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HYDE PARK CORNER

The King is dead

Credit 18

On 5th February 1952 King George VI, the last Emperor of India and first Head of the Commonwealth, stepped out for a bracing expedition of late-season rough shooting through the woods and marshes of his beloved Sandringham. Ever the marksman, he killed three hares with his final three shots and came home a happy man. A few hours later, at the age of 56, he was dead.

The King’s valet could not rouse him in the morning. The King had suffered a thrombosis in the night, the aftermath of the drastic lung removal operation he had undergone the previous September in a vain attempt to check the progress of cancer. Outside the circle of royal physicians, only Winston Churchill had been aware of how truly poor the King’s health was, but when news of the death reached him on the morning of 6th February in Downing Street, sitting up in bed in his pyjamas smoking a cigar and surrounded by state papers, the 77-year-old prime minister burst into tears.

Early February 1952. Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh admiring the view from a bridge in the grounds of Sagana Lodge, Kenya, their first stop on what they expected to be a long royal tour from Africa onwards via Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) to Australia and New Zealand. But then came the bad news — “Hyde Park Corner.” Credit 19

“Bad news?” he growled. “The worst!”

“I tried to cheer him up by saying how well he would get on with the new Queen,” recalled his private secretary John Colville in his diary. “But all he could say was that he did not know her and that she was only a child.”

The King’s death triggered a series of procedures bearing the code name “Hyde Park Corner,” starting with a message cabled out to the British High Commission in Nairobi, Kenya, where Princess Elizabeth had arrived with her husband the Duke of Edinburgh five days earlier. Deputising for the ailing King, the couple had just completed the first stage of a Commonwealth tour that was due to take them on from Africa to Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), Australia and New Zealand.

Episode 2 of The Crown depicts the thrilling and quite dangerous final hours that Elizabeth enjoyed in Africa as a princess, surrounded by trumpeting wild elephants as she made her way with her husband to the legendary Treetops Hotel, built 35 feet up in the spreading boughs of a giant fig tree in Kenya’s Aberdare National Park. Many viewers might have imagined that the sequence sprang from the imagination of The Crown’s creator, Peter Morgan. But it was, in fact, based on the memories of Colonel Jim Corbett, the British hunter who accompanied the royal couple on the trip.

“In the course of a long lifetime I have seen some courageous acts,” Corbett later recounted, “but few to compare with what I witnessed on that fifth day of February [1952]. The princess and her companions, who had never previously been on foot in an African forest, had set out that glorious day to go peacefully to Treetops and, from the moment they left, their ears had been assailed…by the rampaging of angry elephants.”

The royal couple were walking along a narrow jungle track that had been beaten out — and was still used constantly — by rhinos, buffalo and elephants. The only human escape routes were ladders that had been nailed to occasional trees along the track.

“In single file, and through dense bush where visibility in places was limited to a yard or two,” continued Corbett, “they went towards those sounds, which grew more awe-inspiring the nearer they approached them. And then, when they came to the bend in the path and within sight of the elephants, they found that they would have to approach within ten yards of them to reach the safety of the [Treetops Hotel] ladder.”

A large cow elephant was standing guard over her offspring. “I was sweating blood,” said one of the rangers later. But, covered by guns, Elizabeth and her husband crossed the glade and climbed the ladder. One minute later the Princess was up on the balcony with her cine camera filming the elephants.

Private Secretary Martin Charteris hurries from the British press centre to break the news of her father’s death to the unsuspecting Elizabeth II, readying herself for the next stage of her tour—which would now have to be cancelled. Credit 20

And so it was, in the small hours of 6th February 1952, that Elizabeth II became Queen while sitting in the branches of a giant fig tree. The moment is marked in The Crown by the flight of a magnificent African fish eagle that appears out of nowhere, hovering and swinging in the air above the Princess, an eerie omen of her fate. This sequence is based on another contemporary memory, from Commander Michael Parker, the Duke of Edinburgh’s naval friend and private secretary, who had persuaded the couple to watch the sun rise over the jungle and was struck by the majesty of the huge bird of prey as it hovered in apparent salute.

“I never thought about it until later,” he wrote. “But that was roughly the time when the King died.”

By a strange quirk, however, the new Queen was one of the last people in the world to hear the news of her own accession. When the crucial “Hyde Park Corner” telegram reached Nairobi early on the morning of 6th February, the High Commissioner had already left Nairobi with most of his staff, heading for Mombasa where he was due to bid farewell to his royal guests as they left for Ceylon — and he had taken the official code book with him. (Also in Mombasa, packed and ready for the voyage, were many of the items in Elizabeth’s formal wardrobe, including the black mourning outfits that travel everywhere with royalty. A telegram to Buckingham Palace ensured that a black hat would be discreetly brought on board the royal plane next day when the Queen got back to London.)

As the cables piled up in Government House, it was Elizabeth’s private secretary, Martin Charteris, who first got wind that something was amiss when he was summoned to a phone in the British press centre. There in the booth he found a journalist looking dazed and white — blankly turning a packet of cigarettes over and over in one hand, Charteris later remembered. The Reuters wire had just passed on the momentous news from London that the government felt they could keep secret no longer. It was Parker who, alerted by Charteris from the press centre, had to break the news of the King’s death to Philip at Sagana Lodge. “He looked as if you’d dropped half the world on him,” Parker recalled. “I never felt so sorry for anyone in all my life.”

Philip took his wife away from everyone else. “He took her up to the garden,” Parker remembered. “And they walked slowly up and down the lawn while he talked and talked and talked to her.”

When Charteris arrived at Sagana, he found the couple back alone together in the lodge, with Philip lying flat on a sofa, holding a copy of The Times over his face like a tent. The new Queen’s cheeks were flushed, but there was no sign of tears. “She was sitting erect, fully accepting her destiny,” recalled Charteris, struck by the composure with which Elizabeth insisted on personally drafting the telegrams of apology to those awaiting her on the next stages of the now-cancelled tour. When the private secretary asked her how she wished to be known as Queen — her regnal name — she answered briskly: “Oh, my own name — what else?”

Elizabeth II left Sagana in the blue jeans she had worn at Treetops, requesting that the three press photographers present should not take any photographs. “We stood silently outside the lodge as the cars drove away in a cloud of dust,” recalled one of them, John Jochimsen, “not one of us taking a shot at that historic moment. Seeing the young girl as Queen of Great Britain as she drove away, I felt her sadness as she just raised her hand to us as we stood there silent, our cameras on the ground.”

On the long, 19-hour overnight flight back to London, Philip’s valet John Dean noticed how the new Queen left her seat once or twice. When she returned, he thought she looked as if she had been crying. But no one saw any tears. Philip’s cousin Pamela Mountbatten, who had come on the trip as a lady-in-waiting, remembers Elizabeth apologising for spoiling the exciting South Pacific voyage to which everyone had been looking forward. “I’m so sorry that we’re all going to have to go home,” she had said as they left Sagana.

Elizabeth II’s reluctance to play the top potato would prove a defining characteristic of her low-key style as monarch — along with her dry sense of humour. As the aircraft finally taxied to a halt at Heathrow airport, she looked out of the window at the line of large, black official cars waiting.

“Look,” she said. “They’ve sent the hearses.”

A memorable scene in Episode 2 of The Crown shows the interior of the royal DC-4 (a propeller plane) as it taxis to a halt beside the waiting line of bare-headed dignitaries in the early evening dusk of 7th February at London airport. Tommy Lascelles has come aboard to take charge of the protocol, and he blocks the Duke of Edinburgh as Philip moves forward to accompany his wife down the air stairs to the tarmac.

“No, sir. If you don’t mind,” says Lascelles. “The Crown takes precedence.”

Did it happen exactly like that? The details are not recorded. But that, or some similar process of discussion, produced the moving image of the young Queen — not Elizabeth Mountbatten or Elizabeth Windsor, but now a newly minted person, Elizabeth Regina, Elizabeth the Queen — dressed in black and descending the stairs quite alone to meet her prime minister and government.

It was, observed the diplomat Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh, “the 20th-century version of [Lord] Melbourne galloping to Kensington Palace, falling on his knees before Victoria in her nightdress.”

When Elizabeth arrived back at Clarence House, her first visitor was her grandmother Queen Mary who had come straight round from Marlborough House next door. All her life, Elizabeth had curtseyed to her grandmother, but now their roles were reversed.

“Her old granny and subject,” declared Queen Mary with pride and sorrow, “must be the first to kiss her hand.”

The following day, 8th February 1952, the new Queen’s first official act was to meet with her Accession Council in St James’s Palace.

“By the sudden death of my dear father,” she told them, “I am called to assume the duties and responsibilities of sovereignty…My heart is too full for me to say more to you to-day than that I shall always work, as my father did throughout his reign, to uphold constitutional government and to advance the happiness and prosperity of my peoples, spread as they are all the world over. I know that in my resolve to follow his shining example of service and devotion, I shall be inspired by the loyalty and affection of those whose Queen I have been called to be…I pray that God will help me to discharge worthily this heavy task that has been laid upon me so early in my life.”

“The Queen’s entrance,” wrote the future prime minister Harold Macmillan in his diary, “the low bows of her councillors; the firm, yet charming voice in which she pronounced her allocution and went through the various ceremonious forms of the ritual produced a profound impression on us all.”

Britain was still in the grip of post-war austerity, and Macmillan thought that the assembled politicians in their dark coats and striped trousers presented “rather a scruffy, scrubby appearance…” He also noted that while the new monarch was being proclaimed “Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of this Realm and of all Her Other Realms and Territories,” the Scots would argue that she was, in fact, only Queen Elizabeth the First of Scotland, since Scotland did not join the Union until 1603. (Churchill later compromised on this dilemma by deciding that the royal style in Scotland would be ER, for Elizabeth Regina.)

“There must have been nearly two hundred Privy Councilors present,” recalled Oliver Lyttelton, Secretary of State for the Colonies. “The door opened, and the Queen in black came in. Suddenly the members of the Privy Council looked immeasurably old and gnarled and grey. The Queen made one of the most touching speeches to which I have ever listened, and I, like many others, could hardly control my emotions.”

Convened only once at the start of every reign, the Accession Council is made up of Privy Councillors (many of them former or current cabinet ministers), Great Officers of State, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, some senior civil servants and representatives of the Commonwealth. Its principal role is to prepare and sign the Accession Proclamation to be read out from the balcony of St James’s Palace and at other spots around the country.

“It was a very moving occasion,” wrote Vincent Massey, the new Governor-General of Canada. “A slight figure dressed in deep mourning entered the great room alone and, with strong but perfectly controlled emotion, went through the exacting tasks the Constitution prescribes. Her speeches were perfectly delivered. After this, Prince Philip…stepped forward quietly and went out of the door with her.”

6th February 1952. Newspapers announce the death of King George VI. “In the end,” declared Winston Churchill, “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…may hope to do.” Credit 21

Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Churchill’s mutinous cabinet considered the political implications of the change of monarch. Led by Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden, a cabal of senior Conservatives felt that the 77-year-old prime minister was losing his faculties, and should be replaced by a younger, more dynamic leader — Eden himself, in fact. On the day following the King’s death, Churchill had overslept and failed to chair the cabinet meeting that he himself had summoned — “being much tired,” according to Harold Macmillan, “with the emotion of yesterday.” Anticipating that the accession of the new young Queen would show up the old warrior’s frailties, his critics looked forward to the broadcast that he had to prepare at short notice in praise of the late King, confident that he would mix up his words or forget his lines.

At one point during the speech their hopes seem justified. “My friends, no Minister,” declared Churchill in his live BBC radio broadcast of 7th February 1952, before pausing and appearing to stumble “– I suppose no Minister — I am sure no Minister — saw so much of the King during the war as I did.”

In fact, Churchill’s human hesitation only added to the strength of his heartfelt tribute to the dead monarch and his emotional evocation of the new Elizabethan age. His speech, which he entitled “For Valour,” the motto of the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for bravery, proved a triumph, ranking alongside the great perorations with which he had rallied the country during the darkest days of the Second World War.

The final scenes of “Hyde Park Corner” depict Churchill’s critics — Eden and Robert “Bobbety” Cecil, the fifth Marquess of Salisbury and Leader of the House of Lords, along with Clement Attlee, the former Labour prime minister and Leader of the Opposition — as they digest the quivering brilliance of the prime minister’s oratory. Churchill was secure as the leader of Elizabeth II’s first government, for the time being at least, as he conjured up the memory of the father that she, and the nation, had lost.

“During these last months,” he declaimed into the microphone, “the King walked with death as if death were a companion, an acquaintance whom he recognised 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…

11th February 1952. Borne by a guard of honour, the coffin of King George VI arrives in London’s King’s Cross Station from Sandringham, where it had lain in Sandringham Church for two days. Credit 23

“My friends, no Minister — I suppose no Minister — I am sure no Minister — saw so much of the King during the war as I did. I made certain he was kept informed of every secret matter, and the care and thoroughness with which he mastered the immense daily flow of State papers made a deep mark on my mind…

“For fifteen years George VI was King. Never at any moment in all the perplexities at home and abroad, in public or in private, did he fail in his duties. Well does he deserve the farewell salute of all his governments and peoples.

“It is at this time that our compassion and sympathy go out to his consort and widow [Queen Elizabeth, now the Queen Mother]…that valiant woman, with famous blood of Scotland in her veins, who sustained King George through all his toils and problems, and brought up with their charm and beauty the two daughters who mourn their father today. May she be granted strength to bear her sorrow…

“Now I must leave the treasures of the past and turn to the future. 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.

“Queen Elizabeth II, like her predecessor, did not pass her childhood in any certain expectation of the Crown. But already we know her well, and we understand why her gifts, and those of her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, have stirred the only part of our Commonwealth she has yet been able to visit. She has already been acclaimed as Queen of Canada. We make our acclaim too…and 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!’ ”

11th February 1952. After her return from Africa on 7th February, the new Queen Elizabeth II travelled up to Sandringham to be with her grieving mother and sister. There she was driven behind the coffin of her father to the local church, where local villagers and estate workers paid their respects, before the late King was taken on his final journey to London, from Wolferton Station, Norfolk, where Elizabeth followed him. Credit 24

Tobacco

THE FATAL ROYAL CURSE

Stricken by lung cancer, King George VI was the fourth British monarch of the 20th century to die of smoking-related causes.

His grandfather “Bertie,” King Edward VII, was a passionate devotee of tobacco, doing much as Prince of Wales to popularise the smoking of cigars and helping to endorse the remark of his acquaintance the playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “a good cigar is as great a comfort to a man as a good cry is to a woman.” In 1878 the Prince, who smoked 12 large cigars and 20 cigarettes a day, gave the London tobacconists Benson & Hedges their first royal warrant. His mother Queen Victoria disapproved greatly. Throughout her long reign cigars, pipes and cigarettes were strictly banned at court, so it was with unabashed delight at the end of dinner on the evening following his mother’s death on 22nd January 1901, that Bertie declared, “Gentlemen, you may smoke!” Aged 59 when he came to the throne, the massively overweight Edward VII was dogged by ill health, suffering from emphysema, chronic bronchitis and a series of heart attacks, finally dying of pneumonia in 1911 at the age of 69.

His less flamboyant son King George V shared his father’s fondness for cigarettes, and was often taken for the bearded sailor depicted on the packets of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes. Suffering for much of his life from bronchitis and numerous lung problems, he died in January 1936 of a viral respiratory infection, aged 68.

As Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII was seldom pictured in the 1920s without a cigarette dangling elegantly from his lips or fingers. Credit 26

Edward VIII, George V’s eldest son and short-lived successor who abdicated in December 1936, was seldom pictured without a cigarette dangling elegantly from his lips or fingers. As Duke of Windsor he resisted the efforts of advertising companies who wanted him to endorse their products, but as Governor of the Bahamas in the Second World War he did not stand in the way of his wife, who lent her name to a promotion campaign by Chesterfield cigarettes. “Our records show,” wrote the Duchess of Windsor from the United Services Canteen in Nassau in 1943, “that day in and day out smokers show a preference for Chesterfield over all other brands by a margin of four to one.”

“The American-born Duchess,” explained Chesterfield, was working hard at the Nassau canteen to entertain both American and Allied troops. “She takes an active part in making her service guests feel at home — [she] cooks eggs and bacon, carries trays and hands out cigarettes.” The Duke of Windsor died of throat cancer at the Villa Windsor outside Paris in 1972, with the Duchess following him 14 years later, having suffered from poor blood circulation, dementia and eventually loss of speech.

George V’s widow Queen Mary, an inveterate smoker, died of lung cancer in 1953 at the age of 85, and Princess Margaret, who smoked 30 cigarettes a day for many years and suffered from migraines, laryngitis, bronchitis, hepatitis and pneumonia, died of a heart attack aged 71. Contemplating this sorry medical record, Prince Charles, a resolute non-smoker, is thought to have been behind the removal in the 1990s of the royal warrant from Gallagher, the 20th-century producers of Benson & Hedges, Silk Cut, Kensitas, Senior Service and other brands. At her son’s suggestion, Queen Elizabeth II cancelled the supply of all smoking products to the royal households. So, in the year 2000, after 122 years, the royal coat of arms finally disappeared from the packets of any British tobacco, cigars or cigarettes.

Queen Alexandrina, King David and two King Alberts

BRITAIN’S MONARCHS WHO MIGHT HAVE BEEN…

Elizabeth II’s decision to take her own name for her title — her “regnal name” — was quite unusual in the modern history of the British monarchy.

Her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria (1837–1901) was christened Alexandrina Victoria, after her godfather Tsar Alexander I and her mother Marie Louise Victoire. She was known to her family as “Drina” in her early childhood, and the accession documents prepared on the first day of her reign proclaimed her as Queen Alexandrina Victoria. But the new monarch insisted on Victoria alone because she had developed a strong personal fondness for the second name — a choice in which she had been encouraged by her uncle and predecessor King William IV, the “Sailor King.” William thought the navy would like it: sailors would tattoo Victoria’s face and name on their arms, he suggested, imagining that their Queen had been named after Nelson’s famous flagship HMS Victory.

Elizabeth’s great-grandfather King Edward VII (1901–11) was named after his high-minded but disapproving father, Albert the Prince Consort. It was as a signal of his respect as a son, the new King suggested to his Accession Council in 1901, that the name of “Albert the Good” should henceforward be allowed to “stand alone.” But modern biographers of the fun-loving monarch have suggested quite the opposite — that “Bertie” could not wait to step clear of the father who had never found him good enough.

GEORGE V

(1911–1936)

Elizabeth’s grandfather George V (1911–36) was unique among the Queen’s modern predecessors in choosing to reign under the first name by which his family called him as a child.

EDWARD VIII

(1936)

Edward VIII (1936) was baptised Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, the last four of his names being those of the patron saints of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. His parents chose to call him David — in fanciful reference, perhaps, to the fact that he would become Prince of Wales. He took the trouble to learn a little Welsh when he was invested as Prince of Wales in 1911, but as both Prince and King, David took the more historic name of Edward.

GEORGE VI

(1936–1952)

Elizabeth’s father George VI (1936–52), previously Prince Albert Duke of York, was known to his family as “Bertie,” like his grandfather Edward VII. But when the time came to choose his regnal name in the troubled aftermath of the abdication, it was considered wise to emphasise continuity with his popular and solid father (and founder of the House of Windsor), King George V.

It is generally assumed that Queen Elizabeth II’s successor, christened Charles Philip Arthur George, will, in due course, be proclaimed His Majesty King Charles III. But it is not impossible that he might choose to pay tribute to his grandfather (and to his great-grandfather) by adopting the regnal name of King George VII — with Philip and Arthur as two other respectable options.

regnal (adjective, from the Latin “regnum”: kingdom, kingship or royalty)

of a sovereign, reign or kingdom

designating any year of the sovereign’s reign calculated from the date of his or her accession

designating the chosen name of a sovereign (or pope), usually followed by a regnal number traditionally written as a Roman numeral (George VI rather than 6)

As she left Sagana Lodge, Kenya, on 6th February 1952, heading back to London, the new Queen Elizabeth II requested that no photographs be taken. “I felt sadness as she just raised her hand to us as we stood there silent, our cameras on the ground,” recalled one of the photographers.