The King's Speech (2 page)

Towards the end of 2009 I was invited on to the set of
The King’s Speech
during filming in Portland Place, in London. During a break I met Geoffrey Rush, who plays my grandfather, and Ben Wimsett, who portrays my father aged ten. After getting over the initial strangeness of seeing someone as a child I’d only ever known as a man, I became fascinated by a scene in which Rush’s character hovers over my father and his elder brother, Valentine, played by Dominic Applewhite, while they are made to recite Shakespeare. It reminded me of a similar real-life scene when I was a boy and my father obliged me to do the same.

My father had a passion – and a gift – for poetry and verse, often repeating verbatim entire passages that he remembered since childhood. He used to revel in his ability to rattle off reams of Hilaire Belloc as a party piece to guests. But it was from my elder sister, Sarah, that he derived the most satisfaction: indeed, she was often moved to tears by his recitals.

At the time, I don’t remember being much impressed by my father’s talent. Looking back on the scene as an adult, however, I can appreciate both his perseverance and the acute frustration he must have felt at my reluctance to share the love of poetry that his father had instilled in him.

Filming ended in January 2010, and this also marked the beginning of a more personal voyage of discovery for me. Canning and Hooper did not set out to make a documentary but rather a biopic, which, although true to the spirit of my grandfather, concentrates on a narrow period of time: from the first meeting between my grandfather and the future King in 1926 until the outbreak of war in 1939.

Inspired by the film, I wanted to tell the complete story of my grandfather’s life, from his childhood in Adelaide, South Australia, in the 1880s right the way through to his death. Thus I started extensive and detailed research into his character and what he had done during his life. It was in many ways a frustrating process because, despite Lionel’s professional status, very little was known about the methods he employed with the King. Although he wrote a few articles for the press about the treatment of stammering and other speech impediments, he never set out his methods in a formal way and had no student or apprentice with whom to share the secrets of his work. Nor – probably because of the discretion with which he always treated his relationship with the King – did he write up his most famous case.

Then, in July 2010, with the publishers pressing for the manuscript, my perseverance finally paid off. On hearing of my quest for material, my cousin, Alex Marshall, contacted me to say that she had found some boxes of documents relating to my grandfather. She didn’t think they would be of much use but, even so, I invited myself up to her home in Rutland to take a look. I was greeted with several volumes arranged on a table in her dining room: there were two Bankers Boxes full of correspondence between the King and Lionel dating from 1926 to 1952 and two more boxes filled with manuscripts and press cuttings, which Lionel had carefully glued into two big scrapbooks, one green and the other blue.

To my delight, Alex also had the missing parts of the archive, together with three volumes of letters and a section of diary that my grandmother, Myrtle, kept when she and my grandfather embarked on a trip round the world in 1910, and also during the first few months of the Second World War. Written in a more personal style than Lionel’s diary, this gave a far more revealing insight into the minutiae of their life together. The documents, running to hundreds of pages, were a fascinating treasure trove that I spent days going through and deciphering; my only regret was that the letter that I had been so desperate to find was not among them.

It is all this material that forms the basis for this book, which Peter Conradi, an author and journalist with
The Sunday Times
, has helped me to put together. I hope that in reading it, you will come to share my fascination with my grandfather and his unique and very close relationship with King George VI.

Although I have endeavoured to research my grandfather’s life exhaustively, there may be pieces of information about him that still remain undiscovered. If you are related to Lionel Logue, were a patient or colleague of his, or if you have any other information about him and his work, I would love to hear from you. I can be contacted on [email protected]

Mark Logue
London, August 2010

CHAPTER ONE
God Save the King

The royal party on their way to the coronation of George VI

A
lbert Frederick Arthur George, King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and the last Emperor of India, woke up with a start. It was just after 3 a.m. The bedroom in Buckingham Palace he had occupied since becoming monarch five months earlier was normally a haven of peace and quiet in the heart of London, but on this particular morning his slumbers had been rudely interrupted by the crackle of loudspeakers being tested outside on Constitution Hill. ‘One of them might have been in our room,’ he wrote in his diary.
¹
And then, just when he thought he might finally be able to go back to sleep, the marching bands and troops started up.

It was 12 May 1937, and the forty-one-year-old King was about to face one of the greatest – and most nerve-racking – days of his life: his coronation. Traditionally, the ceremony is held eighteen months after the monarch comes to the throne, leaving time not just for all the preparations but also for a decent period of mourning for the previous king or queen. This coronation was different: the date had already been chosen to crown his elder brother, who had become king on the death of their father, George V, in January 1936. Edward VIII had lasted less than a year on the throne, however, after succumbing to the charms of Wallis Simpson, an America divorcee, and it was his younger brother, Albert, Duke of York, who reluctantly succeeded him when he abdicated that December. Albert took the name George VI – as both a tribute to his late father and a sign of continuity with his reign after the upheavals of the previous year that had plunged the British monarchy into one of the greatest crises in its history.

At about the same time, in the considerably less grand setting of Sydenham Hill, in the suburbs of south-east London, a handsome man in his late fifties, with a shock of brown hair and bright blue eyes, was also stirring. He, too, had a big day ahead of him. The Australian-born son of a publican, his name was Lionel Logue and since his first meeting with the future monarch just over a decade earlier, he had occupied a curious but increasingly influential role at the heart of the royal family.

Just to be on the safe side, Logue (who was a reluctant driver) had had a chauffeur sleep overnight at his house. With his statuesque wife Myrtle, who was to accompany him on that momentous day, he began to prepare himself for the journey into town. Myrtle, who was wearing £5,000 worth of jewellery, looked radiant. A meeting with a hairdresser whom they’d agreed to pick up along the way would add the final touch. Logue, in full court costume, was rather conscious of his silk-stockinged legs and had to keep taking care not to trip over his sword.

As the hours ticked by and the streets of London began to fill with crowds of well-wishers, many of whom had slept out on camp beds, both men’s sense of apprehension grew. The King had a ‘sinking feeling inside’ and could eat no breakfast. ‘I knew that I was to spend a most trying day & to go through the most important ceremony in my life,’ he wrote in his diary that evening. ‘The hours of waiting before leaving for Westminster Abbey were the most nerve racking.’
²

With origins dating back almost a millennium, the coronation of a British monarch in Westminster Abbey is a piece of national pageantry unmatched anywhere in the world. At the centre of the ceremony is the anointing: while the monarch is seated in the medieval King Edward’s Chair, a canopy over his head, the Archbishop of Canterbury touches his hands, breast and head with consecrated oil. A cocktail of orange, roses, cinnamon, musk and ambergris, it is dispensed from a filigreed spoon filled from an eagle-shaped ampulla. By that act, the monarch is consecrated before God to the service of his peoples to whom he has sworn a grave oath. For a man as deeply religious as King George VI, it was difficult to overestimate the significance of this avowal of his dependence on the Almighty for the spirit, strength and power needed to do right by his subjects.

To be at the centre of such a ceremony – all the while balancing an ancient 7lb crown on his head – would have been a huge ordeal for anyone, but the King had particular reason to view what was in store for him with trepidation: plagued since childhood with a series of medical ailments, he also suffered from a debilitating stammer. Embarrassing enough in small gatherings, it turned public speaking into a major ordeal. The King, in the words of America’s
Time
magazine, was the ‘most famed contemporary stammerer’ in the world,
³
joining a roll call of prominent names stretching back to antiquity that included Aesop, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Virgil, Erasmus and Darwin.

Worse, in the weeks running up to the coronation, the King had been forced to endure a whispering campaign about his health, stirred up by supporters of his embittered elder brother, who was now living in exile in France. The new King, it was rumoured, was in such a poor physical state that he would not be able to endure the coronation ceremony, let alone discharge his functions as sovereign. Further fuel for the campaign had been provided by the King’s decision not to go ahead with an Accession Durbar in Delhi that his predecessor had agreed should take place during the cold-weather season of 1937–8.

The invited congregation had to be in the Abbey by around 7 a.m. Crowds cheered them as they passed; a special Tube train running from Kensington High Street to Westminster was laid on for Members of the House of Commons and for peers and peeresses, who travelled in full robes and wearing their coronets.

Logue and his wife set off from their home at 6.40, travelling through deserted streets, northwards through Denmark Hill and Camberwell Green and then westwards towards the newly rebuilt Chelsea Bridge, which had been opened less than a week earlier by William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister who was in town for the coronation. One by one, the police constables spotted the ‘P’ in green lettering on the windscreen of their car and waved them through, until, just before the Tate Gallery, they ran into a jam of cars from all over London converging on the Abbey. They got out as they reached the covered way opposite the statue of Richard the Lionheart in Parliament Square and had squeezed into their seats by 7.30.

The King and Queen travelled to the Abbey in the Gold State Coach, a magnificent enclosed carriage drawn by eight horses that had been first used by King George III to open parliament in 1762. For the present King, the presence of his wife, Queen Elizabeth, was an enormous reassurance. During their fourteen years of marriage, she had been a hugely calming influence on him; whenever he faltered in the middle of a speech, she would squeeze his arm affectionately, willing him to go on – usually with success.

Seated in the royal box were the King’s mother, Queen Mary, and his two young daughters. The smaller one, Princess Margaret Rose, now aged six and naughty at the best of times, was bored and squirming. As the interminably long service continued, she stuck her finger in her eye, pulled her ears, swung her legs, rested her head on her elbow and tickled her rather more serious elder sister, Elizabeth, who had recently celebrated her eleventh birthday. As was so often the case, the elder girl found herself urging her sister to be good. Queen Mary finally quietened Margaret Rose by giving her a pair of opera glasses to peek through.

Reassurance of another kind was provided by Logue, whose presence in a box overlooking the ceremony was a sign of his importance to the King. A self-described ‘common colonial’, who despite a career devoted to elocution had never quite succeeded in shaking off his Australian accent, Logue seemed strangely out of place among the upper echelons of the British aristocracy given pride of place in the Abbey.

Yet it would be difficult to exaggerate the contribution to the day’s momentous events that had been made by a man whom the newspapers called the King’s ‘speech doctor’ or ‘speech specialist’. Such was Logue’s status that he had just been made a member of the Royal Victorian Order, an appointment entirely in the gift of the sovereign. The award was front-page news: his was, declared the
Daily Express
, ‘one of the most interesting of the names in the Coronation Honours List’. Logue wore the medal proudly on his chest in the Abbey.

In the eleven years since his arrival on the boat from Australia, Logue, from his rented room in Harley Street, in the heart of the British medical establishment, had become one of the most prominent figures in the emerging field of speech therapy. For much of that time he had been helping the then Duke of York tackle his speech impediment.

For the past month they had been preparing for the great day, rehearsing over and over again the time-honoured responses that the King would have to give in the Abbey. In the years they had worked together, whether at Logue’s little surgery, at Sandringham, Windsor or Buckingham Palace, they had developed a system. First Logue would study the text, spotting any words that might trip the King up, such as those that began with a hard ‘k’ or ‘g’ sound or perhaps with repeated consonants, and wherever possible, replace them with something else. Logue would then mark up the text with suggested breathing points, and the King would start practising, again and again, until he got it right – often becoming extremely frustrated in the process.

But there could be no tampering with the words of the coronation service. This was the real test – and it was about to begin.

The various princes and princesses, both British and foreign, had started to be shown to their places at 10.15 a.m. Then came the King’s mother, walking to the stately music of the official Coronation March, followed by the various state representations and then the Queen, her marvellous train carried by her six ladies-in-waiting.