The King's Speech - Mark Logue [47]
In a letter to the Under-Secretary of State in the Aliens Department, dated 2 October 1936, the Society demanded action against Wings. ‘Mr. Wings is making from£5,000– £10,000 a year, and the majority of that comes from exploiting credulous and ignorant people,’ they claimed. ‘Unless something is done, and done quickly, to stop this unfair competition, and the snowball method of increasing the number of so-called Specialists giving free lectures, followed by courses of treatment, our British Speech Therapists will find themselves left with only their hospital and gratuitous work, and little else. Patients who have once been disillusioned over a reputed cure, generally take years before they will again trust themselves to anyone, in an endeavour to cure their defect.’ It is not clear whether any action was taken.
In December of that year the Duke wrote again to Logue after he praised a speech he had made. ‘On the whole I am very pleased with the continued progress,’ the Duke said. ‘I take a lot of trouble over practising my speeches, I still have to change words occasionally. I am losing that “sense of fear” gradually, very gradually sometimes. It depends so much on how I am feeling and on what subject I am to speak.’
With the Duke making such progress Logue, now aged fifty-five, may have been reconciled to the fact that their work together was largely over. He would have been wrong. The Duke’s life was about to change for ever – and with it Logue’s.
Ever since George V’s illness in 1928, there had been concerns about his health; a renewal of his bronchial trouble in February 1935 necessitated a period of recuperation at Eastbourne. The King recovered sufficiently to take full part in celebrations of his Silver Jubilee that May, when he appears to have been genuinely surprised at the enthusiastic welcome he was given by the crowds. ‘I’d no idea they felt like that about me,’ he said, on returning from a drive through the East End of London. ‘I am beginning to think they must like me for myself.’57 When he appeared at Spithead that July to review the Fleet, many onlookers were convinced that he would go on to reign for several more years.
Any improvement was relative, however. The King, who had just celebrated his seventieth birthday, was ailing, and after he returned from Balmoral that autumn, those closest to him noticed a serious deterioration in his health. The death of his younger sister, Princess Victoria, early in the morning of 3 December, came as a tremendous blow and for once his overwhelming sense of public duty faltered – he cancelled the State Opening of Parliament. He went to Sandringham that Christmas for the usual celebrations and made his broadcast to the Empire, but listeners could detect the deterioration in his health.
On the evening of 15 January 1936 the King took to his bedroom at Sandringham, complaining of a cold; he would never again leave the room alive. He became gradually weaker, drifting in and out of consciousness. ‘I feel rotten,’ he wrote in the last recorded entry in his diary. On the evening of the 20th his doctors, led by Lord Dawson of Penn, issued a bulletin with the words that were to become famous: ‘The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.’
That close came at 11.55 p.m., scarcely an hour and a half later – hastened along by Dawson, who admitted in medical notes (which were made public only half a century later) to have administered a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine. This, it seems, was in part to prevent further suffering for the patient and strain on the family, but also to ensure the death could be announced in the morning edition of The Times rather than ‘the less appropriate evening journals’. The newspaper, apparently advised to hold its edition by Dawson’s wife in London, whom the doctor had tipped off