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While his father reigned and his elder brother gaily globetrotted, Bertie conscientiously studied manufacturing processes and workers' hours and wages (he was president of the Industrial Welfare Society). He was called "The Industrial Prince." His still-persistent stammer made public speaking a wearisome chore, yet on one occasion, while rehearsing a speech at Wembley, he endeared himself to a crowd of startled workmen by stammering into a microphone, "This d-d-damn thing won't work," just as it started working. He played a good game of left-handed tennis, shot golf in the 80s, liked to hunt, and was content to let his brother Edward make the headlines.
In 1936, after a reign of but eleven months, Edward's headlines got scandalously big.
The constitutional monarchy of Britain had long since been bereft of power; Edward's abdication seriously diminished its authority and prestige. George VI spent most of his reign re-establishing them. Approving the man, the people gradually recovered their reverence for his office.
Holding a Fort. World War II completed the process. While the Duke of Windsor spent the war years in his Bahamas sinecure with the woman for whom he had abandoned the throne, the King held the fort in London, and endured like other Londoners. Like theirs, his home was bombed. His children, like theirs, were sent to the country; his relatives, like theirs, died in the line of duty. He shared with his people the sweat and tears of war. A memorable wartime newsreel depicted on one side of the Channel a ranting, raving Hitler, surrounded by tanks and planes, and on the other side, all alone, the quiet figure of the steadfast King.
Two nights a week George slipped into overalls and stood at a bench in a nearby arms plant, turning out precision parts for R.A.F. guns. Every Tuesday he lunched with the Prime Minister ("I made certain he was kept informed of every secret matter," said Churchill). While the fires still burned in devastated Coventry, the King tramped from ruin to ruin, picking his way between tottering walls and unexploded bombs.
At war's end, looking as weary as any other man of 50 who had lived through those years, George VI stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and heard his people sing with full and grateful hearts:
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King!
The Enduring Honor. In postwar Britain, it was George's constitutional duty to approve legislation that created the welfare state and wrested from the crown its brightest single jewel, the Indian Empire. Yet in drab, austere, Socialist Britain, the popularity of the monarchy reached a new zenith. Britons clung to the royal family as the last source of traditional color and ancient ceremony. And the royal family was something much more, though more intangible: the visible embodiment of good form—what the British call "decency." King George's quiet courage, his unostentatious persistence in meeting the everyday duties of his job, personified to Britons their own stubborn refusal to be downed by adversity.