The King's War Read online

  THE KING’S WAR

  The Friendship of George VI and Lionel Logue

  During World War II

  MARK LOGUE

  AND PETER CONRADI

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  To my wife Ruth, who contributed substantially to this book.

  To my children Amy, Hannah and Laurie,

  even though they still haven’t read The King’s Speech.

  To my mother-in-law Beryl, for her support

  (especially over the past year).

  To all my close friends for their kindness and love.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue: The King’s Funeral

  Chapter One: The First Wartime Speech

  Chapter Two: Sitzkrieg

  Chapter Three: The Big Freeze

  Chapter Four: The ‘stab in the back’

  Chapter Five: Dunkirk

  Chapter Six :The Blitz

  Chapter Seven: No Longer Alone

  Chapter Eight: Letter to Rupert

  Chapter Nine: Cutting the Gordian Knot

  Chapter Ten: The March on Rome

  Chapter Eleven: D-Day

  Chapter Twelve: Victory

  Chapter Thirteen: Voices from the Other Side

  Chapter Fourteen: The Last Words

  Epilogue

  Illustrations Insert

  Notes

  Index

  Foreword

  The King’s Speech was a huge critical and commercial success when it was released at the end of 2010, picking up seven BAFTAs and four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Tom Hooper, Best Actor for Colin Firth for his memorable portrayal of George VI, and Best Screenplay for David Seidler. It must have been watched by at least forty million people at the cinema alone. In the years since, millions more have viewed it on DVD, Netflix, Amazon and on television.

  It is not difficult to understand the film’s appeal: the story of the future King’s battle with his life-long stammer and the help he received from Lionel Logue, his irreverent Australian speech therapist, clearly struck a chord with audiences. Cinema-goers revelled in its Englishness, were touched by Firth’s performance as the gentle, vulnerable monarch and applauded Geoffrey Rush’s portrayal of Logue with his determination to cut through protocol to help his royal patient. It helped that the story was true: George VI did have a stammer and, yes, he was helped by an Australian commoner who used highly unconventional methods.

  For me the film meant something much more: Lionel Logue was my grandfather, but he died in 1953, twelve years before I was born, so he was always something of a mystery. His story was told to me when I was a child, but I never paid too much attention to what seemed like ancient history – even though, growing up, I became fascinated by the medals, signed royal photographs and mementoes scattered around the house.

  In fact, it wasn’t until my own father, Antony – the third of Lionel’s three sons – died in 2001 that I began to appreciate the role that my grandfather had played in the history of the royal family. It fell to me to organize his personal papers, which had passed first to his eldest son, Valentine, an eminent brain surgeon, and then, on Valentine’s death in 2000, to my father, who had locked them away in a tall grey filing cabinet in his study.

  Coming face to face with my grandfather for the first time, on 31 August 2010, at a private screening of the film at the Odeon in Panton Street, London, was an extraordinary experience. It was a year earlier, when Seidler’s script was already written and the shooting of The King’s Speech was about to begin at Elstree Studios and on location around London, that the film-makers got in touch with me. Although I, too, live in London, the connection came via an academic website published by Caroline Bowen, a Sydney-based speech and language pathologist, which at the time was the only online source of information on Lionel Logue. The producers were excited to learn I had my grandfather’s papers, most of which had never been seen before. As the papers were transcribed, Hooper and Seidler rewrote the script to incorporate the gems of information that I found.

  None of this, though, could fully prepare me for seeing Rush as my grandfather, alongside Firth, Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen and Jennifer Ehle as my grandmother Myrtle. It was surreal to see my father depicted as a ten-year-old boy. I still remember the day when I was invited on the set and met Ben Wimsett, who played him. A scene they were filming particularly resonated with me: Rush’s character hovered over my father and Valentine while they recited Shakespeare. It reminded me of a scene from my own childhood when I struggled to do the same, while my father, who had a prodigious memory, repeated verbatim the lengthy passages he had learnt as a boy.

  The success of the film provided me with a series of even more surreal experiences: during the first few weeks following its release, I made countless newspaper and television appearances in both Britain and America, during which I was asked to talk about ‘the real Lionel Logue’. Then came the Oscars themselves, when I was invited to a party at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. As the ceremony ended in triumph for The King’s Speech, the room filled with every Hollywood star you could mention. The celebrations went on until dawn.

  I went to another party later that day hosted by the film’s producers, Simon Egan and Gareth Unwin, at a luxury villa in the Hollywood Hills. Glimpsing Simon’s fifteen-month-old daughter, I thought she would look cute photographed with the Oscar, so I handed her the statuette and stepped back to take the picture. She lost her grip just as I was clicking the shutter, and the Oscar fell to the ground with a loud bang, bouncing down the stone steps. Everyone at the party fell silent. The horror was evident on everyone’s face – not least mine, where it was mixed with embarrassment and shame.

  The statuette suffered several dents: it had a bashed head, damaged shoulder and a dented stand, and gold plating had flaked off the chest. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was contacted immediately, and, to my relief, it turned out they have an ‘Oscar Hospital’ to cope with the all-too-common injuries sustained by the statuettes during victory celebrations. When Simon went to have it repaired, he was half expecting to see a queue of sheepish Oscar winners in there with their own damaged statuettes nursing hangovers.

  There is only so much you can show in 118 minutes, however brilliant the director – and Hooper, for whom this was only his second feature, was certainly that. That was why, after having become involved in the making of the film, I also set out to tell the real-life story behind the events it depicted, working with Peter Conradi, a journalist with the Sunday Times. We entitled our book The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy. Published to coincide with the film, it was a bestseller in both Britain and America and translated into more than twenty languages.

  During the more than a quarter of a century they worked together, my grandfather remained loyal to the King, respecting his privacy and the confidential nature of the treatment he gave him. He chose to remain behind the scenes, largely silent, rarely giving interviews, never publishing his work or having his methods scrutinized by peers or teaching them to students. He also always worked alone. Perhaps this was because he felt like an imposter, never having received any formal training or qualifications, and was forced to battle the prejudices of established medical institutions, as well as a degree of anti-Australian sentiment.

  Yet he was immensely proud of his achievements, as became clear to me when I examined the papers he left behind. The hundreds of pages I transcribed included correspondence between the King and my grandfather from their first meeting in 1926 –
when the future monarch was still Duke of York and, as second son of George V, never expected to be King – until his death in 1952. The letters from the King, the majority on Buckingham Palace headed paper (but with a few sent from Sandringham and from Windsor Castle), were handwritten and signed George R. The draft replies from Lionel were scribbled in barely legible handwriting, always in pencil on Basildon Bond paper. Occasionally, he would note down anecdotes so as not to forget them, using whatever came to hand: an empty envelope, the cover of a book, a scrap of paper, all of them painstakingly filed for posterity.

  There are also four large scrapbooks in which Lionel – or perhaps Myrtle – had carefully pasted press cuttings, almost all of them relating to the King’s struggle with his speech impediment and the treatment my grandfather gave him. One has ‘1937’ embossed in gold leaf on its front cover. This was a memorable year for Lionel, following the King’s accession to the throne after the abdication of his elder brother, Edward VIII, in December 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, and marked a turning point in his career. Into the scrapbook have been pasted all the paperwork surrounding the coronation that May, including his and Myrtle’s invitation to Westminster Abbey, photographs of the pair of them in their court dress, and all manner of tickets and scraps, however trivial.

  Inevitably, over time, the frenzy that surrounded the film faded, and my life returned to normal, leaving me to reflect on a crazy two years and the relentless pace and unquenchable appetite of the publicity machine that had monopolized my time and, for a while, had taken me in as one of its own. Those involved with the film moved on to other projects, but for me there was no question of turning my attention elsewhere. There was still more that I wanted to find out about my grandfather.

  The speech that the King made in September 1939 on the outbreak of war – which formed the climax of the film – was not the end of his relationship with Lionel Logue. Far from it; it was the beginning of an even more intense phase of their work. With Britain’s very survival as an independent nation at stake, the King found himself thrust further into the limelight. This meant greater pressure, too, on my grandfather, who was to play a crucial role in preparing the King for the countless speeches he made during the course of the conflict.

  Constraints of time and space meant we were able to consider the war years only briefly in our first book. The King’s War sets out to study this period in considerably greater depth. The main elements of the story will be familiar to those who read The King’s Speech: quotes and some descriptive passages that were first published there are necessarily repeated here for completeness. Yet the years that have passed have also given us the opportunity to go back into the archives and tease out more material relating to the two men. We have also made greater use of the diary kept by Myrtle, which provides a very different perspective on her and Lionel’s life in wartime London.

  We have been able to enrich our narrative with the reminiscences of some of those whose lives were touched by Lionel Logue. At the end of the Introduction in The King’s Speech, I appealed to readers to write in with their memories of my grandfather. It proved a shrewd move. In the months and years since, countless people have sent me letters and emails: former patients, the children and grandchildren of patients or people who knew him; even the nurse who cared for him in hospital. Others have approached me at events at which I have spoken about the book.

  Some told me what it was like to have been my grandfather’s patient, describing the techniques he encouraged them to employ to tackle their stammers. Others shared snippets about his life or copies of letters they exchanged with him. I have been presented with an inscription discovered inside a book cover and a letter discovered in a second-hand shop in New Zealand. Others wanted to know what – if anything – I had found in the archives about them or their fathers.

  The result is not just a more detailed portrait of the two men’s relationship from 1939 onwards than we were able to provide in our first book. We have also set out to put this relationship into a broader context. This is essentially a story of two families at war – the Windsors and the Logues – whose respective experiences of the conflict were in many ways so different, yet in some respects so similar.

  PROLOGUE

  The King’s Funeral

  It was a rumble of drums that they heard first, followed by the wail of a piper’s lament and the blast of trumpets. The crowds, standing thirty deep along the Mall, stirred as the funeral cortège approached. Caps were doffed and hands pulled from pockets; conversation faded away. The artillery in Hyde Park sounded a salute that made the pavement shake: the guns boomed fifty-six times, once for every year of a life cruelly cut short. It was 15 February 1952 and the people of Britain – and of the Empire – were bidding farewell to their King. The cortège was headed by the Household Cavalry, flanked by the pipers and band of the Scots Guards. Then came the Earl Marshal and a few personal servants, and behind them the dull green gun carriage that was serving as the King’s bier, its highly polished brass flashing in the pale sunshine. The coffin was dressed in the red, blue and gold of the Royal Standard. Surmounting it lay the Imperial State Crown, resting on a cushion of royal purple, together with the gold orb, sceptre and insignia of the Order of the Garter. Beside them lay a wreath of white flowers from the woman who had spent the previous three decades at the King’s side and was now known as the Queen Mother.

  She rode in a carriage immediately behind the gun carriage, accompanied by her daughters, the Queen and Princess Margaret, and her sister-in-law, Mary, the Princess Royal. They were all shrouded in black. Following on foot were the closest male members of the family: the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Gloucester, the Duke of Kent. Joining them was the Duke of Windsor, back from exile in France. The crowd strained forward to get a better view of a man whose decision to give up the throne sixteen years earlier to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American, still divided the nation. Simpson herself was not present. It had been made clear to her husband she would not be welcome; this was not the moment for reconciliation.

  The funeral procession had set off from Westminster Hall, to which the King’s body had been brought from Sandringham. During the four days in which he lay in state, more than 300,000 people filed past his coffin, which lay within a circle of candlelight set like a jewel against the darkness enveloping the hall. Supported on a catafalque, it was draped with the Royal Standard and topped by a brass cross from Westminster Abbey and candles from the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. The Yeomen of the Guard and officers of the Household Cavalry stood guard in their brilliantly coloured uniforms.

  Then, just after daybreak, the carefully choreographed ceremony began. At 8.15, the RAF detachment in the guard of honour, their belts gleaming white against the blue of their greatcoats, marched through one of the west gates to a position on the left of the line, facing the great door of Westminster Hall. They were followed by a detachment of Royal Marines and Coldstream Guards, both dressed in field grey. The Sovereign’s Standard was borne by a warrant officer of the Household Cavalry, attended by the Standard Coverer and a trumpeter. The silence hanging over New Palace Yard was broken by the cry of military commands.

  As the bells of the Abbey tolled, the gun carriage on which the King would make his final journey was set in position outside the hall. The bearer party of the King’s Company, Grenadier Guards, their heads uncovered as a mark of respect, carried out the coffin and placed it in on the bier. Big Ben chimed for the first time. Then, as the sound of funeral brass and drums carried across faintly from Whitehall, the bier moved forward towards the west gate and onwards across London, followed by seven carriages bearing the royal family and representatives of other monarchies.

  It was nine days earlier that the people of Britain – and of the Empire – had learnt of the death of George VI. The country was plunged into mourning; Winston Churchill, who had returned as Prime Minister the previous October, set the tone with a characteristically robust broadcast in which he praised the K
ing and described the news of his death as having ‘stilled the clatter and traffic of twentieth-century life in many lands, and made countless millions of human beings pause and look around them’. Similar tributes followed, praising above all the decisive role that ‘King George the Good’, as the newspapers had begun to call him, had played in rallying morale during the Second World War when his nation’s existence as an independent state had hung in balance. There was discussion, too, of the King’s stammer, a subject that, although obvious to anyone who had ever heard him speak, had been largely taboo during his lifetime – and of the help he had received in overcoming his impediment from a plain-talking Australian speech therapist named Lionel Logue.

  The stress of war had certainly taken a heavy toll on the King’s always delicate health. During the late 1940s he suffered a series of scares that culminated in September 1951 with the removal of his cancerous left lung. His speech for the opening of parliament that November had – exceptionally – to be read for him by Lord Simonds, the Lord Chancellor, and his Christmas message pre-recorded in a tortuous process that had taken the best part of two days. He had nevertheless seemed well on the path to recovery by the end of the following January when the then Princess Elizabeth set off with the Duke of Edinburgh on a tour that began with East Africa and was intended to take them on to Australia and New Zealand.

  On 5 February, back in Sandringham, the King seemed happy and carefree as he set out in the morning for a day of shooting with his neighbour, Lord Fermoy, during which he bagged nine hares and did not return home until dusk. After a relaxed dinner, he went to bed at midnight. The next morning at 7.30, his valet, James MacDonald, came to bring him his usual morning cup of tea. When he did not receive any reply to his knock, MacDonald entered the King’s bedroom and found his master’s lifeless body. Dr James Ansell, ‘Surgeon Apothecary’ to the royal household, was called and declared the King dead. The cause of death was not cancer but instead a coronary thrombosis – a fatal blood clot to the heart – that he appeared to have suffered soon after falling asleep.