George V wasn’t a warm father. That’s an understatement of several centuries. He once wrote, and the spelling errors survive in the historical record, “I was afraid of my father, and I am going to be damned sure that my children are afraid of me.” Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, called him simply a terrible father.
George V believed that only by imposing the discipline of the quarterdeck on his young sons could he deter them from getting into scrapes. His quick temper and strict military training made him a near martinet. The royal children lived on edge, in constant fear of their father’s retribution.
But his father wasn’t even the worst of it. There was someone in that household who did something far more deliberate. Someone who operated in the nursery, beyond the sight of parents who rarely visited anyway. Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George was born at 3:05 in the morning on December 14th, 1895, at York Cottage on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk.
The date itself carried a burden. It was the 34th anniversary of the death of his great-grandfather, Prince Albert, the Prince Consort. Queen Victoria considered it unlucky. When the Prince of Wales wrote to tell his mother about the new baby, she was rather distressed by the timing. Two days later, he wrote again, suggesting they name the child Albert, which mollified the aging queen somewhat.
The baby was christened Albert Frederick Arthur George at St. Mary Magdalene Church near Sandringham 3 months later. Within the family, he was known as Bertie. He was fourth in line to the throne after his grandfather, his father, and his elder brother Edward, born the previous year in 1894. No one expected the second son to matter much.
In aristocratic households of that era, parents were generally removed from their children’s day-to-day upbringing. The daily care of young children was given to paid functionaries, nurses, nannies, governesses whose authority over the nursery was nearly absolute. What happened in those rooms stayed in those rooms. Children’s upbringing depended not upon their parents, but upon the temperament of their nannies.
And Prince Albert’s head nanny had a particular temperament. Her name has been lost to careful historical editing. Some sources identify her as Mary Peters. Others call her Mrs. Green. The most authoritative historical accounts, including the Wikipedia entry on Charlotte Bill, leave her unnamed entirely, which tells you something about how thoroughly the institution closed ranks around this scandal.
What we know for certain is that she was employed as the head nurse in the royal household beginning around 1894, when Prince Edward was born. She remained in that position through Prince Albert’s birth in December 1895, and continued caring for both boys through his infancy. She showed deep affection for Edward, the elder son, the heir apparent.
She was obsessively possessive of him. But Prince Albert, the spare, the second son, the one who wasn’t supposed to matter, incurred her disdain. She tossed him into his crib. She neglected him to the point that he became ill. One historical account describes cycles of withholding nourishment followed by overfeeding until the infant became sick.
The feeding irregularities were severe enough to cause lifelong digestive issues. In a palace with unlimited food, unlimited staff, unlimited resources, the second son of the Duke of York grew thin and sickly because the person responsible for his care chose not to care for him. The mechanism of control she employed was perverse in its effectiveness.
When it came time for the daily visit, that brief window when the Duke and Duchess of York would see their children, the nanny would pinch Prince Edward savagely. She pinched him hard enough to make him cry. Hard enough that when his parents received him, he was wailing and inconsolable. The natural response of any parent faced with a screaming infant is to return the child to the nursery, which is exactly what happened every time.
The crying baby went back to the nanny. The parents concluded their children were fussy, difficult, unpleasant to be around. The nanny’s exclusive control was reinforced. Edward showed bruises. This abuse continued for approximately the first 2 years of Prince Albert’s life. It ended only because someone was watching.
Charlotte Jane Bill was born in 1875 and trained in the traditional English manner of child care. She worked as an under nurse, subordinate to the head nurse in the household hierarchy. She observed the pinching. She observed the neglect. She saw what was happening to these children, and unlike everyone else in that household, she did something about it.
In the autumn of 1897, when Prince Albert was approximately 2 years old, Charlotte Bill raised concerns that reached the right ears. The head nurse was dismissed from royal service immediately. Bill herself was promoted to take her position as head nurse. Charlotte Bill would remain devoted to the royal children throughout their youth.
She became particularly close to Prince John, the youngest son born in 1905, who was diagnosed with epilepsy at age 4. John was eventually isolated at Sandringham, kept away from public view due to the stigma of his condition, and he died at 13 from a severe seizure in 1919. Charlotte Bill cared for him in his isolation until the end.
Another child the institution didn’t quite know what to do with. Another example of how the royal household handled its imperfect members. But by the time Charlotte Bill arrived as head nurse, the damage to Prince Albert had been done. He had been systematically neglected by his primary caregiver for the first 2 years of his life.
He had been denied proper nourishment during critical developmental periods. He had been denied affection. He had watched his brother receive the obsessive attention he was starved for. And then he was handed over to his father’s care. The physical evidence of his difficult childhood was written on his body.
From the age of 8, Prince Albert was forced to wear corrective splints on his legs to address his knock-knees, a condition he shared with his father and grandfather, passed down through the family line. But the hereditary condition may have been worsened by nutritional deficiencies during infancy. Rickets, a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency and malnutrition, was historically known as the English disease, prevalent in Victorian and Edwardian England due to poor nutrition and lack of sunlight. The condition causes bone deformities, including the characteristic bowing or knocking of the legs. The treatment available in 1903 was brutal. Prince Albert wore splints described by contemporaries as agonizing and painful. They were metal devices strapped to a young boy’s legs, worn through the night, worn through the day, a constant physical reminder that his
body was wrong and needed fixing. One account from the era describes the experience. “They were still treating knock-knees the same way they did in 1900, with splints. At night, I had to go to bed with my legs strapped. The splints didn’t just cause physical pain. They reinforced the message that this wasn’t the robust son who would appeal to the hearty king.
Prince Albert was thin and frail. He was easily frightened and somewhat prone to tears. He had chronic stomach problems that traced back to those irregular feedings in the nursery. He was naturally left-handed, but he was forced to write with his right hand, as was common practice at the time. This forced switch is itself associated with increased stammering in children.
Another piece of institutional correction that may have compounded his difficulties. The stammer appeared around 1909 and persisted into adulthood. It became the defining challenge of his public life. Modern speech therapy research tells us that psychological factors don’t cause stuttering.
They’re a neuromotor issue with origins separate from trauma. A University of Washington expert on stuttering notes that psychological factors don’t cause stuttering. They’re a result. But what trauma does, what fear does, what growing up terrorized by your father and neglected by your caregiver does, is make everything worse.
It creates psychological barriers that compound the physical difficulty. It makes treatment It makes speaking more frightening. It makes every public occasion an ordeal. One historical account puts it bluntly. The reason George VI had such a stammer was because he was terrified to speak to his father when he was young.
Beginning in 1909, Prince Albert attended the Royal Naval College at Osborne as a naval cadet. He came bottom of his class in the final examination in 1911, but he progressed to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth regardless. When his grandfather Edward VII died in 1910, his father became King George V.
His elder brother Edward was invested as Prince of Wales. Prince Albert was now second in line to the throne. He spent the first 6 months of 1913 on the training ship HMS Cumberland in the West Indies and on the eastern coast of Canada. He was rated as a midshipman aboard HMS Collingwood on September 15th, 1913.
He spent 3 months in the Mediterranean, but never overcame his seasickness. 3 weeks after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, he was medically evacuated from the ship to Aberdeen, where his appendix was removed by surgeon John Marnock. Prince Albert wanted to serve despite his health problems.
In 1916, he saw combat during the Battle of Jutland, the great naval battle of the war, and was mentioned in dispatches for his actions as a turret officer. He didn’t see further combat, largely because of ill health caused by a duodenal ulcer, for which he had an operation in November 1917. In February 1918, he was appointed officer in charge of boys at the Royal Naval Air Services training establishment at Cranwell.
2 months later, with the establishment of the Royal Air Force, he transferred from the Royal Navy to the new service. He completed training and took command of a squadron on the cadet wing. He became the first member of the British royal family to be certified as a fully qualified pilot on July 31st, 1919, and was promoted to squadron leader the following day.
In October 1919, Prince Albert attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history, economics, and civics for a year. On June 4th, 1920, King George V created him Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, and Baron Killarney. He began taking on more royal duties, visiting coal mines, factories, and rail yards.
Through such visits, he acquired the nickname the industrial prince. He developed an interest in working conditions and became president of the Industrial Welfare Society. His series of annual summer camps from 1921 to 1939 brought together boys from different social backgrounds. The stammering, anxious duke working to bridge class divides in a way the institution rarely attempted.
His stammer and his embarrassment over it, together with his tendency to shyness, caused him to appear much less impressive than his older brother Edward. But he was physically active and enjoyed playing tennis. In 1926, he played at Wimbledon in the men’s doubles with Louis Greig, losing in the first round. In 1920, Albert met Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon for the first time since childhood.
She was the youngest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, technically a commoner under British law, though descended from King Robert the Bruce and King Henry VII. He became determined to marry her. She rejected his proposal twice, in 1921 and 1922, reportedly reluctant to make the sacrifices necessary to become a member of the royal family.
Perhaps she sensed something about what that family did to its members. In the words of Lady Strathmore, Albert would be made or marred by his choice of wife. After a protracted courtship, Elizabeth finally agreed. They were married on April 26th, 1923 at Westminster Abbey. His marriage to a British commoner was considered a modernizing gesture.
The newly formed British Broadcasting Company wished to record and broadcast the event on radio, but the Abbey chapter vetoed the idea, though the Dean, Herbert Edward Ryle, was in favor. From December 1924 to April 1925, the Duke and Duchess of York toured Kenya, Uganda, and the Sudan, traveling via the Suez Canal and Aden.
During the trip, they both went big game hunting. Upon their return, the Duke faced one of the greatest ordeals of his life. On October 31st, 1925, he delivered the closing speech at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The speech was broadcast live by radio. It proved an ordeal for speaker and listeners alike.
The stammering was severe, the silences painful, the experience humiliating for the Duke, and agonizing for everyone who heard it. Something had to change. Lionel George Logue was born on February 26th, 1880 in College Town, South Australia. He was trained as an elocutionist, not a doctor, a distinction that mattered to the medical establishment, which initially dismissed him as a quack.
But Logue had developed his methods treating shell-shocked Australian soldiers returning from the First World War, men whose voices had been locked by trauma. His approach was part physical therapy, part psychology. He focused on breathing techniques and vowel work, but he also addressed what he called deep-seated insecurities by focusing on significant past traumas.
In 1926, Logue opened a speech defect practice at 146 Harley Street in London. The Duke of York sought his help after the Wembley disaster. Their first consultation was recorded in Logue’s diaries in October 1926. “He entered my consulting room,” Logue wrote, “a slim, quiet man.” Logue diagnosed poor coordination between the Duke’s larynx and thoracic diaphragm.
He prescribed a daily hour of vocal exercises, but more importantly, Logue’s treatment gave the Duke confidence, the confidence to relax, to avoid the tension-induced muscle spasms that made the stammer worse. Logue insisted on addressing the Duke as Bertie, much to the Duke’s initial discomfort. He also insisted that their consultations take place at his Harley Street office, rather than at the palace, in order to make the atmosphere less formal.
Over the next 10 months, the two men met on 82 occasions, each session lasting an hour. The Duchess rehearsed with her husband patiently. Logue noted that Bertie was imbued with confidence after their first meeting. Subsequently, the Duke was able to speak with less hesitation. With his delivery improved, Albert opened the new Parliament House in Canberra, Australia during a tour of the Empire with his wife in 1927.
He managed the address without severe stammering. Their journey by sea on HMS Renown to Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji took them via Jamaica, where Albert played doubles tennis partnered with a black man, Bertram Clark, unusual at the time and taken locally as a display of equality between races. The Duke and Duchess had two daughters, Elizabeth, born on April 21st, 1926 and called Lilibet by the family, and Margaret, born on August 21st, 1930.
The family lived at 145 Piccadilly in London, then at White Lodge in Richmond Park, a relatively sheltered life by royal standards. They were devoted parents, close and warm with their daughters in a way that would have been unrecognizable to anyone who knew how the Duke had been raised.
King George V had severe reservations about his eldest son Edward, the Prince of Wales. “After I am dead,” he reportedly said, “the boy will ruin himself in 12 months.” He also said, more prophetically than he knew, “I pray God that my eldest son will never marry and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne.
” George V died on January 20th, 1936. Prince Edward ascended the throne as Edward VIII. Albert was now heir presumptive. But the old king’s prediction was about to come true with devastating precision. Edward VIII was in love with Wallis Simpson, an American who had divorced her first husband, US Navy officer Win Spencer, in 1927.
Her second husband was Ernest Simpson, a British-American businessman. British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin advised the new king that he couldn’t remain on the throne and marry a divorced woman with two living ex-husbands. The head of the Church of England couldn’t marry someone the church wouldn’t sanction.
The political establishment wouldn’t accept it. Edward chose Wallace. Less than a year after ascending the throne on December 11th, 1936, Edward VIII abdicated. The day before, Albert went to London to see his mother, Queen Mary. He later wrote in his diary, “When I told her what had happened, I broke down and sobbed like a child.
” The stammering second son with the painful childhood and the corrective splints and the lifelong digestive problems was now King George VI. He was 41 years old. He had never wanted this. He had never expected this. Three different kings had sat on the throne in a single year. The monarchy was shaken.
And the man responsible for restoring confidence in the institution was someone who could barely get through a public speech without painful hesitation. On the day of Edward’s abdication, the Oireachtas, the parliament of the Irish Free State, removed all direct mention of the monarch from the Irish Constitution.
The next day, it passed the External Relations Act, which essentially made the Irish Free State a republic while retaining nominal links to the Commonwealth. The empire was already beginning to fracture. George VI chose his regnal name deliberately, emphasizing continuity with his father, George V, attempting to restore confidence.
One of his first acts as king was to confer upon his brother the title of Duke of Windsor with the style Royal Highness. But the letters patent creating the dukedom prevented any wife or children from bearing royal styles. George VI was also forced to buy from Edward the royal residences of Balmoral Castle and Sandringham House, as these were private properties and didn’t pass to him automatically.
His coronation took place on May 12th, 1937, at Westminster Abbey, the date originally intended for Edward’s coronation. Queen Mary broke with tradition to attend in a show of support for her second son. There was no Durbar in India as there had been for his father. The cost would have been a burden on the government of India and rising Indian nationalism made the reception uncertain.
The king was constitutionally bound to support Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler. When Chamberlain returned from negotiating the Munich Agreement in 1938, George VI and Queen Elizabeth invited him to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with them. This public association of the monarchy with a politician was highly unusual.
Balcony appearances were traditionally restricted to the royal family. Historian John Grigg called it “the most unconstitutional act by a British sovereign in the present century.” But it reflected the desperate hope that peace could be preserved. In May and June 1939, the king and queen toured Canada and the United States.
George VI was the first reigning monarch of Canada to visit North America. Both the Governor General of Canada, Lord Tweedsmuir, and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King hoped that the king’s presence would demonstrate the principles of the Statute of Westminster 1931, which gave full self-government to the British Dominions.
At Rideau Hall, George VI personally accepted and approved the letter of credence of the newly appointed US Ambassador to Canada, Daniel Calhoun Roper. The official royal tour historian, Gustave Lanctot, stated, “When their majesties walked into their Canadian residence, the Statute of Westminster had assumed full reality.
The King of Canada had come home.” They also visited the United States, where they stayed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House and at his private estate at Hyde Park, New York. The king and the president forged a strong personal bond. The tour was intended to soften strong isolationist tendencies in North American public opinion regarding the developing tensions in Europe.
The fear that George would be compared unfavorably to his predecessor was dispelled. The stammering king, awkward in public, had proven himself on the world stage. On September 3rd, 1939, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. That evening, George VI had to address his people by radio. The technology of the era didn’t allow for pre-recording.
Every hesitation, every stumble, every moment of stammering would go out across the empire in real time. The official photograph shows him seated at his desk in naval uniform. This was staged. He actually delivered the speech standing at a lectern in an anteroom with the window open and his jacket off. Only Lionel Logue was allowed in the room with him.
Logue advised the king to forget everyone else and just say the speech to him as a friend. “In this grave hour,” the king began, “perhaps the most fateful in our history, I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, spoken with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself.
For the second time in the lives of most of us, we are at war.” He continued, “We have been forced into a conflict, for we are called with our allies to meet the challenge of a principle which, if it were to prevail, would be fatal to any civilized order in the world. It’s a principle which permits a state, in the selfish pursuit of power, to disregard its treaties and its solemn pledges, which sanctions the use of force or threat of force against the sovereignty and independence of other states.” His delivery was calm, dignified, measured. He had gotten through it. At the end of the broadcast, Logue finally addressed him as “Your Majesty.” The counterfactual here is important. Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, had well-documented Nazi sympathies. In 1937,
he and Wallace toured Nazi Germany. They were greeted by the British national anthem and Nazi salutes. They dined with Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Historians have examined evidence suggesting the Duke actively collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. Documents unearthed from archives suggest he wanted England bombed to force an Anglo-German alliance.
In June 1940, according to reports from Spanish diplomat Don Javier Bermejillo, an old friend of Windsor’s who had known him since the 1920s, the Duke blamed the Jews, the Reds, and the Foreign Office for the war. Windsor added that he would like to put Anthony Eden and other British politicians up against a wall.
In another conversation on June 25th, 1940, Bermejillo reported that Windsor stressed that if one bombed England effectively, this could bring peace. The Duke seemed to hope this would occur. “He wants peace at any price,” Bermejillo concluded. This report went to Franco and was then passed on to the Germans.
The bombing of Britain started on July 10th. Had Wallis Simpson never met Edward? Had he not abdicated? The king on the throne during Britain’s existential struggle against fascism would have been a Nazi sympathizer. The woman vilified by history may have inadvertently given England the king it needed.
George VI and Queen Elizabeth resolved to stay in London during the German bombing raids. They officially stayed in Buckingham Palace throughout the war, though they often spent nights at Windsor Castle for safety. When Lord Hailsham suggested that Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret be evacuated to Canada, Queen Elizabeth refused.
“The children won’t leave without me,” she said. “I won’t leave the king. The king will never leave.” The first German raid on London came on September 7th, 1940, killing about 1,000 people in the East End. Two days later, on the morning of Monday, September 9th, George VI spent 3 hours with Captain Euan Wallace touring bomb-damaged neighborhoods in the East End.
He walked through the rubble, talked to survivors, bore witness to what his people were enduring. On September 13th, 1940, the king and queen were very close to death when two German bombs exploded in a Buckingham Palace courtyard while they were present. The explosion could have killed them both.
Queen Elizabeth’s response became of the most quoted lines of the war. In a letter to Queen Mary describing the bombing, she wrote, “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can now look the East End in the face.” The royal family had shared the experience of their subjects, not from the safety of exile in Canada, not from a country estate far from the bombs, but from their home in the capital city.
Newsreel footage from the era shows the King and Queen walking through the ruins of the East End talking to survivors. He did this repeatedly throughout the war, visiting factories, visiting troops, visiting the sites of devastation. Every appearance required overcoming the stammer, overcoming the terror, overcoming all the damage that had been done to him as a child.
But he showed up. He spoke. He stood with his people. The relationship between George VI and Winston Churchill evolved from weariness to deep partnership. Churchill had initially supported Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. The King and his Prime Minister weren’t destined to be natural allies.
But together, as one historian puts it, as foils, confidants, conspirators, and comrades, they forged a wartime bond that became one of the most important relationships of the conflict. Churchill was regularly invited to the royal family’s Christmas dinner party during the war years. Logue was often called when the King was expected to make a speech.
By December 1944, George VI finally felt confident enough to deliver speeches without Logue present in the room, nearly two decades after beginning treatment. 20 years. That’s how long it took to undo what two years in a neglectful nursery and a terrorizing household had created. When George VI addressed the country on D-Day in June 1944, he said, “Once again, what is demanded from us all is something more than courage and endurance.
We need a revival of spirit, a new, unconquerable resolve.” On May 8th, 1945, VE Day, Victory in Europe Day, George VI addressed the nation one final time as a wartime king. “Today, we give thanks to almighty God for a great deliverance. Speaking from our empire’s oldest capital city, war-battered, but never for one moment daunted or dismayed, speaking from London, I ask you to join with me in that act of thanksgiving.
” He acknowledged the ongoing war against Japan. He honored those who wouldn’t return. “Let us remember those who won’t come back. Their constancy and courage in battle, their sacrifice and endurance in the face of a merciless enemy.” He spoke of armed and unarmed men and women who had fought and striven to their utmost, and he reminded the nation what they had been fighting for.
The knowledge that everything was at stake, our freedom, our independence, our very existence as a people. Crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace that night, chanting for the King. The royal family, George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, appeared on the balcony alongside Winston Churchill.
The nation celebrated. But the war had taken its toll. The British Empire had begun its transition into the Commonwealth of Nations. India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947. George VI relinquished the title of Emperor of India in June 1948. Ireland was formally declared a republic in 1949. India followed suit in 1950.
The King adopted the new title of Head of the Commonwealth, a symbolic position with little real power, a sign of how much the world had changed during his reign. George VI was a heavy smoker. He had been told that cigarettes might help with his stammer, a piece of medical advice that would prove fatal.
Two years after his death, Oxford academic Richard Doll would publish research showing that lifelong smoking reduced life expectancy by 10 years. At the time of his reign, Britain had the highest prevalence of smoking in the world. Cigarettes were cheap, widely advertised, and readily available. By the late 1940s, the King’s health was declining.
He developed peripheral vascular disease, causing intermittent claudication, leg pain while walking due to impaired blood supply. In March 1949, he suffered an arterial blockage in his right leg that threatened amputation. He underwent a lumbar sympathectomy to relieve the blockage. The planned tour of Australia and New Zealand had to be postponed.
Princess Elizabeth began taking on more royal duties in her father’s place. In 1951, doctors discovered a malignant tumor in his left lung. On September 23rd, 1951, his left lung was removed by surgeon Sir Clement Price Thomas. The operation was successful, but the damage had been done. Years of smoking had caused arteriosclerosis and Buerger’s disease in addition to the lung cancer.
In November 1951, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Simonds, had to read the King’s speech at the state opening of Parliament. George VI was too ill to deliver it himself. His Christmas message that year had to be recorded in sections and edited together before broadcast. The technology finally existed to spare him the ordeal of live speaking, but only because he was too sick to manage it otherwise.
On January 31st, 1952, George VI insisted on being at London Airport to see Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip off on their tour of Australia. Despite his declining health, despite the advice of doctors, he stood there and watched his daughter leave. The famous photograph shows a gaunt, hollow-cheeked man waving goodbye.
It would be the last time he saw her. On February 6th, 1952, King George VI died in his sleep at Sandringham House. He was 56 years old. He had suffered a coronary thrombosis, a fatal blood clot to the heart, soon after falling asleep. His valet discovered him at 7:30 in the morning. The news was conveyed to Buckingham Palace by telephone using the code “Hyde Park Corner” to avoid alerting switchboard operators.
BBC newsreader John Snagge broke the news to the nation at 11:15 a.m. “It’s with the greatest sorrow that we make the following announcement.” As a mark of respect, the Great Tom Bell at St. Paul’s Cathedral was tolled every minute for two hours. The Sebastopol Bell at Windsor Castle, a Crimean War trophy that is rung only upon a royal death, was tolled 56 times, once for each year of George VI’s life, between 1:27 and 2:22 p.m.
His daughter, who had been in Kenya at the start of her tour, was now Queen Elizabeth II. She wrote afterward, “For having taken him in such a peaceful way, he just slept quietly into his heavenly home.” The King’s coffin lay in St. Mary Magdalene Church at Sandringham for two days before being carried in procession to the nearby Wolferton railway station.
It was transported to London King’s Cross, where a formal procession carried it to Westminster Hall. The King lay in state for three days. Some 304,000 people passed through Westminster Hall with queues stretching up to four miles. Richard Dimbleby’s radio commentary captured the mood. “The oak of Sandringham, hidden beneath the rich golden folds of the standard, the slow flicker of the candles touches gently the gems of the Imperial Crown, even that ruby that Henry wore at Agincourt.
Never safer, better guarded, lay a sleeping king than this, with a golden candlelight to warm his resting place, and the muffled footsteps of his devoted subjects to keep him company.” The state funeral took place on February 15th, 1952. The coffin was carried on a gun carriage hauled by Royal Navy seamen, as is traditional at the funerals of British sovereigns, from Westminster Hall to Paddington Station, then by train to Windsor.
The procession was accompanied by Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and four royal dukes, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, and Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. The kings of Denmark, Greece, and Sweden attended, as did the president of France.
Big Ben was tolled 56 times, once for each year of the King’s life. A 56-gun salute was fired. The funeral at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, was presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. The King was interred in the Royal Vault. The funeral procession was the first of a British monarch to be broadcast on television.
Historians believe it may have helped spark the mass purchase of television sets that would define the following decade. The nation watched as their King was laid to rest. In 1969, his body was moved to the newly built King George the VI Memorial Chapel within St. George’s Chapel. His wife, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, was laid to rest beside him when she died in 2002 at the age of 101.
Princess Margaret’s ashes were placed there as well. And in September 2022, following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, she and Prince Philip were interred alongside them. The family together at last. George VI could have repeated the cycle of cruelty. He could have been cold to his children the way his father was cold to him.
He could have neglected them the way his nanny neglected him. He could have created another generation of damaged royals, passing trauma down the family line the way knock-knees passed down through his legs. He didn’t. By all accounts, he and Queen Elizabeth were devoted parents. They were close with their daughters.
They were warm where his parents had been distant. Present where his nanny had been neglectful. Whatever the institution had done to him as a child, George VI refused to do to his own children. The playboy prince, the natural heir, the one everyone expected, he ran away to marry his divorcee and spent the war years with documented Nazi sympathies.
The second son, the stammering spare, the one whose childhood had been a catalog of cruelty, he stayed. He served. He led. “If Britain needed a king to lead it through a test of survival at any given moment in its history,” one historian wrote, “then George VI was a great king, and perhaps a very great king.
” He was also a damaged one. The physical evidence was written on his body. The knock-knees that had required those agonizing splints. The digestive problems that traced back to disrupted feeding in infancy. The stammer that required decades of therapy to manage. The psychological evidence was written in his diary.
The breakdown when he learned he would be king. The terror of public speaking. The constant struggle against his own fear. The stammer was the visible scar. The abuse was the wound. And the quiet dignity that defined his reign was forged in the crucible of a childhood that should have destroyed him. He never wanted the crown.
And yet, the crown needed him. Rest in peace, Your Majesty. You earned it. If you’re watching this and you’ve struggled with a stammer, or if someone you love has struggled with a stammer, I want to hear from you. Leave a comment below. Tell me your story. Tell me what you’ve overcome. George VI struggle resonates with anyone who has ever fought to make their voice heard.
Anyone who has ever had to work twice as hard just to be understood. He found his voice. So can you. Subscribe for more stories like this.
