King Charles III coronation: King George VI, the reluctant king with a short reign

King George VI, the reluctant king, had a very different accession to throne from that of both his daughter, the late Queen Elizabeth II and his grandson, King Charles III.

While both Elizabeth and Charles knew they would one day wear the crown and accept the duties and responsibilities that went with that, George did not.

The second son of George V, known to his family as Bertie from his Christian names of Albert Frederick Arthur George, he was not expected to take the throne. That was to be the future of his brother, the sociable, outgoing and scandalous Prince Edward, who became king in January 1936 on the death of their father George V.

Albert was one of six children and not the one with the longest collection of Christian names in the family — his mother, Queen Mary, was christened Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes of Teck.

Albert, who had the title Duke of York, married Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and became the father of Elizabeth and her sister Margaret, expected to live as a “spare”, performing the royal duties required of him without the pressures of kingship. A devoted father, he referred to his daughters as “my pride and my joy”. Likewise, his daughters assumed in their early years that their lives would be similarly untroubled by the weight of a crown.

But he had not reckoned on the determination of his brother to put his romantic passion ahead of his duty as king.

While the British press had largely ignored the growing scandal of Edward’s relationship with the divorced American socialite Wallis Simpson it erupted when he became king. The affair sparked a constitutional crisis when Edward proposed to marry her as soon as her second divorce was finalised.

Fierce religious, moral and political concerns ensued. The monarch was head of the Church of England, which at that time did not allow divorced people to remarry if their ex-spouses were still alive.

Edward’s refusal to end the relationship resulted in his abdication in December 1936 with Albert becoming an unlikely king. Edward, given the title of Duke of Windsor, married Simpson the following year. They remained married until his death 35 years later.

And so began the reign of the reluctant king, a man ill-suited to the life but who is remembered as being loyal and dutiful, stalwart in his determination to support his people through the rigours of World War II when he and his wife refused to leave Buckingham Palace during the Blitz and whose visits to beleaguered parts of the United Kingdom earned him the respect of his war-weary subjects.

He took the name of George as his regnal title, in honour of his father, though the two had an often tempestuous relationship. One documented story is that George V would display his wrath for the most trivial of reasons, particularly around clothing errors. One such time was when the young Prince George wore a kilt with the wrong jacket. Bertie’s stammer is sometimes attributed to fearing his father, a figure described as priggish, obsessed with formality, order and fearful of scandal after the salacious reputation of his own father, Edward VII.

That stammer was one of the most difficult aspects of his kingship, since public speaking was part of the job.

He had already come in contact with Lionel Logue, the Australian speech therapist whose professional career began in Perth where he taught elocution, acting and public speaking at various schools, including St Hilda’s, Methodist Ladies College, Scotch College, Loreto and Claremont Teachers College.

While in London in 1924, Logue’s work with World War I shell-shock victims who had speech difficulties was brought to the then-Duke’s attention. In addition to physical exercises, which helped with patients’ breathing, Logue’s therapy emphasised humour and patience.

Logue worked with the King until the mid-1940s, their efforts to overcome his stammer the subject of the film The King’s Speech, starring Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth.

George’s coronation took place in May 1937, five months after the abdication of Edward, on the same date as that planned for Edward’s coronation and with many of the original details staying in place. Edward had floated the idea of not having a coronation service at all, or at the least a much reduced one. Some of the traditional elements he had wanted removed were reinstated after the abdication, with his mother, Queen Mary, insisting on taking a planning role.

A major innovation with lasting consequences from the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth was the BBC Television service’s first major outside broadcasting challenge. The service was just six months old.

People had never been able to both see and hear the monarch in their homes before. But it was a vote of confidence in the power of television, particularly on such regal occasions. There were just three cameras available to record that coronation — all outside the abbey. At Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953 there were more than 20.

George’s reign was not a long one, at least compared with that of his daughter. He was troubled by illness and having undergone surgery for lung cancer in 1951, his daughter Elizabeth had increasingly stood in for her father on State occasions.

She last saw him as he bid her and her husband Phillip farewell on their tour of Australia, via Kenya. Six days later he died from coronary thrombosis.

The reluctant king wrote to his brother after the abdication, saying that he had inherited a rocking throne and would do all that he could to make it steady again. Few would disagree that he succeeded, bringing new stability to the monarchy in a display of loyalty and duty.