The King's Speech - Mark Logue [5]
Worse, in the weeks running up to the coronation, the King had been forced to endure a whispering campaign about his health, stirred up by supporters of his embittered elder brother, who was now living in exile in France. The new King, it was rumoured, was in such a poor physical state that he would not be able to endure the coronation ceremony, let alone discharge his functions as sovereign. Further fuel for the campaign had been provided by the King’s decision not to go ahead with an Accession Durbar in Delhi that his predecessor had agreed should take place during the cold-weather season of 1937–8.
The invited congregation had to be in the Abbey by around 7 a.m. Crowds cheered them as they passed; a special Tube train running from Kensington High Street to Westminster was laid on for Members of the House of Commons and for peers and peeresses, who travelled in full robes and wearing their coronets.
Logue and his wife set off from their home at 6.40, travelling through deserted streets, northwards through Denmark Hill and Camberwell Green and then westwards towards the newly rebuilt Chelsea Bridge, which had been opened less than a week earlier by William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister who was in town for the coronation. One by one, the police constables spotted the ‘P’ in green lettering on the windscreen of their car and waved them through, until, just before the Tate Gallery, they ran into a jam of cars from all over London converging on the Abbey. They got out as they reached the covered way opposite the statue of Richard the Lionheart in Parliament Square and had squeezed into their seats by 7.30.
The King and Queen travelled to the Abbey in the Gold State Coach, a magnificent enclosed carriage drawn by eight horses that had been first used by King George III to open parliament in 1762. For the present King, the presence of his wife, Queen Elizabeth, was an enormous reassurance. During their fourteen years of marriage, she had been a hugely calming influence on him; whenever he faltered in the middle of a speech, she would squeeze his arm affectionately, willing him to go on – usually with success.
Seated in the royal box were the King’s mother, Queen Mary, and his two young daughters. The smaller one, Princess Margaret Rose, now aged six and naughty at the best of times, was bored and squirming. As the interminably long service continued, she stuck her finger in her eye, pulled her ears, swung her legs, rested her head on her elbow and tickled her rather more serious elder sister, Elizabeth, who had recently celebrated her eleventh birthday. As was so often the case, the elder girl found herself urging her sister to be good. Queen Mary finally quietened Margaret Rose by giving her a pair of opera glasses to peek through.
Reassurance of another kind was provided by Logue, whose presence in a box overlooking the ceremony was a sign of his importance to the King. A self-described ‘common colonial’, who despite a career devoted to elocution had never quite succeeded in shaking off his Australian accent, Logue seemed strangely out of place among the upper echelons of the British aristocracy given pride of place in the Abbey.
Yet it would be difficult to exaggerate the contribution to the day’s momentous events that had been made by a man whom the newspapers called the King’s ‘speech doctor’ or ‘speech specialist’. Such was Logue’s status that he had just been made a member of the Royal Victorian Order, an appointment entirely in the gift of the sovereign.