Queen's House (46 page)

Their six-week tour of Canada and the United States in May and June 1939 was the turning point in the public perception of them, and in the development of the King's self-confidence. With the Queen's help, King George VI, speaking with a new authority, was conquering his crippling stammer, and the Queen captured the crowds with her spontaneous gestures of friendship and affection. Timetables were disrupted while she plunged into the crowds, taking special delight in greeting the many fellow Scots in Canada. In a typically graceful gesture she laid a bunch of wild poppies, given her by a boy, on the grave of the Unknown Warrior. In Quebec she reminded her audience, in fluent French, that as a Scot she too came from a separate background. On their brief visit to the USA they established a lasting friendship with President and Mrs Roosevelt.

In the relaxed atmosphere of the Roosevelts' family home at Hyde Park, the King and President chatted informally about world politics long into the night until Roosevelt patted the King's knee and said, ‘It's time for you to go to bed, young man.'
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King George VI never forgot their conversation, always wishing that his own ministers could talk to him so frankly. Listening to Roosevelt's explanation of his New Deal
to cope with the massive unemployment in the USA after the slump, the King realized how much he had to learn.

On i September 1939 the German army invaded Poland, ignoring the British and French ultimatum. At eleven o'clock on Sunday 3 September Britain declared war.

The King's diary for 3 September recorded his simple faith in the justice of the cause, and that ‘those of us who had been through the Great War never wanted another'.

On 3 September the King broadcast to the nation from Buckingham Palace:

we have been forced into a conflict… to meet the challenge of a principle … which permits a State, in the selfish pursuit of power, to disregard its treaties and its solemn pledges … For the sake of all that we hold ourselves dear, and of the world's order and peace, it is unthinkable that we should refuse to meet the challenge.
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There followed a period of ‘phoney war' when the King was advised by his War Cabinet under Chamberlain, with Churchill at the Admiralty and Eden at the Dominion Office. He was kept fully informed; with authority grown out of his experience as a naval officer, he was able to fulfil his historic duty to advise. Buckingham Palace became his wartime headquarters. There was no question of sending his wife and daughters to Canada or America, as many did. Queen Elizabeth firmly insisted ‘The King will not leave, and I will not leave him and the Princesses will not leave us.'
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During the Blitz the Princesses were sent to Windsor with Miss Crawford, but throughout the war, even during the worst of the Blitz, the King and Queen worked from Buckingham Palace during the week.

Buckingham Palace was now stripped of its valuable contents. Pictures were taken down and the porcelain taken from the display cases and carefully packed. Chandeliers were dismantled and taken to places of safety in country houses. Dust sheets covered the gilt furniture. The Palace Mews were now empty and silent, the ornate carriages removed to Windsor, where the horses worked on the farm.

The phoney war dragged on and the spirit of high resolve was
disappearing as Cabinet ministers quarrelled among themselves. Meanwhile, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and Leopold, King of the Belgians, warned that Hitler was planning to attack.

The King, in his Christmas message in 1939, broadcast from Sandringham, aimed to inspire unity of purpose. He conquered his stammer with difficulty, hesitating at first. He ended with, ‘A new year is at hand, we cannot tell what it will bring.' Then he quoted from Minnie Louise Haskins's The Gate of the Year':

‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.'
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The year 1940 was to test his faith. Hitler's armies advanced through Europe: the King's fellow monarchs were in danger. On 9 April the Germans occupied Denmark and after the disastrous allied campaign in Norway King Haakon escaped to a British warship and took refuge in Buckingham Palace. On 10 May Hitler mounted a massive ground and air attack on Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg, and a weary and sick Chamberlain was replaced by Winston Churchill.

The King was at first uneasy with Churchill, remembering his support for King Edward VIII. But in September he started a tradition of intimate private luncheons in his room at Buckingham Palace. The two men met every Tuesday in complete privacy and served themselves from a buffet. Although the King missed his orderly weekly talks with Chamberlain at the Palace, he came to appreciate Winston's qualities, and, as John Colville, Churchill's private secretary, wrote, Winston, however cavalierly he may treat his Sovereign, is at least a most vehement royalist.'
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Churchill now transferred his loyalty to the anointed King, and supported King George VI in his difficult negotiations with the Duke of Windsor, who, when war broke out, came back and saw the King at Buckingham Palace to discuss what war work he could do. He was given a post at Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force in Paris, but, dissatisfied, returned to London without the King's permission, and tried in vain to enlist Winston Churchill's support. He now saw himself as a leader of a world peace movement. After the fall of France he and the Duchess fled to Spain, where his relationship with German contacts
made him a cause of acute embarrassment to the King and government. Eventually he was appointed Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Bahamas. Here, from August 1940, he and the Duchess spent the war years in diminished grandeur. The activity of the Duke of Windsor was one of many causes of concern for the King during the black months of the spring and summer of 1940.

On 13 May the King had been awakened at Buckingham Palace by a telephone call from Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands: in great distress she begged the King to send aircraft to defend her country. Later that day he heard from her again; this time she was ringing from Harwich. She had escaped with only half an hour to spare before German parachutists had descended on her Palace. Determined to join her forces in south Holland, the courageous sixty-year-old Queen had made her way to the Hook of Holland, boarded a British destroyer and asked to be taken south to Flushing. The Admiralty, however, had ordered the warship back to Harwich, and an unwilling Queen Wilhelmina was obliged to take refuge in England. The King met her at Liverpool Street and brought her back to Buckingham Palace, where Queen Elizabeth, as she remembers, organized a wardrobe for her. She had left Holland with nothing except her handbag, the clothes she stood up in and a tin helmet. As she had done with the other royal refugee, King Haakon of Norway, Queen Elizabeth provided all that was needed, although it was not easy in wartime Britain when even the clothes of the royal family were rationed. Queen Wilhelmina's son-in-law, Prince Bernhard, later brought over from Holland his wife Princess Juliana, the heir to the Dutch throne, and their two children, Princess Beatrix (later Queen of the Netherlands) and Princess Irene. On 15 May the Dutch Army capitulated. Queen Wilhelmina never forgot the spontaneous and thoughtful kindness of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in those tragic days. Later Princess Irene was baptized in the Chapel of Buckingham Palace on the day that had been appointed for her christening in Amsterdam. It was almost the last ceremony to take place in the Chapel at Buckingham Palace, which was destroyed in the Blitz of 1940.

The two war-hardened refugees in the Palace regarded the Palace preparations with some scepticism: they knew the danger from
determined German paratroops. Whereas the King and Queen went reluctantly down to the air-raid shelter, King Haakon took air-raid warnings seriously. Queen Elizabeth still remembers stepping over the sleeping body of the snoring King of Norway stretched out on the floor of their basement shelter.

During the first months of the war, it had been realized that, unlike during the First World War, the danger would come from the air. The Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, ordered air-raid shelters to be made – but at Buckingham Palace the precautions were somewhat haphazard. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's biographer recorded that the housekeeper's rooms in the basement were taken over,

the ceiling reinforced with some steel girders, and the window which was at ceiling height was protected by steel shutters. It was incongruously furnished with gilt chairs, a regency settee and a large mahogany table, surrealistically surrounded by emergency steps to reach the window, axes on the wall to hack one's way out, oil lamps, electric torches, a bottle of smelling salts and a supply of glossy magazines. Next door the room used by the Household was supplied with a piano, though the attempts of a member of a refugee monarch's House-hold to enliven the nocturnal hours with a rousing sing song were not appreciated by the King.
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What would happen, King Haakon asked King George VI, if parachutists descended on the Palace? To which the King replied that a special guard was prepared day and night to defend them. As the King's biographer records,

The King explained the method of alerting the guard, and King Haakon, somewhat sceptically, asked to see it in operation. Obligingly the King pressed the alarm signal and, together with the Queen, they went into the garden to watch the result. There followed anti-climax; nothing happened at all. Apparently the officer of the guard had been told by the police sergeant on duty that ‘no attack was impending as he had heard nothing about it…' Then a number of guardsmen rushed to the Palace gardens and to the horror of King Haakon but to the vast amusement of the King and Queen proceeded to thrash the undergrowth in the manner of beaters at a shoot rather than men engaged in the pursuit of a dangerous enemy.
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King Haakon's fears were soon to be justified: Buckingham Palace was to be the direct target of Hitler's assault.

The fall of Holland was succeeded by the collapse of the Belgian Army. Now that the threat of invasion was very real, the Princesses were sent to Windsor.

The King had a shooting range laid down in the gardens of Buckingham Palace and another at Windsor, at which he and his equerries practised regularly with rifles, pistols and tommy guns. The Queen too took instruction and became a good shot. ‘I shall not go down like the others,' she said. No one doubted the steely resolution behind the Queen's sweet charm.
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She had proved her skill with a gun in the early days of their marriage when on safari in Africa.

It was feared that the Allied forces would be wiped out at Dunkirk but a flotilla of little ships came to the rescue. At the end of May, Paris was under German occupation and German troops were massing on the Channel coast preparing to invade. As King Haakon and Queen Wilhelmina had been at pains to impress on the King and Queen, there was now real danger: the children might be taken hostage, paratroopers might descend on Buckingham Palace, or they themselves might be captured. Lord Hailsham recommended that the Princesses should be sent to Canada; the King and Queen firmly refused, but they were kept under close watch. Queen Mary, against her will, was evacuated to Badminton in Gloucestershire, where she spent the rest of the war with her niece the Duchess of Beaufort. Here she employed her formidable energy, clearing the woodlands. ‘Bring your very oldest clothes,' she told Lady Airlie. She had an obsessive hatred of ivy, which she had attacked with venom in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Now she worked off her hatred of Hitler by hacking away at the encroaching ivy at Badminton.

The King and his ministers had learned that Hitler had set August for his invasion date. We did not know what the future would bring,' Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother still remembers. She commissioned John Piper to paint a series of pictures of Windsor Castle, ‘so that it would be remembered as it was,' she said, ‘if the worst
happened'.
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They hang at Clarence House today. In 1940, also, Augustus John began a portrait of her at Buckingham Palace, but it was never finished. It was taken for safety to the artist's house in the country during the Blitz and not discovered until 1960, when it was found in his cellar. It also now hangs in Clarence House.

In spite of the imminent danger of invasion, the King and Queen determined to stay in Buckingham Palace, although there were other, safer houses in London, less easily distinguished from the air. But King George VI, though he was the least demonstrative of kings, realized the importance of this visible gesture of solidarity with their people.

Hitler's planned invasion was prevented by the courage of the airmen who beat back the German attacking planes. In Churchill's celebrated words, ‘Never … was so much owed by so many to so few.'
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On 7 September the Blitz began. During the first night 200 German planes bombed London, killing 400 and seriously wounding 4,357.

Hitler's plan was to destroy London and to kill or capture the King. During the following years Buckingham Palace was a direct target, suffering nine direct hits, and on more than one occasion the King and Queen narrowly escaped.

On 11 September 1940 the King wrote to his mother, Queen Mary,

My darling Mama,

You will have heard about the time bomb which fell near the Garden Entrance at Buckingham Palace last Sunday night, & which exploded on Monday night. I am sending you photographs taken on Monday & Tuesday before & after the explosion showing the damage done. Except for damaging the swimming pool, the main structure of the Palace is untouched. All the windows on each floor were broken. The blast was all upward & only one ceiling is damaged. We were down here at Windsor luckily, & no one in B.P. felt the worse for the ‘thud' as the bomb fell on Sunday night, though all our shelters are on that side. Everybody was evacuated on Monday night to the other side of the Palace, in case it exploded & it did at 1.25 a.m.
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