The King's Speech (14 page)

Perhaps because of the Duke, stammering remained a subject for the press. In September 1929 a debate raged in the pages of
The Times
and other national newspapers over the discovery by scientists that women were far less prone to stammering than men. As ‘discoveries’ went, it was not a particularly surprising one: people working in the field had long noticed a preponderance of male over female patients. This did not prevent the newspapers devoting many column inches of editorial to it; readers, too, wrote in with their own experiences – even though they differed among themselves as to the cause of the discrepancy between the sexes.

Logue dutifully cut the articles and letters out of the newspapers, pasting them into page after page of his scrap book. Asked by the
Sunday Express
to join the discussion, he came up with his own view – which the edition of 15 September put under the headline, ‘Why Women do not stammer. They talk without listening’.

‘One reason is that men go out into the world more, and the conditions make them more self-conscious in thinking,’ Logue claimed. ‘Women will often chatter on to each other without either being concerned in what the other is saying.’ As for those women who did stammer, they would do everything to hide their affliction, he added, citing the example of a female patient he had known who travelled every day from the City to her home in Earl’s Court, but used to buy a ticket to Hammersmith because she couldn’t manage the initial ‘k’ sound of ‘Court’. ‘Another would always tender the exact fare on an omnibus, to hide her defect.’

Confirmation of quite how confident the Duke had become about his stammer (and his mastery of it) came the following month with the publication of a book about him by Taylor Darbyshire, a journalist from the Australian Press Association who had accompanied him and his wife on their trip to Australia and New Zealand. The book, running to 287 pages, described itself as a ‘an intimate & authoritative life-story of the second son of their majesties the King and Queen by one who has had special facilities, and published with the approval of his Royal Highness’ – what we would call today an authorized biography.

The book, which was widely trailed in the newspapers, went into great detail about all aspects of the Duke’s life to date. But it was the pages that Darbyshire devoted to his stammer and Logue’s work in curing it that most interested the press. Under headlines such as ‘How the Duke Won Through’, ‘Defect in Speech overcome by his pluck’ and ‘Man who Cured the Duke’, they ran details of what one paper called his ‘youthful struggle to fit himself to take his place in public life’.

This time, given the Duke’s sanction of the book, Logue felt able to talk to the press about his own role – and about the efforts made by his famous patient. ‘The real cause of the Duke’s impediment was that his diaphragm did not work properly in conjunction with his brain and articulation, and consequently the defect was purely physical,’ he said in an interview carried in several newspapers on 26 October. ‘As soon as he began to work at the course of voice exercises there was an immediate improvement.

‘I have never known a patient so patient and regular,’ Logue continued. ‘He never missed a single appointment, and he told me he was ready to do anything if he could be cured.’ Logue declared that the Duke was, indeed, now cured, ‘but he still carries on with physical exercises for the sake of health’. The Duke, he said, was ‘the pluckiest and most determined patient I have ever had’.

Word of the Duke’s stammer – and of the unconventional Australian who was curing him of it – also spread beyond the British Isles. On 2 December
Time
magazine weighed in with a short article headlined ‘Great Britain: C-C-C-Cured’. ‘For many years public speaking has been a torture to the stuttering Duke of York,’ it said. ‘Well known is the fact that in order to avoid saying “K-K-K-King” at moments of state he habitually refers to his father as “His Majesty”. Specialists, remembering the Duke’s extreme shyness as a child, have for years treated his stuttering psychologically, as caused by nervousness. The treatments were unavailing, His Royal Highness continued to splutter.’

The previous week, it reported, ‘Britain rang with joyful news. The Duke’s stuttering was so nearly cured that he could say “King” without preliminary cackles. Alone among specialists Dr. Logue had discerned that the ducal impediment was physical, not mental. He had prescribed massage and throat exercises’. Quite where the magazine got the notion that Logue was a doctor was not clear – although he would undoubtedly have been flattered by the title.

The Duke’s improvements came despite a worrying scare over his father’s health. While attending the Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in November 1928, the King developed a severe chill, which he neglected and which then turned to acute septicaemia. It became clear he would be incapacitated for some time, and on 2 December six Counsellors of State were appointed to transact public business in the meantime; the Duke was one, as were his elder brother and mother.

Edward was away on a tour of East Africa, and despite warnings of the severity of his father’s condition, did not immediately set off for home – to the horror of his aides. Eventually convinced of the seriousness of the situation, he hurried back. During the journey he received a letter from the Duke, which suggested that, despite the gravity of the King’s illness, neither brother had lost his sense of humour. ‘There is a lovely story going about which emanated from the East End,’ wrote the Duke, ‘that the reason for your rushing home is that in the event of anything happening to Papa I am going to bag the Throne in your absence !!! Just like the Middle Ages . . .’ Edward was clearly so amused by the letter that he kept it and included it in his memoirs.

The King was operated upon and, although his life remained in danger for some time, he began gradually to recover in the new year. It would not be until the following June that he would be strong enough to take part in public ceremonies again. The Duke had been put under strain both by worry about his father and by the extra duties he had to perform, but he took it all in his stride, as he revealed in a letter he sent to Logue on 15 December 1928, thanking him for the book he sent him as a birthday present.

‘I don’t know whether you sent it with a gentle reminder for me to come and see you more often or not, but I liked your kind thought in sending,’ the Duke wrote. ‘As you can imagine just lately my mind is full of other things, and as a matter of fact through all this mental strain my speech has
not
been affected one atom. So that is all to the good.’
⁵¹

These birthday books were to become something of a tradition. Regardless of where he was or what he was doing, Logue would send the Duke one or more carefully selected volumes on 14 December for the rest of his life. The Duke, even after he had become King, would respond with a thank-you letter written in his own hand, in which he would inevitably talk about the progress he was making with his speech as well as giving brief insights into other things going on his life. Logue treasured the letters, which found their way into his papers.

CHAPTER SEVEN
The Calm Before the Storm

Beechgrove, the Logue family house in Sydenham

T
he 1930s proved to be the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had brought the Roaring Twenties to a shuddering halt, ushering in the Great Depression, which led to untold economic misery across the world. It also helped the rise of Adolf Hitler, who became German chancellor in January 1933, setting off the chain of events that were to lead to the outbreak of the Second World War six years later.

For the Duke, however, the first six years of the decade, at least, were a time of peace and calm. ‘It was almost the last span of untroubled peace that he was to know,’ wrote his official biographer, ‘and one in which a felicitous balance seemed to have been struck between his arduous duties as a servant of the State and his happy existence as a husband and father.’
⁵²

Gradually, though, the Duke was being required to play a part in the functioning of the Crown. As well as serving as a Counsellor of State during his father’s illness, he had represented him in October 1928 at the funeral in Denmark of Marie Dagmar, the Dowager Empress of Russia, and at the marriage in March the following year of his cousin, Crown Prince Olav of Norway. The same month he was also appointed Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Other duties, and inevitably more speech-making, were to follow.

There were changes, too, on the domestic front: on 21 August 1930, his second daughter, Margaret Rose, was born, and in September the following year the King gave him and the Duchess the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park as their country home.

As they grew up, the two princesses were rapidly turning into media stars. Newspapers and magazines on both side of the Atlantic were keen to publish stories and photographs of them – and did so, often with the encouragement of the royal family themselves, who realized their publicity value. Extraordinarily, the third birthday of baby ‘Lilibet’, as Elizabeth was known in the family, was considered an important enough occasion to earn her a place on the cover of
Time
magazine on 21 April 1929 – even though her father, at that stage, was not even heir to the throne.

In the meantime, Logue’s personal circumstances were also changing. In 1932 he and Myrtle left Bolton Gardens and moved to the lofty heights of Sydenham Hill, an area largely comprising Victorian villas with generous gardens, offering glorious views towards the city. Their house, ‘Beechgrove’, at 111 Sydenham Hill, was a sprawling if somewhat shabby three-storey detached property with twenty-five rooms, dating back to the 1860s. It was a few streets away from the Crystal Palace, the giant cast-iron and glass building built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, which had been erected in Hyde Park but moved to south-east London after the exhibition ended. When the Crystal Palace fell victim to a spectacular blaze in November 1936, drawing crowds a hundred thousand strong, Logue and Myrtle had a ringside seat.

By this time, Laurie was a strapping young man in his late-twenties, almost six feet tall and with an athletic stature he had inherited from his mother. He had gone off to Nottingham to learn the catering business with Messrs Lyons. His brother Valentine was studying medicine at St George’s Hospital, which in those days was situated at Hyde Park Corner, while Antony, the youngest, was attending Dulwich College, a mile and a half or so away. The house needed several servants to run, but all the extra space came in useful because the family took in lodgers to boost their income.

To Myrtle’s delight, it also had about five acres of garden, including avenues of rhododendrons and a stretch of woodland at the end which, if the rumours were true, had been used to bury the dead during the time of the Great Plague. There was a tennis court, too. As a reminder of home, she succeeded in growing Australian gum and wattle there, although inside the greenhouse rather than outside in the cool London climate.

By this time, Logue’s relationship with the Duke was provoking mixed emotions. Like any teacher, he must have felt pride in what he had achieved – yet the more progress his royal pupil made, the less his own services were needed. He nevertheless maintained his contacts with the Duke, writing to him regularly and continuing to send him congratulations and the birthday book. Letters written to him by the Duke, coupled with drafts of those he wrote, were all faithfully glued into his scrapbook.

On 8 March 1929, for example, Logue wrote to the Duke enquiring about how well his speeches were going. ‘It is the time when I send a little enquiry to all my patients just to know how they are performing and to ask if speech is quite satisfactory and giving no trouble,’ he wrote. ‘As I have always treated you just as any other patient I hope you will not mind my enquiry.’ Five days later, the Duke wrote back to say that despite the house being full of flu, ‘on the few occasions of public speaking all has gone well’.
⁵³

That September, the Duke wrote to Logue from Glamis Castle, responding to his letter of congratulation on the birth of Princess Margaret Rose. ‘We had a long time to wait but everything went off successfully,’ he wrote. ‘My youngest daughter is going on very well and she has got a good pair of lungs. My wife is wonderfully well, so I have had no worry on that side. My speech has been quite all right and the worry did not effect [sic] it at all.’ Then, that December there were the usual royal birthday thanks for ‘the little “booook”, which is perfect in every way and takes up no room in the pocket’.

The Duke’s aides, too, were also taking a great interest in Logue’s work with him, as an illuminating handwritten letter from Patrick Hodgson, the Duke’s private secretary, sent on 8 May 1930, reveals: