‘Had party in the evening,’ recorded John McGarry, a 15-year-old schoolboy living in Bournemouth, on 8 January 1952. ‘Dorothy came, had super time. Dots really got me. Finished at 11 took Dot home. Mum said something very offending about her when I got back. Feel very rotten about it. Why can’t she leave me alone?’ Three days later, a Friday, he saw Dot in the evening: ‘Had super time, better than talking at scouts. Decide to stay in Mon, Tue, Wed to do some swotting. Dad and Mum do not want me to enjoy myself, surely that’s what the life is for. Bed at 10.45 feeling very happy as well as discontented.’ The downs and ups of adolescence continued unabated over the next few weeks:
13 January.
Decide to join the Navy.
17 January.
Dull day at school . . . All they talk about is exams, exams, exams what rotten fun.
22 January.
Dot came round in the evening, spent quite a good evening together, but she seems very cold hearted tonight.
24 January.
History exam in the morning, did terribly about 15% or less.
25 January.
Had a super evening. Get a long way with Dorothy. She’s lovely, the best girl I’ve ever had.
4 February.
Go round to Dorothies at 7.45 and spend the last evening of my life, so far, there. Had super time . . . Got real warmed up at some spots . . .
6 February.
Find my history book at school . . . Dull morning. THE KING DIES AT 10.45 all very strange, everybody seems quiet over the strange news.
Strange but true – at 7.15 that Wednesday morning, King George had been found dead in his bed at Sandringham by an under-valet. He was 56, and it was less than a fortnight since the
Daily Mirror
had published a brief but to-the-point letter from Mrs Florence Price of Dunvant near Swansea: ‘Surely we had a great example of the value of prayer during our beloved King’s recovery from his severe illness.’15
At about 11.00, less than two hours after Churchill had been informed, a Mass-Observation investigator was on a number 6 bus going to Marble Arch via Edgware Road in London:
There was an undercurrent of talk in the bus – and now and again Inv. caught the words ‘Princess Elizabeth’ and ‘the King’ and ‘It’s a pity – she’ll have to come back [i.e. from Kenya] I expect’. Everybody seemed to be talking softly, and the expressions on their faces looked solemn. Inv. had a feeling something had gone wrong, so turning to the bus conductress who was standing nearby she asked ‘Is there anything wrong?’
Bus conductress – ‘Haven’t you heard? – it’s just come thro’ on the wireless – the King died in his sleep.’
Other people on the bus on hearing this remark added – ‘Shame isn’t it?’ – ‘Oh well, it’s a mercy the way it ended – he had it coming.’ ‘I’m sorry for the old Queen – Queen Mary – it’ll be the death of her.’
An hour or so later, another M-O investigator was in Hammersmith, where he asked people how they felt about the news:
Pretty rough. If anybody’s patriotic they’re bound to feel something. I think most people feel something about it.
(M 40. Engineer)
I’m sorry for the King and I love him very much.
(M 20. Apprentice to watch repairer)
(
Didn’t know
.) I think I feel shocked. Sort of bewilders me I guess. The King died? Oh gee.
(F 20. Typist)
(
Didn’t know
.) Oh I think it’s dreadful – I’m terribly sorry. How sudden. I feel most terribly sorry. I feel as shocked as if it was someone belonging to me.
(F 40. Dept Store Buyer)
Bit of rough that’s all. Can’t say very much about it at all. Sorry to hear he’s gone that’s all.
(M 40. Pipe Fitter)
Well not at all pleased – it’s a funny question.
(M 40+. Fitter)
Very sad and can’t help being very sad. Very sad indeed.
(F 40+. Housewife)
Among the diarists, Nella Last in Barrow heard the news from a neighbour and ‘wasn’t very surprised’, with her ‘pity and concern’ going ‘in a rush of sympathy to Princess Elizabeth, whose youth dies at 26’; Judy Haines in Chingford was also told by a neighbour, with the two of them settling down for ‘a cup of tea’ and ‘a pleasant chat’; ‘hope he didn’t take a wrong pill’, was the rather sardonic reflection of Marian Raynham in Surbiton, adding that ‘it will be picturesque to have such a young Queen & Consort, a real Queen’; and Henry St John, working in the Ministry of Food in central London, mainly concentrated in his entry on how the cold in his head had ‘reached a stage of sore throat’ and ‘more nasal discharge’, though noting that ‘I never saw King George VI.’ As for the left-leaning political class, Richard Crossman, a prominent Labour backbencher who also wrote prolifically for the
New Statesman
and
Sunday Pictorial
, noted how ‘no one I have met [in the Commons that afternoon] genuinely feels anything about this, except Clem Attlee’.16
For many people, the most striking aspect of the day was the absence of normal radio programmes, apart from weather forecasts and news bulletins. There was close-down for most of the afternoon and then again after the six o’clock news (listened to by 54 per cent of the adult population), apart from four further bulletins, one of which was followed by a short memorial service listened to by 46 per cent. ‘The evening seemed so strange without the wireless,’ reflected Last. ‘We joined in silently to the really lovely little service after the nine o’clock news.’ For Frank Lewis in Manchester, it was a mixed evening. ‘DATE WITH WINN,’ he noted. ‘SHE DIDN’T TURN UP, probably due to the “King” business.’ So instead, with all cinemas and theatres closed for the day (though not pubs), he went to the Chinese restaurant in Mosley Street: ‘I found I couldn’t eat it all – I’d been eating too many sweets earlier on. 4/5d it came to, I left 6d tip; I don’t intend leaving more. I like those meals though, I must go more often to these places.’ But for John McGarry in Bournemouth, the death of a monarch was not something to be shrugged off so easily: ‘Dull afternoon, get home at 3.15 do homework . . . Mum’s do is off she’s heard. Says she’s going to have a party instead. Fancy on such a sad day. Go out at 7.30, meet Dorothy. Go out for stroll on cliffs and have lovely time, stroll back through the chine stopping at every seat. Get back at 9.45 to find every body having a good time. What disgusting manners.’ The young, burdened diarist went to bed at 10.30 ‘feeling very tired and sad’.
The new Queen returned home on Thursday the 7th. ‘The most prosperous-looking among the waiting women wore black furs and hats, and the men wore black ties, but the most touching things were the bows of painstakingly tied cheap black ribbon and the homemade crêpe-paper armbands pinned on many shabby coats,’ observed Mollie Panter-Downes (in her regular London letter in the
New Yorker
) about the silent crowd in the Mall watching Elizabeth drive by. Elsewhere the sartorial code seems to have been reasonably relaxed – ‘surprised to see so few black ties being worn,’ noted Anthony Heap in St Pancras, adding that ‘when George V died [in 1936], practically every man in London donned one immediately’ – and cinemas and theatres reopened. That evening (the same evening that detectives called on Alan Turing), Churchill paid an eloquent radio tribute to the late King. ‘It was the best piece of prose I have heard or read from him,’ reflected an appreciative Macmillan. The next day Kenneth Preston, an English teacher in Keighley, recorded how ‘many people have spoken of the fine funeral oration that Churchill pronounced on the wireless last night.’17
By this time the radio was also proving a source of considerable discontent. ‘The BBC proposes to continue scrapping its normal advertised programmes and substituting dreary “modified” ones – mostly made up of what one of my office colleagues expressively describes as “gut-aching” music,’ complained Heap on the 8th, with a week still left until the State Funeral and a return to radio normality. ‘I can see no justification whatever for this.’ Marian Raynham agreed: ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary on radio again, but am missing my funny men.’ Still, these were bumper days for the popular press, with Crossman noting the following week how the
Daily Mirror
had ‘put on half a million’ and the
Star
(a London evening paper) ‘more than doubled its circulation’, while the
Sunday Pictorial
(effectively the Sunday version of the
Daily Mirror
) ‘put on 150,000 circulation, although this was the fourth day after the King’s death and there was no news’. His unimpeachable conclusion was that royalty was ‘the one inexhaustible subject’.
Crossman was present on Monday the 11th when the lying-in-state began at an ‘extremely cold, dark and dank’ Westminster Hall. ‘There was a bang,’ he recorded, ‘the doors opened and the coffin was carried in by eight Grenadiers and heaved on to the catafalque, with only the crown on top. After the coffin came the most extraordinary sight, the Queens and Princesses, looking more like eight [in fact seven] Muslim women, clothed in dead black, swathed and double-swathed with veils so thick that they couldn’t read the order of service through them.’ Next morning the
Daily Express
carried an instantly famous (or infamous) photograph of the grieving ‘three Queens’, ie Mary and the two Elizabeths – a decision in ‘execrable taste’ according to Nella Last, who found that ‘everyone else I met when out shopping had the same “disgust” ’ at ‘such “
shocking
bad taste” ’.
Over the next few chilly nights and days, some 300,000 mourners passed solemnly through Westminster Hall to pay their last respects. ‘Never safer, better guarded lay a sleeping King than this, with a golden light to warm his resting place and the muffled tread of his devoted people to keep him company,’ ran Richard Dimbleby’s suitably hushed radio commentary on the Tuesday evening. ‘They come from a mile away in the night, moving pace by pace in hours of waiting, come into the silent majesty of the scene and as silently leave again.’ Among those next day inspecting the tomb of ‘George the Faithful’ (in Dimbleby’s characteristic coinage) was the novelist Barbara Pym, struck by ‘the still figures guarding the catafalque – the nose and chin of a very young officer of the Household cavalry – so pink and smooth – eyes hidden’. Virginia Potter, an American living in England, was there on the final evening. ‘It was,’ she reported to her mother, ‘a very awe-inspiring sight – hundreds of people slowly filing through that enormous and dimly-lit hall, and
no sound
except a quiet shuffling of feet.’ Afterwards, ‘we walked out into the street where the thousands of people were standing, completely silent, in the cold night air’. Yet for millions of others that week, the frustration mounted. ‘My husband was so “fidgety” – couldn’t settle to read, wouldn’t have a game of card patience,’ noted the long-suffering Last on Tuesday evening. ‘He counted up the days till he could expect the wireless programmes he likes. They are certainly dreary. Without being “gay”, I’m sure a “lighter” style of broadcast would not have been “disrespectful” to a man who loved “Itma”.’ She added that ‘a few plays could have easily been included’ in the schedule, whereas ‘they left in the mawkish “Mrs Dale’s Diary”, a real sick maker if there was one!’18
On Friday morning the coffin was put on a gun carriage and marched in slow time to Paddington Station by men of the Household Cavalry. All along the route there were crowds who, in Panter-Downes’s words, ‘had slept through the icy night beside their thermos flasks’. The ‘Bloomsbury’ diarist Frances Partridge was in north London that morning, but hoping to get across town to have lunch with her son in Kensington. ‘My bus decanted me at Selfridges,’ she wrote, ‘and all at once – like a bucket emptying its contents on me – I saw a horde of human beings advancing towards me. The procession must just have passed as their faces distinctly showed traces of a cathartic experience, like blackboards after a teacher had wiped them.’ From Paddington two trains took the world’s leaders and royal families as well as the coffin to Windsor, where the service and burial were in St George’s Chapel. ‘Had hours of King George VI’s funeral on television,’ noted Judy Haines in Chingford. ‘Pamela suddenly said, “Mummy, I
am
having an unhappy time” . . . I wondered aloud who would be looking after all the V.I.P.s over here for the funeral, and Abbé [her husband] said they’d be hurrying home to do their “pools”. I did laugh.’
But if private irreverence about foreign dignitaries was one thing, public irreverence about the only royal family that properly counted was quite another. ‘In Fleet Street two young men who refused to keep the 2 minute silence, & clumped down the street, were nearly lynched,’ noted Florence Speed next day, ‘& had to take refuge in a block of offices, & then have police protection, the crowd was so furious. One woman hit one of them with an umbrella . . .’ Similarly, Panter-Downes recorded in her next letter the widely expressed view that ‘the week’s events had proved beyond doubt the impossibility of Britain’s ever entering into any European federation, since Britons are already federated into a family that has loyalties and traditions bred in its bones and planted in its blood stream’; for her own part, she added that ‘this has certainly been brought home with new and moving force’. Even so, looking back in the same letter on the ten days of mourning since the fateful news, she did observe that ‘there are few English who do not say frankly that the time has dragged like a year and who are not relieved that it is over’.
Soon afterwards, a BBC survey found that 59 per cent of people had disapproved of the way programmes had been altered during this period, with only 29 per cent approving. Younger people disapproved much more than older people and men more than women, while in terms of class, the further down the social ladder, the greater the weight of disapproval. The findings were arguably a sign of an age of deference, if it had ever existed, starting to fray at the edges – though the accompanying BBC report emphasised that those who disapproved did so ‘not on the grounds of abstract principles but because they were deprived of the programmes they liked and offered a service which in general they considered to be “highbrow”, with the result that they felt left out in the cold’. The sense of relief at one house in Surbiton was probably typical. ‘Radio goes back to normal, Korea, Suez, etc & no King business,’ noted Marian Raynham the day after the funeral: ‘Some think B.B.C. overdid the mourning. We certainly had a lot of lovely, if solemn music. Daddy [i.e. her husband] simply hated all the Royalty part. He got so tired of it & gave up listening to the news. I enjoy it all, though sorry the King had to go, though these young normal ones seem more cheerful.’19