The King's Speech - Mark Logue [93]
Logue did, however, see one ambition realized: on 19 January 1948, he wrote to the King asking him to become patron of the College of Speech Therapists, which now counted 350 members, was ‘quite solvent’ and was now recognized by the British Medical Association. ‘I am sixty-eight years of age and it will be a wonderful thought in my old age to know that you were the head of this rapidly growing and essential organisation,’ he wrote. The King agreed.
Logue was still finding it difficult to come to terms with Myrtle’s death. They had been married for almost forty years, during which she had been a dominant influence on him, and her death left a massive hole in his life. Although otherwise a rational man, he became attracted to spiritualism in the hope of making contact with her on the ‘other side’. As a result he got in touch with Lilian Bailey, a ‘deep trance medium’. Over the years, Bailey had been consulted by a number of prominent figures in Britain and abroad – among them the Hollywood actresses Mary Pickford, Merle Oberon and Mae West, and Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister.
Quite how Logue got in touch with Bailey and how many séances he attended is unclear; his sons, however, were appalled when he used to tell them he was going off to ‘get in touch’ with his late wife. ‘It was something we thought was really crazy and wished to goodness he wasn’t doing it,’ recalled Valentine Logue’s wife Anne.90
Amid the gloom of the immediate post-war years, there was one glimmer of light: on 10 July 1947, it was announced that Princess Elizabeth would marry Philip, the son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and the British-born Princess Alice of Battenberg. The couple had met in June 1939 when Philip was eighteen and the future Queen just thirteen. The King had travelled with his family on the Royal Yacht to visit the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, and during the visit someone had to look after Elizabeth and Margaret, then aged nine.
Lord Mountbatten, the King’s ambitious aide-de-camp, made sure that of all the young men present, it was his nephew Philip, a tall, strikingly good-looking man who had just graduated as the top cadet in his course, who was given the task. Elizabeth (who was Philip’s third cousin through Queen Victoria, and second cousin, once removed, through Christian IX of Denmark) was smitten. ‘Lilibet never took her eyes off him,’ observed Marion Crawford, her governess, in her memoirs. The couple soon began to exchange letters.
What appeared to have started as a crush on Princess Elizabeth’s part soon turned to a full-blown romance – which was encouraged at every stage by Mountbatten, who was keen to see his family linked with the House of Windsor. Elizabeth and Philip wrote to each other and even managed occasional meetings when Philip was on leave, but so long as the war continued, there was little chance of their relationship going any further. That was changed by the outbreak of peace.
The King had mixed feelings about the match, not least because he considered his daughter too young and was concerned she had fallen for the first young man she had ever met. Philip was also seen by many at court – the King included – as far from the ideal consort for a future monarch, not least because of his German blood; the Queen was said to refer to him privately as ‘the Hun’. Hoping their daughter might find someone else, she and the King organized a series of balls packed with eligible men, to which Philip, to his great annoyance, was not invited. Yet Elizabeth remained devoted to her prince.
Eventually, in 1946, Philip asked the King for his daughter’s hand in marriage. George agreed – but still had one last trick up his sleeve: he insisted any formal announcement was postponed until after Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday the following April. By the month before, at Mountbatten’s suggestion, Philip had renounced