At 11.30 the Queen sent for Lionel and Myrtle, and they said their goodbyes in the sitting room. Then the King’s equerry, Peter Townsend, led them out through the gardens to the Royal Mews where their car was waiting. The crowds had thinned out considerably by then, but there were still plenty of people on the streets celebrating victory. The Logues gave a ride in the car to a soldier they saw standing in Horseferry Road, taking him as far as the Kennington Oval. After he had got out, they picked up a couple with a little girl, who wanted to go to Dog Kennel Hill, near Beechgrove. As they drove, they talked about the evening’s events and about the King and Queen. The couple thanked the Logues warmly as they left.
The next afternoon, the royal couple drove through north-east London; the following day they headed south to New Cross, Greenwich and Streatham, where they were greeted by large enthusiastic crowds; at various points they would get out of their car and mingle with them. Both evenings they again appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to an ovation from the revellers gathered below. National Services of Thanksgiving were held at St Paul’s on 13 May and at St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh on 16 May. The following day, the King went to the Great Hall of Westminster where he received addresses from both Houses of Parliament. During his long response he made a prolonged hesitation on the word ‘imperishable’ and faltered when he spoke of the death of the Duke of Kent. ‘We listened in silence to the King’s speech,’ wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary. ‘He has a really beautiful voice and it is to be regretted that his stammer makes it almost intolerably painful to listen to him. It is as if one read a fine piece of prose written on a typewriter the keys of which stick from time to time and mar the beauty of the whole. It makes him stress the wrong word.’176
Exhausted, the couple went for a short rest at Windsor. ‘We have spent a very busy fortnight since V.E. day & feel rather jaded from it all,’ the King wrote in his diary. ‘We have been overwhelmed by the kind things people have said over our part in the War. We have only tried to do our duty during these 5½ years. I have found it difficult to rejoice or relax as there is still so much hard work to deal with.’177 The Queen put it more simply: ‘We felt absolutely whacked,’ she revealed later.178
Whacked or not, there was little time to relax: the war against Japan was still not yet won, while the situation in Europe remained tense following Stalin’s insistence to Churchill and Roosevelt at the Yalta conference that February that Poland and the other countries of Eastern Europe should be part of a sphere of Soviet influence. On a personal level, the King was saddened by the sudden death in April of Roosevelt, whom he had regarded with genuine admiration, affection and gratitude since their meeting in America on the eve of war. The blow was even greater because Roosevelt had spoken of paying a return visit to Britain that spring and the King was looking forward to hosting him at Buckingham Palace.
It was instead Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s vice-president and successor, who came to Britain that August, though for only a few hours on his way home to America from the conference in Potsdam on the future of Germany and Europe. The King had been determined to get to know the new American leader in the hope of establishing the same rapport with him as he enjoyed with Roosevelt and travelled down to Plymouth Sound to meet Truman on board the battle cruiser, HMS Renown, which was anchored alongside the USS Augusta. The two men hit it off. Truman proclaimed himself ‘impressed with the King as a good man’.179 Among the subjects discussed was America’s atomic bomb, the first of which Truman would drop on Hiroshima on 6 August, four days later.
Domestic events, however, posed the greatest challenge to the King. It was now almost ten years since the last general election. While the all-party National Government had been united over the waging of war, it was divided on ideological lines when it came to determining the direction of domestic policy, which now moved to the fore. Churchill hoped his coalition could nevertheless continue in office until the defeat of Japan, but Attlee was pressing for an election. Faced with apparently insurmountable policy differences, Churchill eventually bowed to Labour’s demands and on 23 May went to the Palace to request a dissolution. The election was set for 5 July, though counting was postponed for three weeks to allow time to get in the ballots from troops stationed overseas.
Churchill was confident of victory; on 25 July, the day before the count, he told the King he expected the Conservatives to be returned with a majority of between thirty and eighty.180 Yet he had seriously misjudged the mood of the British people. Far from rewarding the Prime Minister for his wartime leadership, they seemed determined to punish the Conservatives for the failings of the inter-war years, during which they had run the country continuously with only two brief interruptions. The Conservatives lost 160 seats, while Labour gained 230, giving them a massive overall majority of 180. On the evening of 26 July Churchill drove to the Palace to offer his resignation and recommend the King send for Attlee. It was, according to the King, a ‘very sad meeting’. The distrust that had characterized his relationship with Churchill when they first worked together five years earlier had long since been replaced by mutual admiration and what the King’s official biographer described as a ‘unique degree of intimacy’.181 Indeed, the King felt towards his defeated Prime Minister the same sympathy he had felt for Chamberlain when he was ousted five years earlier. ‘I saw Winston at 7.00 p.m. and ... told him I thought the people were very ungrateful after the way they had been led in the War,’ the King noted in his diary.182 ‘We said goodbye & I thanked him for all his help to me during the 5 war years’. Half an hour later, the King received Attlee, who seemed as surprised by his own victory as Churchill had been by his defeat.
The King also faced a more personal problem: finding a potential role for the Duke of Windsor. The issue could be put on the back burner as long as Britain was at war, but as the end of the conflict loomed, the Palace became preoccupied with where the King’s elder brother should live and what he could do. The Duke had effectively forced the issue in January by saying he would step down from the governorship of the Bahamas at the end of that April, a few weeks before the end of what was traditionally a five-year term of office. Various possibilities were discussed in the ensuing months: the two that most appealed to the Duke were another representational job abroad or returning to Britain. Both prospects were unacceptable to the Palace; Lascelles argued it would be best for him to live as a private citizen in the United States, but the Duke, who remained preoccupied by his finances, would do so only if he were given an official position – which would be the only way of obtaining relief from heavy American taxes. This, however, was ruled out by the Palace. Nothing had been decided when his resignation was formally announced except that he and Duchess would go first to Miami on holiday. In the end the former monarch had little alternative but to resume his pre-war exile in France.
Although Logue had celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday that February, he had no plans for retirement and continued to see other patients – among them Michael Astor, the twenty-nine-year-old son of Viscount Astor, the wealthy owner of the Observer, who wanted to follow his father into politics. On 3 June, Miéville, who had introduced them, wrote to Logue to thank him for ‘what you did for young Astor’ after he was adopted as the Conservative candidate for Surrey East. ‘He ought to get in as it is a v. safe seat, but I fear he will not contribute much when he does arrive in the House of Commons,’ he added. Miéville was right on both counts: Astor was duly elected, but served only until 1951 and made little impact on British public life.
For Logue, joy at the return of peace quickly became tinged with worries about his family. East Africa had not proved good for Laurie’s health: the bout of dysentery he suffered in Mogadishu in April 1944, about which Antony had written mockingly, had actually been a serious one. In the course of the following few months he had been in and out of hospital there and in Nairobi several times. His parents were keen to get him home – which Logue achieved, by pulling a few strings at the Palace. Laur
ie left his unit at the beginning of December, with a medical classification of ‘D’ – temporarily unfit for medical service – and set off for Britain on 10 January. A few days later Logue wrote to Miéville to thank him for his help. Laurie, he wrote, had been ‘nearly at the end of his tether, and could not have gone on much longer ... I cannot tell you how grateful Myrtle and myself are to you.’
Once back in Britain, Laurie slowly recovered, but Logue’s own health was deteriorating. Later in June he went into St Andrew’s Hospital in Dollis Hill in north-west London, to have an operation on his prostate. The hospital was run by the Little Sisters of Mary, also known as the Blue Nuns, and Logue was treated in a new wing for private patients. While he was in hospital he spoke to the medical staff about his work. ‘He was very modest but happy to talk,’ recalled John Millar, one of two resident medical officers. ‘His teaching methods were primarily concerned with breathing, control of the muscles of the chest and diaphragm. He demonstrated to me how he was able to contract individual chest muscles’.
While Logue was recuperating, Myrtle suddenly fell seriously ill and was taken to the same hospital. A few days later, on 22 June, she died of acute kidney failure. The shock was all the greater since a fortnight earlier she had still been working with her usual energy at the Boomerang Club. Its members expressed regret at the death of one of their ‘most active voluntary workers’. Logue was heartbroken at the loss of the woman, who, as he had described in his BBC radio interview in September 1942, had ‘stood by my side’ for so many years ‘and helped me so valiantly over the rough places’. Myrtle was cremated at Honor Oak Crematorium in south-east London, near their home.
The King sent a telegram of condolence as soon as he heard the news: ‘The Queen and I are grieved to hear of Mrs Logue’s death and send you and your family our deepest sympathy in your loss – George.’ He followed up with two letters: one on June 27 and a second on the following day. ‘I was so shocked when I was told because your wife was in such good form on Victory night,’ he wrote to Logue. ‘I do so feel for you as I know you had a perfect companionship with her ... Please do not hesitate to let me know if I can be of any help to you.’
On 14 July, Logue wrote back to the King:
Your two letters gave both my boys and myself great comfort and I am deeply grateful to you.
Valentine [who had joined the Royal Medical Corps on 10 February] leaves in a few weeks for India with a neurosurgical unit. And Tony we expect to go back to Italy shortly.
Laurie I hope will be left in England. He has had a bad time in Africa and has not yet recovered. I don’t know just what I would have done without him. I have not been very well but I am glad to say that I am back at work, the great panacea for all sorrow, and I am entirely at your Majesty’s convenience. I expect there will be a Parliament to be opened shortly.
The State Opening, which took place on 15 August, saw a return to most – if not quite all – of the pomp of the pre-war years. Thousands of people lined the streets as the King, dressed in the service uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, and the Queen, wearing her customary shade of light blue, travelled to parliament in an open landau. The ceremony had initially been scheduled for 8 August. But Attlee had had to take Churchill’s place alongside Truman and Stalin at the Potsdam conference almost immediately after his election victory was announced. The State Opening was therefore postponed by a week to give the Labour leader more time to complete his government and formulate his programme. The day also brought another cause for celebration: a few hours earlier, Emperor Hirohito of Japan announced his country’s surrender, following America’s dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki on 9 August. The Second World War was finally over.
The King’s speech reflected the momentous nature of the event: ‘The surrender of Japan has brought to an end six years of warfare which have caused untold loss and misery to the world,’ he said. ‘In this hour of deliverance, it is fitting that we should give humble and solemn thanks to God by whose grace we have been brought to final victory.’ The government, he continued, would work with the governments of the Dominions and with other peace-loving peoples ‘to attain a world of freedom, peace and social justice so that the sacrifices of the war shall not have been in vain’.
The speech also concerned domestic policy. Attlee took Labour’s massive majority as a mandate for a programme of sweeping social, economic and political change that aimed to transform Britain. Among the major reforms to which the new administration was committed was the nationalization of the Bank of England, the coal industry and the gas and electricity networks, as well as the creation of a National Health Service. ‘It will be the aim of my ministers to see that national resources in labour and material are employed with the fullest efficiency in the interests of all,’ the King declared. MPs were told money would be needed ‘not, happily, for the continuance of the war, but for expenditure on reconstruction and other essential services’. The King delivered his speech well. ‘His voice was clear, and he spoke better than usual and was more impressive,’ wrote Chips Channon, the diarist. ‘But they say that the word Berlin had to be substituted for Potsdam, which he could not have articulated.’183
As a constitutional monarch, the King had no alternative but to accept his new government. A natural conservative, he did think the government was pushing ahead too fast with nationalization programme, though, and expressed private concerns about the effect of heavy taxation and estate duties on the wealthy classes. When Vita Sackville-West told him that her family’s home, Knole, had been given to the National Trust, he replied despairingly: ‘Everything is going nowadays. Before long, I shall also have to go.’184
During the afternoon cheering crowds gathered around the Palace, and, that night, after they had changed into their evening clothes, the King and Queen went out repeatedly onto the balcony, just as they had done three months earlier on VE Day. The evening was perfectly clear, warm and still. The writer, John Lehmann, described making his way towards the Mall through streets that were brightly lit and bedecked with flags until he reached ‘the great illuminated façade of the Palace, with an enormous, raw half-moon hanging over it.’
As we came nearer, the noise of singing increased. People were clustered as thickly as swarming bees. Every few minutes the singing would pause, and the chant would go up: ‘We want the King ... We want the King.’ Until at last the French windows on the far, red-draped, fairy-tale balcony were opened, and the King and Queen, diminutive but glittering figures – the Queen’s diamonds flashed into the night under the arc-lights – came out to wave and be greeted by cheer after cheer, waving of hands, and the singing of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’.185
That Christmas the King again spoke to the nation without Logue at his side. The tone of this, his first peacetime broadcast after six years of war, was suitably upbeat. ‘By gigantic efforts and sacrifices a great work has been done, a great evil has been cast from the earth,’ he said. ‘No peoples have done more to cast it out than you to whom I speak. With my whole heart I pray to God by whose grace victory has been won, that this Christmas may bring to my peoples all the world over every joy they have dreamed of in the dark days that are gone.’ Yet the joy was tempered by grieving for those who had given their lives in the war and a thought for those, ‘still to be numbered in millions, who are spending Christmas far from your homes, engaged in East and West in the long and difficult task of restoring to shattered countries the means and the manners of civilised life’.
Peace may have come, but life in Britain remained tough. As The Times put it in its report of the King’s broadcast: ‘The continuing shortages in the supply of many necessaries, especially houses, food, clothing and fuel, will call for the same spirit of tolerance and understanding which the nation has displayed during the past six years of war.’ Rationing, far from being ended, became stricter: bread, which had been freely on sale during the war, was rationed from July 1946; in November the following year so, too, were potato
es after the crop was hit by spring floods followed by a summer drought. The government came under intense criticism. ‘So Britain is now to face the winter with both bread and potatoes rationed – the two commodities which during the war were considered unrationable, the shock-absorbers of the rationing system,’ commented the Spectator. ‘The position, of course, looks different according to the comparisons made. If the comparison is with pre-war days it is intolerable, if with Central and Eastern Europe at the moment it is comfortable.’186 The restrictions were gradually lifted in the following years, but it was not until July 1954, with the end of controls on meat and bacon, that food rationing in Britain finally ended – fourteen years after it was introduced.
Logue, meanwhile, was left to grieve for Myrtle alone: Antony had left the army and was continuing his studies at Queen’s College, Cambridge, after having managed to be transferred from London University. Realizing his heart was not in being a doctor, he had switched to law. Laurie was back working for Lyons at their headquarters in Nottingham, while Valentine was in Mandalay, where he performed a brain operation – a first for Burma – that was witnessed by doctors and surgeons from across the country.
The King's War Page 23