The King's Speech (25 page)

A
t one minute to nine on the evening of Friday 24 May 1940, cinemas across Britain shut down their programmes; crowds of people began to gather outside radio shops and a hush fell over clubs and hotel lounges. Millions more were gathered around their radios at home as the King prepared to make his first speech to the nation since his Christmas address at Sandringham. Lasting twelve and a half minutes, it was also to be his longest – and a major test of all the hours he had spent with Logue.

The occasion was Empire Day, which during wartime gained additional resonance from the huge contribution being made by many thousands of people across the Empire to the war against Hitler in Europe. Appropriately, the King’s words were to be heard at the end of a programme called
Brothers in Arms.
Featuring men and women born and brought up overseas, the programme, the BBC claimed, would ‘demonstrate in no uncertain fashion the unity and strength of which Empire Day is the symbol’.

Britain needed all the help it could get from the Empire. The phoney war had come to a sudden and dramatic end. In April the Nazis had invaded Denmark and Norway. Allied troops landed in Norway in an attempt to defend the country, but by the end of the month the southern areas were in German hands. In early June the Allies evacuated the north and on the ninth Norwegian forces laid down their arms.

The Nazis’ successes in Scandinavia brought the long-running pressure on Chamberlain to a head in the so-called Norway debate, during which the former cabinet minister Leo Amery famously quoted to the hapless prime minister the words that Oliver Cromwell had used to the Long Parliament: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.’

Despite the political forces ranged against him, Chamberlain won the vote on 8 May by 281 to 200, but many of his own supporters abstained or voted against him. There was a growing clamour to widen the coalition to include Labour, but that party’s MPs refused to serve under Chamberlain. There was speculation that he might be succeeded by Lord Halifax, who had been one of the main architects of appeasement since replacing Eden as foreign secretary in March 1938.

Although Halifax enjoyed the support of both the Conservative Party and the King, and was acceptable to Labour, he realized that there was a better man for the job. When Chamberlain resigned two days later, he was replaced instead by Winston Churchill, who formed a new coalition government including Conservative, Labour and Liberal MPs as well as non-party figures. That same day, German forces marched into Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

The Nazis rapidly tightened their grip. At five o’clock in the morning of 13 May, the King was woken to take a call from Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. At first he thought it was a hoax – but not once she began to speak and urgently begged his help in having more aircraft sent to defend her beleaguered country. It was too late; a few hours afterwards the Queen’s daughter Princess Juliana, her German-born husband Prince Bernhard and their two young daughters arrived in England. Later that day, Wilhelmina was on the phone to the King again, this time from Harwich, to which she had travelled aboard a British destroyer after fleeing German attempts to capture her and take her hostage. Her aim was initially to go back and join Dutch forces in Zeeland, in the south-west of the country, which were still resisting, but the military situation had deteriorated so sharply that everyone thought a return was impossible. On 15 May her army capitulated in the face of the German Blitzkrieg. Wilhelmina remained in Buckingham Palace, where she attempted to rally Dutch resistance at a distance.

It was against the background of these dramatic setbacks that Logue was called at 11 a.m. on 21 May by Hardinge and asked to go and see the King at 4 p.m. He arrived fifteen minutes early to find the King’s private secretary fretting over yet more bad news from the Continent. German forces, continuing their whirlwind advance across France, had reportedly entered Abbeville, at the mouth of the Somme and fifteen miles from the Channel, cutting the Allied armies in two. The future of the British Expeditionary Force, which had been deployed mainly along the Franco-Belgian border since it had been sent out at the beginning of the war, was looking bleak.

Despite the gravity of the situation, the King appeared in a strangely cheerful mood when Logue was called up to see him. Standing on the balcony, dressed in his military uniform, he was whistling to a young corgi sitting under a plane tree in the garden that was struggling to work out where the sound was coming from. Logue noticed the King’s hair was a little greyer on the side of the temples than he remembered it. The strain of war was clearly beginning to take its toll.

They went into a room that was bare of all pictures and valuables save for a vase of flowers. Logue was impressed by the text of the Empire Day speech, which he thought was outstanding and beautifully written, but they nevertheless still went through it together and made some alterations. As they were doing so a second time, there was a light tap at the door. It was the Queen, dressed in powder grey, with a loud diamond butterfly brooch on her left shoulder. While the King was writing out alterations to the text, he talked to Logue about the wonderful efforts the Royal Air Force was making – and ‘how proud one should be of the boys from Australia, Canada and New Zealand’. Soon afterwards, Logue went to leave.

‘It was a wonderful memory as I said goodbye and bowed over the King’s and Queen’s hands, the two of them framed in the large window with the sunshine behind them, the King in field marshal uniform and the Queen in grey,’ he recalled.

On Empire Day itself, Logue went to the Palace after dinner and, together with the BBC’s Wood and Ogilvie, made sure the room had been properly prepared for the broadcast. In case of air raids, Wood had run a cable down into the dugout. ‘It didn’t matter what happened,’ wrote Logue. ‘The broadcast would go on.’

The King, dressed in a double-breasted jacket, looked slim and fit. The two of them then went into the broadcasting room which, to Logue’s relief, was pleasantly cool: he had left instructions that the windows be left open to prevent a repetition of the previous day’s disaster when the unfortunate Queen Wilhelmina had made a lunchtime broadcast to her Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and the room was so hot and stuffy it was practically on fire.

Logue suggested only minor changes to the speech. Rather than beginning ‘It is a year ago today’, he proposed the King rearrange the text to start instead, ‘On Empire Day a year ago’. They had a last run-through of the speech and it took twelve minutes. With just eight minutes to go, the King walked off into his room to practise the emphasis on two or three of the more difficult passages.

A minute before he was due to start speaking, the King walked across the passage into the broadcasting room and stared out of the open window in the failing light. It was a beautiful spring evening and perfectly peaceful. ‘It was hard to believe that within a hundred miles of us, men were killing each other,’ thought Logue.

The red studio light flashed four times and went dark – the signal to begin. The King took two steps to the table, and Logue squeezed his arm for luck. The gesture spoke volumes about the closeness of the two men’s relationship; no one was meant to touch a king unbidden in that way.

‘On Empire Day last year I spoke to you, the peoples of the Empire, from Winnipeg, in the heart of Canada,’ the King began, adopting the first of Logue’s changes. ‘We were at peace. On that Empire Day I spoke of the ideals of freedom, justice, and peace upon which our Commonwealth of Free Peoples is founded. The clouds were gathering, but I held fast to the hope that those ideals might yet achieve a fuller and richer development without suffering the grievous onslaught of war. But it was not to be. The evil which we strove unceasingly and with all honesty of purpose to avert fell upon us.’

And so he went on, smiling like a schoolboy (or so Logue thought) whenever he managed a hitherto impossible word without difficulty. The ‘decisive struggle’ was now upon the people of Britain, the King continued, building up the tension. ‘It is no mere territorial conquest that our enemies are seeking; it is the overthrow, complete and final, of this Empire and of everything for which it stands and, after that, the conquest of the world . . .’

There was nothing for Logue to do but just stand and listen, marvelling at the King’s voice. When he had spoken his last words, Logue just gripped his hands; both men knew it had been a superb effort.

They didn’t dare speak immediately, though; at Logue’s insistence, they were trying a new way of working under which the red light – this ‘red eye of the little yellow god’, as Logue called it – didn’t stay on throughout the broadcast. This had the disadvantage of making it difficult to be absolutely certain that they were actually off air. The two men continued to look at each other in silence – ‘the King and the commoner and my heart is too full to speak’. The King patted him on the hand.

A few minutes later, Ogilvie came in – ‘Congratulations, your Majesty, a wonderful effort’, he said – followed by the Queen, kissing her husband and telling him how grand he had been. They all stayed there talking for another five minutes.

‘And then,’ as Logue put it, ‘the King of England says “I want my dinner” – and they all said good night and went down the stairs into another world.’

The King was suitably proud of his effort, and relieved that, despite the fluidity of the military situation, he had not been obliged to make major last-minute changes to the text. ‘I was fearful that something might happen to make me have to alter it,’ he wrote in his diary that evening. ‘I was very pleased with the way I delivered it, & it was easily my best effort. How I hate broadcasting.’
⁸⁵

The next morning, the newspapers were full of praise for the speech. The
Daily Telegraph
called it ‘a vigorous and inspiring broadcast’, adding, ‘Reports last night indicated that every word was heard with perfect clarity throughout the United States and in distant parts of the Empire.’ Logue’s telephone, meanwhile, had been ringing off the hook. ‘Everyone is thrilled over The King’s Speech,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Eric Mieville rang me from Buckingham Palace and told me that the reception all over the world had been tremendous. Whilst we were speaking the King rang for him, so I sent my congratulations through again.’ The reaction from the Empire and beyond had also been enthusiastic.

The next day, a Saturday, Logue and Myrtle celebrated the King’s success by going to see a matinee of
My Little Chickadee
, a comedy set in the Old West of the 1880s, starring Mae West and W. C. Fields. Afterwards, Valentine took his parents to dinner at a restaurant Myrtle called ‘the Hungarian’. It was the first time they had been there since the war had started, and the band played all Myrtle’s favourites.

It would take more than one speech, however fine, to turn the tide of a war which was going against the Allies. Next to fall to the Germans was Belgium. King Léopold III, who was commander-in-chief of his country’s forces, had hoped to fight on in support of the Allied course, imitating the heroic example of his father, King Albert, during the First World War. Yet the situation this time was different, and on 25 May, convinced that further resistance was hopeless, Léopold surrendered. Controversially he chose to stay with his people rather than accompany his ministers to France where they attempted to continue to operate as a government-in-exile. However unfairly, he was vilified in Britain as a result. His behaviour during the war divided his own country and sowed the seeds for his abdication just over a decade later.

The British fury at Léopold’s capitulation was due in large part to the damaging effect it had on the Allied Forces, whose left flank was now entirely exposed and who now had to fall back to the Channel coast. The only solution was to mount a rescue – and what was to be one of the most dramatic episodes of the war. On 27 May the first of a flotilla of around 700 merchant marine boats, fishing boats, pleasure craft and Royal National Lifeboats began to evacuate British and French troops from the beaches of Dunkirk. By the ninth day, a total of 338,226 soldiers (198,229 British and 139,997 French) had been rescued.

On 4 June, the final day of the evacuation, Churchill made one of the most memorable speeches of the war – or, indeed, of all time. ‘Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail,’ he told the House of Commons, going on famously to vow to ‘fight on the beaches’.

In her diary the next day, Myrtle noted simply: ‘All our men off. God be praised. Have met some of the nurses, they have a story to tell which will live forever.’ There were some more immediate worries too: on 1 June, in the midst of the evacuation, she heard that Laurie, their eldest son, had joined the army. Already into his thirties, and with a wife and baby, he was not among the first to be called. At the end of March he received his call-up papers and when Myrtle heard the news, she and Jo had ‘a little weep’.

For many ordinary people, what became known as the Dunkirk spirit perfectly described the tendency of Britons to pull together at times of national emergency and adversity. Yet, however great the heroism and however remarkable some of the escapes, there was no disguising the fact that this was no victory. In private, Churchill told his junior ministers that Dunkirk was ‘the greatest British military defeat for many centuries’.

The bad news kept on coming. On 14 June Paris was occupied by the German Wehrmacht and then, three days later, Marshal Philippe Pétain (appointed head of state with extraordinary powers) announced that France would ask Germany for an armistice. ‘This is the blackest day we have ever known,’ wrote Myrtle in her war diary. She heard news of Pétain’s announcement from a disgusted bus driver who ‘proclaimed to the entire world what he would do to the entire French nation . . . Surely now, there is nobody left who can rat on us. We are all really alone, and if our government gives up there will be a revolution, and I am in it.’