The King's Speech - Mark Logue [14]
Armed with the pass, Logue and Kaufmann strolled down at 9.30 and were permitted by the police to pass through to a position just a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace from which they enjoyed a magnificent view of the King and Queen in their golden carriage. ‘It was a very enthusiastic crowd, but the English are all afraid to make a noise,’ he wrote to his mother-in-law.
The next day was the royal progress into London proper, and Logue and Myrtle had seats in the Admiralty stand, just outside the new Admiralty Arch. Although they had to wait from 7.15 a.m. until 1.30, the time flew by and they ‘behaved like kids when the King and Queen came by in their beautiful state carriage with the eight famous cream horses, each with its postillion and leader’. The Logues also found time to visit Edith Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, and a distant cousin of theirs, at her beautiful home in the Kent countryside. It was a trip that Myrtle in particular found enchanting.
They had originally intended to travel on to Europe but now there was a problem: Logue had invested a large chunk of savings in shares in the Bullfinch Golden Valley Syndicate, which had created huge excitement on the Perth Stock Exchange the previous December after claiming to have struck gold in a new mine near Kalgoorlie. The company’s predictions proved hopelessly exaggerated, however, and the share price collapsed a few months later, taking most of the couple’s savings with it. They cabled Uncle Paris to send some more money, but appreciated the need to economize and went instead to stay with relatives in Birmingham for a few days.
On 6 July they set off for home from Liverpool aboard the White Star Line’s SS Suevic, a liner designed especially for the Australian run, and later that month the couple arrived back without mishap at King George Sound, Albany, Western Australia. ‘Had enough of travelling for a time?’ Logue was asked in the same Perth Sunday Times interview about his travels in which he had mentioned his meeting with Woodrow Wilson. ‘That I have,’ he replied. ‘Australia is the finest country of the world.’
Back home, Logue was able to draw on his experiences in Britain. When a special coronation programme called Royal England was staged in the New Theatre Royal in Perth that August, Logue was chosen to provide the commentary to accompany a show of ‘animated pictures specially cinematographed by C. Spencer from privileged positions along the route’.
Logue could scarcely have imagined that one day he would be consulted by the King’s son on his speech defects, yet this (and other such performances) were turning him into a notable figure on Perth’s social scene. In December 1911 his recently established school of acting, which included many well-known local amateurs, gave their first performance: on the evening of Saturday the 16th they appeared in his production of One Summer’s Day, a comedy by the English playwright Henry Esmond. Two days later an entirely different cast appeared in a production of Our Boys, the proceeds of which were to go to a local nursing charity.
Myrtle, meanwhile, was also beginning to make an impact: in April 1912 the West Australian reported she was opening a ‘school of physical culture (Swedish) and fencing for women and girls in the Wesley gymnasium’, a lofty and well-ventilated hall at the back of Queen’s Hall. Myrtle, the article claimed, had ‘recently