"Chuckle Stop!"

King George VI, who was clearly a bit intemperate generally (he said ‘Abroad is bloody’, for example), also did not much like being polite, and saw at least one advantage in Britain being isolated in the early part of World War II. As he put it to Queen Mary on 27 June 1940:

I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to and pamper.

(Quoted in J. Wheeler-Bennett 1958, King George VI, part 3, Ch. 6.)

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