The King's War Read online

  A well-oiled machine swung into action: at 8.45 Alan Lascelles, the King’s principal private secretary, telephoned his deputy, Sir Edward Ford, who was in London at home in his flat in Park Lane. Lascelles – a veteran of the royal establishment who had served George VI’s elder brother and father before him – used the agreed code word.

  ‘Hyde Park Gardens,’ he told Ford. ‘Tell Queen Mary and the Prime Minister.’ He did not need to say any more.

  A clergyman’s son, and the product of Eton and Oxford, Ford had become the King’s Assistant Private Secretary in 1946 after a spell as tutor to King Farouk of Egypt and several years at the Bar followed by a ‘good war’ in the Grenadier Guards. Half an hour after Lascelles’s call, he arrived at 10 Downing Street and was shown up to see Winston Churchill. He found the Prime Minister still in bed, Foreign Office papers strewn around him and a chewed cigar in his mouth. On the table next to it was the candle he used to relight it.

  ‘Prime minister, I’ve got bad news for you,’ Ford told him. ‘The King died last night. I know nothing else.’

  ‘Bad news, the worst,’ exclaimed Churchill, slumping back in shock. He had been preparing a speech on foreign affairs to the House of Commons, but threw the papers to one side, deeply moved. ‘Our chief is dead,’ he said. ‘How unimportant these matters seem.’

  Ford then had to travel on to Marlborough House to break the news to Queen Mary, the late King’s mother. It was sixteen years since her husband, George V, had died. Now her son was to follow him to the grave. Ford had the impression when he arrived that she knew already what he had come to tell her, yet this did not soften the blow. ‘What a shock,’ she told him. ‘What a shock.’

  It was time to tell the world: at 10.45 news agencies released a brief statement announcing the King had ‘passed peacefully away in his sleep’. Half an hour later, the announcer John Snagge broke the news to the nation on the BBC.

  Yet the woman whose life was to be most affected by the King’s death was still in the dark. Princess Elizabeth, as she was then, had spent the previous night with Prince Philip at the Treetops Hotel, a game-viewing lodge in the foothills of Mount Kenya, watching wildlife drinking at the waterhole beneath. The young couple returned at dawn to Sagana Lodge, a farm a hundred miles north of Nairobi that had been given to her as a wedding present by the Kenyan government. It was only several hours later that Martin Charteris, her private secretary, heard the news from a shocked local journalist at the nearby Outspan Hotel. Charteris told Lieutenant Commander Michael Parker, Philip’s equerry and close friend. ‘Mike, our employer’s father is dead,’ he said. ‘I suggest you do not tell the lady at least until the news is confirmed.’ It fell to Parker to inform Philip, who looked, as Parker later put it, ‘as if you’d dropped half the world on him’. Pulling himself together, the Duke took his wife for a walk in the garden where, at 2.45 that afternoon he told her she was now Queen. When Charteris arrived at Sagana fifteen minutes later, he found her surprisingly composed. She had an emotional walk around the grounds of the lodge with Philip and then prepared for the long journey home. The royal party flew the few hundred miles to Entebbe, over the border in Uganda, and then on to London. Already flags were flying at half mast across the Empire, crowds were beginning to gather at the royal residences and diplomats were making their way to Buckingham Palace to express condolences on behalf of their nations.

  The cortège’s route took it along the Mall past Marlborough House, where eighty-four-year-old Queen Mary, too frail to take part, watched from a window, a large bowl of flowers by her side, and then continued on through St James’s Street to Piccadilly, past number 145 where the then Duke of York had begun his married life. The building had been hit by a German bomb and reduced to a single storey, draped in black and purple. A Union flag on top flew at half mast. From there the mourners continued through Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch, Edgware Road and by way of Sussex Gardens to Paddington Station. The royal train was waiting at platform eight, the black funeral coach in the middle, with an expanse of red carpet covering the platform beside it. Accompanied by the shrill piping of a naval party, the bearers, walking in slow motion, carried the coffin on board, and the doors of the funeral coach were sealed. A few seconds later, the Queen and the other female members of the royal party stepped into the coach behind it, with the royal dukes in the one behind that. Then, as the guard of honour presented arms and the bands of the Coldstream and Scots Guards played Chopin’s Funeral March, a thin shaft of smoke rose from the funnel of the engine, and the royal train moved slowly out of the station. Its destination was Windsor, where the King was to be laid to rest in St George’s Chapel, as his father and grandfather had been before him.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The First Wartime Speech

  The red light faded and silence descended briefly on the room. It was just after 6 p.m. on 3 September 1939. The sense of relief on the King’s face was clear for all to see. The broadcast had lasted only a few minutes, but it had been the most important of his life, and he knew it. Despite the huge pressure, he had risen to the challenge. Finally able to relax, he allowed himself a smile.

  Lionel Logue extended his hand.

  ‘Congratulations on your first wartime speech, your Majesty,’ he said.

  ‘I expect I will have to do a lot more,’ replied the King.

  As the two men walked out of the door, the Queen was waiting in the passage. ‘That was good, Bertie,’ she said.

  The King went to his study to have his photograph taken. As ever, at Logue’s insistence, he had broadcast standing up. During all the years that the King had worked with the Australian speech therapist to overcome the stammer that had blighted his life since childhood, one of the most important lessons he had learnt was the importance of deep breathing, which he found easier when he was on his feet. Yet he was always photographed sitting down; it looked more intimate that way. Today was no exception: the photograph that would appear the next day on the front pages of newspapers across the world was of the King, dressed in his admiral’s uniform, complete with ribbons, sitting bolt upright at a table, the microphones positioned straight in front of him.

  The Queen began to chat with Logue. She had arrived at Euston from Scotland five days earlier aboard the night train. After a gruelling four-week tour of North America that May and June, she and the King had been longing for the peace and quiet of Balmoral. They had travelled north at the beginning of August, but, as the threat of war grew, the King had been required back in London. The Queen stayed on a few days in Scotland and now she, too, had returned to the capital. During the tense days that followed, she was constantly at her husband’s side, her presence invaluable. She left the two princesses, Elizabeth, aged thirteen, and Margaret Rose, nine, behind, with instructions that if war broke out they should be moved to Birkhall, a smaller property on the Balmoral Estate that was thought to be less vulnerable to enemy bombers. The Queen wrote to her eldest sister, Rose, asking her to look after them if anything happened to her and the King. In the meantime, the girls’ governess, Marion Crawford, known to all as ‘Crawfie’, was instructed to ‘stick to the usual programme as far as you can’.1

  It was thirteen years earlier that the then Duke of York had for the first time climbed the two flights of stairs leading to Logue’s consulting room at 146 Harley Street, beginning a relationship that was to shape both men’s lives. The Duke had initially been reluctant to make the visit. Over the course of the years he had seen too many so-called experts who had turned out to be quacks – nine, by one count – but the outlandish cures they proposed merely added to the sense of anger and frustration he felt whenever he tried to speak and no words came out. His staff had become used to what they called his ‘gnashes’, sudden outbursts of unrestrained anger that were terrifying in their ferocity. But his wife, who seemed to feel his anger and frustration as much as he did, was insistent that he make one last attempt.

  Logue had arrived in London from his native Australia
in 1924 aboard the Hobsons Bay, a ship of the Commonwealth and Dominion Line, together with his statuesque wife, Myrtle, and their three sons, Laurie (fifteen), Valentine (ten), and Antony (three). The journey took six weeks; they travelled third class. A few weeks short of his forty-fourth birthday, Logue had worked as a speech therapist in various places in Australia besides his native Adelaide. Speech therapy in those days was still in its infancy; like many of his fellow practitioners, Logue did not have a medical or scientific background or indeed formal training of any sort. His background was instead in oratory and amateur dramatics. But he had put the techniques he acquired in public speaking and on the stage to good use in helping Australian soldiers who struggled to speak after falling victim to gas attacks during the First World War. He found the same techniques effective in helping people with stammers – among them a young journalist named Keith Murdoch, father of the future media mogul, Rupert.

  Coming to Britain was a considerable gamble: Logue had built up a name for himself in Australia, but London, home to seven and a half million people and the bustling capital of the Empire that ruled a quarter of the world’s population, was a different matter. He had £2,000 of savings – the equivalent of £110,000 in today’s money – and just one introduction: to John Gordon, an ambitious young Dundee-born journalist who was chief sub-editor of the Daily Express and would go on to become one of the most influential British newspapermen of his generation.

  Logue began modestly, settling in simple lodgings in Maida Vale and offering his services to local schools. Then he took the plunge, taking a flat in Bolton Gardens in South Kensington and leasing a consulting room in Harley Street. Number 146 was at the cheaper and less prestigious end of the street, near to the bustle of the Marylebone Road, but it was still Harley Street. The gamble began to pay off. Logue’s reputation spread and he started to acquire a number of wealthy patients, whom he charged hefty fees to subsidize the lower rates paid by the poor. This, though, was to be his first contact with royalty.

  That he and the Duke met at all was thanks to Lord Stamfordham, a royal equerry who had been told about Logue by John Murray, a member of the publishing dynasty who had been his patient. Stamfordham was impressed by what he found and proposed that Logue call on the Duke at his home in Piccadilly. But Logue was adamant that his prospective royal patient should visit his consulting room, just like everyone else.

  ‘He must come to me here,’ Logue insisted. ‘That imposes an effort on him which is essential for success. If I see him at home we lose the value of that.’

  And so, two days later, the Duke came to him. On 19 October 1926, Logue opened the door of his consulting room to a slim, quiet man, fifteen years his junior. Logue was struck by his tired eyes. It soon became apparent how heavily the Duke’s stammer weighed on him. In his quest to find the source of his patients’ problems, Logue would quiz them on their past. As he did so, the Duke described his childhood and the lack of understanding shown towards his problem by his father, George V, and by his tutors. The advent of adulthood had not cured his problem: instead it brought public speaking duties that drew his stammer to the attention of a far wider audience.

  The day of their first consultation, the Duke was still reeling from the humiliation that he had suffered eighteen months earlier when he had been obliged to make a speech at the Empire Exhibition in Wembley. His stammer had given him an understandable horror of public speaking, and this was an especially high-profile speech that was to be broadcast across the Empire. Through force of will, the Duke managed to make it through to the end, but his performance had been marred by several embarrassing pauses during which his jaws were still moving but no words came out. Now he and the Duchess were about to embark on a six-month tour of Australia and New Zealand that would require countless public speeches. He was dreading it.

  The two men spent an hour and half together. ‘I can cure you,’ Logue told him. ‘But it will need a tremendous effort by you. Without that effort, it can’t be done.’ The record card he filled out after their meeting began ‘Mental: Quite Normal, has an acute nervous tension which has been brought on by the defect’, and went on to describe the Duke’s physique, as ‘well built, with good shoulders but waist line very flabby’, his top lung breathing as ‘good’ and commented on his ‘nervous tension with consequent episodes of bad speech, depression’ and his ‘extraordinary habit of clipping small words’. This initial consultation cost £4 4s – the equivalent of about £250 today. Over the next 14 months, the Duke had a further 82 appointments, taking his total bill to £197 3s (or £11,000 today). And so began an extraordinary relationship in which the Australian would play the role as much of counsellor to the future King as his speech therapist.

  During the early years they worked together at his practice in Harley Street, Logue had used a variety of methods to help the Duke. As with all his patients, he placed most emphasis on learning to breathe properly. The chest was not to expand with inhalation, but instead the lungs should push the diaphragm down and allow it to rise on expiration; this had ideally to be performed in a relaxed, standing pose, with legs apart and hands on hips, following a process of conscious relaxation that started with the feet and moved upwards. Logue invariably taught such techniques with the window of his consulting room wide open, even at the height of winter. This was supplemented with various exercises: practising vowel sounds preceded by an ‘H’ such as Hay, Hee, Hi and Ho or else reciting fiendish tongue twisters such as ‘the Regagie Roller Ram’. When faced with a word that seemed likely to trip them up, patients were urged by Logue to use a different word instead, or else to leave off the initial consonant, since no stammerer ever struggles over a vowel. As Frank Weeks, a former patient put it: ‘If one spoke of the King and the Queen and the ‘k’ was the problem one simply said “the ‘ing and the queen”. If one could get a small “k” in there so much the better, but the sentence would be understood and was far better than having a K-K-K-King.’2 Such techniques were informed by Logue’s instinctive knowledge of human nature that led him to understand the causes of stammering were often psychological as much as physiological.

  Despite all his years with Logue, the King was never ‘cured’ as such; it is arguable whether anyone can ever really be cured of a stammer. But he nevertheless made considerable progress. Over time, his defect became barely noticeable in private conversation, among friends, family and members of the royal household. ‘With others,’ according to one of his wartime equerries,* ‘he stammered occasionally, but the stammer was not a “stutter” with visible movements of the head or the lips. It took the form of a silence during which he tried to emit, pronounce the offending word or a synonym.’3

  The King’s accession to the throne in December 1936, following the abdication of his elder brother Edward VIII – or David as he was known in the family – to marry Wallis Simpson, heralded a new phase in Logue’s relationship with the King. His broadcasts and other public speeches assumed an importance they had never had when he was Duke of York; the outbreak of war elevated them further. With it would come a widening of Logue’s role: whenever the King had an important speech or broadcast, Logue would go through the text to remove difficult words and help him rehearse his performance. As the years passed, Logue became increasingly close to the King and Queen until he had almost become a member of the royal family. Like her husband, the Queen opened up in the presence of this cheery, good-humoured Australian who was refreshingly free of the stuffiness of the others with whom they were surrounded at court, and she confided in him to an extent she did not with other people. This evening, the first of the war, was no exception: she shared with Logue the strange feeling of relief that she and King felt now that the die had been cast and a conflict that had long seemed inevitable had finally been declared.

  ‘Bertie hardly slept at all last night, he was so worried, but now that we have taken the decisive step he is much more cheerful,’ she told him.

  That morning, a Sunday, Sir Nevile Hender
son, the British ambassador to Berlin, had given Hitler until 11 a.m. to withdraw the troops he had sent into Poland two days earlier. If he failed to do so, Britain would declare war. The ultimatum was met with silence. At 11.15 Neville Chamberlain addressed the nation from the cabinet room at 10 Downing Street.

  ‘This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us,’ Chamberlain said. ‘I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany...’

  The situation in which no word given by Germany’s ruler could be trusted and no people or country could feel itself safe, has become intolerable. And now we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part...

  May God bless you all. And may He defend the right, for it is evil things that we shall be fighting against – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution; and against them I am certain that right will prevail.

  No sooner had Chamberlain finished speaking than the air raid siren blared. Robert Wood, the BBC sound engineer in charge of the broadcast, watched with amazement as the Prime Minister led his entire cabinet down to his special air raid shelter underneath the building. Rather than follow them, Wood went instead to the front door of Number 10, lit a cigarette and looked at the people outside rushing about in confusion to try and find a shelter. It quickly became clear that it was a false alarm: there were no enemy aircraft, merely a little British spotter plane. Whoever was responsible had apparently been overreacting to the enormity of the news they had just heard. The all-clear sounded before Wood could finish his second cigarette, and the cabinet ‘trooped rather sheepishly back and began the business of waging all-out war’.4