The King's Speech - Mark Logue [42]
The King was operated upon and, although his life remained in danger for some time, he began gradually to recover in the new year. It would not be until the following June that he would be strong enough to take part in public ceremonies again. The Duke had been put under strain both by worry about his father and by the extra duties he had to perform, but he took it all in his stride, as he revealed in a letter he sent to Logue on 15 December 1928, thanking him for the book he sent him as a birthday present.
‘I don’t know whether you sent it with a gentle reminder for me to come and see you more often or not, but I liked your kind thought in sending,’ the Duke wrote. ‘As you can imagine just lately my mind is full of other things, and as a matter of fact through all this mental strain my speech has not been affected one atom. So that is all to the good.’51
These birthday books were to become something of a tradition. Regardless of where he was or what he was doing, Logue would send the Duke one or more carefully selected volumes on 14 December for the rest of his life. The Duke, even after he had become King, would respond with a thank-you letter written in his own hand, in which he would inevitably talk about the progress he was making with his speech as well as giving brief insights into other things going on his life. Logue treasured the letters, which found their way into his papers.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Calm Before the Storm
Beechgrove, the Logue family house in Sydenham
The 1930s proved to be the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had brought the Roaring Twenties to a shuddering halt, ushering in the Great Depression, which led to untold economic misery across the world. It also helped the rise of Adolf Hitler, who became German chancellor in January 1933, setting off the chain of events that were to lead to the outbreak of the Second World War six years later.
For the Duke, however, the first six years of the decade, at least, were a time of peace and calm. ‘It was almost the last span of untroubled peace that he was to know,’ wrote his official biographer, ‘and one in which a felicitous balance seemed to have been struck between his arduous duties as a servant of the State and his happy existence as a husband and father.’52
Gradually, though, the Duke was being required to play a part in the functioning of the Crown. As well as serving as a Counsellor of State during his father’s illness, he had represented him in October 1928 at the funeral in Denmark of Marie Dagmar, the Dowager Empress of Russia, and at the marriage in March the following year of his cousin, Crown Prince Olav of Norway. The same month he was also appointed Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Other duties, and inevitably more speech-making, were to follow.
There were changes, too, on the domestic front: on 21 August 1930, his second daughter, Margaret Rose, was born, and in September the following year the King gave him and the Duchess the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park as their country home.
As they grew up, the two princesses were rapidly turning into media stars. Newspapers and magazines on both side of the Atlantic were keen to publish stories and photographs of them – and did so, often with the encouragement of the royal family themselves, who realized their publicity value. Extraordinarily, the third birthday of baby ‘Lilibet’, as Elizabeth was known in the family, was considered an important enough occasion to earn her a place on the cover of Time magazine on 21 April 1929 – even though her father, at that stage, was not even heir to the throne.
In the meantime, Logue’s personal circumstances were also changing. In 1932 he and Myrtle left Bolton Gardens and moved to the lofty heights of Sydenham Hill, an area largely comprising Victorian villas with generous gardens, offering glorious views towards the city. Their house, ‘Beechgrove’, at 111 Sydenham Hill, was a sprawling