The death of George V

At five minutes to midnight on 20 January 1936, King George V, sovereign of the United Kingdom and the Dominions and Emperor of India, died at Sandringham House in Norfolk. He was 70 and had reigned since May 1910. He had steered the monarchy through the First World War, the fall of the thrones of Russia, Germany and Austria, the first Labour government and the Great Depression, and in his final years he was a figure of almost universal respect, a symbol of continuity in troubled times. The crown passed to his eldest son, until then Prince of Wales, who took the name Edward VIII. In 1936 the change of monarch mattered more than it might have seemed: the new king openly sympathised with Germany, disregarded constitutional conventions and was involved with a married American woman, which led to his abdication before the year was out. Half a century later it also emerged that the old king’s death had been hastened by his physician.

The King’s illness

George V had never been a man of robust health. In October 1915, while reviewing troops in France, he was thrown from his horse and badly injured, and heavy cigarette smoking aggravated his chronic bronchitis. In November 1928 he fell gravely ill with septicaemia and an empyema of the pleura. For months he was close to death; he underwent an operation and convalesced at the seaside town of Bognor, which was given the suffix Regis in his honour. He never fully regained his strength, and in the last year of his life his doctors were giving him oxygen. In May 1935 the country celebrated his Silver Jubilee, and George V, surprised by the warmth of the crowds, said he could not understand such popularity, since he was, after all, “only a very ordinary sort of fellow”. In December 1935 his beloved sister Victoria died, which left him deeply depressed.

On 15 January 1936 the King, complaining of a cold, took to his bed at Sandringham and never rose from it again. He grew weaker by the day and lapsed ever more often into unconsciousness. Queen Mary summoned their children. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, later recounted that in his lucid moments the King asked his secretary, “How is the Empire?”, and was told that all was well with the Empire. On 20 January the Privy Council gathered at the dying man’s bedside to appoint Counsellors of State to carry out his duties. According to those present, the King, with enormous effort, made a mark on the document in place of a signature.

Death at Sandringham

The King’s medical team was headed by Bertrand Dawson, Lord Dawson of Penn, who had long served as the royal family’s physician. At 9.25 p.m. he wrote on the back of a menu card the bulletin that passed into history: “The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.” Yet the death agony might still have lasted many hours, and Dawson decided to shorten it. In his private diary he recorded that at about 11 p.m. he concluded that the last stage might be prolonged, which would be out of keeping with the dignity and serenity the King deserved and would exhaust the family keeping vigil at his side. He himself therefore injected three-quarters of a grain of morphine into the dying man’s jugular vein, followed shortly afterwards by a grain of cocaine. Within a quarter of an hour the King’s breathing grew quieter. George V died at 11.55 p.m. in the presence of the Queen, his children and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, who was reciting prayers.

Dawson made no secret in his diary that the timing of the announcement was also a consideration. He wanted the news to appear in the morning edition of The Times rather than in the “less appropriate” evening papers, and he telephoned his wife in London to ask her to alert the newspaper. He sought the consent of neither the King nor the family. The truth came out only in 1986, when the doctor’s biographer, Francis Watson, published extracts from his notes. In 1994 the author of an article in the British Medical Journal described Dawson’s conduct as “a killing for convenience”. Historians of medicine still debate whether this was euthanasia, given that the patient had not consented to it, or rather the arbitrary decision of a doctor who believed he knew best. That same year Dawson himself spoke in the House of Lords against a bill to legalise euthanasia, arguing that such decisions belonged to the conscience of doctors, not to the law. The same diary reveals that the King’s last words were far from noble: they were a slurred curse aimed at the nurse who was giving him a sedative. The popular anecdote in which the dying King, assured that he would soon be back in Bognor, replied with an oath about the town is a legend.

The funeral

The next day the new king flew from Sandringham to London for the meeting of the Accession Council, becoming the first British monarch to travel by air. His very first days showed that he meant to behave differently from his father: he watched the reading of the proclamation of his accession from a window of St James’s Palace in the company of Wallis Simpson, an American then in her second marriage.

On 23 January the coffin was taken by train to London to lie in state in Westminster Hall. As it was carried in, the cross fell off the Imperial State Crown resting on the coffin and dropped on to the cobbles. Edward VIII is said to have exclaimed, “What is going to happen next?”, and many of those present took it as a bad omen. Over four days more than 800,000 people filed past the coffin. On the last night the dead king’s four sons stood guard at the catafalque: the King, the Duke of York, Albert, and the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent.

The funeral took place on 28 January. The cortège crossed London to Paddington station, from where a train carried the coffin to Windsor, and the King was buried in St George’s Chapel. Behind the gun carriage walked his sons, followed by the Kings of Denmark, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria and the Belgians, the French President, Albert Lebrun, and dozens of princes and dignitaries. The ceremony was a review of the Europe of the day. Germany was represented by its Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, and among the dead king’s relatives was his cousin Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, an English-born grandson of Queen Victoria and for years a committed National Socialist. The Soviet Union sent the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who a year and a half later was shot during the Great Purge. Italy, which had just been placed under League of Nations sanctions for its attack on Ethiopia, was represented by the heir to the throne, the Prince of Piedmont. The Finnish marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim was also present. The ceremonies were broadcast by the BBC. The German composer Paul Hindemith, who happened to be in London, wrote his Trauermusik (Funeral Music) for viola and orchestra in a matter of hours on the very day after the King’s death, and it was performed live on the radio straight afterwards, on the evening of 21 or 22 January (sources give both dates).

The King and his successor

George V was a constitutional monarch who understood the limits of his role, yet on many occasions he influenced the course of events. In 1924 he entrusted power to the first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, and in 1931 he persuaded him to form a National Government. After Hitler came to power he watched Germany with unease. In 1934 he told the German ambassador that his country had become a danger to the world and that if it went on arming at that pace there would be war within ten years. At the same time he feared war more than anything and supported the government’s efforts to avoid it, as reflected, for instance, in the naval agreement with Germany of June 1935.

What worried him most, however, was his heir. The Prince of Wales, a 41-year-old bachelor, was the darling of the crowds and the newspapers, but his father thought little of either his character or his way of life, and his affairs with married women filled the King with disgust. In 1935 the King is reported to have said that after his death the boy “will ruin himself in twelve months”, and to have prayed that nothing would come between his second son, Albert, and his little daughter Elizabeth and the throne. Politicians were troubled by the Prince’s views as well. In June 1935, at a gathering of British Legion veterans, he called for a hand of friendship to be extended to Britain’s former German enemies, for which his father rebuked him, since the remark strayed into foreign policy. In Berlin it was welcomed. According to historians, German diplomats and Duke Charles Edward then conveyed to Hitler their conviction that the new king would be a friend of Germany.

On the road to war

Edward VIII’s reign lasted less than eleven months and confirmed his father’s fears. The King neglected state papers, which were also read by his companion and her guests, voiced opinions on political matters and accepted the sanctions against Italy only grudgingly. In March 1936, six weeks after the funeral, Hitler sent troops into the demilitarised Rhineland. The stories that circulated later, claiming that Edward VIII personally restrained the government from an armed response at that time, find no support in the documents, but their very popularity shows how the King was perceived in Germany. In any case, Baldwin’s government, which had won the general election of November 1935, had no intention of fighting for the Rhineland, whatever the monarch’s wishes.

In December 1936 Edward VIII chose marriage to Wallis Simpson and abdicated. The throne passed to his brother as George VI, who deliberately took his father’s name in order to restore the monarchy’s dignity. It was he who in September 1938 appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after his return from Munich, and who a year later addressed the nation on the day war was declared on Germany. George V did not live to see the Second World War he had warned against. The last years of his reign, however, fell at a time when Britain could still have stood up to Hitler at relatively little cost. Preoccupied with the economic crisis, the affairs of the Empire and the consequences of its own disarmament, it chose instead the policy of appeasement.