POD Save the King!

Save the King!

Hello and welcome back to the POD Save the King.

I am your host Ann Gripper and I am delighted to be joined by Martin Williams who has written the book

The King is dead long lived the king which turned out to be remarkably timely in the end, Martin. I guess when you were writing about it,

sadly, that it has come at this era of change for a source. I'm looking forward to hearing

about then and now and the echoes and welcome to the show.

Thank you very much Anne it's a pleasure to be here.

So the king that is the subject of your book is Edward the seventh.

King Charles's great great grandfather, Queen Victoria's eldest son Bertie, who I expect a lot of our listeners may be most familiar with from the drama series Victoria, which we've all, many of us,

enjoying watching.

What was it, what is it that attracts you to him

and that particular era and what, you know, what did you enjoy writing about it?

Well, I've always been a veracious reader of biographies and social histories and particularly histories of European royalty in the early 20th century.

And I had long been searching for a suitable subject to turn into a book of my own and I'm a dedicated Instagram user under the

username Israeli 81, no relation to the Victorian Prime Minister I hasten to add. And back in 2019 I made a post with an extended caption about the legendary Black Ascot of June 1910 when High Society attended the annual race meeting in head to toe black in homage to Edward the 7th who had died the previous month and over dinner a couple of weeks later a great friend of mine said well you're looking for a subject for a book why not expand upon your Instagram post about Black Ascot and tell us more about the context in which that unique event unfolded and from there it became an organic process to explore the world of 1910 over a century ago now and the role of Edward the seventh, a king who really defined the Edwardian era to which he gave his name,

who died in May that year,

and whose passing really marked a kind of severance between the long Victorian period and its Edwardian Coda and the world that we live in today.

So in some ways I guess it was him exceeding the throne that is the real reflection of today maybe because like like our king Charles and he had a very long apprenticeship as the Prince of Wales, while Victoria was on the

throne for decades.

That is so, and Edwards almost unprecedented tenure as Prince of Wales really equipped him with the skills to be an exceptional monarch. The hopes that accompanied him to the throne on the death of his mother in

1901 were it has to be said extremely low. Victoria herself was extremely apprehensive about the way in which he would

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