The King's Speech - Mark Logue [57]
When Logue saw the King the following afternoon, he thanked him for the great honour. The King grinned and said, ‘Not at all. You have helped me. I am going to reward those who help me.’ He then took the order out of his drawer, showed it to Logue and said ‘wear this tomorrow’. The Queen laughed and congratulated Logue.
While he was there, Logue and the King listened through the recording they had made of his speech. It was good enough to broadcast, but Logue hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to use it. ‘H.M. improves every day, getting good control of his nerves and his voice is getting some wonderful tones into it,’ he noted in his diary. ‘Hope he does not get too emotional tomorrow. H.M. offered up a prayer tonight. He is such a good chap – and I do want him to be a marvellous King.’
CHAPTER TEN
After the Coronation
George VI and Queen Elizabeth on their way to the state opening of Parliament, 12 October 1937
Both the coronation itself and the speech to the Empire that evening had been a triumph for the King – as next morning’s newspapers noted. ‘Slow, deliberate and clear, his voice betrayed no sign of fatigue,’ commented the Daily Telegraph. A clergyman wrote to the Daily Mail from Manchester to express delight at ‘the sound of the King’s voice and the purity of his diction’. He continued: ‘With all the depth of his father’s voice, there is an additional softness which makes it even more impressive for the listener. I think it was the nearest approach to perfect “standard English” I have ever heard. There was no trace of anything which could be called accent.’
Those listening abroad were also pleasantly surprised by the fluency of the supposedly tongue-tied monarch. The compiler of the Detroit Free Press’s radio notes was baffled by what he had heard coming loud and clear over the ether from London. ‘Now that the coronation is over, listeners are wondering what became of the speech impediment that King George VI was supposed to have,’ he wrote. ‘It wasn’t apparent throughout the entire ceremony, and after hearing the new King deliver his address, many persons are classifying him with President Roosevelt as possessing a perfect radio voice.’
With the coronation behind him, the King was able to relax. He was still not completely cured of his speech impediment but, with Logue’s assistance, he was gradually getting the better of it. Logue, meanwhile, suffering from what Time described as nervous exhaustion, was reported to have left London for a long rest. On his return, he helped the King prepare for the various speeches that were now becoming routine.
Although such speeches passed off fairly successfully, the King’s staff were concerned about the effect his continuing speaking problems were having on him – and were forever on the lookout for ways of treating them. On 22 May Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, the King’s assistant private secretary, wrote to Logue referring to a letter he had received from an A. J. Wilmott relating to correspondence in The Times about how forcing left-handed children to act as if they were right-handed could cause problems – among them speech impediments such as stammering.
In his reply, four days later, Logue notes how such practice can lead to a disorder – which may disappear if the patient is changed back to his natural hand. He stressed that it was too late for the King, however. ‘After 10 years of age it becomes increasingly difficult to change the patient back again, and I have rarely heard of a case in which it has proved satisfactory in middle life.’ Bizarrely, he suggested it might be possible to obtain ‘temporary relief ’ from such a problem (often mistaken for a cure) by ‘assuming an American or cockney accent’, presumably since, as H. St John Rumsey,