King’s Speech, The

  On 5 February, a cold, but dry and sunny day, the King enjoyed a day of shooting. He was, according to his official biographer, ‘as carefree and happy as those about him had ever known him’.93 After a relaxed dinner, he retired to his room and, about midnight, went to bed. At 7.30 the following morning, a servant found him dead in his bed. The cause of death was not cancer, but rather a coronary thrombosis – a fatal blood clot to the heart – that he suffered soon after falling asleep.

  By this time, Elizabeth and Philip had reached the Kenyan stage of their trip: they had just returned to Sagana Lodge, one hundred miles north of Nairobi, after a night spent at Treetops Hotel, when word arrived of the King’s death; it fell to Philip to break the news to his wife. She was proclaimed Queen and the royal party quickly returned to Britain.

  On 26 February Logue wrote to the King’s widow, who, at the age of fifty-one had begun what was to be more than half a century as Queen Mother. He referred to the ‘wonderful letter’ that her late husband had sent in December and expressed his regrets that his own illness had prevented him from replying to it – until it was too late. ‘Since 1926 he honoured me, by allowing me to help him with his speech, & no man ever worked as hard as he did, & achieved such a grand result,’ Logue wrote. ‘During all those years you were a tower of strength to him & he has often told me how much he has owed to you, and the excellent result could never have been achieved if it had not been for your help. I have never forgotten your gracious help to me after my own beloved girl passed on.’

  In her reply two days later, the Queen Mother was equally fulsome in her praise of Logue. ‘I think that I know perhaps better than anyone just how much you helped the King, not only with his speech, but through that his whole life & outlook on life,’ she wrote. ‘I shall always be deeply grateful to you for all you did for him. He was such a splendid person and I don’t believe that he ever thought of himself at all. I did so hope that he might have been allowed a few years of comparative peace after the many anguished years he has had to battle through so bravely. But it was not to be. I do hope that you will soon be better.’

  That May, her daughter, now Queen Elizabeth II, mindful of how close Logue had been to her father, sent him a small gold snuff box that had belonged to the King, together with the following message:

  I am sending you this little box which always stood on the King’s table, & which he was rather fond of, as I am sure you would like a little personal souvenir of someone who was so grateful to you for all you did for him. The box was on his writing table, & I know that he would wish you to have it.

  I do hope that you are feeling better. I miss the King more & more.

  Yours v sincerely

  Elizabeth R.

  That December, the Queen gave her first Christmas message from Sandringham. ‘Each Christmas, at this time, my beloved father broadcast a message to his people in all parts of the world,’ she began. ‘As he used to do, I am speaking to you from my own home, where I am spending Christmas with my family.’ Speaking in clear, firm tones – and without a trace of the impediment that had so clouded her father’s life – she paid tribute to those still serving in the armed forces abroad and thanked her subjects for the ‘loyalty and affection’ they had shown her since her accession to the throne ten months earlier. ‘My father and my grandfather before him, worked hard all their lives to unite our peoples ever more closely, and to maintain its ideals which were so near to their hearts,’ she said. ‘I shall strive to carry on their work.’

  Logue did not record what he thought of the speech – or indeed whether he listened to it, at all. Either way, his services were no longer required and his health was failing. He spent the festivities in his flat surrounded by his three sons and their families: Valentine and his wife Anne, with their two-year-old daughter, Victoria; Laurie and Jo, with their children, Alexandra, 14, and Robert, 10, and Antony, with his future wife Elizabeth, whom he would marry less than a year later.

  Shortly after New Year, Logue was taken ill for the last time. He remained bedridden for more than three months, and a live-in nurse was employed to look after him, but he eventually fell into a coma. He died on 12 April 1953 of kidney failure, less than two months after his seventy-third birthday. Among his effects were two invitations to the Queen’s coronation, to be held that June – the second presumably sent because he had been too sick to respond to the first.

  The obituaries that appeared in Britain, Australia and America were brief. ‘Mr Lionel Logue, C.V.O., who died yesterday at the age of 73, was one of the leading specialists in the treatment of speech defects and was mainly responsible for helping King George VI to overcome the impediment in his speech,’ wrote The Times, which sandwiched him between the former president of Poland and the head of an American engineering company. ‘He was on close personal terms with the King for a long time.’ As for his techniques, the obituary writer merely noted: ‘An important part of Logue’s method was his instruction in how to breathe properly and so produce speed without strain.’

  A few days later, readers added their comments: ‘May I be allowed, through the courtesy of your columns, to pay a humble tribute to the great work of Mr Lionel Logue,’ wrote a Mr J. C. Wimbusch. ‘As a patient of his in 1926, I can testify to the fact that his patience was magnificent and his sympathy almost superhuman. It was at his house in Bolton Gardens that I was introduced to the late King, then Duke of York. There must be thousands of people who, like myself, are living to bless the name of Lionel Logue.’94

  Logue’s funeral was held on 17 April at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton. He was cremated. Both the Queen and the Queen Mother sent representatives, as did the Australian High Commissioner. While Logue’s work with the King had brought him prominence and honours – although strangely, given the closeness of their relationship, not a knighthood – it had not made him a wealthy man. In his will, details of which were published in The Times on 6 October, he left a fairly modest £8,605 – the equivalent of about £180,000 today.

  Even with the benefit of more than half a century’s worth of hindsight, establishing quite how Logue succeeded with the King where those who preceded him had failed still remains something of a challenge. The various breathing exercises on which he put such emphasis certainly appear to have helped – the King, for one, appears to have been convinced of that. Important, too, was the effort that Logue put into going through the texts of the various speeches that had been written for him, removing words and phrases that he knew could potentially trip up his royal pupil. In a sense, though, this was not so much curing the problem, as avoiding it – yet there seems little doubt that by eliminating the largest of such stumbling blocks, Logue helped to build up the King’s confidence, ensuring that the speech as a whole, with all the other lesser challenges it contained, proved less daunting.

  Ultimately, though, the crucial factor appears to have been the way in which Logue, from the start, managed to persuade his patient that his was no deep seated psychological affliction, but rather an almost mechanical problem that could be overcome through hard work and determination. An important part of this was the closeness of the relationship that developed between the two men, which was helped by Logue’s no-nonsense approach. By insisting from the beginning that they should meet in his practice at Harley Street or at his own home, rather than on royal territory, Logue had made clear his intention that the King should be his patient; over the years this was to turn into a genuine friendship.

  That being said, the two men’s very different positions in what was still a very class-ridden society meant that there were limits to how close this relationship could be – especially after Bertie became King. The tone, not just of Logue’s letters but also of entries in his diary, both of which have been quoted extensively in this book, reveal a deep respect not just for the King as a person but also for the institution of monarchy. Indeed, to a modern reader, the tone Logue adopts when writing of the King can seem fawning – especially more so in the case of
the Queen Mother.

  The last word belongs to one of the few people still alive at the time of writing who actually knew Logue well – his daughter-in-law Anne, who was married to his middle son Valentine, and who, in the summer of 2010, although already in her early nineties, remained enviably sharp and sprightly. Her opinions appeared to be given further weight by her career, which had culminated in her becoming Consultant in Child Psychiatry at the Middlesex Undergraduate Teaching Hospital.

  Asked about the secret of her father-in-law’s success, Anne, too, was unable to give a definitive answer, but thought it was largely due to the rapport that Logue had developed with the future King when his patient was still a young man, rather than to any particular treatment. ‘Anyone can do tongue twisters and breathing exercises, but he was a first class psychotherapist,’ she said. ‘He was a super good daddy where George V had been a ghastly one.’

  ‘[Lionel] would never talk about what he did. But when you look at what happened and what he was dealing with, that can be the only answer. The King had heaps of other people who had been no use to him. Why else did he stay with him for such a long time?’

  Notes

  1 John W. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI, His Life and Reign, London: Macmillan, 1958, p. 400.

  2Ibid., p. 312.

  3Time, 16 May 1938.

  4 Quoted in Joy Damousi, ‘“The Australian has a lazy way of talking”: Australian Character and Accent, 1920s–1940s’, in Joy Damousi and Desley Deacon (eds), Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound, Canberra: ANU Press, 2007, pp. 83–96.

  5 Lionel Logue papers, 25 March 1911.

  6Sunday Times (Perth), 20 August 1911.

  7West Australian, 27 May 1912.

  8Sun (Kalgoorlie), 27 September 1914.

  9 The following dialogue is taken from an account by John Gordon in the Sunday Express.

  10 Marcel E. Wingate, Stuttering: A Short History of a Curious Disorder, Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1997, p.11.

  11Ibid., p. xx.

  12Star, 11 January 1926.

  13Pittsburgh Press, 1 December 1928.

  14 Reported in the Daily Express, Friday 21 August 1925 and reproduced in full in Radio Times on 25 September. The BBC became the British Broadcasting Corporation only in 1926.

  15 John Gore, King George V, London: John Murray.

  16 Sarah Bradford, The Reluctant King: The Life and Reign of George VI 1895–1952, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990, p.18.

  17Ibid., p. 18.

  18Ibid., p. 22.

  19Ibid., p. 40.

  20Ibid., p. 33.

  21 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 42.

  22 Bradford, op. cit., p. 48.

  23 Lambert and Hamilton quoted in ibid., p. 57.

  24Ibid., p. 70.

  25 Robert Rhodes James, A Spirit Undaunted: The Political Role Of George VI, London: Little, Brown, 1998, p. 92.

  26 Davidson papers quoted in ibid., p. 96.

  27Pittsburgh Press, 1 December 1928.

  28 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 207.

  29Ibid., p. 208.

  30Ibid.

  31 Taylor Darbyshire, The Duke of York: 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, London: Hutchinson and Co., 1929, p. 90.

  32 Michael Thornton, email correspondence with the author, July 2010.

  33 Darbyshire, op.cit., p. 22.

  34Scotsman, 2 December 1926.

  35 Lionel Logue papers, 5 January 1927.

  36 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 215.

  37Ibid., p. 216.

  38 Lionel Logue papers, 25 January 1927.

  39Ibid., 14 February 1927.

  40 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 218.

  41 Reginald Pound, Harley Street, London: Michael Joseph, 1967, p. 157.

  42 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 227.

  43Ibid., p. 228.

  44Ibid., p. 230.

  45 Lionel Logue papers.

  46 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 230.

  47 Lionel Logue papers.

  48Ibid.

  49 Pound, op. cit., p. 157.

  50Evening Standard (London), 12 June 1928; North-Eastern Daily Gazette, 13 July 1928; Evening News (London), 24 October 1928; Daily Sketch, 28 November 1928; Yorkshire Evening News, 4 December 1928.

  51 Lionel Logue papers, 15 December 1928.

  52 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 251.

  53 This and the following extracts from the Logue–Duke correspondence in the Lionel Logue papers.

  54 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 258.

  55 Lionel Logue papers, 12 February 1929.

  56Ibid., 16 and 23 May 1934.

  57 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 263.

  58 James Lees-Milne, The Enigmatic Edwardian: The Life of Reginald, 2nd Viscount Esher, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1986, p. 301, quoted in David Loades, Princes of Wales: Royal Heirs in Waiting, Kew: The National Archives, 2008, p. 228.

  59 Diana Vreeland, DV, New York: Knopf, 1984, quoted in Loades, op. cit., p. 230.

  60 HRH The Duke of Windsor, A King’s Story, London: Cassell, 1951, p. 254–5.

  61 Quoted in Christopher Warwick, Abdication, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1986.

  62 See Michael Bloch, The Reign and Abdication of King Edward VIII, London: Bantam Press, 1990.

  63Time, 9 November 1936.

  64 Philip Ziegler, ‘Churchill and the Monarchy, History Today, Vol. 43, 1 March 1993.

  65 Lionel Logue papers, 28 October 1936.

  66 William Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: The Official Biography, London: Macmillan, 2009, p. 376.

  67 Rhodes James, op. cit., p. 112.

  68Ibid., p. 113.

  69 Shawcross, op. cit., p. 380.

  70 Lionel Logue papers, 14 December 1936.

  71Time, 21 December 1936.

  72 Lionel Logue papers.

  73 Logue diary extracts: Lionel Logue papers.

  74Sun, 18 January 1938.

  75 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 379.

  76Ibid., p. 383.

  77Ibid., p. 390.

  78Ibid., p. 392.

  79Ibid., p. 394.

  80Ibid.

  81 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 405.

  82 Shawcross, op. cit., p. 488.

  83 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 406.

  84Ibid., p. 429.

  85Ibid., p. 449.

  86Ibid., p. 553.

  87 Lionel Logue papers, 29 December 1943.

  88 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 608.

  89Ibid., p. 610.

  90 Interview with the author, June 2010.

  91 Lionel Logue papers, 10 December 1948.

  92Daily Express, 7 February 1952.

  93 Wheeler-Bennett, op. cit., p. 803.

  94Times obituary, 13 April 1953; response by J.M. Wimbusch, The Times, 17 April 1953.