George VI had been reluctant to follow suit, not least because of his stammer, which turned every public speech into a painful ordeal. At Christmas 1936, with his elder brother’s abdication just two weeks old, there had been no expectation that he should speak. A year later, the situation was different, and there had been a clamour from the Empire for him to make a broadcast. Thousands of letters began to arrive at Buckingham Palace urging him to speak. After considerable hesitation, he bowed to the pressure. The broadcast had turned out well, but the King had made clear, in a phrase picked up by the newspapers, that this was to be a one-off rather than a continuation of the practice established by his father. ‘I cannot aspire to take his place – nor do I think that you would wish me to carry on, unvaried, a tradition so personal to him,’ he said. True to his word, he did not make a speech in 1938.
The following year, with Britain – and the Empire – at war, there could be no question of the King not addressing his subjects. It was decided he would deliver a personal message at the end of the BBC’s Round the Empire programme on Christmas afternoon. The purpose of the speech was to counter the mood of anticlimax, apathy and complacency engendered by the phoney war. The King was also keen to point out that the conflict was about defending Christian civilization; he spoke of what he had seen at first hand since September: of the Royal Navy, ‘upon which, throughout the last four months, had burst the storm of ruthless and unceasing war’; of the Royal Air Force, ‘who were daily adding laurels to those that their fathers had won’; and of the British Expeditionary Force in France: ‘Their task is hard. They are waiting, and waiting is a trial of nerve and discipline.’
‘A new year is at hand,’ the King concluded. ‘We cannot tell what it will bring. If it brings peace, how thankful we shall all be. If it brings continued struggle we shall remain undaunted. In the meantime, I feel that we may all find a message of encouragement in the lines which, in my closing words, I would like to say to you.’
Then he quoted from a hitherto unknown poem that had been drawn to his attention by the Queen. It had been written in 1908 by Minnie Louise Haskins, an academic at the London School of Economics, and privately published in a collection four years later.
The poem began:
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
And he replied:
‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’
After the broadcast ended, Wood quipped that in a few years’ time he expected the King to be making his Christmas broadcast on television. The King looked at Logue with a grin and said: ‘I expect you will be under the table then, Logue.’
Thanks to the broadcast, Haskins’s poem became enormously popular under the title ‘The Gate of the Year’. It was reproduced on cards and widely published. The Queen was especially moved by it, and in the late 1960s, when a new side chapel was added to St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle as a permanent resting place for her late husband, the words were inscribed on a panel to the right of the iron gates. When she died in 2002, the poem was read out at her state funeral.
No one had let Haskins herself know in advance that her words were going to be quoted, and she did not listen to the broadcast. ‘I heard the quotation read in a summary of the speech,’ she told the Daily Telegraph the following day. ‘I thought the words sounded familiar and suddenly it dawned on me that they were out of my little book.’
Haskins had Logue to thank for ensuring her work reached such a large audience. When he was rehearsing the text of the broadcast with the King five days earlier, he had been told that the Archbishop of Canterbury wanted to paraphrase her verses and turn them into prose. Logue had objected and talked round the King’s advisors into agreeing to block the suggestion. He was disappointed, though, with the King’s delivery. ‘It began badly, voice high-pitched, and it was at once evident that he was suffering under some emotional stress,’ he noted afterwards. ‘After the first minute, he settled into his stride, and spoke well, in a good voice, but only took 9½ minutes instead of 10 or 11. Too quick.’
* Plans for limited conscription applying to single men aged between twenty and twenty-two were given parliamentary approval in the Military Training Act in May 1939. This required men to undertake six months’ military training, and some 240,000 registered for service. On the day Britain declared war on Germany, parliament immediately extended conscription to all males aged eighteen to forty-one, with exceptions for some in key industries.
CHAPTER THREE
The Big Freeze
The first full year of the war began with a big chill: the newspapers proclaimed it the coldest since the Battle of Waterloo. The Thames was frozen for eight miles between Teddington and Sunbury, and ice covered stretches of the Mersey, Humber, Severn, the Lakes and all the Scottish lochs. Hundreds of barges were unable to move on the Grand Union Canal. Temperatures in central London were below zero for a week and there was skating on the Serpentine on six inches of ice. Trains were trapped in snow drifts, water pipes froze, boilers exploded and birds were said to have fallen from the sky into the Channel. The average temperature in January was minus 1.4° C.
Despite the war and the worsening weather, the Logues had enjoyed a remarkably normal Christmas break – even though, as had become a habit, Lionel spent the day itself with the King. Guests began arriving at Beechgrove on the twenty-third, which was a Saturday. Together with the Logues, there would be ten of them for Christmas. The visitors would be staying in the house because the fog made travelling almost impossible, even within London. Myrtle viewed the challenge ahead with some trepidation: it would be the first time since they had left Australia that she had to look after so many people without any staff to help. In the run-up to Christmas she had also been struck down by a bout of bronchitis – although at least this afforded her time to finish knitting a pullover for Valentine.
On Christmas Day itself, they had a ‘jolly cold luncheon’. ‘Champagne cocktails at 6.30 p.m.; the presents given, goodness knows when we shall be able to afford champagne again,’ noted Myrtle. As the guests washed up after dinner, they listened to Gracie Fields on the radio singing to the troops. ‘Didn’t have our usual dance as nobody felt inclined for it.’
By 27 December the guests had all departed, and life settled down into the usual lull between Christmas and New Year, though it was enlivened by the arrival home of Valentine, who had been given a ten-day break from the hospital after having worked all through Christmas. It began to snow; Beechgrove, to Myrtle’s eyes, ‘looked divine’, even though Valentine and Antony, who was back from Leeds for the holidays, were disappointed that not enough of it had settled to make it worth getting out their toboggan. On New Year’s Eve, they all set off for a party hosted in Wimbledon by their Australian friends, Gilbert and Mabel Goodman, which meant a ten-mile drive through blacked-out London. ‘The fog came up and we had the most terrifying experience getting there in Valentine’s little open sports car,’ Myrtle wrote in her diary. ‘Dozens of people telephoned cancelling, we had another party in town to go to, left early and went to the Lyceum club and saw the New Year in, then started for home, which took 1½ hours instead of 30 minutes. Pedestrians led us with torches, their hands on the top of the car. I really must not try an experience like this again.’
And then it was all over. That Sunday, Antony left early to go back to Leeds to look for new digs; Valentine stayed until after lunch. ‘It is lonely without them,’ wrote Myrtle after they had both gone. ‘Back again to the old routine. Frost again, and snow nearby, the whole of Europe suffering likewise.’
In the days that followed, Myrtle chronicled the worsening arctic conditions engulfing London:
9 January: ‘Freezing today, so I’m not allowed out, so have decided to repair bed linen, have not had to do this myself many years.’
10 January: ‘Fall of sn
ow, which had hardened on top of frost and making roads very dangerous, so decide to clear out the drawers of discarded toys belonging to the boys ... This cold is certainly keeping the Huns quiet.’
18 January: ‘This icebound land is becoming boring, our place is a sheet of snow, with only the marks of the birds across the smooth surface.’
Keeping a large house such as Beechgrove liveable in such temperatures was a near impossible task. At the beginning of the winter, to save money, Lionel and Myrtle had decided to heat only the few rooms they were using and to turn off all the radiators in the top part of the house. On 19 January, as the temperature plunged, three of the radiators burst. Myrtle spent two hours fighting an ever increasing cascade of water using a spanner as a lever until she managed to shut off the stop cock. ‘Oh boy, do we have fun,’ she wrote. The next day, according to Met Office records, after an early low of close to minus 9° C, the temperature crept up only as high as minus 2.4° C.
Antony, up in Leeds, was faring even worse, as Myrtle recorded: ‘All the pipes froze in his digs, and he had not had a bath for nine days. Then soot fell down the chimney which put the lid on things. He moved to new digs today, do hope he’ll have a little more comfort.’
Despite the extreme cold, the roads remained passable. The next day, a Sunday, Valentine came round to Beechgrove in his new car. Myrtle was delighted to see it was a saloon – unlike the open tourer he had previously driven. She put down the change to Gilbert Goodman, who, hearing about how much she hated the sports car, had said to Valentine: ‘Why didn’t you cut your mother’s throat outright instead of freezing her to death in your open car.’ Laurie also called by to fit the car radio – which gave Myrtle the chance to nurse her granddaughter Sandra – a ‘wee, fat thing’ now almost four months old.
The temperatures were dropping again, though: the following Wednesday, Lionel and Myrtle came home after a film and dinner to hear the sound of rushing water when they were still twenty yards from home. ‘Lionel did a bulldog rush, bellowing “main burst”, and sure enough it was, in three places ... [It] flooded the garage and cascaded out of the drive,’ Myrtle wrote. ‘Telephoned the plumber who crawled out of bed to come, nothing to be done at that hour but turn the water off at the main and draw the furnaces. What fun we have!’
The next day, there were ‘plumbers all over the house, no hot baths, no central heating, cold is intense, but thawing. Managed to get the holes cut out and replaced.’
There was worse to come: for forty-eight hours starting on 26 January, Britain was in the grip of a devastating snow storm that created drifts as much as two feet deep in the north. In the south, it fell largely as super-cooled rain that froze as soon as it touched the ground. Roads and pavements turned into skating rinks, making sloped surfaces impossible to climb. Telegraph poles and wires snapped under the weight of the ice.
By the following day, a Saturday, the snow was six inches deep in London. ‘Traffic held up all over the country, no coal deliveries, just enough to see us through until Monday,’ wrote Myrtle.
There was little respite from the frozen conditions:
Tuesday, 30 January: ‘Slight thaw and then hard freeze, no vehicles can get up steep hill. It’s a lovely sight, but we are sick of it.’
Wednesday, 31 January: ‘Fog, so cancelled the James’s dinner party. The way we break treaties is worthy of Hitler. Snow drifts to knees.’
Thursday, 1 February: ‘Have been down garden at danger to life and limb. Digger dug up a rat and made his first kill. Lionel said it was a good scrap, he’s come in very cock-a-hoop.’
Friday, 2 February: ‘Snowbound, cancelled Mrs Plummer’s lunch. People were creeping along pavements holding to railings. I ventured out and nearly landed on my hands and knees.’
Saturday, 3 February: ‘The snow is thawing and freezing to such an extent that it is impossible to walk on pavements. Another burst drain and a waste pipe inside which necessitates everyone using the cloakroom lav using an open umbrella, because the ceiling is streaming. The sum total to date is three burst radiators, main burst twice in three places, burst waste. Lionel shovelled the ice off a frozen gutter and precipitated a hundredweight of ice through a large window, so until a man can repair it, it is covered with brown paper.’
Sunday, 4 February: ‘We decided to go out today, [even] if we had to crawl, and nearly had to. There was a thaw and a freeze, we clung to railings and slithered down the 400 foot to the railway, Lionel finishing in a sprint, calling to the porters to hold the train – which they obligingly did – for one padding along in the rear ... I never want to see snow again.’
The next day, the weather was warmer and the snow melted, leaving the roads inches deep in water. Myrtle went out to pack up papers and books for Australian troops. The ground had thawed sufficiently for her to work in the garden. She took the opportunity to clear up the garden and start a bonfire, but because of the blackout she had to extinguish it by dusk.
The frost was getting worse; by Saturday it was three inches deep and Myrtle, pressing on with her gardening, struggled to get her fork into the hardened ground. ‘This winter has been the worst I ever remember,’ she wrote the next day. ‘Life is strange. Hardships on top of war conditions.’
Monday brought yet more snow and impassable roads. ‘Never again will I admire a snowy landscape, trains held up, traffic and standstill, no coke nor coal,’ wrote Myrtle.
Amid the freeze, there was news from afar of a dramatic postscript to the sinking the previous December of the Admiral Graf Spee in the South Atlantic. The Altmark, a newly built German tanker and supply vessel, had been assigned to support her, and when the Graf Spee went down, the Altmark took on board seamen who had been rescued from her – among them 300 captured British merchant navy officers and seamen. The Altmark then attempted to take its human cargo back to Germany, steaming around the north of Scotland and through the territorial waters of neutral Norway. On 14 February, as it was heading south, it was discovered by three British Lockheed Hudson Mk II aircraft from RAF Thornaby in North Yorkshire and pursued by several British destroyers led by HMS Cossack. The following evening, when the Altmark was in the fjord of Josing, in western Norway, the Cossack caught up with her. According to a breathless account in the Sunday Express, thirty British seamen ‘threw up grappling irons from the Cossack, climbed them, and, armed with cutlasses, swept on to the Nazi crew’.22 Leaping twelve feet in the dark across the water, a British officer grasped the ship’s rail, hauled himself abroad and then, revolver in hand, stormed his way onto the bridge and reversed the engines so the German vessel ran aground on the rocks. The German sailors fled across the ice to land from where they turned and opened fire on the ship. The other British seamen, meanwhile, set about rescuing their comrades, who were locked in shell rooms, storerooms and an empty oil tank, battened down beneath hatches strengthened by cables and chains. The British prisoners emerged with lurid tales of the brutality of their captors. ‘It was a filthy place with no fresh air. Conditions were terrible, and the Germans made them as miserable as they possibly could with their cruel, heartless treatment,’ one man told the paper. Another said he had not seen daylight for three weeks.
This story of British derring-do on the high seas prompted rejoicing back home. ‘I am delighted with this exploit,’ wrote the King. ‘I have been thinking of the Altmark for the last 2 days, & thanks God we have rescued these men from a “living hell”’.23 Like other Britons, the Logues heard the news on 17 February. Bored with the weather, they had put on snow shoes and ventured out to the cinema and, on their return, had seen the newspapers hoardings were carrying reports of the attack, which they stood in the street and read. Myrtle proclaimed herself to be ‘overjoyed’, writing in her diary: ‘Our spirits seem lighter, what a story, it must be a century since our sailors boarded a ship in real earnest and took what they wanted ... Rejoicing.’
A few days later, to help boost their depleted coke and coal supplies, Myrtle and Davey, their gardener,
sawed down one of the trees in the garden at Beechgrove, but ‘the wretched thing jumped off the stump and wedged itself upright in the soil, entwined in the branches of another tree. I left Davey sawing it about four foot up, hoping it would drop clear of the top branches.’ The next day, a bailiff arrived unexpectedly and informed Myrtle that the penalty for chopping down a tree without permission was £50 – a considerable amount, equivalent to £3,000 today. ‘I felt guilty,’ she wrote, ‘but reasoned that the only thing they could do would be to send one to jail. However we’ll wait and see.’
Adding to the misery of the cold was food rationing, which the government finally introduced on 8 January after several months of discussion. Each adult was permitted just four ounces of butter a week, twelve ounces of sugar and four ounces of bacon or ham (uncooked) and three ounces (cooked). Extra sugar rations were allowed for making jam and marmalade. On 11 March meat was also ‘put on the ration’, with just over one pound per person per week. That July, so, too, were tea, margarine, cooking fats and cheese; jam, marmalade, treacle and syrup followed in March 1941.
The Logues coped surprisingly well; not only did they turn over much of Beechgrove’s garden to growing vegetables, but Valentine obliged by continuing to contribute the occasional rabbit shot during his trips to Epping Forest. ‘We are living well within our ration,’ wrote Myrtle. ‘Four ounces of butter each per week. It’s marvellous how we can do without.’ Food prices were rising, though, and maintaining such a large house was proving increasingly tough. For that reason, they went ahead that March in letting out the basement to another couple and moving upstairs themselves. ‘We are now much more compact,’ wrote Myrtle, while bemoaning the fact that making the required changes to the house necessitated an army of electricians and other workmen that made them feel for a few days ‘that we are living in the middle of Piccadilly Circus’. The tenants settled in well, although Myrtle was livid the next month when she discovered that their only child, George, had dismantled the rockery and pitched it, stone by stone, into the pond. ‘He is so truthful, one is so amazed that rage evaporates before “yes, madam, I done it weeks ago”’, she wrote in her diary. ‘So after a homily on giving way to destructive feelings, holding up Hitler as an awful example, I leave him.’
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