The King's Speech (10 page)

The Australian had a solution. ‘There’s a young Australian just come over,’ he said. ‘He seems to be good. Why not try him?’

The next day, 17 October 1926, the equerry came to Harley Street to meet Logue. He made a good impression, and the equerry asked if he would be able to meet the Duke and try and do something for him. ‘Yes,’ said Logue. ‘But he must come tome here. That imposes an effort on him which is essential for success. If I see him at home we lose the value of that.’

There is another, more intriguing, version, according to which the role of go-between was played by Evelyn ‘Boo’ Laye, a glamorous musical comedy star. The Duke had had a crush on her since he first saw her on stage aged nineteen in 1920, and Laye, a lyric soprano, was later to become a friend of both himself and his wife. Five years later, she was appearing at the Adelphi Theatre in the title role of the musical play
Betty in Mayfair
and, after a gruelling schedule of eight performances a week, was beginning to have problems with her singing voice.

According to Michael Thornton, a writer and long-term friend of Laye, the singer sought the advice of Logue, who diagnosed incorrect voice production and prescribed some deep breathing exercises relating to the diaphragm– which quickly relieved her problems. Laye was deeply impressed. And so in summer 1926, when she met the Duchess of York and their conversation turned to the forthcoming trip to Australia and all the speeches that the Duke would have to make there, Laye recommended Logue.

‘The Duchess listened with great interest and asked if she would let them have Mr Logue’s details,’ recalls Thornton. ‘The Duchess appeared to consider it a point of great importance that Lionel Logue was an Australian and that she and the Duke were going to Australia.’
³²
Shortly afterwards, Laye called Patrick Hodgson, the Duke’s private secretary, and gave him Logue’s telephone number.

Laye herself continued to consult Logue for many years, especially in 1937 when she was faced with the strenuous role of singing a leading role alongside Richard Tauber, the great Austrian tenor, in the operetta
Paganini
. With Logue’s encouragement, she also began to give the future King singing lessons, which were aimed at improving the fluency of his delivery when he spoke.

Whoever was responsible for the initial introduction, the first meeting between the Duke and Logue almost didn’t come off. Although his wife was keen he should seek professional advice, Bertie was becoming increasingly frustrated with the failure of the various cures he had been persuaded to try – especially those that assumed his stammering had its root in a nervous condition, which seemed to make matters worse rather than better. The Duchess was determined he give Logue a try, however, and, for her sake if nothing else, he eventually succumbed and agreed to an appointment. Those few minutes were to change his life.

CHAPTER FIVE
Diagnosis

Harley Street in 1926

‘M
ental: Quite Normal, has an acute nervous tension which has been brought on by the defect . . .’ A card, written in a small, spidery hand and headed ‘His Royal Highness The Duke of York –Appointment Card’, records Logue’s first impressions of the Duke of York after he had climbed the two flights of stairs leading to his consulting room in Harley Street at 3 p.m. on 19 October 1926.

‘Physical [
sic
]: Well built, with good shoulders but waist line very flabby,’ the card entry continued.

Good chest development, top lung breathing good. Has never used diaphragm or lower lung – this has resulted through non control of solar plexus in nervous tension with consequent episodes of bad speech, depression. Contracts teeth & mouth & mechanically closes throat. Gets chin down & closes throat at times. An extraordinary habit of clipping small words (an, in, on) and saying the first syllable of one word and the last in another clipping the centre and very often hesitancy.

During this first meeting, Logue traced his patient’s problems to the treatment that he had suffered at the hands of both his father and his tutors, who had appeared to have little sympathy for his speech impediment. The Duke mentioned to him the incident when as a child he had been unable to say the word ‘quarter’ and his continuing problems with both ‘king’ and ‘queen’.

‘I can cure you,’ Logue declared at the end of their session, which lasted an hour and a half, ‘but it will need a tremendous effort by you. Without that effort, it can’t be done.’

Logue identified the Duke’s problem, as with many of his patients, to be one of faulty breathing. They agreed on regular consultations. Logue prescribed an hour of concentrated effort every day, made up of breathing exercises of his own invention, gargling regularly with warm water and standing by an open window intoning the vowels one by one, each for fifteen seconds.

Logue insisted, however, that they should meet not at the Duke’s home or another of the royal buildings but at either his practice in Harley Street or his small flat in Bolton Gardens. Despite the difference in rank between them, this meeting should be on equal terms – which meant a relaxed relationship rather than the formal kind that a prince would normally have with a commoner.

As Logue later recalled, ‘He came into my room a slim, quiet man with tired eyes and all the outward symptoms of a man upon whom a habitual speech defect had begun to set the sign. When he left you could see that there was hope once more in his heart.’

Gradually, progress began to be made – as Logue’s case notes, although brief and to the point, reveal:

Oct 30: Diaphragm much firmer, a distinct advance.

Nov 16: A good all round improvement much greater control, diaphragm almost under complete control.

Nov 18: As he progresses the click in the throat becomes very noticeable as other faults are cleared up. Diaphragm is now forcing air through throat muscles.

Nov 19: Never made a mistake during the hour, despite fact very tired.

Nov 20: Lower jaw became pliable.

After the initial interview, the Duke had a total of eighty-two appointments between 20 October 1926 and 22 December 1927, according to a bill eventually drawn up by Logue on 31 March 1928. The initial consultation cost him £24 4s; the other lessons a total £172 4s. Logue charged him a further £21 for ‘lessons taken on trip to Australia’, giving a grand total of £197 3s – the equivalent of close to £9,000 today.

This ‘trip to Australia’ was the main reason for the Duke’s visits to Harley Street. The following January, he and the Duchess were to embark on a six-month world tour abroad the battle-cruiser
Renown.
The highpoint would be 9 May, when the Duke was to open the new Commonwealth Parliament House in Canberra. It was a highly symbolic occasion. The
Daily Telegraph
claimed the Duke’s speech there would be as historic as Queen Victoria’s proclamation as Empress of India in 1877. With all eyes – and, more crucially, ears – upon him, Bertie could not risk a repetition of the Wembley fiasco.

The origins of the trip went back just over a quarter of a century to the transformation of the then Australian colonies into states, federated together under one Dominion government. This government, and the parliament to which it was responsible, was initially located in Melbourne, in the State of Victoria. This was only a temporary solution, however; while the people of Victoria would have liked their capital to become the federal one, Sydney, the capital of New South Wales, also wanted the honour.

A decade later, a compromise was finally decided upon: the government acquired an area of nine hundred square miles from the state of New South Wales, which was to be designated federal territory and serve as the site of a new Australian capital, Canberra. Although the First World War caused a hiatus, building work finally began in 1923, and 1927 was chosen as the year for transfer of power to Canberra and the convening of the first session of the federal parliament. Stanley Bruce, the prime minister, asked King George V to send one of his sons to perform the opening ceremony.

The Duke’s elder brother, the Prince of Wales, had toured Australia in 1920 to lavish acclaim, and the King felt it was time his younger son carried out an important imperial mission. But he was not entirely convinced that Bertie was up to it – not least because of his stammer. Bruce had his doubts too: he had heard the Duke speak several times during the Imperial Conference of 1926 and had not been impressed. Bertie was equally doubtful about his ability to get through the gruelling programme of speeches that would be required. Embarking on such a long trip would also mean leaving behind his Duchess and their only child, Princess Elizabeth, who had been born the previous April.

Despite such concerns, on 14 July the Governor-General sent a cablegram to the King asking that the Duke and Duchess open parliament; five days later came the official confirmation back from London.

It was against this background that the Duke was to have his first meeting with Logue exactly three months later – and it seems to have provided him with a considerable psychological boost. According to Taylor Darbyshire, an early biographer of the Duke, ‘The one great advantage of that first consultation was that it had given the Duke assurance that he could be cured . . . Disillusioned so often before, the change in the outlook caused by the discovery that his trouble was physical and not as he had always feared mental, re-established his confidence and renewed his determination.’
³³

It was one thing to identify the problem but quite another to rectify it. In the seven months leading up to the trip, the Duke would regularly meet Logue for an hour either in Harley Street or at his home in Bolton Gardens. Every spare moment he had outside his official duties was spent on practising and doing exercises that he had been set. If he was out hunting, he would make sure he came back early to put in an hour’s work with Logue before dinner. If he was on an official engagement, he would arrange for a break to allow him to fit in his lesson.

‘What those seven months imposed upon the Duke in toil and effort has never been adequately understood by the nation,’ recalled Logue’s friend, the
Sunday Express
journalist John Gordon, years later. All that effort at last began to show results: the Duke began to conquer difficult consonants over which he had previously stumbled. Each breakthrough prompted him to throw himself back into his exercises with still more determination.

On one occasion, a snobbish neighbour sent a curt letter to Logue telling him to instruct his visitor not to park his car outside his house. When the Australian replied that he would tell the Duke to put his car somewhere else, the neighbour’s tone changed completely. ‘Oh, no, don’t. I’ll be delighted if the Duke will continue to leave it here.’

A few weeks before he was due to leave on his trip, the Duke faced a test of his speaking abilities. The Pilgrims Society, a dining club with the aim of furthering Anglo-American relations, wanted to hold a farewell dinner for him. Its members, a mix of politicians, bankers, businessmen, diplomats and other influential figures, were used to hearing some of the best speakers in the world. On this occasion Lord Balfour, who had been prime minister more than two decades earlier, was in the chair and some of Britain’s most gifted speakers were on the toast list. In short, it would have been a challenge for the best orator, let alone for someone who still struggled to pronounce the letter ‘k’.

The Duke decided to confront the challenge head on. He prepared and revised the speech himself and, on the day of the banquet, left the hunting field early to have a final rehearsal with Logue. The Duke’s reputation was such that those present hadn’t expected much more than a few hesitant words. Instead, they were addressed by a smiling, confident speaker who, although no great orator, spoke with a surprising confidence and conviction. As Darbyshire put it, ‘Those who were at that dinner will not easily forget the surprise in store for them.’

Although they had largely tiptoed around the sensitive matter of the Duke’s speaking problems, the newspapers also expressed surprise at how well he’d done. ‘The Duke of York is rapidly improving as a speaker,’ reported the
Evening News
on 27 December. ‘His voice is good – unmistakably the family voice. He still sticks too closely to his notes to have much freedom in his manner; but is none the less princely.’ Another newspaper added, ‘Everybody knows the difficulties under which he speaks. He has practically conquered his impediment of utterance, and as his old private secretary Sir Ronald Waterhouse remarked as the gathering was dispersing,“Wasn’t he wonderful! It was the best delivered speech he has ever made.”’

The Duke revealed later that he had treated the speech as a real test of the progress he had made under Logue’s tutelage and that, by acquitting himself with such success, he had reached a turning point in his career; at last, his handicap seemed to be fading into the past.
³⁴