The King's Speech (8 page)

It was not surprising the children’s relationship with their parents was a distant one. Matters were not helped by their father’s approach to child rearing. The future King George V had enjoyed what for the era had been a relatively relaxed upbringing, thanks to his father Edward VII, who had been reacting against the strictness with which his parents, Victoria and Albert, had behaved towards him. As a result, whenever she had contact with her grandchildren, the Queen expressed horror at their wayward behaviour.

Far from bringing up his own offspring in an equally liberal way, George did precisely the opposite: the Prince, according to his biographer Kenneth Rose, was ‘an affectionate parent, albeit an unbending Victorian’. Thus, although he undoubtedly loved his children, he believed in inculcating a sense of discipline from an early age – influenced in part by strict obedience to authority that had been instilled in him during his and his brother’s adolescence in the navy. George wrote a telling letter to his son on his fifth birthday: ‘Now that you are five years old I hope you will always try & be obedient & do at once what you are told, as you will find it will come much easier to you the sooner you begin. I always tried to do this when I was your age & found it made me much happier.’
¹⁸

Punishment for transgressions was administered in the library – which, despite its name, was devoid of books, the shelves being filled instead with the impressive stamp collection to which George devoted his leisure time when he was not shooting or sailing. Sometimes the boys would get a verbal dressing down; for serious offences, their father would put them over his knee. The room, not surprisingly, was remembered by the boys largely as a ‘place of admonishment and reproof ’.

The children’s lives changed dramatically following the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901. The Prince of Wales, who now became King Edward VII, took over Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Balmoral, while his son acquired Marlborough House as his London residence, Frogmore House at Windsor and Abergeldie, a small castle on the River Dee near Balmoral. As heir to the throne (and, from that November, Prince of Wales), George began to assume more official duties, some of which took him away from home. That March, he and Mary set off on an eight-month tour of the Empire, leaving their children in the more indulgent hands of Edward and Alexandra. School work was neglected as they followed the round of the Court between London, Sandringham, Balmoral and Osborne; their genial grandfather indulged their boisterousness.

It was also time for the boys to start their education. George had not received much formal schooling himself and did not consider it much of a priority for his own children. David and Bertie were not sent to school but were instead tutored by Henry Hansell, a tall, gaunt tweed-clad bachelor with a large moustache who seemed to have spent more of his time at Oxford on the football or cricket fields than in tutorials or lecture halls. A less than inspiring teacher, he thought the boys would be better off at prep school, like others their age; their mother appears to have agreed. George was having none of it, however, blaming their lack of academic progress on their stupidity. Tellingly, though, he was to relent later with two younger sons, both of whom he sent away to school.

Given the amount of time they spent together – and the distant nature of their parents – it was natural that David and Bertie should become close. It was an unequal relationship: as the oldest child, David both looked after his younger siblings and told them what to do. In his own words, written years later in his autobiography, ‘I could always manage Bertie.’ As puberty approached, Bertie, like all younger brothers, appears to have begun to resent such management – as Hansell noticed to his concern. ‘It is extraordinary how the presence of one acts as a sort of “red rag” to the other,’ he reported.
¹⁹

This was more than just usual sibling rivalry. David was not just older, he was also good looking, charming and fun. Both boys were also aware from an early age that he was destined one day to become king. Bertie had been less blessed by fate: he suffered from poor digestion and had to wear splints on his legs for many hours of the day and while he slept, to cure him of the knock-knees from which his father had suffered. He was also left-handed but, in accordance with the practice of the time, was obliged to write and do other things with his right, which can often cause psychological difficulties.

Adding to Bertie’s problems – and to some extent a result of them – was the stammer that had already begun to manifest itself when he was aged eight. Indeed, the incidence of stammering has been demonstrated to be higher among those born left-handed. The letter ‘k’ – as in ‘king’ and ‘queen’ – was a particular challenge, something that was to prove a particular problem for someone born into a royal family.

Matters were not helped by the attitude of Bertie’s father whose response to his son’s struggles was a simple ‘get it out’. A particular trial was their grandparents’ birthdays, which were marked by a well-established ritual: the children were required to memorize a poem, copy it out on sheets of paper tied together with ribbon, recite the verses in public and then bow and present them to the person whose anniversary was being celebrated. It was bad enough when the poem was in English – later, after they started language lessons, they had to be in French and German, too. Such occasions, to which their grandparents invited guests, were a nightmare for Bertie, according to one of his biographers.

‘The experience of standing in front of the glittering company of grown-ups known and unknown, and struggling with the complexities of Goethe’s
Der Erlkönig
, painfully conscious of the contrast between his halting delivery and that of his “normal” brother and sister, was a humiliating one which may well have laid the foundation for his horror of public reviews when he was King.’
²⁰

Like their father before them, the two boys were destined for the Royal Navy. Although for David this was intended as a brief spell before he assumed his duties as Prince of Wales, Bertie was expected to make a career of it. The first stage was the Royal Naval College at Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s previous home, on the Isle of Wight. King Edward had refused to take on the house when his mother died and instead gave it to the nation; the main house was used as a convalescent home for officers, while the stable block was turned into a preparatory school for cadets. The experience must have been a strange one for the two boys who had visited ‘Gangan’ – as Victoria was known – at the house during her final years.

Bertie was thirteen when he was admitted to the college in January 1909; David had arrived two years earlier. It proved a dramatic contrast to Sandringham life for the boys, both socially and intellectually. According to royal tradition, neither of the brothers had been brought up to have contact with other children the same age; by contrast, their counterparts (most of whom had been at preparatory school) would have been used to separation from their parents and to the discipline, harsh conditions, poor food and curious rituals considered an integral part of an upper-class English education.

Then there was the bullying. Far from enjoying preferential treatment from their future subjects as a result of their royal origins, both boys were picked on mercilessly. David, on one occasion, was forced to endure a mock re-enactment of the execution of Charles I in which he was obliged to place his head in a sash window while the other part was brought down violently on top of it. Bertie, nicknamed ‘sardine’ because of his slight physique, was found by a fellow cadet trussed up in a hammock in a gangway leading from the mess-hall, crying for help. Given the importance placed on team games, the two boys were put at a disadvantage by their lack of experience playing football or cricket.

Bertie’s problems were compounded by his dismal academic performance. Osborne was essentially a technical school, concentrating on maths, navigation, science and engineering. Although good at the practical side of engineering and seamanship, he was a disaster at mathematics, typically coming bottom of the class or close to it. Again, his stammer undoubtedly played a role. Although it virtually disappeared when he was with friends, it returned to dramatic effect whenever he was in class. He found the ‘f ’ of fraction difficult to pronounce and, on one occasion, failed to respond when asked what was a half of a half because of his inability to pronounce the initial consonant of ‘quarter’ – all of which helped to contribute to an unfortunate reputation for stupidity. His father, always better at dealing with his son from afar, seemed to understand. ‘Watt [the second master] thinks Bertie is shy in class,’ he wrote to Hansell. ‘I expect it is his dislike of showing his hesitating speech that prevents him from answering, but he will I hope grow out of it.’
²¹

That, however, was going to take several years. In the final examinations, held in December 1910, Bertie came 68th out of 68. ‘I am afraid there is no disguising to you the fact that P.A. has gone a mucker,’ wrote Watt to Hansell. ‘He has been quite off his head, with the excitement of getting home, for the last few days, and unfortunately as these were the days of the examinations he has come quite to grief.’

It was during this time that his beloved grandfather, Edward VII, died. On 7 May Bertie had looked out of his old schoolroom window in Marlborough House to see the Royal Standard flying at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. Two days later, dressed in the uniforms of naval cadets, he and David watched the ceremony as their father was proclaimed King from the balcony of Friary Court, St James’s Palace. On the day of their grandfather’s funeral, they marched behind his coffin in Windsor from the station to St George’s Chapel. The elevation of their father meant David was now first in line to the throne, and Bertie second.

Bertie’s dismal academic performance did not prevent him from progressing the following January to the next stage of his education, Dartmouth Royal Naval College, where David was already in his last term. Here again, Bertie faced the inevitable comparisons with his elder brother who was, by any standards, not much of a scholar himself. ‘One could wish that he had more of Prince Edward’s keenness and appreciation,’ wrote Watt.
²²

Matters improved the following year, however, not least because David left Dartmouth for Magdalen College, Oxford, allowing his younger brother to emerge from his shadow. The curriculum began to be weighted more away from the academic towards the practical aspects of seamanship, to which he was better suited. He was also encouraged by his term officer, Lieutenant Henry Spencer-Cooper, to take up sports that he was better at, such as riding, tennis and cross-country running.

After two years at Dartmouth, he embarked in January 1913 on the next stage of his preparation: a six-month training cruise on the cruiser
Cumberland
. During the voyage through the West Indies and Canada, Bertie experienced the adulation that being a member of the royal family inevitably brought. Such were the number of public appearances that he was required to make that he persuaded a fellow cadet to stand in for him as his ‘double’ on some minor occasions. He was also confronted for the first time with the need to make speeches, which was to prove such an ordeal for his whole life. A prepared speech he had to read out to open the Kingston Yacht Club in Jamaica proved particularly arduous.

On 15 September 1913, at the age of seventeen, Bertie was commissioned as a junior midshipman on the 19,250-ton battleship HMS
Collingwood
, in the first stage of a naval career, which, like his father before him, he expected to be his life for the next few years. Apparently for security reasons, he was known as Johnson.

There was a major difference between father and son, however. While the future King George V loved both the navy and the sea, his son worshipped the navy as an institution but did not much like the sea itself – indeed he suffered badly with seasickness. He also continued to be plagued by shyness – a fact recorded by several of his fellow officers. One, Lieutenant F. J. Lambert, described the Prince as a ‘small, red-faced youth with a stutter’, adding ‘when he reported his boat to me he gave a sort of stutter and an explosion. I had no idea who he was and very nearly cursed him for spluttering at me.’ Another, Sub Lieutenant Hamilton, wrote of his charge: ‘Johnson is very well full of young life and gladness, but I can’t get a word out of him.
²³
Proposing a toast to ‘the King’ in a Royal Navy wardroom became a torment because of his fear of the ‘k’ sound.

There were far more serious challenges to come: on 3 August 1914 the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, following an ‘unsatisfactory reply’ to the British ultimatum that Belgium must be kept neutral. On 29 July the
Collingwood
, together with other members of the Battle Squadrons, had left Portland for Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, off the extreme northern tip of Scotland, with the task of guarding the northern entrance to the North Sea from the Germans.

Bertie went north with his ship but after just three weeks he went down with the first of several medical conditions that were to cast a shadow over his naval career. Suffering violent pains in his stomach and with difficulty breathing, he was diagnosed with appendicitis; on 9 September the offending organ was removed at hospital in Aberdeen.

A semi-invalid at nineteen, while his contemporaries were fighting and dying for his country, Bertie joined the War Staff at the Admiralty. He found the work there dull, however and, after pressing, was allowed back to the
Collingwood
in February the following year. He was on board for only a few months before he began to suffer with his stomach again. He was, it subsequently turned out, suffering from an ulcer, but doctors failed to diagnose it, blaming his problems instead on a ‘weakening of the muscular wall of the stomach and a consequent catarrhal condition’. He was prescribed rest, careful diet and a nightly enema, but, not surprisingly, he failed to respond.