King George VI

The future king was born on December 14, 1895, at York Cottage on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, the second son of the Duke and Duchess of York, later King George V and Queen Mary ^[1]. The date carried an awkward weight in the family: it was the anniversary of the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, and the child was named Albert partly to soften the old queen's grief. Within the family he was always called Bertie.

His childhood was strict and often unhappy. George V was a demanding father who expected naval discipline from his sons, and Albert struggled under the pressure. He developed a stammer around the age of eight that would shadow his public life for decades, and he was made to write with his right hand despite being naturally left-handed ^[2]. Knock knees brought painful corrective splints. He grew up in the shadow of his confident elder brother Edward, known as David, who was groomed for the throne while Albert was prepared for a conventional naval career.

Academic work did not come easily. At the Royal Naval College at Osborne he finished near the bottom of his class, though he showed persistence and a capacity for hard, unglamorous effort that observers would note throughout his life ^[1]. He moved on to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth and entered the Royal Navy as a midshipman in 1913, on the eve of a war that would define his generation.

Albert served aboard HMS Collingwood during the First World War and was present at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the largest naval engagement of the war, where he manned a gun turret and was mentioned in dispatches ^[3]. Chronic gastric illness interrupted his service repeatedly, and he underwent surgery for a duodenal ulcer in 1917. Frustrated at being sidelined, he transferred to the newly formed Royal Air Force and in 1919 became the first member of the British royal family to qualify as a fully certified pilot ^[3].

After the war he took up public duties as Duke of York, a title his father granted him in 1920. He developed a genuine interest in industrial conditions and workers' welfare, visiting factories and mines so often that his family teased him as the industrial prince. From 1921 he sponsored the Duke of York's Camps, annual summer gatherings that mixed boys from public schools with boys from industrial towns, an experiment in social mixing that ran until 1939 ^[4].

Sport gave him a rare arena of personal accomplishment. A capable tennis player, he competed in the men's doubles at the Wimbledon Championships in 1926, the only British royal ever to play in the tournament, though he and his partner Louis Greig lost in the first round ^[5]. The stammer, however, remained a torment. His speech closing the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1925 was a public ordeal, and in 1926 he began working with the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, whose breathing exercises and patient coaching gradually gave him workable control over his voice ^[2].

Anyone asking who was King George VI before December 1936 would have been told he was the quiet Duke of York, a family man with no expectation of reigning. That changed in a matter of days. George V died in January 1936 and Edward VIII succeeded him, but the new king was determined to marry Wallis Simpson, an American who had one divorce behind her and a second in progress. The government, the Church of England, and the Dominion prime ministers would not accept her as queen. On December 10, 1936, Edward signed an instrument of abdication, and the following day Albert became king ^[6].

He chose the regnal name George VI to signal continuity with his father and to steady an institution rocked by the crisis. Privately he was distraught. He had no training for the role, dreaded public speaking, and knew the throne had passed to him because of a scandal without precedent in modern British history ^[1]. His coronation took place at Westminster Abbey on May 12, 1937, the date originally set for his brother's.

The early reign was consumed by the gathering European emergency. George VI supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's attempts to avoid war, even appearing with him on the Buckingham Palace balcony after the Munich Agreement of 1938, a gesture later criticized as drawing the crown into partisan controversy ^[6]. In the summer of 1939 he and Queen Elizabeth made a state visit to Canada and the United States, the first by a reigning British monarch to either country. The tour, including days spent with President Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park, built personal goodwill that proved valuable once war came ^[7].

Among King George VI achievements, none mattered more than his conduct between 1939 and 1945. When Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, he addressed the empire by radio, a slow, deliberate broadcast that the stammering king delivered with evident effort and that listeners found all the more affecting for it ^[2]. Through the war he became a visible emblem of shared endurance.

During the Blitz the king and queen refused advice to leave London or send their daughters to Canada. Buckingham Palace was bombed nine times, including a September 1940 raid that struck while the couple were in residence. Queen Elizabeth remarked that she was glad the palace had been hit because it allowed her to look the bombed East End in the face, and the royal visits to shattered streets became a fixture of wartime morale ^[6]. In 1940 George VI instituted the George Cross and the George Medal to honor civilian bravery, and in 1942 he awarded the George Cross collectively to the island of Malta for withstanding siege ^[4].

His relationship with Winston Churchill, cool at first because the king had preferred Lord Halifax for the premiership in May 1940, matured into a close weekly partnership over private Tuesday lunches. He visited troops in North Africa and Malta in 1943 and crossed to Normandy ten days after D-Day in June 1944 ^[3]. On May 8, 1945, VE Day, enormous crowds outside Buckingham Palace called the royal family to the balcony again and again, with Churchill at their side ^[7].

In 1920 the Duke of York met Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, daughter of the Earl of Strathmore. She turned down his proposal twice, reluctant to surrender private life to royal duty, before accepting in January 1923. They married in Westminster Abbey on April 26, 1923, the first marriage of a king's son in the Abbey in more than five centuries ^[1]. The match proved one of the great assets of his reign: Elizabeth's warmth and social ease balanced his reserve, and she sat beside him through every speech therapy session with Logue.

Two daughters followed, Princess Elizabeth in 1926 and Princess Margaret in 1930. The Yorks lived at 145 Piccadilly in London and at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, and by the standards of the family they raised their children in an unusually affectionate household. The king called his wife and daughters "us four," and contemporaries agreed that domestic life was the center of his existence ^[1].

He was a heavy smoker from a young age, a habit that would eventually kill him, and he found relaxation in shooting at Sandringham and in the needlepoint he took up on medical advice. His temper could flare suddenly, episodes his family called his gnashes, but those who worked with him described a conscientious man who read his state papers thoroughly and hated leaving work unfinished ^[6].

Peace brought no rest. The Labour government elected in 1945 launched sweeping nationalization and the National Health Service, and the king, whatever his private instincts, worked correctly with Prime Minister Clement Attlee. The empire he had inherited began to dissolve: India and Pakistan became independent in August 1947, and George VI gave up the title Emperor of India in 1948 ^[6]. When India chose to become a republic in 1950 yet remain in the Commonwealth, he accepted a new formula, becoming Head of the Commonwealth, a title invented to hold the association together ^[4].

His health collapsed under the strain of war and decades of smoking. Arteriosclerosis in his legs forced the cancellation of a planned tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1949, and a lumbar sympathectomy that March relieved the danger of amputation. In September 1951 surgeons removed his entire left lung after finding a malignant tumor, though the word cancer was kept from the public and, by most accounts, from the king himself ^[1].

On January 31, 1952, looking gaunt, he stood hatless in the cold at London Airport to wave off Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh on a tour to East Africa. Six days later, on February 6, 1952, after a day of shooting at Sandringham, he died in his sleep of coronary thrombosis at the age of 56 ^[7]. Elizabeth learned in Kenya that she was queen. After lying in state at Westminster Hall, where more than 300,000 people filed past the coffin, he was buried at St George's Chapel, Windsor ^[7].

Any fair King George VI biography has to weigh what he inherited against what he left. He took over a monarchy damaged by abdication and handed his daughter an institution more trusted, arguably, than at any point in the century. Historians generally credit that recovery to his transparent sense of duty: he was not brilliant, not charismatic, and never wanted the job, and the public came to value exactly those qualities in him ^[6]. Elizabeth II modeled much of her own style of quiet, constant service on her father.

The basic King George VI facts have reached audiences far beyond Britain through popular culture. The 2010 film The King's Speech, built around his work with Lionel Logue, won the Academy Award for Best Picture and made his struggle with the stammer one of the best known stories about any modern monarch ^[8]. The George Cross he founded remains Britain's highest civilian award for gallantry, and Malta still carries the decoration on its national flag.

His name endures in institutions and places across the former empire, from the King George VI Chase in steeplechasing to geographic features in Antarctica and Canada. More than the memorials, his reign fixed the template of the modern constitutional monarch: politically neutral, personally dutiful, and present with the nation in its worst hours ^[4].