Mystery of horror Highland plane crash that killed the King’s brother
II IS hard for a subsequent generation to realise how intense a national experience was the Second World War. It caught up every adult; it solemnised every child; it threw everywhere terrible bereavement – and, on August 25, 1942, it struck at the heart of the highest family in the land.
At ten past one that afternoon, a calm and sunny day, a heavily laden S-25 Sunderland Mk III flying boat took off from the Royal Navy base in Invergordon – and not half an hour later, smashed into a remote Sutherland hill, Eagle’s Rock, and with a huge explosion – some 2,500 gallons of fuel fatally detonating.
The crash was widely heard but it took an hour and a half, over difficult ground, for the first locals to reach the scene. It was one of devastation – cratered ground, scattered wreckage, 14 dead and broken bodies. And among them, shortly identified, was His Royal Highness George, Duke of Kent – the King’s brother.
The disaster has never been satisfactorily explained. Certain aspects were eyebrow-raising and in recent years the tragedy has spawned many colourful conspiracy theories, not least given the Duke’s most troubled youth and his real if tenuous connections to Nazi Germany.
Kent, granted every gift save length of days – he was still not 40 – is little remembered now. Yet he was an extraordinary personality in a House of Windsor that has for the most part thrown up weak, unremarkable men of prosaic interests and a fondness for shooting.
For he was extraordinarily good-looking, of generous mouth and keen, vivid eyes – gorgeous to both men and women, and he knew it. He was, too, highly intelligent, sophisticated, a keen collector of beautiful things – only the second royal boy to attend a proper school, and the first to hold a proper, professional job.
Indeed, at the darkest hour of the Abdication Crisis a reeling Government seriously considered installing him on the throne – and (disguised as the Duke of Clarence) Kent even enjoys a walk-on cameo in Evelyn Waugh’s sublime novel, Brideshead Revisited.
Born at Sandringham in December 1902, Prince George was the fifth child and fourth son of the future George V and Queen Mary, who would assume the throne in 1910.
HE was cleverest of all the brothers – Albert, the future George VI, and Henry, Duke of Gloucester, were of barely normal intelligence – and, of all the children, the closest to his mother, coming to share her interest in pictures and furniture, books and bibelots and even embroidery.
George V and Queen Mary have had a hard press. They were certainly rigid, most Victorian figures. She was a woman ‘who never tasted a cocktail’ notes one biographer, ‘or flew in a plane, who only ever spoke 44 words on the radio and never used the telephone’.
In fact, Queen Mary was immensely cultured, capable of great hilarity and immense personal kindness. She had, however, a near-suffocating veneration for the monarchy itself, even in the person of her husband, a well-meaning but very gruff man who hated change and was haunted lifelong by the shameless womanising of his late father, Edward VII. George V was a great king. That the Crown survived the Great War, subsequent and sore economic recession and even the Abdication Crisis owes much to George V’s sound judgment.
But he was a dreadful father: cloth-eared to any point of view save his own, obsessed with punctuality and the minutiae of dress, handling even his adult offspring like recalcitrant schoolchildren – and his Queen far too cowed to question it.
All George V’s deeply scarred sons would smoke; all were heavy drinkers. Albert was haunted all his life by a humiliating stammer, so broken was his spirit as a little boy. And the King’s quarterdeck outlook had its gravest impact at either end of the family.
In the case of Edward, the oldest, his father’s sustained mistreatment had by his twenties ingrained a ‘What’s the point?’ mentality and an insouciant and self-absorbed lifestyle that would wreck his brief reign.
As for the baby, Prince John – born in 1905, a strange, fey child of whom little is known – he suffered from epilepsy, learning difficulties and, probably, autism.
His parents eventually responded in a way that was normal for the times but seems shocking today; he was removed from general family life and brought up, generally secluded, in a cottage on the Sandringham estate by his nanny. Only George visited as often as he could and shared such time and fun as he could think up. Prince John died early in 1919; his parents were not present.
Of all the boys, George was the only one his father could not break and, unlike Edward and Albert – entrusted to an incompetent private tutor – Henry and he broke with all precedent and attended school, fetching up at Eton. Henry’s reports were woeful, but George shone.
He wanted a proper, interesting job. For this he had to fight: the King insisted on a much more traditional course. George ‘probably suffered most from his father’s blustering talk and unyielding attitudes,’ writes Theo Aronson. ‘His emotional, artistic, unconventional nature was something that the King would never have been able to appreciate…’
The prince was instead forced into a career in the Royal Navy. He hated it, as he confided to a lady-in-waiting, and pressed instead for new royal ground – an absorbing and useful deskjob in Whitehall.
GEORGE never stopped pressing, but he was 26 by the time he finally wore down the old man’s resistance and was allowed to quit the Senior Service on the grounds of ill-health. He then held posts at first, the Foreign and then the Home Offices.
But he ‘shone far more brightly in the carrying out of his official duties’ observes Aronson.
‘For to his strikingly good looks – he was tall and slim with blue eyes and a radiant smile – he brought a great charm of manner. Both at home and on his tours… Prince George won great popularity… after the Prince of Wales, the most dashing of the King’s sons.’
And the odd one out. He loved fast cars and flying planes; could spend hours in an art gallery, built an extensive record collection and happily played the Great American Songbook on his piano.
Fluent in several languages and a devourer of newspapers, an habitué of the cinema and the theatre and the Royal Ballet, George was the bestinformed of all the family and built a considerable collection of antiques. But the strain of his upbringing drove him to explore, too, rather baser things.
The Duke of Kent, diarist Henry ‘Chips’ Channon mewed slyly years later, had ‘drunk deeply from life’. Sexually, he was almost comically indiscriminate – ‘always in trouble with girls. Scotland Yard chased so many of them out of the country the Palace stopped counting’.
George fathered at least one illegitimate child, the late Michael Canfield. He also dabbled with drugs. Hashishsmoking sessions were one thing, but another shady lady
soon had him hooked on cocaine (the Prince of Wales intervened, locked him away and cured him). And there were, besides, men.
Noël Coward was one conquest: Channon may have been another. It is whispered George was once arrested (in full drag) when the police raided a gay bar; it took frantic Palace intervention to free him and cover the affair up. There were even, Randolph Churchill insisted, ‘letters to a young man in Paris. A large sum had to be paid for their recovery…’
Never were wild oats more indiscriminately sown, and never was a new leaf more comprehensively turned. Just when the old King feared there would be final and irrefutable scandal, George made the royal match of the century – to the 27-year-old and beautiful Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark. She was stylish, cosmopolitan, artistic and almost as clever as him; their Westminster Abbey wedding, in November 1934, was the event of the year – and the first ever royal occasion to be broadcast live on national and indeed international radio.
ASUBLIMELY happy marriage produced three children and, with the Kents’ good looks and elan, all doted with Channon on that ‘dazzling pair’. Their poise – and the fact that, in December 1936, only Kent of the four surviving brothers had a male heir – was certainly sore temptation to Stanley Baldwin amidst the chaos of the Abdication, given the inexperience and limitations of Albert and Henry. But public regard for the ‘little princesses’ Elizabeth and Margaret finally held greater sway and thought of diverting the succession passed.
Officially, that fateful flight in August 1942 was a morale-boosting mission to RAF personnel in Iceland. But what was, after all, a flying boat – and of a type notoriously sluggish in climbing – should have been flying over the North Sea, not dangerously low amidst Highland crags. Why, in broad daylight and pretty fair conditions, had the pilots flown into a hill?
There are other anomalies. The sole survivor, Andy Jack – found, hours later, shaking in a crofter’s cottage – was made to sign the Official Secrets Act and died, decades later, an alcoholic. None of the Duke’s retainers – his valet, his Private Secretary and so on – had accompanied him. Why not? A witness who saw his body on the hillside was adamant, in a 1985 interview, that a burst briefcase full of Swedish cash was strapped to Kent’s wrist – 100-krona banknotes fluttering all over the heather. But, again, why?
Subsequent official investigation attributed the crash to pilot error; but the report and all papers have mysteriously disappeared.
There are strong hints that Kent was engaged on a far more important and hush-hush mission – perhaps peace negotiations of some sort with Germany. He spoke the language fluently and had many German relatives. Neutral Sweden would have lent itself well to this ‘conspiracy for peace’. But, if elements of the state and the Establishment were well-disposed to it, Churchill would have been appalled – and might have gone to dreadful lengths to destroy it.
The Duke’s Civil List income ended with his death; Marina received no official income of any kind – it being deemed imprudent for Parliament to address the situation in wartime – till our current Queen took the throne in 1952.
THE Duchess was thus in 1947 compelled to auction off most of George’s treasures; it raised £92,000, a sum, she murmured, that hardly compensated for her humiliation. All her widowhood, she was evidently haunted by what happened at Eagle’s Rock. She visited the locale; she visited Andy Jack; she spoke, occasionally, of her husband’s ‘mission’.
And it was only after her own death, in 1968, that his lead-lined coffin was finally removed from the vault of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, to join hers in the private royal burial ground of Frogmore.
It was at night, down a narrow road through assorted grace-andfavour homes, whose residents were all instructed to remain indoors and behind drawn curtains as the hearse slid by.
Even now, there seems dread in high places of undue spotlight on this glittering but most mysterious of royals. The Palace has never, to this day, permitted an official biography of the dashing Duke.