The King's War Read online

  One of the greatest fears was of chemical warfare. Poison gas had been used to horrific effect in the trenches during the First World War, and there was concern that the Germans might use it against civilians in this conflict. By September 1939, some thirty-eight million black rubber gas masks had been handed out, accompanied by a propaganda campaign. ‘Hitler will send no warning – so always carry your gas mask,’ read one advertisement. Those caught out and about without one risked a fine.

  Such preparations had been stepped up as Chamberlain’s hopes of avoiding conflict with Hitler began to look increasingly forlorn. A decisive step towards war was passed on 23 August 1939 when Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, his German counterpart, signed a non-aggression pact. Far from heralding peace, the pact gave Hitler a free hand to invade Poland and then unleash his forces on his western neighbours. Two days later, Britain signed a treaty with the Polish government pledging to come to its assistance if it were attacked. Chamberlain had not yet given up hope of negotiating with Hitler. The King, who had immediately taken the night train down from Balmoral, offered to write a personal letter to the Nazi leader, but the Prime Minister turned him down – just as a suggestion that the King might send a friendly message to the Emperor of Japan, from one head of state to another, to try and detach him from the other Axis powers, was rejected for fear of almost certain rebuttal.

  On 28 August Logue had received a call from Hardinge.

  ‘Hold yourself in readiness to come to the Palace,’ the King’s private secretary told him.

  Logue did not need to ask why. ‘I said I was ready at any time day or night – but much as I would like to see, and speak with His Majesty, I sincerely hoped I would not be sent for,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Have given orders at Harley [St] and at home – everyone knows exactly when to get me, day or night.’

  Yet even at that late stage, war did not seem completely inevitable. There was still a hope that Poland’s defence pact with Britain might dissuade Hitler from invading. Calling at Buckingham Palace on 26 August, the day after it was signed, Sir Miles Lampson, the British ambassador to Egypt, found the King in ‘admirable form’, his main concern that the political crisis had disrupted some excellent grouse shooting – ‘1,600 brace in six days’ – at Balmoral. ‘It was utterly damnable that that villain Hitler had upset everything,’ Lampson reported. ‘H.M. thought that there would almost certainly now be peace and that this time Hitler’s bluff had been called.’9

  Preparations for war had nevertheless begun to acquire a momentum of their own. At 11.07 a.m. on 31 August, the terse order ‘Evacuate Forthwith’ was issued, marking the mass evacuation of London and other towns and cities. In the first four days of September, nearly three million mothers and children thought to be in danger from enemy bombers were transported to places of safety in the countryside. Many of the children, labelled like pieces of luggage, had been separated from their parents and accompanied instead by an army of 100,000 teachers. ‘Keep calm, keep a cheerful British smile on your face ... Good luck, and a safe return to dear old London,’ was the parting message of Herbert Morrison, at that time Minister of Supply, to an early wave of evacuees who set off on 1 September. In the event, only half of those eligible actually left the city; many parents could not bear to be separated from their children. Civil servants, by contrast, had no choice in the matter. In the weeks and months that followed, thousands of them were also evacuated from the capital, as were a number of employees of private companies. Pets fared less well: a pamphlet issued by the government aimed at animal owners published on 26 August urged them to send their pets to the countryside but, if this was not possible, ‘it might be kindest to have them destroyed’ for fear that during an emergency there might be ‘large numbers of animals wounded, gassed or driven frantic with fear’. By the end of the first week of war, 750,000 had been put down.

  Then, in the early hours of 1 September, Hitler launched his assault on Poland, undeterred by the defence pact it had signed with Britain. At around 4.45 a.m. the Luftwaffe began bombing raids on airfields, ships and troops, while the Schleswig-Holstein, on a visit to the free port of Danzig (Gdansk), opened fire at the Polish garrison. A few hours later, the King presided over a meeting of the Privy Council at which he signed an Order in Council mobilizing Britain’s armed forces. When he visited Chamberlain in Downing Street that afternoon, he was wildly cheered and said to have been ‘deeply touched’ by the spontaneous demonstration of loyalty.10 That evening Henderson, the British ambassador, delivered an ultimatum to the German Foreign Ministry saying his government would ‘without hesitation fulfill their obligation to Poland’ if Germany did not withdraw its forces and cease its aggression. The official German news agency responded by accusing Britain of being ‘an aggressor who desires a European war.’

  The next day Logue received a summons to go to the Palace. The weather was hot; it reminded him more of a summer’s day in Sydney or Ceylon than England. He arrived just before 4 p.m. and was shown in to see Hardinge. The son of a former Viceroy of India, Hardinge had been appointed assistant private secretary to George V in 1920 at the age of twenty-six and had served him until his death sixteen years later. When Edward VIII acceded to the throne, Hardinge was promoted to become his principal private secretary and, as such, had to negotiate his abdication, during which, like many at court, he had little sympathy either for the departing King or for Wallis Simpson. He was much happier working for his successor, their earlier difference over appeasement, although not forgotten, rendered irrelevant by the march towards war.

  Logue was surprised to see Hardinge, usually formally dressed as befitted a long-standing member of the royal household, in his shirt sleeves. Invariably calm, he was uncharacteristically tense, his mood exacerbated by the heat. ‘The only time I have ever known him lose his temper was when he opened out on the Nazi regime, and the Russia-German pact,’ Logue noted in his diary. ‘He told me lots of funny things were happening in Germany, but they could not quite find out just what they were. As he said, this waiting is too terrible for words.’

  As they parted Hardinge told Logue: ‘Only one thing will satisfy us and that is the removal of Hitler,’ which Logue ‘thought was a good tip’.

  The King was in similarly grim mood. There was nothing left of the optimism Lampson had encountered a few days earlier. Instead the monarch seemed as frustrated as everyone else in Britain at trying to work out what was going on.

  ‘Hello, Logue, can you tell me, are we at war?’ the King enquired.

  ‘I don’t know, your Majesty,’ replied Logue.

  ‘You don’t know, the Prime Minister doesn’t know, and I don’t know,’ the King shot back, a note of irritation in his voice that could presage one of his ‘gnashes’. ‘It is so damn unreal. If only we knew which way it was going to be.’

  But by the time Logue left the Palace he was convinced that war was ‘just around the corner’. The following evening, he stood at hand as the King made his broadcast.

  Logue collapsed into bed shortly after arriving home on the first night of war. Despite the grave nature of the occasion, he was pleased with the way the King’s broadcast had gone. His slumbers proved brief: at 3 a.m. came another air raid warning that sent him and Myrtle rushing down to Beechgrove’s stuffy basement. ‘The only feeling is one of irritation,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘It is strange how things work out – no panic, no fear, only plain mad at being disturbed.’ Like the warning the previous day, this too was a false alarm.

  The Germans had already struck at sea, however. A few hours earlier, the SS Athenia, a transatlantic passenger liner on charter to Cunard, with 1,103 passengers and 315 crew on board, was hit by a torpedo off the coast of Northern Ireland as it made its way from Glasgow to Montreal. The ship was targetted about 250 miles northwest of Inishtrahull, as its passengers, a mixture of Jewish refugees, Americans, Canadians and Britons, were sitting down to dinner. The missile was fired by a Ger
man U-boat, whose captain mistook the Athenia for an armed merchant cruiser and attacked without warning. The ship sank with the loss of ninety-eight passengers and nineteen crew – twenty-eight of them Americans. Fifty of the victims died when their lifeboat was crushed by the propeller of a Norwegian tanker that came to their assistance.

  This unprovoked attack on a civilian vessel, in contravention of all the rules of naval warfare, and just hours after the declaration of war, caused outrage on both sides of the Atlantic – all the more so because the Germans refused to admit responsibility. In Canada, the death of Margaret Hayworth, a ten-year-old from Hamilton, Ontario, who had been on board the stricken ship, helped rally that nation behind its government’s decision a week later to follow Britain in declaring war on Germany. The scale of the disaster, and large loss of American lives, fuelled hopes that the United States would now follow suit: comparisons were drawn with the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, which helped stiffen American resolve against the Kaiser’s Germany. ‘Hitler is unlucky,’ noted Myrtle. ‘American neutrality will soon go.’

  Such hopes were misplaced, however. Just as it took two years after the attack on the Lusitania before the United States entered the First World War, despite the loss of 1,128 American lives, so the sinking of the Athenia was not enough to change the isolationist mood of a country reluctant to be dragged into another European conflict so soon after the last. It did, however, help to change American public opinion sufficiently to lead to the amendment of the neutrality laws to allow Washington to sell munitions and supplies to Britain and France – a first step towards taking on the Nazis directly.

  For the people of Britain, the war nevertheless still seemed far away. The weather in London that September continued fine, with warm days and calm nights. At times it was stifling inside the Logues’ shuttered house. Myrtle cooked for the first time in a long while and was pleased to note that her hand ‘had not lost its cunning’. Beechgrove’s huge garden was well stocked with vegetables, but their gardener was due to leave to start as an air raid warden that week, which would mean it would be her job to harvest them all. She and Lionel also got down to work chopping up eight oak trees that had been felled, taking as much of the wood into their storehouse as they could. Myrtle was proud of how skilled she had become at cutting the smaller pieces of timber into short lengths. ‘The rangers patrolling the railway at the foot of our garden are much amused at the sight of me wielding a saw,’ she noted.

  Air raid warnings were becoming a regular feature of life in London, even though they had yet to be followed by the arrival of a single enemy plane, let alone the much-feared mass aerial bombardment. On 6 September, a Wednesday, the Logues were woken by the sirens at 6.45 a.m. and went down to the basement. While they waited, they had breakfast. Bored, they finally made their way back upstairs. It was, noted Myrtle, ‘so beautiful a day for men to kill one another’. After the all-clear sounded at nine o’clock they went into London to have their hair cut; Laurie drove. Myrtle had not been to the centre of the capital for six weeks and was struck by its transformation: the lights at crossings had been blacked out so that all that was visible were little Xs of light and the kerbs were painted black and white to help people find their way.

  The warning had been yet another false alarm – caused by German reconnaissance planes that had been turned back – but it had still made everyone late for work. Yet Myrtle was struck by how cheerful people seemed as they hurried through the city, gas masks slung over their shoulders. She was also entranced by the sight of the barrage balloons. ‘Hundreds of these silver things fill the sky, and were it not for the menace they will protect us from, it would be a joy to watch,’ she wrote.

  The next day came news that the French had tried to help their Polish allies by taking the war onto German soil with what was to prove a short and ill-fated invasion of the Saar region. Myrtle, meanwhile, was busy on the home front, cutting wood and picking more fruit and vegetables to preserve for the winter. She made blackberry jam for the first time in fifteen years and was pleased with how well it turned out. She dug so many potatoes that she was losing a pound in weight per day. ‘At the end of the war I hope to be a sylph,’ she noted. Valentine was a good shot and brought them back rabbits he had killed in Epping Forest.

  Myrtle marked her fifty-fourth birthday that Sunday by cooking a good dinner – complete with cake – for her whole family, together with several friends. Yet everyone seemed to be struggling to come to terms with the reality of war. ‘Life seems to be suspended – one seems to have no aims or desire to do anything but routine jobs,’ she wrote in her diary.

  ‘We still carry on in this dream-like existence, and this feeling seems to be universal. Our whole life has changed. Life socially is at a standstill, also, owing to the blackout, one dare not venture out after dark. The street accidents are terrifying. Val is operating every night until the early hours.’

  On the day that war was declared, cinemas, together with sports arenas and theatres, had been ordered closed, ostensibly because of potential mass casualties in the event of an air strike, but also as part of a broader policy by the government aimed to show it took the conflict seriously. The closures were denounced by the playwright George Bernard Shaw in an open letter to The Times as a ‘masterstroke of unimaginative stupidity’ that could only be disastrous for morale. ‘What agent of Chancellor Hitler is it who has suggested we should all cower in darkness and terror “for the duration”?’ he demanded.11 People went to the pub instead, and the number of street brawls rose accordingly. Conscious of the negative effect on civilian morale, the government soon changed tack and allowed the cinemas to reopen. Myrtle and Antony went to their local picture house that Friday afternoon. Several theatres both in the West End and in the suburbs were also soon back in business. Concerts, too, began to be staged again, although it was not until March 1940 that the Albert Hall reopened. The public dance halls were full as never before. Spectator sports were harder hit: although football fixtures soon resumed on a limited basis, Arsenal’s ground was turned over to civil defence, the pitch at Twickenham was dug up and replaced by vegetables and the Oval cricket ground converted to a prisoner of war camp, though never used.

  Britain’s move to a war footing gathered pace. On 16 September, petrol rationing was introduced. Post offices and local taxation offices had begun to issue ration books just over a week earlier; drivers had to produce their car’s registration book and in return received the number of coupons to which they were entitled, based on its engine size. Hundreds of buses were withdrawn from service. Taxis were allowed only three gallons of petrol a day and gave up cruising the streets in search of passengers. London began to turn into a country village, its residents walking on the roads rather than keeping to the pavement. Sections of Greenwich Park, Primrose Hill and London’s other green spaces were turned over to allotments as posters exhorted people to ‘dig for victory’. Tailors’ windows were devoted to uniforms, and policemen wore tin hats instead of their traditional helmets. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon’s budget on 27 September raised income tax from five shillings to seven shillings and sixpence in the pound and sharply increased the duties on beer, wine, spirits and tobacco.

  Yet normal life continued: on the evening of budget day, Lionel and Myrtle went round to play bridge with their friends, Dr Gerald Tattersall Moody, a scientist and a barrister, and his wife Hester, who lived at the Cedars, an imposing house a few minutes’ walk away from Beechgrove, on the other side of the Sydenham Road. It was a lovely moonlight night, all the more striking because of the blackout – even though, as Myrtle noted, the sky in London was always faintly luminous, in contrast to the ‘pitch blackness of an Australian sky’ that she remembered from life back home.

  They were woken at 2 a.m. by the telephone. It was Laurie. Jo had just gone into labour and he said he was about to go with her by ambulance to Queen Charlotte maternity hospital. Suddenly all thought of war was replaced by concern for Jo. F
our hours later, she gave birth to a baby girl, Alexandra – who became known as Sandra. ‘Great rejoicing,’ wrote Myrtle. ‘We haven’t had a girl in the family since I was born. It feels strange to be a grandmother – the whole family calls me “Gran”. Laurie is staying with us. It gives me a warm feeling to have him near if only for a short time.’

  Laurie himself was working for Lyons, the food company. Having risen to become second-in-command of the ice cream department, he was in charge of supplying cinemas, all the dog racing tracks and Wimbledon during the tennis tournament. Since he was in food distribution, he had not been among the first wave of men to be called up when conscription was introduced for all males aged between eighteen and forty-one.* Antony, meanwhile, had been accepted to study medicine, following in the footsteps of Valentine. A few weeks before he was due to start his course at King’s College, London, he learnt the faculty was being shifted to Leeds for the duration of the war. A fun-loving young man who had inherited his father’s passion for poetry, Antony had cheered up life at Beechgrove, and his parents were sad when they saw him off at King’s Cross on 5 October. ‘His being away takes a lot of laughter out of my life,’ wrote Myrtle in her diary. With her three sons now gone and Lionel often at work, she was grateful for the company of her two young dogs, Digger, a fox terrier, and Tov, a cairn, even though it was becoming a struggle to find enough beef in the shops to feed them.