A Brief History of the House of Windsor (20 page)

Here again, Queen Elizabeth had a pungent and inspiring retort: ‘The girls would not go without me, I would not go without the king, and of course the king would never go.’ Even the redoubtable Queen Mary would not leave. Her only compromise was to move out of London, and she was to spend the war years comfortably at Badminton, one of England’s grandest country houses. The two princesses were also removed from the capital. They began the war at Balmoral, but moved to an undisclosed location – actually Windsor Castle – where they remained until the return of peace. The king and queen would not have tolerated having their children out of reach. They themselves spent each week at Buckingham Palace, which was twice hit by bombs, and went to Windsor at weekends.

Their courage in remaining in Britain during that terrible summer of 1940 should not be underestimated. They participated fully in Britain’s ‘finest hour’. Braced for enemy invasion – Hitler had gone so far as to announce that he expected to take the surrender of the country on or about 15 August – they expected to share the fate of their subjects. Both the king and queen – and even Queen Mary! – carried firearms, and practised shooting.

The king and queen made a point of travelling to wherever there had been air raids. They regularly went to the East End, the part of London that bore the brunt of German attacks because of its proximity to the docks. After huddling in an air-raid shelter, people might come out into daylight to find George and Elizabeth waiting for them. Their presence, and their obvious
interest and concern, made a deep impression on the public. It was during one such walk through a recently blitzed area that someone called out: ‘Thank God for a good king!’ George at once called back: ‘And thank God for a good people!’ They naturally went to other cities too, visiting Coventry just after it had been devastated in a raid. This image of royalty, of the king and his wife (he was usually dressed in army uniform, she was in stylish coats and hats, making no attempt to curry favour by dressing down) among their people, sharing their hardship, sympathizing with the loss of their homes, was a very powerful one. It sent the king’s popularity soaring and made the couple part of the heroic legend that the Blitz and the Battle of Britain inspired.

George appeared in the uniforms of all three Services. He had served both in the Navy and in the Royal Air Force, in whose distinctive blue uniform he had been married. He was Colonel-in-Chief of the Guards regiments too, and held by virtue of his position the highest rank in each of the armed forces. He was shown frequently in the press, dressed as an Admiral of the Fleet or a Field Marshal, emphasizsing the point that he belonged to the same Services as so many of his subjects. The queen wore no uniform but their elder daughter would, by the last year of the conflict, be old enough to enlist in the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service, a female branch of the Army) and thus to ‘do her bit’.

The king awarded medals, and indeed had one named after him. During 1940 it became very obvious that with the country under attack, civilians, or troops far removed from the front line, could display heroism – for example, in defusing bombs or in rescue work – that was just as great as was shown in battle. An award for gallantry was therefore set up, at the suggestion of Winston Churchill, and was called the George Cross. This bore no resemblance to the medal established by his grandmother. It was of its time, a sleek silver Art Deco-inspired cross with, in the middle, a medallion of St George and the dragon. It bore the king’s cipher and was hung from
a ribbon of Garter blue. It is arguably the most attractive of British medals. When the colony of Malta withstood successfully a massive and sustained air assault by the Axis powers, the king awarded the medal collectively to the whole island, which he visited in 1943. Malta became independent in 1964 yet the George Cross still features in its national flag.

After the French sued for peace with Hitler, George commented that: ‘I feel happier now that we have no Allies to be polite to and pamper.’ This was hardly the case. The leaders of several foreign governments were now living on his doorstep. Among this group that turned up in London in need of shelter, resources or encouragement was Charles De Gaulle, a maverick and largely unknown French General. He had written a number of books by then, but was not a recognizable public figure outside France. He claimed to represent the spirit of his home country that had not been destroyed by the German conquest. De Gaulle was a prickly, haughty and almost completely unlikeable man, possessed of a Messianic belief that he was France incarnate and that only he could save his country. Though Churchill regarded him with both suspicion and annoyance, the royal family made him welcome, and he got on well with them on a personal level. Whatever he thought of the rest of the British Establishment – and he was notoriously ungrateful for anything done for him – he always retained a sense of friendship for the Windsors, and was later to acknowledge his debt to them for taking him seriously when others did not.

Buckingham Palace, extremely obvious from the air in its set-piece location facing down the Mall, was targeted by the Luftwaffe. Bombs destroyed the chapel and the swimming pool. On another raid, a bomb failed to explode but detonated the following day, destroying the room in which the king had been working only minutes earlier. Windsor Castle was similarly conspicuous, and over a hundred bombs – both the conventional sort and the remote-control ‘doodlebugs’ fired from across the Channel during 1944 – landed in its
surrounding park. Such was the risk of destruction that the queen commissioned the artist John Piper to make extensive drawings of the Castle, to preserve a record of it.

In the war, as at no other time in recent history, the royal family proved their worth as a national (and indeed international) symbol. While the prime minister was the one who actually inspired the country and galvanized its efforts, the monarchy provided an example of quiet, steady decency that contrasted with the barbarity of the enemy leadership. They were a reminder of old certainties, of a better, pre-war world and – through their children – a better future. The welcome they received when they visited towns and cities was eloquent testimony to this. The king also visited the theatres of war in North Africa, Italy and north-west Europe. He landed in Normandy only ten days after D-Day. Though he could not share the dangers faced by his soldiers, he made efforts to see at first hand the places in which they had recently fought. Because he was accompanied on these trips by a film crew, he was obliged to wear thick theatrical make-up for close shots. Soldiers idling by roadsides who saw him pass were bewildered – and horrified – to see the monarch made up like a pantomime dame.

An unlooked-for and tragic circumstance increased the family’s popularity still further. The Duke of Kent, the king’s youngest brother, was serving in the Royal Air Force. In August 1942 he was aboard a Sunderland flying boat that was travelling to Iceland, where he would inspect bases. In dense fog, it crashed into a Scottish mountainside. It had been two hundred years since royalty had taken part in battles, and therefore fatalities among them were, in recent history, unheard of. Somehow the death of this handsome young man created a bond between the royal family and the people. They too were subject to the random fortunes of war.

The most enduring image of royalty during wartime is that of the family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on VE Day, 9 May 1945. The huge crowd that was celebrating the news of
Germany’s defeat converged, by instinct (there was no prior arrangement that the family would appear, and it was not clear that they were even in residence), at the end of the Mall. The war was not, of course, over. Japan remained to be invaded – an operation that would, it was thought, cost up to a million Allied lives – but the end of fighting in Europe was nevertheless a moment of national catharsis. Churchill appeared with the royal family. The two leaders, one ceremonial and one political and military, represented the strength of the British constitutional system. The prime minister did not know it yet but he was about to be swept from office by an electorate that wanted radical change from the attitudes and institutions of the past – one which he personified in the post-war era. The empire was about to be dismantled, major industries would be nationalized, education was already being reformed to make it more democratic, and the National Health Service – a utopian concept that would be envied by other countries – was on its way. At no time, however, did these changes threaten the Crown. Even though for a short time the Left in Britain had the chance to put some of their dreams into practice (they considered a Soviet-style medal for productivity by workers, but found that men and women would rather receive monetary rewards), no one thought it possible, or politically advisable, to suggest abolishing the monarchy.

In the new socialist government, George’s Foreign Secretary was to be Ernest Bevin, a trade-union veteran and left-winger. They developed a warm and genuine friendship, but this was not the first time that the king had charmed a member of the Labour movement. Both he and his father had been genuinely interested to meet men who had risen from backgrounds so different from their own. Knowing how intimidating the surroundings of the Palace could seem, they went out of their way to put them at ease. For the politicians it came as a surprise to find at the apex of a despised social order men of such modesty and humour. Once both sides had adjusted their expectations there was genuine mutual regard.
The daughter of George VI was to have an equally notable success in winning over Harold Wilson.

The king would reign for a further six and a half years, but the remainder of his life was to be a time of drabness and decline. Despite a few bright moments (in 1947 his daughter Elizabeth was married, and the following year London hosted the Olympic Games), the tone of these years was one of grey austerity and overall poverty. Rationing of some commodities continued until after his death, so that when Elizabeth married she had to be allocated additional clothing coupons for her dress, and food rations had to be arranged for all the foreign royals who were to stay at the Palace. India, which not for nothing was known as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire, became independent in August 1947, a year earlier than had been envisaged by the government.

To anyone who had grown up in the reign of Victoria and her successors this loss would have seemed immense, though the departure of the sub-continent was not unexpected. India had been increasingly difficult to govern since the end of the previous war. It was too big, and now too politically aware, willingly to remain a vassal of another nation, and because of the war the whole climate of international feeling was in favour of self-determination for Europe’s colonies. The Holocaust had produced an outpouring of sympathy for subjugated peoples, and the victories of the Japanese over the British, Americans and Dutch in the Pacific had shown that Westerners were not invulnerable. Now the two superpowers, the United States and Russia, were both opposed to colonialism, and in any case the colonial masters were impoverished by the war. In Gandhi’s famous words to a British official: ‘It is time you left.’

This was the feeling throughout much of Asia and Africa in the post-war decade, and as one territory after another gained independence the momentum, and the clamour, picked up. Churchill, in another famous phrase, had said that he ‘did
not become prime minister to preside over the dismemberment of the British Empire’, but that appeared to be precisely what George VI would have to do. The king, perhaps having learned greater wisdom after mistakenly siding with Chamberlain, made a point of not showing any regret at the loss of India, since the issue was a political one in Britain.

In fact he was deeply attached to his overseas territories, and resented enormously the new Labour administration’s willingness to get rid of them. ‘What bits of my empire have you given away today?’ he irritably asked one of them, Lord Stansgate, when it became plain Britain’s new government could not afford both to keep the empire and to pay for the National Health Service that was one of their key objectives. Trivial though it may seem, George hated losing the title of emperor and the practice of signing himself ‘GRI’ (George Rex Imperator), for from now on he would merely be ‘GR’. His mother shared this sentiment in full, cherishing the last missives he wrote her with his imperial title on the letterhead. She also added Louis Mountbatten (who as the last Viceroy had been the one to grant independence to India, and who had carried out the process with surprising speed) to the list of those she would never forgive.

One especially painful severance was very close to home. The Irish Free State had for decades held Dominion status and had distanced itself, consistently and deliberately, from the United Kingdom. It had remained neutral during the war, and without having undergone that experience was separated by something of a gulf from the rest of the Commonwealth. In 1949 the Eire government completed the process of establishing a Republic, with a president at its head instead of a Governor-General acting – however nominally – on behalf of the Crown. Indeed they had abolished the position of Governor-General even before the war. The drift to separation was unstoppable, and Ireland was to relinquish its membership.

With Ireland there had, of course, been a violent, sometimes horrific, past. The country’s War of Independence had
indeed been a war, albeit a guerilla one. Though fighting had been bitter, most of the separation of Ireland from Britain was to be a matter of legislation carried out by Eire’s parliament, yet there was considerable regret on the mainland that a country whose history was so bound up with Britain’s, and whose common interests ought to have made for friendship, should so completely have left the fold.

Though the king was in no sense involved in the politics of this matter, he asked John Dulanty, the Irish High Commissioner (who was about to lose this status), ‘
Must
you leave the family?’ The king and queen were both genuinely fond of Ireland, and had had hopes of visiting the country. When the moment came to part, the British government drafted a message for the king to deliver, but he amended it to express his own thoughts more clearly. It read in part: ‘I send you my good wishes on this day, being well aware of the neighbourly links which hold the people of the Republic of Ireland in close association with my subjects in the United Kingdom. I hold in most grateful memory the services and sacrifices of the men and women of your country who rendered gallant assistance to our cause in the recent war, and who made a notable contribution to our victory. I pray that every blessing may be with you today and in the future.’