The King's War

by The King's War- The Friendship of George VI

  Logue drafted his response on the back of the letter: ‘Am so glad you like the effort. It was a very happy broadcast & did not cause the slightest worry or trouble. I only wish every patient would work as hard as he has, what splendid result one could obtain.’

  * Logue described the incident to Valerie Robinson, the daughter of a friend while she was visiting London for the Festival of Britain in 1951 (letter to author).

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  No Longer Alone

  1941 was to bring a dramatic change to Britain’s fortunes. At the beginning of the year, the country stood virtually alone against the Nazis. By its close Britain had been joined by both the United States and the Soviet Union.

  Roosevelt, re-elected for a third term as President in November 1940, was sympathetic to Britain’s plight, and the American people were impressed by the country’s brave resistance to Hitler. But they were still resistant to being dragged into a European war, and Britain was running out of money with which to buy the American goods it needed for the war effort. A solution was found when Roosevelt sent Harry Hopkins, a foreign policy advisor and one of his closest confidants, to London in January 1941 to get the measure of Churchill and assess the extent of Britain’s determination to fight on. The two men quickly hit it off and Churchill agreed with Hopkins a new basis for the purchase of oil, equipment and other supplies on credit that would not have to be repaid until after the end of the war.

  The Blitz, meanwhile, had raged on relentlessly through the winter. One of the most devastating attacks began on the evening of 29 December. From 6.15 p.m. until the all-clear sounded three and a half hours later, 100,000 incendiary bombs and another 24,000 high-explosive devices rained on the heart of the City. As it was a Sunday and the commercial areas were largely unoccupied, there were not the usual fire watchers on every rooftop, and the flames spread quickly. A low ebb tide on the Thames made it difficult for firemen to draw water. At one point some 1,500 fires were raging in a strip of land that stretched from St Paul’s Cathedral to the edge of Islington to the north, forming the largest continuous area of destruction in any Blitz attack on Britain. It became known as the Second Great Fire of London. The Guildhall was hit, as were several Wren churches and railway and Underground stations. Miraculously, St Paul’s Cathedral itself survived the destruction: twenty-eight incendiary bombs fell on the building, including one that just penetrated the dome, which, being a mainly wooden structure covered with lead, was highly combustible. Fortunately, the bomb, having lodged in the roof, fell outwards rather than inwards and was swiftly dealt with.

  Herbert Mason, chief photographer of the Daily Mail, recorded the destruction from his vantage point on the roof of Northcliffe House on Tudor Street, close to Fleet Street. His photograph, St Paul’s Survives, published on the front page of the Daily Mail on New Year’s Eve, showed the cathedral wreathed in smoke while everything else around it burned. The image became emblematic of the message that ‘Britain can take it’ and helped bring worldwide attention to London’s position on the front line of the battle against the Nazis. It was not until the next morning that the last of the fires could finally be brought under control.

  The area around the Logues’ home continued to take a battering in the early months of 1941: in what was one of the deadliest attacks in south-east London, a pair of parachute mines hit Dartmouth Road, at the junction with Cheseman Street, just under a mile south of Beechgrove on 16 April. Twenty-one people were killed – six of them policemen on duty at the police station – and twenty-five were injured. Among those hurt was Charles Jennings, a policeman who lived with his family at 7 Cheseman Street and had been on fire watch on the roof of the station His wife and daughter were sheltering in a Morrison shelter in the back garden, and although their house was badly damaged, they survived.

  The war was also hurting Logue’s business. Many of the young men who constituted the majority of his clients had been called up by the armed forces and were unable to come for consultations. The relentless aerial bombardment also discouraged others who lived outside London from venturing to the city. To add to his woes, Beechgrove had been damaged by the bomb the previous October that landed in their neighbour’s woodland. In a spirit of despair, Logue wrote on 11 January to the charity that owned the freehold of the house, asking for a suspension of his £102 8s-a-year ground rent for the duration of the war.

  ‘Up to the present, I have been able to meet all my obligations at a very great sacrifice to myself and my family,’ he wrote, ‘but the time has come when I am no longer able to do this, and I must ask to be allowed freedom from my ground rent until my practice resumes its flow, or until the War is ended, when I hope that I shall be able to earn a living again.’

  Logue also pointed out that the house was damaged, with the loss of the chimney stacks making the lighting of fires ‘a most uncomfortable business, the rooms being filled with smoke for some hours’. Could anything be done to repair at least one stack to make the one living room they were using habitable, he asked. He also claimed that the battery of 4.5 inch anti-aircraft guns in the golf links at the bottom of his garden that made the ground shake every time it was fired was slowly ‘disintegrating’ Beechgrove and other nearby houses. ‘How long will one be able to stand this bombardment?’ he asked.

  The charity replied to Logue that, as an emergency measure, it was prepared to half his annual payment to £52 8s, with him owing the remainder, which would accrue interest at a rate of four per cent. Though grateful for any relief, Logue was shocked by the interest rate, which, as he pointed out when he wrote back, was considerably higher than that paid on war loan.

  Then, on 30 January, apparently out of the blue, Logue received a letter from Sir Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse, together with a cheque for £500 – the equivalent of more than £20,000 in today’s money. ‘I am commanded by the King to send you the enclosed cheque for Five hundred Pounds, this being a personal present from his Majesty in recognition of the very valuable personal services you have rendered,’ Alexander wrote. ‘The King is well aware that in these times everyone is suffering to some extent from financial distress, but feels that you cannot well have escaped the conditions that are so generally prevailing, and his Majesty hopes that you may find this gift a useful one at the present time.’

  On 1 February Logue wrote back to Alexander: ‘Your letter containing his Majesty’s most generous gift which arrived today has touched me more that I can say. I have been so happy working with the King, that is reward enough and now to have the unexpected recognition of my service is indeed wonderful.’

  Nine days later, Logue followed up with a letter to the King himself, who was at Windsor. ‘It would be impossible for me to say on paper, how deeply troubled I am with Your Majesty’s kindness and generosity in making me a gift of Five Hundred Pounds,’ he wrote:

  As you so well know, the majority of my work is done with young men, and they of course have been joining the forces ever since the war began. I have seen them go joyfully, but my practice is suffering more and more, and that you with all your great responsibility and worry should thank me and help me so naturally has overwhelmed me. My humble service has always been at your disposal, and it has been the great privilege of my life to serve you.

  Your kindly thoughtfulness has touched me many times, and my sincere and heartfelt wish is that I may be spared to serve you for many years.

  May I again say how grateful I am.

  Work did not dry up completely, however, and Logue acquired some new patients – among them Nicholas Mosley, the second child of the fascist leader by his first wife, Lady Cynthia Curzon. Mosley’s description of his treatment decades later, by which time he was a successful novelist, provided an insight into Logue’s technique. Mosley’s impediment emerged when he was a young boy, though he became aware of it only when he went to prep school at the age of nine and found himself having to stand up and talk to the class. As he grew up, the young Mosley was told the way to g
et over his problem was to talk more slowly and carefully. This only served to make things worse by making him more selfconscious and desperate to choke back his stammer. His mother died in 1933, a few weeks before his tenth birthday, and Mosley was taken under the wing of his aristocratic aunts. By the time he was seventeen, they decided something had to be done. ‘I was due to go into the army and my aunts thought my terrible stammer would be an enormous obstacle to getting on,’ Mosley recalled decades later.109 ‘So in my last year at Eton I was allowed to go up to London once a week after morning work. I had an hour with Logue in his Harley Street rooms.’

  Logue, Mosley recalled, was ‘charming to me as a 17-year-old. He was very still and very authoritative. He tried to make me speak in a sing-song voice because he said stammerers don’t stammer when they sing or act. He encouraged me to talk like someone singing, my voice going up and down in cadences. He got me reading by heart a famous speech by William Pitt the Younger which I still remember. It included the phrase: “I am accused of the atrocious crime of being a young man”. He told me to speak it as though I were addressing Parliament. So I put in a few Churchillian inflections.

  ‘I could talk all right in sing-song mode when I was with him but when I went out to get a taxi to Victoria station I sounded completely half-witted,’ he added. ‘I thought: “Oh hell, what’s the difference between feeling like an absolute ass and stammering.” I couldn’t go home and talk like this to my family.’

  Mosley was still stammering badly when he left Eton for the Rifle Brigade in 1940, so the army allowed him to travel from the brigade’s Winchester depot to see Logue for more treatment. He still struggled: although he could bark orders on the parade ground, at other times his stammer was worse than ever – though this did not prevent him from earning his commission. Mosley’s impediment was to be with him for the rest of his life, but he remained grateful to Logue. ‘He gave me confidence. He gave me hope.’

  The German attacks on London continued, reaching a climax on the night of 10-11 May, which was to be the deadliest since the beginning of the campaign the previous September. In the course of just under seven hours, the Luftwaffe flew 571 sorties and dropped 800 tons of bombs, causing 2,000 fires; 1,436 people were killed and 1,792 seriously injured. The orgy of destruction began at 11 p.m. and the all-clear did not sound until 5.50 the next morning. This time almost the whole of London was hit: German bombers targeted all the bridges west of Tower Bridge, factories on the south side of the Thames, the warehouses at Stepney and the railway line that ran northwards from Elephant and Castle. Westminster suffered especially badly: the Abbey and the Law Courts were damaged and the House of Commons caught fire, bringing its roof down.

  ‘In the morning there was nothing left of the famous House but a charred, black, smouldering, steaming ruin,’ recalled the writer William Samson, who worked during the war as a fireman. ‘The Bar no longer stood to check intruders. The Speaker’s chair was lost. The green-padded leather lines of seats were charred and drenched. The ingenious, ingenuous, most typical gothic innovations of the old period had gone for ever; and with them the Chamber, its Press Gallery, its Strangers’ and Ladies’ galleries.’110 One-third of London’s streets were impassable and all but one railway station line was blocked for several weeks. By the following month, more than two million British homes had been destroyed, more than half of them In London.

  On 16 May, the King was visiting Sandhurst. As he glanced through the list of cadets, he spotted a familiar name: that of Antony Logue who, after two years of medicine in Leeds, had suspended his studies and in November 1940 received a commission in the Scots Guards. The King asked for him to be presented and they spoke for ten minutes. The encounter was reported in the Australian press, by the Adelaide Advertiser, which explained to readers he was the son of a famous Adelaide-born Harley Street specialist in speech defects ‘with world experience in curative speech work’ who had ‘attended his Majesty’. The next day, Second Lieutenant Antony Logue was posted to the Scots Guards training battalion in Pirbright, Surrey.

  Laurie’s military career was also progressing. By now a lance corporal in the 1st Holding Battalion of the Royal Corps of Signals, based at Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire, he was being considered for officer training. Among those who vouched for him was an old family friend, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Waite, an Adelaide-born Anzac war hero and director of the Austin Motor Company, who had won the first Australian Grand Prix in 1928. Laurie, Waite wrote, was ‘an excellent type of man for commissioned rank and for any duties he may be called upon to do in the Service ... and his personal integrity is beyond doubt’. Laurie’s application was approved in June, and in September he was sent for officer training to the Royal Armoured Corps Training Unit in Sandhurst, from which he would graduate and be commissioned as a second lieutenant the following February. May 1942 was also to see the birth of his and Jo’s second child, Robert.

  Valentine, by contrast, had yet to sign up but was confronted daily with the effects of German bombing through his work at St George’s Hospital, where he was now chief of the orthopaedic department. While he was there he met Wylie McKissock, one of the pioneers of the emerging field of neurosurgery and decided to go and train under him at Leavesden Hospital near St Albans.

  In mid-May the Blitz abruptly stopped; although London and other parts of Britain continued to suffer air raids in the months that followed, the country was never again to suffer a continuous bombardment of the scale it had undergone during the previous eight months. The reason for the respite lay in events about to unfold thousands of miles to the east. Hitler’s decision to conclude an alliance with Stalin in 1939 had been inspired not by a desire for peace with his eastern neighbour, but rather to buy him time. On 22 June 1941 this ‘devils’ alliance’ came to an abrupt end when German troops, along with other European Axis members and Finland, invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Three army groups with more than 3 million soldiers, 150 divisions and 3,000 tanks smashed their way across the border into Soviet territory, taking Stalin completely by surprise. The aim was to eliminate both the country and communism, providing Germany not just with Lebensraum but also with access to the strategic resources that Hitler required to defeat his remaining enemies.

  When Colville broke the news of the attack to Churchill that morning, the Prime Minister responded with a ‘smile of satisfaction’. Despite Churchill’s long history of opposition to communism, he had no doubt as to where Britain’s interests lay. ‘If Hitler invaded Hell I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons,’ he told Colville. That evening he made a special radio address to the nation. ‘No one has been a more consistent opponent of communism for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word I have spoken about it,’ Churchill declared. ‘But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies, its tragedies, flashes away.’ On 13 July Britain and the Soviet Union signed an agreement in which they mutually undertook ‘to render each other assistance and support of all kinds in the present war against Hitlerite Germany’. On 21 August, a British supply convoy set off for Murmansk, the first of what would be seventy-eight such convoys to be dispatched between then and May 1945; in all some 1,400 merchant ships would be involved, escorted by ships of the British, Canadian and US navies.

  After entering Soviet territory, the German forces advanced rapidly, covering a front from the North Cape to the Black Sea, thousands of miles to the south. Within the first month they had encircled large Soviet forces at Minsk and Smolensk, while armoured spearheads reached two-thirds of the way to Moscow and Leningrad. By the end of September, they had taken Kiev and advanced eastwards and southwards towards the industrial Donbass region of eastern Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula. They also had their sights on the main prize, Moscow. But the onset of the Russian winter began to take its toll; although the Germans struggled on towards the gates of capital – and were so close some officers
claimed to be able to see the spires of the Kremlin – they were stopped by Soviet counterattacks in early December and forced to conduct a slow retreat. A defeat reminiscent of that suffered by Napoleon’s Grand Army more than a century earlier loomed.

  On 22 October, Lionel received a letter from Hardinge on Buckingham Palace-headed paper. The envelope was marked ‘secret’. ‘I have not heard anything of you for a long time I am afraid, but I hope that all goes well with you,’ Hardinge wrote. ‘This is a line to say that your services may possibly be needed here before very long, as, for your private information, the King will have to make a speech at the opening of Parliament.’

  The speech was set for 12 November and Logue went to the palace two days earlier. After lunch with Hardinge and several others, he sat down with the King at 2.30. ‘He was looking younger & his voice has deepened & he was standing much straighter,’ Logue noted in his diary. ‘He said that the deep therapy on his back & between the shoulder blades had done him a lot of good.’ They went through the text, which, according to Logue, contained the ‘usual stereotyped sentences which had to be used’. He contented himself with making some minor changes. ‘The word apprehension had to come out,’ he wrote, presumably because the King would have struggled over it. As Logue was about to leave, the King sat down and began to talk, quizzing him about Australian politics.

  When Logue returned to the palace on the day of the State Opening, the King described how, the previous day, he and the Queen had narrowly avoided being caught up in a bizarre incident as they drove through Chiswick: Gunner Philip Joseph Ward, who served in an anti-aircraft unit battery, had gone on a three-hour shooting spree through west London, killing three people in cold blood and injuring several others. Ward, who had a history of mental illness, was still bitter over his expulsion from the Brentford & Chiswick Junior Conservative Association in 1937 over his treatment of a female member, and was out to get revenge. His first victim was the solicitor who had formerly chaired the Conservative committee; the others were strangers unfortunate enough to find themselves in his path. ‘We had a bit of luck,’ the King told Logue. ‘The madman who shot up the unfortunate people at Chiswick High St did it about 30 mins before the Queen and I drove through.’