The Thirties: An Intimate History by Gardiner Juliet

Author:Gardiner, Juliet [Gardiner, Juliet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2010-01-29T23:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

Choosing Between Gas Masks and God’s Tasks

I believe that Christ was neither meek nor mild, nor frail, but a man magnificently built, tall and strong and that His mind was even stronger than His body … By the keenness of His brain all those who argued with Him were outwitted and subdued.

H.W. (‘Bunny’) Austin, champion tennis player and convert to the ‘Oxford Group’, writing in the Daily Express, 1932

‘What a bloody shit! Now we are going to get a republic,’ exclaimed Baroness Rothschild when she heard of Edward VIII’s abdication. She was proved wrong, of course, but nevertheless the unshakeable determination of the King Emperor to marry an American woman who had ‘a couple of living husbands still scattered around’ was a major constitutional issue, and there were worries as to whether the monarchy would survive, or would ‘crumble under the shock and strain’. No King of England had abdicated since Richard II in 1399 (and he had hardly departed of his own volition), but although the matter of Edward and Mrs Simpson soon faded for most people, and its importance to the life of the nation proved to be transitory, it sometimes illuminated currents already coursing through the law, the Church, society, fashion, and of course the monarchy itself.

For a start, there was the small matter of the coronation mug. The artist Eric Ravilious, who had established a considerable reputation as a watercolourist, engraver, lithographer and decorator of ceramics, was commissioned by Josiah Wedgwood to produce some designs that could be transfer-printed onto pottery, a traditional eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century English technique. In July 1936 Ravilious travelled to Stoke-on-Trent to finalise designs for a special mug to celebrate the coronation of Edward VIII, planned for the following May. Wedgwood, which had also commissioned a commemorative mug from Dame Laura Knight — Ravilious thought it was ‘bloody beyond belief’ — was delighted with Ravilious’s exuberant, colourful design with its ‘submerged royal arms with the heads of the beasts sticking out into the [exploding] fireworks above’. The large mug, like ‘a mantelpiece ornament’, exclaimed Ravilious when he first saw the finished product, went into production straight away, and the first shop in London to stock it was Dunbar Hay in Albemarle Street, run by a friend of Ravilious. The first customer through the door to buy one was Wallis Simpson. However, when Edward VIII abdicated on 10 December 1936, the mug had to be hastily withdrawn, and reissued with the ‘ER’ changed to ‘GR’ and the background colours changed from turquoise and yellow to green and pink.

A royal visit, planned for Edward and announced by him in his one and only speech to Parliament as King, during which the British monarch would be crowned King-Emperor of India at the Delhi Durbar, was postponed. This was partly because George VI declared he wanted time to ‘settle in’ to his role, partly because he was regarded as quite physically frail, but also because of the tensions following the passing of the Government of India Act the previous year, which had established a federation without conceding self-government.

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