The King's Speech - Mark Logue [40]
Logue was quoted as merely confirming the Duke was his patient, saying that professional etiquette prevented him from telling more. The Duke’s private secretary was equally unwilling to elaborate.
Such reticence did not dampen the journalist’s praise for Logue’s work. ‘Obviously, Logue’s analysis of the Duke of York’s difficulty was the correct one,’ Foss concluded. ‘Those who had never heard the Duke speak until recently said they would never dream that he had once suffered agonies of embarrassment over his speech. Much like Demosthenes in ancient Athens, the Duke has mastered a handicap and is making himself into an accomplished orator.’
The floodgates were now open. The following day Gordon’s newspaper, the Sunday Express, weighed in with its own version – which then went round the world. ‘Thousands of people who have heard the Duke of York deliver public speeches recently have commented on the remarkable change in his speech-making,’ the newspaper wrote. ‘The Sunday Express is able today to reveal the interesting secret behind it.’ The story went on to cover much the same ground as Foss’s, noting how what had started as a slight stammer turned into a defect that ‘spread its shadow over the whole of the Duke’s life’, leaving him literally lost for words when he met strangers, with the result that he began avoiding speaking to people.
Despite the closeness of his friendship with Gordon, Logue did not allow himself to be any more forthcoming about his role than he had been with Foss. ‘Obviously, I cannot discuss the case of the Duke of York or any other patients of mine,’ he told the newspaper. ‘I have been asked about this matter many times during the past year by both British and American newspapers and all I can say is that it is very interesting.’ The Sunday Express’s story was reprinted or followed up by newspapers not only in Britain but also elsewhere in Europe – and especially in Australia, where Logue’s contribution was noted with understandable pride.
Perhaps because of the Duke, stammering remained a subject for the press. In September 1929 a debate raged in the pages of The Times and other national newspapers over the discovery by scientists that women were far less prone to stammering than men. As ‘discoveries’ went, it was not a particularly surprising one: people working in the field had long noticed a preponderance of male over female patients. This did not prevent the newspapers devoting many column inches of editorial to it; readers, too, wrote in with their own experiences – even though they differed among themselves as to the cause of the discrepancy between the sexes.
Logue dutifully cut the articles and letters out of the newspapers, pasting them into page after page of his scrap book. Asked by the Sunday Express to join the discussion, he came up with his own view – which the edition of 15 September put under the headline, ‘Why Women do not stammer. They talk without listening’.
‘One reason is that men go out into the world more, and the conditions make them more self-conscious in thinking,’ Logue claimed. ‘Women will often chatter on to each other without either being concerned in what the other is saying.’ As for those women who did stammer, they would do everything to hide their affliction, he added, citing the example of a female patient he had known who travelled every day from the City to her home in Earl’s Court, but used to buy a ticket to Hammersmith because she couldn’t manage the initial ‘k’ sound of ‘Court’. ‘Another would always tender the exact fare on an omnibus, to hide her defect.’
Confirmation of quite how confident the Duke had become about his stammer (and his mastery of it) came the following month with the publication of a book about him by Taylor Darbyshire, a journalist from the Australian