“Thousands of you in this country have had to leave your homes and be separated from your fathers and mothers. My sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all. To you, living in new surroundings, we send a message of true sympathy and at the same time we would like to thank the kind people who have welcomed you to their homes in the country,” spoke the girl into the BBC microphone. “We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well; for God will care for us and give us victory and peace. And when peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place. My sister is by my side and we are both going to say goodnight to you,” she finished.
The Blitz, the “lightning war” executed by the Third Reich, threatened to destroy London and its hinterland. Not a night went by in the capital without a missile falling upon the population. Not a day went by without aerial bombardments and fires ravaging all before them. Piercing sirens rang out in the streets, sending panic through households as the people rushed to take shelter in the Underground stations. There they waited for hours for the signal to return to the surface, shivering in the dank grey of the tunnels beneath the city. They lay hidden under blankets, knees tucked up as they held their children to their breasts. The nights were long. They spoke little, only to ask for water or something to eat, and glanced sympathetically at one another. Outside people wore gas masks for protection, and their long beak-like mouthpieces frightened the children. London was consumed by blood and fire, and the citizens fled to the country.
Three million people had been evacuated from cities under fire across the kingdom and its colonies. The future Elizabeth II gave her speech alongside her younger sister Margaret, in their family home of Windsor Castle. Her father, George VI, had flatly refused to leave London, despite the government’s request to have the royal family evacuated to Canada. They would fight until the end; the English would never abdicate; the Royal Air Force would emerge victorious from this battle! The future queen, all of fourteen years old, was not the only member of the family to be doing her part for the war effort. “For the sake of all that we ourselves hold dear, and of the world order and peace, it is unthinkable that we should refuse to meet the challenge.” Thus spoke the king in his BBC radio address. “For the second time in the lives of most of us we are at war,” he declared. “We have been forced into a conflict. For we are called, with our allies, to meet the challenge of a principle which, if it were to prevail, would be fatal to any civilized order in the world. The task will be hard. There may be dark days ahead, and war can no longer be confined to the battlefield,” he warned.
“The girls will not go without me, I will not go without the King, and the King will never leave,” the Queen Consort had told the people in matter-of-fact fashion. ‘The girls’, of course, were the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Of the many evils wrought by the Blitz, Englishmen well remembered the moment when George VI and his wife had been at afternoon tea, when suddenly they heard the “unmistakable whirr-whirr” of a German plane. The royal couple had run for cover, as two bombs fell mere feet from where they had been sitting. A third destroyed the chapel, and others left huge craters in front of the building. It was neither the first nor the last time the palace had been attacked during the Second World War: in that same week there were two other attacks, and a total of nine direct hits were scored in the space of five years. Still, the tea-time bomb had been the most dangerous attack.
If the Nazi high command believed that the attack would sow despair among the British, they had been sorely mistaken. In fact, it merely cemented Londoners’ tenacity. “I'm glad we've been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face,” joked the Queen Consort. This would be the royal family’s great contribution to the war effort – they embodied the mythical “Blitz spirit” of courage, resilience and solidarity, of the famous posters bearing the words: Keep Calm and Carry On. In shop windows they hung signs reading London can take it, or Bombed but not defeated.
Alan Alfredo Geday
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