Free The King's Speech by Mark Logue, Peter Conradi Page A

answering, but he will I hope grow out of it.’ 21
    That, however, was going to take several years. In the final examinations, held in December 1910, Bertie came 68th out of 68. ‘I am afraid there is no disguising to you the fact that P.A. has gone a mucker,’ wrote Watt to Hansell. ‘He has been quite off his head, with the excitement of getting home, for the last few days, and unfortunately as these were the days of the examinations he has come quite to grief.’
    It was during this time that his beloved grandfather, Edward VII, died. On 7 May Bertie had looked out of his old schoolroom window in Marlborough House to see the Royal Standard flying at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. Two days later, dressed in the uniforms of naval cadets, he and David watched the ceremony as their father was proclaimed King from the balcony of Friary Court, St James’s Palace. On the day of their grandfather’s funeral, they marched behind his coffin in Windsor from the station to St George’s Chapel. The elevation of their father meant David was now first in line to the throne, and Bertie second.
    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