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George VI. The man who embodies England's compromise of classes is the King. They have turned the rose beds at Windsor Castle into vegetable gardens. Queen Elizabeth practices sharpshooting. George VI, King of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, dodges bombs, eats by ration card, works some 20 hours a day. He is Defender of the Faith in a deeper sense, says Author Kraus, "than his ancestors and predecessors in a thousand years of British Monarchy." For "the war has transformed King and nation alike. . . . He is not only the noblest of reformed Englishmen, but . . . himself a great reformer . . . everything revolutionary in England, from mechanized warfare to the abolition of the class system is intimately connected with his personal endeavors."
Perhaps his post as second in command of a gun turret at the Battle of Jutland gave George VI that sense of reality that modern monarchs seldom get. Perhaps it was his training as a pilot in the early R.A.F. But "the merit of having mobilized the Duke of York's social conscience goes to . . . the Reverend Robert Hyde," long a social worker among England's poor. Hyde once proposed a great welfare project to King George V. The King called in the Duke of York, asked him to sponsor the project. "I will do it," said the future George VI, "but I don't want any of that damned red carpet (official receptions)." Sometimes he ran into another kind of red. On an inspection of the Welsh coal mines, the Duke was met by the secretary of the miners' federation, wearing a red tie and a red carnation. Housewives, "to demonstrate their political convictions," hung red petticoats on their clotheslines. The Duke smiled, talked, offered agricultural advice to kitchen gardeners. The petticoats disappeared. The secretary threw away his carnation. He could not get rid of his tie. "Blimey," he said, "I can't run around in front of a duke without a tie." Later the Duke organized his youth camps, a kind of British NYA, widely copied in the Dominions.
Today when George VI visits bombed sections of London and other cities, Herbert Morrison is usually at his side. Morrison, "once a rabid socialist" is now Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security. "The King," says Author Kraus, "likes Mr. Morrison's sharp wit and his tight-lipped but so much the more fanatic devotion to England." Morrison likes the King, regrets that he already holds so exalted a job. Morrison, who also runs the London County Council, once enviously sighed: "What an excellent Alderman of London the King would make!"