The King's Speech - Mark Logue [10]
In 1902, aged twenty-two, Logue became Reeves’s secretary and assistant teacher, while also studying at the Elder Conservatorium of Music which had been established in 1898 ‘for the purpose of providing a complete system of instruction in the Art and Science of Music’, thanks to a bequest from the wealthy Scottish-born philanthropist Sir Thomas Elder.
Like his teacher, Logue started giving recitals; he also became involved in amateur dramatics. An event on the evening of Wednesday 19 March 1902 at the YWCA in Adelaide allowed him to show off his prowess in both. ‘The hall was filled, and the audience was very appreciative,’ reported the local newspaper, the Advertiser the next day. ‘Mr. Logue looks young, but he possesses a clear, powerful voice and a graceful stage presence. He evidenced in his selections considerable dramatic talent – scarcely mature at present, however – and an artistic appreciation of characters he impersonated and of stories he was telling.’ The newspaper’s critic said Logue had been successful in all the poems and excerpts he had tried, although he was at his best in W. E. Aytoun’s ‘Edinburgh After Flodden’.
Logue’s pride at such reviews was tempered by tragedy: on 17 November that year his father died after a long and painful battle with cirrhosis of the liver at the age of just forty-seven. The following day an obituary of George Logue was published in the Advertiser and his funeral was attended by a large number of mourners.
Now twenty-three, Logue was feeling confident enough to set up on his own in Adelaide as an elocution teacher. ‘Lionel Logue begs to announce that he has commenced the practice of his profession, and will be in attendance at his rooms, No. 43, Grenfell Buildings, Grenfell Street, on and after April 27. Prospectus on Application,’ read a notice published three days earlier in the Advertiser. At the same time he was continuing his recitals and even set up the Lionel Logue Dramatic and Comedy Company.
On 11 August 1904 the Advertiser published a particularly effusive review of an ‘elocutionary recital’ that Logue had given at the Lyric Club the evening before, under the headline, ‘Next to being born an Englishman, I would be what I am – a “common colonial”.’ Logue, the reviewer noted, was the ‘happy possessor of a singularly musical voice, a refined intonation, and a graceful mastery of gesture, in which there is no suspicion of redundancy’. It concluded: ‘Mr. Logue has nothing to fear from his competitors, and his recital was characterised by dramatic expression, purity of enunciation, and a keen appreciation of humour which won him the enthusiastic approval of the audience.’
Then came one of the first of several upheavals in Logue’s life. Despite his growing reputation in Adelaide, he decided to up sticks and move more than 2,000 kilometres westwards to work with an electrical engineering firm involved in installing the first electricity supply at the gold mines in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. The town had grown fast since the discovery of rich alluvial gold deposits in the early 1890s had set off a gold rush. By 1903 Kalgoorlie boasted a population of 30,000, along with ninety-three hotels and eight breweries. The day of the individual prospector was over, however, and large-scale deep underground mining had begun to predominate.
Logue did not stay long, but after completing his contract he had saved up enough money to relax for a few months while he planned the next stage in his life. Not surprisingly, he decided to continue on westwards to the more civilized surroundings of Perth, the state capital. Western Australia had been traditionally regarded as remote and unimportant by those in the east, but that had been changed by