The King's Speech - Mark Logue [22]
Those who had to deal with these cases during and after the war know what a tremendous aid Vocal Therapy was and is – by bringing them the relief of the sung word from the torture of the spoken one.
In his talk Logue then described a curious experiment in which he had managed, by visual means, to lower a voice that was too high pitched. The patient was set in front of a stand containing a number of coloured lights and commanded to make an ordinary vocal sound while he watched the highest light. He was then made to lower the pitch of his ordinary speaking voice while the lights were extinguished one by one. This brought the voice, by a great strain, to a lower pitch. The scale was begun next on a lower tone and the voice broke suddenly and permanently to a lower key.
CHAPTER FOUR
Growing Pains
York Cottage, Sandringham. Birthplace of the future George VI
The future King George VI was born on 14 December 1895, at York Cottage, on the Sandringham estate, on the southern shore of the Wash, the second son of the future George V and a great-grandson of Queen Victoria. Guns boomed in Hyde Park and at the Tower of London. ‘A little boy was born weighing nearly 8lb at 3.30 (S.T) everything most satisfactory, both doing very well,’ his father recorded. ‘Sent a great number of telegrams, had something to eat. Went to bed at 6.45 very tired.’15 The S.T. referred not to Summer Time but Sandringham Time, an idiosyncratic tradition adopted by his father Edward VII, a keen huntsman, who set the clocks half an hour early in his own form of daylight saving to allow for more hunting before it got dark.
It was not an auspicious date in the royal calendar: it was on this day in 1861 that Queen Victoria’s beloved consort Prince Albert had died at the age of just forty-two. Then on 14 December 1878 her second daughter, Princess Alice, had died at thirty-five. The baby’s arrival on what was regarded within the family as a day of mourning and melancholy remembrances was treated with some consternation by the parents.
To everyone’s relief, Victoria, by now a venerable old lady of seventy-six, took the birth as a good omen. ‘Georgie’s first feeling was regret that this dear child should be born on such a sad day,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘I have a feeling it may be a blessing for the dear little boy, and may be looked upon as a gift from God!’ She was also pleased her great-grandson was to be christened Albert, even though he was always to be known to close friends and family as Bertie.
Prince George and his wife Mary – or May, as she was called in the family – already had one son, Edward (or David as he was known), born eighteen months earlier, and there was no secret the couple would have liked a daughter. Others considered the birth of a male ‘spare’ a good insurance for the succession. After all, George, the second son of the future Edward VII, owed his position as heir to the throne to the sudden death three years earlier of his dissolute elder brother Eddy from influenza that turned into pneumonia, less than a week after his twenty-eighth birthday.
Bertie’s early life was spartan and typical of English country house life of the period. The Sandringham estate, which spans 20,000 acres, had been bought by the future Edward VII in 1866 as a shooting retreat. The original house was not grand enough for him and he pulled it down, beginning in 1870 to build a new one that was progressively enlarged over the following two decades in what a local historian described as ‘a modified Elizabethan’ style. Neither especially ugly, nor especially beautiful, it reminded one royal biographer of a Scottish golf hotel.16
York Cottage, given to George and Mary on their marriage in 1893, was a far more modest affair. Situated a few hundred yards from the main house on a grassy mound, it had been built by Edward as overflow accommodation for shooting parties. ‘The first