The King's Speech - Mark Logue [26]
Bertie’s dismal academic performance did not prevent him from progressing the following January to the next stage of his education, Dartmouth Royal Naval College, where David was already in his last term. Here again, Bertie faced the inevitable comparisons with his elder brother who was, by any standards, not much of a scholar himself. ‘One could wish that he had more of Prince Edward’s keenness and appreciation,’ wrote Watt.22
Matters improved the following year, however, not least because David left Dartmouth for Magdalen College, Oxford, allowing his younger brother to emerge from his shadow. The curriculum began to be weighted more away from the academic towards the practical aspects of seamanship, to which he was better suited. He was also encouraged by his term officer, Lieutenant Henry Spencer-Cooper, to take up sports that he was better at, such as riding, tennis and cross-country running.
After two years at Dartmouth, he embarked in January 1913 on the next stage of his preparation: a six-month training cruise on the cruiser Cumberland. During the voyage through the West Indies and Canada, Bertie experienced the adulation that being a member of the royal family inevitably brought. Such were the number of public appearances that he was required to make that he persuaded a fellow cadet to stand in for him as his ‘double’ on some minor occasions. He was also confronted for the first time with the need to make speeches, which was to prove such an ordeal for his whole life. A prepared speech he had to read out to open the Kingston Yacht Club in Jamaica proved particularly arduous.
On 15 September 1913, at the age of seventeen, Bertie was commissioned as a junior midshipman on the 19,250-ton battleship HMS Collingwood, in the first stage of a naval career, which, like his father before him, he expected to be his life for the next few years. Apparently for security reasons, he was known as Johnson.
There was a major difference between father and son, however. While the future King George V loved both the navy and the sea, his son worshipped the navy as an institution but did not much like the sea itself – indeed he suffered badly with seasickness. He also continued to be plagued by shyness – a fact recorded by several of his fellow officers. One, Lieutenant F. J. Lambert, described the Prince as a ‘small, red-faced youth with a stutter’, adding ‘when he reported his boat to me he gave a sort of stutter and an explosion. I had no idea who he was and very nearly cursed him for spluttering at me.’ Another, Sub Lieutenant Hamilton, wrote of his charge: ‘Johnson is very well full of young life and gladness, but I can’t get a word out of him.23 Proposing a toast to ‘the King’ in a Royal Navy wardroom became a torment because of his fear of the ‘k’ sound.
There were far more serious challenges to come: on 3 August 1914 the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, following an ‘unsatisfactory reply’ to the British ultimatum that Belgium must be kept neutral. On 29 July the Collingwood, together with other members of the Battle Squadrons, had left Portland for Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, off the extreme northern tip of Scotland, with the task of guarding the northern entrance to the North Sea from the Germans.
Bertie went north with his ship but after just three weeks he went down with the first of several medical conditions that were to cast a shadow over his naval career. Suffering violent pains in his stomach and with difficulty breathing, he was diagnosed with appendicitis; on 9 September the offending organ was removed at hospital in Aberdeen.
A semi-invalid at nineteen, while his contemporaries were fighting and dying for his country, Bertie joined the War Staff at the Admiralty. He found the work there dull, however and, after pressing, was allowed back to the Collingwood in February the following year. He was on board for only