My Grandfather Wrote The Princess's Speech

Seventy years ago, the Queen made her most famous broadcast to mark her 21st birthday. Charles Utley reveals how it came to be written.

The name of our current royal house changed from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor on 17th July 1917, 100 years ago. We have had four Windsor monarchs but only one of them, the present Queen, was born with that name.

It was thirty years after the change, seventy years ago – on 21st April 1947, her 21st birthday – that Princess Elizabeth made the most famous speech to be made by any Windsor. And, I dare to suggest, it ranks, in fame, with the first Elizabeth’s speech in Tilbury and well above that of Mary I in the Guildhall in 1554.

What is there left to say about one of the most frequently quoted speeches of the 20th century? The answer is that it was written by a fifty-year-old journalist. His name was Dermot Morrah. And he was my grandfather.

The most quoted passage says: ‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.’

I have always thought my grandfather’s genius in writing the speech lay in his ability to put into words what the speaker herself genuinely thought. Her declaration that her whole life would be devoted to our service rang true in 1947, and rings even truer in 2017, because she really meant it. Had those words been put into the mouths of others, they could easily have sounded false. But there was nothing remotely false about them when she said them.

My family still has the letter, headed ‘The White Train’ – the ivory-painted, air-conditioned saloons ordered for the Royal Family’s three-month tour of South Africa. The letter is from the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, thanking my grandfather for the speech.