55 Facts About King George V

From 1877 to 1892, King George V served in the Royal Navy, until the unexpected death of his elder brother in early 1892 put him directly in line for the throne.

On Victoria's death in 1901, King George V's father ascended the throne as Edward VII, and King George V was created Prince of Wales.

King George V's reign saw the rise of socialism, communism, fascism, Irish republicanism, and the Indian independence movement, all of which radically changed the political landscape of the British Empire, which itself reached its territorial peak by the beginning of the 1920s.

In 1924, King George V appointed the first Labour ministry and the 1931 Statute of Westminster recognised the Empire's dominions as separate, independent states within the British Commonwealth of Nations.

King George V was born on 3 June 1865, in Marlborough House, London.

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King George V was the second son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, and Alexandra, Princess of Wales.

King George V's father was the eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and his mother was the eldest daughter of King Christian IX and Queen Louise of Denmark.

King George V was baptised at Windsor Castle on 7 July 1865 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Longley.

King George V was third in line to the throne, after his father, and elder brother Prince Albert Victor.

In 1881 on a visit to Japan, King George V had a local artist tattoo a blue and red dragon on his arm, and was received in an audience by the Emperor Meiji; King George V and his brother presented Empress Haruko with two wallabies from Australia.

King George V travelled the world, visiting many areas of the British Empire.

King George V married Ferdinand, the future King of Romania, in 1893.

King George V had only just recovered from a serious illness himself, having been confined to bed for six weeks with typhoid fever, the disease that was thought to have killed his grandfather Prince Albert.

King George V was, on his own admission, unable to express his feelings easily in speech, but they often exchanged loving letters and notes of endearment.

King George V was created Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, and Baron Killarney by Queen Victoria on 24 May 1892, and received lessons in constitutional history from JR Tanner.

King George V preferred a simple, almost quiet, life, in marked contrast to the lively social life pursued by his father.

At the request of his father, "out of respect for poor dear Uncle Sasha's memory", King George V joined his parents in St Petersburg for the funeral.

King George V inherited the title of Duke of Cornwall, and for much of the rest of that year, he was known as the Duke of Cornwall and York.

King George V presented thousands of specially designed South African War medals to colonial troops.

King George V Edward wished to prepare his son for his future role as king.

In contrast to Edward himself, whom Queen Victoria had deliberately excluded from state affairs, King George V was given wide access to state documents by his father.

King George V in turn allowed his wife access to his papers, as he valued her counsel and she often helped write her husband's speeches.

King George V had never liked his wife's habit of signing official documents and letters as "Victoria Mary" and insisted she drop one of those names.

Later that year, a radical propagandist, Edward Mylius, published a lie that King George V had secretly married in Malta as a young man, and that consequently his marriage to Queen Mary was bigamous.

King George V objected to the anti-Catholic wording of the Accession Declaration that he would be required to make at the opening of his first parliament.

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King George V made it known that he would refuse to open parliament unless it was changed.

King George V wore the newly created Imperial Crown of India at the ceremony, and declared the shifting of the Indian capital from Calcutta to Delhi.

King George V was the only Emperor of India to be present at his own Delhi Durbar.

Knollys advised King George V to accept the Cabinet's demands, while Stamfordham advised King George V to accept the resignation.

The King George V later came to feel that Knollys had withheld information from him about the willingness of the opposition to form a government if the Liberals had resigned.

Desperate to avoid the prospect of civil war in Ireland between Unionists and Nationalists, George called a meeting of all parties at Buckingham Palace in July 1914 in an attempt to negotiate a settlement.

The King George V had brothers-in-law and cousins who were British subjects but who bore German titles such as Duke and Duchess of Teck, Prince and Princess of Battenberg, and Prince and Princess of Schleswig-Holstein.

On 17 July 1917, King George V appeased British nationalist feelings by issuing a royal proclamation that changed the name of the British royal house from the German-sounding House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor.

King George V compensated his male relatives by giving them British peerages.

In letters patent gazetted on 11 December 1917, the King George V restricted the style of "Royal Highness" and the titular dignity of "Prince of Great Britain and Ireland" to the children of the Sovereign, the children of the sons of the Sovereign and the eldest living son of the eldest son of a Prince of Wales.

Under pressure from his mother, Queen Alexandra, the King removed the Garter flags of his German relations from St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.

In May 1922, the King George V toured Belgium and northern France, visiting the First World War cemeteries and memorials being constructed by the Imperial War Graves Commission.

The tour, and one short visit to Italy in 1923, were the only times George agreed to leave the United Kingdom on official business after the end of the war.

At the opening session of the Parliament of Northern Ireland on 22 June 1921, the King appealed for conciliation in a speech part drafted by General Jan Smuts and approved by Lloyd George.

King George V cultivated friendly relations with moderate Labour Party politicians and trade union officials.

In 1924, King George V appointed the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, in the absence of a clear majority for any one of the three major parties.

In 1926, King George V hosted an Imperial Conference in London at which the Balfour Declaration accepted the growth of the British Dominions into self-governing "autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another".

King George V was concerned by the rise to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

In 1934, the King George V bluntly told the German ambassador Leopold von Hoesch that Germany was now the peril of the world, and that there was bound to be a war within ten years if Germany went on at the present rate; he warned the British ambassador in Berlin, Eric Phipps, to be suspicious of the Nazis.

In 1932, King George V agreed to deliver a Royal Christmas speech on the radio, an event that became annual thereafter.

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King George V was not in favour of the innovation originally but was persuaded by the argument that it was what his people wanted.

King George V was disappointed in Edward's failure to settle down in life and appalled by his many affairs with married women.

King George V became gradually weaker, drifting in and out of consciousness.

The royal family did not want the King George V to endure pain and suffering and did not want his life prolonged artificially but neither did they approve Dawson's actions.

At the procession to King George V's lying in state in Westminster Hall, the cross surmounting the Imperial State Crown atop King George V's coffin fell off and landed in the gutter as the cortege turned into New Palace Yard.

George V was interred at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on 28 January 1936.

George V disliked sitting for portraits and despised modern art; he was so displeased by one portrait by Charles Sims that he ordered it to be burned.

King George V did admire sculptor Bertram Mackennal, who created statues of George for display in Madras and Delhi, and William Reid Dick, whose statue of George V stands outside Westminster Abbey, London.

King George V established a standard of conduct for British royalty that reflected the values and virtues of the upper middle-class rather than upper-class lifestyles or vices.

King George V was by temperament a traditionalist who never fully appreciated or approved the revolutionary changes under way in British society.