Was King George V Murdered by His Own Doctor? | Royal Murder Mysteries | Season 1 Episode 3

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Since that memorable coronation day 26 years ago, he has become to each one of >> On the morning of the 21st of January 1936, the people of Great Britain awoke to the startling news that their monarch, King George V, was dead.

[00:00:17]Businesses closed and shops put up their shutters out of respect. The country was mourning the loss of the much-loved man who had guided them through the Great War.

[00:00:29]There was a huge outpouring of grief and public affection for him on his death. I mean, he's he lay in state for 4 days at Westminster Hall. A million people passed by his his coffin.

[00:00:43]>> They were told the official account released by the palace that he had lost his long- fought battle against lung disease and ultimately that it had a peaceful and natural death.

[00:00:56]But in 1986, a shocking discovery was made. A diary written by the doctor who had treated King George showed that his death was far from natural and even led some to state that the official cause of death should be recognized as murder.

[00:01:13]And so Dorson makes this incredibly bold decision that actually he is going to kill the king. Uh, make no mistake, under British law, Dorson has murdered the king.

[00:01:28]>> And did the man responsible also kill another famous royal in a similar way?

[00:01:35]>> If that's the case, he's killed two monarchs. That's a pretty impressive murder record.

[00:02:10]For half a century, the real cause of King George V's death was kept a secret from the public. Just how did one of the most respected kings in the history of the British monarchy end up being given a lethal injection to hasten his death?

[00:02:29]Why was it covered up? Who gave the order? And what reason lay behind the decision to artificially end the king's life and commit the first reside of a British monarch for nearly 300 years?

[00:02:45]King George V of Great Britain was born on June the 3rd, 1865, the unpromising second son of Edward IIIth.

[00:02:55]Initially, he sought a career in the British Navy, but the untimely death of his brother Albert placed him on the throne. He became king in 1910 and played an active role supporting the troops during World War I.

[00:03:13]King George the F was one of Britain's most highly respected and muchloved monarchs. He had been king all the way throughout the First World War and he had uh inspired terrific loyalty and passion amongst the average Tommy.

[00:03:27]>> We have learned to think of him as more than a monarch. My very dear people, he has called us on the radio, abandoning the we of majesty for the eye of a man and a friend.

[00:03:41]I mean first of all right from the start he realized that you know it was no good the monarchy being lavish and sort of carrying on as normal during um the war.

[00:03:51]So he wore for example you know military uniform through most of the war. The lavish kind of dinners and spectacles that would have happened at Buckingham Palace didn't take place anymore. There was a real kind of pairing down of ceremony. um and he made a lot of visits to um the western front. So he wanted to very much be um seen as representing Britain and being very much at the heart of the war effort.

[00:04:20]>> He became king at a time when the monarchy was largely disapproved of um and many felt the monarchy was perhaps coming towards its end.

[00:04:31]realizing the danger I suppose of the tide of public opinion turning and uh focusing on the German royal family. You know, he made the very pragmatic and very progressive and very necessary step of changing um the royal family name uh from Sax Goldberg and Cthur to the House of Windsor.

[00:04:54]King George V was a quiet, conservative, naval educated man who had a great aversion to new ideas and an explosive temper.

[00:05:06]I think in many ways he was a kind of old school monarch. I guess he focused on the need to um be seen to serve, to be kind of humble and dutiful, um to be moderate in his behavior.

[00:05:21]George was a family man and he was devoted to his wife Mary. I mean they were a devoted loyal couple. He didn't have mistresses. He was committed to her and he also relied on her. They were very much a kind of partnership during the war. There was a sense of you know both kind of visiting uh injured soldiers him visiting um the western front. I mean there was a real sense of being seen and being beautiful and being devoted and both were very much signed up to that.

[00:05:52]I think there was a huge outpouring of of sympathy for George V during World War I because let's remember it's only four years into the reign that war was declared and it was said that he aged 10 years because he really had the weight of the monarchy on his shoulders. He'd seen the emperors of Russia, the emperor of Germany, the emperor of Austria fall, and the British monarchy was one of the last men standing. And that was George the F's responsibility was to stabilize the ship.

[00:06:27]The cost of the war on Great Britain was huge.

[00:06:31]There were between 800,000 and 1 million military and civilian deaths and over 1.5 million wounded.

[00:06:40]It was a savage and brutal war that took its toll on every country and individual involved. It brought many changes to Britain, but it also brought changes to George V's health. After a serious accident while riding his horse, George was never quite the same again.

[00:07:02]George V did not enjoy great health to be frank. There were two problems with him. first in 1915 when he was uh inspecting some troops on the Western Front when they had all cheered out for him. His horse had reared up and he had fallen off and his horse had fallen on top of him and this had probably fractured his pelvis. So this had pretty serious consequences throughout the rest of his life. Secondly, as an extremely heavy smoker, he suffered from a lot of bronchial and pulmonary complaints.

[00:07:33]During George's reign, smoking was a hugely popular habit. Cigarette consumption had risen to such an extent in the early 20th century that doctors were starting to make the link between tobacco and lung disease.

[00:07:48]I think it's fair to say that that the entire royal family in the Edwardian era and through to George V and his sons were very very heavy smokers. all of the men. Um, George V certainly was Queen Mary was said to smoke an awful lot and um, the king already had respiratory problems, so adding 40 cigarettes to it full strength wouldn't have helped, I'm sure.

[00:08:13]But smoking probably wasn't the only cause of George's problems. At the Old Operating Theater Museum and Herb Garrett in London, they hold a number of medical specimens related to George's illnesses.

[00:08:30]Iris Milis is a specialist in the history of medicine.

[00:08:35]What we have here is what's called a Lang. Um this is a specimen that happens um while Lon was still um using coal fire. The smoke was around. So there are lots of particles in there, but it also is very much um resembling a heavy smoker's lung, which the king unfortunately was.

[00:08:57]>> The unprecedented and unrestricted growth of industry meant that cities like London were suffering from serious levels of air pollution.

[00:09:06]Thick winter fog would mix with the noxious fumes from the many factories to create a dense smog that would be inhaled by the inhabitants.

[00:09:18]the particles in there will stop the intake of oxygen while you're breathing.

[00:09:23]So it will make you short of breath and um it will be increasing over time which means with age um and towards the end there was always oxygen made available to the king.

[00:09:39]His heavy smoking only further worsened his problems. By 1925 he was diagnosed with obstructive pulmonary disease more commonly known as emphyma.

[00:09:53]>> He had started smoking as a child and there's no doubt that he continued that and so really throughout his life he suffered from uh bronchial problems from pulmonary infections uh pluracy bronchitis at different points. So this was a sort of really underpinned his reign, these bouts of ill health.

[00:10:18]>> George still carried on with his royal duties, shielding the public from his failing health.

[00:10:25]>> 22 years ago, my dear father opened the King Edward II bridge.

[00:10:34]Now it is with great pleasure that I dedicate an even more imposing structure to public use.

[00:10:45]But his sickness persisted and George continued to suffer with respiratory problems.

[00:10:52]When the king's physician, Lord Dawson, discovered that the king was suffering from pneumonia, the first thing he did is getting a pathologist he had worked with closely before, Lionel Whitby, to come to the palace and produce the whole set of diagnosis. Um, and this was when they discovered that the king actually suffered from pneumonia and they had to change their treatment from general nursing care to um a proper cure to the king's illness.

[00:11:24]George was lucky enough to have benefited from the latest medical advancements of the age.

[00:11:30]When King George V 6 developed pneumonia in 1928, the disease had become more manageable than it had been in the 19th century.

[00:11:38]There had been a large development when Louis Pastau first discovered the bacterium that actually caused pneumonia which was streptococcus pneumonia. And this is a slide which was produced 4 years later, part of our collection where you can see a little cut of an infected lung which would be put under a microscope and then um this would use be used to produce a serum a type specific serum for the patient to cure them.

[00:12:11]He also had um a lung absis on two occasions which really did lead him you know his life hanging in the balance and um you know he developed septasemia and it seemed for a number of weeks that he may not survive.

[00:12:28]>> In 1928 George became seriously ill. He was found to have an abscess in the lung which had spread to his bloodstream.

[00:12:39]The king underwent an urgent operation to drain the fluid from his lungs.

[00:12:44]>> When the king um had his treatment for pneumonia, it happened in two stages.

[00:12:50]There were two operations um within a year. And in the first one when they had discovered that um there had been pus developing in the lung. The first thing Lord Dawson did was use a syringe would have been fitted with a long rubber tube um which had a needle at the end and you would take this syringe. You would put the long needle into the chest cavity and you would pull out um the pass with the syringe. The procedure of treating the abscess in the king's lung meant that they had to open the chest cavity.

[00:13:32]>> At the time, surgical operations of this kind were hugely dangerous.

[00:13:37]Yet, despite the risks and without consulting a specialist, George's doctor, Bertrand Dorson, decided to carry out the operation and drained half a quart of fluid from the abscess in the king's lung.

[00:13:53]The operation was a success, but other members of the king's medical team were furious with Dawson for acting without their approval.

[00:14:02]But this wouldn't be the last time that Dawson would make his own decisions about the king's life.

[00:14:10]Dawson was very much perceived as the man who had saved the life of the king and as a result his profile grew. He was elevated to the puridge, made Lord Dawson of Penn.

[00:14:24]>> As the king's physician, Dorson received a great deal of press attention and enjoyed his newfound fame. He had gained such trust with the royal family that he was given unparalleled access to the king and allowed to make crucial decisions about his treatment and health care.

[00:14:43]And this almost certainly contributed to the freedom he had to manage and control the circumstances of the king's death.

[00:14:55]>> George had become increasingly weakened by the invasive medical procedures he had endured. By 1936, his breathing had become so poor that he would often require an oxygen tank.

[00:15:09]In a sense, all of these bouts of illness kind of weakened him and I think made him anxious about the future whilst at the same time in a sense increasing his popularity among the people. There was a growing sense of affection for him. And of course, you know, he became king in his 40s and died in his 70s. So he naturally aged but I think all the remarkable revolutionary changes that his reign had overseen also put a strain on him together with his ill health. So I mean it was a gradually kind of weakening figure and in the final months of his life there is a kind of quite rapid deterioration.

[00:15:48]>> As his health worsened and his life seemed to be coming towards its end.

[00:15:53]George began to reflect on the situation of his country and the looming threat of Nazi Germany.

[00:15:59]>> Well, of of World War I, King George V called it absolutely pointless, you know, pointless, useless war. So to see him approaching very ill health and World War II was almost staring him in the face. The rise of the fascists, the rise of the Nazis in Germany, the rise of Mussolini in Italy would have depressed him immensely. that they'd gone through all of that hell of World War I allegedly for absolutely nothing because it was only going to happen again just about in his own lifetime.

[00:16:34]The king's health can't have been improved by personal concerns. The most pressing of which was his strange relationship with his eldest son, Edward, the man who would become king after George's death.

[00:16:47]>> King George V was absolutely frantic about the succession. um heartily disapproved of his son, the Prince of Wales. Said that um the Prince of Wales's friends were not gentlemen, which was pretty strong meat for King George V. Um heartily disapproved of his mistresses of Freda Dudley Ward and Thelma Furnest who were both married ladies and the last one um Mrs. Ernest Simpson who had two husbands still alive, a divorcee and an American.

[00:17:18]Edward says she makes him happy. There have been rumors that he might elope with her and abandon crown and throne.

[00:17:28]I think George in those final weeks was very reluctant to let go because of course what he was going to unleash was so uncertain and he couldn't rely on his air. And so I think there's this sense of fight. There's a sense of he needs to hold on. And I think you know again given all the things that he'd endured all these kind of you know political and social strains the fact the sort of irony of the fact that the the ultimate thing that really came closest to potentially sort of breaking him and breaking the monarchy was from within his own family. It was the sort of failure of his uh eldest son to kind of man up to what he was supposed to be doing. His health continued to worsen and on the 15th of January 1936, George confined himself to his bedroom at the Royal Sandingham Estate, complaining of a cold, unaware at the time that he would never leave the room alive.

[00:18:27]>> The next day, Dorson was called for, and it soon became clear that the condition was much more serious as the king slipped in and out of consciousness.

[00:18:38]The king is attended to by two key figures. The first is Katherine Black.

[00:18:44]She's the nurse and she's been a nurse in the royal household for many, many years. Uh to the extent that she even has a pet name. Uh she's called Blackie.

[00:18:52]And then also the other key figure is the king's personal physician, Bertrren Dawson. And it's Dawson who will be making some very, very key decisions about the king's healthcare.

[00:19:08]It was then that Dr. Dawson was once more summoned to the king's bedside.

[00:19:13]And it was now that the mystery surrounding the death was about to begin.

[00:19:20]The king was at Sandringham in January 1936 when he entered into his final illness, which was a huge respiratory trouble um that he evidently wasn't going to recover from. his son, the Prince of Wales, was sent for who flew to Sandringham. Um, the royal physician was in attendance, Lord Dawson.

[00:19:41]Dorson was treating the king uh largely with sedatives of morphine, it seems, from his notes. But by the 20th of January, it became clear that the king was not going to recover.

[00:19:57]George spent the next few days slipping in and out of consciousness. And on January the 20th, Dorson released a statement to the press saying, >> "This is London."

[00:20:08]Following bulletin was issued at 9:25.

[00:20:13]The king's life is moving peacefully towards its close.

[00:20:23]Just before midnight, the announcement came that King George V of Great Britain had died peacefully of complications arising from bronchitis.

[00:20:34]Whereas it has pleased Almighty God to call to his mercy our late sovereign Lord King George V.

[00:20:48]There was a huge outpouring of grief and public affection for him on his death. I mean, he's he lay in state for 4 days at Westminster Hall. A million people passed by his his coffin. Um I mean it was a huge moment really for the country and I think in a sense it was a kind of I mean it was a full stop I guess from you know a paragraph which was his reign that was completely full of unprecedented change and and suffering and you know the most profound sort of revolutionary currents really >> through Westminster Hall set on the west flank of the new parliament buildings the parliament was rebuilt in 1840 all the great figures of English history since William the Conqueror have passed.

[00:21:34]To this historic building they have brought our king for his lying in state and the morning crowds of his devoted subjects stretch for hundreds of yards beyond the Victoria Tower waiting hours on end for the privilege of passing by his coffin.

[00:21:47]I think the country learned to love King George V and Queen Mary because they were almost a throwback to the Edwardian era to an era of certainty um when life in Great Britain was relatively safe before the war before the first world war. So he was looked on as a sort of patis for the country.

[00:22:09]There's no doubt that he was a very devoted husband and father and you know in the midst of monarchy actually there was this kind of committed loving family and yes he had a problematic relationship with his son politically really and also that spilled over into kind of personal resentments but you know his wife and his children absolutely felt the loss of him. Um I mean it was a personal grief as well as a sort of public loss. Um and you know there's no sense that it wasn't anything other than genuine but of course relief I guess after you know months of suffering and decline and a sense that finally I guess that was over.

[00:23:00]George's legacy was considered dull by many historians. He was a stoic character who preferred a subdued and quiet life at home, spending his time shooting and amusing himself with his hobby of stamp collecting.

[00:23:15]He was often remembered for his lack of controversy.

[00:23:19]But all that was about to change.

[00:23:35]of America.

[00:23:42]>> 50 years after the death of King George, the world was a very different place, and events from the 1930s seemed almost irrelevant.

[00:23:53]But the discovery of the personal diary of his doctor, Lord Bertrren Dawson, would cause one of the biggest scandals in royal history because many believe that it showed that the king was murdered.

[00:24:07]In 1986, uh Dorson's diary is is unearthed by a biographer. Um, there's this stunning revelation that Dorson has actually injected the king with this enormous overdose of of cocaine and morphine that's obviously killed him.

[00:24:24]And in them, he makes it clear that the overdose was a deliberate decision to end the king's life.

[00:24:33]Just what had happened in that room? And why had it taken 50 years to come to light?

[00:24:45]On the night in question, seeing that the king's life was hanging in the balance, Dorson decided to make a public statement.

[00:24:55]Dorson issues this now very famous medical bulletin uh which states the king's life is now drawing peacefully to its close. Uh this obviously suggests that his death is imminent. But Dorson is thinking, how much longer has he got?

[00:25:11]Um, is he going to be in pain? Uh, a decision needs to be made. Now, what's informing Dawson? Is Dawson worried about the king's own well-being? Uh, is he going to have a peaceful, relatively painless death? Or is Dorson worried about something else?

[00:25:31]Strangely, Dorson had become concerned about how the news of the king's imminent death would be made public.

[00:25:38]>> Dorson writes that prolonging the suffering would only cause more distress for the family and would not be proper for the dignity of a king. His other concern, which is more controversial and interesting, was that he wanted the news of the king's death to be announced in the Times newspaper of London in the morning.

[00:26:01]He knows that the one place that befits the sovereign, you know, for his death to be announced is in the august pages of the Times newspaper, which was then always called the newspaper of record or the the first draft of history.

[00:26:18]Lord Dawson rung his wife and sort of said, "Tell the Times to hold the front page. We want to make this announcement in the morning papers." That was seen as the best place.

[00:26:28]>> Dawson's wife, Lady Mini Dawson, made a phone call to John Walter, editor of the Times newspaper. She relayed her husband's message stating that the king will be dead before the end of the evening.

[00:26:42]If the king dies after the times's deadline at around 11:00 that evening, um the king's death is therefore going to be reported in the morning newspapers which are considered to be very below stairs kind of reading and not the type of newspapers that the king's death should be reported in.

[00:27:05]And so Dorson makes this incredibly bold decision that actually he is going to kill the king. But for Dorson to end the king's life, he would need to do it in a way that would look like natural causes and leave no obvious trace.

[00:27:28]The use of opiates in treating patients in the early 1900s was not unusual.

[00:27:34]Until the 70s, every doctor, every general practitioner could carry a little case with um little tubes of tabloids. They usually um were things like cocaine, morphin, other barbit turrets. So all of these were available to doctors and um especially for severe pain like the king was in.

[00:27:59]As the king you know lay dying in the um late evening um he was injected uh with um lethal I suppose amounts ultimately of uh cocaine and morphine which hastened his death by a few hours.

[00:28:15]Dawson gave the king two consecutive injections administered directly into his bloodstream.

[00:28:25]>> The jugular vein runs down either side of the neck into the chest cavity where it joins the heart. If you were to inject into the jugular vein, you'd be able to distribute the medicine around the body in the quickest possible time.

[00:28:42]It was easy to produce the right dosage because the tabloids were already mixed in Hawaii so that they could be just dissolved in the right amount of water to be then used um for your injections.

[00:28:56]Usually for morphin you would give something between 5 and 15 mg.

[00:29:05]A Dorson's injections contained one grain of cocaine and 3/4 of a grain of morphine.

[00:29:12]Each of these injections would have been lethal on their own.

[00:29:17]Together, death was a certainty.

[00:29:23]Euthanasia was illegal at the time, as it still is now. So, George V's death could be viewed as a murder.

[00:29:33]There is no other way of putting it. He doesn't ask the king's permission.

[00:29:38]whether would you like to die your majesty or anything like that. So Dorson takes it upon himself to actually kill the sovereign. This is a huge decision.

[00:29:52]But was it a decision that Dawson made by himself or could the decision have been made with the knowledge and support of the king's family?

[00:30:02]I think it's fair to say that this decision taken by his physician wasn't actively discussed, openly discussed with the family. I don't think it's likely that Dawson acted on his own. I think that that is probably too big a risk for him to take to take the life of someone's father, you know, right in front of them in Sandringham in the middle of the royal court effectively. I I think it's highly possible that he would have s sought some sort of approval.

[00:30:36]>> When the revelations from Dorson's diary became public, the royal household were asked to comment.

[00:30:44]>> One of the surprising things was that Buckingham Palace seemed barely concerned.

[00:30:50]They simply issued a brief statement saying that it all happened a long time ago and everyone concerned is now dead.

[00:30:59]You have to remember that the British royal family is probably the best theater director in the world. They are fantastic at stage managing not only weddings and christings and all those sort of happy moments, but they're also fantastically good at managing a transition of power from one monarch to the next. And so therefore that when a king dies, it is a choreographed stagemanaged presentation to the people out there. So the people will be reading the times at breakfast with the very sad news that their monarch has passed away.

[00:31:32]It's all very very precisely timed and that's what Dawson was giving the royal family and the royal household. He was helping to maintain the very dignified, serene uh heir of majesty to the proceedings.

[00:31:49]We do know that Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales said that they didn't want him to suffer unnecessarily. Um, which is possibly a green light to ease his pain.

[00:32:03]1936 was obviously a time of great instability and uncertainty, and this may have informed Lord Dawson's decision to try to make the transition as clean and dignified as possible.

[00:32:17]He'd done what he was supposed to do, which was to ease the king's suffering and oversee his passing. And that's what had happened. The immediate focus on the king's death is well announcing it. And then we see, you know, great outpourings of popular affection, not surprised that the king has dead, but actually um mourning his loss and recognizing this loss of this father figure for the country, which people had really regarded him as.

[00:32:45]But in recent years, speculation has arisen that King George may not have been the only patient to receive Dawson's special treatment.

[00:32:56]There's another twist to the story of Dawson because it's also likely he didn't just bump off one crowned head of Europe, but a second, Queen Mor of Norway, who also happened to be George's sister.

[00:33:10]Queen Morud of Norway came over to London in 1938.

[00:33:14]At the time, she was in rude health and showed no signs of illness.

[00:33:20]And when she was here, she suffered from this uh abdominal complaint that required surgery. Who was present but Dawson? What happens to Queen Maud? She dies.

[00:33:32]The Royal Oak lies ready at Portsmouth to carry the queen home to Norway.

[00:33:36]Lowering crowds cast a gloom over the scene as the coffin passes aboard.

[00:33:40]Behind the line of sailors, it is born to the quarter deck where it is laid on a draped beer for the last voyage to Os.

[00:33:48]The official cause of her death was said to be heart failure, but a letter from Dorson to Queen Mud's physicians in Norway have led many to conclude that Maud may have been euthanized.

[00:34:00]His letter states, "When reading this account, you will agree that the queen's sudden death was a relief and which saved her from these last painful stages of the disease both you and I know only too well."

[00:34:18]Knowing what we do know now after 1986 about what Dorson did to her brother the king back in 1936 just two years before uh it now seems very likely that Dawson may have given Queen Morud one of his big trademark injections. If that's the case he's killed two monarchs. That's a pretty impressive murder record.

[00:34:43]Was Dawson aware of the consequences of his actions? What would have happened to him if it had come to light at the time that he had administered lethal injections?

[00:34:56]If it had been found out in 1936 that Dawson had actually killed the king, which let's face it, he did kill the king. I think there would have been an absolute scandal. uh and it is possible in legal terms for him to have uh been put on trial for murder and regicide and killing a king in this country carries the death penalty. So under law Dawson could have hanged for what he had done.

[00:35:25]Was Dawson playing God, deciding when and how the king should die? Can it really be considered a murder? Or was this simply an act of mercy in the hope of easing the passing of a dying man?

[00:35:40]>> However, another way of looking at it is the fact that maybe there was an acceptance or an ethical acceptance of the time that this kind of voluntary euthanasia to a comeomaos individual who was beyond all hope um was a widely and very quietly accepted uh form of treatment that physicians could do.

[00:36:04]I think the British public are very pragmatic and I'm sure euthanasia was practiced very very often whether it was in royal circles or middle-class circles or working-class circles. It doesn't really matter. It's a kind release.

[00:36:20]>> Although Dawson felt that euthanasia did have a place in medical practice, he actually spoke out against it being made legal.

[00:36:28]It's clear that Dorson felt that euthanasia of this type was a common and accepted practice.

[00:36:36]A few years later, he spoke in the House of Lords in response to a bill proposing to legalize euthanasia.

[00:36:43]He argued that euthanasia was a common practice, a growing practice, and widely accepted by doctors.

[00:36:52]But I think, you know, he probably wouldn't have regarded what had happened with the king as euthanasia as such. I mean, you know, he this was about administering certain amounts of morphine and cocaine. Morphine that may well have been used anyway, but just in certain amounts that would have speeded up a sort of natural process.

[00:37:14]>> Dawson, who signed off on the death certificate, knowingly falsified the cause of death. There's no doubt this was a very sensitive matter and Dawson of course knew that recording the king's death as lung disease was going to be the way forward. He wasn't going to go into the ins and outs of exactly what had been administered when. But I mean, you know, being a royal physician was a position of ultimate trust. I mean, being a physician to anybody at a time of death is a position of great confidence and intimacy. And that's even more so for a monarch. So in some sense I don't think we should see him being cautious about what kind of information is released as particularly aware of the need to cover up.

[00:37:56]However, when um the first kind of biographer of Dawson wanted to car, you know, write about what had happened and talk about the king's death, I think um Dorson's widow was very aware of not wanting to reveal all the details of his papers and be a little bit circumspect about all of that. So perhaps she realized how it might be perceived.

[00:38:25]The doctor wrote on a death certificate that the king died of lung disease whereas in actual fact he died from an injection of cocaine and morphine. The doctor probably did this because he knew that he could be prosecuted. In the UK, no matter how serious the condition or illness, it is still illegal for a doctor to carry out euthanasia and is something even now that you know the monarchy don't want to kind of particularly make a big thing out of it belong to a kind of past era. It doesn't change anything, but the fact remains the king's death was brought on artificially by his doctor.

[00:39:04]It was later revealed that some people had actually known about Dawson's actions prior to his diary being released in 1986.

[00:39:14]When the author Francis Watson was tasked with writing Dawson's biography in 1950, he actually included the event in his book.

[00:39:24]This biographer did originally include um the the story that that Lord Dawson had had effectively ended King George V's life um but that it was taken out of the biography. I would imagine this would be in respect of Queen Mary who was still living until 1953 and King George the F's granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II. So yes, I would have thought respect alone would have prevented that being included in an official biography.

[00:39:56]One of George the F's biographers, Kenneth Rose, made a statement in 1986 when the notes were released that expressed the view that it was in fact the murder.

[00:40:09]But of course, nothing could happen to Dawson because he died in 1945. So, you know, he he's in the clear. Um it is really an extraordinary story. It may seem like just a very small thing just to inject a man who's on his way anyway.

[00:40:24]But actually there was no consent. The king didn't agree to it. There was no formal consent given by the family. And and know if you are going to apply the full weight of law to Dorson. He's a murderer and a regicide.

[00:40:39]Was Dawson acting for the benefit of king and country? Why did he take it upon himself to determine the end of the king's life?

[00:40:49]And what drove his concern with how the news of George's death should be announced? To this day, Dawson's actions still divide opinion.

[00:41:00]For some, they were the acts of a kind and merciful man determined that a muchloved king should not endure further suffering.

[00:41:09]For others, the opposite is true. For them, Dawson was self-obsessed and autocratic, a doctor who played god and got away with nothing less than an act of murder.

[00:41:24]Some might feel that this is the most recent case of reicide and the first since Charles I more than 300 years earlier.

[00:41:33]King George ruled the waves, but Lord Dawson waved the rules.

[00:41:41]I think there was an open secret around the royal household that Dawson had actually committed this act of murder because this jingle went around the royal household and it went Lord Dawson of Pen, he kills lots of men. So that's why we sing God saves the king.

[00:42:00]He was dying. You know, everybody was clear that the end was near. Um so it was simply a case of timing and it was about, you know, whether he was going to die in the morning or in the evening. So I think that you know although we can perhaps imagine that if it got out it could have been a sensational story actually when you put it in the context um of those hours it really wasn't and it was just about really giving the king pain relief but turning up the volume on that in such a way that meant he would die then there's no doubt that Dawson was acting with the best intention And I think I think it should be recorded as mercy, not murder. There was no reason why Dorson would want to have brought about the king's death for any reason other than easing his suffering and trying to facilitate the best kind of transition of power. But actually beyond that, of course, there was no malicious motive there. It was about mercy. And in that sense, I guess he was doing perhaps what many many physicians at, you know, at that point would have done