The King's Speech - Mark Logue [9]
Then lagoo, the great boaster,
He the marvellous story-teller,
He the traveller and the talker,
He the friend of old Nokomis,
Made a bow for Hiawatha;
Logue went on reading for an hour, entranced by the words. Here was something that really mattered: rhythm – and he had found the door that led him into it.
Even as a young boy, he had been more interested in voices than faces; as the years passed, his interest and fascination in voices grew. In those days, far more emphasis was put on elocution than today: every year in Adelaide Town Hall, four boys who were the best speakers would recite and compete for the elocution prize. Logue, of course, was among the winners.
He left school at sixteen and went to study with Edward Reeves, a Salford-born teacher of elocution who had emigrated with his family to New Zealand as a child before moving to Adelaide in 1878. Reeves taught elocution to his pupils by day and gave ‘recitals’ to packed audiences in the Victoria Hall or other venues by night. Dickens was one of his specialities. Such recitals were an extraordinary feat not just of diction but of memory: a review in the Register of 22 December 1894 described his performance of A Christmas Carol in glowing terms: ‘For two hours and a quarter, Mr Reeves, without the aid of note, related the fascinating story,’ it reported. ‘Rounds of applause frequently interrupted the reciter, and as he concluded the carol with Tiny Tim’s “God Bless us every one”, he was accorded an ovation which testified in a most unmistakable manner to the hearty appreciation of the house.’
In an era before television, radio or the cinema, such ‘recitals’ were a popular form of entertainment. Their popularity also appears to have reflected a particular interest in speech and elocution throughout the English-speaking world. What could be called the elocution movement had begun to emerge in England in the late eighteenth century as part of a growing emphasis on the importance of public speaking. People were becoming more literate and society gradually more democratic – all of which led to greater attention being paid to the quality of public speakers, whether politicians, lawyers or, indeed, clergymen. The movement took off particularly in America: both Yale and Harvard instituted separate instruction in elocution in the 1830s, and by the second half of the century it was a required subject in many colleges throughout the United States. In schools, particular emphasis was put on reading aloud, which meant special attention was paid to articulation, enunciation and pronunciation. All this went hand in hand with an interest in oratory and rhetoric.
In Australia, the growth of the elocution movement was also informed by a growing divergence between their English and the version of the language spoken back in Britain. For some, the distinctiveness of the Australian accent was a badge of national pride, especially after the six colonies were grouped together into a federation on 1 January 1901, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. For many commentators, though, it was little more than a sign of laziness. ‘The habit of talking with the mouth half open all the time is another manifestation of the national “tired feeling”,’ complained one writer in the Bulletin, the Australian weekly, at the turn of the last century.4 ‘Many of the more typical bumpkins never shut their mouths. This is often a symptom of post-nasal adenoids and hypertrophy of the tonsils; the characteristic Australian disease.’
The South Australian accent, with which Logue grew up, came