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THE KING MAKER

The Man Who Saved George VI

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

'Strike Sure'

Greig family motto

Louis Leisler Greig was born on 17 November 1880, the ninth of eleven children, in the west end of Glasgow. His father, David, was a successful Scottish merchant, whose trading company, Greig, Leisler & Co., had offices in Glasgow and Hamburg. Louis was given the German middle name in honour of his father's German business partner, who was also made his godfather. His mother, Jessie Thomson, the daughter of a shawl and fancy dress manufacturer, was a robust religious woman with a particular interest in homeopathic medicine. She served on the board of management of the Western Infirmary and the Houldsworth homeopathic hospital in Glasgow.

No one doubted that the family roost was ruled by this severe, formidable woman with a ramrod-straight back and puritanical dress sense. She habitually wore long black skirts and had her hair scraped back tightly into a bun. Yet she was elegant and carefully attired; her clothes were modest, but never dowdy on her tall, statuesque figure. A high forehead, a patrician nose and a firm gaze marked her out as a woman whose word was not to be questioned. Her hair was a luxurious dark brown, and when unwound—only when she got into bed—it reached halfway down her back. Even though she was no great beauty she was striking, and her clear, sharp vision of what was right and wrong made her a powerful matriarch.

Her life was dominated by her children. On average she gave birth every eighteen months for a period of twenty-four years. Her tastes were conventional, as were her conservative politics, except when it came to a staunch belief in better conditions for women and children and, in particular, her support of the suffragettes. Her other unorthodox interest, in homeopathy, and her work with hospitals in Glasgow, brought medicine to those who could not afford it, or were too ignorant to ask for the right help.

She ran a strict household, but also one filled with much laughter and a great deal of chatter from her large brood of children, who seldom drew breath and spilled out of every corner of the family house in Lynedoch Crescent. And none of the Greig sons or daughters was ever backward in coming forward with their views. Jessie always maintained she had no sense of humour. 'Granny Greig only made jokes which she had not intended,' remembered her granddaughter, Nancy Maclay, the daughter of Louis's eldest brother Robert. Louis liked to tease her affectionately to combat her sometimes unintentional humour or sharp rejoinders.

Louis's father was a gentler, quieter character who was pleased to let his wife run the household. Rarely did he raise his voice, but when he did it was to thunderous effect, most often to quell the din of his many children. Lean and dark—haired, even in his fifties he gave the appearance of being fit and athletic. Serious in his work and in his Christian faith, he was also, unlike his wife, intentionally witty. He would let slip little one-line ripostes or put-downs, often quite ironical and seldom unoriginal. Laughter always seemed to be about to break on his face. Family life was a somewhat exhausting trial for David Greig, who at heart just wanted a peaceful life at home. When Jessie took the children up to him to get his approval after persuading them into hand-me-down clothes, he would scarcely look up from his newspaper except to mutter approvingly 'first class, first class'. His business, buying and selling commodities, occasionally took him to Frankfurt, but mostly he was content to stay home. His children were to be far more adventurous travellers, making long and exhausting journeys to India, Singapore and New Zealand. David was a comfortably-off merchant who was able to afford to send his boys to the best private schools in Glasgow and provide governesses for his daughters. His one luxury was to take a holiday house in the Orkneys, a large stone-built farmhouse where there were shooting, fishing and other traditional pursuits for a country gentleman.

It was difficult to grow up in the centre of Glasgow without feeding off the city's energy. Louis's childhood was firmly rooted at No. 18 Lynedoch Crescent in the heart of the city, which remained the family home until his mother's death in 1915. His father died at the age of sixty-two in 1900 when Louis was nineteen. It was a substantial sandstone house, four storeys high. Inside, its most impressive features were an ornate grape-and-barley cornice in the drawing room and a sweeping wrought-iron staircase which dominated the hall. It was somewhat gloomy and dark and a tight squeeze for all eleven children.

Kelvinside was a prosperous area for generally well-to-do Glasgow families. The houses were solid and well built in elegant gaslit streets. The crescent-shaped garden outside the Greigs' house, enclosed by iron railings, was carefully looked after, providing a welcome patch of green for the children to play on. The house has changed hands many times since the Greigs lived there. It was at one time a boarding house and now holds the offices of Douglas Laing & Co., whisky blenders and bottlers.

Although Louis's home was far from grand, it was not that dissimilar to York Cottage, where Prince Albert was brought up. Harold Nicolson, George V's biographer, described Albert's childhood home on the Sandringham estate as 'a glum little villa in which the rooms inside with their fumed oak surrounds, their white over-fanlights, are indistinguishable from those of any Surbiton or Upper Norwood home'. It was like thousands of other middle-class homes. Prince George passed up the opportunity to live in great extravagance, but instead chose to live in a style similar to that of a great many of his subjects. Queen Victoria always had an uncannily instinctive ability to be sympathetic to what her fellow countrymen thought and felt. It was not exactly the common touch, but an ability to judge and assess wisely their mood or taste. Prince George also inherited this tendency and, to a certain extent, so did Albert when he eventually came to the throne.

Lynedoch Crescent contained features similar to those in many a well-to-do Edwardian household. An Alexandre fourteen-stop walnut-cased harmonium stood in the dining room. A white marble clock and classical bronze figures were on the mantelpiece, all lit by five gaselier globes, visible through the street window. In the drawing room, a polished rosewood grand piano took centre position alongside walnut-inlaid bookshelves, a tapestry-covered sofa, a copper coal scuttle and an assortment of walnut, bamboo and wicker chairs. The books, according to an insurer's inventory, included the life of the Prince Consort in five volumes, the complete works of Dickens, and several hundred others on general literature. Three pairs of deer antlers hung in the hall, trophies of beasts shot by the Greigs on Orkney. A mahogany barometer and exotically painted Chinese ceramic jars were displayed on a tallboy on the landing. Outside at the rear was a washhouse in a small walled garden.

Louis's childhood was defined by his noisy, omnipresent brood of ten brothers and sisters. Almost exactly a year after his parents were married in Glasgow on 25 March 1864, Agnes Ethel was born on 3 March 1865, at their then home in Fitzroy Place. Robert Coventry followed in 1867; Jessie Constantine in 1869; George Thomas in 1871; David Herbert in 1873; John Edwin, known as Jack, in 1875; Anna Blyth in 1877; and Marjorie Frances in 1879. Louis Leisler was born the next November at their new home in Lynedoch Crescent, with Arthur and Kenneth following in 1883 and 1888. There were more than twenty-four years between the birth of the oldest and the youngest child. Kenneth and Robert were practically from different generations; the one could have been the other's father. In a group portrait of all the Greig children, Robert stands very much defined as a grown-up with his moustache, formal suit and distinctly adult bearing, while Louis is a boy who has not yet reached puberty. It was, on the whole, a very happy childhood with a prominent role being taken by the elder children in the running of the household. Jessie's favourite was Robert, whom she called 'young husband' because she relied on him so much. David was happy to leave his eldest son to sort out minor domestic disputes or problems. The other children called Robert 'Coffee', a shortening of his middle name, Coventry, and also because he turned a mild brown tan when hot rather than red. One advantage of having such a spread of brothers and sisters of all ages was that Louis and the younger ones were not intimidated by older people. Differences of age never really bothered them, and this made them appear more confident with other people than most of their contemporaries. But then, none of the Greig children was shy. They were known for their easy charm, larky humour and noisy chatter. Louis was one of the more mischievous. The roof over their house was steep and high, overlooking the whole of the city. It was a tempting place to explore, and Louis was never allowed to forget how once he was caught dashing naked over the eaves, as a dare with another brother in tow.

Photographs of Louis, aged eleven, show a scruffy rough-and-tumble little boy wrestling with friends in the street, playing pavement cricket, his crudely cut hair and blunt-nosed features surrounding a cheeky grin. His shirt is untucked, his hair is tousled and untidy, his cheeks are flushed, and he often looks slightly breathless or as if he has been caught doing something forbidden. He was a ragamuffin of a child, who was not mollycoddled by his parents. While extremely proud of her children, Jessie did not bathe them in compliments. She once exhorted Louis to remember that 'he had the sort of unflattering visage which was best framed by a hat'. Louis just laughed when he heard this; very little dented his self-confidence, not even his father's sometimes stern letters extolling him to work hard at school, which he took seriously, winning several prizes for Latin and history. David and Jessie Greig both instilled in their children the importance of a Christian family and community. It was a message that sank in, and from an early age Louis was a fixer and facilitator for others—helping in the house, liking to play the role of negotiator or go-between, but always displaying a sense of independence.

Louis came from a long line of optimists. According to family papers, his paternal grandfather, Robert Greig, was 'a cheery hospitable soul, fond of good company' who was a skilled horseman and a trooper in the Lothian Yeomanry for twenty years. He was described by his colonel as 'the gayest man in the regiment' because he extravagantly appeared at nearly every parade drill on a different horse. He was also a city elder of Edinburgh and a member of the University Council, and used to boast that he had been one of the first people to recognise the ability of Professor James Simpson, the scientist who discovered chloroform, and had voted for him when he was an applicant for a university chair long before his famous scientific breakthrough. Robert Greig smoked, took snuff and chewed tobacco, and was reckoned to be the best judge of grain in Edinburgh market. Stories survive of one particularly unscrupulous farmer being seen talking to him one day in the Grassmarket; when asked about it afterwards, he confessed to Greig: 'I just wanted to be seen with an honest man before I sold my corn.' He made a comfortable living with a grain and bakery business in Edinburgh's Canongate, but farming was his real delight, and he bought a small estate called Glen Park, just outside Edinburgh.

For all the Greig children to thrive and prosper was a triumph of parenting particularly in Glasgow, where infant mortality was high. But then Louis's family was always strong on survival. A pair of wooden candlesticks took pride of place on the dining-room sideboard as testimony to their ability to beat the odds. They were made from a piece of wood salvaged from the wrecked steamer Orion, which had sunk off Port—Patrick on 18 June 1850. George Thomson and his wife Agnes, Louis's maternal great-grandparents, had clung to that makeshift raft, which eventually took them to safety. Louis's uncle, George Greig, had not been so lucky, drowning in 1882 in New Zealand in quicksand while working there for a shipping firm. Louis's great-grandmother on his father's side, Ann Coventry, was reckoned to be 'the prettiest girl in Kinross', and Jessie Blyth, his grandmother on his father's side, also cut a fine figure, although in her latter years she 'became a religious maniac and lost her sense of proportion and humour. This might have been due to the worry of bringing up a large family with seven children as a widow.'

The most celebrated member of the Greig family was Sir Samuel Greig, born in Inverkeithing in November 1735, who emigrated to Russia in 1764 to join the Russian Navy and within six years had been promoted to Rear Admiral commanding the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean, which annihilated the Turkish Navy at the Battle of Chesme Bay off the coast of Asia Minor in 1770. Catherine the Great appointed him Grand Admiral in 1782, and, six years later, he became the commander-in-chief of the Russian fleet which defeated the might of Sweden at the Battle of Hogland. When he died, he was accorded a state funeral and a magnificent monument in Reval Cathedral. Sir Samuel Greig's son was also a Russian admiral, but the family line petered out just over a century later with the Russian Revolution. Some starved, others fled or were killed. The last survivor directly in line to the great admiral, Baron Johan von Greig, contacted Louis in desperate straits in the 1940s. Louis arranged for money to be sent to him every month in Austria, where he had become stateless, penniless and in danger of starving.

Louis was proud of his ancestry, and as a child was dressed in a MacGregor kilt because the first traceable Greig was a MacGregor who, with his wife, settled at Kennoway, Fife, in 1611. They were two members of the feisty MacGregor clan which was broken up after it had achieved a resounding victory over the rival Colquhouns, who then sneakily retaliated with a Royal Commission, which decreed that the MacGregors' attack had been an act of rebellion. The clan was outlawed and the name proscribed for 170 years, until 1775. Many had been forced to take refuge with other clans or had changed their names to Greig, Green, White, Black; in fact almost anything but their actual name. The government drove them out of Balquidder in Perthshire, and settled them in pairs mainly in the east of Scotland. They were also forbidden to wear the tartan, carry weapons or to meet. The punishment for any three clansmen found together was for all three to lose their heads. The Kennoway pair took the name of Greg, which subsequently became Greig.

Exact details of the Greig line are hazy, as a fire destroyed parish records at Markinch in the early nineteenth century. The Christian name of the first Kennoway Greig is not even known, but his wife was called Bessie and both were born before 1600. The family kept itself fairly aloof, and they were perceived as outsiders, inventing their own particular family customs, such as having three witnesses to a child's, baptism rather than one.

Glasgow, however, provided the essential ingredients for the making of Louis. He enjoyed what J. B. Priestley called 'the merriment, the innocence and the aspirations of the small business and professional families' when looking back on his own childhood in Yorkshire. At the age of eight, Louis went to Glasgow Academy, one of the city's oldest private schools, where he did well, winning several prizes for Latin and history as well as the Victor Ludorum. Every day he bicycled from Lynedoch Crescent to the imposing classical building of polished sandstone on Colebrooke Street. He was remembered, according to the school records, as an outstanding athlete, 'a quarter who jinks well, and is very good at making openings for his halves ... a good tackier and fair kick'.

Aged thirteen, he progressed to Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh, where he boarded. The school is famous as the home of John Napier, the mathematician who invented logarithms in 1614 and Napier's Bones, an early mechanical calculating device used for multiplication and division. Once again, Louis was an outstanding athlete as well as a smart scholar. The urge to succeed was strong, his large family making him very competitive. At home, as the third youngest boy, he was never the centre of attention for long and so always had to fight to get noticed. This drive to do well, to be seen to prosper and to please others, stayed with him throughout his life and is one of the defining qualities of his whole career.

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Excerpted from THE KING MAKER by Geordie Greig. Copyright © 2013 Geordie Greig. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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