“Beaudesert, a district of reputed wealth, fund raising efforts look miserly … and the laxity of Beaudesert is remarkable.”
These comments printed in the Beaudesert Times in 1936, so soon after the great depression, you can imagine did little to encourage the locals to dig deeper into their pockets.
Queenslanders were asked to donate to a memorial monument for King George V (that was opened in King George Square Brisbane in 1938) with a target of £6000 set and met. Beaudesert people managed to donate 23 pounds.
Time has shown that maybe £23 was not miserly at all. This King refused his cousin, the Tsar of Russia, asylum in England and the Tsar would later be assassinated with his wife and children.
George changed his royal family surname from its German one of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor to protect the wealth and status of his royal family, and he was a tyrant to wife and children, behind closed doors.
King George V died peacefully on 20 January 1936.
But a diary locked in Windsor Castle appeared in 1986, belonging to the King’s physician, who was present at the death and responsible for it!
The doctor wrote of the event “I therefore decided to determine the end and inject morphia … and shortly after cocaine … into the King’s distended jugular vein”.
The King’s last words were “God damn you.”
The doctor wrote he intended to both grant the King a painless death and to guarantee that his passing would be announced in the morning papers rather than the “less appropriate evening journals”!
