King’s Speech, The Read online

  They travelled to Oxford, too, where friends of friends invited them for Eights Week, the annual competition in which the colleges’ rowers battle it out on the river. They spent the mornings visiting the various colleges and were delighted by the sight of the hundreds of gaily decorated punts from which the men in white flannels and girls in pretty dresses watched the rowers. A friend also took them punting, and they lay back in the cushions as he propelled them along the river under low branches, pointing out all the sights. They left Oxford with the greatest reluctance, after what Logue described in a letter to his mother-in-law as ‘six days in paradise’.

  One of the highpoints of their visit to Britain was on 22 June when they were among the crowds who turned out on the streets of London for the coronation of King George V, the ‘sailor king’ who had succeeded his father, Edward VII, in May the previous year. London was a seething mass of humanity and its streets decorated with so much bunting and so many electric lights that it looked to Myrtle like fairyland. People had begun staking out the best vantage points the evening before, sleeping on the pavement, and everyone had to be in their place by six o’clock the following morning. A friend of Logue’s named Kaufmann, whom he had met on the Teutonic, managed to get him a reporter’s pass allowing access right up to the doors of Westminster Abbey.

  Armed with the pass, Logue and Kaufmann strolled down at 9.30 and were permitted by the police to pass through to a position just a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace from which they enjoyed a magnificent view of the King and Queen in their golden carriage. ‘It was a very enthusiastic crowd, but the English are all afraid to make a noise,’ he wrote to his mother-in-law.

  The next day was the royal progress into London proper, and Logue and Myrtle had seats in the Admiralty stand, just outside the new Admiralty Arch. Although they had to wait from 7.15 a.m. until 1.30, the time flew by and they ‘behaved like kids when the King and Queen came by in their beautiful state carriage with the eight famous cream horses, each with its postillion and leader’. The Logues also found time to visit Edith Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, and a distant cousin of theirs, at her beautiful home in the Kent countryside. It was a trip that Myrtle in particular found enchanting.

  They had originally intended to travel on to Europe but now there was a problem: Logue had invested a large chunk of savings in shares in the Bullfinch Golden Valley Syndicate, which had created huge excitement on the Perth Stock Exchange the previous December after claiming to have struck gold in a new mine near Kalgoorlie. The company’s predictions proved hopelessly exaggerated, however, and the share price collapsed a few months later, taking most of the couple’s savings with it. They cabled Uncle Paris to send some more money, but appreciated the need to economize and went instead to stay with relatives in Birmingham for a few days.

  On 6 July they set off for home from Liverpool aboard the White Star Line’s SS Suevic, a liner designed especially for the Australian run, and later that month the couple arrived back without mishap at King George Sound, Albany, Western Australia. ‘Had enough of travelling for a time?’ Logue was asked in the same Perth Sunday Times interview about his travels in which he had mentioned his meeting with Woodrow Wilson. ‘That I have,’ he replied. ‘Australia is the finest country of the world.’

  Back home, Logue was able to draw on his experiences in Britain. When a special coronation programme called Royal England was staged in the New Theatre Royal in Perth that August, Logue was chosen to provide the commentary to accompany a show of ‘animated pictures specially cinematographed by C. Spencer from privileged positions along the route’.

  Logue could scarcely have imagined that one day he would be consulted by the King’s son on his speech defects, yet this (and other such performances) were turning him into a notable figure on Perth’s social scene. In December 1911 his recently established school of acting, which included many well-known local amateurs, gave their first performance: on the evening of Saturday the 16th they appeared in his production of One Summer’s Day, a comedy by the English playwright Henry Esmond. Two days later an entirely different cast appeared in a production of Our Boys, the proceeds of which were to go to a local nursing charity.

  Myrtle, meanwhile, was also beginning to make an impact: in April 1912 the West Australian reported she was opening a ‘school of physical culture (Swedish) and fencing for women and girls in the Wesley gymnasium’, a lofty and well-ventilated hall at the back of Queen’s Hall. Myrtle, the article claimed, had ‘recently returned from abroad, where she had the advantage of studying the most up-to-date methods in force both in England and America’.

  The following month, Logue’s troupe was back at His Majesty’s Theatre with a production for charity of Hubert Davies’s drawing room comedy, Mrs Gorringe’s Necklace. The beneficiary this time was the Parkerville Waifs’ Home. ‘Mr. Logue and his pupils are heartily to be congratulated,’ declared the West Australian. ‘There was nothing mechanical about it, no dependence placed upon mere recitative, and the whole thing was a frank and genial appeal to ordinary human nature.’ Myrtle, too, joined him on stage: her performance as Mrs Jardine was a ‘very artistic bit of work in voice, act, and general manner’, the newspaper found.7

  Logue’s own elocutionary recitals, meanwhile, were drawing large and enthusiastic audiences. ‘The announcement of a recital by Mr Lionel Logue was sufficient to comfortably fill St George’s Hall last night, and those who attended were amply repaid for venturing out on a showery evening,’ read one review in August 1914 which described him as ‘a master of the subtle art of elocution in all its branches’.

  Logue appears to have gone down particularly well with women in the audience – as was noticed by a local newspaper reporter when Logue went back to Kalgoorlie to serve as ‘elocutionary adjudicator’ at a Welsh-style Eisteddfod, which, according to the account, sounded somewhat reminiscent of a modern-day television talent show. ‘Mr Lionel Logue,’ the reporter noted, ‘is a very good-looking young man and a number of goldfield girls were not slow to appreciate it. Two of them followed up the competitions every evening and spent most of the time gazing soulfully in the direction of the judge’s cabinet. It might be interesting for those young ladies to know that Mr Logue has a charming wife and two beautiful children.’8

  Logue was also enjoying plaudits for his work with his elocution students. In September 1913, at a dinner in the Rose Tea Rooms in Perth’s Hay Street (organized by the Public Speaking Club, which Logue had founded five years earlier) several of his pupils ‘testified to their appreciation of that gentleman’s abilities and to the success of his tuition,’ according to one contemporary account. To the amusement of the twenty or so present, one speaker wondered whether Logue might turn his considerable talents to making the large number of politicians and others who posed as public speakers stop talking nonsense and switch to common sense instead. Logue replied in suitably humorous tone, describing the proper use of the mother tongue as ‘the first evidence of civilization and refinement’.

  However comfortable their life in Perth, Lionel and Myrtle’s eyes had been opened by their world tour and they seem to have been slowly coming around to the idea of trying to make a new life abroad, perhaps in London. Any immediate prospect of a move had been dashed by the birth of their second son, Valentine Darte, on 1 November 1913. Then on 28 June 1914 the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in faraway Sarajevo forced them to put their plans on hold indefinitely.

  For Australia, as for the mother country, the First World War was to prove hugely costly in terms of death and casualties. Out of a population of fewer than five million, 416,809 men enlisted, of whom more than 60,000 were killed and 156,000 wounded, gassed or taken prisoner.

  As in Britain, the outbreak of war was greeted with enthusiasm – and although proposals to introduce conscription were twice rejected in a plebiscite, a large number of young Australian men volunteered to fight. Most of those accepted in August 1914 were sent first not to
Europe but to Egypt, to meet the threat posed by the Ottoman Empire to British interests in the Middle East and the Suez Canal. The first major campaign in which the joint Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) force was involved was at Gallipoli.

  The Australians landed at what became known as ANZAC Cove on 25 April 1915, establishing a tenuous foothold on the steep slopes above the beach. An Allied attack followed by a Turkish counterattack both ended in failure, and the conflict soon settled down into a stalemate that lasted for the remainder of the year. According to figures compiled by the Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs, a total of 8,709 Australians were killed and 19,441 wounded. Gallipoli had a huge psychological effect on the country, denting Australians’ confidence in the superiority of the British Empire. The Anzacs quickly acquired hero status – and their heroism was recognized in Anzac Day, which has been commemorated since on 25 April.

  Logue was already aged thirty-four and had two sons, but nevertheless volunteered for military service. He was rejected on medical grounds: after he left school, he had fallen heavily while playing football and smashed his knee, which ended any serious sporting activities – or chance of serving in the army. ‘I joined a rifle club, but was obliged to give it up as I couldn’t march,’ he said in a newspaper interview which appeared during the war years. ‘I am afraid as a soldier I should lay up for a few weeks after the first long march, and would only be an unnecessary expense to my country.’

  Although spared the horrors of Gallipoli, Logue nevertheless set out to do his bit for the war effort. He put his energies into organizing recitals, concerts and various amateur dramatic performances in Perth in aid of the Red Cross Fund, French Comfort Fund, the Belgian Relief Fund and other charities. The programmes were often a curious mixture of the deadly serious and the comic. During one performance by the Fremantle Quartette Party in July 1915, Logue began with what the reviewer described as a ‘graphically descriptive recital of “The Hell Gates of Soissons”, which deals dramatically with the glorious martyrdom of twelve men of the Royal Engineers in checking the German advance to Paris in September last’. Later he had his audience roaring with laughter at several ‘delightfully humorous trifles’. The reviews, as on this occasion, were invariably glowing and the houses full.

  Logue had so far concentrated on elocution and drama, but he attempted to apply some of the knowledge of the voice that it had given him to help servicemen suffering speech disorders as a result of shell shock and gas attacks. He scored success with some – including those who had been told by hospitals that there was nothing that could be done for them. Logue’s achievements were documented in some detail in an article that appeared in the West Australian in July 1919, under the dramatic headline ‘The Dumb Speak’.

  His first success appears to have been with Jack O’Dwyer, a former soldier from West Leederville, in the Perth suburbs. Earlier that year, Logue had been sitting on a train next to a soldier and watched, intrigued, as he leant forward to speak to two companions in a whisper. ‘Mr Logue thought the matter over, and just before he got to Fremantle he gave the soldier his card and asked him to call on him,’ the newspaper reported. O’Dwyer, it emerged, had been gassed at Ypres in August 1917 but had been told in London that he would never speak again. At Tidworth hospital on Salisbury Plain suggestive and hypnotic treatment was tried but failed. And so, on 10 March 1919, the unfortunate man had gone to see Logue.

  Logue was convinced he could help. So far as he could tell, the gas had affected the throat, the roof of the mouth and the tonsils, but not the vocal cords – in which case there was hope. At this stage, though, it was only a theory. He had to put it into practice. After a week, Logue managed to get a vibration in O’Dwyer’s vocal cords and his patient was able to produce a clear and distinct ‘ah’. Logue continued, trying to show him how to form sounds, much in the same way as a parent would teach a child how to speak for the first time. Less than two months later, O’Dwyer was discharged, quite cured.

  Logue described the treatment (which he made clear to the newspaper that he’d provided without charge) as ‘patient tuition in voice production combined with fostering the patient’s confidence in the result’ – the same mixture of the physical and psychological that was to prove a feature of his future work with the King. As such, it was in sharp contrast to rather more brutal methods, including electric shock therapy that had been tried on patients in Britain – apparently to no avail.

  Encouraged by his treatment of O’Dwyer, Logue went on to repeat his success with five other former soldiers – among them a G. P. Till, who had been gassed while fighting with Australian forces at Villers-Bretonneux on the Somme. When he came to see Logue on 23 April that year, Till’s vocal cords weren’t vibrating and what voice he could muster had a range of just two feet. Logue discharged him on 17 May after he appeared to have made a full recovery. ‘In fact, I could not stop talking for about three weeks,’ Till told the newspaper. ‘My friends said to me, “Are you never going to stop talking?” and I replied, “I’ve got a lot of lost time to make up.”’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Passage to England

  The Hobsons Bay, which carried the Logue family to England

  On 19 January 1924 Lionel and Myrtle set off for England aboard the Hobsons Bay, a twin-masted single-funnel ship of the Commonwealth and Dominion Line. They travelled third class. With them were their three children, Laurie, now aged fifteen, Valentine, ten and a third son, Antony Lionel (usually known in the family as Boy), born on 10 November 1920. The 13,837-ton ship, which had 680 passengers and 160 crew, had made its maiden voyage from London to Brisbane less than three years earlier. After forty-one days at sea, they steamed into the port of Southampton on 29 February.

  It was only by chance – and another of the spontaneous decisions that shaped his life – that Logue, by then employed as an instructor in elocution at the Perth Technical School, had found himself aboard the Hobsons Bay. He and a doctor friend had planned to take their families away for a holiday together. The Logue family’s bags were packed and their car ready to go when the telephone rang: it was the doctor.

  ‘Sorry, but I cannot go with you,’ he said, according to an account later published by John Gordon, a journalist and friend of Logue’s.9 ‘A friend has fallen ill. I have to stay with him.’

  ‘Well, that holiday is over,’ Logue told his wife.

  ‘But you need a holiday,’ she replied. ‘Why don’t you go out East by yourself?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I went East last year.’

  ‘Then why not Colombo?’

  ‘Well,’ Logue replied, hesitantly. ‘If I went to Colombo I would probably want to go to England.’

  ‘England? Why not!’ exclaimed Myrtle.

  Rapidly warming to the idea, Myrtle had her husband call a friend who was head of a shipping agency. When Logue asked about the possibility of getting two cabins on a ship to Britain, his friend laughed.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ the friend replied. ‘This is Wembley year. There isn’t a cabin free in any ship, and not likely to be.’

  The friend did not need to explain what he meant by Wembley. That April, George V and the Prince of Wales were due to open the British Empire Exhibition, one of the greatest shows on earth, in Wembley in north-west London. The exhibition was the largest of its sort ever staged and intended to showcase an empire at its height that was now home to 458 million people (a quarter of the world’s population) and covered a quarter of the total land area of the world. The exhibition’s declared aim was ‘to stimulate trade, strengthen bonds that bind Mother Country to her Sister States and Daughters, to bring into closer contact the one with each other, to enable all who owe allegiance to the British flag to meet on common ground and learn to know each other’.

  Three giant buildings – Palaces of Industry, Engineering and Arts – were constructed; so, too, was the Empire Stadium, with its distinctive twin towers, which as Wembley Stadium became the heart of English f
ootball until it was demolished in 2002. Some twenty-seven million people in total visited – many of them from the far corners of the Empire, including Australia.

  With all these people heading for Britain, the Logues’ prospects of realizing their dream seemed slim, but half an hour later the phone rang again: it was the shipping agent, who seemed excited.

  ‘You are the luckiest man,’ he told Logue. ‘Two cabin bookings have just been cancelled. You can have them. The ship sails in ten days.’

  ‘I’ll tell you in half an hour,’ Logue replied.

  ‘It’s this minute or never.’

  Myrtle nodded and Logue didn’t hesitate. ‘Right, we take them,’ he said.

  The journey, which lasted almost six weeks, gave them plenty of time to get to know the passengers and crew. They made a particular friend of the master, a Scotsman named O. J. Kydd, who eight years later was to invite Logue to join him on his holiday at his home near Aberdeen, and showed him Holyrood Castle, Glencoe, the Pass of Killiecrankie and dozens of other places that he had read about as a boy.

  It is not clear if Logue and Myrtle were planning to emigrate or merely to have another look at the country they had left a decade earlier. In any case, there were few ties to keep them in Australia. Both their fathers had long since died; in 1921 Lionel’s mother, Lavinia, also passed away; Myrtle’s mother, Myra, followed in 1923.

  The Britain in which the family landed was a country in turmoil. The First World War had caused an enormous upheaval and putting the country back onto a peacetime footing proved a huge challenge, too. David Lloyd George vowed to turn Britain into a Land Fit for Heroes, but jobs had to be found for the returning soldiers, while the women who had taken their places in the factories had to be coaxed into returning to the home. Optimism quickly faded as the immediate postwar boom turned to bust in 1921, public spending was slashed and the jobless total surged. The war had plunged Britain deeply into debt.