We live in challenging times. Whenever I face daunting, uncertain times, I often take great comfort from looking at people and events from the past. This helps me in several ways:
- I realize I am NOT the first or only person to face hardships,
- Others have faced hardships before too, many MUCH worse than what I am facing,
- Many people in the past were able to summon their courage, faith, resourcefulness, and resiliency to face their hardships and overcome them, and
- If they could overcome their daunting problems in the past, then I can probably manage to keep going myself.
On September 1, 1939, Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Poland and Great Britain were allies and Britain had warned Germany, “if you attack Poland, that will be war.”
Undeterred, Hitler invaded Poland anyway and Britain followed suit and declared war on Nazi Germany, thus triggering World War II. Since World War I had only ended in 1918, twenty-one years earlier, most Britons had the sick feeling in their stomachs, “Oh no, here we go again. War with Germany for the second time in recent memory.”
As the King of England, it fell to him to explain WHY his country was going to war with Germany…again. Most people HATE public speaking, but for the King, it was even more serious–he had a serious speech impediment. He stuttered and stammered badly. He had had the wisdom and humility to get help from an Australian speech teacher living in London, and with his help, he managed to draft and deliver this momentous speech. And think about it: not only was this speech vitally important and going to all of the British Isles…it was going around the WORLD, because at that time, the British Commonwealth included all of His Majesty’s royal colonies across the globe: Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Bermuda, South Africa, Kenya, Jamaica, the Bahamas…and countless more. Talk about pressure! But he did it! In the movie, look for the older of the two young girls, the King’s daughters. The older one is Elizabeth–who later went on to become Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-ruling British monarch in history!
You can watch a clip from the King’s Speech here.
On April 5, 2020, Queen Elizabeth II gave this speech to her subjects about the coronavirus.
- The video starts by panning what building? Why do you think it starts this way?
- The Queen early in her speech thanks two groups of people. Why?
- What story does she tell from her childhood? Why?
- How does she end her speech? Why do you think she chose to wrap it up that way?
Key vocabulary:
NHS: National Health Service
Albert Mohler is an American educator and theologian who has a popular daily podcast, “The Briefing.” In his episode from April 7, 2020, he talks about the Queen’s speech and how it relates to her father’s speech some 80 years earlier.
As a young girl, Elizabeth was asked to record a brief radio message to British children who had been evacuated from their homes to escape bombardment from the Nazi air force and sent elsewhere in the UK and indeed to many places around the world. You can learn more about her remarkable first speech as a young girl here.
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