The King and I

It is all the foofarah and Oscarization of current star movie The King’s Speech that prompts this memory of my childhood encounters with that King a few months before his 1939 war-declaration speech. And I listened with my family thereafter to his annual Christmas-day radio talks throughout his reign to 1952.

   Not that it has been fully established that my role in the 1939 spring tour of Canada by King George VI exerted any major influence on his war-declaring speech September 3.

   Nor, indeed, has it been firmly confirmed that he adopted any of my seven-years-old style of muttering, fluttering,  slangish speaking which His Majesty may have overheard during our quite-distant encounters in Ottawa—on Parliament Hill, in the entrance way of Rideau Hall and at the towering new war memorial His Majesty formally unveiled in a military ceremony.

   My involvement arose in part by accompanying my World War One veteran father, wearing his war-service medals and beret at the Parliamentary and War Memorial royalty services.

   Also, although I was about a month shy of my 8th birthday—the age normally required to become a uniformed Wolf Cub—adult leaders of our Ottawa Glebe district Wolf Cub Pack permitted me to join early.

   That enabled me to participate in Ottawa events for King George and his Queen Elizabeth during the first-ever visit to Canada by reigning British majesties.

   I was then, for example, able to join a thong of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, Cubs and Brownies, to line the driveway into Rideau Hall, the Governor-General’s residence, and salute in welcome the royal couple to their abode in the Canadian national capital.
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   The only current proof of my encounters is in a photograph of me as an onlooker while King George, geared in a grenadier soldier uniform with an enormous fur hat, marches up Parliament Hill toward the Peace Tower.

   Barely visible on the King’s left side is Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. I stand beyond them in my Cub uniform, to the left of a Mountie who stepped aside so I could see and salute and maybe cheer the King—George, that is, not Mackenzie. Between His Majesty’s raised right hand and his huge head-dress, is my mother Grace’s face under her wide-brimmed hat. My father (pastor of Ottawa’s Fourth Avenue Baptist Church), wearing his army veteran’s beret, is behind me.