CHAPTER FOUR
York Cottage, Sandringham. Birthplace of the future George VI
The future King George VI was born on 14 December 1895, at York Cottage, on the Sandringham estate, on the southern shore of the Wash, the second son of the future George V and a great-grandson of Queen Victoria. Guns boomed in Hyde Park and at the Tower of London. ‘A little boy was born weighing nearly 8lb at 3.30 (S.T) everything most satisfactory, both doing very well,’ his father recorded. ‘Sent a great number of telegrams, had something to eat. Went to bed at 6.45 very tired.’15 The S.T. referred not to Summer Time but Sandringham Time, an idiosyncratic tradition adopted by his father Edward VII, a keen huntsman, who set the clocks half an hour early in his own form of daylight saving to allow for more hunting before it got dark.
It was not an auspicious date in the royal calendar: it was on this day in 1861 that Queen Victoria’s beloved consort Prince Albert had died at the age of just forty-two. Then on 14 December 1878 her second daughter, Princess Alice, had died at thirty-five. The baby’s arrival on what was regarded within the family as a day of mourning and melancholy remembrances was treated with some consternation by the parents.
To everyone’s relief, Victoria, by now a venerable old lady of seventy-six, took the birth as a good omen. ‘Georgie’s first feeling was regret that this dear child should be born on such a sad day,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘I have a feeling it may be a blessing for the dear little boy, and may be looked upon as a gift from God!’ She was also pleased her great-grandson was to be christened Albert, even though he was always to be known to close friends and family as Bertie.
Prince George and his wife Mary – or May, as she was called in the family – already had one son, Edward (or David as he was known), born eighteen months earlier, and there was no secret the couple would have liked a daughter. Others considered the birth of a male ‘spare’ a good insurance for the succession. After all, George, the second son of the future Edward VII, owed his position as heir to the throne to the sudden death three years earlier of his dissolute elder brother Eddy from influenza that turned into pneumonia, less than a week after his twenty-eighth birthday.
Bertie’s early life was spartan and typical of English country house life of the period. The Sandringham estate, which spans 20,000 acres, had been bought by the future Edward VII in 1866 as a shooting retreat. The original house was not grand enough for him and he pulled it down, beginning in 1870 to build a new one that was progressively enlarged over the following two decades in what a local historian described as ‘a modified Elizabethan’ style. Neither especially ugly, nor especially beautiful, it reminded one royal biographer of a Scottish golf hotel.16
York Cottage, given to George and Mary on their marriage in 1893, was a far more modest affair. Situated a few hundred yards from the main house on a grassy mound, it had been built by Edward as overflow accommodation for shooting parties. ‘The first thing that strikes a visitor about the house itself is its smallness and ugliness,’ wrote Sarah Bradford, the royal biographer.17 ‘Architecturally, it is a higgledy-piggledy building with no merit whatsoever, of small rooms, bow windows, turrets and balconies, built of mixed carstone, a dark reddish-brown stone found on the estate, and pebble-dash, with black-painted half-timbering.’ It was also extremely cramped, given that it was home to not just the couple and eventually six children, but also equerries and ladies-in-waiting, private secretaries, four adult pages, a chef, a valet, dressers, ten footmen, three wine butlers, nurses, nursemaids, housemaids and various handymen.
The two boys and Prince Mary, who arrived in 1897, followed by Prince Henry, born in 1900, Prince George in 1902 and Prince John in 1905, spent most of their time in one of two rooms upstairs: the day nursery and the slightly larger night nursery, which looked out over a pond to a park beyond where deer roamed.
Like other English upper-class children of the day, Bertie and his siblings were brought up for the first years of their lives by nurses and a governess who ruled the area beyond the swing door on the first floor to which they were largely confined. Once a day, at tea time, dressed in their best clothes and hair neatly combed, they would be brought downstairs and presented to their parents. The rest of the time they were left entirely in the hands of the nurses, one of whom was later revealed to be something of a sadist. She was jealous of even the little time each day David would spend with his parents and, it was later claimed by the Duke of Windsor in his autobiography, would pinch him hard and twist his arm in the corridor outside the drawing room so he was crying when he was presented to them and quickly taken out again.
At the same time, she largely ignored Bertie, feeding him his afternoon bottle while they were out riding in the C-spring Victoria, a carriage notorious for its bumpy ride. The practice, according to his official biographer John Wheeler-Bennett, was partly to blame for the chronic stomach problems that he was to suffer as a young man. The nurse later had a nervous breakdown.
It was not surprising the children’s relationship with their parents was a distant one. Matters were not helped by their father’s approach to child rearing. The future King George V had enjoyed what for the era had been a relatively relaxed upbringing, thanks to his father Edward VII, who had been reacting against the strictness with which his parents, Victoria and Albert, had behaved towards him. As a result, whenever she had contact with her grandchildren, the Queen expressed horror at their wayward behaviour.
Far from bringing up his own offspring in an equally liberal way, George did precisely the opposite: the Prince, according to his biographer Kenneth Rose, was ‘an affectionate parent, albeit an unbending Victorian’. Thus, although he undoubtedly loved his children, he believed in inculcating a sense of discipline from an early age – influenced in part by strict obedience to authority that had been instilled in him during his and his brother’s adolescence in the navy. George wrote a telling letter to his son on his fifth birthday: ‘Now that you are five years old I hope you will always try & be obedient & do at once what you are told, as you will find it will come much easier to you the sooner you begin. I always tried to do this when I was your age & found it made me much happier.’18
Punishment for transgressions was administered in the library – which, despite its name, was devoid of books, the shelves being filled instead with the impressive stamp collection to which George devoted his leisure time when he was not shooting or sailing. Sometimes the boys would get a verbal dressing down; for serious offences, their father would put them over his knee. The room, not surprisingly, was remembered by the boys largely as a ‘place of admonishment and reproof ’.
The children’s lives changed dramatically following the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901. The Prince of Wales, who now became King Edward VII, took over Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Balmoral, while his son acquired Marlborough House as his London residence, Frogmore House at Windsor and Abergeldie, a small castle on the River Dee near Balmoral. As heir to the throne (and, from that November, Prince of Wales), George began to assume more official duties, some of which took him away from home. That March, he and Mary set off on an eight-month tour of the Empire, leaving their children in the more indulgent hands of Edward and Alexandra. School work was neglected as they followed the round of the Court between London, Sandringham, Balmoral and Osborne; their genial grandfather indulged their boisterousness.
It was also time for the boys to start their education. George had not received much formal schooling himself and did not consider it much of a priority for his own children. David and Bertie were not sent to school but were instead tutored by Henry Hansell, a tall, gaunt tweed-clad bachelor with a large moustache who seemed to have spent more of his time at Oxford on the football or cricket fields than in tutorials or lecture halls. A less than inspiring teacher, he thought the boys would be better off at prep school, like others their age; their mother appears to have agreed. George was having none of it, however, blaming their lack of academic progress on their stupidity. Tellingly, though, he was to relent later with two younger sons, both of whom he sent away to school.
Given the amount of time they spent together – and the distant nature of their parents – it was natural that David and Bertie should become close. It was an unequal relationship: as the oldest child, David both looked after his younger siblings and told them what to do. In his own words, written years later in his autobiography, ‘I could always manage Bertie.’ As puberty approached, Bertie, like all younger brothers, appears to have begun to resent such management – as Hansell noticed to his concern. ‘It is extraordinary how the presence of one acts as a sort of “red rag” to the other,’ he reported.19
This was more than just usual sibling rivalry. David was not just older, he was also good looking, charming and fun. Both boys were also aware from an early age that he was destined one day to become king. Bertie had been less blessed by fate: he suffered from poor digestion and had to wear splints on his legs for many hours of the day and while he slept, to cure him of the knock-knees from which his father had suffered. He was also left-handed but, in accordance with the practice of the time, was obliged to write and do other things with his right, which can often cause psychological difficulties.
Adding to Bertie’s problems – and to some extent a result of them – was the stammer that had already begun to manifest itself when he was aged eight. Indeed, the incidence of stammering has been demonstrated to be higher among those born left-handed. The letter ‘k’ – as in ‘king’ and ‘queen’ – was a particular challenge, something that was to prove a particular problem for someone born into a royal family.
Matters were not helped by the attitude of Bertie’s father whose response to his son’s struggles was a simple ‘get it out’. A particular trial was their grandparents’ birthdays, which were marked by a well-established ritual: the children were required to memorize a poem, copy it out on sheets of paper tied together with ribbon, recite the verses in public and then bow and present them to the person whose anniversary was being celebrated. It was bad enough when the poem was in English – later, after they started language lessons, they had to be in French and German, too. Such occasions, to which their grandparents invited guests, were a nightmare for Bertie, according to one of his biographers.
‘The experience of standing in front of the glittering company of grown-ups known and unknown, and struggling with the complexities of Goethe’s Der Erlkönig, painfully conscious of the contrast between his halting delivery and that of his “normal” brother and sister, was a humiliating one which may well have laid the foundation for his horror of public reviews when he was King.’20
Like their father before them, the two boys were destined for the Royal Navy. Although for David this was intended as a brief spell before he assumed his duties as Prince of Wales, Bertie was expected to make a career of it. The first stage was the Royal Naval College at Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s previous home, on the Isle of Wight. King Edward had refused to take on the house when his mother died and instead gave it to the nation; the main house was used as a convalescent home for officers, while the stable block was turned into a preparatory school for cadets. The experience must have been a strange one for the two boys who had visited ‘Gangan’ – as Victoria was known – at the house during her final years.
Bertie was thirteen when he was admitted to the college in January 1909; David had arrived two years earlier. It proved a dramatic contrast to Sandringham life for the boys, both socially and intellectually. According to royal tradition, neither of the brothers had been brought up to have contact with other children the same age; by contrast, their counterparts (most of whom had been at preparatory school) would have been used to separation from their parents and to the discipline, harsh conditions, poor food and curious rituals considered an integral part of an upper-class English education.
Then there was the bullying. Far from enjoying preferential treatment from their future subjects as a result of their royal origins, both boys were picked on mercilessly. David, on one occasion, was forced to endure a mock re-enactment of the execution of Charles I in which he was obliged to place his head in a sash window while the other part was brought down violently on top of it. Bertie, nicknamed ‘sardine’ because of his slight physique, was found by a fellow cadet trussed up in a hammock in a gangway leading from the mess-hall, crying for help. Given the importance placed on team games, the two boys were put at a disadvantage by their lack of experience playing football or cricket.
Bertie’s problems were compounded by his dismal academic performance. Osborne was essentially a technical school, concentrating on maths, navigation, science and engineering. Although good at the practical side of engineering and seamanship, he was a disaster at mathematics, typically coming bottom of the class or close to it. Again, his stammer undoubtedly played a role. Although it virtually disappeared when he was with friends, it returned to dramatic effect whenever he was in class. He found the ‘f ’ of fraction difficult to pronounce and, on one occasion, failed to respond when asked what was a half of a half because of his inability to pronounce the initial consonant of ‘quarter’ – all of which helped to contribute to an unfortunate reputation for stupidity. His father, always better at dealing with his son from afar, seemed to understand. ‘Watt [the second master] thinks Bertie is shy in class,’ he wrote to Hansell. ‘I expect it is his dislike of showing his hesitating speech that prevents him from answering, but he will I hope grow out of it.’21
That, however, was going to take several years. In the final examinations, held in December 1910, Bertie came 68th out of 68. ‘I am afraid there is no disguising to you the fact that P.A. has gone a mucker,’ wrote Watt to Hansell. ‘He has been quite off his head, with the excitement of getting home, for the last few days, and unfortunately as these were the days of the examinations he has come quite to grief.’
It was during this time that his beloved grandfather, Edward VII, died. On 7 May Bertie had looked out of his old schoolroom window in Marlborough House to see the Royal Standard flying at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. Two days later, dressed in the uniforms of naval cadets, he and David watched the ceremony as their father was proclaimed King from the balcony of Friary Court, St James’s Palace. On the day of their grandfather’s funeral, they marched behind his coffin in Windsor from the station to St George’s Chapel. The elevation of their father meant David was now first in line to the throne, and Bertie second.
Bertie’s dismal academic performance did not prevent him from progressing the following January to the next stage of his education, Dartmouth Royal Naval College, where David was already in his last term. Here again, Bertie faced the inevitable comparisons with his elder brother who was, by any standards, not much of a scholar himself. ‘One could wish that he had more of Prince Edward’s keenness and appreciation,’ wrote Watt.22
Matters improved the following year, however, not least because David left Dartmouth for Magdalen College, Oxford, allowing his younger brother to emerge from his shadow. The curriculum began to be weighted more away from the academic towards the practical aspects of seamanship, to which he was better suited. He was also encouraged by his term officer, Lieutenant Henry Spencer-Cooper, to take up sports that he was better at, such as riding, tennis and cross-country running.
After two years at Dartmouth, he embarked in January 1913 on the next stage of his preparation: a six-month training cruise on the cruiser Cumberland. During the voyage through the West Indies and Canada, Bertie experienced the adulation that being a member of the royal family inevitably brought. Such were the number of public appearances that he was required to make that he persuaded a fellow cadet to stand in for him as his ‘double’ on some minor occasions. He was also confronted for the first time with the need to make speeches, which was to prove such an ordeal for his whole life. A prepared speech he had to read out to open the Kingston Yacht Club in Jamaica proved particularly arduous.
On 15 September 1913, at the age of seventeen, Bertie was commissioned as a junior midshipman on the 19,250-ton battleship HMS Collingwood, in the first stage of a naval career, which, like his father before him, he expected to be his life for the next few years. Apparently for security reasons, he was known as Johnson.
There was a major difference between father and son, however. While the future King George V loved both the navy and the sea, his son worshipped the navy as an institution but did not much like the sea itself – indeed he suffered badly with seasickness. He also continued to be plagued by shyness – a fact recorded by several of his fellow officers. One, Lieutenant F. J. Lambert, described the Prince as a ‘small, red-faced youth with a stutter’, adding ‘when he reported his boat to me he gave a sort of stutter and an explosion. I had no idea who he was and very nearly cursed him for spluttering at me.’ Another, Sub Lieutenant Hamilton, wrote of his charge: ‘Johnson is very well full of young life and gladness, but I can’t get a word out of him.23 Proposing a toast to ‘the King’ in a Royal Navy wardroom became a torment because of his fear of the ‘k’ sound.
There were far more serious challenges to come: on 3 August 1914 the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, following an ‘unsatisfactory reply’ to the British ultimatum that Belgium must be kept neutral. On 29 July the Collingwood, together with other members of the Battle Squadrons, had left Portland for Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, off the extreme northern tip of Scotland, with the task of guarding the northern entrance to the North Sea from the Germans.
Bertie went north with his ship but after just three weeks he went down with the first of several medical conditions that were to cast a shadow over his naval career. Suffering violent pains in his stomach and with difficulty breathing, he was diagnosed with appendicitis; on 9 September the offending organ was removed at hospital in Aberdeen.
A semi-invalid at nineteen, while his contemporaries were fighting and dying for his country, Bertie joined the War Staff at the Admiralty. He found the work there dull, however and, after pressing, was allowed back to the Collingwood in February the following year. He was on board for only a few months before he began to suffer with his stomach again. He was, it subsequently turned out, suffering from an ulcer, but doctors failed to diagnose it, blaming his problems instead on a ‘weakening of the muscular wall of the stomach and a consequent catarrhal condition’. He was prescribed rest, careful diet and a nightly enema, but, not surprisingly, he failed to respond.
Bertie spent much of the rest of the year ashore, initially at Abergeldie, but then at Sandringham, alone with his father, where the two of them became close. During this time Bertie was to learn a lot about what it was to be a king in time of war – an experience that he would be able to draw on when he found himself in the same position two decades later.
In mid-May 1916 he made it back to the Collingwood, just in time to take part in the Battle of Jutland at the end of the month. Although again in the sick bay (this time, apparently as the result of eating soused mackerel) on the evening the ship set off, Bertie was well enough to take his place in ‘A turret’ the following day. The Collingwood’s part in the action was not significant, but Bertie was glad to have been involved and, as he recorded, to have been tested by the ordeal of coming under fire.
Much to his relief, his stomach problems appeared to be receding. But then that August they struck again, this time with a vengeance. Transferred ashore, he was examined by a relay of doctors who finally diagnosed his ulcer. In May 1917, however, he was back at Scapa Flow, this time as an acting lieutenant on the Malaya, a larger, faster and more modern battleship than the Collingwood. By the end of July, he was ill once more and transferred ashore to a hospital in South Queensferry, near Edinburgh. After eight years of either training or serving in the navy, Bertie realized reluctantly that his career in the service was over. ‘Personally, I feel that I am not fit for service at sea, even after I recover from this little attack,’ he told his father.24 That November, after much hesitation, he finally underwent the operation for the ulcer, which went well, however this sustained period of ill health would continue to affect him both physically and psychologically in the years to come.
Bertie was determined not to return to civilian life while the war was going on and in February 1918 was transferred to the Royal Naval Air Service, which two months later was to be merged with the Royal Flying Corps to form the Royal Air Force. He became Officer Commanding Number 4 Squadron of the Boys’ Wing at Cranwell, Lincolnshire, where he remained until that August. During the last weeks of the war, he served on the staff of the Independent Air Force at its headquarters in Nancy, and following its disbanding in November, he remained on the Continent as a staff officer with the Royal Air Force.
When peace came, Bertie, like many returning officers, went to university. In October 1919 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history, economics and civics for a year. It was not immediately clear why he, as the second son, would need such knowledge, but it was to prove more than useful a decade later.
Although Bertie was doing all that was expected of him, his speech impediment (and his embarrassment over it) together with his tendency to shyness, continued to weigh on him. The contrast could not have been greater with his elder brother, who increasingly basked in the adulation of press and public.
Yet all was not quite what it seemed. By the time the two brothers were in their twenties, their relationship with their father began to change. David was already conducting tours of the Empire with great success but those around began to feel that he was enjoying the limelight rather too much for his own – or the country’s – good. The King was becoming concerned about his eldest son’s almost obsessive love of the modern – which George despised – his dislike of royal protocol and tradition and, above all, the predilection for married women he seemed to have inherited from Edward VII. Father and son began to clash frequently, often over the most minor things such as dress, in which the King took an almost obsessive interest. As the Prince later recorded, whenever his father started to speak to him about duty, the word itself created a barrier between them.
Bertie, by contrast, was gradually becoming his father’s favourite. On 4 June 1920, at the age of twenty-four, he was created Duke of York, Earl of Inverness and Baron Killarney. ‘I know that you have behaved very well, in a difficult situation for a young man & that you have done what I asked you to,’ the King wrote to him. ‘I hope you will always look upon me as yr. best friend & always tell me everything & you will always find me ever ready to help you and give you good advice.’25
In his capacity as president of the Boys’ Welfare Society, which then grew into the Industrial Welfare Society, the Duke, as we will henceforth call him, began to visit coal mines, factories and rail yards, developing an interest in working conditions and acquiring the nickname of the ‘industrial Prince’. Starting in July 1921 he also instituted an interesting social experiment: a series of annual summer camps, held initially on a disused aerodrome at New Romney on the Kent coast and later at Southwold Common in Suffolk, which were designed to bring together boys from a wide range of social backgrounds. The last was to take place on the eve of war in 1939.
The Duke rose even further in his father’s estimation following his marriage on 26 April 1923 to the society beauty Elizabeth Bowes Lyon. Although his bride had led a life even more sheltered than that of her husband, she was a commoner – albeit a high-born one. The King, who had to give his consent under the Royal Marriage Act of 1772, did not hesitate in so doing. Society had changed, he appeared to have reasoned, making it acceptable for his children to marry commoners – provided they came from among the highest three ranks of the British nobility.
Bertie and Elizabeth had met at a ball in the early summer of 1920. The daughter of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, Elizabeth was twenty and had just arrived in London society to universal acclaim. A large number of young men were keen to marry her, but she was in no hurry to say yes to any of them – especially the Duke. It was not only that she was averse to becoming a member of the royal family, with all the constraints that this imposed. The Duke also did not seem that much of a catch: although kind, charming and good looking, he was shy and inarticulate, thanks in part to the stutter.
The Duke fell in love with her, but his early attempts to woo her were not successful: part of the problem, as he confided to J. C. C. Davidson, a young Conservative politician, in July 1922, was that he could not propose to a woman, since, as the King’s son, he could not place himself in a position in which he might be refused. For that reason, he had instead sent an emissary to Elizabeth to ask on his behalf for her hand in marriage – and the response had been negative.
Davidson had simple advice for him: no high-spirited girl was going to accept a second-hand proposal and so, if the Duke was really as much in love with her as he claimed, then he should propose himself. In 16 January 1923 the newspapers were full of their engagement. Three decades later, after she was widowed, the then Queen Mother wrote to Davidson to ‘thank you for the advice you gave the King in 1922’.26
Their wedding on 26 April 1923 in Westminster Abbey – being used for the first time for the nuptials of a son of the King – was a joyous occasion. The bride wore a dress of cream chiffon moiré, a long train of silk net and a point de Flandres lace veil, both of which had been lent her by Queen Mary. The Duke was in his Royal Air Force uniform. There were 1,780 places in the Abbey – as the Morning Post reported the next day, there was a ‘large and brilliant congregation which included many of the leading personages of the nation and Empire’. ‘You are indeed a lucky man,’ the King wrote to his son. ‘I miss you . . . you have always been so sensible and easy to work with (very different to dear David) . . . I am quite certain that Elizabeth will be a splendid partner in your work.’
Yet amid the joy, there was also a reminder that the Duke’s marriage was something of a sideshow compared to the occasion when his elder brother would eventually follow suit. In a special supplement, published on the day before the wedding, a writer in The Times had expressed satisfaction at the Duke’s choice of a bride who was ‘so truly British to the core’ and had spoken approvingly of his ‘pluck and perseverance’. Yet he concluded, as many of the time did, by contrasting Bertie with his ‘brilliant elder brother’, adding: ‘There is but one wedding to which the people look forward with still deeper interest – the wedding which will give a wife to the Heir to the Throne and, in the course of nature, a future Queen of England to the British peoples’. The newspaper and its readers were to be disappointed.
Marriage was a turning point in the Duke’s life: he became far happier and more at ease with himself – and with the King. His father’s devotion to Elizabeth also helped: although a stickler for punctuality, he would forgive his daughter-in-law her chronic lateness. When she turned up for a meal on one occasion when everyone was already seated, he murmured, ‘You are not late, my dear. We must have sat down too early.’ The birth of their first daughter, Elizabeth, the future Queen, on 21 April 1926 brought the family even closer together.
They lived initially at White Lodge, in the middle of Richmond Park, a large and rather forbidding property that King George II had built for himself in the 1720s. The couple really wanted to live in London, however, and, after a long search for something suitable within their budget, they moved in 1927 to Number 145 Piccadilly, a stone-built house close to Hyde Park Corner, facing south with a view over Green Park towards Buckingham Palace.
The Duke was continuing with his factory visits and seemed relaxed and happy in such work. More formal occasions – especially speech-making – were a different matter completely, however. The continuing speech defect was weighing on him. The sunny and companionable temperament of his boyhood began to be lost behind a sombre mask and diffident manner. Her husband’s impediment and the effect that it had on him were having an effect on the Duchess, too; according to one contemporary account, whenever he rose from the table to respond to a toast, she would grip the edge of the table until her knuckles were white for fear he would stutter and be unable to get a word out.27 This also further contributed to his nervousness which, in turn, led to outbursts of temper that only his wife was able to still.
The full extent of the Duke’s speech problems became painfully obvious for all to see in May 1925, when he was due to succeed his elder brother as president of the Empire Exhibition in Wembley. The occasion was to be marked by a speech that he was due to give on the tenth. The previous year, thousands of people had watched as the slim golden-haired figure of the Prince of Wales had formally asked his father for permission to open the exhibition. The King had spoken briefly in response – and for the first time his words were broadcast to the nation by the then British Broadcasting Company (and later Corporation). ‘Everything went off most successfully,’ the King noted in his diary.28
It was now up to the Duke to follow suit. The speech itself was only short and he practised it feverishly, but his dread of public speaking was making itself felt. Equally terrifying was the fact that he would be speaking in front of his father for the first time. As the great day approached he became increasingly nervous. ‘I do hope I shall do it well,’ he wrote to the King. ‘But I shall be very frightened as you have never heard me speak & the loudspeakers are apt to put one off as well. So I hope you will understand that I am bound to be more nervous than I usually am.’29
Matters were not helped by a last-minute rehearsal at Wembley. After he was a few sentences into his speech, the Duke realized no sound was coming out of the loudspeakers and turned to the officials next to him. As he did so, someone threw the appropriate switch and his words, ‘The damned things aren’t working’, boomed around the empty stadium.
The Duke’s actual speech, broadcast not just in Britain but around the world, ended in humiliation. Although he managed through sheer determination to struggle his way to the end, his performance was marked by some embarrassing moments when his jaw muscles moved frantically and no sound came out. The King tried to put a positive spin on it: ‘Bertie got through his speech all right, but there were some long pauses,’ he wrote to the Duke’s young brother, Prince George, the following day.30
It would be difficult to overestimate the psychological effect that the speech had both on Bertie and his family, and the problem that his dismal performance threw up for the monarchy. Such speeches were meant to be part of the daily routine of the Duke, who was second in line to the throne, yet he had conspicuously failed to rise to the challenge. The consequences both for his own future and that of the monarchy looked serious. As one contemporary biographer put it, ‘it was becoming increasingly manifest that very drastic steps would have to be taken if he were not to develop into the shy retiring nervous individual which is the common fate of all those suffering from speech defects’.31
By coincidence, Logue was a member of the crowd at Wembley listening to the Duke’s speech that day. Inevitably, he took a professional interest in what he heard. ‘He’s too old for me to manage a complete cure,’ he told his son, Laurie, who accompanied him. ‘But I could very nearly do it. I am sure of that.’ By an equally strange coincidence, he was to get the chance to do precisely that – although it was not to be until a few months later.
There have been different versions of how precisely the Duke was to become Logue’s most famous patient, but according to John Gordon of the Sunday Express, the chain of events that led to it was set in motion the following year when an Australian who had met Logue afterwards encountered a worried royal equerry.
‘I have to go to the United States to see if I can bring over a speech defect expert to look at the Duke of York,’ the equerry explained. ‘But it’s so hopeless. Nine experts here have seen him already. Every possible treatment has been tried. And not one of them has been the least successful.’
The Australian had a solution. ‘There’s a young Australian just come over,’ he said. ‘He seems to be good. Why not try him?’
The next day, 17 October 1926, the equerry came to Harley Street to meet Logue. He made a good impression, and the equerry asked if he would be able to meet the Duke and try and do something for him. ‘Yes,’ said Logue. ‘But he must come tome here. That imposes an effort on him which is essential for success. If I see him at home we lose the value of that.’
There is another, more intriguing, version, according to which the role of go-between was played by Evelyn ‘Boo’ Laye, a glamorous musical comedy star. The Duke had had a crush on her since he first saw her on stage aged nineteen in 1920, and Laye, a lyric soprano, was later to become a friend of both himself and his wife. Five years later, she was appearing at the Adelphi Theatre in the title role of the musical play Betty in Mayfair and, after a gruelling schedule of eight performances a week, was beginning to have problems with her singing voice.
According to Michael Thornton, a writer and long-term friend of Laye, the singer sought the advice of Logue, who diagnosed incorrect voice production and prescribed some deep breathing exercises relating to the diaphragm– which quickly relieved her problems. Laye was deeply impressed. And so in summer 1926, when she met the Duchess of York and their conversation turned to the forthcoming trip to Australia and all the speeches that the Duke would have to make there, Laye recommended Logue.
‘The Duchess listened with great interest and asked if she would let them have Mr Logue’s details,’ recalls Thornton. ‘The Duchess appeared to consider it a point of great importance that Lionel Logue was an Australian and that she and the Duke were going to Australia.’32 Shortly afterwards, Laye called Patrick Hodgson, the Duke’s private secretary, and gave him Logue’s telephone number.
Laye herself continued to consult Logue for many years, especially in 1937 when she was faced with the strenuous role of singing a leading role alongside Richard Tauber, the great Austrian tenor, in the operetta Paganini. With Logue’s encouragement, she also began to give the future King singing lessons, which were aimed at improving the fluency of his delivery when he spoke.
Whoever was responsible for the initial introduction, the first meeting between the Duke and Logue almost didn’t come off. Although his wife was keen he should seek professional advice, Bertie was becoming increasingly frustrated with the failure of the various cures he had been persuaded to try – especially those that assumed his stammering had its root in a nervous condition, which seemed to make matters worse rather than better. The Duchess was determined he give Logue a try, however, and, for her sake if nothing else, he eventually succumbed and agreed to an appointment. Those few minutes were to change his life.