The King's War

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

  Logue’s own health continued to trouble him; in spring 1946 he had to go back into hospital. His growing world weariness was evident in a letter he sent to Myrtle’s brother, Rupert Gruenert, that May. ‘Life goes on, and I am working very hard, harder than I should at my age 66, but work is the only thing that lets me forget,’ he wrote. He also expressed the hope that he could visit Australia – in what would have been his first trip home since he and Myrtle emigrated to Britain more than two decades earlier. ‘As soon as the Commonwealth give over control of the shipping lines, I am coming out for a six-month spell, but not under the present conditions, thank you. When I travel I like to do it in comfort. I am not allowed to fly, on account of my abnormal blood pressure.’ He never made the trip.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Voices from the Other Side

  In April 1947, with Myrtle gone and his sons far away, Logue sold Beechgrove. It was not just because the house was now far too large for him. As he wrote to the King that December when he sent him his annual birthday greetings, ‘it held too many memories’ of life with Myrtle. He moved to a ‘comfortable little flat’ at 29 Princes Court in the Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, just opposite Harrods. Beechgrove was bought by the Community of the Nursing Sisters of St John the Divine as a residence for its members.

  Logue continued to teach, more often than not in his new home rather than Harley Street, even though he kept his practice there. After years in which he was careful not to speak about his royal connection, he now allowed himself to boast a little about his relationship with the King – or ‘my king’ – as he called him. This was especially the case when talking to his younger patients, who appeared suitably impressed. ‘He showed us a letter he had got from the King, written in his own hand writing, thanking Mr Logue for some books he had given the King for his birthday,’ Alan Elliott, a fourteen-year-old from Northern Ireland, whom Logue had begun to treat four years earlier, wrote to his family. ‘Mr Logue says that if he puts: “The King, London” with his own initials in the bottom left hand corner [of the envelope], it goes straight to the King and no one dare touch it!’

  David Radcliffe, who was in his second or third year at Oundle School in Northamptonshire when he was sent to see Logue, had a similar experience. ‘I will always remember Logue saying, on one of my visits, “Did you hear my King’s speech on the radio last night?’”, he recalled more than half a century later. ‘It was encouraging to think that King George, my king, and I had something in common, and that I too had been helped by one who I think was truly a national hero for helping George VI lead the country through so many difficult years.’

  Of Logue’s various cases in the immediate post-war years, particularly poignant was that of Jack Fennell, a thirty-one-year-old from Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, who had written to the King in September 1947 pleading for his assistance. Unemployed, penniless, and with one child, Fennell was despondent and suffered from an inferiority complex brought on by years of discrimination over his stammer. Lascelles forwarded Fennell’s letter to Logue, asking him to take a look at him and give an opinion on his condition. Logue reckoned he might need as much as a year of treatment – which Fennell couldn’t afford. After trying in vain to get help from the various welfare bodies, Fennell eventually found a sponsor in Viscount Kemsley, the newspaper baron who owned the Daily Sketch and the Sunday Times. Lodging in an army hostel in Westminster and with the offer of a job at the Kemsley newspaper press in London, Fennell began his treatment in January 1948. Kemsley paid Logue’s fee, which he reduced from his usual three pounds three shillings a consultation to two pounds and ten shillings.

  By April the following year, Logue wrote back to the newspaper baron boasting of the progress his patient had made. Fennell had grown in confidence and passed ‘with flying colours’ an interview to work at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire. Logue continued to see him for another year, although their appointments were reduced to just one a month. By August 1949, things were going so well at work that Fennell had moved his family into a house in Wantage; in January the following year he enrolled at the Oxford College of Technology and by May was offered a permanent job at Harwell.

  Logue’s own youngest son, however, was in poor health. Antony was taken into hospital in the spring suffering from suspected appendicitis but then had to undergo four major operations within six days. In his customary birthday letter to the King that December, Logue blamed the dramatic turn of events on a delayed reaction to the injury Antony had suffered in North Africa in 1943. His son had been involved ‘in a desperate fight for his life and is still in hospital’, Logue wrote. ‘He is at last making progress, and I hope to have him here for Christmas.’

  The King wrote back two days later expressing sympathy. ‘You have certainly had your share of shocks and sorrows,’ he said. Rather touchingly, after their years of working together, he updated Logue with how his public speaking was going, noting how pleased he had been with a speech he had made at his father’s memorial. He expressed concern, however, that his Christmas message would not be easy, ‘because everything is so gloomy’.

  Antony recovered and returned to Cambridge, graduating in law in June 1949. Logue was suitably proud. He also realized a long-standing ambition of his own: in January the previous year he wrote to the King asking him to become patron of the College of Speech Therapists, which now counted 350 members, was ‘quite solvent’ and was recognized by the British Medical Association. ‘I am sixty-eight years of age and it will be a wonderful thought in my old age to know that you were the head of this rapidly growing and essential organisation,’ he wrote. The King agreed.

  Logue was nevertheless finding it difficult to adapt to life without Myrtle and was drawn to spiritualism in the hope of making contact with her on the ‘other side’. In 1946 he got in touch with Lilian Bailey, a prominent ‘deep trance medium’ who over the years held séances for a number of prominent figures in Britain and abroad – among them the Hollywood actresses Mary Pickford, Merle Oberon and Mae West, and Mackenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister. Born into a working-class family in Cardiff in 1895, Bailey worked as a secretary for the army in France during the First World War – for which work, she claimed, somewhat implausibly, to have been awarded the OBE – and then married William Bailey, a railway stoker with whom she went to live in his native Crewe. Mourning her mother, who died when she was eighteen, she drifted into spiritualism, which was enjoying a renaissance in the 1920s as women tried to contact the husbands they had lost in the war. Bailey soon made a name for herself and, after a few years, was travelling frequently to London to satisfy the growing demand for séances. Eventually she and her husband moved to the capital, settling in a luxurious home.

  Bailey claimed as her spirit guide an ex-Grenadier Guards captain named William Hedley Wootton, who, so her story went, had been shot over one eye and killed instantly in France during the First World War. To those who questioned her, Bailey insisted that she had authenticated Wootton’s service at the War Office, which had confirmed he had been killed in the First Battle of Ypres. She also claimed to have written to his mother, who by then had moved to Boston, after her spirit guide told her the address. Bailey’s claims were accepted at first hand by her contemporaries, but Christopher Wilson, a historian, who researched Bailey decades later, found no trace of Wootton in military records. Nor could he find any record of Bailey having been awarded an OBE.187

  Logue was introduced to Bailey by another colourful character, Hannen Swaffer, a prominent journalist and drama critic, who was both a militant socialist and the leader of a spiritualist home circle that followed the teachings of a Native American spirit named ‘Silver Birch’. According to an account by Bailey’s biographer, William F. Neech,188 Logue told Swaffer that he had been left so grief-stricken by Myrtle’s death that he had contemplated suicide. ‘I am a broken man. I have lost my wife and I cannot go on,’ he said.

  A few days later, Swaffer and Bailey met
at a spiritualist gathering.

  ‘Can you come to my flat to help a man in grave trouble?’ he asked her.

  The medium said she was happy to help, and a few days later, Logue arrived at Swaffer’s flat overlooking Trafalgar Square. The journalist had moved there some years earlier to have ‘a front seat when the revolution came’. He was still waiting, the British proletariat having remained depressingly reluctant to rise up and overthrow their oppressors. The doorbell rang, and Bailey made her entrance. Logue recognized her, but she gave the impression of not knowing who he was – a tribute to his success in having kept his long relationship with the King out of the public eye. They sat down in a circle, but even before Bailey entered her state of trance, she looked embarrassed.

  ‘I don’t know why it is and I scarcely like to tell you, but George V is here,’ she said, hesitatingly. ‘He asks me to thank you for what you did for his son.’

  To her surprise – and relief – Logue replied simply: ‘I quite understand.’ Bailey also announced that she could see Myrtle’s spiritual form. ‘But she is too excited to do more than send her love to her husband.’

  A few days later they met again. Again, according to Neech’s account, Myrtle this time ‘communicated’ with Logue, controlling Bailey’s body and wrapping her arms around him. Myrtle, it was claimed, told him of changes he had made to his home since her death – things no one else could know. Wootton, her spirit guide, even told Logue that his pet name for his wife was ‘Muggsy’.

  Then Bailey invited Logue to ask any question.

  ‘Does my wife want to say anything about the place where we first met?’ he asked.

  Bailey responded with a puzzled expression. ‘She is referring to a bird named Charlie. It is not a canary. It looks like a sparrow.’

  Logue was overwhelmed. Charlie Sparrow was his best friend and it was at his twenty-first birthday party that he and Myrtle met and fell in love.

  From then on, Logue had regular séances with Bailey. Logue’s sons were horrified, but there was nothing they could do to dissuade their father. Such was his gratitude towards Bailey that he even gave her the ornate wooden chair in which the King used to sit when, still the Duke of York, he had visited Logue’s Harley Street consulting room. Valentine, well on his way to becoming one of Britain’s leading neurosurgeons, had no time for what he considered nonsense. Nor did his wife, Anne: ‘It was something we thought was really crazy and wished to goodness he wasn’t doing it,’ she recalled years later.189 The King was more understanding; when Logue told him of his séances with Bailey, he replied simply: ‘My family are no strangers to Spiritualism.’

  Amid the gloom of the immediate post-war years, there was one glimmer of light: on 10 July 1947, it was announced that Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip would marry. The two had remained in touch since their meeting at Windsor in Christmas 1943, prompting speculation of a possible future union – speculation that was encouraged both by Philip’s ‘Uncle Dickie Mountbatten and by the exiled King George II of Greece. As long as the war continued there was little chance of their relationship going any further. That changed when peace came. The King was in two minds about the match, not least because he thought his daughter was too young and was concerned she had fallen for the first young man she had ever met. Philip was also seen by many at court – the King included – as far from the ideal consort for a future monarch, not least because of his German blood; the Queen was said to refer to him privately as ‘the Hun’. In the hope that their daughter might find someone else, she and the King organized a series of balls packed with eligible men, to which Philip, to his great annoyance, was not invited. Yet Elizabeth remained devoted to her prince.

  Eventually, in 1946, Philip asked the King for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The King agreed – but still had one last trick up his sleeve: he insisted any formal announcement was postponed until after Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday in April the following year. In the meantime, at Mountbatten’s suggestion, Philip had renounced his Greek and Danish titles, as well as his allegiance to the Greek crown, converted from Greek Orthodoxy to the Church of England and become a naturalized British subject. He also adopted the surname Mountbatten (an Anglicized version of Battenberg) from his mother’s family.

  The couple married on 20 November 1947 in Westminster Abbey in a ceremony attended by representatives of various royal families – but not Philip’s three surviving sisters, who had married German aristocrats with Nazi connections and so stayed away. On the morning of the wedding, Philip was made Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich of Greenwich in the County of London. The previous day the King had bestowed on him the style of His Royal Highness.

  The King’s public speaking may have been getting better and better, but his health was worsening. He was still only forty-nine when the war ended, but in poor physical shape: the strain he had been under during the conflict was an important factor. Another was his chain-smoking: in July 1941, Time magazine reported that, in order to share the hardship of his people, he had cut down from twenty to twenty-five cigarettes a day to a mere fifteen. After the war, he started smoking more again.

  Despite his poor health, the King set off in February 1947 on a ten-week tour of South Africa. The schedule was a gruelling one and the King tired easily; a warm reception from the Afrikaners, especially from those old enough to remember the Boer War, was not guaranteed. There was also an added psychological strain: Britain was again in the grip of a bitter winter, and the King suffered pangs of guilt at not sharing his subjects’ suffering; at one point, he even suggested cutting short his trip. Attlee strongly advised against it, warning this would only add to the sense of crisis.

  The King, Queen and their two daughters travelled more than 10,000 miles, much of it aboard a white royal train. Princess Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday fell during the trip and she marked it with a broadcast to the Empire in which she vowed to dedicate her life to ‘our great imperial Commonwealth to which we all belong’. The royal party was greeted with large crowds wherever they went, although the Nationalists boycotted official gatherings and there was a lack of enthusiasm among many Afrikaners. The King found the heat and all the travel something of a trial, and lost an alarming amount of weight. Smuts, the Prime Minister, was facing a general election the following year, and had hoped to make political capital out of the royal visit. Instead it was the Nationalists who won, ushering in more than four decades of apartheid. The King got a foretaste of what was to come when he was told by his hosts that when giving medals to black South African servicemen, he should not speak to them or shake them by the hand. He objected but was told he must do as the government said.

  Logue, who followed the King’s progress through Africa from afar and listened to those of his speeches that were broadcast on the radio, was among the first to congratulate him on his return to Britain. ‘It has been a great joy to me, to keep in touch with your travels during the last 100 days, and a wonderful pleasure to hear your speeches,’ he wrote on 12 May. ‘I come in for a large and, in many cases, undeserved glory, as everyone I come in contact with is enthusiastic about the trip and particularly the speeches. Almost every day someone says to me “Hasn’t the King developed into a great speaker and what a beautiful voice he has”!!’

  The King was beginning to suffer cramp in his legs, complaining in a letter to Logue of ‘feeling tired and strained’. By October 1948, the cramps had become painful and permanent: his left foot was numb all day and the pain kept him awake all night; later, the problem seemed to shift to the right. The King was examined the following month by Professor James Learmouth, one of Britain’s greatest authorities on vascular complaints, who diagnosed early arteriosclerosis; at one stage it was feared his right leg might have to be amputated because of fear of gangrene.

  Logue wrote a few weeks later to express his concerns: ‘As one who had the honour to be closely connected with you during those dreadful war years and had a glimpse of the enormou
s amount of work you did, and saw the strain that was constantly made on your vitality, it is very evident that you have driven yourself too hard and at last have had to call a halt,’ he wrote. ‘I know that rest, medical skill and your own wonderful spirit will restore you to health, and this will be the prayer of your devoted subjects, among whom is one that feels this matter very deeply.’

  The King appeared to have recovered by December, but the doctors ordered continued rest, and a trip to Australia and New Zealand planned for early the next year had to be abandoned. The King nevertheless seemed upbeat in a letter he sent Logue on 10 December. ‘Personally I am very surprised that something of the sort hadn’t happened before as I was feeling tired & strained after South Africa,’ he wrote:

  You will remember my laryngitis at the Guildhall. However, I am very glad it was forced out before going to Australia & New Zealand. What a disappointment that is to everyone there I’m afraid but our visit is only put off for a while. I am getting better with treatment & rest in bed & the doctors do have a smile on their faces, which I feel is all to the good. I hope you are well & are still helping those who cannot speak.

  Logue was also having a bad year – and confined for some of the time to his new flat, which was on the eighth floor. As he wrote back to the King in his annual birthday letter a few days later, he was in such poor health that in August he collapsed. He had since recovered and was even working again, though was only ‘allowed four patients a day’. He was heartened, though, by the apparent good news about the King’s condition. ‘I have followed the wonderful struggle you have made and rejoice the Almighty has brought you back to health,’ Logue wrote.

  Christmas was approaching – and with it the annual message. ‘I have got a new type of broadcast this year from a more personal angle which I hope will go well,’ the King wrote back on 20 December. In a sign of the progress he had made over the years, he no longer looked to Logue to help him prepare for his broadcast, let alone to sit beside him as he had done for so many years, but he still urged him to telephone afterwards to give his opinion on his performance.