The King's Speech (20 page)

The oval table that George V had used to broadcast from had been pushed into a corner. In the centre of the room was a large desk with two microphones and the red light in the centre. The King, Logue found, was always much easier and less constrained in his speech when he could walk about – it made him laugh when he used to see posed photographs of him in the newspapers seated at a table.

Logue opened the window so there would be plenty of fresh air. They then joined R. H. Wood of the BBC who was in his own room. Quiet and fair haired, Wood probably knew more about the fledgling art of outside broadcasting than anyone else in Britain. It was Wood who had planned the installation of microphones for the coronation, and for that evening’s speech. He had also been in charge of the technical side of George V’s last broadcast, bringing along two microphones, cue lights and amplifiers as insurance against a breakdown. With him were six other men and all the paraphernalia of broadcasting: instruments, a telephone and a large loudspeaker through which they were to hear a record of the speech when it was relayed from Broadcasting House. The King was due to start talking at 3 p.m. precisely.

Despite the fog and gloom, everyone was in high spirits. Logue and the King went back to the microphone to try out the speech. As they did so, they could hear it booming back through the large radiogram in the room next door. So this was switched off and the rest of the royal family and their guests trooped up to the nursery to listen from there instead.

At five minutes to three, the King lit a cigarette and began to walk to and fro. Wood tried the red light to see it was working properly and they synchronized their watches. With one minute to go, the King threw his cigarette into the fireplace and stood with his hands behind his back, waiting. The red light flicked four times, and he stepped up to the microphone. The red light ceased for a moment and then came back on full, and he began to speak in a beautifully modulated voice.

‘Many of you will remember the Christmas broadcasts of former years, when my father spoke to his peoples, at home and overseas, as the revered head of a great family . . .’

He was speaking too quickly: close to a hundred words a minute, rather than the eighty-five that Wood had wanted. He also had trouble with one of the words, running on to it too quickly.

‘His words brought happiness into the homes and into the hearts of listeners all over the world,’ the King continued. Logue was pleased to note that he was pulling himself up.

Then, high up in the speech – an inclusion that was to be noted by the newspapers – came the insistence that this was to be a one-off rather than a tradition: ‘I cannot aspire to take his place – nor do I think that you would wish me to carry on, unvaried, a tradition so personal to him.’

The King continued at the same pace, sweetly towards the end, when he paused. After precisely three minutes and twenty seconds, it was all over. ‘Just a shade too long on two words through trying to get too much of an emphasis,’ Logue recorded.

But to the King, he said: ‘May I be the first to congratulate you, Sire, on your first Christmas Broadcast.’ The King shook his hand, gave what Logue described as ‘that lovely schoolboy grin of his’, and said, ‘Let’s go inside.’

They went back into the reception room where the royal family and guests were thronging down from the nursery. They crowded round the King and they, too, congratulated him. It was now 3.20 and the royal family and visitors began to disperse: some went to their rooms; others went out for a short walk. The King, his wife and mother went back into Wood’s room to wait and hear the broadcast played back.

Queen Mary, aged seventy, was as interested as a schoolgirl in all the paraphernalia and, after shaking hands with all the men, had the instruments explained to her. Then the telephone rang. Wood took the call and said, ‘London is now ready to play it back to us, your Majesty.’ Queen Mary sat in front of the microphone and Logue stood with his hand on the chair. The King was leaning against the wall, and the Queen, her face animated and flushed, was standing in the doorway.

Then the opening bars of ‘God save the King’ came through and they heard the speech back again. When it was over, Queen Mary thanked them all and asked Wood: ‘Was all this done when my late husband broadcasted and were all you gentlemen here?’

‘Yes, your Majesty,’ replied Wood.

‘And I knew nothing about it,’ replied Mary, rather sadly as it seemed to Logue.

As they passed through the microphone room, her daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth, stopped Logue and, putting her hand on his shoulder, said: ‘Mr Logue, I do not know that Bertie and myself can ever thank you enough for what you have done for him. Just look at him now. I do not think I have ever known him so light-hearted and happy.’

Logue was overcome with emotion, and it was as much as he could do to stop tears trickling down his cheeks. They then walked through into the reception room and he, the King and the Queen sat in front of the fire for nearly an hour, talking through the many things that had happened in the seven months since the coronation.

Just before it was time for tea, the King stood up. ‘Oh, Logue, I want to speak to you,’ he said. Logue followed him to the library. He took from his desk a picture of himself, the Queen and the little princesses in their coronation robes, which they both had autographed, as well as a box. Inside was a beautiful replica of a silver tobacco box, and a pair of gold sleeve links in black enamel with the royal arms and Crown.

Logue was too overcome to say much, but the King patted him on the back. ‘I do not know that I can ever thank you enough for all that you have done for me,’ he said.

Tea was another informal meal: the Queen was at one end of the table and Lady May Cambridge at the other. Afterwards, they all went down to the big decorated ballroom, where Logue was to receive an insight into the highly organized ritual of royal present-giving. In the centre of the room was a large Christmas tree stretching up to the roof, beautifully decorated. All around the room huge trestle tables had been put up, covered in white paper. They were about three feet wide and divided every three feet by a blue ribbon, giving everyone a space three feet square. Each space was marked with a name tag, starting with the King and Queen, and inside was that person’s presents.

The King had given the Queen a lovely sapphire coronet, but Logue was struck by the simplicity of both the whole procedure and the other presents, especially those given to the children. Then they all played ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ with the two princesses and the other royal children.

For Logue, the time went by almost in a dream until at 6.30 Commander Lang, the equerry, pointed out that if he was going to make his train back to London he would have to set off presently, especially because of the fog. Earlier that afternoon, the Queen had offered to Logue to stay the night if he wanted, but he was reluctant to outstay his welcome. There was also the matter of his own guests waiting for him back at his home in Sydenham.

In the meantime the King, his wife and mother had gone into the nearby long room to hand out presents to staff and people on the estate, but when the equerry whispered to them that Logue was leaving, they broke off to bid him farewell.

So Logue bowed over the two queens’ hands and they both thanked him sweetly for what he had done, and then the King shook his hand and said how much he appreciated his having sacrificed Christmas dinner on his behalf. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘as there is no dining car on the train I have arranged for a hamper to be left for you.’

Outside it was now terribly foggy, but the driver somehow made it to Wolferton in good time and Logue was soon on the train back to London, accompanied by a hamper containing a beautiful Christmas dinner with the King’s compliments. Despite the fog, the train pulled into Liverpool Street three minutes ahead of schedule. Laurie, who had left his own Christmas dinner, was waiting to bring his father home. By 10.45 Logue was receiving another welcome in his own home where all the guests seemed well and happy. And so ended what he described as ‘one of the most wonderful days I have ever had in my life’.

Myrtle did not join her husband at Sandringham. That spring, she had begun to suffer from an inflamed gall bladder, and on 5 July was operated on. The surgeon removed fourteen stones, ‘enough to make a rockery’, as she put it in a letter to her brother Rupert. She spent more than three weeks in hospital before she was discharged, but suffered a relapse ten days later, when a splinter of stone left behind began to move. As she lurched from crisis to crisis, Lionel was distraught at the possibility of losing the woman who had been by his side for most of his adult life. That March, they had celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary – ‘a terrible time to spend with one woman and yet looking back there are few things that I would like altered,’ he wrote. ‘It has been a very wonderful time, and she has always been behind me to give me the extra little shove I want.’

Myrtle’s doctors wanted to spare her the British winter and prescribed a few months in Australia to recuperate. She set off on 4 November 1937 from Southampton as one of the 499 passengers aboard the 8,640-ton
Jervis Bay
of the Aberdeen and Commonwealth Line. She arrived at Fremantle, in Western Australia, on 5 December, spent four weeks in Perth and then continued eastwards across the country. She wasn’t due to return to Britain until the following April.

It was the first time Myrtle had been home since she and Lionel had left more than a decade earlier. Thanks to her husband’s success and proximity to the monarch, she was treated as a celebrity: parties, concerts and recitals were thrown in her honour, and she was a guest of the Governor of Victoria, Lord Huntingfield, and his wife at Government House. Journalists flocked to interview the woman described as the ‘wife of King George’s voice specialist’, and the society columns of the newspapers recorded where she went, whom she met and what she was wearing. Myrtle seemed only too happy to bask in the reflected glory, even though she suffered a few health scares along the way – at one stage she was so bad they thought they would have to take her to Adelaide in an ambulance, but she rallied until she was ‘a bit yellow but able to carry on’.

In one newspaper interview, published under the headline ‘Australians Thrive in London’, Myrtle painted a rosy picture of the life that she and her compatriots enjoyed in the mother country, noting how many of them had achieved prominence in London. ‘I put it down to their self-confidence and freedom from fear,’ she declared. ‘They are most capable and adaptable, and seem to fall on their feet in every walk of life.’ She also described how her own ‘lovely home’ on Sydenham Hill had become a ‘calling-point’ for Australians visiting Britain.

While Lionel was always discreet when it came to talking about his work, his wife couldn’t stop herself from discussing the King, boasting how he had personally invited her and her husband to his coronation. The monarch, she told one interviewer, is ‘the hardest worker in the world’, a man with ‘enormous vitality and strength’ that enables him to cope with his workload. She spoke warmly of his ‘particularly happy smile – a grin you could call it’ and his ‘wonderful sense of humour’.

‘If all my husband’s patients showed the grit and determination of the King all his cures would be 100 per cent,’ she told another interviewer. ‘His Majesty frequently comes to our house – he is most charming. So are the Princesses, who are completely unspoilt, although Margaret Rose is the more joyous – Elizabeth has rather more sense of responsibility.

‘They both speak beautifully and are simple and unassuming,’ she added. ‘My husband goes to the Palace every night now, and always the little Princesses come in to say “Goodnight, Daddy”.’
⁷⁴

Quite what Myrtle’s husband thought about such indiscretions is not clear. His disapproval cannot have been that strong, however, since the newspaper cuttings in which his wife was quoted were all diligently glued in his scrapbook.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Path to War

George VI and Queen Elizabeth en route to Canada, 1939

W
hile Myrtle was making her triumphal progress through Australia, Europe was moving inexorably towards war. For several years, as part of his pursuit of
Lebensraum
, Hitler had been turning his attention to the area along the German border occupied largely by German-speaking people. In 1935, following a plebiscite, the Saar region was united with Germany. Then in early 1938 came
Anschluss
with Austria. This left Czechoslovakia, a tempting target with its substantial ethnic German population, who formed a majority in some districts in the Sudetenland. The landlocked country was also hemmed in on three sides. When, in the spring and summer of 1938, some Sudeten Germans began to agitate for autonomy or even union with Germany, Hitler took it as the excuse he needed to act.

Czechoslovakia had a well-trained army, but its government knew that it would prove no match for the might of the Nazi war machine. The Czechs needed the support of Britain and France, but London and Paris were about to hang them out to dry. That September, Chamberlain met Hitler at his lair at Berchtesgaden, where it was agreed that Germany could annexe the Sudetenland, provided a majority of its inhabitants voted in favour in a plebiscite. Czechoslovakia’s remaining rump would then receive international guarantees of its independence. But when Chamberlain flew back to see the Nazi leader in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn, on 22 September, Hitler brushed aside the previous agreement.