It was December of 1939. Attempts to achieve peace on earth through appeasement had failed, and a woefully unprepared Britain had declared war on Hitler. While his subjects hung blackout curtains over their windows in preparation for air raids, King George VI struggled to compose his Christmas radio broadcast.

Unhappy George! A shy, stammering man for whom public speaking was torture, he had reluctantly assumed the throne three years earlier when his older brother had skipped off to marry an American divorcee. Salvaging the monarchy’s prestige had seemed a daunting task then, but it was nothing compared to the burdens of being a wartime king. The Christmas broadcast was only the beginning of what would be demanded of him in the years ahead.

Fortunately, the King had help. Someone (it had to have been a speechwriter) gave him some lines from an obscure book of poetry that had been published about thirty years before. They expressed perfectly the message of hope that the King wished to give his people, and he used them with great effect at the end of the broadcast:

I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied,
“Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than a light, and safer than a known way.”

The King concluded: “May that Almighty hand uphold and guide us all.”

The poem made the broadcast. One might almost say that it made King George.

It is impossible to exaggerate the effect that this brief radio address had on British morale, or on the British people’s affection for their King. Forever after, the lines he quoted on the air during that fateful broadcast were associated in the public mind with George VI. When the King died in 1952, they were engraved on his tomb.

The author of the quote was later identified as one Minnie Louise Haskins, a retired lecturer at the London School of Economics. But the person who sent the quote to the King remains unknown. That is as it should be. Speechwriters should remain anonymous, but that doesn’t mean that there are no heroes in our profession.

I wish happy holidays to speechwriters everywhere –- you’ve earned them.