The King's War
Page 10
The next weekend, Laurie and Jo came to Beechwood again for dinner; Valentine was there too. Myrtle served them a brace of guinea fowl, new potatoes and green peas; ‘not bad for wartime’. She was struck by how well her daughter-in-law was holding up. ‘Jo is so brave, poor darling,’ she noted. Valentine, meanwhile, who had been under the weather, returned to work at hospital very much better in health.
A few days after Dunkirk came another evacuation of a very different nature, this time from Norway. When the German forces invaded, the sixty-seven-year-old King Haakon and his son, Crown Prince Olav, fled Oslo, together with their government and much of the country’s gold reserves. They travelled seventy-five miles to the north, seeking refuge in the woods as German war planes tried to attack them. Vikdun Quisling, the Norwegian fascist installed by the Nazis as puppet Prime Minister, appealed to the monarch to return to the capital and recognize his government, but Haakon refused, choosing exile instead. On 7 June the King, together with other members of the Norwegian royal family and the government, were spirited away from Tromsø aboard HMS Devonshire to Britain. George VI and Haakon were close: Haakon had been married to George’s aunt, Maud, the daughter of Edward VII, who had continued to spend considerable time in England after her husband became King in 1905, much of it at Appleton House on the Sandringham Estate. When Maud died in a London nursing home in 1938, George followed her coffin with Haakon on the first stage of its journey back to Norway.
Haakon was put up at Buckingham Palace, joining Wilhelmina of Holland, who was still staying there. Wilhelmina’s daughter, Juliana, her husband, Bernhard, and their two daughters had also been accommodated at the Palace for a few weeks before going on to exile in Canada. Looking around at what he called ‘this influx of foreign cousins’, the King, tongue in cheek, wondered, to Wood, the BBC sound engineer, ‘where he was going to sleep that night’.61
The flight of the Norwegian royals, combined with fears that Britain, too, could soon be invaded, prompted serious thought about how to ensure the safety of the Windsors. There had initially been talk of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret being sent to Canada, following the example of the children of many upper-class British families, but the Queen was having none of it: ‘The children could not go without me, I could not possibly leave the King, and the King would never go,’ she declared.’62 Instead, the two princesses were moved, first to the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park and then to Windsor Castle itself, although, for their safety, official pronouncements said merely that they were ‘living in a house in the country’. The King and Queen also slept at the Castle, initially in a dugout constructed under the Brunswick Tower and then, from early September 1940, on the ground floor of the Victoria Tower (also known as the Queen’s Tower), which was specially reinforced against bombs. They spent weekends there as well, but during the week would travel up and down to Buckingham Palace in an armour-plated car, their gas masks and steel helmets always to hand.
Although the Palace was a prime target for German attack, the security precautions were somewhat amateurish: a royal air raid shelter was created out of the housemaids’ basement sitting room, which was reinforced with wooden partitions and equipped with baskets of sand and hand pumps. ‘The first thing that strikes you is that the shelter is not excessively elaborate,’ observed a journalist who visited later that year63 – even though the many readers, who, unlike the Logues, did not have a basement and were instead forced to rely on more primitive arrangements in their back gardens or public shelters, may have begged to differ.
The linoleum on the floor is covered with rugs which neither fit nor match in colour, and the big old-fashioned housemaid’s sink still remains with nothing to screen it. A well-scrubbed deal table pushed against one wall was formerly piled high with sheets and towels. Now it has a small mirror standing on it, with ivory brushes and a comb – in fact, it has been promoted to be the Queen’s dressing-table.
The walls of the room are papered with rather a faded flowery design, and the biggest bits of furniture are two large sofas and two armchairs, which have been brought down from one of the state apartments. They are covered in rich red brocaded satin, and the sofas are so long and so wide that they make comfortable beds. Folded rugs lie across them with large pillows, and beside one of them is a small, round, gilt table. On it stands a tray with quite a small teapot and two cups of thin white and gold china, marked with the royal crown, so that just as they did when taking refuge in a public shelter last week, the King and Queen may have a ‘nice cup of tea’ – though in this case they can make it themselves with a small electric kettle. On another table, beside the opposite couch, are set out patience cards, bottles of mineral water and glasses, a notebook and pencils, two electric torches, and a bottle of smelling salts. There is a house – or rather a palace – telephone. Although the windows are heavily shuttered and sandbagged outside, one of them has a flight of rough wooden steps, leading to an emergency exit. Beside it stands a stirrup pump, buckets of sand and water, a couple of entrenching tools, and two hurricane lamps.
There is a full-sized radio set similar to the one the King uses in his own sitting-room, and the doors and windows have been treated so as to make the whole room gas-proof. Nearby
are separate shelters for the ladies-in-waiting, equerries, and for every single person in the palace, each of whom goes to his or her appointed place when the sirens sound.
It was not until 1941 that a full-scale concrete air raid shelter was built adjoining the palace, with proper gas-proof rooms, and kitchen and bathroom facilities. Security on the ground was barely more professional. On one occasion, Haakon asked the King what precautions had been taken against a possible attack on the Palace by German parachutists. As an answer, the King pressed an alarm signal to summon a member of the Coats Mission, a special unit set up to provide round-the-clock protection for the royal family and evacuate them if necessary. No one came. An equerry was promptly dispatched to find out what had gone wrong. It turned out the duty police sergeant had assured the officer of the guard that ‘no attack was impending’ and its members had stood down. When the situation had been explained, a party of guardsmen came rushing into the garden and, to the astonishment of Haakon – and the amusement of the King and Queen – ‘proceeded to thrash the undergrowth in the manner of beaters at a shoot rather than of men engaged in the pursuit of a dangerous enemy’.64
The King took great interest in the Coats Mission, which he described on one occasion as ‘my private army’. But incidents such as this one made him realize he should also take measures to protect himself. Thus he had firing ranges laid down in the gardens of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, where he and his equerries practised with rifles, pistols and tommy guns. If the Germans invaded and occupied Britain, the King told one guest, he would offer his services to the leader of a British resistance movement. The Queen also learnt how to fire a revolver. ‘I shall not go down like the others,’ she vowed to Harold Nicolson.65
What became known as the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ perfectly described the determination of the people of Britain to pull together at such 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 Dunkirk had been no victory. On the contrary: as Churchill told his junior ministers in private, it had been ‘the greatest British military defeat for many centuries’.
The bad news kept on coming: on 5 June, the day after Churchill’s speech to the Commons, the second act of the Battle of France began as the Germans struck southwards from the River Somme. The French fought well in many areas, but they were no match for the Germans. Then five days later, Mussolini, Hitler’s ally, finally declared war on Britain – ‘a stab in the back but not unexpected’, as Myrtle put it in her diary.
The Germans meanwhile had launched a major offensive on Paris on 9 June, and four days later the French capital was declared an open city, as the country’s government fled to Bordeaux. Early the
next morning, a little more than a month after the beginning of the campaign, the first German troops entered the city. In her diary, Myrtle echoed the disappointment felt by many Britons at the speed with which their ally had given up. ‘Bosch had entered Paris at 6 AM,’ she wrote the next day. ‘We are all stunned, we so hoped the French could hold them.’
During a speech to the Commons on 18 June, Churchill announced that the Battle of France was now over and the Battle of Britain about to begin. ‘Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation,’ he told MPs. ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour’”.66
France’s final act of surrender came three days later with the signing of an armistice with Germany in the Compiègne forest. This established a German occupation zone in northern and western France, leaving the remainder of the country ‘free’ to be governed by the French. The location was chosen by Hitler because this was where Germany had surrendered at the end of the First World War. Hitler insisted the document of capitulation be signed in Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s personal railway coach, the same one that had been used in 1918. He later had the coach destroyed.
‘This is the blackest day we have ever known,’ wrote Myrtle. ‘I heard the news that France had stopped fighting in a bus from a disgusted bus conductor who proclaimed to the entire world what he would do to the entire French nation and Chamberlain. 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.’
It was a sentiment shared by the King. ‘Personally I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to & to pamper,’ he wrote to his mother.67 Dorothy L Sayers, best known for her detective stories, struck the popular mood in her poem, ‘The English War’, which was published in the 7 September issue of the Times Literary Supplement.
‘Praise God, now, for an English war –
The grey tide and the sullen coast,
The menace of the urgent hour,
The single island, like a tower,
Ringed with an angry host.’
Such rhetoric apart, there was no disguising the desperate situation in which Britain, now without any Continental allies, found itself. It seemed only a matter of time before the Germans invaded. Fears abounded of enemy parachutists, perhaps abetted by fifth columnists. For that reason, May 1940 saw a sharp rise in the number of people, largely from the far right of the political spectrum, interned as potential security risks, under what was known as Defence Regulation 18B. The regulation, which came into force two days before the outbreak of war, had initially been used sparingly, with the arrest of only a dozen or so people believed to be hardcore Nazis. But the ease with which Quisling seized power in Norway again focused fears on the danger of enemy infiltration, prompting a change of heart. One of the first to be arrested, early on the morning of 23 May, was Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, who had made no secret of his admiration for Hitler. By the end of the year more than a thousand people were in custody.
The government also set out to strengthen Britain’s defences against invasion. In a radio broadcast on 14 May, Eden called on men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to enrol in a new force to be known as the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV). By July, nearly 1.5 million men and boys had signed up, and its name was changed to the more inspiring Home Guard. Golf courses, sports fields or other open spaces that could be used for enemy landings were ‘sabotaged’ by being scattered with junk. Road signs and the names of villages and of railways stations were taken down to confuse the enemy. Metal railings from houses, churches and other buildings were collected to be turned into weapons. The mayor of Camberwell in south-east London appealed for the gift or loan of firearms and binoculars for use by his local force. ‘We are seriously in need of rifles, guns, revolvers, either automatic or revolving,’ he declared. A week later, in a rare moment of truth, it was reported that the mayor felt very disappointed with the response, complaining: ‘All I have received is one pair of binoculars.’68 For the first months, many members of the Home Guard had to drill with wooden rifles or hone their street-fighting skills with non-existent machine guns. The Marylebone company of the Home Guard had to make do with forty-eight pikes borrowed from the Drury Lane theatre.
Lionel, who had celebrated his sixtieth birthday that February, joined his local branch of the Home Guard, which was based at the Dulwich & Sydenham Golf Club. He, Val and Antony were members of the club, which lay on the other side of the railway cutting that ran along the back garden of Beechgrove. The volunteers based themselves in the clubhouse at the top of nearby Grange Lane, which, with its elevated views across London, was an ideal vantage point. They were an erudite if eclectic bunch, which, besides Logue, included at least four doctors, a wine importer and several local builders and property developers. There was also the local undertaker and another man who was still waited upon at his home by an elderly uniformed maid. Within a few weeks of the unit’s creation, the volunteers were given rifles for which they were issued thirty rounds of ammunition each night from a store kept in a cigar box in the clubhouse. Andrew Rankine, a founder member who later joined the regular army, was in tears of laughter when he first saw Dad’s Army, the BBC television comedy about the Home Guard that debuted in the late 1960s, telling his nephew Ian: ‘That’s just how it was.’
Notes compiled by Guy Bousfield, one of the doctors in the unit, and obtained by Brian Green, a local historian69 contain a mixture of the serious and the absurd. On one occasion, a few nights after mysterious gunshots were heard in Dulwich Woods, a curious figure was seen moving towards the clubhouse, raising fears of a possible fifth columnist. The figure, when challenged, did not respond. Upon closer inspection it was revealed to be the golf club’s horse, which was normally used for pulling the lawn mower. As in Dad’s Army, there was also the inevitable friction between the volunteers and members of the regular army’s anti-aircraft battery, who were based only a few hundred yards away.
One entry recorded by Bousfield said: ‘Very bad blackout observed in R.A. [Royal Artillery] hut opposite ridge at top of 4th fairway from 10.35 p.m.-10.55 p.m. Proceeded on numerous occasions to corner of hedge on 5 th fairway by path without at any time challenge from R.A. sentry. Battery could easily be entered at any time from this direction. Phoned police at West Dulwich to request Yellow Warnings be telephoned.’ The volunteers also jealously guarded their privileges. One of them asked if the searchlight personnel operating the Locator Post had permission to use the inside lavatory in the clubhouse. The answer was an emphatic ‘no’. Clearly written in the log in pencil were the words: ‘outside Lav’.
That August members of the unit were among a 3,000-strong force from across south-east London and Kent inspected by the King in West Wickham. As its members marched across the sports ground, he watched them perform different exercises that included learning how to use a Bren gun, manning road blocks and physical training for the over forty-fives. ‘Of the 3,000 men who took part in the parade only a few were without uniform, and the majority were fully armed,’ reported The Times,70 which called the day’s events ‘a living witness of Greater London’s quiet determination to resist the invader’.
Myrtle was also doing her bit for the war effort, working with other women from London’s Australian community to welcome troops from their native land who had begun to arrive in large numbers in June. Between then and the end of 1940, some 8,000 members of the Second Imperial Australian Force, all of them volunteers, were stationed in Britain. The basement ballroom of Australia House, the High Commission, was turned into a club and canteen with room for two to three hundred to sit, drink tea and eat sandwiches. When a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald attended the centre’s official opening that August she wrote of a ‘khaki tidal wave’ surging into the building, many of whom were
passing through en route to Scotland. ‘Two minutes after the first half dozen came in through the doors in Melbourne Place – where red, white and blue placards direct passers-by to “Australia’s Social Centre” – Mrs Lionel Logue, wife of the King’s voice specialist – was working at top speed looking up trains to Edinburgh and Glasgow,’ she wrote.71
Hitler’s advance across Europe meant new roles for the King’s brothers: by giving the Duke of Gloucester the rather ill-defined post of Chief Liaison Officer to the British Expeditionary Force at the beginning of the war, the authorities had intended to create the impression he was playing a militarily significant role while keeping him out of harm’s way. This was not how it was seen by Gloucester, who hoped the outbreak of hostilities would finally give him the chance to do some proper soldiering. Often cast as the least intelligent of George V’s sons, he had joined the army after Eton, attending Sandhurst in 1919, and aspired to take command of his regiment, the 10th Royal Hussars. The Duke was a competent enough officer, but membership of the royal family brought its constraints: he was not able to serve abroad and often had to break off to perform princely duties, in which he had little interest. The abdication of his eldest brother, which led to his naming as Regent Designate until Princess Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday, put paid to any military career. He retired on his major’s pension and devoted himself to farming an estate he had bought at Barnwell Manor in Northamptonshire.