The King's Speech - Mark Logue [65]
While he was there reading, the King’s assistant private secretary Eric Mieville came in, and he and Hardinge started to discuss at length the wisdom or otherwise of the King taking representatives of the Court with him to Canada. Unable to decide, they turned to Logue for his opinion ‘as a colonial’. Logue had fond memories from his childhood of the visit to Adelaide paid by King George V, when he was still Duke of York. ‘The more pageantry the better,’ he told them. ‘This they accepted and the Lord Chamberlain will probably never know that it was the opinion of colonial Lionel Logue that got him included in the Canadian Tour.’
The King looked tired, understandably perhaps, since he had got up at four o’clock that morning to go duck shooting at Sandringham. To Logue’s eyes, he seemed in fairly good form, though. They went through the speech twice: the first time it took them thirteen minutes; by the second, they had got it down to eleven. It was written in the usual difficult language, though, and they fixed two other appointments for further preparation. Before he left, a few minutes before seven o’clock, Princess Margaret, who was then almost eight, came in to say goodnight to her father. ‘It is very beautiful to see these two playing together,’ thought Logue. ‘He never takes his eyes off her when she is in the room.’
Logue met the King again on the morning of the State Opening for a final run-through: ‘A good effort, despite the fact that the redundancy of words is dreadful,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It took 11 minutes exactly and it will be interesting to know how long he takes to deliver it.’ Logue couldn’t go to parliament himself, but Captain Charles Lambe, one of the King’s officials who was going to be present in the chamber, promised to time the speech and call him immediately afterwards. Lambe reported later that it had taken thirteen minutes and there had been four hesitations.
To the relief of Logue – and even more so of the King himself – it was decided that there would be no Christmas message that year; the previous one had been a one-off, delivered only because it had been coronation year. Any such relief was short lived, however: during his visit to North America, the King would have to make a number of speeches, the most important of which was in Winnipeg on 24 May, Empire Day. First marked in 1902 on the birthday of Queen Victoria, who had died the previous year, the day was intended to remind children what it meant to be ‘sons and daughters of a glorious Empire’. At a time of great international tension such as this, it provided an opportunity for a display of solidarity on the part of the members of the Empire towards the mother country.
All these speeches necessarily meant a number of sessions for the King with Logue. A letter sent from the Palace on 10 March, for example, confirmed appointments at the Palace for the 16th, 17th and 20th. Such frequent visits meant Logue was also beginning to see more of the King’s family. During the first of those three appointments, Princess Margaret Rose again interrupted them – captivating Logue with her charm, just as her mother always did. ‘What a dear mature little woman she is with her bright eyes that do not miss a thing,’ he noted in his diary. ‘She had just come from a dancing lesson and showed us how in doing the last steps of the Highland fling her little shoes scraped her legs and after demonstrating it she [asked that] “something be done about it”.’
The following month, Logue encountered the formidable figure of Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, who was by then in her early seventies. As he was walking down the curved corridor on his way to the King, he saw around the corner that one of the footmen was standing stiffly to attention. A few steps later, he noticed two women coming towards him, one of whom was walking with the aid of a stick.