At the start of 1951, Britain needed cheering up. The years of postwar austerity, bleakness and general belt-tightening meant that the general atmosphere was one of virtually unrelieved misery, as it had been since the VE Day celebrations in 1945. Labour had won the election shortly after that on a platform of rebuilding the country, but their much-reduced majority in the 1950 poll was testament to their qualified success – at best – in such an endeavour. Therefore, with limited funds at their disposal and Attlee’s increasing, and justified, belief that his time as premier was limited, there was only one sure-fire means of increasing the gaiety of the nation: throwing a party.
The Festival of Britain, as it was known, was not a spontaneous occurrence. Herbert Morrison had first come up with the idea in 1947. The initial concept was to celebrate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, but Morrison soon realised that there could be a wider and broader purpose at hand: ostensibly promoting British endeavour in everything from the arts and sciences to design and architecture, with a distinguished council that included such luminaries as T. S. Eliot and John Gielgud as advisers. That it would also double as a celebration of the Labour Party’s achievements in office was a welcome by-product. In Morrison’s words, it would be ‘something jolly … something to give Britain a lift’.1 The theme decided upon was ‘new Britain springing from the battered fabric of the old’, and the site earmarked was on London’s South Bank, close to both Waterloo station and the Houses of Parliament.
The Conservatives, naturally, decried the festival from its inception. Churchill sneeringly described it as Morrison’s ‘fun fair’2 and openly criticised its operation at a time of international crisis, writing to his former scientific adviser Lord Cherwell that ‘I feel increasing doubts about the Festival of Britain now that the United States have declared and are taking vast emergency measures.’3 He may or may not have described the festival as ‘three-dimensional Socialist propaganda’,* but he certainly joined his colleagues in voting down Morrison’s proposal to open the site on Sundays, which was dismissed on 28 November 1950. As Channon put it, ‘the saints triumphed over the sinners … and by an enormous margin defeated the government’s proposal to open the Fun-Fayre of the Festival of Britain on Sundays’. His own motivation for voting was not to keep the Sabbath holy, but ‘to slap Morrison and to catch the nonconformist vote in [his constituency of] Southend’.4
For all the Conservative cavilling about the festival – the author Michael Frayn wrote in 1963 that its opponents could be summarised as ‘the readers of the Daily Express; the Evelyn Waughs; the cast of the Directory of Directors – the members of the upper-and middle-classes who believe that if God had not wished them to prey on all smaller and weaker creatures without scruple he would not have made them as they are’5 – it was clear that it was a popular endeavour in the true sense of the term, and one of broad appeal to the entire nation.
It was appropriate that it would be opened by the king, on 3 May, in a ceremony on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. Unfortunately, when the monarch was seen in public – on one of his increasingly infrequent appearances – his declining health was now obvious to shocked onlookers. Channon was able to comment at the end of the month, accurately, that the king ‘is more ill than was announced’,6 although he was typically mean-spirited about the cause. ‘It is not overwork as the newspapers suggest but “over-pleasure”; he is killing himself as we all know, but the secret is kept.’ The so-called secret was the king’s heavy smoking, something Channon described as a ‘harmless pleasure’7 but that had probably caused the lung cancer that was now rapidly leading to his terminal decline.
The tenor of many of Queen Elizabeth’s letters between late 1950 and the summer of 1951 could be described as either optimistic or delusional. She may have genuinely believed, as she wrote to Queen Mary on 15 October 1950, that George ‘is really better I think … it is a great and blessed relief to see him stronger and more able to cope with the many worries & difficulties of life nowadays’,8 but complaints about his declining health now permeated her correspondence. On 12 December, he had ‘a painful attack of lumbago, or something like it, but is better now’,9 and on 7 April 1951, Princess Elizabeth was informed that while he was, again, much better, ‘that flu got him very down, & he took a long time to shake it off’.10 It was the epitome of the uncomplaining stoicism she had manifested throughout the war, and it had worked beautifully then. Now, however, her husband was facing a far more implacable foe than even Nazi bombs: his own mortality.
Shortly after the ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral, the king appeared at Westminster Abbey, on 24 May, to install his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, as Great Master of the Order of the Bath. By now, it was obvious that his illness was more serious than either flu or a chest infection. A few days later, he took to his bed to try to, as he put it, ‘chuck out the bug’, but his condition had moved far beyond bed rest. Although he wrote to his mother two days later, in an attempt to reassure her, that ‘the doctors can find nothing wrong with my chest so rest & quiet is the only thing for it’,11 it was clear that simply removing himself from the stresses of everyday life was insufficient. He was examined repeatedly by doctors, and X-rays indicated that there was a shadow on his left lung. Yet out of complacency, ignorance or a misguided attempt at noblesse oblige, the seriousness of his illness was played down.
Instead, he was told that he had pneumonitis, a less threatening cousin of pneumonia: he informed Queen Mary that ‘at last doctors have found the cause of the temperature. I have a condition on the left lung known as pneumonitis. It is not pneumonia though if left it might become it.’ Although he had been informed about the presence of the ominous shadow, he was prescribed daily injections of penicillin for a week, and wrote blithely that ‘this condition has only been on the lung for a few days at the most so it should resolve itself with treatment … everyone is very relieved at this revelation & the doctors are happier about me tonight than they have been’.12
This optimism did not last. Despite the penicillin, the king was unable to recover his strength over the summer of 1951, and continued to remain an invalid, missing several events such as the Trooping of the Colour parade in June; Princess Elizabeth deputised for him on that occasion, and her presence reminded spectators, as if it needed to, both that her father’s ill health was as much a public concern as it was a family one, and that the date of her accession to the throne was drawing ever closer. Yet few would have believed that George’s illness was terminal; after all, he had been assured by his doctors that it was merely a passing period of poor health, one that could be managed and would resolve itself naturally in time.
He underwent a further battery of tests on 10 July, and then headed to Balmoral for the summer. Here, he seemed to rally slightly, as he went out grouse shooting. One of his beaters said of him that he was ‘still the same laird, alert to every detail, eager for sporting news, pertinacious and critical’.13 Yet even as he said of himself that he was ‘stronger every day’, he caught a chill at the end of the month, and the queen insisted that his doctors head to Scotland to examine him. They, in turn, asked that the reluctant king return to London to undergo a biopsy on his left lung, something he wished to keep secret; he informed his mother on 11 September that ‘I am telling no one about this new development.’14 With mordant humour, as he left Balmoral he sang a couple of lines from a comic song that was popular at the time: ‘It may be that this is the end. Well, it is …’15
In an attempt to preserve normality, he insisted his wife remain in Scotland, but her presence at Balmoral was anything but relaxing. She wrote to Queen Mary on 17 September without her previous optimism, acknowledging that ‘it is very worrying about Bertie, and I feel miserable being up here, and feel most cut off’. Acknowledging that her husband would not want her to be alarmist – ‘he had a faint hope of returning here, and … did not want to agitate people too much’, she nonetheless spelled out the situation. ‘I have been dreadfully worried all the time up here, as Bertie was really very unwell with a bad cough & so unfortunately caught a bad cold, & tho’ he really was feeling much better last week, he was far from well.’ She concluded that ‘I do pray that the doctors will be able to find something to help the lung recover.’16
By the time his wife was confiding her anxieties to her mother-in-law, the king had been seen by several specialists, and it was clear to them that he was suffering from a tumour on his lung. Yet to avoid worrying or distressing him, the word ‘cancer’ was never used; instead, the euphemism ‘structural changes’ was deployed with an obituarist’s skill. Those around him, however, were under no such illusions. Lascelles informed Churchill, without the king’s knowledge, of the growth in the organ and the consequent inevitability of a major operation. It was believed that the entirety of his lung would have to be removed to have any chance of saving his life. Even as Churchill was preparing for the increasing likelihood of a snap election, which would eventually take place on 25 October and return him and the Conservatives to power once again, he was overcome with sympathy. He remarked, ‘Poor fellow, he does not know what it means’,17 and replied to Lascelles that ‘I am deeply grieved to receive your letter and I share to the full the anxiety which you feel.’18
The king was told that the cause of his illness was an obstruction in one of his bronchial tubes, which would require a ‘resection’ of the lung. Given the graveness of the situation, there was little time for delay, and Sunday 23 September was the date selected for the operation, to be performed at Buckingham Palace by Clement Price Thomas, a leading chest surgeon. The king was miserable at the idea, commenting, ‘if it’s going to help me get well again I don’t mind but the very idea of the surgeon’s knife again is hell’. There were numerous complications and concerns. It became clear on the day of the operation that there was a risk of permanent damage to the king’s larynx, meaning he might never speak above a whisper again. Given his lifelong difficulties with his speech, this was an especially cruel piece of irony. There was also the risk, after a major piece of invasive surgery such as this, either of thrombosis taking place, or the monarch bleeding to death through uncontrollable haemorrhaging.
The procedure was a success, as far as it could be. In the early afternoon, Queen Elizabeth wrote to the anxious Queen Mary to state that ‘I have just seen the surgeon, and he is very satisfied with the operation, which is a marvellous relief. Bertie stood it very well – about 3 hours of it, and if he goes on as he is now, the doctors will be pleased. He said that we must be anxious for 2 or 3 days, because of reaction & shock etc, but his blood pressure is steady, & his heart good.’ She tried to be as positive as she could, observing, ‘It does seem hard that he should have to go through so much, someone as good as darling Bertie who always thinks of others – but if this operation is successful, he may be much stronger in the future.’19
She struck a different, more religious note to Lascelles later that day. Allowing that the last few weeks had been ‘pure hell’, and acknowledging that it would now be necessary to convene a council of state, which would allow the queen, her daughters, the Duke of Gloucester and the Princess Royal to take on monarchical responsibilities of everyday necessity, she nonetheless hoped that there could be some salvation at this time for her husband. ‘I am sure that today the King was utterly surrounded by a great circle of prayer, and that he has been sustained by the faith of millions. There must be great strength in such an uprising of spiritual forces.’20
One man to whom she did not hold out any such Christian forgiveness was currently in Britain, preparing for what would eventually be the abortive launch event for his new book. Although the Duke of Windsor had written to his brother with – for him – warmth and compassion, commiserating about the ‘recurrence of that damned lung trouble – it’s too bad and I am sorry indeed’21 and suggesting a meeting between the two,* his sister-in-law had no desire to see him. She indicated to Lascelles that ‘You can imagine that I do not want to see the Duke of Windsor’, who she described as ‘the part author of the King’s troubles’;22 the contempt she had felt for him since the abdication crisis, usually couched in euphemism, here saw its full expression.
Public reaction to the procedure was one of deep and sincere sympathy. A crowd of thousands gathered outside Buckingham Palace, waiting for news of the king’s condition. None was forthcoming until five p.m. that day, when a terse bulletin was posted outside the building: ‘The King underwent an operation for lung resection this morning. Whilst anxiety must remain for some days, His Majesty’s immediate post-operative condition is satisfactory.’
Yet many people remained sceptical about any long-term improvement in his health. Nicolson, who wrote in his diary on 24 September that ‘the King pretty bad. Nobody can talk about anything else – and the election is forgotten’,23 saw Churchill’s personal physician, Lord Moran, at a party at the London Library the day after the operation. In response to his unspoken enquiry, the doctor shook his head gravely. Even as Lascelles informed Churchill on 27 September that ‘I saw the King for two minutes this morning. He was in full possession of all his faculties, and my brief talk with him was reassuring’,24 the monarch was clearly desperately unwell. It was little wonder that on 10 October, a formal meeting was held, with Lascelles and others present, to discuss the arrangements for what would happen in the event of the ‘demise of the Crown’; the matter had swiftly moved beyond the theoretical by now.
In the aftermath of the king’s operation, all his public commitments were postponed or called off, including his long-delayed trip to Australia and New Zealand, which was formally cancelled on 9 October. Two days previously, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip had headed off to Canada by air, something Churchill had initially opposed due to the risk of the plane crashing. Philip took a certain wry satisfaction in reminding the politician that he had undertaken considerably more hazardous journeys during the war, when he was prime minister. The trip was ostensibly a successful and enjoyable one, echoing her parents’ visit to Canada and the United States shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939, but Elizabeth’s concern about her father’s health overshadowed her diplomatic functions, despite her husband’s bonhomie and energy. She was much criticised by the media for looking anxious and drawn, even if she snapped, at one stressful point, ‘My face is aching with smiling.’ That her private secretary, Martin Charteris, was travelling with the documents for her accession to the throne in the event of her father’s sudden death did not improve her mood.
Nonetheless, there were happier moments. At the end of the formal trip, a short visit to Washington was added, so that the princess could meet President Truman. All were aware that in the increasingly likely event that her father died while Truman continued in office, good relations between the future queen and the president were a prerequisite. While Truman and George VI had got on well enough during their brief encounter in 1945,* the president was positively enraptured by the princess; Charteris even went as far as to say that ‘he fell in love with her’.25 Not only did he declare publicly that ‘Never before have we had such a wonderful couple, that so completely captured the hearts of all of us’, but he remarked to the Washington Evening Star, shortly after Elizabeth and Philip’s departure, that ‘when I was a little boy, I read about a fairy princess, and there she is’.26
When her father saw Truman’s glowing words, he must have felt both proud of his daughter and envious that he was confined to his home as a virtual invalid. The election on 25 October returned Churchill and the Conservatives with a majority of seventeen; this was not quite the hung parliament territory that Attlee had been in the previous year, but it was hardly robust. Nonetheless, despite the amity and trust that had developed between the Labour premier and the king,* the return of his long-standing friend to 10 Downing Street was undeniably a much-needed morale boost. Eleven years earlier, when Churchill had replaced Chamberlain as prime minister, the relationship between monarch and politician had been initially strained and awkward, with both men struggling to impose their wishes. Now, Churchill’s presence offered continuity and, it was hoped, stability.
The court circular of 26 October was laconic. After offering the details of Attlee’s resignation, it noted that ‘the King subsequently received in audience the Right Honourable Winston Spencer-Churchill and requested him to form a new Administration. The Right Honourable Winston Spencer-Churchill accepted His Majesty’s offer, and kissed hands upon his appointment as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury.’ Yet if it was hoped that the partnership between the two could recapture the spirit of 1940–45, this was an optimistic ambition. Churchill was an aged figure, elderly at seventy-six and recovering from the first of his strokes; the king, meanwhile, coped as best he could, all the while plagued by the spectre of his own declining health. Nonetheless, his residual stubbornness still demonstrated itself. When Churchill drew up his first Cabinet, the king vetoed Anthony Eden’s title of deputy prime minister, arguing that in the event of Churchill’s death or incapacity, it remained his constitutional right to choose his next premier, rather than having one foisted upon him via the back door. Churchill acquiesced.
It was hoped, in the aftermath of the king’s operation, that it had been successful. The queen reported to Princess Elizabeth on 15 October that ‘I really think that Papa is getting stronger … and he is today sitting in the audience room for lunch and tea.’ Although she reported that his voice was still ‘very hoarse’ and that his recovery was inevitably slow, she was able to observe that ‘he is beginning to take an interest in things again, and once he makes a start, he will, I am sure, get on quicker … the doctors are pleased, & he is a little more cheerful’.27 Certainly, when his daughter and son-in-law returned from their travels, he made a concerted effort to seem more his old self. On 14 November, a photograph was taken of him and his grandson, Prince Charles, sitting side by side to mark the boy’s third birthday, and a general – if premature – belief that the worst was past meant that a day of national thanksgiving was declared on 2 December.
The king headed to Sandringham for Christmas that year, and pre-recorded his broadcast to the nation; his stamina would not have allowed him to read it live, as he had the previous year. Tidings of his health dominated the address, as he praised those around him, and suggested that he had recovered. ‘I myself have every cause for deep thankfulness, for not only – by the grace of God and through the faithful skill of my doctors, surgeons and nurses – have I come through my illness, but I have learned once again that it is in bad times that we value most highly the support and sympathy of our friends.’ He expressed gratitude for his subjects’ prayers and good wishes, reiterated his disappointment at not being able to visit Australia and New Zealand, and praised the spirit of his worldwide well-wishers, saying, ‘We are living in an age which is often hard and cruel, and if there is anything that we can offer to the world today. perhaps it is the example of tolerance and understanding that runs like a golden thread through the great and diverse family of the British Commonwealth of Nations.’28
The sentiments were uplifting and positive, but recording the broadcast proved taxing. Robert Wood, the BBC engineer, who had worked on the king’s speeches before, later observed that the two-hour recording session was prolonged by the monarch only managing to say a few words at a time before being overcome by exhaustion. He observed that ‘it was very, very distressing for him, and the Queen, and for me, because I admired him so much and wished I could do more to help’. Wood noted that the king’s voice, never his greatest feature, was now ‘husky, hoarse [and] wheezing as if he had a heavy cold audible between phrases’.29 Had the speech been broadcast live, it would have been disastrous.
Yet in other regards, his health seemed to have stabilised, if not improved. He was well enough to go shooting at Sandringham, and to involve himself in world affairs, albeit in a low-key way; he wrote to both Truman and his former comrade-in-arms Eisenhower to emphasise his hope that, with the continuing uncertainty of the world situation, they might work closely with Churchill to attempt to resolve matters in Korea and beyond. He decided that he was due a holiday, and so made plans to head to South Africa on 10 March, for what would be pure relaxation; his fragile health would not have allowed any affairs of state to be considered. Yet the king believed that he was on the way to recovery. When he returned to London in late January, he saw his doctors, who were said to be ‘very well satisfied’ with his progress, and on 30 January, he saw South Pacific with his daughters at Drury Lane, his first public appearance in a considerable time.
As it was considered impossible for the king to head to Australia, Princess Elizabeth instead undertook the trip, and left for Kenya on 31 January, along with Prince Philip. Ignoring any suggestion that he should conserve his strength, the king headed to London Airport to bid farewell to his daughter, joined by Churchill. The pictures that exist of him that day, hat in hand and looking gaunt and unwell, are marked by a rare intensity in his eyes; he had considered it all-important to be at the airport, whatever its cost. Churchill later observed that although his monarch was superficially ‘gay and even jaunty’, and drank a glass of champagne, ‘I think he knew he had not long to live’.30 He returned to Sandringham afterwards, and his final days were happy and contented ones, taken up with everything from shooting hares and rabbits to viewing new pictures by the artist Edward Seago. His wife was sufficiently confident of his continued recovery to write to Princess Elizabeth on 2 February that ‘Papa seems pretty well, & I do hope that a good soaking from the sun will do him good. But he does hate being away from his responsibilities and interests – & I don’t expect we shall stay long!’31 After a pleasant family dinner with Princess Margaret on 5 February, the king headed to bed in jolly spirits. It would be the last time anyone saw him alive.
In an emotional letter to Queen Mary* the following day, the queen briefly summarised what had happened. ‘This morning, only a few hours ago, I was sent a message that his servant couldn’t waken him. I flew to his room, & thought that he was in a deep sleep, he looked so peaceful – and then I realised what had happened.’ He had died not of cancer, but of a coronary thrombosis; the blood clots that had begun to afflict him so grievously in 1948 had finally done their worst. His wife had spent years fearing for his health, and now, at the age of fifty-one, she found herself a widow. Acknowledging that it was ‘impossible to grasp’ what had happened to him, she wrote, ‘he was my whole life, and one can only be deeply thankful for the utterly happy years we had together’.32
Shortly after he was discovered, Edward Ford, the assistant private secretary to the monarch, was deputed to tell Churchill what had occurred, using the codeword ‘Hyde Park Corner’. When Ford arrived at Downing Street, all he could say was ‘I’ve got bad news, Prime Minister. The King died last night.’ Churchill, intensely affected, replied, ‘Bad news? The worst’, and burst into tears. When his private secretary, Jock Colville,† arrived, the prime minister was sitting alone weeping, unable to concentrate on either his official papers or the newspapers. As Colville observed, ‘I had not realised how much the King meant to him.’ He attempted to reassure Churchill by stressing the competence and dutiful nature of the new queen, whom he had served as private secretary between 1947 and 1949, but a grief-stricken prime minister could only respond, ‘I do not know her. She is only a child.’33
When Churchill recovered from the initial shock of the king’s death, he knew that he would have to rise to the occasion with a public broadcast that would require all his rhetorical skill, which he delivered on 7 February. He was speaking to a nation poleaxed by grief. When the news was announced, people spontaneously stopped their cars in the street, stepped out and saluted. Tears became the common expression of a shared loss. The king had been a great unifying figure for the nation during the war and beyond. A matter of two months earlier, there had been a belief that he was on the road to recovery. And now he was gone, replaced by a twenty-five-year-old woman who was hurriedly returning from Africa as soon as she was informed of her father’s death.
The prime minister was addressing at least some sceptics. Channon, the eternal cynic, wrote in his diary on 6 February that ‘life suddenly stopped’, and at a lunch party that day, he stated his belief that ‘His late Majesty committed a form of suicide: with only one lung, and a generally debilitated condition, it was foolish to spend the weeks of recovery at damp Sandringham.’ Warming to his denunciation, he suggested that ‘he rarely worked … he wore himself out by fidgeting and doing nothing’. Channon blamed the queen, naturally, for being ‘limited and insular’ and refusing to allow her husband to go abroad, before offering his final judgement on his sovereign. Although he admitted that ‘he could, on occasion, be kind’, his attitude was deeply sceptical and heartless. ‘His death is regrettable; it is a pity it couldn’t have been postponed for a while – but it is not a disaster at all. He was cross, uninteresting, lightly nervous and often disagreeable.’34
Churchill, then, was faced with a difficult task. He had to memorialise his friend and console the nation, but also implicitly rebuke the naysayers, who had always muttered about the king being ill-suited to the role he had occupied for the past decade and a half. It was inevitable, perhaps, that he began his broadcast by observing the ‘deep and solemn note in our lives, which, as it resounded far and wide, stilled the clatter of twentieth-century life in many lands and made countless millions of human beings pause and look around them’. He then segued elegantly from the universal to the personal. He praised the king for his stoicism, his bravery and his commitment to his country, both in the wartime years and during his illness, and went on, in words that have justly become famous even if they employed more than a little dramatic licence:
The last few months of King George’s life, with all the pain and physical stresses that he endured – his life hanging by a thread from day to day, and he all the time cheerful and undaunted, stricken in body but quite undisturbed and even unaffected in spirit – these have made a profound and an enduring impression and should be a help to all.
He was sustained not only by his natural buoyancy, but by the sincerity of his Christian faith. During these last months the King walked with death as if death were a companion, an acquaintance whom he recognized and did not fear. In the end death came as a friend, and after a happy day of sunshine and sport, and after ‘good night’ to those who loved him best, he fell asleep as every man or woman who strives to fear God and nothing else in the world may hope to do.
The nearer one stood to him the more these facts were apparent. But the newspapers and photographs of modern times have made vast numbers of his subjects able to watch with emotion the last months of his pilgrimage. We all saw him approach his journey’s end. In this period of mourning and meditation, amid our cares and toils, every home in all the realms joined together under the Crown may draw comfort for tonight and strength for the future from his bearing and his fortitude.
He ended the broadcast by looking not to the past, but to the future. For all the scorn he had expressed to Colville in the depths of his grief, he was aware that it was now his role to offer succour and optimism to the nation, and he spoke with all the cheer he could summon about what was now upon them: the second Elizabethan age. As he declared, ‘Famous have been the reigns of our queens. Some of the greatest periods in our history have unfolded under their sceptre. Now that we have the second Queen Elizabeth, also ascending the Throne in her twenty-sixth year, our thoughts are carried back nearly four hundred years to the magnificent figure who presided over and, in many ways, embodied and inspired the grandeur and genius of the Elizabethan age.’
He acknowledged that the sudden advent of Elizabeth’s reign was a shock, but reminded his listeners of her popularity both in her native country and abroad; countering his own comments of the previous day, he said, ‘already we know her well’. He then built up to a suitably stirring peroration. ‘Tomorrow, the proclamation of her sovereignty will command the loyalty of her native land and of all other parts of the British Commonwealth and Empire. I, whose youth was passed in the august, unchallenged and tranquil glories of the Victorian era, may well feel a thrill in invoking once more the prayer and the anthem, “God save the Queen!”’
The king was dead. Long live the queen. Yet at a time of personal loss and unimaginable responsibility, Elizabeth had to deal with a range of complex and unprecedented difficulties. And one of these, inevitably, was none other than her uncle, who had been waiting for such an occasion ever since the day of his abdication.