In Canada, Prince George and Princess Mary undertook a two-month visit from the east coast to the west, using a specially fitted-out rail carriage provided by the Canadian Pacific Railway. They performed the duties typical of a royal visit to Canada: watching a lacrosse match, reviewing troops, even attempting a lumberjack’s hearty meal of pork and beans outside Ottawa. As during future Royal Tours, they ensured that the accompanying press would not have any juicy tidbits to report.16 When the couple visited British Columbia and travelled from Vancouver to Victoria on October 1, they sailed on the Canadian Pacific’s latest ship, the Empress of India. The royal party returned to Vancouver on October 3, and the Duke was so impressed by the ship and its captain, O.P. Marshall, that he made him an Elder Brother of Trinity House. Through the years, many members of the British royal family favoured the Canadian Pacific’s ships for transport, but Empress of India was the first to be so honoured.
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The royal party from the Ophir. Front row (L to R): Earl of Minto, Duke of Cornwall and York, Duchess of Cornwall and York, Countess of Minto. Back row (L to R): ?, Hon. Mrs. Derek Keppel, Lady Mary Lygon, others unidentifiable. Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, October 16, 1901.
The Canadian tour was a good test for Prince George, who on his return to England was created the Prince of Wales. From October 1905 to April 1906, the Prince and Princess would visit India and Burma on the battleship HMS Renown, and in 1908, His Royal Highness returned to Canada on the battleship HMS Indomitable to celebrate the tercentenary of Quebec City. The former temporary Royal Yacht Ophir was sold by the Orient Line in 1913 and during the Great War was commissioned as an Armed Merchant Cruiser and later a hospital ship.
On wishing his son and daughter-in-law farewell in 1901, Edward VII must have recalled pleasant memories of his own tour to Canada. In 1860, as Prince of Wales, the nineteen-year-old had arrived in North America on the latest British battleship, HMS Hero, disembarking at Quebec City on August 18. The object of the tour was to rebuild the Anglo-North American transatlantic ties that had become somewhat strained during the American Civil War. His Royal Highness threw himself into this as a goodwill ambassador and visited Ottawa, the lumber town on the Ontario-Quebec border that had been chosen by his mother to be Canada’s capital, where he laid the cornerstone for its parliament buildings.17 Travelling by wood-burning locomotive, by ship, and carriage, the Prince charmed crowds from St. John, New Brunswick, to Windsor, Ontario — even breaking the royal prohibition by dining publicly. His mother had never been seen to eat in public, and the last British monarch to do so had been George IV in 1821. Edward met an ancient Laura Secord and the last surviving veterans of the war of 1812, drove in the last spike on the Victoria Bridge that connected Montreal with the South Shore of the St. Lawrence, and hunted and fished. Gifts of stuffed moose and birds were presented to him, and he was danced off his feet by Montreal matrons. The Prince went as far west as Niagara Falls, where he watched the French acrobat Charles Blondin cross the raging waters by a tightrope. His Royal Highness presented Blondin with a bag of gold coins, and when Blondin offered to take him across in a wheelbarrow, the Prince readily agreed to do so — until dissuaded by his entourage. Easily his most memorable experience on the Canadian tour was running the Chaudière timber slides on a raft during the Ottawa portion of the visit. When he returned from the tour on November 15, Queen Victoria noticed that he had become more talkative, and even the politicians who had previously depreciated his strengths agreed that the Prince of Wales had found his metier, and that henceforth, foreign visits by members of the royal family were to be encouraged.
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Prince of Wales’s visit to Canada. Shooting the rapids on the Nipigon River, Ontario, September 5-7, 1919.
Edward VII’s eldest grandson, whose full name was Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David (he was called David by his family), first went to sea as a seventeen-year-old. In August 1911, Edward served as a midshipman on the old battleship Hindustan and learned how to read flag signals, keep watch, and run a picket boat. It wasn’t that his father had planned a naval career for Edward (he was, after all, going to accede to the throne) but that, as a former naval officer himself, George V thought it would teach him some concept of duty. Writing about the experience fifty years later, the Duke of Windsor recollected the voyage from Cowes to the Firth of Forth. He got to mix with boys his age, drink a glass of port on “guest nights,” and begin smoking cigarettes. It all ended in three months when he was summoned home to the library at Sandringham and told by his father that he was going to Oxford. “If I cannot stay in the Navy,” he is supposed to have begged his father, “please let me go around the world and learn about different countries and their peoples at first hand.” In the summer of 1913, he was sent on a tour of Europe to improve his languages, and also made an officer in the Royal Navy, his commission jointly signed by his father, Winston Churchill, the young First Lord of the Admiralty, and his relative Prince Louis of Battenberg, First Sea Lord.18
Second sons in the royal family (such as both George V and Prince Albert, the Duke of York) were trained for a career in the Senior Service, the Royal Navy. It would thus be as a member of the crew of an old training ship, HMS Cumberland, that Prince Albert (Bertie to his family), the future George VI, first visited Canada in 1913. Known as Mr. Johnson by all on board, the seventeen-year-old had never even crossed the English Channel, let alone the Atlantic, and now he was stoking coal with the other middies (midshipmen), seeing exotic Tenerife, and drinking beer. With lifelong gastric problems, the Prince was never a good sailor and was plagued with seasickness throughout his life. Without his father’s authoritarian bearing and perpetually in the shadow of his older brother, Albert stammered and was remembered as too shy to meet the young ladies of Montreal. Interviews with the press terrified him even more. Harassed by North American reporters, he hired a shipmate to impersonate him. The Canadian tour was part of his education, and besides Halifax and Montreal, he visited Niagara Falls. On the way home, in Charlottetown, the Prince refereed a cricket match between the crew and the local team. HMS Cumberland would soon become a familiar sight to Canadians, since, because of the First World War, the 9,800-tonne armoured cruiser got a second lease on life, doing convoy duty between the U.K. and Canada until 1917. Three years after the Canadian visit, as a sub-lieutenant, the future George VI would take part in the Battle of Jutland on HMS Collingwood.
Even before the war had ended, Prime Minister Lloyd George had conceived the plan for a whole series of Empire tours for the heir to the throne, to strengthen relations with the peoples of the Commonwealth. His Majesty approved them, as his father had approved his own worldwide tour in 1901. But now twenty-five, the Prince of Wales had been changed by the war and the gap between his generation and that of his father’s was becoming more obvious daily.19 His first Canadian tour was devised for him. On August 5, 1919, the Prince of Wales left Portsmouth for St. John’s, Newfoundland, on the battleship HMS Renown.20 He was accompanied by a retinue of twenty-two, which included friends, clerks, valets, orderlies, and two detectives from Scotland Yard. The Renown was too large for the harbour at Charlottetown, and the Prince transferred to HMS Dragon, returning to the battleship for his arrival at Quebec City on August 21. Between Vancouver and Victoria, His Royal Highness sailed on the Canadian Pacific ferry Princess Alice, and the next year, when he returned, it would be the Princess Louise.
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Prince Albert (later George VI) as a midshipman when his ship HMS Cumberland arrived in Canada in 1913.
When George V went to France in 1923, instead
