The King's Speech - Mark Logue [11]
Installed in Perth, Logue set up another elocution school and also founded the city’s public speaking club in 1908. The previous year he had met Myrtle Gruenert, a clerk, who at twenty-two was five years his junior, and who shared his passion for amateur dramatics. An imposing young woman several inches taller than Lionel, she was of German stock: her grandfather, Oskar Gruenert, had come from Saxony in eastern Germany. Her father, Francis, an accountant, was proud of his Germanic roots and was secretary of the Verein Germania club in Western Australia. Francis had been unwell for some time and in August 1905 he had died suddenly aged just forty-eight, leaving behind his wife, Myrtle, forty-seven, Myrtle, then twenty, and her brother, Rupert.
Lionel and Myrtle were married on 20 March 1907 at St George’s Cathedral by the Dean of Perth; the event was apparently sufficiently important to warrant a write-up in the next day’s edition of the West Australian. The bride, as the newspaper reported, was beautiful in a wedding dress of white chiffon glacé silk. A white tulle veil, embroidered at the corners with floral sprays in white silk, was arranged coronetwise on her hair. After the ceremony, there was a reception at the Alexandra Tea Rooms in Hay Street, where Myrtle’s mother, dressed in a frock of deep blue chiffon voile, received the guests. The pair spent their honeymoon in Margaret River south of Perth, visiting the caves which had a few years earlier become a major tourist attraction.
The newlyweds went to live at 9, Emerald Hill Terrace. When their first child, Laurie Paris Logue, was born on 7 October 1908, they moved to Collin Street. Myrtle, with whom Logue was to spend the next four decades, was a formidable and energetic character. ‘My wife is a most athletic woman,’ he told a newspaper interviewer several years later. ‘She fences, boxes, swims, and golfs, is a good actress and a fine wife.’ She was, he once declared, his ‘spur to greater things’.
It appears to have been Myrtle’s idea, two years later, that the two of them should set off for six months on an ambitious round-the-world tour, eastwards through Australia, on across the Pacific to Canada and the United States and then, after crossing America, back home via Britain and Europe. The trip was to be paid for partly from money lent them by Lionel’s uncle, Paris Nesbit, a colourful lawyer turned politician. Little Laurie, whose second birthday they had only just celebrated, was to be left behind in the care of Myrtle’s mother, Myra.
The inspiration was, in part, a simple desire to see the world. But Logue was also keen to widen his professional experience. By now he had become a well-known figure in Perth through his recitals and the many plays he had directed or appeared in. He was also building up his private practice, working with politicians and other prominent local people to improve their voice production – even though, when asked by a reporter to name some of his patients, he was the soul of discretion: ‘Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory is an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study,’ he said, by way of explanation.
America, in particular, was home to many of the leading names in the field of elocution and oratory from whom Logue was keen to learn. Both he and Myrtle also apparently thought that if they liked what they saw on their travels they might settle abroad, sending for their son and Myrtle’s mother to join them. The many long letters that Myrtle (and, to a lesser extent, Logue) wrote home were to provide a vivid picture of their voyage.
They set off from home on Christmas Day, 1910, sailing eastwards around Australia, via Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney to Brisbane, with stops of several days in each. Sydney Harbour, according to Myrtle, was ‘wonderful – superb – no language can fit it’. She was less impressed by Brisbane, which