The King's Speech - Mark Logue [98]
I am sending you this little box which always stood on the King’s table, & which he was rather fond of, as I am sure you would like a little personal souvenir of someone who was so grateful to you for all you did for him. The box was on his writing table, & I know that he would wish you to have it.
I do hope that you are feeling better. I miss the King more & more.
Yours v sincerely
Elizabeth R.
That December, the Queen gave her first Christmas message from Sandringham. ‘Each Christmas, at this time, my beloved father broadcast a message to his people in all parts of the world,’ she began. ‘As he used to do, I am speaking to you from my own home, where I am spending Christmas with my family.’ Speaking in clear, firm tones – and without a trace of the impediment that had so clouded her father’s life – she paid tribute to those still serving in the armed forces abroad and thanked her subjects for the ‘loyalty and affection’ they had shown her since her accession to the throne ten months earlier. ‘My father and my grandfather before him, worked hard all their lives to unite our peoples ever more closely, and to maintain its ideals which were so near to their hearts,’ she said. ‘I shall strive to carry on their work.’
Logue did not record what he thought of the speech – or indeed whether he listened to it, at all. Either way, his services were no longer required and his health was failing. He spent the festivities in his flat surrounded by his three sons and their families: Valentine and his wife Anne, with their two-year-old daughter, Victoria; Laurie and Jo, with their children, Alexandra, 14, and Robert, 10, and Antony, with his future wife Elizabeth, whom he would marry less than a year later.
Shortly after New Year, Logue was taken ill for the last time. He remained bedridden for more than three months, and a live-in nurse was employed to look after him, but he eventually fell into a coma. He died on 12 April 1953 of kidney failure, less than two months after his seventy-third birthday. Among his effects were two invitations to the Queen’s coronation, to be held that June – the second presumably sent because he had been too sick to respond to the first.
The obituaries that appeared in Britain, Australia and America were brief. ‘Mr Lionel Logue, C.V.O., who died yesterday at the age of 73, was one of the leading specialists in the treatment of speech defects and was mainly responsible for helping King George VI to overcome the impediment in his speech,’ wrote The Times, which sandwiched him between the former president of Poland and the head of an American engineering company. ‘He was on close personal terms with the King for a long time.’ As for his techniques, the obituary writer merely noted: ‘An important part of Logue’s method was his instruction in how to breathe properly and so produce speed without strain.’
A few days later, readers added their comments: ‘May I be allowed, through the courtesy of your columns, to pay a humble tribute to the great work of Mr Lionel Logue,’ wrote a Mr J. C. Wimbusch. ‘As a patient of his in 1926, I can testify to the fact that his patience was magnificent and his sympathy almost superhuman. It was at his house in Bolton Gardens that I was introduced to the late King, then Duke of York. There must be thousands of people who, like myself, are living to bless the name of Lionel Logue.’94
Logue’s funeral was held on 17 April at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton. He was cremated. Both the Queen and the Queen Mother sent representatives, as did the Australian High Commissioner. While Logue’s work with the King had brought him prominence and honours – although strangely, given the closeness of their relationship, not a knighthood – it had not made him a wealthy man. In his will, details of which were published in The Times on 6 October, he left a fairly modest £8,605 – the equivalent of about £180,000 today.
Even with the benefit of more than half a century’s worth of hindsight, establishing quite how Logue succeeded with the King where those who preceded him had failed still remains