The King's Speech - Mark Logue [44]
‘You must be wondering what has become of me,’ wrote the Duke on 16 June 1932, from Rest Harrow, Sandwich, Kent, where he and the family had gone to relax for a week. ‘You remember me telling you I was feeling unwell and tired in March. I saw a doctor who told me my inside had dropped down and that the lower muscles were weak and so of course I was ill. Now with massage and a belt I am getting better, but it will take time to get perfectly well again. I used to complain to you about my breathing “too low down”, as I called it, as those muscles were weak, my diaphragm felt as if there was nothing to hold. Now the breathing is much easier with the aid of the belt, and I talk much better with very little effort.’
The Duke ended his letter by promising to come and see Logue again soon, although he warned he was busy and it might be some time before it was possible. In fact, the visit did not happen that year or the next – largely because of the Duke’s growing confidence in his ability to speak in public, which meant such sessions were not necessary.
That September the Duke reflected on the huge progress he had made since those early consultations with Logue. He continued to have qualms about speaking in public, doing so slowly and deliberately, ‘but nothing happens actually during a speech to make me worry any more’. The hesitations were also fewer: Logue advised him to stop pausing between individual words and to pause instead between groups of them.
The Depression was beginning to bite: by the end of 1930 unemployment in Britain had more than doubled from 1 million to 2.5 million – equivalent to a fifth of the insured workforce. Even the royal family felt the need to be seen to make sacrifices (although largely symbolic ones). One of the King’s first acts after Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader, formed his National Government in August 1931, was to take a £50,000 reduction in the Civil List so long as the emergency lasted. For his part, the Duke gave up hunting and his stable. ‘It has come as a great shock to me that with the economy cuts I have had to make, my hunting should have been one of the things I must do without,’ he wrote to Ronald Tree, master of the Pytchley Hounds, in Northamptonshire, where he had been hunting for the previous two seasons while renting Naseby House.54 ‘And I must sell my horses too. This is the worst part of it all, and the parting with them will be terrible.’
Those such as Logue who had to work for a living were suffering even more. As everyone tightened their belts, the services he provided would be among the first things on which people would cut back. Although Logue was careful not to be seen to be trading on his royal connection, it must have helped him keep his head above water at such a difficult time. The Duke, ever grateful for what Logue had done for him, made a point of recommending him to his friends.
The coverage Logue received in the Sunday Express in December 1928 also appears to have been good for business, as he mentioned in a letter to the Duke the following February. ‘Since Xmas I have received over 100 letters from people all over the world asking me to take them as patients,’ he wrote. ‘Some of the letters are very humorous, but all are pathetic.’55 Despite this boost, by 1932, the economic downturn was taking its toll, as he wrote to the Duke that January. ‘It has been a very hard year for me, as so many people have lost their job.’
Logue, meanwhile, was planning to set up a new clinic, which he told the Duke about in his annual birthday letter in December 1932. Bertie appeared suitably enthusiastic: ‘I have been so interested to hear of your new venture with the clinic,’ he wrote back on the 22nd. ‘I am sure you are right in striking out on your own and feel that so many people know about you now as being the only lasting cure for speech defects. I often tell people about you and give them your address when asked.’ The Duke ended his letter with the