OPERATION SAVE THE KING
... or how three real-life surgeons recreated the incredible day the Palace was turned into an operating theatre — for TV’s blockbuster drama on the Queen’s life
ON THE first floor of Buckingham Palace, with views down the great avenue of the Mall, is a guest room that must evoke very mixed emotions for Her Majesty the Queen. It was in the Buhl Room, as it’s known, that Prince Philip stayed on the night the royal couple announced their engagement in July 1947 — and there, too, that the Queen gave birth to Prince Charles a year after their wedding.
But alongside such happy memories the room has a darker association. For it was there that, on the morning of Sunday, September 23, 1951, the Queen’s father, George VI, became the focus of one of the most remarkable episodes in palace history.
It was the day when the country’s top surgeons, having erected a temporary but fully equipped operating theatre, battled to save him from lung cancer.
The story is told in The Crown, the much-hyped £100million TV series about the early years of our monarch’s reign.
Watching it unfold, you might suspect that director Stephen Daldry, best known for the film Billy Elliot, has made liberal use of dramatic licence.
After all, it seems unlikely that such a life-threatening procedure would have been carried out just along from the balcony where the Royal Family make their public appearances.
But that is exactly what did happen, and the production team wanted to make the scene as authentic as possible.
And if there seems to be something eerily convincing about the medics wielding their scalpels on the King’s chest, that’s because Daldry cast in the roles a team of real-life surgeons from Guy’s Hospital in London, ‘operating’ on a highly realistic silicon replica body.
In normal life, the surgeons work together regularly on organ transplants.
Professor nizam Mamode plays lead surgeon Sir Clement Price Thomas, a chainsmoker and grocer’s son from Wales, in whose hands the course of British history lay. Like his colleagues, Professor Mamode had no acting experience.
NOT that much was required once filming began at the palatial Goldsmiths’ Hall in the City of London, a stand-in for the real Buhl Room. ‘It did feel for us very much like we were standing there doing a real operation,’ he says, adding that the experience gave him great admiration for Sir Clement and his assistants.
‘Ideally, you treat every patient in the same way. But it would not have escaped their minds that they were in Buckingham Palace and operating on the King, and that would have created a huge amount of stress.’
Alongside the psychological pressure, operating at the Palace also presented the surgeons with an unexpected practical problem, according to Karin Ort, the eldest granddaughter of Sir Clement.
‘He realised that he might be disturbed by the changing of the guard below the room in which he was operating, so he insisted that the change-over should be carried out at St James’s Palace instead.’
Her grandfather’s expertise was called upon after the King developed what one courtier described as ‘that awful cough’ in the months after he opened the Festival of Britain in May 1951.
He was then 55 and his health had suffered as a result of the stress of the abdication crisis, not to mention World War II.
It didn’t help that he was also a heavy smoker, said to get through 50 cigarettes a day — but even after tests suggested the presence of a malignant tumour in his left lung, the word ‘cancer’ was never mentioned.
The King certainly knew he was seriously ill, though. In the opening shots of The Crown, he is seen coughing blood into a toilet bowl. not to mention cancer was standard practice at the time and, although informed that his condition would require the removal of one lung, the King believed this was down to a blocked bronchial tube.
The royal desire for privacy had led to many operations being performed at the palace — Edward VII had an appendix removed there, for example. But this was a much more serious procedure.
Sir Clement initially resisted the idea — and understandably so, according to Professor Mamode.
‘He would effectively be operating in a makeshift theatre,’ he says. ‘Hopefully, you would have everything you needed, but if someone had forgotten something, it wouldn’t be just around the corner as it would be in a hospital.’
In the end, Sir Clement agreed to work at the Palace on condition that he could exactly replicate the equipment and layout of his operating theatre at Westminster Hospital. In fact, he insisted on setting up two identical theatres, one in an adjoining room in case of an unforeseen emergency.
In The Crown, the operating table is positioned directly beneath huge chandeliers, in a room hung with oil paintings.
As the Buhl Room is not open to the public, we don’t know how accurate this is. But whatever the furnishings were, it’s certain that the King was not exposed to dust and dirt in the way this might suggest.
WE KNOW this because the assistant anaesthetist was Dr Cyril Scurr, father of Dr Martin Scurr, who writes the Mail’s weekly ‘Ask the Doctor’ column in Good Health.
‘My father was very discreet and didn’t tell me much about the operation at all,’ Dr Scurr says. ‘But I do know that they erected a sterilised canvas structure around the table.’
The task of transporting numerous oxygen cylinders, mobile lights and sterilising equipment was co-ordinated by theatre superintendent Sarah Minter, who later recalled the thrill of looking out of the palace window and seeing the crowds gathering as a bulletin about the operation was posted to the gates.
If the King could hear the hubbub as he was prepared for the anaesthetic, it must have added to his already considerable anxiety. As Dr Cyril Scurr described many years later: ‘The most touching thing was that when we went to put him to sleep in the morning, he had all the Sunday papers around him, and they were all hazarding a guess that he’d got cancer of the lung.
‘He was a timid sort of person who I think was very apprehensive about the operation — more, perhaps, than most people — because he had a biblical quotation in his own hand on his bedside table, “Put your trust in the Lord” and that sort of thing.’
Since a patient needs to be as calm and relaxed as possible before being put under, this was hardly a desirable state of affairs. But the King’s worries were well-founded, according to Professor Mamode. ‘The complication rates from that sort of surgery were pretty high at that time, so there was a good chance that he may not have survived the operation,’ he says.
He and the rest of his team
were reminded of some of the reasons for those complications as they were transported back in time for the filming. One was the white gowns with which they were provided by the costume department — seen increasingly spattered with blood as the operation went on.
‘Today, the gowns we wear are impermeable to protect us from the patient’s body fluids and to protect them from our sweat and infection,’ says Professor Mamode.
‘In those days they were using linen and cotton, which is clearly not as effective in terms of sterility.’
Other things felt more familiar. Although modern treatments for lung cancer are far more likely to involve chemotherapy, radiotherapy and minimally invasive ‘keyhole’ surgery, it is sometimes still necessary to carry out the kind of operation which the King underwent.
This involved removing the lung through a large incision in the chest wall. Most surgeons will have made such an incision at some point in their career, and the instruments used have changed little over time.
Like the real thing, the filming took place on a Sunday, with the Guy’s team working in their spare time. The difference was that Sir Clement completed the removal in about three hours — a quarter of the time it took to capture the scene on camera. During the real operation, the King’s wife, Queen Elizabeth, (later the Queen Mother) and daughter Princess Margaret were at the Palace throughout.
Princess Elizabeth, our present Queen, was then aged 25 and waited at her nearby home, Clarence House, with Prince Philip and their young children, three-year-old Prince Charles and Princess Anne, who was only a year old.
TOWARDS the end of the operation, they were called to the Palace to be told that the King had survived. As his family took in this good news, the job of clearing up began. And those who have already started watching The Crown, which is available via the online TV channel Netflix, may have been shocked to see a nurse removing the King’s diseased lung from a specimen bowl and wrapping it in an old newspaper, presumably prior to disposing of it.
This is inaccurate, according to the Mail’s Dr Scurr.
‘My father told me that he put the lung in a bottle of formalin and took it back to the pathology lab at westminster Hospital in a taxi,’ he says.
when Sir Clement left the Palace that afternoon, it was in his own car, and he was so distracted by all that had happened that he crashed into another vehicle on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace.
Fortunately, the police didn’t prosecute the man whose efforts on behalf of the King would soon be rewarded with a knighthood.
Sadly, the King died the following February from a coronary thrombosis (a clot blocking the flow of blood to the heart). This may have been a delayed complication of the surgery, or might have happened anyway.
we shall never know — but he could easily have died on the operating table five months previously, depriving him of the time he needed to put his house in order and pave the way for his daughter to become our Queen.
For that, Sir Clement and his team could congratulate themselves on a job well done. And so, it seems, can the makers of The Crown, which is already being acclaimed for its lavish sets and spellbinding acting, in particular Jared Harris’s anguished but heroic George VI.
Claire Foy and Matt Smith are also being praised for their portrayals of the Queen and Prince Philip. And, of course, the team from Guy’s did their bit, too — bringing to the role the professionalism and skill which helped their historical counterparts prolong the life of the King nearly seven decades ago.