The King's Speech (9 page)

Bertie spent much of the rest of the year ashore, initially at Abergeldie, but then at Sandringham, alone with his father, where the two of them became close. During this time Bertie was to learn a lot about what it was to be a king in time of war – an experience that he would be able to draw on when he found himself in the same position two decades later.

In mid-May 1916 he made it back to the
Collingwood
, just in time to take part in the Battle of Jutland at the end of the month. Although again in the sick bay (this time, apparently as the result of eating soused mackerel) on the evening the ship set off, Bertie was well enough to take his place in ‘A turret’ the following day. The
Collingwood
’s part in the action was not significant, but Bertie was glad to have been involved and, as he recorded, to have been tested by the ordeal of coming under fire.

Much to his relief, his stomach problems appeared to be receding. But then that August they struck again, this time with a vengeance. Transferred ashore, he was examined by a relay of doctors who finally diagnosed his ulcer. In May 1917, however, he was back at Scapa Flow, this time as an acting lieutenant on the
Malaya
, a larger, faster and more modern battleship than the
Collingwood
. By the end of July, he was ill once more and transferred ashore to a hospital in South Queensferry, near Edinburgh. After eight years of either training or serving in the navy, Bertie realized reluctantly that his career in the service was over. ‘Personally, I feel that I am not fit for service at sea, even after I recover from this little attack,’ he told his father.
²⁴
That November, after much hesitation, he finally underwent the operation for the ulcer, which went well, however this sustained period of ill health would continue to affect him both physically and psychologically in the years to come.

Bertie was determined not to return to civilian life while the war was going on and in February 1918 was transferred to the Royal Naval Air Service, which two months later was to be merged with the Royal Flying Corps to form the Royal Air Force. He became Officer Commanding Number 4 Squadron of the Boys’ Wing at Cranwell, Lincolnshire, where he remained until that August. During the last weeks of the war, he served on the staff of the Independent Air Force at its headquarters in Nancy, and following its disbanding in November, he remained on the Continent as a staff officer with the Royal Air Force.

When peace came, Bertie, like many returning officers, went to university. In October 1919 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history, economics and civics for a year. It was not immediately clear why he, as the second son, would need such knowledge, but it was to prove more than useful a decade later.

Although Bertie was doing all that was expected of him, his speech impediment (and his embarrassment over it) together with his tendency to shyness, continued to weigh on him. The contrast could not have been greater with his elder brother, who increasingly basked in the adulation of press and public.

Yet all was not quite what it seemed. By the time the two brothers were in their twenties, their relationship with their father began to change. David was already conducting tours of the Empire with great success but those around began to feel that he was enjoying the limelight rather too much for his own – or the country’s – good. The King was becoming concerned about his eldest son’s almost obsessive love of the modern – which George despised – his dislike of royal protocol and tradition and, above all, the predilection for married women he seemed to have inherited from Edward VII. Father and son began to clash frequently, often over the most minor things such as dress, in which the King took an almost obsessive interest. As the Prince later recorded, whenever his father started to speak to him about duty, the word itself created a barrier between them.

Bertie, by contrast, was gradually becoming his father’s favourite. On 4 June 1920, at the age of twenty-four, he was created Duke of York, Earl of Inverness and Baron Killarney. ‘I know that you have behaved very well, in a difficult situation for a young man & that you have done what I asked you to,’ the King wrote to him. ‘I hope you will always look upon me as yr. best friend & always tell me everything & you will always find me ever ready to help you and give you good advice.’
²⁵

In his capacity as president of the Boys’ Welfare Society, which then grew into the Industrial Welfare Society, the Duke, as we will henceforth call him, began to visit coal mines, factories and rail yards, developing an interest in working conditions and acquiring the nickname of the ‘industrial Prince’. Starting in July 1921 he also instituted an interesting social experiment: a series of annual summer camps, held initially on a disused aerodrome at New Romney on the Kent coast and later at Southwold Common in Suffolk, which were designed to bring together boys from a wide range of social backgrounds. The last was to take place on the eve of war in 1939.

The Duke rose even further in his father’s estimation following his marriage on 26 April 1923 to the society beauty Elizabeth Bowes Lyon. Although his bride had led a life even more sheltered than that of her husband, she was a commoner – albeit a high-born one. The King, who had to give his consent under the Royal Marriage Act of 1772, did not hesitate in so doing. Society had changed, he appeared to have reasoned, making it acceptable for his children to marry commoners – provided they came from among the highest three ranks of the British nobility.

Bertie and Elizabeth had met at a ball in the early summer of 1920. The daughter of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, Elizabeth was twenty and had just arrived in London society to universal acclaim. A large number of young men were keen to marry her, but she was in no hurry to say yes to any of them – especially the Duke. It was not only that she was averse to becoming a member of the royal family, with all the constraints that this imposed. The Duke also did not seem that much of a catch: although kind, charming and good looking, he was shy and inarticulate, thanks in part to the stutter.

The Duke fell in love with her, but his early attempts to woo her were not successful: part of the problem, as he confided to J. C. C. Davidson, a young Conservative politician, in July 1922, was that he could not propose to a woman, since, as the King’s son, he could not place himself in a position in which he might be refused. For that reason, he had instead sent an emissary to Elizabeth to ask on his behalf for her hand in marriage – and the response had been negative.

Davidson had simple advice for him: no high-spirited girl was going to accept a second-hand proposal and so, if the Duke was really as much in love with her as he claimed, then he should propose himself. In 16 January 1923 the newspapers were full of their engagement. Three decades later, after she was widowed, the then Queen Mother wrote to Davidson to ‘thank you for the advice you gave the King in 1922’.
²⁶

Their wedding on 26 April 1923 in Westminster Abbey – being used for the first time for the nuptials of a son of the King – was a joyous occasion. The bride wore a dress of cream chiffon moiré, a long train of silk net and a point de Flandres lace veil, both of which had been lent her by Queen Mary. The Duke was in his Royal Air Force uniform. There were 1,780 places in the Abbey – as the
Morning Post
reported the next day, there was a ‘large and brilliant congregation which included many of the leading personages of the nation and Empire’. ‘You are indeed a lucky man,’ the King wrote to his son. ‘I miss you . . . you have always been so sensible and easy to work with (very different to dear David) . . . I am quite certain that Elizabeth will be a splendid partner in your work.’

Yet amid the joy, there was also a reminder that the Duke’s marriage was something of a sideshow compared to the occasion when his elder brother would eventually follow suit. In a special supplement, published on the day before the wedding, a writer in
The Times
had expressed satisfaction at the Duke’s choice of a bride who was ‘so truly British to the core’ and had spoken approvingly of his ‘pluck and perseverance’. Yet he concluded, as many of the time did, by contrasting Bertie with his ‘brilliant elder brother’, adding: ‘There is but one wedding to which the people look forward with still deeper interest – the wedding which will give a wife to the Heir to the Throne and, in the course of nature, a future Queen of England to the British peoples’. The newspaper and its readers were to be disappointed.

Marriage was a turning point in the Duke’s life: he became far happier and more at ease with himself – and with the King. His father’s devotion to Elizabeth also helped: although a stickler for punctuality, he would forgive his daughter-in-law her chronic lateness. When she turned up for a meal on one occasion when everyone was already seated, he murmured, ‘You are not late, my dear. We must have sat down too early.’ The birth of their first daughter, Elizabeth, the future Queen, on 21 April 1926 brought the family even closer together.

They lived initially at White Lodge, in the middle of Richmond Park, a large and rather forbidding property that King George II had built for himself in the 1720s. The couple really wanted to live in London, however, and, after a long search for something suitable within their budget, they moved in 1927 to Number 145 Piccadilly, a stone-built house close to Hyde Park Corner, facing south with a view over Green Park towards Buckingham Palace.

The Duke was continuing with his factory visits and seemed relaxed and happy in such work. More formal occasions – especially speech-making – were a different matter completely, however. The continuing speech defect was weighing on him. The sunny and companionable temperament of his boyhood began to be lost behind a sombre mask and diffident manner. Her husband’s impediment and the effect that it had on him were having an effect on the Duchess, too; according to one contemporary account, whenever he rose from the table to respond to a toast, she would grip the edge of the table until her knuckles were white for fear he would stutter and be unable to get a word out.
²⁷
This also further contributed to his nervousness which, in turn, led to outbursts of temper that only his wife was able to still.

The full extent of the Duke’s speech problems became painfully obvious for all to see in May 1925, when he was due to succeed his elder brother as president of the Empire Exhibition in Wembley. The occasion was to be marked by a speech that he was due to give on the tenth. The previous year, thousands of people had watched as the slim golden-haired figure of the Prince of Wales had formally asked his father for permission to open the exhibition. The King had spoken briefly in response – and for the first time his words were broadcast to the nation by the then British Broadcasting Company (and later Corporation). ‘Everything went off most successfully,’ the King noted in his diary.
²⁸

It was now up to the Duke to follow suit. The speech itself was only short and he practised it feverishly, but his dread of public speaking was making itself felt. Equally terrifying was the fact that he would be speaking in front of his father for the first time. As the great day approached he became increasingly nervous. ‘I do hope I shall do it well,’ he wrote to the King. ‘But I shall be very frightened as you have never heard me speak & the loudspeakers are apt to put one off as well. So I hope you will understand that I am bound to be more nervous than I usually am.’
²⁹

Matters were not helped by a last-minute rehearsal at Wembley. After he was a few sentences into his speech, the Duke realized no sound was coming out of the loudspeakers and turned to the officials next to him. As he did so, someone threw the appropriate switch and his words, ‘The damned things aren’t working’, boomed around the empty stadium.

The Duke’s actual speech, broadcast not just in Britain but around the world, ended in humiliation. Although he managed through sheer determination to struggle his way to the end, his performance was marked by some embarrassing moments when his jaw muscles moved frantically and no sound came out. The King tried to put a positive spin on it: ‘Bertie got through his speech all right, but there were some long pauses,’ he wrote to the Duke’s young brother, Prince George, the following day.
³⁰

It would be difficult to overestimate the psychological effect that the speech had both on Bertie and his family, and the problem that his dismal performance threw up for the monarchy. Such speeches were meant to be part of the daily routine of the Duke, who was second in line to the throne, yet he had conspicuously failed to rise to the challenge. The consequences both for his own future and that of the monarchy looked serious. As one contemporary biographer put it, ‘it was becoming increasingly manifest that very drastic steps would have to be taken if he were not to develop into the shy retiring nervous individual which is the common fate of all those suffering from speech defects’.
³¹

By coincidence, Logue was a member of the crowd at Wembley listening to the Duke’s speech that day. Inevitably, he took a professional interest in what he heard. ‘He’s too old for me to manage a complete cure,’ he told his son, Laurie, who accompanied him. ‘But I could very nearly do it. I am sure of that.’ By an equally strange coincidence, he was to get the chance to do precisely that – although it was not to be until a few months later.

There have been different versions of how precisely the Duke was to become Logue’s most famous patient, but according to John Gordon of the
Sunday Express
, the chain of events that led to it was set in motion the following year when an Australian who had met Logue afterwards encountered a worried royal equerry.

‘I have to go to the United States to see if I can bring over a speech defect expert to look at the Duke of York,’ the equerry explained. ‘But it’s so hopeless. Nine experts here have seen him already. Every possible treatment has been tried. And not one of them has been the least successful.’