Depression Forums

...a medical memoire to read and the tag line was "Chronic depression + fruitloop thoughts = a rare diagnosis" would you buy it?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/royals/article-15463803/he-mystery-King-George-V-death-decoded.html#newcomment

The mystery of King George V's death decoded 90 years on as historian claims 'grotesque error of judgement' led to the sovereign's rapid demise

    King Charles's great-grandfather died on January 20, 1936
    READ MORE: The Royal Family's hellish journey from Portsmouth to South Africa as tension reached boiling point below deck and crew members went hungry writes CHRISTOPHER WILSON

By CHRISTOPHER WILSON

Published: 07:23, 21 January 2026 | Updated: 12:03, 21 January 2026

On the 90th anniversary of his death, the question still remains unanswered was King George V murdered?

King Charles’s great-grandfather was the man who created the House of Windsor and was considered one of the most solid and dependable of British monarchs during a 26-year reign. But in January 1936, at the age of 70 and having suffered serious illness, his life was drawing to a close.  It’s known that the king’s physician, Lord Dawson of Penn, administered two fatal injections which hastened the monarch’s end. He said it was done to spare the stress and strain on the sovereign’s relatives who were attending his deathbed as he slowly slipped away.  The drugs having been administered, the King’s family Queen Mary, the Prince of Wales, his three brothers and sister were ushered back into the bedchamber.  'They stood around the bedside the Queen dignified and controlled others with tears, gentle but not noisy. Life passed so quietly and gently that it was difficult to determine the actual moment,' he wrote afterwards.

The distinguished historian Kenneth Rose was given the task of writing His Majesty’s official biography in 1980. Himself the son of a doctor, Rose was shocked to discover, as he did his painstaking research, that Dawson was alone when he made the single-handed decision to end the king’s life.  Alarmed at what he’d uncovered, Rose questioned whether Dawson’s actions were not a case of sympathetic euthanasia but, in fact, murder.  Revealing that truth when his book was published in 1983 cost Rose the knighthood that should have come his way as an official biographer of a sovereign.  The real reason for giving the monarch a late-night fatal dose of morphine, he disclosed, was so the death announcement could appear in the London morning newspapers - rather than the evening papers, which he considered trashy.  In a largely unknown note added to later editions of his book, Rose angrily wrote: 'The King was suffering not from cancer or other agonising ailment, but from cardiac weakness. Nor was he in any discernible pain indeed, he lay comatose.   How then could Dawson justify injecting his patient with between five and ten times the usual palliative dose of morphia and cocaine?'

The man whom his sovereign had ennobled sixteen years earlier had, beyond doubt, hastened the king’s death.  Rose called him out on it. 'It was, he wrote, ”a grotesque error of judgement.'

He was not alone in his low opinion of the royal surgeon. Though he had earned the confidence of the royal family, Lord Dawson had a reputation among the medical profession for playing fast and loose with people’s lives.  Some very senior doctors, Rose noted, shook their heads when King George appointed him as his personal physician.  One of them, the eminent surgeon Lord Moynihan, even went so far as to compose a savage clerihew:

'Lord Dawson of Penn
Has killed lots of men
So that’s why we sing
God Save The King.'

But alas, Moynihan and his friends did not sing loudly enough – and the King’s life drew to a close at Dawson’s hands at 11.55pm on 20 January 1936.  In a private note, the doctor later confessed: 'I decided to determine the end and injected morphia and cocaine into the jugular vein.  'Determining the time of death had another object in view – the importance of the death having its first announcement in the morning papers, rather than the less appropriate field of the evening journals. I told my wife to advise The Times to hold back publication.'

The newspaper, known as The Thunderer and effectively the voice of the Establishment, had printed its first 30,000 copies when the message came through, but changed its front page immediately.  Rose sardonically asked why, if he was going to do it for the newspaper’s benefit, Lord Dawson hadn’t killed the king 30,000 copies sooner.  'The law does not distinguish between euthanasia , or mercy killing as it is sometimes called,' he wrote in 1983, 'and murder.'

There is no doubt as to which he thought it was.

*Kenneth Rose, who died in 2014, told me of his disappointment in being robbed of his knighthood for having disclosed Dawson’s questionable actions.  Advisors to Queen Elizabeth II decided it might encourage other senior biographers to tell the truth, rather than hold their tongue, on sensitive issues.  It all ended happily, however the Queen Mother, who disliked her father-in-law intensely, made sure Rose was awarded the next best thing, a CBE, and ostentatiously took him out to lunch at The Ritz to celebrate his investiture.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/royals/article-15442533/Queen-Mother-car-crash-change-royal-history.html

How Queen Mother's serious car crash nearly resulted in a miscarriage that would change history - and devastate the Royal family

     She was the most famous woman in the world yet we nearly didn't have her!
    READ MORE:  CHRISTOPHER WILSON: How the Queen Mother's true love was forced out of the picture while she was pushed into an arranged marriage

By CHRISTOPHER WILSON

Published: 07:14, 12 January 2026 | Updated: 12:25, 12 January 2026

As the centenary of her birth in April approaches, it's hard to imagine a time where there was no Queen Elizabeth II.  In her day she was the most famous woman in the world - yet we nearly didn't have her!  A hundred years ago, in January 1926, Elizabeth the Duchess of York was five months pregnant with her first baby. Only by a miracle did she ever gave birth to the child.  The 25-year old duchess and future Queen Mother was involved in a serious car crash, thrown to the floor of the chauffeur-driven limousine she was travelling in, narrowly avoiding a miscarriage.  A reckless motorist had overtaken and cut in front of Elizabeth's car as she neared Lord's Cricket Ground in north London on her way home from visiting friends in Hampstead.  Her chauffeur, taking avoiding action, smashed into a parked bus. She was bruised and severely shaken.  Had circumstances been different this collision would have been no more than an unfortunate accident though of course to the duke, known as Bertie, and duchess the loss of the baby would be a tragic event.  But less so to the nation the baby would have grown up to become no more than a royal princess enjoying the same rank and status as our present Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie.   Nothing more because it was expected that soon the bachelor Prince of Wales, now 31, would find a bride, marry, and produce that vital heir to the throne.  Instead, the whole course of history stood on the brink of change.  As it turned out the Duchess, travelling alone, suffered shock but no lasting injury. But the socialite MP Chips Channon, returning from Buckingham Palace with the news, exclaimed, 'She very nearly had a miscarriage!'

The pregnancy had been kept under wraps. Elizabeth was having a difficult time of it and swapped houses twice during the run-up to the birth quitting the couple's marital home White Lodge in Richmond Park to move to Curzon House in Curzon Street, then on to an address in Mayfair's Grosvenor Square.   Pretty soon she decided she'd feel safer at her parents' London home in nearby Bruton Street and moved there the crash making her even more fearful of the forthcoming event.  And the Palace, refusing to confirm Elizabeth was expecting, did its best to play down the smash.  A statement was put out blaming the entirely innocent bus driver, saying his bus had collided with the royal limousine, rather than the other way round. They added snootily that far too much fuss had been made about a 'non-event'.  But the accident had rattled the future Queen Mum. The cheery bon viveur found that pregnancy had taken away one of her great pleasures 'The sight of wine simply turns me up!' she confessed to Bertie, her husband. 'It will be a tragedy if I never recover my drinking powers!'

She did, of course.  She engaged a maternity nurse, Annie Beevers, to see her through the latter stages of pregnancy and the birth itself, and so well did the pair get on that they remained friends until Annie's death many years later.  The baby was due at the end of April 1926 but by the beginning of the month, royal doctors decided the birth should be induced.  The little girl who'd one day become the country's longest-reigning sovereign was born, after a difficult labour, by Caesarian section at 2.40am on 21 April.  Bertie, 'very worried and anxious', paced about the house, irritatedly bumping into the Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks who, royal protocol dictated, should be present at the birth of a child in the direct line of succession, to ensure no substitution should take place a ridiculous tradition stretching back three centuries.  King George V and Queen Mary, eager to know, were woken at 4am in Windsor Castle with the news – for, even ten years before his eldest son abdicated, George sensed it entirely possible that the then Prince of Wales wouldn't last long as king, and therefore Bertie and Elizabeth's first-born could one day ascend the throne.  The baby's names were to be Elizabeth (after her mother), Alexandra (after her great-grandmother), and Mary (after her grandmother, the queen consort), and guns in Hyde Park thundered out her arrival to the world in true royal style.  Meanwhile somewhere in Europe – nobody could be sure on any given day exactly where a rootless blond and handsome four-year old boy was being shuffled between relations while his father was off with his mistress and his mother in a nursing home. Prince Philip of Greece would never find the comfort and security of family life until he finally married that baby girl, 21 years later.  It could all have been so different if that car crash back in January 1926 had turned out more seriously than it did.

Both onedaysoon and also yoda are celebrating with a hot choccie this morning!