On the 3rd of September 1951, in an operating theater at Buckingham Palace, specially converted for the purpose, a three-hour operation removed the upper lobe of King George V 6th’s left lung. The diagnosis given to a private circle, including his wife, his elder daughter, his private secretary, and the prime minister, was metastatic bronchial carcinoma.
The prognosis written by his surgeon Clement Price Thomas and committed to a single memo was that the king had between four and 7 months. The memo was dated September 1951. The Princess Elizabeth was told that her father was unwell. She was not told what the surgeon had written. In late January 1952, the household put her on a plane to Kenya.
The king died on the 6th of February. 5 months and 3 days. The medical record of what happened in the Bule room of Buckingham Palace on the 23rd of September 1951 is one of the most carefully secreted clinical episodes in modern British history. The operation as it is now documented in the surgical literature was a left total pneumctomy.
The whole of the king’s left lung was lifted out. The standard contemporary description was a resection. The contemporary public bulletin posted on the gates of Buckingham Palace and reprinted in every paper in the Commonwealth used the phrase structural abnormalities. Neither the word carcinoma nor the word cancer appeared in the public record at any point in the king’s lifetime.
Sir Clement Price Thomas, the Welsh thoracic surgeon called in to operate, had insisted before the date that the Bule room be refitted with standby emergency lighting circuits. He had postponed the operation by 24 hours to ensure the wiring was done. The medical historian Ian Coner, writing in the journal of medical biography in 2015, established the technical detail of the anesthetic.
The 2021 pathologist’s reassessment in the annals of diagnostic pathology reestablished the surgical sequence. Two assistants worked with Price Thomas, Charles Edwin Drew and Peter Jones, his surgical registars. The operation took 3 hours. The cancer on the surgical evidence was already centrally located in the left broncus.
Continued hemopticis, the coughing of blood in the days and weeks after the operation suggested to the surgical team that the disease had already crossed to the right lung by the time of the procedure. That was the underlying fact that the bulletin did not and would not communicate.
The phrasing the household used with the king himself was the same phrasing the household used with the public. He was not in his own lifetime told he had cancer. He was told he had a structural abnormality. Whether the household’s elder daughter, 25 years old in the autumn of 1951, the heir presumptive to the throne, a wife of four years and a mother of two small children, was told what her father had not been told, has remained for seven decades.
a contested point between the household’s biographers. Wheeler Bennett’s official biography of 1958, written with the household’s papers in hand, implied she was told only that her father was unwell. Brandit’s later marriage portrait of Philip and Elizabeth published in 2004 on the basis of conversations with the surviving equaries and a wider circle holds she was given the prognosis in detail.
The two accounts have not been reconciled. What is documented is that Sir Tommy Lels, the king’s private secretary, briefed the prime minister at intervals through the autumn of 1951 and on into the new year. Lel’s published diaries, King’s Counselor, Abdication and War, edited by Duffart Davis and issued by Widenfeld in 2006, show him as the household’s principal informant to number 10 on the King’s Health.
The autumn entries are explicit about the procedure. The January entries are guarded. Sir Winston Churchill had returned to number 10 in October 1951, 3 weeks after Price Thomas had lifted the king’s left lung out of his chest. Churchill had been prime minister to George V. He was by the late autumn of 1951 in his second term as prime minister to George V 6th.
He had known the king for the better part of 50 years. He understood without need of explanation what a 4 to7month prognosis would mean for the constitutional calendar of the country he had just returned to govern. The 4 to 7month figure, the figure recorded in Wheeler Bennett’s later official account was understood inside number 10 by the end of October.
It was reconfirmed in late January in the last of the formal LEL’s briefings before the heir’s departure for Kenya. The prime minister’s documented position in the record we can read is that he kept his council. Whether he expressed a quiet preference inside the household that the heir stay close to her father in the closing weeks, a preference the brief on this video flagged as possible is not text confirmable from the published Lel’s record.
What is text confirmable is that Churchill knew. He had been told. He had been briefed. He had been told again. Vanity Fair’s later editorial summary of the period in retrospect observed the obvious. Every politically significant adult in the household and in the government knew that the king had a matter of months.
The exception in the household’s careful operational planning was the public. The Commonwealth tour at the heart of this story had been planned originally as the king’s tour. It was to be a six-month progress through Australia, New Zealand, and son with a stop in Kenya at the outset. The decision that the king could not travel and that his elder daughter and her husband should go in his place was taken in October 1951 after the surgery and was announced publicly in the same month.
By the time the substitution had been formalized, the household briefing circle understood the prognosis. the decision to keep the tour rather than to cancel it altogether to send the 25-year-old air presumptive 4,000 miles away into the African colonies while her father in the household’s documented private estimate had between 4 and 7 months to live was made not in October at the moment of substitution but in the closing weeks before the departure in the late January meetings at Buckingham Palace at which the medical position was reviewed and the operational plan was reconfirmed. The household that made that decision was the household of which Queen Elizabeth, the wife of the king, was at the center. She would not yet be called the Queen Mother. That title would not be assumed formally until after the death of Queen Mary in March 1953.
And in the January 1952 documentary record, she is Queen Elizabeth or the Queen. the queen consort of George V 6th, 51 years old, and the only one of the household’s principal voices who had been there at every meeting through the autumn. Whether she alone said, “Let her go,” in the prosecutotorial sense of a single decisive sentence around the table at the palace, is not documented in any source that has been made public in the 70 years since.
William Shawacross’s official biography of 2009, the most authoritative reading of her private papers, gives the household’s collective decision its detail, without naming her as its solitary author. Hugo Vicker’s 2005 biography written from a wider documentary base of the household surrounding witnesses treats the decision in similar terms as a household decision taken by a circle that included Lel, the royal physicians, the queen consort, and ultimately the king himself. The queen consort was, however, the household member who had been there at every briefing, every revision, every plan, and whose preference on the question of the tour was that the tour go forward. The substitution in late October was hers as much as anyone’s.
The reconfirmation in late January was hers as much as anyone’s. The figure of the household decision in which she was the central voice is not invented. The figure of a single sentence in which she said let her go is the figure the documentary record will not corroborate to that level of literal exactness.
The decision at the architectural level was hers. She had her reasons. She believed on the documentary evidence of the surrounding letters that the institution had a calendar of its own, that the Commonwealth required the appearance of stability through the transition, that the heir needed to be seen on tour as the public’s reassurance against the king’s frailty, that to cancel the tour would be to announce to the press and to the Commonwealth that the king was dying. She had been the queen consort through the abdication. She had been the queen consort through the war. She had been in her own formidable formulation in the letters Shawacross would later quote the wife of a man who had not wanted the job. She was not going to permit the institution to fail in the closing months of a man who had been its loyalty.
The political cost of cancing the tour in late January 1952 would have been a political cost the household measured against a calendar that did not by then lie entirely within its own control. The 1952 tour had been announced in the press of every Commonwealth capital for the better part of a year.
The Australian federal government had prepared the schedule of openings, ribbon cutings, military reviews, and civic banquetss that would carry the air through a continent in the autumn. The New Zealand government had done the same. The sale ceremonies had been scheduled. The colonial governments of Kenya, Uganda, and the Rhodesian Federation had announced the route.
To cancel in the closing week of January would have required the household to give a reason. The reason the household had been giving the public for 16 months that the king had been undergoing treatment for structural changes would not by late January suffice as a reason to cancel a six-month tour.
The cancellation would have required the household to admit at last what the medical record had said in September. The household preferred not to admit it. The household preferred to send the air. That preference had a documented operational expression. The press machinery for the tour was by mid January beyond the household’s capacity to wind back without comment.
The advanced party of equaries had already departed for Mombasa. The BOAC charter of the Argonaut Atlanta had been booked. The governor of Kenya had been briefed. The schedule of game viewing at Sagana and at Treetops had been published in the Naieri papers. The press pool that would meet the aircraft on the tarmac at Nairobi on the 1st of February had filed its accreditation.
To cancel at that stage would have meant a different press conference, one held by Lel or by the prime minister himself, at which the question that the household had been deferring since September would at last be asked aloud. The household on the documentary Evidence was not prepared to hold that press conference.
It would put the air on the plane instead. On the 31st of January 1952, the king, against the advice of those close to him, in the careful neutral phrasing Wikipedia preserves, and which the contemporary press confirmed, went to London airport to see his daughter off. The weather was bitterly cold.
He stood on the tarmac without a hat. The photographs from that morning held now in the Getty Images and Alam archives dated by the agency captioned to the 31st show a man so thin in his coat that the coat looks borrowed. He waved as the BOAC Argonaut taxied. The Queen consort, who had not gone with him to the airport in some accounts, and who was in others standing slightly behind him, was photographed with Princess Margaret.
The four engineed Argonaut lifted off into the gray London cloud and turned south. The first stop, refueling, was Mombasa. The party arrived in Nairobi on the 1st of February. The crowds at Nairobi were the crowds the press had been preparing for a month. The new governor of Kenya, Sir Philip Mitchell, met the aircraft.
The schedule for the first three days was the routine schedule of a colonial tour, lunchons, a reception at government house, a children’s gala, a review of the king’s African rifles, the drive to Sagana Lodge, the small royal residence on the Sagana River, given to Elizabeth and Philip by the colony of Kenya as a 1947 wedding present and built for them in 1949 and 1950 by the Colonial Public Works department took the better part of the 2nd of February.
They reached Sagana on the 3rd. The schedule at this point was the schedule of the Commonwealth tour, not the schedule of a death watch. There were two days of local engagements, photographs with the governor, the routine business of a tour that was scheduled to last 6 months and was scheduled to take in Salon, Australia, and New Zealand.
On the afternoon of the 5th of February, the royal couple accompanied by Chief Justice Sir Horus Hearn and a small party including Lady Pamela Hicks as Lady in waiting drove the short distance from Sagana up into the Aberdair National Park. There in a giant fig tree near a water hole was Treetops. It was not yet the modern hotel of the brochures.
The original Treetops, opened in 1932 by Eric Sherbrook Walker, was a small two- room lodge built into the canopy of a fig tree at a height of about 30 ft, accessed by a wooden ladder. The platform measured perhaps 20 ft across. The two rooms were separated by a wooden partition. The roof was thatch.
Below the platform was the water hole the elephants and rhinoceros came down to at dusk. The view from the small balcony in the gathering dark was the view of the eastern face of Mount Kenya which on a clear evening filled half the southern sky at the base of the ladder with a shotgun across his knee for the leopards was the naturalist Jim Corbett.
Corbett, then in his 77th year, was the most famous big game hunter of the late Raj, the man who had tracked and shot the Champawat Tigris and a dozen other named man-eaters of the Kuman Hills, and who in retirement in Kenya had become a conservationist and a friend of the Sherbrook Walkers.
Corbett would stand his watch through the night. He would not sleep. He would write in the visitors log the next morning the sentence the world would later quote that for the first time in the history of the world a young girl had climbed into a tree one day a princess and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience had climbed down from the tree the next day a queen god bless her Elizabeth slept above the canopy on the night of the 5th of February 4,000 mi to the north in In a bedroom at Sandringham, the king, who had spent the day shooting hairs on the estate, his last full day above ground, went up to bed early. He was found by his valet at 7 the next morning. He had died, on the documented medical record, of coronary thrombosis. He was 56 years old. The household at Sandringham informed the
household in London. The household in London informed the BBC. The BBC announcement was made at a quarter 11 on the morning of the 6th of February. The household in London then informed the foreign office, the Commonwealth Office and Government House Nairobi. But the household in London had reckoned without the cipher books.
The telegram from Buckingham Palace to Government House Nairobi was by long-standing protocol encoded and the cipher books that would have enabled Government House to read the telegram on receipt had been taken by an officer on a routine errand to Mombasa. The telegram sat at government house for 4 hours unreadable.
The news of the king’s death traveled in the meantime by faster means. A Reuters cable reached the Nairobi office of the East African Standard Midm morning local time. A reporter for the paper named Granville Roberts walked over to the Outspan Hotel in Na where the Princess Elizabeth’s assistant private secretary, Sir Martin Charterus, was having a lunch drink.
Roberts told Charterus the king had died. Charterus asked him for the source. The source was Reuters. Charterus waited. Within the hour, government house had decoded its telegram and telephoned the outspan with the formal confirmation. Charterus then took the next call. He telephoned Sagana Lodge. The Duke of Edinburgh answered.
Charterus asked Commander Michael Parker, Philip’s Equiry, the Australian-born Royal Navy officer who had been Philip’s right hand since 1947, to break the news to Philillip directly. Parker found Philillip lying down in the early afternoon heat. He woke him. He told him. Phillip looked, Parker would later recall, as if you dropped half the world on him.
It was approximately 2:00 in the afternoon, local Kenya time. Philip got up, dressed, and went out into the gardens of Sagana Lodge to find his wife. He did not, in the account Parker gave to Giles Brandth 52 years later, immediately tell her. He took her up to the long lawn in front of the lodge. They walked up and down.
They walked, in Parker’s recollection, the length of the lawn and back more than once. Philillip talked and talked and talked to her. At a/4 to 3 local time on the 6th of February 1952, Princess Elizabeth understood that her father had died and that she was in the technical constitutional moment of her father’s death some hours earlier the queen of England and the head of the Commonwealth.
Lady Pamela Hicks, the lady in waiting, who was in the house and would record the moment in her 2012 memoir, Daughter of Empire, met her shortly afterwards inside the lodge. She instinctively gave her a hug, she would write, but quickly remembering that she was now queen, I dropped to a deep curtsy. In London on the same morning, the queen consort had been at Sandringham.
The valet’s discovery of the king had set in motion the routine of a great house in shock. The doctor summoned the chaplain, the immediate retinue, the household telegrams. The Norfolk House in the early morning of the 6th of February was a house of 70 or 80 staff, household and estate, and the news moved through it in the careful concentric rings of a great house death.
The personal valet first, then the duty footman, then the page, then the doctor, then the chaplain, then the steward, then the queen consort, then the younger daughter, Princess Margaret. The morning routine, the trays brought up, the curtains drawn, the dressing, was in the documented household routine of the period, the routine of the household quietly stalled.
By the late morning, the queen consort was in the bedroom. By the early afternoon, she had spoken to Princess Margaret, who had been at Sandrreenham with her parents through the winter. The Sandrreenham household was of necessity the household that had to take the formal first steps. The official confirmation to Buckingham Palace, the formal medical certification of death, the notification to the Earl Marshall that the state machinery of a royal funeral was now in motion.
The Queen consort on the documentary record of household practice in such moments was the principal mover. The sentence she said to Margaret on the morning of the 7th of February in the dining room at Sandringham would not be published until 43 years later when Margaret would tell it to the biographer Robert Lacy for his volume Royal issued in 2002.
The sentence was about a photograph and a mantlepiece. The sentence has been told in another video. In the wider context of this one, the sentence is the moment at which the queen consort began the work of widowhood. The work in the prosecutorial reading the biographer Lady Colin Campbell would later make of the institutional reorganization of the household around herself.
The household decision to keep the tour taken in October and reconfirmed in late January had been the first act of that institutional reorganization. The sentence about the mantelpiece was the second. The 14-month occupation of Buckingham Palace would be the third. The coup’s overdraft, the Townsend matter, the Charles and Camila hosting at Burkhall, the 50 years of widowhood, every subsequent act would proceed from the architecture set at the household level in the autumn and winter of 1951 and 1952.
The decision to put the air on the plane to Kenya was the first stone of that wall. The flight back from Africa retraced the outward route in reverse. The queen, for she was now in everything but the formal proclamation. The queen left Sagana Lodge in the late afternoon of the 6th of February, was driven to Nanuki, and from there flew by Dakota to Antebi in Uganda.
At Intebi, the larger BAC Argonaut, the Atlanta registration G A LHK, was waiting for the long flight north. The aircraft refueled and lifted off into the East African dusk. The route the household had chosen avoided Egyptian airspace. The Suez situation was already tense, and the household preferred not to overfly.
The Argonaut therefore tracked northwest across the Sudan to Eladm in Libya, refueled a second time, and then turned for England. The flight took the better part of a day and a night as the aircraft began its descent over the southern English coast. The wardrobe problem the household had not anticipated became for the first time a logistical problem.
There were no morning clothes in the new queen’s luggage. The wardrobe she had packed for a six-month Commonwealth tour was the wardrobe of a six-month Commonwealth tour. It was light. It was tropical. It was, in Lady Pamela Hicks own later inventory, the wardrobe of a woman who would be in son in March, in Australia in April, and in New Zealand in May.
The dress in which the new queen had boarded the aircraft was by Hicks account in Daughter of Empire a beige dress with white shoes. The shoes had been ordered to her summer outfits. The dress had been ordered to her summer outfits. The new monarch of the United Kingdom and the head of the Commonwealth was as the aircraft began its descent into London airport dressed for the equator.
A black dress was rushed to the aircraft by the household at Heathrow, brought aboard at the last possible moment before the cabin door was opened. A black dress was smuggled on board, Hicks would write, because we didn’t have one, so she had to change very quickly. The change happened in the cabin. The new queen stepped down the steps of the Argonaut in a black coat with the flame lily brooch given to her in Salsbury, southern Rhodesia on the 7th of April, 1947 by 42,000 school children who had each contributed a tick of three old pence pinned at the lapel. The emission in itself was the receipt. The household had not packed morning. The household had not, in the operational planning that had attended every other detail of a six-month tour, prepared for the possibility that the king would die while his daughter was
abroad. Whether that was an oversight or whether it was the household’s documented preference not to admit, even in the wardrobe, what the medical record had said. The receipt evidence runs the wrong way for the brief that this video began with. The household on the wardrobe alone had not prepacked the black dress.
The household had prepared for a six-month tour. The household had prepared for everything except what the household’s own 4 to sevenmon prognosis had said would happen. The queen mother, for she would by the time these things came to be written down become the queen mother, was at Sandringham still. She would not move to Clarence House for 14 months.
She would not assume the formal Queen Mother style until after Queen Mary’s death in March 1953. She would not, on the dining room, evidence Robert Lacy would later document, take her husband’s photograph off the mantlepiece. the household into which her elder daughter had returned at London airport on the 7th of February met on the tarmac by the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, Clement Atley, the foreign secretary Anthony Eden, and the Lord President of the Council, Lord Walton, was a household in which the architecture of the next 50 years had been laid down in the autumn and winter of 1951 and 1952 by the woman who who had been the queen consort and who would now on her own widowed terms and on her own widowed timetable be the queen mother. The question that surrounds this episode in the
household’s later memory and that has remained in the 70 years since. The question that no biographer of the principal woman has wholly answered is the question of why, if they knew they sent her at all. The answer the documentary record gives is that they did know. The medical record is documented.
Wheeler Bennett wrote it down. The LEL’s diaries record the briefings. The Imperial College Medicine literature has reconstructed the operation. The 2021 pathologists reassessment in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology confirmed the surgical reading. The household in its closed operational meetings at Buckingham Palace in late January 1952 knew that the king had between 4 and 7 months in the prognosis Price Thomas had recorded.
The household decided in those meetings that the heir would go anyway. the reasons the household gave itself, the institutional stability, the commonwealth’s reassurance, the protection of the public from the knowledge that the king was dying, were the reasons the household had given itself for everything since the abdication. The decision was made on those reasons.
The decision held. She slept above the canopy on the night of the 5th of February in a wooden lodge in the Aberdair Mountains, 4,000 miles from her father’s deathbed. The household in London had known for 5 months that he had four to seven. The prime minister had known, the private secretary had known, the queen had known.
The decision had been made in late January in a meeting at Buckingham Palace that the air would still go. She went. The king died. The queen mother kept the photograph on the mantelpiece for a few hours more, just long enough to say to the younger daughter what she said. And then the household began the slow business of letting the marshmallow look like grief.
