The King's Speech - Mark Logue [36]
On 23 May the Duke and Duchess finally set off for home, the congratulations still ringing in their ears. ‘His Royal Highness has touched people profoundly by his youth, his simplicity and natural bearing,’ Sir Tom Bridges, the Governor of South Australia wrote to the King, ‘while the Duchess has had a tremendous ovation and leaves us with the responsibility of having a continent in love with her. This visit has done untold good and has certainly put back the clock of disunion and disloyalty twenty-five years as far as this State is concerned.’46
The drama was not completely over, however. Three days after the Renown left Sydney Harbour and was making its way through the Indian Ocean, a serious fire broke out in one of the boiler rooms and came close to igniting the ship’s entire oil supply. The blaze was put out in the nick of time, but such was its seriousness that at one stage there were plans to abandon ship.
The Duke and Duchess landed in Portsmouth on 27 June, giving the locals a chance to assess Bertie’s progress from a speech he made in response to the Mayor’s welcome address. Basil Brooke, the Duke’s comptroller, who was among those present, wrote to Logue to say how ‘really amazed’ he had been by what he had heard. ‘There was practically no hesitation and I thought it was perfectly wonderful,’ he wrote. ‘I thought you would like to know this.’47
While the Duke’s three brothers met him in Portsmouth, the King and Queen greeted him and his wife at Victoria station. During their six months away, the royal couple had travelled thirty thousand miles by sea and several thousand by land. The warmth of the reception they received had demonstrated clearly the high regard in which the monarchy was still held in both Australia and New Zealand, and there was little doubt that, by their presence, they had further strengthened such devotion to Crown and Empire.
Just as importantly, the trip had given the Duke a new confidence in his own abilities. He was acutely conscious of the way his performance had improved his standing in the eyes of the King. Conversations with his father no longer seemed quite as daunting as they once had. ‘I mustn’t boast and I must touch wood while I write this that I haven’t had a bad day since I have been in Scotland,’ he wrote to Logue on 11 September from Balmoral. ‘Up here I have been talking a lot with the King & I have had no trouble at all. Also I can make him listen, & I don’t have to repeat everything over again.’48 The Duke said he had also told the King’s physician, Lord Dawson of Penn, how he was being treated by Logue and he noticed the difference at once – whereupon the Duke told him he should send all his stammering cases to Logue ‘and to no one else !!!’49
At a lunch at the Mansion House where the City welcomed him back, the Duke spoke for half an hour pleasantly, smoothly and with great charm about his experiences on the tour. Logue began to think his patient was not only getting over his problems but even on his way to becoming a really first-class speaker. But however great the progress he had made in Australia, Bertie realized he still had to work on his stammer and on his public speaking. And so, a few days after he returned to London he resumed his regular visits to Harley Street.
In the sessions that followed, the Duke would work on the tongue twisters Logue prescribed for him such as ‘Let’s go gathering healthy heather with the gay brigade of grand dragoons’ and ‘She sifted seven thick-stalked thistles through a strong thick sieve’. Despite the huge social gulf between them, theirs turned from a professional relationship to friendship, helped by Logue’s frank and straightforward style.
‘The outstanding feature