The King's Speech

Mark Logue is the grandson of Lionel Logue. He is a film maker and the custodian of the Logue Archive. He lives in London. Peter Conradi is an author and journalist. He works for
The Sunday Times
and his last book was
Hitler’s Piano Player: The Rise and Fall of Ernst Hanfstaengl
.

THE
KING’S
SPEECH

Mark Logue and Peter Conradi

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

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Published in the United States of America in 2010
by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016

Copyright © 2010 Mark Logue and Peter Conradi

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Quercus
21 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NS
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

Text and plates designed by Helen Ewing

PICTURE CREDITS
All images courtesy Logue family archive except:

PLATE SECTION
♣
, top courtesy Prince Alfred College school archives, bottom courtesy of Alex Marshall, Logue family archive; bottom © Daily Express; © Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy; all images courtesy of Alex Marshall, Logue family archive; all images courtesy of Alex Marshall, Logue family archive; all images courtesy of Alex Marshall, Logue family archive; top © Sunday Express, bottom © Sunday Pictorial

INTEGRATED IMAGES
♣
© RA/Lebrecht Music & Arts;
♦
© RA/Lebrecht Music & Arts;
♥
© Getty images;
♠
© Getty images;
†
© Getty images;
‡
© Getty images;
Δ
© The Times, London/Lebrecht;
♣
© Rex Features;
♦
© Times, London/Lebrecht;
♥
© Roger Viollet / Rex Features;
♠
© AP/Press Association Images;
†
© Getty;
‡
© Scottish Dm / Rex Features

Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved

Sterling ISBN 978-1-4027-8676-1

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Contents

Acknowledgments

F
irstly, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Peter Conradi. If it wasn’t for his unflinching determination in the face of a daunting schedule, this book may never have existed.

I would like to thank my extended family, especially Alex Marshall, whose discovery of a treasure trove of letters led to a more profound understanding of Lionel’s life and work. Anne Logue for her recollections, Sarah Logue for her time and Patrick and Nickie Logue for their help in looking after the archive. Also my lovely wife Ruth and our children for allowing this project to take over our lives for a year. Without their support this book would never have happened.

Thanks also to Caroline Bowen for answering so many questions about speech therapy, and who was pivotal in putting the film’s producers in touch with the Logue family, and starting the ball rolling. Francesca Budd for her help in transcribing the archive and her support throughout the filming process. All involved in the film, Tom Hooper, David Seidler, Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and everyone at See-Saw Films, especially Iain Canning.

Jenny Savill at Andrew Nurnberg Associates was central in getting the book published.

I’d also like to thank Meredith Hooper for some illuminating facts, Michael Thornton for letting us publish his accounts of Evelyn Laye, Neil Urbino, whose genealogy work helped dig deeper, Marista Leishman for her help with the Reith diaries, and David J Radcliffe for his own account of his fight with a stammer.

Margaret Hosking and The University of Adelaide and Susanne Dowling at Murdoch University were an enormous help in digging out library material.

Thanks also to Tony Aldous, school archivist at Prince Alfred College, Peta Madalena, archivist at Scotch College and Lyn Williams at Lion Nathan. The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists were extremely helpful, especially Robin Matheou.

Finally, thanks to the National Library of Australia, the State Library of South Australia and the State Library of Western Australia, the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Introduction

W
hen I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s we lived in Belgium, where my father, Antony, worked as a lawyer at the European headquarters of Procter & Gamble. Over the years we moved between various houses on the outskirts of Brussels, but there was one constant: regardless of where we were, a collection of photographs and mementos would be set up on a mantelpiece or windowsill.

Among them was a photograph of my father in his Scots Guards uniform; another of him and my mother, Elizabeth, on their wedding day in 1953, and a picture of my Australian-born paternal grandfather, Lionel, and his wife, Myrtle. Also, more intriguingly, there was a leather-framed portrait of King George VI, the father of the present Queen, signed and dated 12 May 1937, the day of his coronation; another picture of him and his wife, Elizabeth, better known to my generation as the Queen Mother, and their two daughters, the future Queen Elizabeth, then a girl of eleven, and her little sister, Margaret Rose; and a third of the royal couple, dated 1928, when they were still the Duke and Duchess of York, signed Elizabeth and Albert.

The significance of all these photographs must have been explained to me, but as a young boy I never paid too much attention. I understood the link with royalty was through Lionel, but he was ancient history to me; he had died in 1953, twelve years before I was born. The sum of my knowledge about my grandfather was that he had been the King’s speech therapist – whatever that was – and I left it at that. I never asked any more questions and no more detailed information was volunteered. I was far more interested in the various medals and buttons laid out alongside the photographs. I used particularly to enjoy dressing up in my father’s officer’s belt and hat, and playing at soldiers with the medals pinned proudly on my shirt.

But as I grew older, and had children of my own, I began to wonder about who my ancestors were and where they had come from. The growing general interest in genealogy further piqued my curiosity. Looking back through the family tree, I came across a great-grandmother from Melbourne who had fourteen children, only seven of whom survived beyond infancy. I also learnt that my great-great-grandfather left Ireland for Australia in 1850 aboard the SS
Boyne
.

As far as I was concerned, my grandfather was only one among many members of an extended family divided between Australia, Ireland and Britain. That remained the case even after the death of my father in 2001, when I was left the task of going through the personal papers he had kept in a tall grey filing cabinet. There, among the wills, deeds and other important documents, were hundreds of old letters and photographs collected by my grandfather – all neatly filed away in chronological order in a document wallet.

It was only in June 2009, when I was approached by Iain Canning, who was producing a film,
The King’s Speech
, about Lionel, that I began to understand the significance of the role played by my grandfather: about how he had helped the then Duke of York, who reluctantly became King in December 1936 after the abdication of his elder brother, Edward VIII, in his lifelong battle against a chronic stammer that turned every public speech or radio broadcast into a terrifying ordeal. I began to appreciate that his life and work could be of interest to a far wider audience beyond my own family.

That April, Lionel had been the subject of the Afternoon Play on BBC Radio 4, again called
A King’s Speech
, by Mark Burgess. This film was to be something far bigger, however – a major motion picture, with a big-name cast that included Helena Bonham Carter, Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Michael Gambon and Derek Jacobi. It is directed by Tom Hooper, the man behind the acclaimed
The Damned United
, which showed a very different side of recent English history: the football manager Brian Clough’s short and stormy tenure as manager of Leeds United in 1974.

Canning and Hooper, of course, wanted their film to be as historically accurate as possible, so I set out to try and discover as much as I could about my grandfather. The obvious starting point was my father’s filing cabinet: examining Lionel’s papers properly for the first time, I found vividly written diaries in which he had recorded his meetings with the King in extraordinary detail. There was copious correspondence, often warm and friendly, with George VI himself, and various other records – including a little appointment card, covered in my grandfather’s spider-like handwriting, in which he described his first encounter with the future King in his small consulting room in Harley Street on 19 October 1926.

Taken together with other fragments of information I managed to gather online, and the few pages of references to Lionel included in most biographies of George VI, this allowed me to learn more about my grandfather’s unique relationship with the King and also to correct some of the part-truths and overstretched memories that had become blurred across the generations.

It soon became clear, however, that the archive was incomplete. Missing were a number of letters and diary entries from the 1920s and 1930s, snippets of which had been quoted in John Wheeler Bennett’s authorized biography of George VI, published in 1958. Also nowhere to be found were the scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings that, as I knew from my cousins, Lionel had collected for much of his adult life.

Perhaps the most disappointing absence, though, was that of a letter, written by the King in December 1944, which had particularly captured my imagination. Its existence was revealed in a passage in Lionel’s diary in which he described a conversation between the two men after the monarch had delivered his annual Christmas message to the nation for the first time without my grandfather at his side.

‘My job is over, Sir,’ Lionel told him.

‘Not at all,’ the King replied. ‘It is the preliminary work that counts, and that is where you are indispensable.’ Then, according to Lionel’s account, ‘he thanked me, and two days later wrote me a very beautiful letter, which I hope will be treasured by my descendants’.

Had I had the letter I would have treasured it, but it was nowhere to be found amid the mass of correspondence, newspaper cuttings and diary entries. This missing letter inspired me to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every line of enquiry in what became a quest to piece together as many details as I could of my grandfather’s life. I pestered relatives, returning to speak to them time and again. I wrote to Buckingham Palace, to the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle and to the authors and publishers of books about George VI, in the hope that the letter may have been among material they had borrowed from my father or his two elder brothers, and had failed to return. But there was no trace of it.