The King's War

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

  A major upheaval, meanwhile, was brewing in the royal household, even though Logue did not appear to have been aware of it. At its centre was Hardinge. As loyal a servant to George VI as he had been to Edward VIII and George V before him, Hardinge was admired by those who worked with him for his serious-mindedness, great administrative and executive talents and his highly developed sense of duty. But he was also arrogant, aloof and an often impossible colleague. Macmillan, who met Hardinge during the royal tour of North Africa found him ‘idle, supercilious, without a spark of imagination or vitality’, adding damningly: ‘He just doesn’t seem to live in the modern world at all. He would have been out of date in the 1900s.’132

  It was Hardinge’s increasingly fraught relationship with the King and Queen that proved his undoing. As principal private secretary, he was meant to be the main channel of communication – in both directions – between the monarch and the outside world. But their disagreement over appeasement, with Hardinge unhappy at the unwavering support the King had given Chamberlain over his attempts to do a deal with Hitler, had cast a shadow over their early relationship and things had continued to deteriorate in the years since. After having been allowed considerable freedom of action over state business by the two former monarchs he had served, Hardinge resented George VI’s insistence on seeing everything for himself – and even more so the Queen’s determination to become involved in matters he did not consider were anything to do with her. He was also uncomfortable with the more informal atmosphere that prevailed under the King and was driven mad by the Queen’s lack of punctuality. ‘He and the King were so temperamentally incompatible that they were driving themselves crazy,’ wrote Lascelles, who as Hardinge’s deputy could see at close hand the deterioration of the relationship between the two men. ‘The situation had become so bad that something had to be done about it.’133

  Lascelles believed it was down to the royal family to ‘cut the Gordian knot’, but despaired of them actually doing anything: Bertie Clarendon, the Lord Chamberlain, ‘who should properly have wielded the scissors, could not be trusted with negotiating a change of scullery maids, let alone of private secretaries’, he felt. So it fell to Lascelles himself to act. The moment came after the King returned from North Africa. Lascelles was angry that Hardinge had not briefed him properly before leaving and protested to him. Hardinge responded by sending back Lascelles a note ‘so impertinent that I had no alternative but to write out my resignation to the King’. Then, in a further bizarre twist, Hardinge himself offered his resignation, too, and his was the resignation that the King accepted – apparently without hesitation. When Lascelles suggested they give his boss six months’ leave before reaching a decision, the King replied emphatically: ‘Certainly not – he might come back.’134 And so it was Lascelles, a more genial figure, who took his place at the King’s side. The official version, as reported by the ‘Court Circular’ in The Times,135 was that Hardinge had tendered his resignation after being ordered by his doctors to ‘take a prolonged rest’ and that this had been accepted by the King ‘with great regret’.

  Logue had also had his disagreements over the years with Hardinge, who, he felt, had never appreciated the importance of his work and would insert phrases in the King’s speeches that Logue knew would prove problematic. ‘It is astonishing that I cannot get them to understand that a speech may read very well, but be a perfect devil to deliver,’ Logue wrote in his diary after one such clash:

  They rejoice in alliteration, surely the hardest things to say. Hardinge’s statement to me, that, as long as the King’s speeches read well in the papers, it doesn’t matter how they are delivered, is so absurd that it hardly require an answer.

  But Hardinge is essentially a secretary used to the written and not the spoken word. When the people hear the King broadcast they know it is the King and hear what he says – but when they read a speech by him in the newspapers – they know that he did not write it.

  Logue nevertheless had the good grace to write to Hardinge to wish him well. ‘In the papers yesterday I read the, to me, unwelcome news that you had resigned from the position of secretary to the King,’ he wrote. ‘This took some digesting, as I have got so used to seeing you & consulting with you ... I am going to miss you more than I can say. I could not let you go, without thanking you, for your great courtesy & many acts of kindness extending over many years, & it would hurt me to even think that I would not contact you again. I do hope that you are soon in much better health.’

  Just over a week later, Hardinge replied: ‘Thank you so much for your most kind letter of July the 19th. The strain of the last seven years has proved too great, and I just could not go on any longer. You and I have managed to get over some pretty awkward obstacles together, and I should hate to think that we should not see anything of one another in the future.

  ‘I hope after some months of complete rest to be fit again, but during this time I shall not be showing up very much.’

  Logue, now in his sixties, was also beginning to suffer from poor health. After several months during which he felt increasingly unwell, he was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer. In August 1943, he went into hospital for an operation. The King, who was having his traditional summer break at Balmoral, was kept informed of Logue’s progress. A letter that Miéville sent Logue on 26 August showed the affection in which he was held in the Palace. ‘I was delighted to get a letter from your good lady this evening telling me the glad news that the operation was successfully completed & that all was going as well as could be hoped,’ he wrote:

  That is just fine & I am wasting a shilling on a telephone call up North, as unaccountable as it may seem, I know that H.M. will want to know as soon as possible & that he will quite likely be pleased to hear that all is well! It beats me!

  Well! I suppose you have got the prettiest nurse in the hospital looking after you! I only wish that I could come & see, but I am very much tied up here & cannot get away for a minute. I am alone in my glory. I came down South yesterday, & Tommy Lascelles went up North.

  H.M. was in grand form with the fleet. He is always at his best and happiest when he is with the Navy. He is completely at ease. He knows their drill and talks their language & I must say that they are a remarkably fine lot of men. So cheery & good natured. It is a tonic to be amongst them ...

  Do let me know how you get on & what your plans are. The party will not return here anyway till towards the end of next month. I go back North in about ten days’ time. They can’t do without me! Says you!! Buck up & get well. We want you back.

  Yours Ever,

  Eric

  Such was the seriousness of the operation that Logue remained in hospital for several weeks, though his stay was enlivened by the arrival on 11 September of a consignment of grouse from the Palace, prompting him to write a thank you letter to the King.

  By Saturday’s post, 2 brace of Grouse arrived, I am deeply grateful for this Royal Gift. Myrtle and my son are coming to the hospital on Wednesday evening, as also are my surgeon & house doctor, and all hope to do full justice to your present.

  I am progressing slowly but safely & everyone who counts seems to be satisfied. As a reward, I am now allowed to write in ink & this is my first letter so written.

  Thank you so much for your thoughtful conclusion.

  On 15 September, Miéville wrote back from Balmoral to discuss plans for Logue’s convalescence. ‘I am afraid you have had a bad time, but it is splendid news that you are really on the mend & that you will soon be out and about again,’ he said:

  Before I came up here for my second spell (damn it!) nearly a week ago, your good lady rang me up & I put the machinery in motion to get you away to the sea. If there is any hitch, get on to Tommy Lascelles at B.P. Our plans are to come South during the middle of next week, but only to be in London for a day or two before visiting Norfolk for ten days or so in order to slaughter as many birds as possible there! It is a very bloodthirsty business this shooting game & I am glad that I
do not indulge! Anyway, we do not really return to London until about the middle of next month.

  All folk well here, H.M. is in good health, except when the weather is bad & he cannot shoot. He then takes the line that the Almighty is deliberately opening the heavens & letting out the well known Scotch Mist just to annoy him personally. I try to point out that other people also are involved & are equally annoyed, but he does not seem to see it that way! ...

  The best of luck, old chap. Keep smiling & come back to us soon. We all miss you & none more than me.

  Your ever,

  Eric

  In a note at the end of the letter, Miéville warned Logue that his services would soon be required again to prepare the King for his next major speech, at the opening of parliament, which would be ‘probably Nov 17th, not before’.

  Logue was discharged soon afterwards and, thanks to the arrangements made for his convalescence by the Palace, was able to spend time in Westgate-on-Sea on the Kent coast. By the autumn he was finally getting back on his feet. ‘I rejoice to say that I am quite recovered,’ he wrote to the King on 23 October. ‘And I am looking forward to attending on you on your return. It has been a long three months. As it is the first ulcer I have ever had, I did not take to it too kindly, but I thank the Good Lord that everything has been a great success.’

  Logue continued to receive comfort from the expressions of gratitude he received from his patients, some of whose letters are included among his papers. A fifty-three-year-old civil servant named C.B. Archer, from Wimbledon, wrote in November 1943136 to thank Logue for completely curing him of the stammer from which he had been suffering since the age of eight, apparently through teaching him to breathe abdominally. ‘It was a lucky day for me a little over six months ago when I first got into touch with you,’ Archer wrote. ‘I think only a stammerer can really appreciate what a different world I live in now. It is as if a load has been lifted from my mind.’ The letter, running to five hand-written pages, gave an insight into the blight that the speech impediment had cast over Archer’s professional as well as his private life.

  ‘My stammering has been a terrific drawback to me in the civil service,’ Archer continued. ‘Otherwise I should probably have been an assistant secretary by now. All promotions are as a result of interviews by a Promotion Board and you imagine what a sorry show 1 made in front of them.’ He vowed that when he retired from the civil service he would ‘join a political party, stump the country and put up for Parliament. I think I must be a born orator! Questions & interruptions don’t worry me in the least now & in fact I welcome them. You must come and hear my maiden speech in the House of Commons. You mustn’t mind if it is from the Labour benches, as I think the Labour party will give me more scope for public speaking.’

  The following month, Logue received an especially effusive letter from a Tom Mallin, in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham,137 noting how both his mother and his friends had noticed the difference since he had started consulting Logue. ‘My friends all say I have “changed” – yes – but for the better,’ Mallin wrote:

  Now I begin to realise that the voice can be so beautiful, satisfying and expressive, it is a wonder I haven’t stumbled to it before. The words that underline all my feelings, and those that you offered before me. A thing of beauty is a joy forever! Sir, how can I ever thank you for making me happy? If you have made happy all those you have taught you should not die unforgotten.

  Mallin said he was due to go to an interview a couple of weeks later, ‘and I will remember everything you have taught me. I will be sure of impressing them’.

  That December brought a cause for celebration of a more personal nature: Valentine had proposed to Anne Bolton, a consultant child psychiatrist at the Middlesex Hospital, and their forthcoming marriage was announced in The Times on 9 December. The ceremony took place on 8 Jan 1944 at Hampstead Parish Church, close to Anne’s parents’ home on The Bishop’s Avenue in north London. Although both Lionel and Myrtle were there, their other sons’ postings abroad meant they were unable to attend. The couple then set off for a short holiday in Devon. Six months later, the surgical unit at Maida Vale Hospital, where Valentine was now working, was transferred to Bath. This coincided with a major increase in his responsibilities as he gained in experience: he was now operating on patients under general anaesthetic, concentrating almost exclusively on the skull and brain and on spinal injuries. Many of his patients were soldiers who had been hastily patched up in the field and sent home for specialist treatment in Britain, but there were a number of civilians too.

  In a letter dated just over a week after Valentine’s wedding, Antony sent his brother his best wishes. ‘My very heartiest congratulations and best wishes etc., etc. and infinite regrets that I was not at the altar steps to lose the ring,’ he wrote:

  Did you remember your lines? Do write & tell me all about it (with pictures) and I hope you had a lovely honeymoon. Mother said you would be spending it in Devon, I can’t imagine a better place.

  As I am the only bachelor of the family, I hope you are looking out for a very beautiful wife for me. I am afraid she will have to have a great deal of money & be able to do 14 hours of work a day, but you might find one. If so, lock her in the wine cellar until I get back.

  Antony also mentioned that he had seen John Gordon, who had been visiting British forces to write a series of stories for the Sunday Express and had taken him out for a ‘most entertaining evening’, during which he introduced him to Alan Moorehead, a celebrated Australian-born foreign correspondent who wrote for the Daily Express, and Cyril Falls, a military historian. ‘It was so good to see him again, he brought back many happy memories,’ Antony wrote. Somehow, Gordon also managed to give him a bed – presumably one that the British military authorities had provided for his own comfort.

  Victory in North Africa was followed in the summer of 1943 by the opening of a new front: on 10 July, the British Eighth Army under Montgomery (and the US Seventh Army under General George Patton) began their combined assault on Sicily. A fortnight later Mussolini was deposed, and on 3 September, the government of Pietro Badoglio agreed to unconditional surrender. The same day, the first of the Allied forces landed on the Italian mainland. On 13 October Italy declared war on Germany.

  There were other causes for celebration elsewhere: the Tirpitz, a 35,000-ton German battleship that had posed a serious threat to the Allied Arctic convoys, was crippled in September 1943 while at anchor off the coast of northern Norway. The daring attack was carried out by newly designed X-Craft midget submarines that dropped powerful two-ton mines on the seabed beneath their target. Then, on Boxing Day, the 26,000-ton battle cruiser Scharnhorst was sunk nearby. The battle of the Atlantic had effectively been won by the Allies.

  Yet the wider war was far from over. There had been a hope that, following the Italian government’s surrender, the Germans would withdraw northwards, given that Hitler had been persuaded that southern Italy was strategically unimportant. This proved to be little more than wishful thinking. The German forces instead put up fierce resistance along a line of defences running across the full width of the country, eighty or so miles south of Rome known as the Gustav or Winter Line, which Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander in the Italian theatre, vowed to make so strong that the Anglo-American forces would ‘break their teeth on it’. The King monitored events with alarm. ‘Fighting in the mountains is hopeless,’ he wrote in his diary on 21 December. ‘The men are in good heart but the conditions are dreadful. Mud, rain, and cold for weeks now.’138 Fierce battles were also raging in Russia, while the Japanese were far from being vanquished. The King’s mood was further darkened by news that Churchill, who had been attending conferences in the Middle East, had been taken ill with pneumonia in Tunis, the second time that year he had been laid low by the disease.

  The Christmas break, which the King spent at Windsor with his family, provided some respite. Among the guests was a young Royal Navy lieutenant, Prince Philip of
Greece and Denmark. Philip had first been introduced to the royal family in June 1939 when the King had visited the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth; at the time Philip was eighteen and the future Queen just thirteen. Someone had to look after Elizabeth and Margaret while their parents were engaged in their official duties, and Mountbatten made sure that his nephew, Philip, a tall, strikingly good-looking man who had just graduated as the top cadet in his course, was given the task. Elizabeth (who was Philip’s third cousin through Queen Victoria, and second cousin, once removed, through Christian IX of Denmark) was smitten. ‘She never took her eyes off him,’ observed Marion Crawford, her governess, in her memoirs.139 Philip, by contrast, was ‘quite polite to her, but did not pay her special attention’, instead spending a lot of time ‘teasing plump little Margaret’.

  Elizabeth had been in love with Philip ‘from their first meeting’, according to George VI’s official biographer (whose manuscript was read and approved by her after she became Queen), and the two of them kept in touch in the intervening years, writing what were described as ‘cousinly’ letters to one another. Elizabeth was excited to learn that Philip would be spending the Christmas of 1943 with them and, before that, attending the annual royal pantomime that she and Margaret had begun staging a couple of years earlier at Windsor and in which they took the starring roles.

  ‘Who do you think is coming to see us act, Crawfie? Philip,’ Elizabeth said to her governess ‘looking rather pink’.140 Philip sat in the front row alongside the King and Queen and Marina, the Duchess of Kent, who was his cousin. The pantomime went well, with Philip entering in the fun and laughing at all the bad jokes. Crawford had never seen Lilibet, as the future Queen was known in the family, more animated. ‘There was a sparkle about her none of us had ever see before. Many people remarked on it,’ she noted.141 Philip then stayed the Christmas weekend at Windsor; the high point was on Boxing Day, when ‘after dinner and some charades, they rolled back the carpet in the crimson drawing-room, turned on the gramophone and frisked and capered away till near 1 a.m.’, presided over by the King dressed in his tuxedo of Inverness tartan.142