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sitting-room there on the morning of 13 September, having driven up from Windsor
through an air raid, when the Germans made a direct attack on the Palace. ‘The King & I
saw 2 of the bombs drop quite close to us in the quadrangle. They screamed past the
window and exploded with a tremendous boom and crash about 15 yards away,’ the
Queen wrote to Osbert Sitwell. ‘We both thought we were dead, & nipped quickly into
the passage, where we found our two pages crouching on the floor. They rose at once &
we then descended quickly to the basement, pretending really that it was nothing.’ ‘6
bombs had been dropped,’ the King recorded in his diary. ‘The aircraft was seen coming
down the Mall below the clouds having dived through the clouds & had dropped 2 bombs
in the forecourt, 2 in the quadrangle, 1 in the Chapel & the other in the garden. There is
no doubt it was a direct attack on the Palace.’ The King knew quite well that the
Germans would like him dead and that they thought they had the perfect substitute in
his discontented brother. Through intelligence sources he knew of the overtures made to
the Windsors while they were in Lisbon that summer and of the Nazis’ abortive plot to
kidnap the Duke before he left Portugal to take up the only job he had been offered by
the British Government, Governor of the Bahamas (ironically referred to by the
Windsors as ‘Elba’).
Although the King and Queen slept at Windsor, their presence in the Palace
throughout the war was a brave gesture. There were official suggestions that the King
and Queen should occupy various citadels in central London with protected basements
designed to withstand a direct hit by a 500lb bomb. One of these was Curzon House,
which had the advantage, unlike Buckingham Palace, of being difficult to identify from
the air. ‘I have an Air Mosaic of London taken from 13,000 feet,’ an official told the
King’s Principal Private Secretary, Hardinge, ‘and I have difficulty in recognizing the
building at all whereas the Palace, of course, is a landmark…’ 5 The King, however,
merely instructed the Office of Works to strengthen the existing Buckingham Palace
shelter. The fact that the King and Queen shared the dangers faced by the people of
London was of immense propaganda value to them; as the Queen famously remarked
after the Buckingham Palace bombing: ‘Now I feel I can look the East End in the face.’
The shy, stammering King showed that he was brave and had the common touch. As he
was visiting a shattered street in the aftermath of a bombing raid, someone called out,
‘Thank God for a good King!’ George VI replied, ‘Thank God for a good people!’ The
war, and the Blitz in particular, created a bond between George VI and his people which
was never to be broken. On Sunday, 13 October, Elizabeth did her bit for the family war
effort by making her first broadcast, addressed to ‘the children of the Empire’, from
Windsor Castle. Crawfie thought it was full of the ‘rather sweet human touches’ which
the Queen liked to put in, but Jock Colville, now Churchill’s Secretary, listening in with
Churchill’s daughter, Diana Sandys, was ‘embarrassed by the sloppy sentiment she was
made to express’, although he thought ‘her voice was most impressive and, if the
monarchy survives, Queen Elizabeth II should be a most successful radio Queen’.
At Windsor, Elizabeth could feel the vibrations of the bombs hitting London shake the
chalk hill on which the Castle stood. One clear moonlit night in November 1940 wave