The King's Speech - Mark Logue [37]
The Duchess, too, was also playing an important (if discreet) role, spurring her husband on. Although much of this was conducted in private, others in his presence occasionally got a glimpse, such as on one occasion when the Duke rose to speak after a lunch and appeared to be struggling more than usual. He was about to give up, when those present saw the Duchess reach out and squeeze his fingers as if to encourage him to continue. He invariably did so.
CHAPTER SIX
Court Dress with Feathers
An expectant crowd waiting outside the gates of Buckingham Palace
The cars were lined up bumper to bumper along almost the entire length of the Mall leading up to Buckingham Palace. It was the evening of 12 June 1928, and a small group of women, dressed up to the nines in feathers and pearls, were about to be presented to King George V and Queen Mary. Most were drawn from the upper echelons of English society; also among them was Myrtle Logue.
This was a rare honour – but one of the perks that now came with Lionel’s work. On 20 December 1927 Patrick Hodgson, the Duke’s private secretary, had written to say that Myrtle would be presented at one of the next year’s Courts by the wife of Leo Amery, the Secretary for the Dominions. On 28 May came the much awaited ‘summons’ by the Lord Chamberlain to attend the first of two Royal Courts to be held that month at Buckingham Palace.
The card stipulated that ladies were to be dressed in ‘court dress with feathers and trains’; the gentlemen accompanying them should wear ‘full court dress’. Myrtle’s attire was suitably grand: a dress of parchment satin over pale pink georgette with diamante shoulder straps and a train of silver tissue, linked with pink tulle, that came right over her left shoulder, fastening on her breast with a diamond buckle, then draped across her back to her right hip with another diamond buckle.
It was just after six o’clock when she and Lionel drove into the Mall, but they barely moved until 8.30 when, one by one, the cars began to edge slowly towards Buckingham Palace, finally arriving at nine. Proceedings were due to start at 9.30. Myrtle’s sense of awe at the occasion was mingled with frustration at the long delay and unexpected chaos.
‘The wait in the Mall was terrifying,’ she wrote in an account of the day later published in an Australian newspaper. ‘The “hoi polloi” scrambling on the running board of the car to peer in and see what one’s feet looked like! It was too revolting – millions of them – and then, if one looked wearily out into the Mall, one looked straight into the eyes of the young men – and old, too, for that matter – who were cruising up and down in their cars and leering into the carriages. Luckily, Lionel was with me, or I should have died of fright and rage.’
At nine o’clock they were finally allowed inside the Palace and its sumptuous antechamber, where the nodding plumes, tulle veils and jewels made an unforgettable sight. After another wait, this time of about an hour, the Lord Chancellor came for them – the men were taken off to wait in another antechamber and the women stood in queues, their trains tucked over their shoulders. As they entered the throne room, the two equerries whipped the trains off their arms and arranged them on the floor while whispering ‘one curtsy to the King and one to the Queen’. As the women’s names were boomed out so loudly they almost took fright, they were presented to the King, curtsying without smiling. He