The King's Speech - Mark Logue [13]
As he had in Chicago, Logue sought out experts in his field, among them Grenville Kleiser, a Canadian-born elocutionist, who wrote a number of inspirational books and self-improvement guides on oratory and elocution. Logue also addressed the local public speaking club and gave talks at the YMCA. During a side trip to Boston, he met Leland Todd Powers, a leading elocutionist who had established the School of the Spoken Word, giving an address to students there and also at the prestigious Emerson School of Oratory.
Intriguingly, during his time on the East Coast Logue also met the future President Woodrow Wilson, who was then head of Princeton University. ‘An American of the finest type,’ Logue declared in an interview with the Perth Sunday Times about his journey when he got back.6 ‘He has keen piercing eyes that seem to look you through and through. A man of great intellect and character, but thoroughly genial and unassuming. Many people think he will be the next President of the United States.’ An avid collector of autographs, he treasured a letter written by Wilson in his neat and classical scholarly writing.
It was time to move on. On 3 May Lionel and Myrtle boarded the Teutonic, of the White Star line – the company that the following year was to launch the ill-fated Titanic – bound for London. Their time in America had been one long adventure. ‘We have had a lovely time in America and it is a delightful place to live – but a very bad place to bring up children,’ Logue wrote to his mother-in-law. ‘The Americans are a wonderful and strange people – it is a country of graft, dishonesty and prostitutes . . . And yet it is one of the most fascinating countries in the world.’
The Logues docked in Liverpool on 11 May and took the four-hour train journey down to London. The English countryside, proclaimed Myrtle in a letter to her mother, was a ‘wonderland, picturesque to an extreme, green fields all divided off into lots of these beautiful hawthorn hedges, and the canals with the barges being towed along by an old horse and man on the tow path’. But her first impressions of the capital of the Empire (after dinner and a walk around Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square) were not especially positive; it looked ‘provincial’ compared with New York.
London quickly grew on them, however, and Myrtle was soon enthusing about what they saw. They did the obvious sights such as the British Museum, the Tower of London, Madame Tussaud’s and Hampton Court and, of course, Buckingham Palace – to which Logue, in future years, was to become such a frequent visitor. Myrtle was not impressed by its exterior: ‘It’s a dirty, ugly grey old place, hideous beyond description, and in front of the gates is the beautiful new memorial to Victoria unveiled a month ago,’ she wrote. ‘This beautiful piece of work throws into relief the bare monstrosity of Buckingham Palace.’
They made plenty of visits to theatres where they saw, among others, the great Charles Hawtrey, whom they loved, and the Australian-born Marie Lohr, whom they did not: like all English girls, she was too thin and had reached fame far too quickly for her own good, thought Myrtle. She and Logue also ate out a lot, although they were disappointed by the fact that all the restaurants in London closed much earlier than in New York.
They travelled to Oxford, too, where friends of friends invited them for Eights Week, the annual competition in which the colleges’ rowers battle it out on the river. They spent the mornings visiting the various colleges and were delighted by the sight of the hundreds of gaily decorated punts from which the men in white flannels and girls in pretty dresses watched the rowers. A friend also took them punting, and they lay back in the cushions as he propelled them along the river under low branches, pointing out all the sights. They left Oxford with the greatest reluctance, after what Logue described in a letter to his mother-in-law as ‘six days in paradise’.
One of the highpoints of their visit to Britain was on 22 June when they were among the