The King's Speech (3 page)

‘A fanfare of trumpets, and the King’s procession was soon advancing, a blaze of gold and crimson,’ wrote Logue in the diary in which he was to record much of his life in Britain. ‘And at the end the man whom I had served for 10 years, with all my heart and soul comes, as he advances slowly towards us, looking rather pale, but every inch a King. My heart creeps up into my throat, as I realise that this man whom I serve, is to be made King of England.’

As Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, led the coronation service, Logue was listening probably more intently than anyone else present in the Abbey, even though the toothache from which he was suffering kept threatening to distract him. The King seemed nervous to him at the beginning, and Logue’s heart missed a beat when he started the oath, but on the whole he spoke well. When it was all over, Logue was jubilant: ‘The King spoke with a beautiful inflexion,’ he told a journalist.

In fact, given the pressure the King was under, it was a wonder he had spoken his words so clearly: while holding the book with the form of service for him to read, the Archbishop had inadvertently covered the words of the Oath with his thumb. Nor was that the only mishap: when the Lord Great Chamberlain started to dress the King in his robes, his hands were shaking so much he nearly put the hilt of the sword under the King’s chin rather attaching it to the belt, where it should have been. And then, as the King sat up from the Coronation Chair, a bishop trod on his robe, almost causing him to fall over until the King ordered him pretty sharply to get off it.

Such hitches were an inevitable accompaniment to a British coronation; one of the King’s main preoccupations was that Lang wouldn’t put the crown on back to front, as had happened in the past, and so he had arranged that a small line of thin red cotton be inserted under one of the principal jewels at the front. Some over-zealous person had obviously removed it in the meantime, and the King was never quite sure it was the right way round. Coronations of earlier monarchs had bordered on farce: George III’s in 1761 was held up for three hours after the sword of state went missing, while his son and successor George IV’s was overshadowed by his row with his estranged and hated wife, Caroline of Brunswick, who had to be forcibly prevented from entering the Abbey.

None of these current minor hitches was noticed by the congregation, let alone by the thousands of people who were still lining the streets of London despite the worsening weather. When the service was over, the King and Queen took the Gold Coach by the long route back to Buckingham Palace. By now it was pouring with rain, but this did not seem to deter the crowd who cheered them enthusiastically as they drove past. Logue and Myrtle were relaxing, eating sandwiches and the chocolate they had brought with them when, at 3.30, an amplified voice announced: ‘Those in block J can proceed to the cars.’ They then passed down to the entrance and another thirty minutes later their car was called and they fell into it, Logue almost tripping over that sword. They crossed back over Westminster Bridge, past the now deserted viewing stands, and reached home by 4.30. Now suffering from a headache as well as toothache, Logue took to his bed for a nap.

However momentous, the coronation was only part of what the King faced that day. At eight that evening he was to face an even greater ordeal: a live radio address to be broadcast to the people of the United Kingdom and her vast Empire – and again Logue was to be at his side. The speech was due to last only a few minutes, but it was no less nerve-racking for that. Over the years, the King had developed a particular terror of the microphone, which made a radio address seem even more of a challenge than a speech to a live audience. Nor was Sir John Reith, the director-general of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which had been created by Royal Charter a decade earlier, making things easier for him: he insisted that the King should broadcast live.

For weeks running up to the broadcast, Logue had been working with the King on the text. After decidedly mixed rehearsals, the two men seemed confident enough – but they were not taking any chances. Over the previous few days, Robert Wood, one of the BBC’s most experienced sound engineers and an expert at the emerging art of the outside broadcast, had made recordings of their various practice sessions on gramophone records, including a specially edited one that combined all the best passages in one. Even so, Logue was still feeling nervous as a car brought him back to the Palace at 7 p.m.

When he arrived he joined Alexander Hardinge, the King’s private secretary, and Reith for a whisky and soda. As the three men stood drinking, word came down from upstairs that the King was ready for Logue. To the Australian’s eye, the King looked in good shape, despite what had already been an extremely emotional day. They went through the speech once at the microphone and then returned to his room, where they were joined by the Queen, who looked tired but happy.

Logue could sense the King’s nerves, however, and to take his mind off the ordeal ahead, Logue kept him chatting about the events of the day right up until the moment just after eight o’clock when the opening notes of the National Anthem came through the loudspeakers.

‘Good Luck, Bertie,’ said the Queen as her husband walked up to the microphone.

‘It is with a very full heart I speak to you tonight,’ the King began, his words relayed by the BBC not just to his subjects in Britain but to those in the farflung Empire, including Logue’s homeland. ‘Never before has a newly crowned King been able to talk to all his peoples in their own homes on the day of his coronation . . .’

Perspiration was running down Logue’s back.

‘The Queen and I wish health and happiness to you all, and we do not forget at this time of celebration those who are living under the shadow of sickness,’ the King continued, ‘beautifully’, as Logue thought.

‘I cannot find words with which to thank you for your love and loyalty to the Queen and myself . . . I will only say this: that if in the coming years I can show my gratitude in service to you, that is the way above all others that I should choose . . . The Queen and I will always keep in our hearts the inspiration of this day. May we ever be worthy of the goodwill which I am proud to think surrounds us at the outset of my reign. I thank you from my heart, and may God bless you all.’

By the time the speech was over, Logue was so worked up he couldn’t talk. The King handed Wood his Coronation Medal and, shortly afterwards, the Queen joined them. ‘It was wonderful, Bertie, much better than the record,’ she told him.

The King bade farewell to Wood and, turning to Logue, pressed his hand as he said, ‘Good night, Logue, I thank you very much.’ The Queen did the same, her blue eyes shining as, overcome by the occasion, he replied, ‘The greatest thing in my life, your Majesty, is being able to serve you.’

‘Good night. Thank you,’ she repeated, before adding softly, ‘God bless you.’

Tears began to well in Logue’s eyes, and he felt like a fool as he went downstairs to Hardinge’s room, where he had another whisky and soda and immediately regretted it. It was, he reflected later, a silly thing to do on an empty stomach, as the whole world began to spin around and his speech to slur. He nevertheless set off with Hardinge in the car, dropping him off at St James’s before turning south-east towards home. As he looked back over the momentous events of the day, Logue’s mind kept turning to the moment when the Queen had said to him ‘God bless you’ – that, and how he really ought to get his tooth fixed.

Logue spent the next day almost entirely in bed, ignoring the insistent ring of the telephone as his friends called to pass on their congratulations. The newspapers’ verdict on the speech was overwhelmingly positive. ‘The King’s voice last night was strong and deep, resembling to a startling degree the voice of his father,’ reported the
Star
. ‘His words came through firmly, clearly – and without hesitation.’ Both men couldn’t have wished for a better accolade.

CHAPTER TWO
The ‘common colonial’

Adelaide in the 1880s

A
delaide in the 1880s was a city overflowing with civic pride. Named in honour of Queen Adelaide, the German-born consort of King William IV, it had been founded in 1836 as the planned capital of a freely settled British province in Australia. It was laid out in a grid pattern, interspaced by wide boulevards and large public squares, and surrounded by parkland. By the time of its half centenary, it had become a comfortable place to live: from 1860 residents had been able to enjoy water piped in from the Thorndon Park reservoir, horse-drawn trams and railways made it easy to move around, and by night the streets were lit by gas lights. In 1874 it acquired a university; seven years later, the South Australian Art Gallery opened its doors for the first time.

It was here, close to College Town on the outskirts of the city, that Lionel George Logue was born on 26 February 1880, the eldest of four children. His grandfather, Edward Logue, originally a Dubliner, had arrived in 1850 and set up Logue’s Brewery on King William Street. The city at this time had dozens of independent breweries, but Edward Logue’s did especially well; the
Adelaide Observer
attributed its success to the good water and the ‘more than ordinary skill’ of the proprietor, who was able to produce ‘ale of a character which enables him to compete successfully with all other manufacturers of the nut brown creature comfort’.

Logue never knew his grandfather; Edward died in 1868, and his brewery was taken over by his widow Sarah, and her business partner Edwin Smith, who later bought her out. After several mergers, the original business was eventually to become part of the South Australian Brewing Company.

Logue’s father George, who was born in 1856 in Adelaide, was educated at St Peter’s College and, after leaving school, went to work at the brewery, rising to the position of accountant. He later became licensee of the Burnside Hotel, which he ran together with his wife Lavinia, and then took over the Elephant and Castle Hotel, which still stands today on West Terrace. It was, Logue recalled, a perfect childhood. ‘I had a wonderfully happy home, as we were a very united family.’

Logue was sent to school at Prince Alfred College, one of Adelaide’s oldest boys’ schools and arch rival of St Peter’s. The school enjoyed considerable success both academically and in sports, especially cricket and Australian Rules Football. By his own admission, however, Logue struggled to find an academic subject at which he excelled. His epiphany came unexpectedly: kept back for detention one day, he opened a book at random: it was Longfellow’s
The Song of Hiawatha
. The words seemed to leap out of the page at him:

Then lagoo, the great boaster,
He the marvellous story-teller,
He the traveller and the talker,
He the friend of old Nokomis,
Made a bow for Hiawatha;

Logue went on reading for an hour, entranced by the words. Here was something that really mattered: rhythm – and he had found the door that led him into it.

Even as a young boy, he had been more interested in voices than faces; as the years passed, his interest and fascination in voices grew. In those days, far more emphasis was put on elocution than today: every year in Adelaide Town Hall, four boys who were the best speakers would recite and compete for the elocution prize. Logue, of course, was among the winners.

He left school at sixteen and went to study with Edward Reeves, a Salford-born teacher of elocution who had emigrated with his family to New Zealand as a child before moving to Adelaide in 1878. Reeves taught elocution to his pupils by day and gave ‘recitals’ to packed audiences in the Victoria Hall or other venues by night. Dickens was one of his specialities. Such recitals were an extraordinary feat not just of diction but of memory: a review in the
Register
of 22 December 1894 described his performance of
A Christmas Carol
in glowing terms: ‘For two hours and a quarter, Mr Reeves, without the aid of note, related the fascinating story,’ it reported. ‘Rounds of applause frequently interrupted the reciter, and as he concluded the carol with Tiny Tim’s “God Bless us every one”, he was accorded an ovation which testified in a most unmistakable manner to the hearty appreciation of the house.’

In an era before television, radio or the cinema, such ‘recitals’ were a popular form of entertainment. Their popularity also appears to have reflected a particular interest in speech and elocution throughout the English-speaking world. What could be called the elocution movement had begun to emerge in England in the late eighteenth century as part of a growing emphasis on the importance of public speaking. People were becoming more literate and society gradually more democratic – all of which led to greater attention being paid to the quality of public speakers, whether politicians, lawyers or, indeed, clergymen. The movement took off particularly in America: both Yale and Harvard instituted separate instruction in elocution in the 1830s, and by the second half of the century it was a required subject in many colleges throughout the United States. In schools, particular emphasis was put on reading aloud, which meant special attention was paid to articulation, enunciation and pronunciation. All this went hand in hand with an interest in oratory and rhetoric.