The King's Speech - Mark Logue [29]
Yet amid the joy, there was also a reminder that the Duke’s marriage was something of a sideshow compared to the occasion when his elder brother would eventually follow suit. In a special supplement, published on the day before the wedding, a writer in The Times had expressed satisfaction at the Duke’s choice of a bride who was ‘so truly British to the core’ and had spoken approvingly of his ‘pluck and perseverance’. Yet he concluded, as many of the time did, by contrasting Bertie with his ‘brilliant elder brother’, adding: ‘There is but one wedding to which the people look forward with still deeper interest – the wedding which will give a wife to the Heir to the Throne and, in the course of nature, a future Queen of England to the British peoples’. The newspaper and its readers were to be disappointed.
Marriage was a turning point in the Duke’s life: he became far happier and more at ease with himself – and with the King. His father’s devotion to Elizabeth also helped: although a stickler for punctuality, he would forgive his daughter-in-law her chronic lateness. When she turned up for a meal on one occasion when everyone was already seated, he murmured, ‘You are not late, my dear. We must have sat down too early.’ The birth of their first daughter, Elizabeth, the future Queen, on 21 April 1926 brought the family even closer together.
They lived initially at White Lodge, in the middle of Richmond Park, a large and rather forbidding property that King George II had built for himself in the 1720s. The couple really wanted to live in London, however, and, after a long search for something suitable within their budget, they moved in 1927 to Number 145 Piccadilly, a stone-built house close to Hyde Park Corner, facing south with a view over Green Park towards Buckingham Palace.
The Duke was continuing with his factory visits and seemed relaxed and happy in such work. More formal occasions – especially speech-making – were a different matter completely, however. The continuing speech defect was weighing on him. The sunny and companionable temperament of his boyhood began to be lost behind a sombre mask and diffident manner. Her husband’s impediment and the effect that it had on him were having an effect on the Duchess, too; according to one contemporary account, whenever he rose from the table to respond to a toast, she would grip the edge of the table until her knuckles were white for fear he would stutter and be unable to get a word out.27 This also further contributed to his nervousness which, in turn, led to outbursts of temper that only his wife was able to still.
The full extent of the Duke’s speech problems became painfully obvious for all to see in May 1925, when he was due to succeed his elder brother as president of the Empire Exhibition in Wembley. The occasion was to be marked by a speech that he was due to give on the tenth. The previous year, thousands of people had watched as the slim golden-haired figure of the Prince of Wales had formally asked his father for permission to open the exhibition. The King had spoken briefly in response – and for the first time his words were broadcast to the nation by the then British Broadcasting Company (and later Corporation). ‘Everything went off most successfully,’ the King noted in his diary.28
It was now up to the Duke to follow suit. The speech itself was only short and he practised it feverishly, but his dread of public speaking was making itself felt. Equally terrifying was the fact that he would be speaking in front of his father for the first time. As the great day approached he became increasingly nervous. ‘I do hope I shall do it well,’ he wrote to the King. ‘But I shall be very frightened as you have never heard me speak & the loudspeakers are apt to put one off as well. So I hope you will understand that I am bound to be more nervous than I usually am.’29
Matters were not helped by a last-minute