The King's Speech - Mark Logue [55]
At their first preparatory meeting, teacher and patient went through the text of the speech the King was to deliver in the evening, making considerable alterations. Logue was pleased to find that the King, although a bit stiff about the jaw, was in excellent health and, he recalled, ‘most anxious to do best’.
Before he left, Logue remarked how much better the King seemed – to which he replied that he wouldn’t have taken on the job twelve years earlier. The conversation also turned to Cosmo Lang and the unfortunate remarks he had made about the King’s speech impediment. It was, said Logue, ‘a terrible thing that the Archbishop had done’ – especially since there was a whole generation growing up who did not think of their monarch having problems with his speech.
‘Are you gunning for him, too?’ laughed the King. ‘You ought to hear what my mother says about him.’72
Such concerns began to fade after the King went, together with members of the royal family and Lang, on Friday 23 April to unveil a monument to his father, making his first speech as monarch. Logue, who went along to watch the ceremony, was pleasantly surprised to hear how many people openly expressed astonishment at how well the King spoke. Particular satisfaction came when he overheard one of the onlookers say to his wife, ‘Didn’t the Archbishop say that man has a speech defect, my dear?’ To Logue’s amusement, the wife replied, ‘You shouldn’t believe what you hear, dear, not even from an Archbishop.’ The following Monday the King went downriver to Greenwich to open a new hall. He had a wonderful reception and spoke well, although Logue noted he was having trouble with the word ‘falling’. Two days later, at Buckingham Palace, there was another speech, this time to acknowledge a gift he was given from Nepal. It was, Logue recalled, ‘a nasty speech’ and had some particularly awkward words in it.
Nevertheless the main challenge still lay ahead: on 4 May, at 5.45 p.m., Logue met Sir John Reith to check that the microphone was properly installed. It was fitted to a desk to enable the King to broadcast while standing up, as was his preference. He tried it out, speaking some of the words from the text of the planned broadcast speech. He had also been at a rehearsal at the Abbey and had been amused that everyone there seemed to know their job except the bishops.
After a few moments the two princesses came in, saying ‘Daddy, Daddy, we heard you’. They had been listening in a nearby room where a loudspeaker had been installed to relay the two men’s voices. After staying a few minutes the little girls wished Logue what he described as a ‘bashful good night’ and, after shaking hands with him, went to bed themselves.
The King continued to practise over the next few days but with mixed results. On the sixth, with the Queen listening, things went badly and he became almost hysterical, although she managed to calm him down. ‘He is a good fellow,’ Logue wrote of the King, ‘and only wants careful handling.’ The next day, with Reith and Wood (the BBC sound engineer) in attendance, they recorded a version of the speech. It was too slow and the King was disgusted with it. They tried again, but halfway through he wanted to cough, so they had to make yet another attempt. ‘He was quite pleased and departed for his lunch in good patter and with his normal happy grin,’ Logue wrote. ‘He always speaks well in front of the Queen.’
On the seventh, Reith, who was taking a close interest in the speech, was able to write to Logue that all the gramophone records made that morning were in a sealed box that had been left with a Mr Williams at the Palace. He suggested making a composite record of them, ‘which could be more or less perfect as to speech, by taking bits of the first