King’s Speech, The Read online

  The previous week, it reported, ‘Britain rang with joyful news. The Duke’s stuttering was so nearly cured that he could say “King” without preliminary cackles. Alone among specialists Dr. Logue had discerned that the ducal impediment was physical, not mental. He had prescribed massage and throat exercises’. Quite where the magazine got the notion that Logue was a doctor was not clear – although he would undoubtedly have been flattered by the title.

  The Duke’s improvements came despite a worrying scare over his father’s health. While attending the Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in November 1928, the King developed a severe chill, which he neglected and which then turned to acute septicaemia. It became clear he would be incapacitated for some time, and on 2 December six Counsellors of State were appointed to transact public business in the meantime; the Duke was one, as were his elder brother and mother.

  Edward was away on a tour of East Africa, and despite warnings of the severity of his father’s condition, did not immediately set off for home – to the horror of his aides. Eventually convinced of the seriousness of the situation, he hurried back. During the journey he received a letter from the Duke, which suggested that, despite the gravity of the King’s illness, neither brother had lost his sense of humour. ‘There is a lovely story going about which emanated from the East End,’ wrote the Duke, ‘that the reason for your rushing home is that in the event of anything happening to Papa I am going to bag the Throne in your absence !!! Just like the Middle Ages . . .’ Edward was clearly so amused by the letter that he kept it and included it in his memoirs.

  The King was operated upon and, although his life remained in danger for some time, he began gradually to recover in the new year. It would not be until the following June that he would be strong enough to take part in public ceremonies again. The Duke had been put under strain both by worry about his father and by the extra duties he had to perform, but he took it all in his stride, as he revealed in a letter he sent to Logue on 15 December 1928, thanking him for the book he sent him as a birthday present.

  ‘I don’t know whether you sent it with a gentle reminder for me to come and see you more often or not, but I liked your kind thought in sending,’ the Duke wrote. ‘As you can imagine just lately my mind is full of other things, and as a matter of fact through all this mental strain my speech has not been affected one atom. So that is all to the good.’51

  These birthday books were to become something of a tradition. Regardless of where he was or what he was doing, Logue would send the Duke one or more carefully selected volumes on 14 December for the rest of his life. The Duke, even after he had become King, would respond with a thank-you letter written in his own hand, in which he would inevitably talk about the progress he was making with his speech as well as giving brief insights into other things going on his life. Logue treasured the letters, which found their way into his papers.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Calm Before the Storm

  Beechgrove, the Logue family house in Sydenham

  The 1930s proved to be the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had brought the Roaring Twenties to a shuddering halt, ushering in the Great Depression, which led to untold economic misery across the world. It also helped the rise of Adolf Hitler, who became German chancellor in January 1933, setting off the chain of events that were to lead to the outbreak of the Second World War six years later.

  For the Duke, however, the first six years of the decade, at least, were a time of peace and calm. ‘It was almost the last span of untroubled peace that he was to know,’ wrote his official biographer, ‘and one in which a felicitous balance seemed to have been struck between his arduous duties as a servant of the State and his happy existence as a husband and father.’52

  Gradually, though, the Duke was being required to play a part in the functioning of the Crown. As well as serving as a Counsellor of State during his father’s illness, he had represented him in October 1928 at the funeral in Denmark of Marie Dagmar, the Dowager Empress of Russia, and at the marriage in March the following year of his cousin, Crown Prince Olav of Norway. The same month he was also appointed Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Other duties, and inevitably more speech-making, were to follow.

  There were changes, too, on the domestic front: on 21 August 1930, his second daughter, Margaret Rose, was born, and in September the following year the King gave him and the Duchess the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park as their country home.

  As they grew up, the two princesses were rapidly turning into media stars. Newspapers and magazines on both side of the Atlantic were keen to publish stories and photographs of them – and did so, often with the encouragement of the royal family themselves, who realized their publicity value. Extraordinarily, the third birthday of baby ‘Lilibet’, as Elizabeth was known in the family, was considered an important enough occasion to earn her a place on the cover of Time magazine on 21 April 1929 – even though her father, at that stage, was not even heir to the throne.

  In the meantime, Logue’s personal circumstances were also changing. In 1932 he and Myrtle left Bolton Gardens and moved to the lofty heights of Sydenham Hill, an area largely comprising Victorian villas with generous gardens, offering glorious views towards the city. Their house, ‘Beechgrove’, at 111 Sydenham Hill, was a sprawling if somewhat shabby three-storey detached property with twenty-five rooms, dating back to the 1860s. It was a few streets away from the Crystal Palace, the giant cast-iron and glass building built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, which had been erected in Hyde Park but moved to south-east London after the exhibition ended. When the Crystal Palace fell victim to a spectacular blaze in November 1936, drawing crowds a hundred thousand strong, Logue and Myrtle had a ringside seat.

  By this time, Laurie was a strapping young man in his late-twenties, almost six feet tall and with an athletic stature he had inherited from his mother. He had gone off to Nottingham to learn the catering business with Messrs Lyons. His brother Valentine was studying medicine at St George’s Hospital, which in those days was situated at Hyde Park Corner, while Antony, the youngest, was attending Dulwich College, a mile and a half or so away. The house needed several servants to run, but all the extra space came in useful because the family took in lodgers to boost their income.

  To Myrtle’s delight, it also had about five acres of garden, including avenues of rhododendrons and a stretch of woodland at the end which, if the rumours were true, had been used to bury the dead during the time of the Great Plague. There was a tennis court, too. As a reminder of home, she succeeded in growing Australian gum and wattle there, although inside the greenhouse rather than outside in the cool London climate.

  By this time, Logue’s relationship with the Duke was provoking mixed emotions. Like any teacher, he must have felt pride in what he had achieved – yet the more progress his royal pupil made, the less his own services were needed. He nevertheless maintained his contacts with the Duke, writing to him regularly and continuing to send him congratulations and the birthday book. Letters written to him by the Duke, coupled with drafts of those he wrote, were all faithfully glued into his scrapbook.

  On 8 March 1929, for example, Logue wrote to the Duke enquiring about how well his speeches were going. ‘It is the time when I send a little enquiry to all my patients just to know how they are performing and to ask if speech is quite satisfactory and giving no trouble,’ he wrote. ‘As I have always treated you just as any other patient I hope you will not mind my enquiry.’ Five days later, the Duke wrote back to say that despite the house being full of flu, ‘on the few occasions of public speaking all has gone well’.53

  That September, the Duke wrote to Logue from Glamis Castle, responding to his letter of congratulation on the birth of Princess Margaret Rose. ‘We had a long time to wait but everything went off successfully,’ he wrote. ‘My youngest daughter is going on very well and she has got a good pair of lungs. My
wife is wonderfully well, so I have had no worry on that side. My speech has been quite all right and the worry did not effect [sic] it at all.’ Then, that December there were the usual royal birthday thanks for ‘the little “booook”, which is perfect in every way and takes up no room in the pocket’.

  The Duke’s aides, too, were also taking a great interest in Logue’s work with him, as an illuminating handwritten letter from Patrick Hodgson, the Duke’s private secretary, sent on 8 May 1930, reveals:

  Dear Logue,

  If you can persuade the Duke to try to talk to people more when he goes to functions you will be doing a great service. He is alright at dinner but when people are brought up and introduced to him he has a way of shaking hands, but remaining absolutely mute. I think it is entirely due to shyness, but it makes a bad impression on strangers. I know he funks going up to people and then finding he can’t get his words out; but if you can make him believe that it is good for him to make the effort, it would be a real help, because he will have a lot of that sort of thing to do this summer.

  Logue’s actual meetings with the Duke were becoming rarer, though – despite his attempts, through his letters, to encourage his royal patient to find time for a consultation. Although they met in March 1932, it would be another two years before they would do so again.

  ‘You must be wondering what has become of me,’ wrote the Duke on 16 June 1932, from Rest Harrow, Sandwich, Kent, where he and the family had gone to relax for a week. ‘You remember me telling you I was feeling unwell and tired in March. I saw a doctor who told me my inside had dropped down and that the lower muscles were weak and so of course I was ill. Now with massage and a belt I am getting better, but it will take time to get perfectly well again. I used to complain to you about my breathing “too low down”, as I called it, as those muscles were weak, my diaphragm felt as if there was nothing to hold. Now the breathing is much easier with the aid of the belt, and I talk much better with very little effort.’

  The Duke ended his letter by promising to come and see Logue again soon, although he warned he was busy and it might be some time before it was possible. In fact, the visit did not happen that year or the next – largely because of the Duke’s growing confidence in his ability to speak in public, which meant such sessions were not necessary.

  That September the Duke reflected on the huge progress he had made since those early consultations with Logue. He continued to have qualms about speaking in public, doing so slowly and deliberately, ‘but nothing happens actually during a speech to make me worry any more’. The hesitations were also fewer: Logue advised him to stop pausing between individual words and to pause instead between groups of them.

  The Depression was beginning to bite: by the end of 1930 unemployment in Britain had more than doubled from 1 million to 2.5 million – equivalent to a fifth of the insured workforce. Even the royal family felt the need to be seen to make sacrifices (although largely symbolic ones). One of the King’s first acts after Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader, formed his National Government in August 1931, was to take a £50,000 reduction in the Civil List so long as the emergency lasted. For his part, the Duke gave up hunting and his stable. ‘It has come as a great shock to me that with the economy cuts I have had to make, my hunting should have been one of the things I must do without,’ he wrote to Ronald Tree, master of the Pytchley Hounds, in Northamptonshire, where he had been hunting for the previous two seasons while renting Naseby House.54 ‘And I must sell my horses too. This is the worst part of it all, and the parting with them will be terrible.’

  Those such as Logue who had to work for a living were suffering even more. As everyone tightened their belts, the services he provided would be among the first things on which people would cut back. Although Logue was careful not to be seen to be trading on his royal connection, it must have helped him keep his head above water at such a difficult time. The Duke, ever grateful for what Logue had done for him, made a point of recommending him to his friends.

  The coverage Logue received in the Sunday Express in December 1928 also appears to have been good for business, as he mentioned in a letter to the Duke the following February. ‘Since Xmas I have received over 100 letters from people all over the world asking me to take them as patients,’ he wrote. ‘Some of the letters are very humorous, but all are pathetic.’55 Despite this boost, by 1932, the economic downturn was taking its toll, as he wrote to the Duke that January. ‘It has been a very hard year for me, as so many people have lost their job.’

  Logue, meanwhile, was planning to set up a new clinic, which he told the Duke about in his annual birthday letter in December 1932. Bertie appeared suitably enthusiastic: ‘I have been so interested to hear of your new venture with the clinic,’ he wrote back on the 22nd. ‘I am sure you are right in striking out on your own and feel that so many people know about you now as being the only lasting cure for speech defects. I often tell people about you and give them your address when asked.’ The Duke ended his letter with the phrase, ‘hoping to see you soon’.

  The meeting didn’t happen and in May 1934 Logue wrote again, bemoaning the lack of contact, although at the same time praising the Duke on how much his voice was improving. A week later, the Duke responded. ‘I am sorry I have not seen you for so long (2 years as you say), but I have very seldom felt that I have needed the help that you can give me,’ he wrote. ‘This I know is what you want me to feel but at the same time it feels ungrateful of me not to have been to see you.’ He went on: ‘My belt has done wonders to me in the last two years, and now at last I have had it cut down to a level below the diaphragm, which enables me to breathe without the former support.’56

  Although busy, the Duke promised to come and see him soon. ‘Have you still got your room in Harley Street as I could still run up those stairs, I think,’ he wrote.

  They did finally get together in 1934 – but again it was a one-off meeting.

  Logue, meanwhile, was continuing to emerge from the shadows. Following Darbyshire’s book, an article appeared about him in the News Chronicle on 4 December 1930, in its column ‘The Diary of a Man about Town’. Its pseudonymous author, who signed himself Quex, was impressed by the youthfulness of the man who had just celebrated his fifty-third birthday. ‘His blue eyes have the flash of youth,’ he wrote. ‘His hair is crisp and upstanding. He has the schoolboy’s complexion, hardly a line on his face, and with the glow that is more English than Australian.’

  ‘Well,’ Logue replied. ‘I admit I can still run a mile, though I’m not keen on doing it; and you know you can keep young in spirit if you make friends and keep them.’

  Reflecting on his career, he noted: ‘What really is extraordinary is the number of people who never really hear their own voices. I have tried half a dozen people on the gramophone. They talk into the receiver, and when the voices are reproduced, it is surprising how many are unable to pick out the particular record they have themselves made. No doubt with the average person, the visual memory is more strongly developed than the aural.’

  Curiously, Logue claimed his powers of observation were such that, even if he was out of earshot, he could look at a group of people and pick out which one of them was suffering from a speech defect – ‘Providing they act in a normal way, do not sit still and avoid making their normal gestures.’

  Logue outlined his theories in more detail in an article in the Daily Express on 22 March 1932. Headlined ‘Your Voice May be Your Fortune’, it was one of a series of ‘Health and Home Talks’. No mention was made of his professional relationship with the Duke, but it is fair to assume readers would have been aware of it. ‘The greatest fault of modern speech is the rate at which it is used,’ Logue wrote.

  There is a mistaken idea that ‘hustle’ implies achievement, whereas it really means a wrong use of energy and is an enemy of beauty.

  The English voice is one of the finest in the world but its effect is often spoiled by wrong production. Only a minimum of people realise what an a
sset it may be. Was it not Gladstone who said, ‘Time and money spent in improving the voice pay a larger interest than any other investment’. This is a strong statement, but I agree with it.

  Few people know their own voices because it is difficult to ‘hear’ oneself. Therefore I advise all who can manage it to hear their own voices reproduced. People are usually surprised when they do this, so seldom do they know how they sound. Speech defects are among the evils of civilisation; they are almost unknown among native races. Nerves account for much of the trouble. The voice is a sure indication, not only of personality, but of physical condition. I have studied voices all my life and can tell a person’s physical peculiarities by hearing their speech, even if I am in another room.

  Every patient requires slightly different handling and a study of each individual’s psychology is necessary. Conditions that will give one man sufficient confidence to overcome a defect will actually set up a similar defect in another.

  I once had two brothers as patients. One spoke easily when with his family but could not speak to strangers. The other was fluent with strangers but the reverse with friends or relations. Both were cured but by different methods, although the defects treated were almost identical. Men have almost the monopoly of speech defects. The proportions are one woman to a hundred men.

  When a woman has a defect it is usually a bad one, but, she nearly always has success if she decides to overcome it. I think this is due to her power of concentration, which, I always hold, is greater than that of a man.

  Stammering is one of the commonest speech defects, and one which can nearly always be cured. In fact, except in rare cases of physical malformation, most speech defects can be overcome provided the will is present in the patient. Without that will to get better, treatment is hopeless. I have had patients to whom I have had to say: ‘I can do nothing for you,’ [but] given the co-operation of the patient, even extreme cases of aphonia (complete loss of voice) are treatable.