King’s Speech, The Read online

  Then lagoo, the great boaster,

  He the marvellous story-teller,

  He the traveller and the talker,

  He the friend of old Nokomis,

  Made a bow for Hiawatha;

  Logue went on reading for an hour, entranced by the words. Here was something that really mattered: rhythm – and he had found the door that led him into it.

  Even as a young boy, he had been more interested in voices than faces; as the years passed, his interest and fascination in voices grew. In those days, far more emphasis was put on elocution than today: every year in Adelaide Town Hall, four boys who were the best speakers would recite and compete for the elocution prize. Logue, of course, was among the winners.

  He left school at sixteen and went to study with Edward Reeves, a Salford-born teacher of elocution who had emigrated with his family to New Zealand as a child before moving to Adelaide in 1878. Reeves taught elocution to his pupils by day and gave ‘recitals’ to packed audiences in the Victoria Hall or other venues by night. Dickens was one of his specialities. Such recitals were an extraordinary feat not just of diction but of memory: a review in the Register of 22 December 1894 described his performance of A Christmas Carol in glowing terms: ‘For two hours and a quarter, Mr Reeves, without the aid of note, related the fascinating story,’ it reported. ‘Rounds of applause frequently interrupted the reciter, and as he concluded the carol with Tiny Tim’s “God Bless us every one”, he was accorded an ovation which testified in a most unmistakable manner to the hearty appreciation of the house.’

  In an era before television, radio or the cinema, such ‘recitals’ were a popular form of entertainment. Their popularity also appears to have reflected a particular interest in speech and elocution throughout the English-speaking world. What could be called the elocution movement had begun to emerge in England in the late eighteenth century as part of a growing emphasis on the importance of public speaking. People were becoming more literate and society gradually more democratic – all of which led to greater attention being paid to the quality of public speakers, whether politicians, lawyers or, indeed, clergymen. The movement took off particularly in America: both Yale and Harvard instituted separate instruction in elocution in the 1830s, and by the second half of the century it was a required subject in many colleges throughout the United States. In schools, particular emphasis was put on reading aloud, which meant special attention was paid to articulation, enunciation and pronunciation. All this went hand in hand with an interest in oratory and rhetoric.

  In Australia, the growth of the elocution movement was also informed by a growing divergence between their English and the version of the language spoken back in Britain. For some, the distinctiveness of the Australian accent was a badge of national pride, especially after the six colonies were grouped together into a federation on 1 January 1901, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. For many commentators, though, it was little more than a sign of laziness. ‘The habit of talking with the mouth half open all the time is another manifestation of the national “tired feeling”,’ complained one writer in the Bulletin, the Australian weekly, at the turn of the last century.4 ‘Many of the more typical bumpkins never shut their mouths. This is often a symptom of post-nasal adenoids and hypertrophy of the tonsils; the characteristic Australian disease.’

  The South Australian accent, with which Logue grew up, came in for particular criticism as a combination ‘polyhybrid of American, Irish brogue, cockney, county, and broken English’. One feature of this was ‘tongue-laziness’, and an anxiety to ‘communicate as much as possible by means of the fewest and easiest sounds’. This laziness was manifest in the clipping of sentences and in the slurring of sounds.

  In 1902, aged twenty-two, Logue became Reeves’s secretary and assistant teacher, while also studying at the Elder Conservatorium of Music which had been established in 1898 ‘for the purpose of providing a complete system of instruction in the Art and Science of Music’, thanks to a bequest from the wealthy Scottish-born philanthropist Sir Thomas Elder.

  Like his teacher, Logue started giving recitals; he also became involved in amateur dramatics. An event on the evening of Wednesday 19 March 1902 at the YWCA in Adelaide allowed him to show off his prowess in both. ‘The hall was filled, and the audience was very appreciative,’ reported the local newspaper, the Advertiser the next day. ‘Mr. Logue looks young, but he possesses a clear, powerful voice and a graceful stage presence. He evidenced in his selections considerable dramatic talent – scarcely mature at present, however – and an artistic appreciation of characters he impersonated and of stories he was telling.’ The newspaper’s critic said Logue had been successful in all the poems and excerpts he had tried, although he was at his best in W. E. Aytoun’s ‘Edinburgh After Flodden’.

  Logue’s pride at such reviews was tempered by tragedy: on 17 November that year his father died after a long and painful battle with cirrhosis of the liver at the age of just forty-seven. The following day an obituary of George Logue was published in the Advertiser and his funeral was attended by a large number of mourners.

  Now twenty-three, Logue was feeling confident enough to set up on his own in Adelaide as an elocution teacher. ‘Lionel Logue begs to announce that he has commenced the practice of his profession, and will be in attendance at his rooms, No. 43, Grenfell Buildings, Grenfell Street, on and after April 27. Prospectus on Application,’ read a notice published three days earlier in the Advertiser. At the same time he was continuing his recitals and even set up the Lionel Logue Dramatic and Comedy Company.

  On 11 August 1904 the Advertiser published a particularly effusive review of an ‘elocutionary recital’ that Logue had given at the Lyric Club the evening before, under the headline, ‘Next to being born an Englishman, I would be what I am – a “common colonial”.’ Logue, the reviewer noted, was the ‘happy possessor of a singularly musical voice, a refined intonation, and a graceful mastery of gesture, in which there is no suspicion of redundancy’. It concluded: ‘Mr. Logue has nothing to fear from his competitors, and his recital was characterised by dramatic expression, purity of enunciation, and a keen appreciation of humour which won him the enthusiastic approval of the audience.’

  Then came one of the first of several upheavals in Logue’s life. Despite his growing reputation in Adelaide, he decided to up sticks and move more than 2,000 kilometres westwards to work with an electrical engineering firm involved in installing the first electricity supply at the gold mines in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. The town had grown fast since the discovery of rich alluvial gold deposits in the early 1890s had set off a gold rush. By 1903 Kalgoorlie boasted a population of 30,000, along with ninety-three hotels and eight breweries. The day of the individual prospector was over, however, and large-scale deep underground mining had begun to predominate.

  Logue did not stay long, but after completing his contract he had saved up enough money to relax for a few months while he planned the next stage in his life. Not surprisingly, he decided to continue on westwards to the more civilized surroundings of Perth, the state capital. Western Australia had been traditionally regarded as remote and unimportant by those in the east, but that had been changed by the discovery of gold in Kalgoorlie, and Western Australia became a force to be reckoned with especially in the Federation debates prior to 1901.

  Installed in Perth, Logue set up another elocution school and also founded the city’s public speaking club in 1908. The previous year he had met Myrtle Gruenert, a clerk, who at twenty-two was five years his junior, and who shared his passion for amateur dramatics. An imposing young woman several inches taller than Lionel, she was of German stock: her grandfather, Oskar Gruenert, had come from Saxony in eastern Germany. Her father, Francis, an accountant, was proud of his Germanic roots and was secretary of the Verein Germania club in Western Australia. Francis had been unwell for some time and in August 1905 he had died suddenly aged just forty-eight, leaving behind his wife, Myrtle, forty-seven, Myrtle, then twen
ty, and her brother, Rupert.

  Lionel and Myrtle were married on 20 March 1907 at St George’s Cathedral by the Dean of Perth; the event was apparently sufficiently important to warrant a write-up in the next day’s edition of the West Australian. The bride, as the newspaper reported, was beautiful in a wedding dress of white chiffon glacé silk. A white tulle veil, embroidered at the corners with floral sprays in white silk, was arranged coronetwise on her hair. After the ceremony, there was a reception at the Alexandra Tea Rooms in Hay Street, where Myrtle’s mother, dressed in a frock of deep blue chiffon voile, received the guests. The pair spent their honeymoon in Margaret River south of Perth, visiting the caves which had a few years earlier become a major tourist attraction.

  The newlyweds went to live at 9, Emerald Hill Terrace. When their first child, Laurie Paris Logue, was born on 7 October 1908, they moved to Collin Street. Myrtle, with whom Logue was to spend the next four decades, was a formidable and energetic character. ‘My wife is a most athletic woman,’ he told a newspaper interviewer several years later. ‘She fences, boxes, swims, and golfs, is a good actress and a fine wife.’ She was, he once declared, his ‘spur to greater things’.

  It appears to have been Myrtle’s idea, two years later, that the two of them should set off for six months on an ambitious round-the-world tour, eastwards through Australia, on across the Pacific to Canada and the United States and then, after crossing America, back home via Britain and Europe. The trip was to be paid for partly from money lent them by Lionel’s uncle, Paris Nesbit, a colourful lawyer turned politician. Little Laurie, whose second birthday they had only just celebrated, was to be left behind in the care of Myrtle’s mother, Myra.

  The inspiration was, in part, a simple desire to see the world. But Logue was also keen to widen his professional experience. By now he had become a well-known figure in Perth through his recitals and the many plays he had directed or appeared in. He was also building up his private practice, working with politicians and other prominent local people to improve their voice production – even though, when asked by a reporter to name some of his patients, he was the soul of discretion: ‘Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory is an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study,’ he said, by way of explanation.

  America, in particular, was home to many of the leading names in the field of elocution and oratory from whom Logue was keen to learn. Both he and Myrtle also apparently thought that if they liked what they saw on their travels they might settle abroad, sending for their son and Myrtle’s mother to join them. The many long letters that Myrtle (and, to a lesser extent, Logue) wrote home were to provide a vivid picture of their voyage.

  They set off from home on Christmas Day, 1910, sailing eastwards around Australia, via Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney to Brisbane, with stops of several days in each. Sydney Harbour, according to Myrtle, was ‘wonderful – superb – no language can fit it’. She was less impressed by Brisbane, which she found ‘a fearful place – behind the times, unhealthy looking, and hot as Hades’. During the various stops, they had ample opportunity to visit friends and relatives; Lionel – or ‘Liney’ as Myrtle called him in her letters – impressed the other passengers with his skills at cricket, golf and hockey, and, ever the raconteur, drew on his prowess at public speaking to entertain the passengers and crew with his stories.

  Not surprisingly, they were soon missing little Laurie and justifying to themselves the decision to leave him behind. ‘I don’t let myself think too much of my little son or else I should weep,’ Myrtle wrote in one of her first letters to her mother. ‘He was so sweet as I left, “Don’t cry mummy” – “Don’t let him forget me mother dear” . . . The six months will soon pass and we will come back, with wonderful experience and a new outlook on life broadened wonderfully.’

  The next leg of their journey across the Pacific proved more traumatic; Logue spent the first eight days of their voyage from Brisbane sick in his bunk and not touching any food at all. It was not just the waves: the drinking water they had taken on in Brisbane was bad and many of the passengers were sick. Logue was convinced he had lead poisoning. ‘He is the worst sailor possible, poor old dear – I don’t know what would happen to him if he were alone,’ wrote Myrtle. ‘He has fallen away to a shadow.’

  Things looked up after they reached Vancouver and dry land on 7 February. From there they continued by train through Minneapolis and St Paul to Chicago, where they took a room in the YMCA overlooking Lake Michigan for five dollars a week. The city, wrote Myrtle, was ‘supposed to be one of the wickedest in the world’, but contrary to what they had expected, they loved it. They intended to stay only a week or two, but in the end remained for over a month.

  Life in a big American city was a fascinating cultural experience. Myrtle was especially impressed by the drugstores, where you could buy anything from patent medicines to cigars, by the cafes and by the sheer number of automobiles. However, the lack of manners of the local women, who ‘stare, put their elbows on the table, butter their bread in the air with their elbows on the table, pick their chicken bones and use toothpicks at every conceivable opportunity’, was not appreciated.

  The Logues were the toast of the town. Thanks to friends of friends, some of whom they had met on the ship, they were invited to dinners at smart homes and in fancy restaurants and managed to attend some prestigious functions. They also took in a number of plays and shows. Lionel was witty and good company; as Australians, he and Myrtle must also have been something of a novelty for the locals. It was not all play, though. By day they went to Northwestern University, where they attended classes and lectures given by Robert Cumnock, a professor of elocution who had founded the university’s School of Oratory, and whom Myrtle pronounced ‘simply charming’. Logue also gave recitations and talks to students about life in Australia.

  Then it was on via Niagara Falls to New York City, which amazed them with its sheer size. ‘I got in an underground railway yesterday and rode nearly an hour, and when I got out, I was still in New York,’ Myrtle wrote in amazement.5 They were also struck by the sheer number of foreigners in the city, many of whom struggled to speak even the most basic English. Broadway, with its miles of ‘electric light advertising’, dazzled them with its brilliance, and Logue took his wife to her first grand opera. They climbed the Statue of Liberty and enjoyed the amusements of Coney Island. Here, too, the various introductions they had brought from home ensured they were quickly introduced into local society – and treated to some very expensive evenings out on the town. These provided a stark contrast to the harshness of New York life: ‘New York is indeed a city of atrocities and lawlessness,’ Myrtle wrote to her mother. ‘The papers read like Penny dreadfuls, we are never without a revolver, a beauty which Lionel bought on arrival.’

  As he had in Chicago, Logue sought out experts in his field, among them Grenville Kleiser, a Canadian-born elocutionist, who wrote a number of inspirational books and self-improvement guides on oratory and elocution. Logue also addressed the local public speaking club and gave talks at the YMCA. During a side trip to Boston, he met Leland Todd Powers, a leading elocutionist who had established the School of the Spoken Word, giving an address to students there and also at the prestigious Emerson School of Oratory.

  Intriguingly, during his time on the East Coast Logue also met the future President Woodrow Wilson, who was then head of Princeton University. ‘An American of the finest type,’ Logue declared in an interview with the Perth Sunday Times about his journey when he got back.6 ‘He has keen piercing eyes that seem to look you through and through. A man of great intellect and character, but thoroughly genial and unassuming. Many people think he will be the next President of the United States.’ An avid collector of autographs, he treasured a letter written by Wilson in his neat and classical scholarly writing.

  It was time to move on. On 3 May Lionel and Myrtle boarded the Teutonic, of the White Star line – the company that the
following year was to launch the ill-fated Titanic – bound for London. Their time in America had been one long adventure. ‘We have had a lovely time in America and it is a delightful place to live – but a very bad place to bring up children,’ Logue wrote to his mother-in-law. ‘The Americans are a wonderful and strange people – it is a country of graft, dishonesty and prostitutes . . . And yet it is one of the most fascinating countries in the world.’

  The Logues docked in Liverpool on 11 May and took the four-hour train journey down to London. The English countryside, proclaimed Myrtle in a letter to her mother, was a ‘wonderland, picturesque to an extreme, green fields all divided off into lots of these beautiful hawthorn hedges, and the canals with the barges being towed along by an old horse and man on the tow path’. But her first impressions of the capital of the Empire (after dinner and a walk around Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square) were not especially positive; it looked ‘provincial’ compared with New York.

  London quickly grew on them, however, and Myrtle was soon enthusing about what they saw. They did the obvious sights such as the British Museum, the Tower of London, Madame Tussaud’s and Hampton Court and, of course, Buckingham Palace – to which Logue, in future years, was to become such a frequent visitor. Myrtle was not impressed by its exterior: ‘It’s a dirty, ugly grey old place, hideous beyond description, and in front of the gates is the beautiful new memorial to Victoria unveiled a month ago,’ she wrote. ‘This beautiful piece of work throws into relief the bare monstrosity of Buckingham Palace.’

  They made plenty of visits to theatres where they saw, among others, the great Charles Hawtrey, whom they loved, and the Australian-born Marie Lohr, whom they did not: like all English girls, she was too thin and had reached fame far too quickly for her own good, thought Myrtle. She and Logue also ate out a lot, although they were disappointed by the fact that all the restaurants in London closed much earlier than in New York.