, the two princes and their tutor transferred to another RN vessel, HMS
Bacchante
, and made three voyages round the world, which took them away for several years (1879–82). They sailed the Mediterranean, visiting Greece, Palestine, Egypt and Aden. They also went ashore in South Africa, Ceylon, Singapore, Japan and Australia, the Falkland Islands, South America and the United States. While in Japan, both of them visited a tattoo parlour and George was, for the rest of his life, to bear on his arm the design of a dragon in red and blue ink. When they returned, their grandmother was horrified to find that neither boy could speak French or German, the latter an outright necessity given their overwhelming preponderance of teutonic relations. They studied these languages for a time but in neither case with conspicuous success, despite spending an interlude at Heidelberg. Whatever the charms of this town – the ‘Oxford of Germany’ – George considered it ‘beastly dull’ in comparison with the places he had seen on his travels, and he hated German, considering it ‘a rotten language, which I find very difficult’.
    He might have been influenced here by more than mere personal disinclination. Though so many of his relations were German, the relative to whom he was closest – his mother – hated the country. A daughter of the king of Denmark, she would never forgive the Prussians for their war of 1864against her people. The German states – they were not yet at the time a united nation – had, under Bismarck’s leadership, aggressively seized territory from a small and peaceful nation. Princess Alexandra’s vehemence can be seen in a statement she wrote after her son had been appointed honorary colonel of a Prussian regiment: ‘My Georgie boy has become a real, live, filthy, blue-coated, Pickelhaube German soldier!’ (A
pickelhaube
was the brass-and-leather spiked helmet ubiquitous throughout the German armies.) If he had good reason to inherit a dislike of Germany and its language, he had no such excuse for his failure to master French. He managed to communicate in that language, but with the Englishman’s perverse pride in speaking it very badly.
    George enjoyed his period of naval service immensely. One of those straightforward personalities who recognize at once the path he wishes to follow in life, he took to the sea and the camaraderie of the wardroom with genuine enthusiasm. He had the habit of instant obedience, and would be characterized all his life by an absolute respect for those above him – just as he