The man known to history as King George VI
of Britain was born as Albert Frederick Arthur George on the 14th of December 1895 at York
Cottage on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, England. His father was Prince George, Duke of York,
a grandson of Queen Victoria, who at the time of Albert’s birth was nearing the end of
her sixth decade on the throne of Britain. She was also the first Empress of India and
ruled the vast British overseas empire, on which it was said the sun never set. Until shortly before Albert’s birth, Prince
George had been out of the direct line of succession to the throne. Once Victoria died, George’s father, Albert,
Prince of Wales, would become king. But it had been assumed until the early 1890s
that George’s older brother, Albert Victor, as Victoria’s eldest male heir, would ascend
to the throne in due course. However, Albert Victor died prematurely in
1892, ensuring that the future George VI’s father became second in line to the throne
from 1892 onwards. Thus, Albert was born in 1895 into a household
which would someday most likely constitute Britain’s immediate royal family with his
father as king and his mother as queen consort. However, Albert was not his father’s heir. An older brother, Edward, had been born in
the summer of 1894, a year and a half before Albert and Edward was third in line to the
throne. Consequently, from the moment he was born
in the winter of 1895, Albert was the fourth in line to the throne of Britain, though he
would only succeed to that position should something ever happen to displace his older
brother Edward. As we shall see, something did occur. Albert’s mother was Mary of Teck, a member
of the German royal house of Teck which held extensive estates in the unified German Empire. Albert was her and George’s second child
after Edward. Four more children would follow, Mary in 1897,
Henry in 1900, George in 1902 and John in 1905, though John suffered from severe epilepsy
from which he would die in 1919 when only 13 years of age. Albert, who quickly became known to his family
as ‘Bertie’, the same name given to his grandfather, was baptised at St Mary Magdalene
Church in Sandringham just a few weeks after he was born. Thereafter he was largely reared in a separate
household to his parents, an entirely normal practice amongst the royal families of Europe
in the nineteenth century. This continued through his early childhood
years, during which Albert, Edward and their growing brood of siblings were chaperoned
between royal palaces and cottages, taught by tutors in the standard subjects of the
Victorian educational curriculum, which in those days still involved learning Latin and
had a strong focus on the classics of ancient Greek and Roman literature. Albert’s parents were distant figures, who
some historians and observers have since deemed to have been neglectful. This is too harsh an assessment and if they
seemed to be cold parents it was in line with the conventions of the time. Albert’s father was also a strict disciplinarian. It was perhaps on account of the traumatic
elements of his youth that he began to suffer from a stutter in his younger years, one which
would continue to plague him into adulthood, though as we will see, he largely triumphed
over it in his thirties, well before he became king. When he was just 14 years old, Albert was
sent to the Royal Naval College at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, a training school for
royals and sons of the British aristocracy to train as officer cadets. This followed a well-established tradition
and Albert’s father had also been sent to join the British Royal Navy when he was barely
a teenager. Albert, it must be said, was not a great student
of any kind. He came bottom of his class in the cadets’
final exam at Osborne, while he was physically not predisposed to seafaring, having suffered
from stomach issues as a youth. His confidence was also low in his younger
years, in part owing to his stutter and also because of having been forced to learn to
write with his right hand, even though he was left-handed. Although it seems nonsensical to the modern
mind, this was a common feature of schooling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. It was also while he was at Osborne that his
grandfather, King Edward VII, died. With this his father ascended the throne as
King George V and Albert’s older brother Edward became the Prince of Wales and heir
to the throne. Albert was now second in line to the throne,
though something unexpected would need to befall Edward for him to ever become king. Meanwhile, in the early 1910s he continued
to progress through the Royal Navy, joining the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth after
his sojourn at Osborne and then taking in several training tours in 1912 and 1913, voyages
which saw him traversing much of the Atlantic in the Caribbean and off the seaboard of North
America. In late 1913 he was finally posted to the
HMS Collingwood as a midshipman. Albert was still struggling to find his sea
legs, an occupational hazard for a mariner, as diplomatic tensions were building in Europe
in 1914. For decades the continent’s great powers
had been engaged in ongoing rivalries for regional power in Europe and for possession
of colonies overseas in Africa and southern Asia. Russia and Britain, for instance, had been
rivals for a time in Central Asia where they both had interests in countries like Afghanistan. The French and the Italians both had interests
in North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Since the 1890s Germany, which had emerged
as a major power on the continent following unification in 1871, began trying to build
its own overseas empire. Armed alliances had even developed, with Britain,
France and Russia forming the Triple Entente and Germany having a long-standing alliance
with the Empire of Austria-Hungary. Yet despite these rivalries, a major conflict
had been avoided for many years. As a result, when diplomatic tensions began
brewing between Austria-Hungary, Russia and Serbia in the Balkans in July 1914 many believed
that this crisis, like many before it, would pass quickly. It did not, and in the final days of July
tensions escalated rapidly, leading to a succession of declarations of war. By early August nearly every country in Europe
had committed to one side or another as Britain, France and Russia went to war with Germany,
Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The First World War had commenced. In the early stages of it, Albert was fighting
another kind of conflict, one with his appendix. In late August a medical evaluation determined
that he needed to have his operated upon and when his ship made port in the Scottish city
of Aberdeen it was removed. After a sufficient period of rest and convalescence
he returned to service on board the HMS Collingwood. The ship spent most of the war stationed in
the North Sea patrolling the vast waters between Britain north to Iceland and east towards
Norway. While Britain was the pre-eminent naval power
of the day and had been so for two centuries, the Germans had spent an enormous amount of
money building a sizeable navy in the ten or so years leading up to the war. Accordingly there was an expectation that
major naval engagements would occur in the North Atlantic before long, but in the end
the war at sea was very limited by comparison with the carnage occurring in the trenches
of the Western Front in France. Therefore Albert spent much of late 1914,
all of 1915 and into early 1916 on board the Collingwood undertaking gunnery drills and
patrols in the waters north of Scotland, but seeing little active engagement with the enemy. Albert was present for the largest naval clash
between Britain and Germany during the war. The Battle of Jutland took place over the
course of the 31st of May and the 1st of June 1916 in the waters off the coast of western
Denmark and north-western Germany as both sides sought to score a tactical breakthrough
at sea which might turn the course of the war. The British had the greater number of ships,
with just over 150 vessels, 28 of them being the Dreadnought battleships, the foremost
military vessel of the day, supplemented by nearly eighty destroyer class ships. The German armada was just under a hundred
ships, with just 16 Dreadnoughts. Over 60% of its vessels were torpedo boats
and the German attack would rely on these scoring a number of hits before they ran out
of torpedoes in order for the Germans to emerge out of the clash victorious. In the ensuing naval melee Albert served as
a junior officer aboard the HMS Collingwood. He performed well during the battle and was
mentioned as such in the dispatches, but the battle was a mixed affair overall. As the British and German fleets engaged with
each other across a large stretch of sea, the Germans ultimately scored more hits, sinking
14 ships while only losing 11, while the British also lost a disproportionately higher number
of destroyers and larger battleships and over twice as many mariners. As such, the Germans statistically won the
Battle of Jutland, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, one in which the Germans lost vital naval
resources. In its aftermath Berlin decided to prioritise
submarine warfare and there would be no second major naval clash of this kind again during
the First World War. Albert would spend much of the war away from
active service, in large part owing to renewed ill health. Early in 1917 he began suffering from a duodenal
ulcer and he would eventually have to have this operated on early that winter. When he returned to duty it was as part of
the burgeoning RAF, the Royal Air Force, which was formed on the 1st of April 1918 as the
first independent air force operated by any nation anywhere in the world, a sign of how
air warfare had become a central component of military conflict in the course of the
war, where at its outset planes had been used almost exclusively for reconnaissance missions. As a result of this decision, Albert became
the first member of the British royal family to hold a pilot’s licence, while in October
1918 he would fly over the English Channel after being posted to France. The newly created RAF only had a limited role
to play in the war in the end, though. By the summer of 1918 the trajectory of the
war was clear. The entry of the United States into the conflict
on the side of Britain and France the previous year had brought an insurmountable amount
of resources to bear against Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans. In the end, before victory was won on the
field of battle, political unrest across Central Europe brought about the collapse of the German
and Austro-Hungarian empires, bringing the war to an end in November 1918. In the aftermath of the war Bertie returned
to land and civilian life. He began studying at Cambridge University
in the autumn of 1919. He was 23 years of age commencing his time
in college, but this was not unusual in the post-war years when many freshman students
were young men heading towards their mid-twenties who had spent their late teens and early twenties
in the trenches in France. He began attending Trinity College there alongside
his brother, Prince Henry, who was four years his junior. Albert chose to study history primarily and
was tutored by Reginald Laurence, the editor of the Cambridge Modern History and an expert
on both ecclesiastical history and the French Revolution, though the most substantial scholar
to teach Albert at this time was Dennis Robertson, an economic historian and close colleague
of John Maynard Keynes, the founder of the Keynesian economic theory. At Cambridge Louis Greig, who Albert had none
since his days at Osborne a decade earlier, was employed as Bertie’s equerry or royal
assistant. They developed a keen friendship over their
shared interest in tennis and the pair would later play together at the Championships at
Wimbledon. Albert’s time at Cambridge, though, was
cut short after just three terms as he was increasingly drawn into becoming a working
royal in the early 1920s, spending much of his time from 1920 onwards visiting industrial
factories and mines across England as the monarchy sought to establish closer ties to
the working classes in Britain at a time when radical socialism was on the front foot across
Europe. Because he was the second son of the king
and at a time when premature death was beginning to decline dramatically, it was expected in
the 1910s and 1920s that Albert would never be King of Britain. Therefore he was given something of a free
hand to choose his own marriage partner, a relatively novel development for a monarch’s
child. Had he been born in the nineteenth century,
for instance, a marriage to a daughter of one of Europe’s royal households would most
likely have been arranged. Nevertheless, when Albert began an affair
in 1919 with Sheila Chisholm it aroused consternation in the royal establishment. This Australian ‘it-girl’ of the 1910s
was already married to Francis St Clair-Erskine, Lord Loughborough. Bertie met Sheila after his older brother
Edward began seeing Chisholm’s best friend, Freda Dudley Ward. The relationship dragged on for almost a year
before King George, exasperated by the situation instructed Bertie to leave this, quote, “already
married Australian”. Albert was not happy with doing so, but obeyed
his father’s command. His brother’s unwillingness to abide by
a similar injunction from the king over a decade later would have striking consequences
for both Edward and Albert in the long run. In the shorter term Albert was compensated
for ending his affair with Lady Loughborough by being invested with the title of Duke of
York in 1920, one of the most historically significant peerages in British history and
one which had been vacant since his father abandoned the title upon becoming king in
1910. Bertie’s attentions were soon drawn elsewhere
in his quest for a marriage partner. Shortly after ending his relationship with
Lady Loughborough, he met Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon at an engagement. They had known each other as children, but
had not crossed paths in several years. By the time they met again Elizabeth was just
entering her twenties and Albert, by then in his mid-twenties, was evidently smitten. He proposed in 1921, but Elizabeth turned
down his offer, fearful that entering the royal family and the public gaze that came
with it would result in her being stifled and unable to express her true self in years
to come. Bertie, though, would not take no for an answer
and was determined to woo her. A second marriage proposal came following
Albert’s sister Mary’s wedding to the heir to the Viscount Lascelles in February
1922, at which Elizabeth had acted as a bridesmaid. She again said no, but further months of courtship
evidently swayed her and in January 1923, despite her reservations about entering the
royal establishment, she said yes to Albert on his third time of asking. The wedding was swiftly organised and the
couple were married at Westminster Abbey in London on the 26th of April 1923. Thereafter they proceeded on their honeymoon,
at the start of which Elizabeth contracted whooping cough in what she later called a
thoroughly unromantic development. Despite this inauspicious beginning, the marriage
was to be a notably happy one by the standards of many royal unions and Albert and Elizabeth
had a genuine affection for one another. It was in many ways the first modern royal
marriage in British history. While the honeymoon might have been interrupted
by a bout of whooping cough, there was inevitably a longer diplomatic tour to be undertaken
by the couple following their marriage. It was typical for newlywed senior royals
at this time to tour the British Empire so that in an age before television the people
of India, Canada and many other parts of Britain’s dominions could have an opportunity to see
the new member of the royal family. This commenced with a visit to Northern Ireland
in July 1924, no doubt in an effort to reassure the Unionist community there of crown support
for their continued presence within the United Kingdom following the establishment of the
Irish Free State on the rest of the island during the early 1920s. A tour of Britain’s colonies in Africa followed,
taking in Kenya, Uganda and Sudan, as well as Aden in the south of the Arabian Peninsula,
though the Duke and Duchess of York avoided Egypt where the British Governor-General,
Sir Lee Stack, had just been assassinated on the streets of Cairo in November 1924. They returned to England for a time thereafter
in order for Elizabeth to give birth to their first child in 1926, a daughter named Elizabeth
after her mother. She was the first of their two children, with
another girl named Margaret following in 1930. As soon as Elizabeth was born in 1926 and
her mother had recovered, the Duke and Duchess resumed their tour of Britain’s overseas
colonies. In 1927 they headed west across the Atlantic. They first visited Jamaica, where Albert notably
played a doubles tennis match alongside Bertrand Clark, an all-round sporting figure who had
competed internationally in golf, tennis and cricket. In 1924 Clark had become the first black athlete
to compete at the Wimbledon tennis Championships in London, a tournament which Albert had himself
competed at in 1926, partnering his friend and mentor Louis Greig, the Scottish naval
surgeon who had served as his equerry at Cambridge, in the men’s doubles event. Admittedly they were soundly beaten in the
first round but Albert remains the only British royal to have competed at the Championships,
having done so when the Championships were still an amateur event. Albert’s decision to play alongside Clark
in Jamaica the following year was seen as an inclusive decision which embraced the wider
Jamaican population. It was probably simply more in line with Albert’s
personality that he innocently decided to play a game of tennis and wasn’t considering
the political overtones of doing so at all. Thereafter, he and Elizabeth proceeded onwards
to the Pacific Ocean, visiting Fiji, New Zealand and Australia, before returning to Britain
after taking in many of the empire’s countries in the mid-1920s. While in Australia Albert oversaw the formal
opening of the newly built Parliament House in the capital city, Canberra. He delivered a speech during this event, one
which was well delivered. This would not have been possible just a year
or two earlier. Bertie’s stutter had not retreated with
the passage of the years and by the mid-1920s had become a problem. When he had given the closing speech at the
British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in October 1925, the ceremony had been an endurance test
for both Albert and his listeners, with the Duke struggling to deliver his lines. In its aftermath he determined to do something
to confront the stutter which had plagued him since his youth. Thus, although the acclaimed film The King’s
Speech, depicts Albert as having employed him much later in the lead up to and opening
stages of the Second World War, it was actually in 1926 that Bertie first began working with
Lionel Logue, an Australian former stage actor turned speech and language therapist. Logue’s methods were unusual by the standards
of the 1920s and he was considered a quack by many in the medical community, but his
regimen of daily vocal exercises and conscious relaxing of the throat muscles proved enormously
successful in Albert’s case. Already when he had opened the Parliament
House in Canberra in 1927 the Duke’s speech was much improved and his voice did not falter
on that occasion. He continued to work with Logue intermittently
over the next twenty years and in 1937, at the time of his coronation, he honoured the
Australian by making him a Member of the Royal Victorian Order, with promotion to the rank
of Commander in 1944. More broadly, Albert grew into himself in
the 1920s. He was a changed man following his marriage
and after becoming a father and unlike his own father and grandfather his parenting style
was a warm, modern one, rather than being a cold, distant presence in his daughters’
lives. The family originally lived at White Lodge
in Richmond Park in London, but they moved to a more modest home in Piccadilly in 1926. During these years the Duke and Duchess became
known for their philanthropy. Bertie, for instance, founded the Industrial
Welfare Society through which he met with trade unionists and other leaders of industrial
workers to try to gain a greater understanding of the material existences of Britain’s
workers and how their lot could be improved at a time when industrial communities in much
of England and Scotland still suffered from striking deprivation. Bertie became known as ‘the Foreman’ to
his family, such was his interest in labour issues. He also established the Duke of York’s Camps
through which boys from working class communities and public schools competed in a wide range
of events. These were a forerunner of the Duke of Edinburgh
Awards latterly established by his son-in-law. Albert took a great personal interest in them
and attended the camps every year in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s except for
1934 when he was ill. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Albert and
Elizabeth must surely have believed that their lives would continue on the same trajectory
as they had been on since their marriage. They would continue to play prominent roles
in representing the royal family as Duke and Duchess of York, but the assumption was there
that Bertie’s older brother Edward would eventually marry, become king, produce an
heir and the royal line would continue through his family. However, by the early 1930s it was imperative
for Edward to marry at some point, as he neared his fortieth year. It was worrying for both the king and the
government to discover in the course of the mid-1930s that Edward’s attentions had actually
landed on Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee who had come to England following her marriage
in 1928 to Ernest Aldrich Simpson, an American businessman with extensive dealings in England. Edward and she had first met in 1932 and gradually
entered into an extra-marital affair. By 1935 when King George sanctioned the Metropolitan
Police Special Branch to begin monitoring Simpson’s movements, the relationship between
her and the heir to the throne had become a matter of considerable concern to the royal
family and the Conservative Party Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, when he entered government
that summer. Although news of the affair had not become
public knowledge at that time, it was widely believed that if it did it would become a
cause of major scandal, both because Simpson was a divorcee at a time when divorce still
carried considerable social stigma and also because Edward and she were romantically involved
while Wallis was still married to her second husband. The affair would soon change the course of
Albert’s life. Albert’s father, King George V, died on
the 20th of January 1936, in large part owing to a lung condition exacerbated by lifelong
chain smoking, underlying medical conditions and habits which were shared by his sons and
which plagued their later lives as well. He had been considerably ill since the mid-1920s,
but by 1935 matters were very poor indeed. In his final months he had expressed his hopes
that if Edward continued with his relationship with Simpson that they would not have children
and that the way would soon be clear for Albert to succeed to the throne one day. That would come sooner rather than later. Although Edward immediately ascended to the
throne as King Edward VIII following his father’s death in January 1936, there were discussions
taking place immediately within Baldwin’s government about what course should be followed
if Edward insisted on marrying Simpson. As Edward did not have any children, Albert
was necessarily part of these discussions from their inception, as he was next in line
to the throne. It was clear that if Edward were forced to
abdicate, Albert would almost certainly succeed him, although there were rumours in the mid-to-late
1930s that the government was considering the possibility of one of Albert’s two younger
brothers, Prince Henry and Prince George, as possible candidates to succeed Edward if
the crisis deepened. George, it was held at the time, was viewed
in particular as a possible king, as he and his wife, Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark,
had become parents to a son, Prince Edward, in October 1935 and thus he would have a male
heir already if he became king. However, there is no evidence to suggest that
the idea of Henry or George succeeding Edward was ever seriously entertained by Baldwin’s
government and the plan from the very start of the Abdication Crisis was for Albert to
succeed his brother if Edward ended up renouncing his throne. Edward’s coronation was planned for the
12th of May 1937. He would not remain as king for long enough
for it to be held though. The first months of his reign saw a growing
standoff with Baldwin concerning his relationship with Wallis Simpson. Edward was seemingly determined to marry her
and for her part Wallis was taking steps to divorce her second husband in advance of marrying
Edward. She had informed friends that she expected
to be crowned as queen the day that Edward was crowned as king. This would not be the case. Baldwin was utterly opposed to Edward’s
proposed marriage and in the autumn of 1936 began liaising extensively with the wider
royal family, particularly Bertie, who was reluctantly acclimatising himself to the reality
of succeeding his brother within a matter of weeks, a development which he had no desire
to see occurring. News of the affair eventually broke and it
was made known to the nation in the newspapers on the 2nd of December 1936. Thereafter, despite efforts by some senior
members of parliament such as Winston Churchill to support Edward’s right to marry whom
he pleased, it became abundantly clear that parliament sided with Baldwin’s approach. Pressured into making a swift decision, Edward
agreed to abdicate rather than end his relationship with Simpson. He did so on the 11th of December, upon which
Albert succeeded as King of Britain and Emperor of India, taking the regnal name George VI
in honour of his father. He was a reluctant king and later revealed
that when he had to visit his mother and tell her the news of the abdication and his assumption
of the throne, he wept. George rose to the position of king well. His style of rule was modest and undramatic,
in stark contrast to the controversy and drama which had surrounded Edward as Prince of Wales
and during his brief time as king. Over the next fifteen or so years he would
fulfil the role of monarch and its constitutional remit very well, rarely exceeding the role
which the monarchy was largely confined to by the middle of the twentieth century, which
was to represent the royal establishment well and act in a ceremonial capacity. Nevertheless, this was still an important
function, particularly so when Britain entered a period of extreme hardship from the autumn
of 1939 onwards. Moreover, George’s modest and unassuming
personality was a good foil to the larger than life character of Winston Churchill as
Prime Minister when war would come just a few years into his reign. Politically George was conservative in his
views, but not staunchly so and was well-suited to overseeing the gradual modernisation of
the country both socially and culturally. George had come to power at a time when the
political map of Europe was in flux. Following the end of the First World War in
1918, the continent had experienced five years of brutal revolutions and civil wars in regions
like Russia, Turkey, Poland, Ireland and Germany. But eventually in 1923 and 1924 the chaos
subsided and several years of major economic growth and prosperity had followed. This was checked by the Wall Street Crash
in the autumn of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed. As renewed political turmoil arose across
Europe many countries turned to more extreme politics. In Central Europe, in particular, far-right
nationalist and fascist parties had emerged to claim power in countries like Austria,
Hungary and above all Germany where the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler seized power early in
1933. Conversely, Eastern Europe was dominated by
the totalitarian Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin. Those few countries which retained a democratic
governmental system were threatened by the vying forces of fascism and communism and
shortly before George succeeded to the throne a bitter civil war had broken out in Spain
between these left and right-wing political forces. The task before Britain in the first years
of George’s reign was to navigate this difficult political environment, preventing the rise
of both the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley and excessive social unrest
wrought by the political left. And George’s task in acting as head of state
at this time was not helped by Edward and Wallis’s decision to undertake an unofficial
tour of Nazi Germany in the autumn of 1937, one in which Edward clearly displayed his
appreciation of German National Socialism. When George became king, Britain was at a
crossroads in terms of how to approach the German threat. It could begin rearming rapidly in order to
deter Germany from further aggression or try to appease Hitler and the Nazis by granting
them concessions, principally in the shape of reversals of some of the more punitive
aspects of the Treaty of Versailles which had brought the First World War to an end. George was in many ways a favourer of appeasement,
but the principle architect of this approach was Neville Chamberlain who succeeded Baldwin
in May 1937 when he stood down as Prime Minister. Chamberlain continued a policy of slow rearmament,
while also allowing Germany to re-emerge as the major power in Central Europe. Thus, few objections were raised when the
Anschluss, the union of Germany and Austria into a Greater Germany, was undertaken by
the Nazis in March 1938 in direct violation of the peace treaties which had brought the
war to an end. George supported Chamberlain in this approach,
but in doing so he was actually following the constitutional remit of the monarchy by
the 1930s, which was to support the government of the day and its decisions, regardless of
whether or not those same policies ran contrary to the monarch’s own views. In one instance, and a particularly significant
one at that, George did directly associate himself with Chamberlain’s policy. Following the annexation of Austria in the
spring of 1938 the Nazis had turned their attention to the Sudetenland, the German-speaking
region of western Czechoslovakia, making claims to this territory. Eventually a diplomatic conference was convened
to be held in Munich in September 1938. In the lead up to it George offered to write
directly to Hitler to try to appeal to him as one ex-serviceman to another to try to
prevent war. This was well-intended, though considerably
naïve in retrospect. When Chamberlain reached an agreement with
Hitler at Munich to allow Germany to annex the Sudetenland in return for a promise of
no further aggressive actions or claims on its neighbours’ territory, George sent him
a message requesting him to visit Buckingham Palace immediately on his return to England
so that the king could express his immense congratulations on what he perceived to be
a major diplomatic victory. The appearance of the monarch and the Prime
Minister on the balcony of Buckingham Palace together when Chamberlain arrived in England
was a striking statement about their combined belief in the success of appeasement. But they would soon realise how misguided
their faith in the agreement reached at Munich was. In the summer of 1939, despite the troubled
political headwinds in Europe, George and Elizabeth headed across the Atlantic Ocean
and visited the United States. The tour of the US was undertaken on the invitation
of Present Franklin D. Roosevelt. Occurring between the 7th and 12th of June,
it has a significance as being the first time that a British monarch had ever visited the
country. No British monarch had agreed to do so since
the US, which had been born out of Britain’s colonies in North America, had declared its
independence in 1776 and even prior to this no monarch had visited the colonies since
their establishment in the early seventeenth century. The tour took in much of the East Coast, with
visits to Washington D.C. and New York as well as Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington
in Virginia. The state visit was an important one in making
the British royals visible to the American public and was conceived of by Roosevelt as
a way of generating support in the US for providing aid to Britain in the event of war
breaking out. It was a shrewd diplomatic move, one which
did not see US sentiment in favour of intervening in the Second World War when it initially
broke out, but which helped Roosevelt to persuade Congress to provide financial and material
support to Britain in the early stages of the war. Close ties between Britain and the US would
soon be needed, as Chamberlain’s efforts at appeasement were proven to have been in
vain by the time George and Elizabeth toured the US in the summer of 1939. No sooner had the dust settled on the Munich
Agreement and the Sudetenland been annexed into a greater Germany, than Hitler and the
other senior members of the Nazi regime began turning their attentions towards further land
grabs. The winter of 1938 was relatively calm, but
the following March the Munich accords were torn up as German troops entered Czechoslovakia
and occupied the country which became a protectorate of Nazi Germany. Just days later the city of Memel on the Baltic
Sea coast was annexed after being threatened with an aerial bombardment by the German foreign
minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. By now Britain and France had begun to accelerate
the speed of their rearmament in preparation for the inevitable conflict, but they were
far behind where they needed to be. The Nazis were aware of this and consequently
accelerated their own march to war. In the summer of 1939 their attentions turned
to Poland, making diplomatic claims to Polish territory which Germany had been forced to
cede in 1919 as part of the Treaty of Versailles which brought the First World War to an end. Finally, in late August 1939 a false flag
operation was run to make Poland seem like the aggressor in Eastern Europe. On the 1st of September 1939 Germany declared
war on its eastern neighbour and invaded Poland. Two days later, in response to this aggression,
Britain and France went to war with the Nazis. The Second World War had commenced. As the King of Britain and Emperor of India
the task fell to George on the 3rd of September 1939 to address the nation upon Britain’s
declaration of war on Germany earlier that day. At 6pm that evening he delivered his speech,
broadcast over the radio. While Winston Churchill’s addresses to the
nation during the war usually garner greater attention, George’s on Britain’s entry
into the war was also galvanising. In it he stated, “In this grave hour, perhaps
the most fateful in our history, I send to all my peoples, both at home and over seas,
this message with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross
your threshold and speak to you myself. For the second time in the lives of most of
us we are at war. Over and over again we have tried to find
a peaceful way out of the differences between ourselves and those who are now our enemies. But it has been in vain…If one and all be
resolutely faithful today, ready for whatever service or sacrifice it may demand, with God’s
help we shall prevail.” George’s maiden speech to the nation during
the conflict was delivered without any trace of the stutter which had plagued him for much
of his youth. Although the award-winning film The King’s
Speech contains many aspects of George’s story which are historically accurate, his
challenges concerning his stutter were primarily faced and overcome with the assistance of
Lionel Logue in the mid-to-late 1920s, though George did periodically consult with Logue
over the years including during the Second World War. Nevertheless, the film is inaccurate in suggesting
that the king only began to confront his stutter in the period immediately before the war. With the onset of the war there was a growing
problem in the heart of government. Neville Chamberlain remained as Prime Minister
and retained the support of the bulk of the Conservative Party. However, there was a rebellious faction amongst
the Tories and many in Britain felt that Chamberlain’s position was untenable given that he had championed
the policy of appeasing Germany after he became Prime Minister in 1937. Matters came to a head in early May 1940 during
the so-called Norway Debate in the House of Commons, which began concerning British efforts
to open a front in Northern Norway following the country’s occupation by the Nazis, but
which soon morphed into a wider debate on Chamberlain’s management of the war. It became clear that he could not remain on
as Prime Minister, but there was a debate as to who should succeed him, with some favouring
Winston Churchill, a long-standing Conservative critic of the Nazis and appeasement and others
supporting the candidature of Lord Halifax, an ally of Chamberlain’s who was not entirely
opposed to negotiating peace terms with Germany. George was initially in support of Halifax,
holding a grudge against Churchill over his support for Edward and opposition to George
becoming king back in the early winter of 1936. However, as events unfolded in the early summer
of 1940 it became clear that Churchill was the candidate who could command cross-party
support in parliament and on the 10th of May 1940 George asked Churchill to form a new
government. The case was urgent, as the Germans had invaded
Belgium and the Netherlands that morning heading towards France. A cross-party coalition government conceived
on the widest basis was soon established. Though he opposed Churchill’s ascent as
Prime Minister initially, once he occupied 10 Downing Street, the relationship between
George and Winston became one of the closest between any British monarch and Prime Minister
in modern history. The exigencies of the war ensured that they
had to meet regularly and they soon bonded over their common interest in the Navy, Churchill
having served as First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War while George was
at sea in the North Atlantic. Things grew from there. By the late autumn of 1940 their formal meetings
had been replaced by informal lunches between king and prime minister every Tuesday, ones
which would often last for several hours and in which Churchill related the actions of
government, while George explained what he felt the mood of the nation was based on his
extensive meetings with the public, which were taking place on an almost daily basis. We know of the considerable friendship which
developed between the pair in the course of the war owing to George having recorded them
regularly in his diary. It was not always smooth sailing, notably
in the spring of 1944 when Churchill had to convince the king that he could not take part
in the D-Day landings, not even on board the warships at the rear once the beachheads had
been secured, but generally the relationship was a successful one, in large part because
Churchill encouraged George, a naturally shy and retiring man, that he had a considerable
public role to play in the war. He made him feel useful. A sign of their affinity for one another would
be seen many years later, when Churchill was delivered the news of George’s passing at
10 Downing Street, he was said to have laid aside his papers and stated, “Bad news,
the worst”, and descended into a deep gloom for several days. George’s close relationship with Churchill
was in many ways forged in the dark days of the autumn of 1940. Following the Nazi invasion and rapid conquest
of the Low Countries and France in the summer of 1940 the Blitz, a bombing campaign of Britain
initiated by the Nazis, combined with a naval blockade of Britain in the North Atlantic,
commenced. The Blitz began on the 7th of September with
the goal of bringing Britain to negotiate peace terms without the Nazis having to launch
a land invasion of Britain. London was the prime target from the beginning,
but George and Elizabeth took the decision to remain in the capital. It was a hazardous decision. Over 1,000 people alone were killed in the
city on the first night of the bombing campaign and on the 13th of September the king and
queen were very nearly killed when several bombs landed on Buckingham Palace. More broadly, the royal family underwent the
same rationing that was imposed on the entire British public during the war years and the
sense of shared struggle galvanised the nation and won George and Elizabeth the admiration
of the British people even as the Blitz dragged on for eight long months through to May 1941. By the time it ended over 40,000 British civilians
were killed and two million homes had been damaged or destroyed, the majority of the
damage being inflicted on London. The worst of the Blitz and the naval blockade
ended in the spring of 1941. This was entirely owing to the general drift
of the conflict. Between the summer of 1940 after the swift
fall of France, Britain and the North Atlantic became the crucible of the war. The king needed to be visible during this,
Britain’s darkest hour in the conflict. However, from the summer of 1941 onwards the
focus of matters shifted as Hitler and the Nazis abandoned their designs on forcing Britain
to surrender and instead turned their attentions eastwards to the Soviet Union, undertaking
the largest land invasion in military history. Thereafter the Eastern Front became the focus
of the war in Europe, while after the entry of the United States into the conflict in
December 1941 Britain, the US and the Commonwealth nations turned their attentions to gaining
victory in the North Africa campaign against the Italians and the German expeditionary
force which had been dispatched there. They finally emerged victorious in the spring
of 1943, after which a Southern Front was opened in Italy by the Western Allies. Twelve months later, in the summer of 1944,
a Western Front was established with the D-Day landings and the invasion of France. From that point onwards, the course of the
war and the result seemed destined to be one of Allied victory. In September 1940, in the aftermath of the
evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in northern France earlier that
summer, and the commencement of the Blitz and the Battle of the North Atlantic, George
championed the creation of two new awards which would be bestowed by the crown. The George Cross and the George Medal were
both created in September 1940. Unlike the Victoria Cross, which had been
established during the long reign of George’s great-grandmother, and other military honours,
the George Cross and George Medal were to be awarded to anyone who was deemed to have
conducted themselves with gallantry and bravery, be they civilians or soldiers. In the context of the Blitz, when ordinary
Londoners, and in particular fire-fighters and police, were effectively the front line
soldiers in the war against Germany, such awards were deemed necessary by the king. The George Cross would become the civilian
equivalent of the Victoria Cross, the highest military award of its kind. In announcing the creation of the new honour,
the king stated that, quote, “I have decided to create, at once, a new mark of honour for
men and women in all walks of civilian life. I propose to give my name to this new distinction,
which will consist of the George Cross, which will rank next to the Victoria Cross, and
the George Medal for wider distribution.” It was to be awarded for “acts of the greatest
heroism or of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger.” Over the course of the war George would personally
present the awards to dozens of soldiers and civilians. Those who were honoured included the likes
of Stuart Archer, a bomb-diffusing expert who had diffused over 200 bombs that had landed
undetonated in England by September 1941. John Bridge was another medal of the Cross
for his role in defusing dozens of bombs which landed in urban centres across England. The George Medal was granted in similar cases,
often to members of the Commonwealth nations. For instance, Margaret Irene Anderson, an
Australian staff nurse on board the Empire Star, was awarded the Medal for her gallantry
during the evacuation of Singapore in the face of the Japanese onslaught in 1942. Back home, Charity Bick was awarded the George
Medal by the king. She had lied about her age at just 14 in order
to be accepted into the Air Raid Precautions unit in 1939. During an air raid on West Bromwich by the
Germans the following August she delivered messages on her bicycle to a nearby RAF control
room and helped her father put out an incendiary bomb that fell on the roof of a shop. In awarding these honours to individuals like
Archer, Bridge, Anderson and Bick, George galvanised public sentiment to continue the
struggle against Germany during the dark days of late 1940 and early 1941 when Britain stood
largely alone against the Nazi threat. George and Elizabeth contributed to the war
cause in other ways. From 1940 onwards the king and the queen consort
were regular visitors to hospitals and various fronts in England and further afield. From the summer of 1940 onwards they regularly
visited sites of extensive bombing raids to console the victims’ relatives and to meet
the wounded. Often these duties were divided up, with George
heading for military bases and Elizabeth touring London’s hospitals and those in the other
major cities. One might look at these as merely symbolic
gestures, but symbolic gestures at a time of civilian endurance were what was needed
at the time and the king and queen earned plaudits for their very visible public presence
throughout the Blitz and the remainder of the war. As the focus of the conflict shifted away
from Britain in 1941 and the Western Allies began taking the offensive on several fronts,
George often left England, heading to the front lines in North Africa and the island
fortress of Malta in 1943 and visiting France, the Low Countries and Italy in 1944 after
the Southern and Western Fronts had been opened. By 1944 the war was entering its final stages
as Germany found itself being advanced on from the east by the Soviets and from the
south and west by the Western Allies. George did not play an entirely silent role
in these affairs. He made some contributions towards Allied
strategy, notably in 1943 when he proposed that the Allies should forego opening a new
front in France in favour of pushing resources into the Southern Front in Italy, a strategy
which Churchill was considerably in favour of and sent along to the military chiefs of
staff. In the end, though, George saw the logic of
opening a front in northern France and on the evening of the D-Day landings he delivered
a rousing broadcast in which he recalled the grim position Britain had been in four years
earlier, before stating that, quote, “once more a supreme test has to be faced. This time, the challenge is not to fight to
survive but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause.” That eventual victory would take another eleven
months to secure, but in the end as Soviet troops closed on central Berlin and British,
American, Canadian and other Allied soldiers fanned out across Germany, Hitler killed himself
and the Nazis surrendered on the 8th of May 1945. That VE or Victory in Europe Day, George and
the rest of the royal family appeared on the balconies of Buckingham Palace to celebrate
with the British public the end of the near six year long struggle. With victory in the war George’s role shifted
from being Britain’s war leader to overseeing the rapid dismantling of its empire. Promises had been made during the war to many
interested parties concerning increased autonomy as the reward for helping Britain in its struggle
against Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. In particular, the Cripps Mission of 1942
to India had promised the Indian National Congress leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi that
India would be allowed to hold elections and have greater self-determination in the aftermath
of the conflict if it committed fully to aiding Britain in its hour of need. Now the debt fell due. In 1947 India was granted its independence
and the British Raj was divided up, so that the Muslim-majority areas in the north-west
and north-east became the new state of Pakistan, though the province of East Bengal would later
become the independent nation of Bangladesh. George briefly remained as Emperor of India
even after independence, but the title was abolished entirely in 1948, though India and
Pakistan would remain as members of the British Commonwealth. Thus, in the second half of the 1940s, George
was overseeing the first steps of the post-war transition from the Empire to Commonwealth,
including the 1949 London Declaration which was pursuant from India’s declaration of
itself as a republic and the removal of George as head of state of that Commonwealth nation. George was cautiously in favour of this move,
provided India remained a Commonwealth nation, though the episode did see the Republic of
Ireland leave the Commonwealth entirely. The further dismantling of Britain’s empire
would gather pace in the 1950s, particularly from 1957 onwards when the first wave of decolonisation
spread across Africa. By the mid-1960s Britain would relinquish
much of its control of its territories in regions like Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and Rhodesia,
many of which new nations in turn became members of the Commonwealth. But George would not live to see this. His health was deteriorating already in the
late 1940s, though he was only just after entering his fifties. Like his father before him, his lifelong chain
smoking had taken its toll on his health, as had the stresses of the war years. Moreover, by the late 1940s he was suffering
from several circulatory problems including Buerger’s Disease, which leads to clotting
of small and medium arteries and which is also exacerbated by smoking. By 1949 matters were serious and a planned
tour of some of the Commonwealth nations had to be cancelled, while for a time it was feared
that George would have to have one of his legs amputated. Unsurprisingly, by this time his eldest daughter
and the heir presumptive to the throne, Elizabeth, who was only 23 years of age, was carrying
out more and more royal duties by the end of the decade. Matters did not improve into the 1950s. In 1951 George had to have his left lung surgically
removed after he developed lung cancer. He was limited in his physical movements from
that point onwards, although the king attempted to remain active, insisting on accompanying
his daughter and her husband, Prince Philip, to London Airport on the 31st of January 1952
when they left for a tour of much of the empire. It was the last time he would see his daughter
and heir. George died in his sleep a week later on the
6th of February 1952 from a coronary thrombosis at Sandringham where he was born. He was just 56 years of age. Owing to his premature death, Elizabeth succeeded
to the throne of Britain at just 25 years of age and as she lived to be 96 years herself
her reign would be the longest in British history. News of George’s death was released immediately
and the mechanisms for the holding of a state funeral were put in place. His body lay in state at Westminster from
the 11th of February onwards so that the British public could pay their respects to the wartime
king. His funeral was held on the 15th like those
of so many British monarchs at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. Afterwards his remains were interred in the
royal vault, though they only remained here until 1969, at which time George was reinterred
in the George VI Memorial Chapel. His remains lie there today with those of
his wife, Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who lived until 2002, outliving her husband by
half a century, and those of his daughter, the recently deceased Queen Elizabeth II and
her husband the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip. George VI led Britain through one of the most
consequential periods in world history and arguably the most significant in Britain’s
long imperial story. For much of 1940 and 1941 the country was
the only major power standing against Nazi Germany and the fascist threat. In that dark moment the country needed leadership. It is generally understood to have come from
Winston Churchill, but there was also George and Elizabeth as his queen consort who acted
as figureheads in the struggle against the Blitz and the blockade of Britain by Germany. He rose extremely well to that occasion. Moreover, it came from a man who was never
supposed to become king, his older brother’s love life and to a certain extent his difficult
personality having combined to ensure that his reign was a short one and Edward had to
abdicate in favour of George in December 1936. When he did become King of Britain, George
cannot be said to have been a philosopher king or a particularly forceful personality,
but he offered a steady hand and humility at the helm of state which was fitting for
the time period in which he became monarch. Overcoming his own personal limitations, he
won the respect of the British people throughout the war, developed a close relationship with
Churchill and managed the transition from empire to commonwealth well in the aftermath
of the conflict. Tragically, his physical decline ensured that
his reign was cut short and that his last years were spent in considerable pain. He should be remembered as a modest and humble,
but effective king. What do you think of King George VI? Was it a good thing that he became King of
England and that Edward abdicated the throne in 1936? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
