The King's Speech - Mark Logue [68]
The theme was picked up later by the King’s official biographer. The trip ‘had taken him out of himself, had opened up for him wider horizons and introduced him to new ideas’, he noted. ‘It marked the end of his apprenticeship as a monarch, and gave him self-confidence and assurance.’78
This self-confidence had been reflected in the speeches that the King had made during the visit. ‘I have never heard the King – or indeed few other people – speak so effectively, or so movingly,’ Lascelles wrote to Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister. ‘One or two passages obviously stirred him so deeply that I feared he might break down. This spontaneous feeling heightened the force of the speech considerably . . . The last few weeks, culminating in his final effort today, have definitely established him as a first-class public speaker.’79
The King’s British subjects had a chance to appreciate his newfound confidence at a lunch at the Guildhall on Friday 23 June, the day after he and the Queen returned to London to a tumultuous welcome. The King had cabled Logue from the ship to be at the Palace at 11.15. He arrived early enough to have a brief word with Hardinge, who told him the King was tired but in great form.
As always, the King seemed a little nervous to Logue, but he soon relaxed and broke into his characteristic grin as they spent a couple of minutes talking about the trip. ‘He was most interested in Roosevelt – a most delightful man he called him,’ Logue wrote. They ran through the speech, which Logue thought too long; as ever straying beyond the mere words to the content itself, he also made clear his belief that it should contain more references to the American part of the trip. The King noted his advice, but with the speech due to be delivered only a few hours later, it was a bit late for either of them to do anything about it.
Some seven hundred of the great and good were invited to the Guildhall, where they were treated to an eight-course lunch, washed down with two brands of 1928 champagne and vintage port. ‘It is a great pity that a colour film was not made of the scene,’ commented the Daily Express. ‘It would have preserved for posterity a close-up of the entire executive power of Britain, tightly packed on a few square yards of blue carpet.’
Speaking with great emotion, the King described how the visit had underlined the strength of links between Britain and Canada. ‘I saw everywhere not only the mere symbol of the British Crown; I saw also, flourishing strongly as they do here, the institutions which have developed, century after century, beneath the aegis of that Crown,’ he told his audience, who interrupted him several times with loud cheers.
Logue, who listened to the speech on the radio, was impressed. Lascelles called him at 4.15 ‘to say how pleased everyone was with the speech, particularly the King’.
The verdict of the press was also positive. The Daily Express’s William Hickey column described it as ‘an admirable, shapely speech’ with personal touches that gave the impression the King had composed it himself. It was well delivered, too. ‘The King has improved so enormously in this respect since the early days of his reign that one is not now conscious of any impediment,’ the newspaper noted, adding that he had developed the orator’s art of leaving just enough time for the loud cheers that punctuated his speech.
The following month the King expressed his own reaction to the growing praise for his skills as an orator in his reply to a letter of congratulation from his old friend Sir Louis Greig. ‘It was a change from the old days when speaking, I felt, was “hell”,’ he wrote.80
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘Kill the Austrian House Painter’
Green Park took on a very different aspect during World War Two
On the morning of Sunday 3 September 1939 the inevitable finally happened: Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Berlin, delivered a final note to the German government stating that unless