The King's Speech - Mark Logue [63]
Myrtle’s doctors wanted to spare her the British winter and prescribed a few months in Australia to recuperate. She set off on 4 November 1937 from Southampton as one of the 499 passengers aboard the 8,640-ton Jervis Bay of the Aberdeen and Commonwealth Line. She arrived at Fremantle, in Western Australia, on 5 December, spent four weeks in Perth and then continued eastwards across the country. She wasn’t due to return to Britain until the following April.
It was the first time Myrtle had been home since she and Lionel had left more than a decade earlier. Thanks to her husband’s success and proximity to the monarch, she was treated as a celebrity: parties, concerts and recitals were thrown in her honour, and she was a guest of the Governor of Victoria, Lord Huntingfield, and his wife at Government House. Journalists flocked to interview the woman described as the ‘wife of King George’s voice specialist’, and the society columns of the newspapers recorded where she went, whom she met and what she was wearing. Myrtle seemed only too happy to bask in the reflected glory, even though she suffered a few health scares along the way – at one stage she was so bad they thought they would have to take her to Adelaide in an ambulance, but she rallied until she was ‘a bit yellow but able to carry on’.
In one newspaper interview, published under the headline ‘Australians Thrive in London’, Myrtle painted a rosy picture of the life that she and her compatriots enjoyed in the mother country, noting how many of them had achieved prominence in London. ‘I put it down to their self-confidence and freedom from fear,’ she declared. ‘They are most capable and adaptable, and seem to fall on their feet in every walk of life.’ She also described how her own ‘lovely home’ on Sydenham Hill had become a ‘calling-point’ for Australians visiting Britain.
While Lionel was always discreet when it came to talking about his work, his wife couldn’t stop herself from discussing the King, boasting how he had personally invited her and her husband to his coronation. The monarch, she told one interviewer, is ‘the hardest worker in the world’, a man with ‘enormous vitality and strength’ that enables him to cope with his workload. She spoke warmly of his ‘particularly happy smile – a grin you could call it’ and his ‘wonderful sense of humour’.
‘If all my husband’s patients showed the grit and determination of the King all his cures would be 100 per cent,’ she told another interviewer. ‘His Majesty frequently comes to our house – he is most charming. So are the Princesses, who are completely unspoilt, although Margaret Rose is the more joyous – Elizabeth has rather more sense of responsibility.
‘They both speak beautifully and are simple and unassuming,’ she added. ‘My husband goes to the Palace every night now, and always the little Princesses come in to say “Goodnight, Daddy”.’74
Quite what Myrtle’s husband thought about such indiscretions is not clear. His disapproval cannot have been that strong, however, since the newspaper cuttings in which his wife was quoted were all diligently glued in his scrapbook.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Path to War
George VI and Queen Elizabeth en route to Canada, 1939
While Myrtle was making her triumphal progress through Australia, Europe was moving inexorably towards war. For several years, as part of his pursuit of Lebensraum, Hitler had been turning his attention to the area along the German border occupied largely by German-speaking people. In 1935, following a plebiscite, the Saar region was united with Germany. Then in early 1938 came Anschluss with Austria. This left Czechoslovakia, a tempting target with its substantial ethnic German