The King's Speech (30 page)

By April the following year, Logue was able to write back to Kemsley boasting of the progress his patient had made: Fennell had grown in confidence and passed ‘with flying colours’ an interview to work at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. Logue continued to see him for another year, although their appointments were reduced to just one a month. By August 1949, things were going so well at work that Fennell had moved his family into a house in Wantage; in January the following year he enrolled at the Oxford College of Technology and by May was offered a permanent job at Harwell.

With Myrtle gone and his sons now grown, Logue sold the house on Sydenham Hill in April 1947. It was not just that it was far too big for him now; as he wrote to the King that December in his annual birthday greetings, ‘it held too many memories’ of his decades of married life. He moved to 29 Princes Court, a ‘comfortable little flat’ in the Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, just opposite Harrods.

There were more problems at home. Tony, Lionel’s youngest, had in the meantime left the army and returned to university, only this time it was Cambridge. He continued to study medicine for nine months, but his heart was not in it and he switched to law. He was in delicate health, however. He went into hospital for a relatively straightforward operation on his appendix, but then had to have four major operations within six days. In his customary birthday letter to the King, Logue blamed the dramatic turn of events on a delayed reaction to an incident when his son was serving in North Africa and was unconscious for four days after getting too close to an explosion. Tony had been involved ‘in a desperate fight for his life’, he wrote. The King wrote back two days later expressing sympathy. ‘You have certainly had your share of shocks and sorrows,’ he said. As usual, he updated Logue on his public speaking, noting how pleased he was with a speech he had made at his father’s memorial. He expressed concern, however, that his Christmas message would not be easy, ‘because everything is so gloomy’.

Logue did, however, see one ambition realized: on 19 January 1948, he wrote to the King asking him to become patron of the College of Speech Therapists, which now counted 350 members, was ‘quite solvent’ and was now recognized by the British Medical Association. ‘I am sixty-eight years of age and it will be a wonderful thought in my old age to know that you were the head of this rapidly growing and essential organisation,’ he wrote. The King agreed.

Logue was still finding it difficult to come to terms with Myrtle’s death. They had been married for almost forty years, during which she had been a dominant influence on him, and her death left a massive hole in his life. Although otherwise a rational man, he became attracted to spiritualism in the hope of making contact with her on the ‘other side’. As a result he got in touch with Lilian Bailey, a ‘deep trance medium’. Over the years, Bailey had been consulted by a number of prominent figures in Britain and abroad – among them the Hollywood actresses Mary Pickford, Merle Oberon and Mae West, and Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister.

Quite how Logue got in touch with Bailey and how many séances he attended is unclear; his sons, however, were appalled when he used to tell them he was going off to ‘get in touch’ with his late wife. ‘It was something we thought was really crazy and wished to goodness he wasn’t doing it,’ recalled Valentine Logue’s wife Anne.
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Amid the gloom of the immediate post-war years, there was one glimmer of light: on 10 July 1947, it was announced that Princess Elizabeth would marry Philip, the son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and the British-born Princess Alice of Battenberg. The couple had met in June 1939 when Philip was eighteen and the future Queen just thirteen. The King had travelled with his family on the Royal Yacht to visit the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, and during the visit someone had to look after Elizabeth and Margaret, then aged nine.

Lord Mountbatten, the King’s ambitious aide-de-camp, made sure that of all the young men present, it was his nephew Philip, a tall, strikingly good-looking man who had just graduated as the top cadet in his course, who was given the task. Elizabeth (who was Philip’s third cousin through Queen Victoria, and second cousin, once removed, through Christian IX of Denmark) was smitten. ‘Lilibet never took her eyes off him,’ observed Marion Crawford, her governess, in her memoirs. The couple soon began to exchange letters.

What appeared to have started as a crush on Princess Elizabeth’s part soon turned to a full-blown romance – which was encouraged at every stage by Mountbatten, who was keen to see his family linked with the House of Windsor. Elizabeth and Philip wrote to each other and even managed occasional meetings when Philip was on leave, but so long as the war continued, there was little chance of their relationship going any further. That was changed by the outbreak of peace.

The King had mixed feelings about the match, not least because he considered his daughter too young and was concerned she had fallen for the first young man she had ever met. Philip was also seen by many at court – the King included – as far from the ideal consort for a future monarch, not least because of his German blood; the Queen was said to refer to him privately as ‘the Hun’. Hoping their daughter might find someone else, she and the King organized a series of balls packed with eligible men, to which Philip, to his great annoyance, was not invited. Yet Elizabeth remained devoted to her prince.

Eventually, in 1946, Philip asked the King for his daughter’s hand in marriage. George agreed – but still had one last trick up his sleeve: he insisted any formal announcement was postponed until after Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday the following April. By the month before, at Mountbatten’s suggestion, Philip had renounced his Greek and Danish titles, as well as his allegiance to the Greek crown, converted from Greek Orthodoxy to the Church of England and become a naturalized British subject. He also adopted the surname Mountbatten (an Anglicized version of Battenberg) from his mother’s family.

The couple married on 20 November 1947 in Westminster Abbey in a ceremony attended by representatives of various royal families – but not Philip’s three surviving sisters, who had married German aristocrats with Nazi connections. On the morning of the wedding, Philip was made Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich of Greenwich in the County of London; the previous day the King had bestowed on him the style of His Royal Highness.

The King’s public speaking may have been getting better and better, but his health was getting worse. He was still only forty-nine when the war ended, but he was in poor physical shape: the strain he suffered during the war is often given as a prime reason, yet it is difficult to see how this strain was any greater than that suffered by the millions of men who served on the front line or indeed by the civilian population left behind. Another factor was his chain-smoking: in July 1941
Time
magazine reported that, in order to share the hardship of his people, he was cutting down from twenty or twenty-five cigarettes a day to a mere fifteen. After the war, he started smoking more again.

Despite his poor health, the King set off in February 1947 on a ten-week tour of South Africa. He had already been to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, but had never visited South Africa and was keen to see it. The itinerary was a gruelling one and the King tired easily; a warm reception from the Afrikaners, especially from those old enough to remember the Boer War, was by no means guaranteed. There was also an added psychological strain: Britain was in the grip of one of the bitterest winters for decades, and the King suffered pangs of guilt at not sharing his subjects’ suffering. At one point he even suggested cutting short his trip, although Attlee strongly advised against it, warning that this would only add to the sense of crisis.

Within two months of his return, the King was beginning to suffer cramp in his legs, complaining in a letter to Logue of ‘feeling tired and strained’.
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By October 1948 these cramps had become painful and permanent: his left foot was numb all day and the pain kept him awake all night; later, the problem seemed to shift to the right. The King was examined the following month by Professor James Learmouth, one of Britain’s greatest authorities on vascular complaints, who found him to be suffering from early arteriosclerosis; at one stage it was feared that the King’s right leg might have to be amputated because of the possibility of gangrene. A few weeks later Logue wrote to express his concerns: ‘As one who had the honour to be closely connected with you during those dreadful war years and had a glimpse of the enormous amount of work you did, and saw the strain that was constantly made on your vitality, it is very evident that you have driven yourself too hard and at last have had to call a halt,’ he wrote on 24 November. ‘I know that rest, medical skill and your own wonderful spirit will restore you to health.’

The King appeared to have recovered by December, but the doctors ordered continued rest, and a trip to Australia and New Zealand planned for early the next year had to be abandoned. The King nevertheless seemed upbeat in a letter to Logue on 10 December. ‘I am getting better with treatment and rest in bed, and the doctors do have a smile on their face, which I feel is all to the good,’ he wrote. ‘I hope you are well & are still helping those who cannot speak.’

Lionel, who was fifteen years the King’s senior, was also having a bad year – and was confined for some of the time to his new flat, which was on the eighth floor. As he wrote in his annual birthday letter to the King that December, he was in such poor health that friends wrote home to Australia saying they didn’t think he would survive. He was heartened, though, by the apparent good news about the King’s condition. ‘I have followed the wonderful struggle you have made and rejoice the Almighty has brought you back to health,’ he wrote.

Christmas was looming – and with it the annual message. ‘I have got a new type of broadcast this year from a more personal angle which I hope will go well,’ the King wrote to Logue on the twentieth. In a sign of the progress he had made over the years, he no longer looked to Logue to help him prepare for his broadcast, as he had in the old days, although he urged him to telephone afterwards to give his opinion on his performance.

The King delivered the message from Sandringham, returning to London only at the end of February, when he resumed a limited programme of audiences and held an investiture. March 1949 brought bad news, however. After a full examination, it was decided the King’s recovery had not been as complete as everyone had thought; Learmouth advised a right lumbar sympathectomy, a surgical procedure intended to free the flow of blood to his leg. The operation, which was carried out at the King’s insistence in an impromptu operating theatre in Buckingham Palace rather than a hospital, went well. The King was under no illusions, however, that he would be completely restored to health; his doctors ordered him to rest, reduce his official engagements and cut down drastically on the smoking that had aggravated his condition; a second attack of thrombosis could be lethal.

The King’s health appeared to continue to improve through 1949, but the doctors nevertheless ordered as much rest as possible. That Christmas brought another message to the nation, the Commonwealth and the Empire. ‘Once more I am in the throes of preparing my broadcast,’ the King wrote to Logue, thanking him for his annual birthday greetings. ‘How difficult it is to find anything new to say in these days. Words of encouragement to do better in the New Year is the only thing to go on. I am longing to get it over. It still ruins my Christmas.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Last Words

George VI looking tired and ill shortly before his death

T
o the millions of people in Britain and across the Commonwealth and Empire who gathered around their radios on Christmas Day 1951, the voice was both familiar and yet worryingly different. George VI was delivering his traditional Christmas message, but he sounded uncomfortably husky and hoarse, as if he were suffering from a particularly heavy cold. At times, his voice dropped to almost a whisper. He also seemed to be speaking slightly faster than usual. Yet few of those listening could have failed to be moved by what their monarch had to say.

After beginning by describing Christmas as a time when everyone should count their blessings, the King struck a deeply personal note.

I myself have every cause for deep thankfulness, for not only – by the grace of God and through the faithful skill of my doctors, surgeons and nurses – have I come through my illness, but I have learned once again that it is in bad times that we value most highly the support and sympathy of our friends. From my peoples in these islands and in the British Commonwealth and Empire as well as from many other countries this support and sympathy has reached me and I thank you now from my heart. I trust that you yourselves realise how greatly your prayers and good wishes have helped and are helping me in my recovery.