The King's War

by The King's War- The Friendship of George VI

  The State Opening was followed the next Sunday by another royal broadcast. At 9 p.m. on 3 December, the King made a radio speech to mark the disbanding of the Home Guard. A Nazi invasion had seemed imminent when the force was set up in summer 1940. The decision to wind it up was a reflection of the extent to which the tide of war had by now turned in the Allies’ favour. The occasion was marked by a review of representative units in Hyde Park at which the King took the salute. In his speech that evening, broadcast from Windsor, he expressed the nation’s thanks to those who had served in the Home Guard for their ‘steadfast devotion’ that had ‘helped much to ward off the danger of invasion’. Logue had worked with the King on the text and went to hear him deliver the speech. He was impressed to note he had only one problem with it: he stumbled over the ‘w’ in the word ‘weapons’.

  Afterwards, Logue shook hands with the King and, after congratulating him, asked why that particular letter had caught him out.

  ‘I did it on purpose,’ the King replied with a grin.

  ‘On purpose?’ asked Logue, incredulous.

  ‘Yes. If I don’t make a mistake, people might not know it was me.’

  The Queen and the two princesses then came into the room and congratulated the King. Logue was struck by how tall Margaret had become. He then told Elizabeth how impressed he had been by the speech she had made when she launched her first warship – the battleship Vanguard – on Clydebank a few days earlier. The future Queen told Logue of her terror on walking out onto the platform and seeing the huge ship towering over her. Logue wanted to know why the name of the ship had been cut out.

  ‘It is a fetish in Glasgow that no one mentions the name of a ship,’ she replied.

  Logue had dinner by himself, and as he made his farewells the King said: ‘Don’t forget the Christmas Broadcast.’

  On 23 December, Logue made his usual trip to Windsor to run through the wording of his speech. The tone of the text was optimistic: in it the King expressed the hope that before the following Christmas ‘the story of liberation and triumph’ would be complete. ‘If we look back to those early days of the war, we can surely say that the darkness daily grows less and less,’ read the text.

  ‘The lamps which the Germans put out all over Europe, first in 1914 and then in 1939, are slowly being rekindled. Already we can see some of them beginning to shine through the fog of war that still surrounds so many lands. Anxiety is giving way to confidence and let us hope that before next Christmas Day, the story of liberation and triumph will be complete.’

  An annotated copy of the typewritten text, marked ‘fourth draft’ that was contained among Logue’s papers, shows changes he made to eliminate words or phrases that could potentially catch out the King: ‘calamities’, with its difficult initial ‘k’ sound, for example, was replaced by ‘disasters’, while ‘goal’, with its tricky hard ‘g’ at the beginning was substituted by the much easier ‘end’. The King, meanwhile, had made modifications of his own, adding at the end his yearning for the day when ‘the Christmas message – peace on earth, goodwill towards men – finally comes true’. All in all, though, Logue was impressed by the text. ‘They all have to be cut out of the same pattern, but I think we altered this particular one less than any other,’ he wrote.

  As they sat in the study in front of the burning fire, the King suddenly said: ‘Logue, I think the time has come, when I can do a broadcast by myself, and you can have a Christmas dinner with your family.’

  Logue had been expecting this moment for some time, especially since the Home Guard speech, which the King had delivered so confidently. The Queen agreed they should give it a try. So it was decided that, for the first time, she and the two princesses – rather than Logue – would sit beside the King while he spoke.

  ‘You know, ma’am, I feel like a father who is sending his boy to his first public school,’ Logue told the Queen as he went to go.

  ‘I know just how you feel,’ she replied, putting her hand on his arm and patting it.

  While the King was preparing to make his broadcast, Logue was celebrating his first Christmas Day at home since before the war by throwing a house party; Gordon of the Sunday Express and his wife were among the guests. Logue was so busy with all the preparations that he scarcely thought about the speech, but at five minutes to three, he slipped off to his bedroom. After saying a silent prayer, he turned on the radio, just in time.

  Logue was impressed by what he heard: the King sounded much better than he remembered from three years previously, the last time he had heard him on the radio. He spoke confidently and with good inflection and emphasis, and the breaks between words had all but disappeared. During the eight-minute broadcast, he hesitated badly only once, on the hard ‘G’ in ‘God’, but that was only for a second and then he continued even more decisively than before. All the while, Logue made copious notes.

  Logue’s guests were listening in the drawing room. When he went back to join them, they all congratulated him.

  Lionel then tried a little joke: ‘Would you like to hear the King speak?’

  ‘Well, we’ve just heard him,’ replied Gordon.

  ‘If you go to the two extensions of the phone, you will hear him talk from Windsor.’

  During their final run-through, it had been agreed that Logue would call the King after the broadcast; so he took the main phone and telephoned him, while his guests listened in on the two other phones. When the King came on the line a few seconds later, Logue congratulated him on a wonderful talk, adding: ‘My job is over, sir.’

  ‘Not at all,’ replied the King. ‘It is the preliminary work that counts, and that is where you are indispensable.’

  Logue received a number of letters of congratulations – including one from the physician and psychiatrist, Hugh Crichton-Miller. ‘That broadcast was streets ahead of any previous performance,’ he wrote to Logue on Boxing Day. ‘One heard the self-expression of a new freedom which was wholly admirable.’

  A delighted Logue passed the message on to the King: ‘Many letters of congratulations have come in over the Christmas Broadcast but the one I prize the most is from Crichton-Miller, a great psychoanalyst,’ he wrote.

  In his return letter a few days later, the King said it was ‘certainly encouraging for both of us to get such a report from an expert’, adding:

  I do hope you did not mind not being there as I felt that I just had to get one broadcast over alone. The fear of the ‘mike’ itself has really gone.

  The preparation of speeches & broadcasts is the important part & that is where all your help is invaluable. I wonder if you realise how grateful I am to you for having made it possible for me to carry out this vital part of my job. I cannot thank you enough.

  Four days later, Logue responded: ‘Your very gracious and very welcome letter has given me greater pleasure than I can ever hope to explain.’

  When we began years ago the goal I set myself was for you to be able to make an impromptu speech without stumbling and talk over the air without the fear of the microphone. We did not dream then that a yearly broadcast would be added to your manifold duties.

  As you say, these things are now an accomplished fact, and I would not be human if I were not overjoyed that you can now do these things without supervision.

  When a fresh patient comes to me the usual query is – ‘Will I be able to speak like the King?’, and my reply is, ‘Yes, if you will work like he does’ – I will cure anyone of intelligence if they will only work like you did – for you are now reaping the benefit of this tremendously hard work you did at the beginning. I look forward to the initial preparation of your speeches with keen pleasure, knowing that the delivery will be all that is required, as the greatest pleasure in my life has been the honour of working with you.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Victory

  It was one of the greatest – and certainly most joyous – street parties London had ever seen. On Tuesday, 8 May, tens of thousands of singing, dancing p
eople gathered in the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace to celebrate victory over the Germans. Similar scenes were repeated across the length and breadth of Britain. ‘The day we have been longing for has arrived at last, & we can look back with thankfulness to God that our tribulation is over,’ the King wrote in his diary.172

  Preparations for the celebrations had been going on for months: the balcony of the palace had been strengthened, the crimson and gold drapery readied. Loudspeakers and floodlights had been erected in the Mall. A team of bell ringers were on standby to ring in victory at St Paul’s Cathedral, people stocked up on Union flags and houses were garlanded with bunting. The King had even recorded a version of the speech he was due to give and been filmed doing so. ‘Victory in Europe to be declared to-day,’ read the headline in that morning’s edition of The Times, announcing that day and the next as holidays.

  At 3 p.m. Churchill spoke to the nation. At 2.41 the previous morning, he announced, the ceasefire had been signed by Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, at the American advance headquarters in Rheims. In his speech, Churchill paid fulsome tribute to the men and women who had ‘fought valiantly’ on land, sea and in the air – and to those who had laid down their lives for victory. Fittingly, his broadcast was delivered from the War Cabinet Office, the same room in which Neville Chamberlain had announced six years earlier that Britain was at war with Germany.

  When Churchill finished speaking, the crowds briefly fell silent before chanting: ‘We want the King, We want the King.’

  They did not have long to wait. Shortly afterwards, the King, bare-headed and wearing his habitual naval uniform, stepped out onto the balcony, to a chorus of: ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. For the first time in public, he was accompanied not just by the Queen, who was wearing powder blue, but also by the two Princesses – Elizabeth in the khaki uniform of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, which she had joined that February, and Margaret in a blue dress.

  An hour or so later, they came out again, and then a third time at 5.30, now accompanied by Churchill, who stood between the King and Queen, waving his cigar to the crowd and giving the victory sign. Churchill left soon afterwards, but just before 7 p.m. the royal family appeared again. ‘We went out 8 times altogether during the afternoon and evening,’ the King wrote in his diary.173 ‘We were given a great reception.’

  Logue’s role, as ever, had been to help the King prepare for his speech that evening, which would be broadcast on the BBC and relayed to the crowds outside the Palace. The previous Saturday he had received a telephone call at 11.30 a.m. from Lascelles asking him to go to Windsor that afternoon: ‘Peace Day V’, as it was known, was in the offing, but Lascelles was still not certain of the exact date. Following Hitler’s suicide in the Führerbunker on 30 April, Berlin had capitulated to the Russians, while Montgomery had received the surrender of all the German forces operating in north Germany, Denmark and Holland. This still left those in Norway, the Channel Islands and in some pockets still holding out on the French coast. Until they, too, gave up, the war in Europe was not over. Churchill nevertheless believed VE (Victory in Europe) Day could be celebrated by that Monday.

  A car came from the Palace to Beechgrove to pick up Logue. He was at Windsor Castle by 4 p.m. ‘Found him looking very tired and weary,’ he wrote in his diary of the King. ‘My heart ached for him.’ They went through the speech, which Logue liked very much – although he did alter a few passages, including a line: ‘We must go back to work tomorrow’. As someone pointed out, many people would interpret this as ‘The King said there was no holiday tomorrow’, which, thought Logue, showed how careful one had to be before making such statements.

  On Sunday evening, the King and Queen drove up from Windsor in readiness for the announcement expected the next afternoon. On Monday at 3 p.m., the King had a further run-through with Logue, this time at the palace, and it was agreed that Logue should return at 8.30 that evening. He went home for a rest, but at six o’clock the telephone rang; it was Lascelles. ‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘Norway has not come into line.’ Although Churchill was keen to announce the end of hostilities that evening, both Truman and Stalin wanted to postpone for a day, leaving him little option but to do as they wished. The cabinet met and decided to issue a statement proclaiming the following day and the Wednesday to be VE Day holidays. The King was frustrated: ‘This came to me as a terrible anti-climax,’ he complained.174

  The delay in the official announcement did not prevent jubilant crowds from turning out in large numbers. Tens of thousands of people, carrying flags and sounding rattles and hooters, thronged the streets around Piccadilly Circus, clinging to cars and clambering onto the roofs of buses. Tugs, motor boats and other small craft raced up the Thames sounding their sirens, and bonfires were lit around London. That evening a crowd gathered outside Buckingham Palace and began to call for the King, but he declined to step out onto the balcony, ‘not wishing to shoot his grouse before the Twelfth, so to speak’, as Lascelles put it.175

  VE Day dawned fine and warm after heavy thunderstorms overnight. That morning Logue received another message from the Palace. ‘The King would like to see you at dinner tonight, and bring Mrs Logue’ – to which an unidentified hand had added: ‘Tell her to wear something bright’. When Lionel and Myrtle set off for Buckingham Palace at 6.30, they found the streets decked with flags but virtually deserted. It took them only a few minutes to drive the seven miles from Beechgrove to the centre of London. They encountered their first traffic barrier near Victoria Station, but Miéville had rung up Forest Hill police and asked them to organize a pass, which Logue had picked up. This got them through the barrier and on to the first gate of the Palace. Logue expected a hold-up, but the policeman there was an old friend and the gate swung open. As their car crossed the courtyard towards the Privy Purse entrance, a tremendous cheer broke out – the King and Queen had just come out onto the balcony again. Lionel and Myrtle joined other members of the royal household in wildly cheering and waving handkerchiefs.

  Lionel made for the new broadcasting room on the ground floor, facing the lawn, and went through the speech with the King. They made a couple of minor alterations before the King declared, rather plaintively: ‘If I don’t get dinner before 9 I won’t get any after, as everyone will be away, watching the sights’. This, coming from a man in such an exalted position, sent Logue into paroxysms of laughter - so much that the King himself joined in, though after reflecting for a moment, he said: ‘It’s funny, but it is quite true’.

  After they had eaten, they went back to the broadcasting room at 8.35. Wood, of the BBC, was there. He and Logue synchronized their watches and had another run-through. There were two minutes to go before the King, dressed in his naval uniform, was due to step out once more onto the balcony, but this time to make a speech. Another small further alteration, and then the Queen, now wearing a white ermine wrap over her evening gown and a diamond tiara in her hair, came into the room, as she always did, to wish her husband luck.

  Once the floodlights were switched on, a mighty roar erupted from the crowd. ‘And in an instant the sombre scene has become fairyland – with the Royal Ensign, lit from beneath, floating in the air,’ Logue wrote in his diary. ‘Another roar – the King and Queen come on to the balcony.’ He was struck by the way the lights played on the Queen’s tiara; as she turned, smiling, to wave to the crowd, the floodlights created what looked like a band of flame around her head.

  ‘Today we give thanks to Almighty God for a great deliverance,’ the King declared:

  Speaking from our Empire’s oldest capital city, war-battered but never for one moment daunted or dismayed, speaking from London, I ask you to join with me in that act of thanksgiving.

  Germany, the enemy who drove all Europe into war, has been finally overcome. In the Far East we have yet to deal with the Japanese, a determined and cruel foe. To this we shall turn with the utmost resolve and with all o
ur resources But at this hour when the dreadful shadow of war has passed far from our hearths and homes in these islands, we may at last make one pause for thanksgiving and then turn our thoughts to the task all over the world which peace in Europe brings with it.

  Continuing, the King saluted those who had contributed to victory – both alive and dead – and reflected on how the ‘enslaved and isolated peoples of Europe’ had looked to Britain during the darkest days of the conflict. He also turned to the future, urging that his subjects should ‘resolve as a people to do nothing unworthy of those who died for us and to make the world such a world as they would have desired, for their children and for ours.’

  ‘We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing,’ he concluded. ‘But let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead. Japan with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued.’

  The King was exhausted – and it showed; he spoke slowly and stumbled more than usual over his words, but that didn’t seem to matter. The crowd listened in silence, but at the end they raised a great cheer and sang the national anthem. ‘We all roared ourselves hoarse,’ recalled Noël Coward, who was among the crowd. ‘I suppose this is the greatest day in our history.’

  The King and Queen reappeared on the balcony together with the princesses at about 10.45 p.m., standing waving to the crowd for about ten minutes, and yet again just before midnight as searchlights flashed across the sky. This time, though, the two princesses were not with them. They had asked their parents to be allowed out to join in the celebrations. The King agreed: ‘Poor darlings, they have never had any fun yet,’ he wrote in his diary. And so, Elizabeth and Margaret slipped out of the Palace incognito, chaperoned by their uncle, David Bowes-Lyon, the Queen’s youngest brother, and accompanied by their governess and a party of young officers. No one recognized the nineteen-year-old heir to the throne and her fourteen-year-old sister as they joined the conga line into one door of the Ritz and out of the other amid crowds that chanted ‘We want the King! We want the Queen!’ and sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Years later the future Queen was to describe this as one of the most memorable nights of her life.