For the general reader who’s curious about Royal history and will only read one book about George V, this is the best pick. Jane Ridley is a great writer and puts lots of interesting details in here. She has a real gift for summarizing complicated topics and synthesizing them into very readable prose.
One of my most intense special interests is Edward VII, so I’ve read a lot of books about him and his family. I have a collection of coronation memorabilia and a pretty well-rounded library. I’m therefore very well versed in this sphere, and Jane Ridley’s Edward VII book is actually what set me off on this journey about eight years ago. I really admire that book and was excited to read about George V from her perspective and see what new information she had uncovered. Ridley spent seven years working on this book, so I was expecting something really new or groundbreaking in terms of her analysis and point of view. I also was looking forward to her attempt to debunk George V’s “dull” reputation, as the subtitle “Never a Dull Moment” seemed to promise. What were these mysterious facts that would reveal him as an interesting man?
As I’ve said, I have read a lot about this family, so I’d read a different 500 page biography of George V before, and it was very boring. To its credit, this book was not boring, except in the political sections, and Ridley did a valiant effort in making the political back and forth understandable. My interest doesn’t lie in 19th/early 20th century politics, as I am more fascinated by the human psychodrama of the emotional abuse within the Windsor family that ricochets down the generations.
I guess my biggest feeling about this book was frustration. Ridley didn’t seem to have the same connection to George V that she did with Edward VII — there was a real lack of analysis as to why he was so angry and his thoughts. She relies on his diary a lot, but his diary is not a revealing document of his inner landscape. I found it hard to catch onto her argument about him or connect to him as a person beyond the image he seemed to want to project. His explosive temper and his foibles came across, but I’m still left with curiosity as to what caused this deep-seated fury. Also, the motivations and thoughts of others in the book are often under-explained. Ridley seems to have fallen into the researcher’s trap of including lots of quotes and interesting facts, but not then taking the next step of interpretation and analysis. Often, she would say that someone felt a certain way without any evidence, or she would then present a quote that seemed to contradict it. It made for a confusing reading experience for me, because I had trouble believing her when she was so all over the place and contradictory. I also didn’t like how often she said Queen Mary’s response to things was “chilling.” Chilling to whom? Jane Ridley? I didn’t find it that chilling — maybe she kept her grief to herself. Maybe she told someone in confidence and didn’t write it down. Saying that her response to her son dying was chilling and then quoting her saying how sad she is didn’t make any sense to me. She seemed to be sad, and she was not a person who wrote down a lot of her emotional thoughts. That doesn’t make her a sociopath with no feelings, it makes her a private person.
The overall problem here, I think, is that Edward VII’s life was full of big characters — Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Queen Alexandra, Alice Keppel, Gladstone, and Edward VII himself — and there were a lot of interesting scandals and juicy gossip, so there is a lot to go on. Also, Ridley figured out his secret diary code, so that was a very exciting breakthrough that she could build her narrative around. With George V, he is just not emotionally interesting beyond his intense rage. As she writes, he was an ordinary man in an extraordinary position, but at the heart of it, he was a Tory country squire. He loved to shoot birds, collect stamps, and run his life like a naval ship. I respect his accomplishments, and I agree with her conclusion that he did a huge amount to reinvent the monarchy and ensure its stability. I even agree that his reign never had a dull moment due to the intense world events that happened during it. And he did do some political maneuvering that was consequential in maintaining order. But I disagree with her that he was interesting as a person, and I remain in agreement with Harold Nicolson that left to his own devices, he tended to do “nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.” Even Ridley, who is trying to argue against this stereotype, lists endless amounts of birds he killed and stamps he collected! And she just can’t seem to bring herself to realize that all the facts she’s listing are undermining her attempt to make him as interesting a biographical subject as his father.
All in all, if you decide to read one book about George V this would probably be it. It’s pretty comprehensive and Ridley’s writing will keep you awake through some very long passages of political maneuvering. But as someone who is knowledgeable on this subject, I think the book has a lot of glaring flaws and I am not convinced that George V never had a dull moment.
Warnings for: period-typical racism, sexism, homophobia, mass slaughter of animals (birds, tigers, deer), emotional and physical child abuse