The King's Speech - Mark Logue [45]
The meeting didn’t happen and in May 1934 Logue wrote again, bemoaning the lack of contact, although at the same time praising the Duke on how much his voice was improving. A week later, the Duke responded. ‘I am sorry I have not seen you for so long (2 years as you say), but I have very seldom felt that I have needed the help that you can give me,’ he wrote. ‘This I know is what you want me to feel but at the same time it feels ungrateful of me not to have been to see you.’ He went on: ‘My belt has done wonders to me in the last two years, and now at last I have had it cut down to a level below the diaphragm, which enables me to breathe without the former support.’56
Although busy, the Duke promised to come and see him soon. ‘Have you still got your room in Harley Street as I could still run up those stairs, I think,’ he wrote.
They did finally get together in 1934 – but again it was a one-off meeting.
Logue, meanwhile, was continuing to emerge from the shadows. Following Darbyshire’s book, an article appeared about him in the News Chronicle on 4 December 1930, in its column ‘The Diary of a Man about Town’. Its pseudonymous author, who signed himself Quex, was impressed by the youthfulness of the man who had just celebrated his fifty-third birthday. ‘His blue eyes have the flash of youth,’ he wrote. ‘His hair is crisp and upstanding. He has the schoolboy’s complexion, hardly a line on his face, and with the glow that is more English than Australian.’
‘Well,’ Logue replied. ‘I admit I can still run a mile, though I’m not keen on doing it; and you know you can keep young in spirit if you make friends and keep them.’
Reflecting on his career, he noted: ‘What really is extraordinary is the number of people who never really hear their own voices. I have tried half a dozen people on the gramophone. They talk into the receiver, and when the voices are reproduced, it is surprising how many are unable to pick out the particular record they have themselves made. No doubt with the average person, the visual memory is more strongly developed than the aural.’
Curiously, Logue claimed his powers of observation were such that, even if he was out of earshot, he could look at a group of people and pick out which one of them was suffering from a speech defect – ‘Providing they act in a normal way, do not sit still and avoid making their normal gestures.’
Logue outlined his theories in more detail in an article in the Daily Express on 22 March 1932. Headlined ‘Your Voice May be Your Fortune’, it was one of a series of ‘Health and Home Talks’. No mention was made of his professional relationship with the Duke, but it is fair to assume readers would have been aware of it. ‘The greatest fault of modern speech is the rate at which it is used,’ Logue wrote.
There is a mistaken idea that ‘hustle’ implies achievement, whereas it really means a wrong use of energy and is an enemy of beauty.
The English voice is one of the finest in the world but its effect is often spoiled by wrong production. Only a minimum of people realise what an asset it may be. Was it not Gladstone who said, ‘Time and money spent in improving the voice pay a larger interest than any other investment’. This is a strong statement, but I agree with it.
Few people know their own voices because it is difficult to ‘hear’ oneself. Therefore I advise all who can manage it to hear their own voices reproduced. People are usually surprised when they do this, so seldom do they know how they sound. Speech defects are among the evils of civilisation; they are almost unknown among native races. Nerves account for much of the trouble. The voice is a sure indication, not only of personality, but of physical condition. I have studied voices all my life and can tell a person’s physical peculiarities by hearing their speech, even if I am in another room.
Every patient requires slightly different handling and a study of each individual’s psychology is necessary. Conditions that will give one man sufficient confidence to overcome a defect will actually