Logue accompanied the King into the broadcasting room which, to their relief, was pleasantly cool: the windows had been left open to prevent a repetition of the previous day’s disaster when the unfortunate Queen Wilhelmina had made a lunchtime broadcast to the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and the room was so hot and stuffy it felt as if it were on fire. Logue proposed only minor changes to the text: rather than beginning ‘It is a year ago today’, he suggested to the King that it would be better to start: ‘On Empire Day a year ago.’ They had a last run-through and, with just eight minutes to go, the King walked off into his room to focus on the more difficult passages.
There was a sense of anticipation across Britain. Cinemas ended their programmes early and, as nine o’clock approached, crowds of people began to gather outside radio shops and a hush fell over clubs and hotel lounges. Millions more were sitting in front of their radios at home. Empire Day had assumed additional importance during wartime because of the massive contribution being made by the nations of the Empire. The King’s broadcast was to be aired at the end of a programme entitled Brothers in Arms. Featuring men and women born and brought up overseas, it was intended to ‘demonstrate in no uncertain fashion the unity and strength of which Empire Day is the symbol’. At twelve and a half minutes, the speech would be the longest he had made – and a major test of all the time he had spent working with Logue.
A minute before he was due to begin, the King walked across the passage into the broadcasting room and stared out of the open window towards 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 underlined the closeness of the relationship between the two men; 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.’
The King continued, smiling to himself like a schoolboy – or so it seemed to Logue – 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. ‘Let no one be mistaken: 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. And if their will prevails they will bring to its accomplishment all the hatred and cruelty which they have already displayed.’
The King paused after he had finished speaking. At Logue’s suggestion, they were trying a new way of working. Previously the red light – or the ‘red eye of the little yellow god’ as Logue used to call it – stayed on throughout the broadcast. But it was always a distraction, and so this time they were trying without it, although this had the disadvantage of making it difficult for them to know for sure when they were actually off the air. The two men continued to look at each other for a few moments in silence before either dared to speak.
A few minutes later, Ogilvie came in. ‘Congratulations, your Majesty, a wonderful effort,’ he said. He was followed by the Queen, who kissed her husband and also told him how well he had spoken. 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 proud of his effort. He was also relieved that, despite the rapidly changing military situation, he had not been obliged to make any 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.53 ‘I was very pleased with the way I delivered it, & it was easily my best effort. How I hate broadcasting.’
The newspapers the next morning were effusive in their praise of the King’s performance. 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.’ The next day, the Sunday Express went further. ‘The King has finally cured his speech defect,’ it proclaimed, in a triumph of wishful thinking over reality that may have been inspired by Logue’s old friend, John Gordon, who had moved from the Daily Express to become editor of its Sunday sister title in 1928. ‘The hesitation which marred many of his earlier speeches has gone. Experts who listened to the King’s war broadcast on Friday night declared yesterday that his delivery was so smooth that there was no reason why the old trouble should ever recur.’ One such expert, whom the newspaper did not name, declared that ‘even the most difficult consonants and words which formerly would have caused hesitation were delivered without the trace of a stumble’.54
Logue’s telephone, meanwhile, had been ringing constantly. ‘Everyone is thrilled over the King’s speech,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Eric Miéville [the King’s assistant private secretary] 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.’
Others were more sceptical: according to the government’s Home Intelligence Reports on morale and public opinion, the speech had ‘a steadying but not a deep effect. It was generally liked but most frequent comments were on the improvement in H.M.’s delivery and on the slightly impersonal note of the broadcast.’55 The Conservative MP, Cuthbert Headlam, wrote in his diary after listening to the broadcast: ‘Poor little man – one is very sorry for him.’56
Lionel and Myrtle celebrated the King’s success by going the next day to see a matinee of My Little Chickadee, a comedy-western set in the 1880s, starring Mae West and W.C. Fields. Afterwards, Valentine took his parents to their favourite Hungarian restaurant. It was their first visit since the beginning of the war, and the band played all Myrtle’s favourite tunes.
* As Wood describes in his memoirs, the King often took some convincing. The words ‘oppression’ and ‘suppression’ were a particular challenge, but when Wood tried to remove them from a speech on one occasion, the King insisted he could say them perfectly well – which may have been true if he had plenty of time, but not if they came up in the middle of a sentence. Wood did not try to argue but changed the conversation to another matter and then out of the blue challenged the King to say them. ‘Caught unawares, he would try, trip up on those infernal Ss and then give up with good humour,’ Wood noted. (Robert Wood, A World in Your Ear, London: Macmillan, 1979, p.103)
CHAPTER FIVE
Dunkirk
In his headquarters deep below Dover Castle, set in a maze of musty chalk tunnels that had been carved out of the cliffs at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, Admiral Bertram Ramsay convened a meeting of officials from the Admiralty and the Ministry of Shipping. Ramsay had been brought out of retirement on the outbreak of war and appointed officer-in-charge of Dover. He was now to lead one of the greatest and most audacious maritime rescues ever attempted. The meeting was held in the operations centre, a large chamber in the complex that had housed an electric power plant during the First World War. Known as the Dynamo Room, it lent its name to the operation.
A few days earlier, on 19 May 1940, amid growing concern over the fate of the 400,000 British troops in northern France facing the advancing German troops, Ramsay had been summoned t
o the War Office. He was ordered to plan for a ‘partial evacuation’ of the British Expeditionary Force – partial, because at that stage no one in the government seemed able or willing to recognize the severity of the situation in which the force’s members now found themselves. Over the days that followed, Ramsay lobbied the Admiralty, War Office, Ministry of Shipping and the commanders of the other coastal ports for help in assembling the vast number of ships and boats he reckoned he needed for the evacuation. Conscious of the lack of piers at which large vessels could dock, Ramsay also sent out an appeal for hundreds of fishing boats, pleasure steamers and other small craft capable of plucking troops straight off the beaches.
Such an evacuation was initially anathema to Churchill, who, despite what he had seen of the parlous state of the French army, continued to hope it would launch a counter-attack against the Germans. By contrast, Gort, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, had little confidence in the abilities of his allies and warned the war cabinet that his men might be forced to make a fighting retreat towards Dunkirk, which was the only usable harbour left. As a precaution, at cabinet on 20 May, Churchill gave orders for the Admiralty to ‘assemble a large number of small vessels in readiness to proceed to ports and inlets on the French coast’.
In the days that followed, the Allied forces were embroiled in ferocious street fighting. Stukas dive-bombed while British and French warships, sailing perilously close to the coast, shelled German motorized columns as they advanced along the coastal road. Explosions rocked the air as demolition crews blew up bridges and other facilities. Palls of black smoke rose into the air. Starting on 23 May, the evacuation of Boulogne began; over the course of the next two days, some 4,300 men were rescued, though 300 were left behind. There was no attempt to save the forces in Calais, however. Amid French protests that the men of the British Expeditionary Force were doing nothing but preparing their own escape to England, the 3,000 British troops, together with 800 French, who were caught in the town were ordered to stay and fight. Out of ammunition and water, they were overrun. Then, on 24 May, came an unexpected reprieve: as two German army groups were closing in on Dunkirk for the kill, Hitler ordered his armoured spearheads to halt for three days. With the bulk of the French army still undefeated, he wanted to preserve his forces for his drive on Paris. The Germans also did not appear to realize quite how many British forces they had trapped on the coast.
Matters were further complicated by the collapse of the Belgian army following the Dutch defeat. The same day that the King broadcast to the Empire, his Belgian counterpart, Leopold III (having assumed command of his country’s army) had a last meeting with his ministers before they left for France, where they intended to continue to operate as a government in exile. They urged Leopold to leave with them. The Belgian King refused, insisting he must ‘share the same fate as my troops’ and on 25 May, convinced further resistance was hopeless, he instead sued for terms of capitulation. From his headquarters in Bruges, he wrote a letter to George VI explaining his action. The King was dismayed, chiefly because of the potentially disastrous implications for the British forces trapped in France. ‘This came as a great shock to me as the evacuation of the B.E.F. will be almost impossible, with the Germans on three sides of us,’ he wrote.57
The next day, a Sunday, the decision was taken to launch Operation Dynamo. That morning’s newspapers, operating under wartime censorship, talked up the Allies’ military successes, but it was clear the British Expeditionary Force’s prospects were bleak. At the King’s request, the day had been declared a day of People’s Prayer and was marked by special church services across the country, including one at Westminster Abbey, which he and the Queen attended together with Queen Wilhelmina and Churchill. The King went on to visit RAF stations to decorate pilots involved in bombing Germany, but his mind was on the hundreds of thousands of their fellow servicemen still trapped in France. ‘The thought of losing Gort & his band, all the flower and youth of our country, the Army’s backbone in officers and men is truly tragic,’ he wrote in his diary.58 That evening, at three minutes before seven, the Admiralty signaled Ramsay: ‘OPERATION DYNAMO IS TO COMMENCE.’ Ramsay had already jumped the gun and dispatched the first flotilla four hours earlier. The first men arrived exhausted at Dover in the early hours of the next morning, the only equipment with them their rifles.
When he learnt that the British were escaping, Hitler realized the folly in halting his attack and ordered the destruction of the Dunkirk pocket. German artillery and bombers pounded the town, turning it into a living hell for the desperate men waiting on the beaches and in the dunes to be picked up. Yet day and night the rescue ships kept on coming, even though they, too, came under relentless fire as they neared the coast.
The continuing heroics in the Channel coincided with a ferocious political battle within the war cabinet. On one side was Churchill, determined that Britain should fight on against the Nazis, if necessary alone, and, standing against him, Halifax who thought the military situation now so desperate the government should pursue a negotiated peace with Hitler – brokered by Mussolini, who had yet to enter the war on the German side. Over the course of three days from 26 May, the war cabinet met nine times; the bitterness of the discussion exposed the strength of feeling on both sides. When Halifax demanded to know what was so wrong with ‘trying out the possibilities of mediation’, Churchill retorted that ‘nations that went down fighting rose again, but those who surrendered tamely were finished’. Halifax was initially backed by Chamberlain and a sizeable section of the Conservative Party, but Churchill finally outmanoeuvred them on 28 May by appealing over their heads to the full twenty-five-member outer cabinet, which supported him.
The same day the Belgians surrendered. News of their capitulation was broadcast at 8.30 the next morning by Reynaud, the French Prime Minister, who said Leopold had surrendered against the wishes of his government and of the army and made clear his fear that this meant the British Expeditionary Force was lost. Leopold was branded by the newspapers as the ‘traitor King’. ‘From the purely cynical point of view, breaking the news to the British public in this way is not a bad thing,’ noted Harold Nicolson, who was now working at the Ministry of Information.59 ‘It will at least enable them to feel that the disaster was due to Belgian cowardice as indeed to some extent it was.’ Myrtle put it simply in her diary: ‘Darkest day. My cousin who understands French, heard Reynaud’s communiqué and telephoned us, we are horrified. Indeed luck seems to have deserted us. It is a ghastly blow. Leopold must be unhinged.’
Yet, miraculously, the British Expeditionary Force was not lost. The Admiralty thought they would have a window of just two days before the Germans overran Dunkirk, and expected to be able to rescue 45,000 men at best. The Allied forces held on, however, and, despite the relentless German bombardment, the rescue continued throughout the week. When the King saw Anthony Eden, who had returned to the government and was now Secretary of State for War, on 29 May he told him 30,000 men had been evacuated in the previous forty-eight hours.60 Each evening thereafter the King chronicled in his diary the number rescued: by the next day, the total had reached 80,000 and by the day after, 133,000 men from the BEF and 11,000 Frenchmen. By the ninth day, a total of 338,226 soldiers – 198,229 British and 139,997 French – had been plucked from the beachhead. Although the flotilla of yachts, motorboats and skiffs was to become the stuff of popular legend, the majority of the men were rescued by British destroyers, cross-channel ferries and Irish Sea packets.
On 4 June Churchill made one of the most memorable speeches of the war – or, indeed, of all time – in which he warned that Britain faced imminent invasion. ‘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. ‘We shall go on to the end ... we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the
streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.’ In her diary the next day, Myrtle noted more simply: ‘All our men off. God be praised. Have met some of the nurses, they have a story to tell which will live for ever.’
Amid the rejoicing, the Logues had more immediate worries: that week, while all eyes in Britain were turned on Dunkirk, they learnt that Laurie, who had received his call-up papers in March, had been accepted for the Royal Corps of Signals. When Myrtle heard the news, she and Jo had ‘a little weep’.
Despite the war, Lionel and Myrtle tried to continue with normal life at Beechgrove. Myrtle spent much of her time gardening and planting vegetables, even though the summer heat in the greenhouses was terrific – hitting 44° C. On 8 June they went to their friends, the Moodys, to drink champagne to celebrate the ‘Dunkirk miracle’, but the mood turned gloomy the next day, a Sunday, when Laurie and Jo came round with baby Sandra to arrange storage of their furniture in anticipation of Laurie’s departure for war and Jo’s return to her home town of Nottingham. Myrtle was ‘sad to see their little home disintegrated’. A few days later, Laurie sent up his first load of furniture. ‘So sad; he looked drawn and very thin,’ noted Myrtle. Then she went off to the Moodys’ for more champagne. ‘The old boy’s drinking his cellar dry with our help.’
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