Another ‘King’s Speech’

By Neil Earle

Would even Ripley believe it?

The Oscars of 2016 are come and gone but remember 2011 – multiple Oscars were awarded at the 2011 event for the movie “The King’s Speech.” This well-hailed film depicts the stammering struggles of current Prince 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.

Perhaps for millions of senior citizens in Canada and around the world, the noble king was finally getting his due. “The King’s Speech” 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.

A Royal Drama

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 even WW2. It was the abdication crisis of 1936. This was when the very popular and dashing King Edward VIII (“David” to the family) had to give up his throne for pursuing the American divorcee, Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Something about that event shattered 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. Hitler and Mussolini did make 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 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 royalist, 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.

That style came at great cost. 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 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. 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, “King’s Speech” director Tom Hooper explained to Moviephone, when radio was just coming into its own. The movie opens with Bertie as Duke of York making a shambles of a public appearance in the 1920s. What a contrast 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. For another his wife seemed to possess nerves of steel.

This sets the stage for the movie, rated “R” for some harsh language, so be advised.

The Newfoundland Connection

What makes this film particularly germane to people in Canada’s Tenth Province was a recent visit to 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!’

The above was quoted on George VI’s radio broadcast to the Empire on December 25, 1939, the first Christmas of the war. While touring Brigus in early 2010, the poem was brought to the attention of Prince Charles by local host Betty Barrett who pointed out a needle point of the above lines to the visiting royals. An older generation remembers that King George VI’s Christmas broadcast of 1939 came at the end of a grim decade that was but a warm-up for the six nightmarish years of World War Two (1939-1945) – all told, the worst catastrophe on record.

Nervous Empire/Quiet Faith

During those horrific years of the calculated and indiscriminate bombing of civilians George VI and his resolute wife Elizabeth (the Queen Mom, Elizabeth II’s mother) came 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. Instead came George VI’s quiet, understated, almost mystical call to Christian faith and trust. His soft-edged confidence exemplified the speaker’s maxim: “What you ARE speaks so loudly that I can’t hear what you are saying.” Other of Harkins’ lines, which the King did not read, went thus:

In all the dizzy strife of things
Both high and low,
God hideth his intention.”

That is but a 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 The London Daily Telegraph of November 17, 2009 set the speech’s 70th anniversary in context: “At the time no one knew if Britain would win the war.”

In the terrible winter of 1940-41 the Nazis flung their vast bomber fleets at the British cities. Indiscriminate bombing from the air! Almost 40,000 Britons were to die that winter – a 9/11 every month! A generation of British children learned to sleep in city underground “tube” stations as sirens wailed and rows of houses collapsed overhead. To one German pilot, London resembled a cauldron of boiling tomato soup.

But British morale did not crack. One reason? They had 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.

Buckingham Palace was bombed nine times altogether. Once, a delayed action bomb went off in the courtyard. Had the windows been open 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.” A picture from that period 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.”

A Living Legacy

Such actions built up immense reserves of good will. This was evident back in Brigus as Charles and Camilla’s visit ended. Regina O’Keefe commented: “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 also surprising itself this awards season by reminding us that good character often gets its due, and that quiet moral courage counts for much when the chips are down.

(Neil Earle is a Los Angeles based pastor and journalist who returns to Carbonear, NL, Canada each summer.)