By Neil Earle
Would even Ripley believe it?
Even as Prince William and his fiancée Kate Middleton grabbed royal headlines in 2010, multiple Oscars were handed over to the movie “The King’s Speech,” a film depicting the stammering struggles of William’s great-grandfather, George VI. “The King’s Speech” portrays the diffident, self-effacing King George VI wrestling with the burdens of kingship and the public eye.
For millions of senior citizens in Canada and around the world, the longsuffering king was finally getting his due. “The King’s Speech” is a UK production and features ace British actors Colin Firth and Jeffrey Rush playing George VI and his controversial speech therapist, the Australian Lionel Logue. George VI or “Bertie” as the family called him, found it painful to speak in public. Painful too it was for his subjects who had to listen to him. The movie takes the liberty of moving the Bertie-Logue therapy sessions from 1925-1927 to the period after the king’s accession in 1936 with the shadow of Hitler looming. But that can be excused for reasons that are obvious to those who already know the story.
While interviewing some 30 Toronto seniors in the mid-1980s I was struck how the overwhelming shocking public event of their lives was not Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, not WW2 and not even the Beatles. No. It was the abdication crisis of 1936. This revolved around the very popular and dashing King Edward VIII (“David” to the family) having to give up his throne for pursuing the American divorcee, Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Something about that event seemed to deal a great blow to public trust. Nevertheless, it worked out for the best, many still say, for the charming David had been much too impressed with Nazi Germany’s dynamism and energy in facing the Great Depression. The grim joke at the time was that Hitler and Mussolini had made the trains run on time – especially those that ran to the concentration camps!
The year of Edward VIII’s abdication – 1936 – was the year of Hitler’s first overt military gamble in Europe, marching troops into the Rhineland in direct defiance of the Versailles Treaty (1919). David’s debacle meant that his quieter publicity-shunning younger brother “Bertie” was now George VI, by the grace of God, King and Emperor. Perc Burrows, a Toronto-based pastor, well remembers sitting around the old Spartan Junior Radio at his grandparents listening to the king’s annual Christmas message to the Commonwealth and the “deliberate and steady” speaking style of the new monarch.
But George VI deserves his celluloid revival. Though essentially frail and often health-plagued, Bertie was a devoted family man, a stout-hearted young naval officer at the sea Battle of Jutland in 1916, a major backer of youth organizations such as the Scouts and Guides, a sufferer who had faced severe medical challenges, a suitor who had to overcome three rejections from his eventual wife (the “little Duchess” she was called) and a prince who did not at all want to be king. That last is a nice trait in a leader. All his life Bertie had shunned the spotlight – that awful awful stammer. Public speaking was murder for him. After 1936, his subjects would as often as not rate his Christmas messages as if they were watching a version of Jeopardy – “Well, he got through that one all right, I suppose.”
George VI took over, movie producer Tom Hooper explained to Moviephone, when radio was just coming into its own. “The King’s Speech” opens with George VI making a shambles of a broadcast speech in 1937. What a contrast this stuttering figure seemed to his dashing night-clubbing brother, David. George VI would have been crucified in a world of 24/7 news and endless talk show chatter. But in its darkest days the Empire would soon come to know him and his wife and family a lot better. For one thing he looked great in a naval uniform, much like his cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten. For another his wife seemed to possess nerves of steel.
This sets the stage for the movie which is rated “R” for some harsh language, so be advised.
As a Canadian I go home every summer. What makes this film particularly germane to people in Canada’s Tenth Province was a recent visit to Conception Bay, Newfoundland by George VI’s grandson, Prince Charles, and his wife Camilla. Though the film version has King George rallying the nation on the opening of war with Germany in September, 1939, there has been another Bertie speech that has travelled even better in certain circles.
I said
to the man who stood at the gate of the year
‘Give
me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
And he replied,
‘Go
into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God
That shall be you to better than a light and safer than a known way!’
As reported in the “Carbonear Compass,” the lines above were quoted on George VI’s radio broadcast to the Empire (as it then was) on December 25, 1939, the first Christmas of the war. “Man at the Gate of the Year” was brought to the attention of Prince Charles while he toured a historical site in dependably royalist Newfoundland in early 2010. Host Betty Barrett of Brigus pointed out a needle point rendition of “The Gate of the Year” lines to the visiting royals. An older generation remembers what my generation should not forget: that King George VI’s Christmas broadcast of 1939 came at the end of a decade much worse than even what Time magazine has labeled 2001-2009 – “the Decade From Hell.” The 1930s were but a warm-up for the six nightmarish years of World War Two (1939-1945) – all told, the worst catastrophe on record.
During those horrific years of Blitz and indiscriminate bombing of civilians George VI and his resolute wife Elizabeth (the Queen Mom, Elizabeth II’s mother) came quickly to be seen as a bit of a godsend. It was his wife who suggested he read portions of this 1908 poem by the almost unknown Christian poet Minnie Louise Harkins.
The choice was a triumph of popular communications precisely because the message was not overtly religious or evangelistic. Too much Bible-thumping would have been “bad form” in the Age of Swing. What the Empire got that last grim Christmas of the 1930s was George VI’s quiet, understated, almost mystical call to Christian faith and trust. His soft-edged confidence reflected that branch of the royal family to a “T.” He exemplified the speaker’s maxim: “What you ARE speaks so loudly that I can’t hear what you are saying.” The rest of Harkins’ verses, which the King did not read, went thus:
“So heart be still! What need our human life to know If God hath comprehension.
In all
the dizzy strife of things
Both high and low,
God hideth his intention.”
That is only one step removed from Cowper’s superb hymn, “God moves in a mysterious way/His wonders to perform/ He plants his footsteps in the sea/ And rides upon the storm.” As the gates of 1940 opened and the war intensified George and Elizabeth’s people would need all their inner strength to face what lay ahead.
As The London Daily Telegraph of November 17, 2009 mentioned, commenting on the Christmas broadcast’s 70th anniversary: “At the time no one knew if Britain would win the war.” This is often forgotten today.
In May-June, 1940 the British army escaped by the skin of its teeth at Dunkirk. The Nazis flung their vast bomber fleets at the British that fall, winter and spring. Indiscriminate bombing from the air – a nightmare many hoped to never see. Almost 40,000 Britons were to die that winter – a 9/11 every month! A generation of British children learned to go to sleep in city underground “tube” stations as sirens wailed and rows of houses collapsed overhead with incendiaries falling all around. To one German pilot, London resembled a cauldron of boiling tomato soup.
But British morale did not crack. They had – most providentially some felt – a king and queen who refused to leave London. Point blank refused! Some will remember that the Dutch royal family moved to Ottawa for the duration but George and Elizabeth would not hear of it.
Though little remembered today, Buckingham Palace was bombed nine times altogether. Once, a delayed action bomb went off in the courtyard. If the windows had not been closed the royals would have been killed by broken glass. Still the king would not vacate. A popular song went the rounds “The king is still in London, London, London.” After one pummeling of the palace grounds Elizabeth was heard to say: “Thank heavens we’ve been bombed. Now we can look the East End in the eye.” What an improbable statement from royalty as we too often see them today! A picture from September, 1940 shows a mother and two little girls emerging from a bomb shelter to find the King already up and about, making his rounds, and ready to shake their hands. The story went that on one “walkabout” when George VI was moved to tears at the havoc engulfing his people the word rapidly passed around the bombed out neighborhood, “The king really loves us…The king really loves us.”
Such actions built up immense reserves of good will that have stood the present generation of royals in good stead. This was still evident at Brigus last spring on Charles and Camilla’s visit. Regina O’Keefe’s commented to the “Compass” after Prince Charles left Brigus: “I admire them. The tremendous pressure they’re under. I think they still have a place in Canadian history.”
This, of course, will be for the future to decide. But thanks to the movie industry for reminding us as we stand at the gate of another year for reminding us that good character finally gets its due and that quiet moral courage can count for much when the chips are down. In the poet’s words:
God knows. His will is best. The stretch of years which wind ahead, so dim To our imperfect vision, Are clear to God. Our fears are premature. In Him All time hath full provision.
(Neil Earle is a Los Angeles based pastor and journalist who returns to Carbonear, NL, Canada each summer.)