A throne he never sought

Kenneth Rose

GEORGE VI by Sarah Bradford

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £18.95, pp. 506

QUEEN MARY'S PHOTOGRAPH ALBUMS edited by Christopher Warwick

Sidgwick & Jackson, £18.95, pp. 152

King George VI was given little chance to leave his imprint on history. Brought up under the shadow of a stern Victorian papa and a dazzling elder brother, he was haunted throughout youth and naval ser- vice by insecurity, a stammer and the torture of an undiagnosed stomach ulcer.

Then the clouds seemed to lift. At the age of 27 he found unbroken domestic happiness and strength in his marriage to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Fortune smiled on him yet again when as a patient of Lionel Logue he was taught to control the speech defect that turned every public appearance into a private nightmare. He carried out a busy but undemanding pro- gramme of royal duties, raised a family, laid out a garden and set up boys' camps to bridge the gap between social classes. The abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 ended his younger brother's years of con- tent. The new King embarked on his reign with despair, underrating the readiness of his subjects to switch their loyalty from the fickle brilliance of Fort Belvedere to the traditional values of Windsor Castle.

Hardly had George VI begun to acquire confidence in his new rale when he was put to the test of war. He displayed courage, dignity and the chivalry of an earlier age; and although he never lost a hatred of the microphone, his simple words of resolution lifted many hearts. Yet he was no Henry V and recognised that only the voice of a Churchill could rouse and inspire the na- tion to victory.

The general election of 1945 robbed him of a Prime Minister whom he had come to revere. The King's relations with Labour were correct but lacked the warmth and affection which his father had inspired in MacDonald's Government 20 years earlier. He gazed mournfully upon a deteriorating economy and the dissolution of an Indian Empire he had never been allowed to visit.

`I feel burned out,' the King wrote. A tour of South Africa spared him one of the worst of English winters but again left him exhausted and melancholy. He developed arterioscelerosis, then cancer of the lung, neither of which yielded to surgery. In 1952, Churchill said of him, death came as a friend. His wreath was in the shape of a George Cross and bore the inscription 'For Valour.'

Sarah Bradford is a diligent biographer who has ranged widely through the many printed and manuscript sources that have become available since Sir John Wheeler- Bennett's official life of the King appeared in 1958. The result is shapely and sym- pathetic, illuminating and most readable. That, however, does not entitle her to dismiss Wheeler-Bennett's book as 'weigh- ty but unrevealing'. For all its 900 pages and expansive historical treatment, it does contain the essential story of George VI. Published only six years after the King's death, it is illustrated by a wealth of extracts from his diaries and letters that the present author has embodied in her own text and could not have found elsewhere.

Her own achievement is to have written an absorbing book about a good but unremarkable man. 'A virtuous king,' Logan Pearsall Smith said, 'is a king who has shirked his proper function: to embody for his subjects an ideal of illustrious misbehaviour absolutely beyond their reach.' That teasing paradox is not without truth for the royal biographer. How much easier it is to write an enticing life of George IV or Edward VII than of George V or George VI.

The King's political judgments were rarely in advance of his time and occa- sionally naive. Before Munich he offered to write a letter to Hitler, as 'one ex- Serviceman to another.' After Munich he wanted to welcome home Chamberlain at the airport, but contented himself with inviting the Prime Minister to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. In this, it may be added, the King reflected the mood of almost the entire nation, not least those Labour supporters who opposed rearmament until the very eve of war.

It is understandable, too, that in 1940 he should have had reservations about his new Prime Minister, one of the few statesmen of stature to champion Edward VIII's affair of the heart. Yet it was insensitive of the King to burden Churchill's finest hour with a trumpery objection to his choice of that inspired pirate Lord Beaverbrook as Minister of Aircraft Production. Against this must be set examples of the King's sagacity and sense of fair play, as when he deplored Churchill's sustained denigration of King Leopold of the Belgians in the summer of 1940.

I wonder whether Sarah Bradford does not devote too many pages to the running conflict between the Duke of Windsor and his brother: I make it about one quarter of her text. It is true that the abdication darkened the King's life and may ultimate- ly have hastened his death. Yet the saga of 1936 is by now a well-worn, almost thread- bare tale; and to discuss such questions as whether or not the Windsors had a physical relationship before marriage is both irrelevant and self-indulgent.

Nothing so unseemly intrudes on Queen Mary's Photograph Albums, a handsome volume containing a selection from the 10,000 snaps preserved between 1880 and 1952 by that historically-minded consort. They are accompanied by a biographical essay which Christopher Warwick has neatly distilled from her life by James Pope-Hennessy.

Queen Mary's clothes are worth a study of their own. Frozen into the fashion of the Edwardian Age at the command of her tyrannical husband, they reached a' pre- posterous apogee in the early 1920s, there- after acquiring an austere, almost timeless majesty — `like the Jungfrau, white and sparkling in the sun,' as Chips Channon wrote. How brave of her, incidentally, to pat the hounds at a West Newton meet while swathed in fox furs.

I commend the photographs of George V mowing his lawn in a tall hat; that independent-minded royal physician Sir James Reid in frock coat and cloth cap; Lord Curzon in the robes of Chancellor of Oxford and Garter ribbon escorting Queen Mary to Balliol (having warned the domes- tic bursar that 'gentlemen do not take soup at luncheon'); the guardsmen at Queen Alexandra's funeral, their bearskins co- vered with snow as if retreating from Moscow.

Two comments on Christopher War- wick's captions. George V would have sent him to the Tower for writing 'on HMS Crescent' instead of 'in HMS Crescent'. And our present Queen, photographed with raised hand at a parade of guardsmen at Windsor in 1929, is not 'saluting the Commanding Officer'. She is returning the salute after he has asked her, as the senior member of the royal family present, for permission to march off. Even at the age of three, she has the aplomb of one born to reign.