George VI

George VI: The Reluctant King Who Held the Line

He never wanted the job, and the job's central requirement was the one thing he could not do. A man whose stammer severely hampered public speaking became king in the first era when a monarch's voice reached every household in the empire by radio. Between December 1936 and February 1952 he took a throne discredited by his brother, held it through the worst war in British history, and handed it to his daughter intact. George VI's achievement was not brilliance. It was showing up, every day, at something that frightened him.

Bertie

He was born on 14 December 1895 at Sandringham in Norfolk, the second son of the future George V and Mary of Teck, and christened Albert Frederick Arthur George. To his family he was Bertie, and as a second son he was raised for a supporting role — which suited him, because he was shy and afflicted from childhood by the stammer that would define his public life.

He went into the Royal Navy as a teenager and did not have a decorative war. Serving aboard HMS Collingwood, he took part in the Battle of Jutland, the great fleet action of the First World War. In 1919 he qualified as a pilot in the newly formed Royal Air Force.

The Duke of York

Created Duke of York in 1920, he built a public role that was, by royal standards, distinctly unglamorous: industry. He visited factories, took a serious interest in working conditions and became president of the Industrial Welfare Society. It gave him something few princes acquire — direct, unceremonial contact with the industrial working class he would later address as king in wartime.

In 1923 he married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, daughter of the Earl of Strathmore. They had two daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, and the four of them formed the tight domestic unit they called "we four." The marriage was the making of him; the Royal Family credits her with sustaining his work throughout his reign. So was the speech therapy he undertook, which never eliminated the stammer but taught him to manage it well enough to speak in public.

December 1936

Then his brother destroyed the plan. Edward VIII abdicated in December 1936 in order to marry Wallis Simpson, and on 11 December the Duke of York became king. He was, by every account, reluctant and badly shaken. Contemporaries recorded a man frightened of a role he had never been trained for, arriving at it in the middle of a constitutional scandal that had damaged the institution's standing.

He chose the regnal name George VI rather than reigning as Albert — a deliberate signal of continuity with his father, and an early instance of an instinct he turned out to possess in abundance: an understanding of what symbols do. He was crowned at Westminster Abbey in May 1937.

The War

The war made him. In 1940 he had misgivings about Winston Churchill and would have preferred Lord Halifax as prime minister — a serious misjudgement, and one he corrected fast. He and Churchill went on to meet every Tuesday for nearly five years and built one of the most effective working relationships in British constitutional history.

When the bombing began, the royal family refused to leave London. Buckingham Palace was hit nine times. The King and Queen walked through the wreckage of the East End and other blitzed districts, and the visits produced, in the Royal Family's own phrase, a great surge in public sentiment and lasting popularity. In 1940 he instituted the George Cross and the George Medal to honour civilian bravery — an invention that recognised a war in which civilians were now targets. In 1942 he awarded the George Cross to the entire island of Malta for its resistance under siege.

He also went forward. He inspected British forces in France in 1939, in North Africa in 1943, on the Normandy beaches in June 1944, and later in Italy and the Low Countries.

The Empire Ends

Peace brought a different set of problems, and George VI presided over the dismantling of the thing he had inherited. In 1947 he toured South Africa with the Queen and both princesses — the first such family tour. That same year India and Pakistan became independent, and he ceased to be Emperor of India. The Commonwealth was reconstituted around something other than allegiance to the Crown, a transformation that could easily have destroyed the monarchy's international role and, largely because he accepted it without resistance, did not.

Why George VI Is Called a Genius

The word does not fit, and pretending otherwise would insult a man whose entire virtue was that he never pretended. George VI was not an intellectual. He generated no policy, wrote nothing of consequence, and as a constitutional monarch had almost no decisions to make; his one significant exercise of private judgement — preferring Halifax to Churchill in 1940 — he got wrong. The Royal Family's own description of him is telling: conscientious and dedicated, reserved, and a man of deep religious faith. Those are the qualities of a good employee, not a great mind.

What he had instead was two things worth taking seriously. The first is a form of courage that is rarer than intellectual gift. Britannica's summary is precise: he became "a symbol of courage and strength for his people during World War II, partly by battling his stammer." The disability was not incidental to his reign; it was the daily condition of it. A man whose throat closed under pressure had to broadcast to a nation under bombardment, and did, repeatedly, for six years. Anyone who has feared public speaking understands the size of that.

The second is an unschooled but reliable instinct for symbolic action — staying in a bombed palace, creating a decoration for civilian bravery, giving the George Cross to an island, walking through the rubble of the East End. None of these were his ideas alone, and none required cleverness. All of them were right, and a less steady man would have got them wrong.

So he is listed here for consequence and character rather than intellect. He restored the credibility of a monarchy his brother had emptied out, and he did it by being conspicuously the opposite of his brother in every respect that mattered.

Legacy

The strain told. His health declined sharply after the war, and he died at Sandringham on 6 February 1952, aged fifty-six, following a failed lung operation. His elder daughter became Elizabeth II.

He left her a monarchy that had survived an abdication, a world war and the loss of an empire, and that commanded more public affection at his death than at any point since the previous century. That was not a foregone conclusion in December 1936. It is reasonable to say that a lesser man in that position would have lost the throne for his family — and that George VI's stubborn, frightened, unspectacular competence is the reason the British monarchy still exists.

Achievements

• monarch of Australia (1942–1952)
• monarch of New Zealand (1947–1952)
• monarch of the Dominion of Ceylon (1948–1952)
• Emperor of India (1936–1948)
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour
• Companion of the Liberation
• Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the White Eagle
• Educated at Trinity College