The King's Speech (12 page)

CHAPTER SIX
Court Dress with Feathers

An expectant crowd waiting outside the gates of Buckingham Palace

T
he cars were lined up bumper to bumper along almost the entire length of the Mall leading up to Buckingham Palace. It was the evening of 12 June 1928, and a small group of women, dressed up to the nines in feathers and pearls, were about to be presented to King George V and Queen Mary. Most were drawn from the upper echelons of English society; also among them was Myrtle Logue.

This was a rare honour – but one of the perks that now came with Lionel’s work. On 20 December 1927 Patrick Hodgson, the Duke’s private secretary, had written to say that Myrtle would be presented at one of the next year’s Courts by the wife of Leo Amery, the Secretary for the Dominions. On 28 May came the much awaited ‘summons’ by the Lord Chamberlain to attend the first of two Royal Courts to be held that month at Buckingham Palace.

The card stipulated that ladies were to be dressed in ‘court dress
with
feathers and trains’; the gentlemen accompanying them should wear ‘full court dress’. Myrtle’s attire was suitably grand: a dress of parchment satin over pale pink georgette with diamante shoulder straps and a train of silver tissue, linked with pink tulle, that came right over her left shoulder, fastening on her breast with a diamond buckle, then draped across her back to her right hip with another diamond buckle.

It was just after six o’clock when she and Lionel drove into the Mall, but they barely moved until 8.30 when, one by one, the cars began to edge slowly towards Buckingham Palace, finally arriving at nine. Proceedings were due to start at 9.30. Myrtle’s sense of awe at the occasion was mingled with frustration at the long delay and unexpected chaos.

‘The wait in the Mall was terrifying,’ she wrote in an account of the day later published in an Australian newspaper. ‘The “hoi polloi” scrambling on the running board of the car to peer in and see what one’s feet looked like! It was too revolting – millions of them – and then, if one looked wearily out into the Mall, one looked straight into the eyes of the young men – and old, too, for that matter – who were cruising up and down in their cars and leering into the carriages. Luckily, Lionel was with me, or I should have died of fright and rage.’

At nine o’clock they were finally allowed inside the Palace and its sumptuous antechamber, where the nodding plumes, tulle veils and jewels made an unforgettable sight. After another wait, this time of about an hour, the Lord Chancellor came for them – the men were taken off to wait in another antechamber and the women stood in queues, their trains tucked over their shoulders. As they entered the throne room, the two equerries whipped the trains off their arms and arranged them on the floor while whispering ‘one curtsy to the King and one to the Queen’. As the women’s names were boomed out so loudly they almost took fright, they were presented to the King, curtsying without smiling. He responded with a nod, looking seriously at each woman as she passed, before the Queen did the same.

Then, with a fanfare of trumpets, it was all over. The gentlemen of the bedchamber walked out backwards, carrying their wands of office, followed by the King and Queen, with the pages carrying their trains, bowing right and left as all the women sank to the floor with a curtsy and the men stood to attention, with their heads bowed. Later, feeling flat and tired, Lionel and Myrtle sought out the supper rooms for chicken and champagne. After posing for photographs, they were on their way home. ‘I would never have believed it could be such an ordeal,’ recalled Myrtle, although she wrote back to Hodgson saying how much she had enjoyed the evening. On 26 July he invited them both to a Garden Party.

At this time the couple bought a little holiday bungalow, named Yolanda, on Thames Ditton Island in the River Thames. It was surrounded by roses and the lawn ran right down to the water’s edge. ‘Lionel needs a place of rest and peace to go through the spring and summer, and we were getting very tired of taking the children all over the Continent for a month and so missing the loveliest part of the English year, so we decided to stay in England for the summer,’ Myrtle explained. ‘This place is adorable! We have been down here every week all through the spring and summer. We fish, swim and enjoy boating and just “laze”; and thoroughly enjoy ourselves.’

Prince Alfred College inter-college Football Team 1896
Lionel stands beneath the teammate leaning against the doorway

Menu for a dinner given in honour of Lionel and a concert programme for one of the many recitals he gave

Lionel Logue and Myrtle Gruenert on their engagement, 1906

The Logue family on-board the
Hobsons Bay
, 1924
Left to right: Laurie, Tony, Myrtle, Valentine

Letter confirming Lionel’s first appointment with the then Duke of York

Antony Logue with Lionel shortly after their arrival in London in 1924

The appointment card on which Lionel noted his initial observations of the Duke after their first meeting in October 1926

Letter from the Duke expressing his gratitude at the progress he was already beginning to show at the start of his therapy. In the three months after his first interview, the Duke saw Lionel over fifty times