Chapter 10
HMS Cassandra, Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn
It was daunting to think that the great Admiralty Dockyards complex ringing the bay with its half-a-dozen broad fitting out piers jutted out very nearly into the East River, framed by a forest of derricks and the rising walls of steel that were the two new fleet carriers Ulysses and Perseus – both still over a year away from completion – was nowadays, only the third largest in New England. It was dwarfed by the great combined fleet base and shipyards of the Halifax-St Margaret’s Bay complex in Nova Scotia and back home by the yards on the River Clyde and at Rosyth in Scotland. Nonetheless, it still made for a mightily impressive vista as HMS Cassandra slowly picked her way through the flotilla of yachts and launches which had come out to greet the King that afternoon.
Several motor gunboats bristling with heavy machine guns formed an imperfect cordon around the destroyer; their crews’ fingers never far from the triggers of their guns after this morning’s ‘incident’.
For his part the King had refused to make anything of the assassination attempt. There was no question of altering his and his wife’s schedule; all engagements would go ahead as planned and that, was that!
Forsaking full ceremonial dress, he had donned his Blue No. 1 uniform, hardly the best outfit for a hot summer day in the colonies but as Eleanor was wont to remind him ‘you never look more relaxed than when you are in your Navy rig’. This evening he would have to dress up like a proper popinjay; this afternoon he could get away without the antique tail coat and tri-corn hat, if not the oceans of gold braid his subjects expected of him. The main thing was that the brow of his heavily gold-encrusted cap concealed his stitched eyebrow.
‘I am afraid we are going to have to use a gallon of make-up to hide that this evening, darling,’ Eleanor had warned her husband as she inspected his turn out in the moments before they went up to the Lion’s deck to transfer onto the Cassandra.
Unlike his father and his elder siblings, the Navy life had kept King George fit and trim, and cultivated in him frugal habits, tastes and moderation in all things. People were kind enough to say he looked young for his age; he preferred to think that any man fortunate enough to be seen in public on his wife’s arm could not but be ‘given the benefit of the doubt’.
Eleanor had stepped out of the shadows into the harsh glare of World publicity as if to the manner born. The expensive high couture she had previously shunned for modestly stylish glad rags more appropriate to the wife of a career naval officer, and the modesty with which she had insisted their children were raised – such things were relative since their offspring were princes and princesses of the greatest empire the World had ever seen – had stymied the Press and republicans at home and abroad. In retrospect she could not have cultivated the image of a normal, albeit well to do, English housewife and mother better, while quietly gaining a reputation for patronising good causes, mainly in the fields of education, child health and the affairs of the local diocese of Winchester, where the family had been based for much of the King’s time in the Navy. Suddenly thrust onto the public stage she had blossomed, bringing an approachability and a new, human face to the monarchy and carried on being…herself.
Today she was attired in a calf-length grey dress, a single silvery broach above her heart. Regal and sensible her shoulder-length auburn hair was gathered in a bun beneath a hat with a half-veil and she wore matching, very nearly flat-heeled shoes. Her arms, and every inch of skin up to her neck were covered so as not to upset the vociferous East Coast puritanical lobby. Such things could be ignored later in the day when the schedule moved to Manhattan where the populous looked to the future not the past for its solace and inspiration.
Both the King and his Queen were a little taken aback by the positively Biblical throng on the quayside and everywhere they looked as they awaited their disembarkation. Literally, every vantage point was crowded. There were men hanging out of the cabs of the towering cranes, waving enthusiastically from the towering heights of the carcases of the two giant half-built aircraft carriers, packing all the adjacent piers, and cheering, swaying on the shores and hillsides in the middle-distance beneath an ocean of fluttering flags.
The royal couple had become connoisseurs of crowds, intuitive judges of their mood and to a degree, of their expectations. Their last trip to these shores had been over five years ago when they had spent over a month in New England visiting all bar six of the Colonies, journeying from east to west where they had boarded the old battlecruiser Redoubtable bound for the Sandwich Islands. Now they were on the first leg of a new tour of the Empire.
In all they planned to spend over six weeks in New England this time before again catching their breath in the Sandwich Islands – so fondly remembered from their last tour – before moving on to New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Ceylon, and India, where they would spend nearly two months, ahead traversing the Indian Ocean to the East African colonies, going on safari in South Africa, paying state visits to the Gold Coast and Nigeria, returning to the Americas to visit Barbados and Jamaica prior to finally, sailing for home sometime in January or February next year.
This time around HMS Lion, the cruisers Ajax and Naiad and six fleet destroyers, including HMS Cassandra would collect the Royal Party at Vancouver in mid-July, having taken passage in the meantime all the way down to Cape Horn and steamed back up to Canada, a distance of some sixteen thousand miles.
The Ajax and the Naiad had anchored in the Upper Bay a cable to port and starboard respectively of the flagship. Each was a scaled down version of the Lion, fifteen thousand-ton vessels armed with main batteries of eight eight-inch guns. At a distance their silhouettes were virtually indistinguishable from those of the four leviathans of the 5th Battle Squadron, in the same way that Cassandra’s profile was yet again, simply a smaller, leaner version of the layout of the Fleet’s great capital ships. That was a hangover of the days before electronic detection and ranging – ELDAR – was invented when confusing one’s enemy’s precision optical gun-laying had been the name of the game.
The King and the Queen walked serenely down the gangway to step foot onto the soil of New England to where the Lord Lieutenant of King’s County – these days a purely honorific ceremonial post because re-organisations in the 1950s had concentrated all the real power in the hands of the Governor’s Office – waited patiently, he and his wife both flaunting their old-fashioned plumage.
Lord Lieutenancies were sinecures reserved for retired senior colonial civil servants and worthies, their roles and duties a leftover from more feudal times which had tended until relatively recent times to unhelpfully blur lines of responsibility in the old Colonial regimes.
The King raised his cap to the tumult, belatedly remembering that he had promised Eleanor that he would refrain from so doing and thus frustrate any attempt by the serried ranks of photographers to get a snap of his ‘war wound’.
Together they stood on the dock.
The ovation was deafening.
The 5th Battle Squadron’s Royal Marine Band struck up God Save the King.
The Union Flag and red and white St George’s flags out-numbered those of the twin-colony twenty to one. In the Upper Bay the three-inch saluting guns of the Ajax and the Naiad began to bark out the customary twenty-three-gun salute.
King George turned to his wife and said out of the corner of his mouth: “You do realise that all of this is for you, not me, my love!”