BFI

At the time this Topical Budget item was screened, King George II of Greece would have been 33, having ascended the throne in September the previous year. He lasted just over a year before inadvertently becoming the victim of an unsuccessful royalist coup. Although he was not personally blamed, the military officers who actually ran the country behind the scenes insisted that he go into exile. He refused to abdicate, but eventually relocated to his wife's native Romania on 19 December 1923. Topical's footage seems to have been shot in happier times - an intertitle reads "He winked at 'Topical' then - is he winking to-day?"

The following year, George was deposed in absentia when a republic was declared on March 25. He spent the next decade between Bucharest and London, finally reclaiming the Greek throne on 3 November 1935 after Prime Minister Georgios Kondylis held a public referendum on the restoration of the monarchy that produced a 95% vote in support.

But in collaboration with Ioannis Metaxas (the leader of the failed coup of 1922), George turned Greece into a quasi-Fascist regime, though continued to maintain links with Britain that proved invaluable when Italy declared war on Greece in 1940. When the Germans invaded the following year, George went into exile again (he once quipped that a Greek monarch's most important possession was a suitcase). In 1946, a postwar referendum produced a 69% vote in favour of the monarchy, and George returned home, only to die on 31 March 1947 at the age of 56.

Michael Brooke

Click titles to see or read more