The popular Prince George who died in a
mysterious Highland tragedy
22nd August
2021
HISTORY
By Hamish
MacPherson
https://www.thenational.scot/news/19529295.popular-prince-george-died-mysterious-highland-tragedy/
IT was in this
week of 1942 that a major tragedy struck the Royal Family and saddened many
people in Britain and elsewhere.
Despite the
all-pervading atmosphere of death and destruction at the height of World War
II, the death in an aircraft crash in Caithness of Prince George, the Duke of
Kent, struck a terribly melancholic note, not least because he had been a
hugely popular figure and at 39, was the father of three young children by his
wife Princess Marina.
Mystery
still surrounds the circumstances of his death, and theories old and new are
always problematic because such records as were kept have either been “lost” or
are sealed, probably permanently as is the case with many documents about the
royals.
The known
facts are simple and easily recounted. His Royal Highness Prince George
Alexander Edmund, Duke of Kent, was killed when the RAF Short Sunderland flying
boat in which he was travelling to Iceland veered off course and crashed at
full speed into a hillside at Eagle’s Rock near Dunbeath in Caithness on August
25, 1942. A total of 14 people were killed, with only one survivor who
sustained dreadful burns.
The Duke
became the first royal to die on active service since King James IV of Scotland
was killed during the Battle of Flodden in 1513.
The
aircraft was from 228 Squadron based at RAF Oban. The experienced crew had been
assigned to transport the Prince to RAF Reykjavik on Iceland for what would
have been one of his many regular morale-boosting visits to RAF personnel. The
Short Sunderland flew to the seaplane base at RAF Invergordon on the Cromarty
Firth and refuelled, before taking off in foggy weather just after 1pm on
Sunday, August 25.
Less than
half-an-hour later the Sunderland departed from its planned route and crashed
into the Eagle’s Rock hillside, bursting into flames as its nearly full fuel
tanks exploded. Among the dead were the Prince’s private secretary Lieutenant
John Lowther, RNVR, the grandson of the First Viscount Ullswater. The pilot, Fl
Lt Frank Goyen, and all the crew perished except for Sgt Andrew Jack the
wireless operator and rear gunner, who was hospitalised with burns.
Rescue crews
dashed to the scene but there was nothing they could do for anybody except Sgt
Jack who had made his way to a nearby croft. Also there were police and Special
Branch. The area was sealed off and an investigation began, while local people
and the press were warned to stay away.
A board of
inquiry was convened and quickly concluded that pilot error was the case of the
accident.
Prime
Minister Winston Churchill paid a generous tribute in the House of Commons to
the brother of King George VI who was also the favourite uncle of our current
monarch.
“The loss
of this gallant and handsome Prince, in the prime of his life, has been a shock
and a sorrow to the people of the British Empire, standing out lamentably even
in these hard days of war. To His Majesty the King it is the loss of a
dearly-loved brother, and it has affected him most poignantly. I knew the late
Duke of Kent from his childhood, and had many opportunities of meeting him
during the war, both at the Admiralty and thereafter. His overpowering desire
was to render useful service to his King and country in this period when we are
all of us on trial.
“The Duke
of Kent was ready to waive his rank, to put aside all ceremony, and to undergo
any amount of discomfort and danger or, what is harder still, of monotonous
routine conscientiously performed, in order to feel quite sure that he was
making a real contribution to our national struggle for life and honour. The
field he made his own was that of the welfare and comfort of the Royal Air
Force, which entailed an immense amount of work and travelling and yet yielded
a continuous and useful result to which the personal qualities of the Duke
contributed markedly.”
Prince
George was no ordinary royal. He had a deserved reputation as a playboy and was
rumoured to have had affairs with everybody from Noel Coward to Jessie
Matthews. He had dabbled in hard drugs, but he had also been considered as a
suitable replacement for King Edward VIII at the abdication crisis though it
was his elder brother Bertie who took the throne despite his nerves and
stammer.
George had
no such problems and appears to have been a genuinely charismatic figure who
had persevered in the Navy, despite suffering seasickness, before transferring
to the RAF. On the outbreak of war he was asked to become an Air Commodore and
have a public role as the face of the Air Force.
As arguably
the most high-profile figure to die in Scotland during the war, a veritable
blitz of media interest should have taken place, but the Government used its
wartime powers to stop all inquiries other than the official one. The return of
his body by train to London was shown on newsreel and there are reports of
people crying in cinemas as they watched.
There had
been other reports and rumours about George. Did he share the pro-Nazi
sentiments of his brother, the Duke of Windsor? Was he really friendly with
Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Germand ambassador in London?
He and his
family were living in Rosyth when he switched to the RAF at the start of the
war. He was certainly often in the company of the Duke of Hamilton, so could he
have been the real target of Nazi deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess on his flight to
Scotland?
In recent
years there have been revelations that the Duke himself might have been flying
the aircraft and that a woman, presumably his lover, had been on board. We’ll
never know for certain…
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