In Victoria, for example, the duke quickly developed friendships with Samuel Curtis Candler and Frederick Standish, members of a circle of colonial gentlemen who entertained him at the Melbourne Club. Misfortune in Britain (Candler suffered ill health and Standish lost huge amounts of money gambling) left them with uncertain prospects. They migrated to Australia, where they built up solid lives in Victoria. Like Alfred, they enjoyed long careers in government service—Candler as coroner and Standish in the police force. While Alfred made his home for many years in the navy, Candler and Standish found homes in the Melbourne Club. Indeed, the Melbourne Club was Candler’s residence for more than 50 years.^[45]

While each of these three men used his career to establish his individual reputation, each also sought comfort, privacy and relative anonymity in the all-male environments provided by the navy or the Melbourne Club. Aboard ship, or behind the closed doors of the Melbourne Club, Alfred, Standish and Candler could relax with like-minded gentlemen. Candler rejoiced in Alfred’s desire to be treated as any other club member: ‘In short his bearing expressed as plainly as words could have done “Gentlemen, I am an Honorary member of your club. I perceive that you do not intend to treat me with ceremonial and we will be on the same footing if you please.”’^[46]

Alfred appears to have found the Melbourne Club’s relative informality a welcome change from Victorian vice-regal society. Piqued at Governor Sir Henry Manners Sutton’s excessive formality, the prince allegedly gave him a taste of his own medicine by making him and his family remain standing in his presence.^[47] Similarly, aboard his ship, Alfred’s word was law. Candler described Alfred’s request to a Melbourne Club whist party that his own mistakes be pointed out to him while playing. In contrast, Captain Taylor of the Galatea assured Candler that ‘if I won a hundred from him I should never think of letting him fancy it was from wrong play’.^[48]

Like most immigrants to the colonies, Alfred made considerable efforts to fit into local society. Candler records that Alfred picked up colonial slang quickly, and used it frequently while off duty in the Melbourne Club. Similarly, rather than setting fashion trends, Alfred followed:

So delighted was Alfred with his Melbourne Club friends that he chose to spend Christmas Day 1867 with them. It is significant that Alfred chose to spend this holiday, so closely associated with family and ‘home’, ashore with men he had met only weeks before, as well as a few trusted companions from the Galatea. For most of the men at the table, ‘home’ was Britain. According to Candler, however, Alfred described a sense of dislocation on returning home:

Alfred’s closeness to Candler and the other members of the Melbourne Club should not be exaggerated, nor should his apparent preference for egalitarian treatment. In fact, the duke could and did insist on his royal status when piqued, as his treatment of the Victorian governor and his family demonstrates. Alfred enjoyed the freedom of playing prince one day, captain of HMS Galatea another, and Melbourne Club member the next. Moreover, to be a member of the Melbourne Club was to be a privileged member of colonial society indeed! For their part, Candler’s and Standish’s diaries reveal their habit of introspection and their enjoyment of solitude, away from their Melbourne Club cronies. Nevertheless, for all three men, all-male society based around the navy or the club played an important role in their lives. It provided the opportunity to reinvent themselves, and to re-present themselves as they chose, free from ordinary social obligations. It is telling that Alfred and Candler seized the opportunity to go incognito when it arose. At the Fancy Dress Ball in Melbourne, the duke changed from his naval uniform into disguise as an old man, and was delighted that very few people recognised him. For his part, Candler enjoyed dressing up as a Knight of Malta.^[51] Though very different, both costumes suggest that their wearers relished the opportunity to display their masculine independence.

Colonial Australia also provided young men the freedom to escape the familial, social and moral constraints of Britain. Here was a place to reinvent oneself, while still maintaining some recognition of British class divisions. Like the navy, Australia provided an enjoyable and relatively well-remunerated alternative for young men who did not fit into successful middle-class British society. This allowed men to delay or avoid family responsibilities. Removal to Australia made postponement of marriage, and indeed failure to ever marry, much more likely. As Peter McDonald has pointed out, in the late nineteenth century, 20 to 30 per cent of Australian men had never married by the age of fifty—a higher proportion than in Britain.^[52] Whether this was due to lack of opportunity (in most parts of Australia, men considerably outnumbered women) or desire, it is clear that, as Beverley Kingston has argued, contemporary Australian masculine society was ambivalent, to say the least, about marriage with Australian women.^[53] Standish remained a bachelor his entire life and, as Penny Russell points out, his diary entries reveal his dislike of what he saw as ‘fast’ colonial women.^[54] While Candler eventually married Laura Ellen Kennedy, who had borne him four children, he lived apart from them. Indeed, his Melbourne Club colleagues apparently learned of Mrs Candler’s existence only after his death.^[55] Even the duke married only in 1874, more than a decade after his elder brother the Prince of Wales. These examples provided further evidence that what John Tosh termed ‘the flight from domesticity’ applied to colonial Australia and to institutions such as the Royal Navy as well as to Victorian Britain.^[56] From this perspective, Alfred’s transnational life took him away from ‘home’ in more ways than one. For Alfred, as for numerous other British men of his generation, close male friendships and delayed marriage went hand-in-hand with a transnational life.