On the morning of 13 September it was the King and Queen themselves who had a narrow escape. Just after they had arrived at Buckingham Palace for the day from Windsor, a German bomber appeared out of low cloud, flew straight along the Mall and took aim at the building. The royal couple were in the little upstairs sitting room; the Queen was in the process of taking an eyelash out of her husband’s eye when Hardinge came into the room carrying a batch of papers. ‘All of a sudden we heard an aircraft making a zooming noise above us, saw 2 bombs falling past the opposite side of the Palace, & then heard 2 resounding crashes as the bombs fell in the quadrangle about 30 yds. away,’ the King recorded in his diary. ‘We looked at each other & then we were out in the passage as fast as we could get here. The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. We all wondered why we weren’t dead.’93
The chapel took one of the hits: three men in the workshop below were injured, and although a first aid party sprang into action, one later died of his injuries. The King was badly shaken. ‘It was a ghastly experience & I don’t want it to be repeated,’ he wrote. ‘It certainly teaches one to “take cover” on all future occasions, but one must be careful not to become “dugout minded’”. A week later he was still suffering from the after effects. ‘I quite disliked sitting in my room on Monday & Tuesday. I found myself unable to read, always in a hurry, & glancing out of the window.’94
On the afternoon of the attack, after lunch in their shelter, the King and Queen again set off for the East End. The devastation they encountered was terrible. Among the horrors they witnessed was the aftermath of an attack on Agate Street Infants School in Canning Town, which had been hit by a bomb on the night of 10 September when 500 homeless people were sheltering there, awaiting evacuation. The building collapsed on them; some 200 people were still under the rubble when the royal party arrived. ‘The damage there is ghastly,’ the Queen wrote to Queen Mary. ‘I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city ... It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction – I think that really I mind it much more than being bombed myself.’ She ended her letter with a postscript: ‘Dear old BP is still standing, and that is the main thing.’95 The couple received an enthusiastic welcome. ‘When we saw the Queen that day, everybody lost their downheartedness,’ one local resident, Bill Bartley, recalled decades later.96 ‘There was still an air raid on when she walked through the rubble. I always thought the world of her. She doesn’t sit back pompous-like. I remember her putting her arm round people covered in blood and grime and consoling them. I feel she knows what our lives were like. She could talk and she could listen, but above all, she cared. She would listen to a poor victim sobbing out their heart-rending story, and tears would well up in her eyes.’
The bombing of the Palace dominated the front pages the next morning, but it was not revealed how close the King and Queen had come to death until after the end of the war. Even Churchill claimed not to have known. ‘Had the windows been closed instead of open, the whole of the glass would have splintered into the faces of the King and Queen, causing terrible damage,’ he wrote. ‘So little did they make of it that even I... never realised until long afterwards... what had actually happened.’97
On the day after the attack, Logue wrote to the King. ‘It has been my great privilege to write you many letters,’ he wrote, ‘but never have I written one with such a feeling of thankfulness, and gratitude to the Most High, for your escape from the dastardly attempt on your life.’
It did not seem possible that even the Germans would descend to such depths of infamy but they little know the minds of the King and his peoples, if they imagine such an affront would deter us from the fixed determination to overthrow this horrible combination that threatens the world.
My own work is at a standstill as patients cannot travel to me on account of the constant air raids, and I cannot blame them for not wishing to come to London. Three nights a week I am on duty all night as an Air Raid Warden. Myrtle is very busy looking after Australian soldiers at Australia House. I would like the Queen to know how grateful we all are for her escape. My hope in life is that I am privileged to be present at the broadcast when ‘Triumphant Peace’ is the theme of your Majesty’s speech.
Lascelles wrote back to Logue four days later, thanking him for his expression of concern, which the King and Queen had greatly appreciated. ‘T.M. [their majesties] are none the worse for their experience,’ Lascelles added. ‘I hope you manage to get some sleep now and then.’
A few weeks later, the Logues, too, narrowly escaped with their lives. In early October, as Lionel wrote to relatives in Adelaide, ‘a bomb landed at midnight in a neighbour’s woodland, and did its worst: made his house uninhabitable, blew my chimneys down and my slate roof off, cracked the walls in one of the bathrooms, and brought the ceilings down, besides smashing innumerable panes of ¼-in plate glass’.98
The bombing of the Palace, and of other parts of the West End, did have one positive effect – on popular morale. The day before the second attack, Nicolson had written in his diary how ‘everyone is worried about the feeling in the East End where there is much bitterness; it is said that even the King and Queen were booed the other day when they visited the destroyed area.’99 As one London housewife from Kensington who had been bombed out of her home for a second time put it: ‘It’s all very well for them traipsing around saying how their hearts bleed for us and they share our suffering, and then going home to a roaring fire in one of their six houses.’100
Now, however, it seemed the royal couple were just as exposed as their subjects, prompting the Queen to claim, in what was one of the most quoted sayings of the war, that she was glad the Palace had been bombed since she could ‘now look the East End in the face’ – a feeling reinforced by the reception they received during their visits. The King agreed: ‘I feel that our tours of bombed areas in London are helping the people who have lost their relations & homes,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘& we have both found a new bond with them as Buckingham Palace has been bombed as well as their homes, and nobody is immune.’101 As Mountbatten wrote to the King: ‘If Goering had realised the depths of feeling which his bombing of Buckingham Palace has aroused throughout the Empire & America, he would have been well advised to instruct his assassins to keep off.’102
This was confirmed by the Mass-Observation organization, which, among other things, monitored the response of cinema audiences to national figures when they appeared in newsreels. ‘Since the bombing of Buckingham Palace the King’s popularity has risen, as instanced by one out of seven appearances applauded at the outbreak of war, to over one in three appearances applauded since the Blitz,’ it found.103 A report on 6 October noted that one speech by the King was clapped for seventeen seconds by the audience in a Gaumont cinema, the longest applause for one man ever recorded there. ‘Now the King is clapped, not so much as a man, but as a symbol of the country,’ the monitor, Mr England, wrote.104 The newspapers, which since the abdication had been on a mission to boost the monarchy, also played their part, often exaggerating the numbers of people who turned out to greet the royal couple, who, for security reasons, usually arrived without warning. ‘The King and Queen visited us in Liverpool on Wednesday,’ wrote one shipping clerk, ‘but as they came unannounced very few people saw them. I was talking on the phone yesterday and my friend told me that they were then visiting Lancaster, but as nobody was expecting them, very few people were congregated about. Last night the wireless announced that the crowds [in both cities] were so great that their car had to go at walking pace. One of us is wrong.’105
Yet there is no doubting the impact on the individuals whom the King and Queen encountered on their travels around the country – especially when the royal couple literally turned up on their doorstep. During a visit to Portsmouth, they asked to see a woman who had been bombed out of her first two homes and was now poorly housed in a third. A detective knocked on the door and the woman emerged with a baby in her arms.
‘
We heard of your misfortune,’ began the Queen. ‘May we come in and talk to you? The King and I would so much like to bring you such comfort as we can, and to hear your story.’
Though still doubtful of her visitors’ identity, the woman let them in.
‘I understand this is your third home,’ said the King.
‘That’s right,’ the woman replied. ‘He burned us out of one and he flooded us out of another, but he’ll never get us out of here.’106
Such visits were often lovingly recorded by those who came into contact with royalty. A nurse from Midlothian wrote in her diary how she had ‘just been phótographed beside the Queen when the Queen visited her canteen’; another woman showed one of the Mass Observation diarists ‘a photo of her husband in uniform standing beside the Queen’. The King was in his element: he had always set great store by hard work, and the war gave him the opportunity to give his all, whether with such visits to bombed-out civilians or trips to inspect troops or factories engaged in military production. He also insisted on personally decorating all ranks himself with service medals – something none of his predecessors had done. Before the war, it had been primarily officers who received their decorations from the monarch’s own hand; he extended the privilege to all the ranks and to the next of kin of those due to be decorated who had been killed while on active service. Such investitures, which took place week after week, could be monotonous occasions. For more than two hours, the King, standing on a raised dais, flanked by two gentleman ushers, would pin medals on as many 300 people at a time, shaking each by the hand and exchanging a few words. But as he saw it, this was a part of his duty.
At the same time, great play was made of the fact that the royal family were sharing the deprivations of their people: the heating at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace was reportedly turned down to conserve heat. The King was also said to go around the royal bathrooms, personally marking the hot-water limit – five inches from the bottom in each bath – which he measured with a foot ruler. Such deprivation was relative: it emerged decades later that the Queen and other members of her family each received twenty times more clothing coupons than their entitlement. The royal family also continued to eat well: game, fish, fruit and vegetables were never rationed and they had eighty rabbits sent to Windsor each week. Such details were not part of the official version of events. ‘This war has drawn the Throne and the people more closely together than ever before recorded,’ Churchill wrote to the King early in 1941. ‘Yr Majesties are more deeply loved by all classes of your subjects than were any princes of the past.
While London continued to suffer a relentless battering, the King was preparing to address the nation again on 23 September 1940 – this time to announce the creation of a new decoration, the George Cross and Medal. Many such decorations had been created by previous monarchs to reward gallantry and meritorious conduct, but they were largely restricted to members of the armed forces; only one, the Victoria Cross, was open to all ranks. During his tour of the parts of London that were suffering most during the Blitz, the King had been struck by stories of exceptional courage, but also frustrated by his own inability to reward them because of the strict rules that governed the granting of decorations.
He had been especially impressed by the exploits of Temporary Lieutenant Robert ‘Jock’ Davies, the Commanding Officer of 16/17 Section, No. 5 Bomb Disposal Company Royal Engineers, who had successfully defused a 1,000kg bomb that failed to go off after being dropped close to the steps below the south-west tower of St Paul’s Cathedral on 12 September. Davies’s team had shown great skill and courage, first in extracting the bomb and then taking it to the Hackney Marshes, where it was detonated in a controlled explosion that made a crater a hundred feet across. Like other bomb disposal officers, he and George Wyllie, the sapper who had found the bomb, were not deemed by the War Office to qualify for the Victoria Cross because they were not ‘working in the face of the enemy’.
A few days earlier, Logue had received a telephone call from Hardinge inviting him to lunch at Windsor on the Sunday, the day before the broadcast. He and Myrtle had just got back home: the air raids in south London had been especially fierce and they had left the city to stay with friends for the night. Lionel slept in the billiard room. ‘It was very peaceful and gave us some necessary rest,’ he wrote.
On Sunday, Logue set out early in the pouring rain, arriving at the Castle at 12.40. He met Hardinge, who handed him the speech, which Logue proclaimed ‘quite good’. He was then put in the charge of Commander Harold Campbell, an equerry to the King with the ancient title of Groom of the Robes, who gave him a sherry and took him up the Long Room, where they waited for the King and Queen. The royal couple came in punctually at 1.15, the King dressed in his Field Marshall’s uniform. They were joined by the two princesses, who were wearing powder blue. After a few minutes of bright conversation, the King declared himself to be hungry and led them through to lunch in the drawing room, with its long window looking out onto Home Park and Slough.
‘It was such a happy little lunchroom, and everyone was happy,’ Logue recorded in his diary. ‘It seemed as if war was far away, for a time anyhow. After lunch we came back to the lounge and after some talk, their Majesties went. As he was going the King said: “Will you come along with me Logue.”
‘I said goodbye to the Queen in the long passage and thanked her for having me to lunch. She gave me her lovely smile and I went off with the King. Went through the speech: 12½ minutes 3 times. It was written by the Prime Minister and is quite good stuff.’
The next day Logue arrived at Buckingham Palace at 4 p.m. and Lascelles showed him the craters the bombs had made in the courtyard. Fifteen minutes later, the King sent for him, and they went down together to the dugout beneath the palace from which he would make the broadcast. It took them time to get used to the new location with its low ceiling, but Logue proclaimed the room’s acoustic properties just about perfect. After a time, Wood came down and reported the King had been speaking at eighty words a minute, which meant the speech had taken twelve minutes. They made a few alterations, and when they were done, the King proposed a cup of tea. They went upstairs to the old broadcasting room, where the Queen was waiting. They drank China tea. It was from this room that they had seen the bombs hit the courtyard but, looking out, Logue couldn’t help but marvel at how little destruction had been caused. ‘A dreadful noise, but not much damage,’ was the Queen’s verdict on the raid. Laughing, she described how a police constable, a former soldier, had said to her: ‘What a magnificent bit of bombing, Ma’am, if you’ll pardon my saying so.’
At 5.40, they went down to the dugout for another run-through. Logue thought it had gone very well, although they had to take precautions as the air raid siren was sounding. When the all-clear came, bells rang out all over the Palace, among them one outside the door of the dugout, which had to be put out of order.
As they were waiting the last few minutes, the King began to laugh and said: ‘I little thought that I would broadcast from the Housemaid’s sitting room. I must write a book called “Places I’ve Broadcast from’”.
At one minute to six he was in his armchair, waiting, which was always the hardest part. Then at the top of the hour, three red lights came on and he stood up, walked to the microphone and gave a little smile.
‘It is just over ... a year since the war began,’ the King started, pausing uncomfortably between ‘over’ and ‘a’. ‘The British peoples entered it with open eyes recognising how formidable were the forces against them, but confident in the justice of their cause.’ He went on to describe how much the situation had changed in the meantime: ‘Great nations have fallen. The battle which at that time was so far away that we could only just hear its distant rumblings is now at our very doors. The armies of invasion are massed across the Channel, only twenty miles from our shores.’
The King also described the achievements and sacrifices of the British people, their allies and of the Commonwealth, an
d talked of the Blitz and the ‘honourable scars’ Buckingham Palace had suffered when it was bombed. ‘The walls of London may be battered, but the spirit of the Londoner stands resolute and undismayed,’ he added. ‘As in London, so throughout Great Britain, buildings rich in beauty and historic interest may be wantonly attacked, humbler houses, no less dear and familiar, may be destroyed. But “there’ll always be an England” to stand before the world as the symbol and citadel of freedom, and to be our own dear home.’
The King then reached the main point of his speech: ‘Many and glorious are the deeds of gallantry done during these perilous but famous days. In order that they should be worthily and promptly recognised, 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,’ he declared.
The King concluded on an upbeat note. ‘We live in grim times, and it may be that the future will be grimmer yet. Winter lies before us, cold and dark. But let us be of good cheer. After winter comes spring, and after our present trials will assuredly come victory and a release from these evil things. Let us then put our trust, as we do, in God, and in the unconquerable spirit of the British people.’
After the end of the speech, the all-clear could just be heard. Logue was delighted at how well the King had performed. ‘Despite the unpredictable conditions, he spoke splendidly – in a dugout, with an Air Raid warning on, after having been bombed the week before – a stout effort,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘He was very tired and pleased when he left for Windsor with the Queen at 6.30.’
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