The King's Speech - Mark Logue [15]
The following month, Logue’s troupe was back at His Majesty’s Theatre with a production for charity of Hubert Davies’s drawing room comedy, Mrs Gorringe’s Necklace. The beneficiary this time was the Parkerville Waifs’ Home. ‘Mr. Logue and his pupils are heartily to be congratulated,’ declared the West Australian. ‘There was nothing mechanical about it, no dependence placed upon mere recitative, and the whole thing was a frank and genial appeal to ordinary human nature.’ Myrtle, too, joined him on stage: her performance as Mrs Jardine was a ‘very artistic bit of work in voice, act, and general manner’, the newspaper found.7
Logue’s own elocutionary recitals, meanwhile, were drawing large and enthusiastic audiences. ‘The announcement of a recital by Mr Lionel Logue was sufficient to comfortably fill St George’s Hall last night, and those who attended were amply repaid for venturing out on a showery evening,’ read one review in August 1914 which described him as ‘a master of the subtle art of elocution in all its branches’.
Logue appears to have gone down particularly well with women in the audience – as was noticed by a local newspaper reporter when Logue went back to Kalgoorlie to serve as ‘elocutionary adjudicator’ at a Welsh-style Eisteddfod, which, according to the account, sounded somewhat reminiscent of a modern-day television talent show. ‘Mr Lionel Logue,’ the reporter noted, ‘is a very good-looking young man and a number of goldfield girls were not slow to appreciate it. Two of them followed up the competitions every evening and spent most of the time gazing soulfully in the direction of the judge’s cabinet. It might be interesting for those young ladies to know that Mr Logue has a charming wife and two beautiful children.’8
Logue was also enjoying plaudits for his work with his elocution students. In September 1913, at a dinner in the Rose Tea Rooms in Perth’s Hay Street (organized by the Public Speaking Club, which Logue had founded five years earlier) several of his pupils ‘testified to their appreciation of that gentleman’s abilities and to the success of his tuition,’ according to one contemporary account. To the amusement of the twenty or so present, one speaker wondered whether Logue might turn his considerable talents to making the large number of politicians and others who posed as public speakers stop talking nonsense and switch to common sense instead. Logue replied in suitably humorous tone, describing the proper use of the mother tongue as ‘the first evidence of civilization and refinement’.
However comfortable their life in Perth, Lionel and Myrtle’s eyes had been opened by their world tour and they seem to have been slowly coming around to the idea of trying to make a new life abroad, perhaps in London. Any immediate prospect of a move had been dashed by the birth of their second son, Valentine Darte, on 1 November 1913. Then on 28 June 1914 the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in faraway Sarajevo forced them to put their plans on hold indefinitely.
For Australia, as for the mother country, the First World War was to prove hugely costly in terms of death and casualties. Out of a population of fewer than five million, 416,809 men enlisted, of whom more than 60,000 were killed and 156,000 wounded, gassed or taken prisoner.
As in Britain, the outbreak of war was greeted with enthusiasm – and although proposals to introduce conscription were twice rejected in a plebiscite, a large number of young Australian men volunteered to fight. Most of those accepted in August 1914 were sent first not to Europe but to Egypt, to meet the threat posed by the Ottoman Empire to British interests in the Middle East and the Suez Canal. The first major campaign in which the joint Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) force was involved was at Gallipoli.
The Australians landed at what became known as ANZAC Cove on 25 April 1915, establishing a tenuous foothold