Sam:
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we’re talking about the film The King’s Speech, which came out in 2010. Directed by Tom Hooper and written by David Seidler. It shows the lead up to King George VI of England’s first wartime speech in 1939, as he works with speech therapist Lionel Logue to overcome his stammer. Obviously based on a true story. It won high praise and many awards – it got 12 Oscar nominations, more than any other film that year, and it won four, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Colin Firth. And there’s some additional reading: there was a book that was in the works when the movie was being made, but it hadn’t been published yet. It’s called The King’s Speech by Mark Logue, who is Lionel Logue’s grandson, and Peter Conradi. What did you think of this movie?

Maartje:
I enjoyed this movie. I’d seen it before, like you, when it came out – so a while ago. It’s one of those biopics that I enjoy more than most. I think it’s a really kind, strangely feel-good movie to watch. We’re talking about British monarchy – there’s a lot you can say about it – but this really wasn’t too much about the actual politics involved. So I found it’s mostly just about the people as people. I don’t know how realistic I think it is, but I did enjoy it as a movie. How about you?

Sam:
I think the acting is great, obviously – Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush as the leading men, and they’re both absolutely excellent. It goes along at a pretty good pace. I like that it focuses on the relationship between these two guys because I feel like that’s very strong. I do find that it’s kind of in the vein of these movies that are like, the British monarchy is so inspiring. Nothing further. Anyway.

You know, and personally – I mean, if anyone’s listened to this podcast for longer than like 10 minutes, you can probably guess that I think we should abolish the monarchy. I think that just watching this movie and reading about these monarchs, I’m like, wow, the profound mediocrity of people who are born into becoming leaders of men.

Maartje:
Yeah.

Sam:
I do like the aspect of it where it’s this friendship between these two guys and one of them is helping the other one to overcome something. There’s some really kind of sweet scenes between them, and I quite enjoyed that. I do know that if I take even one little step back and consider that it’s about the British monarchy, I’m like, OK, well.

Maartje:
I will say I read the book – not in its entirety, but it’s full of Lionel Logue’s diary entries made into a good narrative, so the book is really fun to read. I do feel like they smartly used this relationship that was fairly close, but it was very different to what we see in the movie in the sense that – for instance – Lionel Logue calls him Bertie in the movie. He did not in real life. I feel like they took some liberties in the way they work together and made that into a little bit of a closer relationship, maybe, than it had been in real life – but not in a way that I necessarily mind. It’s done on purpose, obviously.

Sam:
Yeah, I think it works. I think with that one in particular, the fact that he calls him Bertie the whole movie and then right at the end he calls him “Your Majesty” – or whatever he says – that’s a way for Logue to express, like, yeah, you’ve done it now. You’ve stepped into those shoes. You deserve to be king like we always talked about. You’ve done the thing, you know?

Maartje:
Yeah, I agree. And you do see, even in the book, he’s so proud of this man and he just wants this man to succeed as a human being rather than as this kind of larger-than-life monarch. It feels like an honest relationship between two men. It doesn’t feel like a relationship between a commoner and a monarch so much, which is what I enjoyed from the book quite a lot.

Sam:
Yeah. Another thing I like too – and maybe this is just my own personal bias because we have a World War II podcast – but I did like how they framed it around the lead up to World War II. The massive speech that he has to give is the one where he’s addressing the nation right after Great Britain has declared war on Germany. And I think it really works that he’s developing and evolving as a person right at the moment where he’s going to have to step up and the country’s being thrown into tumult. I feel like they did a good job of having his life and what’s happening with the country reflected really well against each other.

Maartje:
Very true. And it’s an interesting conversation to have, I think – maybe at the end of the podcast, as we near that moment – about the way the war, I think, saved the British monarchy a bit. Because they needed a symbol of hope after a radical, contentious time – scandal and all that – and then the war happened and they needed someone to depend on. And I think he really was that man for Britain in a war. We’re just lucky for him, because he didn’t want to be king – he was kind of forced into it by circumstances. And I think had his role been a different kind, a support role during a war would have been much more difficult for him.

Sam:
I would like to say that King George VI has actually been to my hometown. When he and his wife traveled through Canada in 1939, they came to my city and we still have a park named after them. They did this little ceremony there, and they actually went down into the mines. I thought that was neat.

Maartje:
Cool. Let’s get into the plot!

We start, as is customary at this point, with an opening card. It says: 1925. King George V reigns over a quarter of the world’s people. He asks his second son, the Duke of York, to give the closing speech of the Empire Exhibition in Wembley, London. The speech goes rather poorly, as the Duke – played by Colin Firth – who’s known as Bertie to his family, has a very strong stammer and he really struggles to give this speech. He has seen a number of doctors with the support of his wife Elizabeth, played by Helena Bonham Carter, but none have succeeded in helping him get over this stammer. The one where they put pebbles in his mouth actually came from ancient Greece, because apparently that was a cure at one time, and it’s actually really ridiculous.

Sam:
Yeah, it’s very silly. I was like, he’s definitely going to swallow one of those marbles. And then he did.

Maartje:
Yeah. I really like Helena Bonham Carter in this role, by the way. She’s really good too. I feel like every single actor is good in this.

Sam:
It’s a role that perfectly suits her. I mean, she also played Princess Margaret in The Crown, and I feel like she got to recycle this accent.

Maartje:
Yes.

Sam:
As they say in the movie, 150 years earlier, what people would expect of the king is not to fall off his horse. But now that the royal family has to give all of these speeches, and these things are being broadcast over the radio – obviously it’s a lot more nerve-wracking giving a speech that millions of people are going to hear versus the ten people standing nearest to you. So this is a big deal for this man in a way that it would not have been for monarchs who were born even fifty years before him.

Maartje:
Sit on the horse and look pretty is what you’re supposed to be doing.

Sam:
Yeah. Elizabeth visits a local speech therapist, Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush. He’s very charming and likeable in this movie. She doesn’t tell her husband that she’s going because at this point Bertie’s had it to the back teeth with all these different treatment methods he’s been subjected to. She attempts to get Lionel to treat her husband at home for obvious reasons, but even once he realises who she is, he firmly establishes that treatment must occur at his office. And this is a running theme for him – he is the one who sets the rules, and he’s very insistent that they’re going to treat each other as equals and that Bertie’s going to do what Lionel tells him to do. And she ultimately agrees, and she manages to persuade Bertie to come and see him.

Maartje:
So in real life, I don’t think Elizabeth set this up. It isn’t in the book, so I’m guessing that’s not exactly what happened. But Lionel Logue did insist that therapy happened either at his office or actually at his house. So I’d like to pick up on that.

Sam:
In one of the documentaries that I watched, they were talking about how Bertie and Elizabeth had gone to the theatre and they went backstage and met the cast. And there was this one actress who had had a speech impediment and she was talking about how great this Lionel Logue guy was.

Maartje:
Yeah, that’s in the book as well. But I don’t think it was like Elizabeth that went to see him behind her husband’s back – she did set it up in a way, though. Lionel Logue being Australian – I wish they’d given Geoffrey Rush a stronger accent in the movie. I would have enjoyed a thick Australian accent, but none of that was happening.

Sam:
Yeah, they keep mentioning he’s Australian and I’m like, well, he doesn’t sound Australian.

Maartje:
So, can I just speak very briefly about how awesome Lionel Logue and his wife are? Because they went on a world tour just by themselves. They’d had kids, they left their kids in Australia with her parents. And they were like, we’re just going to go on a world tour. They went through Europe, they’d been to Canada, they’d been everywhere. And they are so cool. Lionel Logue was actually fairly successful and well-known in Australia, but not so much in England – so he didn’t have that much success there. But I just really like this adventurous family. And unlike in the movie, Lionel doesn’t keep it secret from his wife that he’s meeting the king – in real life she knew, and she accompanied him on various occasions.

Sam:
I love his background too. He grows up in Australia and then he decides he wants to be an actor. So he takes elocution lessons with this guy who’s famous for teaching that. And then he starts to work for him and he starts teaching elocution lessons. And then that kind of morphs into what he does during World War I, where there are a lot of people with PTSD – as we would call it today – who have speech issues. So he’s figuring out all these methods to help them. And everyone said his methods were really unique, but that the cornerstone of his whole approach was kindness and humour and empathy. He didn’t want people to feel like they were being yelled at or rushed or whatever. And apparently it was really that that set him apart. And then he just shows up in London and he’s like, yeah, I’m a speech therapist.

Maartje:
They were talking about in the book how he set up his own company of speech therapists, and then one of the other people there decided to start a pyramid scheme for speech therapy. And Lionel Logue did not enjoy this whatsoever. He got so mad.

Bertie is initially resistant to Lionel’s methods and he also doesn’t really want to be there because nothing has worked for him yet and he doesn’t see why this should. And then at the end of their session Lionel has him recite Shakespeare while listening to loud classical music, and while he’s doing that he’s able to speak perfectly – indicating that his speech impediment is likely psychological rather than mechanical, which I think Lionel believed about most speech impediments. But Bertie refuses to listen to the recording. He has no plans to return to Lionel, but Lionel gives him the recording and says, I give this to everybody, you get to take it home.

Sam:
Yeah. One of the things that I liked was that in the documentary I was watching, they were talking about how George VI was known for having this explosive temper, largely because he stammered and he would just get frustrated. And the way that Colin Firth plays it in the movie is so sympathetic in a way that I am not always when I hear men yelling for no reason.

Maartje:
I think it’s because he plays him so quietly – you can see him struggle so well, and by the time he gets to yelling you’re like, poor man. It’s just really sad that he cannot speak the way he wants to. Another thing I really liked was there’s a constant focus – understandably – on Bertie’s smoking. His other speech therapists and doctors have told him that smoking relaxes his throat, which it does not really. And it’s notable in the movie because that’s what eventually kills him – he dies of lung cancer in the end, which is not fun.

Sam:
Yeah, I think the research on it was still dicey at this point. Like, there was some stuff coming out that smoking was really bad for you, but then obviously the tobacco companies were pushing back and being like, no, we have this other research. But I do remember reading The Outsiders, which was written in the early fifties, and by that point all the kids were calling cigarettes cancer sticks. So at some point in that fifteen-year period I guess they pretty firmly established in the public eye that cigarettes are actually terrible for you.

Maartje:
They are bad. Capital B bad.

Sam:
But vaping’s fine, right?

Maartje:
Absolutely.

Sam:
1934. So a period of time has gone by. I think it was interesting how they did this in the movie to add to the dimension of Bertie and Lionel’s relationship, because in real life the first year or so that they knew each other, they met – I think it was 80 times in 14 months. So they were meeting quite often, sometimes more than once a week. It was a very intensive speech therapy course that Lionel was giving him. They kind of separated for a little while, and then when it was time for George to take the throne, they became closer again. And then after that Lionel was around quite a lot. But in the movie, they’re like, yeah, Bertie tells him to take a hike and then a bunch of years go by.

So now it’s 1934 and Bertie’s father, King George V – played by Michael Gambon – recites a Christmas message over the radio. He insists that Bertie attempt to read it as well since the actual heir to the throne, Bertie’s older brother David – played by Guy Pearce – has been shirking his responsibilities and someone has to pick up the slack. This is very much an heir and a spare situation, like we had with William and Harry for most of our lives – if you’re my age.

Bertie struggles. It becomes apparent by his father’s reaction why he stammers so badly, because his dad is a dick. And at his wit’s end again, Bertie listens to the recording that Lionel had made of him and realises that Lionel’s trick had worked – he’d been able to speak pretty well. So he decides to return to speech therapy. However, he doesn’t want to address the root causes of his stammer. He’s very much one of those “the royal family does not air their dirty laundry” types. And he only wants to focus on the mechanical exercises, which are admittedly very fun and silly. There’s lots of doing tongue twisters and yelling swears and doing these odd physical motions.

Maartje:
Yes, I really enjoyed how they used that in the movie. It’s funnily enough in the book – what they actually do. But at this point in 1934 he was already in real life a decent speaker – they’d made so much progress already. But in the movie we kind of skip a whole bit and then they’re like, it’s been a while since they’ve seen each other and now he’s only just starting. They did a switch in the timeline to not give away that progress so quickly and then just start later. I think it makes sense because you want to get to that endpoint of the first wartime speech in a satisfying way, and I think it works.

Sam:
Yeah, I agree. I don’t have any beef with that. I liked that they used his father and brother so effectively because they weren’t in a ton of scenes – especially the father – but you just get such a good sense of what their relationship was like. And I think that in real life, today, if we saw a child being raised the way George VI was raised, we’d be like, well, that’s a little abusive, to be honest.

Maartje:
Ha!

Sam:
As they discuss in the movie, he was supposed to be left-handed and they punished him until he stopped doing that, which was quite common at the time. He used to wear leg braces, his parents were extremely distant – they were mostly raised by the staff. And I think that initially when he was young, he and his brother got along pretty well. Like, his brother was kind of the one who dragged him out of his shell and got him out there to meet the ladies and that kind of stuff. But then as they got older their personalities were so different that they ended up at loggerheads a lot of the time. And it’s difficult being in a family where you’re the shy, retiring one and you stand in everyone else’s shadow.

Maartje:
It’s also really weird to me that George V was such a dick to his son because apparently he was his favourite. And there’s a quote in the book from a letter in which he talks very warmly about Bertie – and you’re like, do these two different feelings mix? Because they really don’t. He’s quite strict. And what you said about the nanny – it made me laugh because it’s so sad – that the nanny at the end of the day would present the children to their parents, but then the nanny would pinch Bertie so he would cry and then he’d be sent away again. So effectively she was bullying this child who was already a sensitive boy. And like, why are people like this?

Sam:
Yeah, I think George V really did think that Bertie would be a better king than his older brother. But it was just that era, you know – spare the rod, spoil the child type thing. Like, you’re not supposed to be a warm, loving father. You’re supposed to be the figure of authority. You’re supposed to raise your boys to be men.

Maartje:
And they show that quite nicely in the movie by having Bertie be so affectionate with his daughters, and then later on when he gets crowned king he’s no longer really allowed to hug them or anything – and it just made me sad. I’m sure that’s in part what it was like in real life.

Sam:
I really liked in the documentary they mentioned Bertie used to refer to his wife and daughters as “us four.” He would commonly say things like “us four are doing this” or whatever. And I just – I’m like, that’s so sweet. He genuinely seems like a guy who felt well supported and loved by his family and wanted to be involved in their lives.

Maartje:
Makes you wonder what kind of life he would have had if he hadn’t been made to ascend the throne. I wonder if he would have been a happier man.

Sam:
Well, I certainly think he would have lived longer.

Maartje:
Yep, me too.

It’s 1936, so we’ve moved on two years. George V dies, very sadly, after we see him decline fairly quickly. And David becomes King Edward VIII. No one’s really impressed by his desire to marry the already twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, played by Eve Best. At this point she’s actually still married, I think, to her last husband, but they are getting a divorce. And she’s an American socialite, so that’s already not what many people would have wanted for him. Bertie then decides to talk to him about his disregard for his duties, but he struggles to do that. And around this time, King Edward cruelly mocks him.

Sam:
Yeah, it’s funny because I think that David knows he’s behaving in a way his father wouldn’t approve of, and he’s trying to be like, yeah, I don’t care that I’m doing that. And he’s trying to make it sound like Bertie is out for his job. And I also think that he knows that’s the last thing Bertie wants, but he’s just very defensive about it.

Maartje:
I don’t know what I think about the portrayal of David in this movie. They chose to show a very narrow view of him and obviously we do get some of his personality, but I feel like there’s a lot more the movie could have told about him. They really chose to focus on Bertie specifically and his relationship with other people, and not so much about the other people. So it’s a choice.

Sam:
Well, yeah – I mean, we’re really only seeing Edward as he pertains to Bertie’s story.

Lionel tries to get to the bottom of why Bertie stutters so much when trying to speak candidly with his own brother. And notably, when Bertie’s having a calm, normal conversation with his brother, it’s fine. But as soon as he gets angry and frustrated with himself, it’s just a compounding problem. He just gets more and more unable to speak.

But Bertie is super stressed out by this whole situation and he gets angry at this perceived crossing of a boundary from Lionel and he calls off their sessions. Lionel attempts to go see him to apologise, but Bertie has staff – and if you have staff, you can just simply refuse to see people.

Maartje:
I don’t think this happened in real life. It’s not in the book, so I feel like it would have been in the book if it had happened. But I understand they needed more conflict, so I’m not mad.

Sam:
Yeah, it’s drama.

Maartje:
Fair. I just feel like Lionel and Bertie were just good friends the entire time and they didn’t have that much conflict. But I guess it doesn’t make for a very good movie.

Sam:
Listen, I was watching this documentary and they were like, Bertie really liked to visit industrial sites and he was part of this industrial organisation where they talked about industry. And I’m like, tedious. Imagine. They’re like, what are you up to today, Bertie? And he’s like, I’m going to go visit another factory. Going to take a look at it, going to talk about industry. Like, yeah, we can’t watch a whole movie about that.

Maartje:
You are so right. I will not mention it again. We need conflict in this movie. Bertie’s very conflict-averse, so they needed to make something up to make it more conflict-heavy.

Sam:
He’s a bit of a pushover, in the common parlance.

Maartje:
Yes. It becomes more apparent that Bertie will likely have to be king because Edward is not doing a very good job of pleasing everybody. Churchill – played by Timothy Spall, because everyone is in this movie – who at this point is not yet Prime Minister, has to spell it out for him. Not only is Edward insisting on marrying Wallis Simpson, but he also has some Nazi sympathies, which we don’t see a whole lot of in the movie. And Bertie is on the doorstep of being at war with Germany. So Edward then officially and somewhat selfishly abdicates in December of 1936, and Bertie visits Lionel’s home to apologise to him – as he knows he will need his help now, again, as the eye of the nation is on him.

Sam:
I feel like we’ve seen so many performances of Churchill by now. How would you rank this one?

Maartje:
Not very high. I just – it’s kind of comical to me. He’s doing a face and I don’t like the face he’s doing. I don’t love it. How about you?

Sam:
Yeah, it’s a bit caricature-ish. I feel like they did the thing again in this movie where they make Winston Churchill this super cool guy with a twinkle in his eye. But yeah, I guess as you said, it’s like the depiction of Edward – it’s very one-sided. Anyway, if you want to listen to our episode about The Darkest Hour, which is mostly about Churchill but King George makes an appearance as well, you can go check that out. And I looked into Churchill and Bertie’s relationship a little bit because I remember in The Darkest Hour they did not get along super well initially. Initially Churchill opposed the abdication of Edward VIII, but he soon realised that the crown was in safer hands with George VI. There’s a statement that he made – he was at the coronation of George VI and he leaned over to his wife, or whoever was sitting next to him, and said, “You were right, the other one wouldn’t have done.” So he came around pretty quickly. George VI supported Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement when it came to Hitler, and he supported Lord Halifax rather than Churchill in 1940 – so they potentially didn’t get along in The Darkest Hour’s timeline. But Bertie and Churchill later developed a very close relationship. George was horrified when Churchill lost the post-war election, and Churchill was noticeably emotional when he gave an address after George’s death.

Maartje:
I also liked that when they were having their weekly meetings as prime minister and king, they would have tea together and they would excuse all the servants and just serve themselves. And they apparently had a very fond relationship later on in Churchill’s tenure. I think that’s nice – as far as I think politics can be nice.

Sam:
Yeah, apparently they spoke quite candidly about the war. George was really on top of wanting to know everything that was happening and reading all the daily briefs and everything.

Maartje:
Yes. It’s fun to read about, isn’t it? High-profile people doing ordinary people things.

So the movie doesn’t really go into details about Edward’s sympathies for Hitler, but he certainly did have them. And there’s an interesting source you can look up – there are German Foreign Ministry archives that were published largely by the Allies after the war. Let me read you a couple of things that are in these files that are really interesting. In July of 1933, former Kaiser Wilhelm II’s grandson Louis Ferdinand reported that Edward said it was “no business of ours to interfere in internal affairs, either regarding Jews or regarding anything else.” And then he also said, “Dictators are very popular these days. We might want one in England before long.”

Sam:
Wrong.

Definitely interesting. I actually went on a little side quest last night because I saw these notes of yours and I was like, I wonder what Kaiser Wilhelm thought about Hitler. Kaiser Wilhelm was the King of Germany who abdicated at the end of World War I, and he was living in the Netherlands at that time – in exile, so to speak. And I remember reading that he was pretty appalled by the Night of the Long Knives and Kristallnacht and anything where there was public violence in the streets. But he also was quite antisemitic, and he was like, maybe if Hitler is able to have an empire, we can bring the monarchy back. And he actually used to write to Hitler saying, hey, what if we brought the monarchy back? And Hitler’s like, this guy’s an idiot. Wilhelm died not long after the Germans invaded the Netherlands – in 1940, I think he died in 1941. Total side quest, but I was just curious what these monarch types thought about Hitler.

Maartje:
In 1937 – which is a year after he and Wallis Simpson together made a very cosy and public visit to Germany, where they were received by Hermann Goring and entertained by him and Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and apparently had a very long chat with Hitler.

Sam:
Can I just say – nightmare scenario?

Maartje:
Yes. I mean, there are photographs and everything, of them just having a chummy old time in Germany.

Sam:
Yeah, if you needed any more evidence that the royal family are and were just profoundly out of touch.

Maartje:
And then in July of 1940 there was an actual SS plot to kidnap Edward – it was called Operation Willi – to hold him in Europe as a potential puppet king for a Nazi-occupied Britain if it ever came to that. You might remember his name because we’ve talked about him before: Joachim von Ribbentrop was the German Foreign Minister, and he apparently told the German ambassador in Madrid on 11 July 1940 that Germany was prepared to accommodate any desire by the Duke, especially with a view to the assumption of the English throne by the Duke and Duchess. So they were basically saying, look, we’ll do anything – even if we have to put Edward back on the throne. And George found out about this and threatened Edward with a court martial. And then he sent him to become Governor of the Bahamas.

And that sounds like a really fancy thing, but it was really as far away from Europe as he could get him. But then the same files that I mentioned before also mentioned that Edward had told Spanish secret agents that continued bombing of London specifically would make Britain ready for peace. So he’s like, if you just bomb the hell out of my country, they will eventually give in.

Sam:
What a terrible person.

Maartje:
Yes. Well, he did go – he went off to the Bahamas.

Sam:
Yeah, what a tragedy. He got to go sit on a beach for a few years.

Maartje:
Yep. Like, I don’t like this man. I do think, by the way, that Guy Pearce is quite slick and greasy in this movie in a good way for this role.

Sam:
Yeah, I’ll be honest – the way that Edward and Wallis Simpson are written and the way the actors played off each other, I was like, I totally understand why these people vibe together, but I feel like they’d be insufferable to actually be around.

Maartje:
The party they give reminded me in a way of the kind of party that Lee Miller would have attended, except that was kind of on brand for her and not annoying – and this one was just annoying.

Sam:
Yeah, definitely. And it definitely gave an opportunity for Bertie to show up with his wife Elizabeth, and neither of them are very impressed by this party. Elizabeth is much more willing to be forthcoming about that than her husband is. I think they both could have come across as sticks in the mud in that situation, but you do get the sense that their disapproval of this party is probably correct, given the state of affairs.

Maartje:
I did enjoy Elizabeth’s refusal to talk to Wallis and just going to the king instead, and then talking to Churchill about it afterwards.

Sam:
Yeah.

Maartje:
So, in case you needed reminding – Joachim von Ribbentrop was German Foreign Minister from 1938 to 1945, but before that he was actually the Ambassador to Britain from 1936 to 1938, which is why he knew Edward personally. And that’s part of the reason why the Nazis thought he was a viable asset. And if you want to go listen to our Nuremberg episode, you can go check that out – because spoiler alert, he had a bad time at the Nuremberg trials.

Sam:
Yes he did. May 1937. As Lionel prepares Bertie for the speaking he’ll have to do at his coronation, Bertie’s advisors – including the Archbishop of Canterbury – try to push Lionel out of the picture by informing Bertie that Lionel has no official qualifications. He’s not a doctor or anything. And to be fair, Lionel has never lied about this – Bertie just assumed. So the two of them have a quarrel about this. Lionel manages to provoke Bertie into flying into a rage, during which he speaks perfectly. So they soon resolve their differences as they rehearse for the coronation. And I really cracked up when I was watching the documentary – they were talking about how the Archbishop, in a misguided attempt to be supportive, did a speech where he was like, “Guys, the king has a stutter, but you should all just chill and cut him some slack.” And the king was like, bro, did I ask you to draw attention to it?

Maartje:
That’s also in the book, so I’m guessing most of this documentary is drawn from the book. And the archbishop in the movie is just such a dick. I did enjoy the fact that Lionel just sat down on the throne. He’s like, it’s just a chair – I can just sit on it.

Sam:
Yeah, it’s very irreverent. I like that the Archbishop is just very representative of this very stuffy, old-fashioned establishment viewpoint on everything.

Maartje:
Archaic would be the word I would use.

Sam:
Definitely.

Maartje:
It’s September 1939. Britain has just declared war on Germany. Bertie and his family watch a newsreel of Hitler giving a speech. And he makes up his mind that he will successfully deliver a speech to the nation. It’s kind of a nice parallel – except one is evil and the other one is not. Depending on how you look at it, I guess. Lionel helps Bertie to rehearse this speech and reminds him that he’s nothing to be afraid of anymore because his father is dead.

Sam:
Yeah. And this is a huge moment when you remember that Bertie’s father, George V, had just become monarch before the outbreak of the First World War – so a similar situation. And Bertie himself had served in the Navy during the First World War, including during the largest sea battle of the war, which was the Battle of Jutland in 1916. And he joined the RAF after the war – he became the first member of the British Royal Family to qualify as a pilot. And all of this factored into why he initially opposed British involvement in another war and why he supported appeasement – because he had been in battle and he had seen men die. He became, you know, probably the right king for the job considering that he had battle experience, and then he went on to become a wartime king in the footsteps of his father.

Maartje:
There’s actually a scene earlier in the movie where he breaks down and cries because he says, “I’m a naval officer and that’s all I know how to do.” I find it so moving. And just the combination of him and Helena Bonham Carter – they are very good together. Such great chemistry. It’s so nice.

Sam:
Yeah, I’ll point out too that his daughter Elizabeth served in World War II – she was an ambulance driver. And his younger brother, the Duke of Kent, was the first member of the royal family to die in battle in like 450 years or something like that. He died in a plane crash.

Maartje:
Wow. How many brothers did he have? Because I got really confused doing my research. It’s quite a few. And they mention a brother who dies as well, early on – probably when he was young.

Sam:
Yeah, there’s definitely a few. I’m glad that the movie just focused on the oldest two brothers. Then I don’t have to keep track of all the others.

Maartje:
Yeah. This family is large. By the way, the newsreel that they see in the film is a rally in Nuremberg, I think. Like one of the first big Nazi rallies – it was also heavily produced because Hitler invited a director to film the entire thing, and it’s more like a propaganda film than anything else. But I think it’s interesting that they show it, because it makes you realise that both of these men knew the value of production – of radio production in Bertie’s case – but it’s not so different really from what Hitler was doing. Just addressing their people in very different ways. And I like that they showed Hitler for a while too. It’s also the very opposite in terms of physicality to Bertie, who is really quiet – although he did yell – but not like Hitler.

Sam:
Yeah, definitely.

Lionel accompanies Bertie to give his speech. And I was reading the speech that he gave in 1925 that the movie opens with – the one that was the catalyst for him going to speech therapy – and everywhere I read about it described it as difficult for him and everyone listening. So I totally get that, because when he starts giving this speech at the end of the movie he’s quite halting and you kind of hold your breath for him. But he uses everything he has learned from Lionel to deliver the speech successfully. It is heard all over the world. We see people listening to it on the radio – soldiers and civilians and all kinds. Bertie thanks Lionel for his help. It’s a very sweet moment. You can tell they’re really good friends.

And the British people cheer for Bertie and his family as they step out onto the balcony, and we get the impression that he’s being accepted as their monarch.

Maartje:
I loved how in the movie they kind of moved it all the way along until the very end. But Bertie was actually very appreciative of Lionel throughout the treatment and also earlier – he gifted him a few nice things, like a silver cigar box, and he also gave him a couple of awards or titles – I don’t quite remember what. But it happened fairly early on in their friendship. I do understand why they waited in the movie to put that at the very end, because he needed a bit of an arc. But it’s just so sweet. I love when friendships like this – a monarch in this case, because they can be much larger than life – get reduced to something really small and personal and personable. That’s what I enjoy about it.

Sam:
Yeah. And I like that the movie leaves off on the very doorstep of the thing that George VI is known for. He and his wife are known for being wartime monarchs, and so we’re leaving off right at the beginning of the major symbol of their reign. It’s like we just got all the backstory for that. And as you were saying, World War II did George a ton of favours in terms of his popularity, because there was this whole thing at the time where the British royal family were convinced that if they told anybody anything in the newspapers, it was going to be a whole thing. The newspapers basically did not carry any stories about Edward’s abdication until the last minute – right before it happened. And when the people of Britain found out, they were broadly in favour of Edward marrying who he wanted and staying on the throne. So there was quite a lot of people protesting on behalf of, like, don’t take our king away. And I really think it was this era where people are flying across the ocean on airplanes and the golden age of Hollywood is starting – it just feels so quaint and old-fashioned that the king can’t marry some woman because she’s been divorced before. So yeah, I think it took people perhaps a little while to warm up to George, but he and Elizabeth became symbols of support and calm during the bombing that Britain was soon to sustain. And it was a pretty big deal for them.

Maartje:
I also wonder – obviously a lot of what happens is kept quiet by the firm – and I wonder if Edward’s indiscretions, of which there were quite a few, were kept silent. And so all the public saw was this man who was not allowed to marry the woman he loved, which sounds really mean. It sounds like a stupid thing to do. But also I think he’d done so many other terrible things that maybe it was kind of an embarrassment to them anyway. He just wasn’t very responsible in being a king.

Sam:
Yeah. And George V – I think he says this in the movie, but he’d also said it in real life – knew that Edward was going to mess up being king within the first year, and he was right. He just wasn’t cut out for it. He was very good at the parties and the socialising and all that kind of stuff, but he very much wanted to do what he wanted and didn’t want to conform to duty. And his younger brother George ended up being quite the opposite of that.

Maartje:
Yeah. I would say one is a wave maker and the other one very much is not. So they were just very different as people and one fits the role of being King of England and the other one really just doesn’t – just from a personality perspective.

Sam:
Right. And yeah, as you say, they’re definitely not telling the public that Edward is a big Nazi supporter. To a degree, obviously, some of it is in the papers – like when he meets with Hitler and stuff – but you would want to keep that on the down low, because when you’re going into wartime you don’t want to let everyone know that your royal family is compromised.

Maartje:
No. And it makes you wonder if – and I’m guessing he probably wasn’t the only one – but you definitely wouldn’t hear about it.

Sam:
Yeah. And I think in their family too – their dad, George V, was the one who during World War I changed the family name to Windsor because it sounded too German. He really went out of his way to separate the British monarchy from the German monarchy, because George V and Kaiser Wilhelm were first cousins. And they were also first cousins with Tsar Nicholas of Russia – they all shared a great-grandmother in Queen Victoria, I believe. And so he really did his best in public to strictly delineate: this is us and this is the Germans. And to have his son then be like, I’m going to actually team up with the Germans and do this and that – I really think that was a huge letdown to the family.

Maartje:
Just imagine if the SS had managed to carry out their operation and abducted Edward and put him back on the throne. Crazy. But I don’t know how realistic it ever was for the Germans to decide they were just going to invade Britain.

Sam:
Yeah, I mean – as we have definitely discussed before – that was on the agenda and ultimately did not work out.

Maartje:
So we get some end cards, because this is where the movie ends. King George VI made Lionel a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1944. The high honour from a grateful king made Lionel part of the only order of chivalry that specifically rewards active personal service to a monarch. Lionel was with the king for every wartime speech – also after the one we see in the film. Through his broadcasts, George VI became a symbol of national resistance. Lionel and Bertie remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Sam:
That’s the whole point. The friendship.

Maartje:
Woohoo! Yeah, I enjoyed it. I really liked how they wrapped this story up so nicely. There were no loose ends. It was quite nice.

Sam:
Yeah, I agree.

Maartje:
I have some notes – a couple. One of the documentaries that we watched, or Sam watched after I was going to watch it and didn’t, is called On the Brink: World War Two and King George VI, which is apparently a bit of propaganda for the British monarchy. But you can watch it – it’s on YouTube.

Sam:
Yeah, there’s definitely some interesting stuff in there. And I watched another one that YouTube recommended to me afterwards – I think it was literally called something like The King’s Speech: George VI and something. So if you wanted to look it up I’m sure you could easily find it. It tied in a bit more with the movie, but it very much leaned into this – I don’t want to call it a fallacy, but this national myth of the keep calm and carry on, stiff upper lip, everyone in Britain supported the monarchy and everyone was behind the war effort. I just think there’s so much nuance, and when you see a documentary made about the monarch you’re like, OK, we’re going to get a certain point of view. That’s what happens.

Maartje:
Yeah, that makes sense. We’ll also put both on the website so you can look at them there.

So Elizabeth – George VI’s wife – was actually monumental in the decision that she and George would not evacuate during the Blitz. They stayed at Buckingham Palace, which was then bombed in September of 1940. And she said something along the lines of – I don’t know the exact quote – but “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel like I can look the East End in the face.” Because the East End was bombed very heavily. And up to that point, Elizabeth hadn’t had the best reputation with the people because she wore expensive clothes and when she would go out she was kind of disconnected from them a little bit. But this quote and the fact that they stayed was really a turning point for both of their reputations with the people, I think.

Sam:
Yeah.

Maartje:
And even though the British Empire began to decline and break apart under George’s rule, he and his wife remained personally very popular with the people of Britain. So like we said, the war kind of did them a favour. And they also seem – at least from the movie – to be kind people. At least.

Sam:
Yeah. I mean, they certainly did a ton of going out and visiting during the war. They would go into bombed neighbourhoods, they would go to factories, they would go to see the troops – they did a ton of that kind of developing social capital, I guess. Yeah, people really appreciated that. And people were very – you know, they took it personally when the Germans bombed Buckingham Palace. Like, to people that was a big deal.

Maartje:
“Do not touch our monarchy” – basically.

Sam:
Yeah. And if we want to tie this back to our episode about the Indian National Army a few weeks ago, George VI was the last Emperor of India.

Maartje:
Ew. That’s right.

So, Churchill and the king – about doing things that made them popular – actually both wanted to accompany the troops to France on D-Day, but everyone else said no. Specifically Eisenhower said no, this is far too dangerous, you cannot do this. So they didn’t go to the beaches of Normandy. But King George did visit Normandy – I think ten days after the invasion – so he did go, just not on the day.

Sam:
I was reading about this and it cracked me up because initially they were both so determined that they were definitely going to be on a ship watching the Normandy landings. And then someone mentioned to the king, they said, “Oh, have you thought about the fact that before you go on this ship, you will have to explain to your oldest daughter” – at this point she was around 20 or 22 – “that you’ve named her as the person to choose your first prime minister?” Because if you and Churchill both go down, she will become the monarch and she will have to choose a prime minister during a war. And then George was like, oh, I didn’t think of that. So he was like, actually, no, I definitely can’t go. And then he got on board with trying to stop Churchill from going. And Churchill was like, I’ll do what I want – because you couldn’t tell that man anything. But he eventually came around and was like, it’s too much of a risk.

Maartje:
So what else did George do in the war? Well, he reinstated a couple of medals, including the George Cross. The George Cross is for civilian bravery, and he awarded this to the entire island of Malta in 1943 – he just declared that the whole island gets a medal.

Sam:
Yeah. If you look at where Malta is situated in the Mediterranean, whoever had control of it could use the airfield and fly planes to wherever they wanted in the North African theatre of conflict. So both sides really, really wanted Malta – it had huge strategic importance. And so of course it got absolutely pounded.

Maartje:
Imagine just going to an island and saying, “This entire island is now deemed to have received the George Cross.” That’s funny. Another thing that made me laugh – this is post-war, I think 1947. George goes on a post-war tour to South Africa, and he was told by the South African government that he was only allowed to shake hands with the white people. He was apparently very appalled by this and referred to his South African bodyguard as Gestapo. I laughed so hard – just imagine.

Sam:
Yeah. I mean, I do feel like it’s like – bro, you are literally the king of the colonisers, but this is somehow a bridge too far. Like, but we don’t say the quiet part out loud.

Maartje:
Of course not.

You can do the last note. The saddest note of all.

Sam:
Yeah. It’s the sad part, everybody. George VI died of coronary thrombosis in 1952 as a result of the lung cancer he had suffered from. He was 56. He had tons of health problems throughout his life – he was sickly even as a child. And then as he got older, he just had compounding conditions. And he had an extremely stressful job, which definitely didn’t help the matter. It aged him significantly.

He passed away in 1952 and Lionel Logue died the following year. Representatives of the royal family attended his funeral, but the actual members of the royal family weren’t able to come because they had had a recent death in the family and they were still doing the official royal mourning.

Maartje:
You can’t mourn another person when you’re already mourning, apparently.

Sam:
No, it’s not allowed. One person at a time.

Maartje:
It’s so sad. But anyway – I haven’t gotten this far in the book. I do wonder what it says about all this. So eventually I might put it on the website once I’ve finished it. Actually, I can totally put it on the website because by the time this episode releases I will have finished the book. So I’ll put a recommendation on the website.

Sam:
Nice.

Maartje:
So – time to rate this movie, but before we do, I would like to remind you that you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and – please do both – you can send this episode to a friend.

Sam:
Every time you send a podcast to a friend, the entire island of Malta gets a medal.

Maartje:
Excellent. How many medals do you want them to have, Sam? They already have one.

Sam:
Well, I’ve never met anyone from Malta, but I assume they, like me, would love to have a shiny medal.

Maartje:
Fair point. So do share this episode with a friend. And I guess now we’re at the part where we have to rate it. I feel like we need to do a tongue twister for this and I forgot to look them up – they’re in the book as well. I should have just written it down.

Sam:
Hang on, I’m going to look up the thistle one.

Maartje:
But this one is hard.

Sam:
It’s longer, but I’ll just put the first part.

Maartje:
I don’t know how we’re going to make this out of ten, but we’re just going to say the tongue twister and then the number of tongue twisters we think it should have, I think. I’m not sure what we’re going to do. What are you going to rate this movie?

Sam:
I’m going to rate this – “Theophilus Thistle, the thistle sifter, sifted a sieve of unsifted thistles” – out of ten. I didn’t even practice. I broadly think it’s well made, I think if you watch it you’ll enjoy it, it’s well acted.

Maartje:
Oh my god, that was perfect.

Sam:
I understand why it won all those awards. It’s personally perhaps not my brand as a film, which is the only reason I didn’t rank it higher. I think probably most people would watch it and be like, yeah, this is your classic Oscar bait movie about a public figure. So yeah, pretty good. Perhaps just not my personal jam as a film.

Maartje:
I will rate it “Theophilus Thistle, the thistle sifter, sifted a sieve of unsifted thistles” out of ten.

Sam:
Yay! Success!

Maartje:
It wasn’t too bad. I feel like I struggle more with unexpected tongue twisters.

Sam:
I think we should do a shot now.

Maartje:
I don’t have one. But anyway – I rated it 8 out of 10 because it is kind of my brand of film. As far as biopics go I think it was a good one. I don’t really have any strong feelings about monarchy in general, and I just really enjoyed everything else about it. I think I would actually watch it again. I watched it with my mother and she really enjoyed it as well. So that was fun.

Sam:
Yeah, this is absolutely a movie that my mom would have liked. Yeah. She also quite likes Colin Firth, you know – the ladies do.

Maartje:
I mean, who doesn’t? He’s a bit older in this movie, but in his younger years he was quite something.

Sam:
Yeah, well, now he’s moved into a certain territory.

Maartje:
Maybe. That’s fair. I’ll take that.

Are you reading anything currently that we haven’t yet talked about?

Sam:
I am. I started The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan because we are less than a month out from the 82nd anniversary of D-Day.

Maartje:
How far along are you in this book? I need to know because I also started this book like six months ago and then I stopped reading. I don’t think D-Day has started yet for me in the book.

Sam:
Well, I don’t think D-Day starts until the last third of the book. So much of this is build-up to D-Day. I’m only on page 22.

Maartje:
I’m actually further into the book than you are. It’s so good in that you feel like you’re there. It’s such a smart way of writing.

Sam:
Yeah, I honestly don’t think I’ve read a better history writer than Cornelius Ryan.

Maartje:
And why did he have to die so soon?

Sam:
I know. And just the fact that he put so much work into his books – it took him five or six years to write each one. I’m like, I don’t know how many more he would have cranked out anyway, but it does seem a shame that we didn’t get at least a couple more out of him.

Maartje:
I’m not reading anything new right now. Well, I am still reading this one book, but by the time this episode comes out I’ll have finished it and it’ll be on the recommendation for this episode. So I don’t know what I’m reading next. Maybe The Longest Day.

Sam:
Yeah, you’ve got to get through it before we record that episode. Mandatory.

Maartje:
That sounds good. I should be able to do that for sure. So what’s in our pipeline? Let’s tell the people what we’ve got coming up.

Sam:
Well, we are recording an episode on The Dirty Dozen pretty soon.

Maartje:
Yeah, so if you want to watch the movie or read any books related to it before the episode, do – and then tell us what you think. And for now I’m going to thank you for listening to yet another episode of Rosie. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts and rate us five stars or leave a review. And you can follow us on Instagram at Rosie the Reviewer Podcast or you can visit our website rosiethereviewer.com for more information and we’ll see you next week!

Sam:
Bye.