The King's War

by The King's War- The Friendship of George VI

  Logue did not record what he thought of the speech – or indeed whether he even listened to it. Either way, his services were no longer required, and his health was failing. He spent Christmas 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 daughter, Alexandra, fourteen, and son Robert, ten, and Antony with Elizabeth, whom he was to marry the following November.

  Shortly after New Year, Logue was taken ill for what was to be the last time. He remained bedridden for more than three months, and a live-in nurse was employed to look after him. Such was his dedication to his work, however, that he still attempted to see patients. Among them was Richard Oerton, who, then in his mid-teens, travelled with his mother from Devon for a consultation. ‘The door of his flat was opened by a nurse who said he was too ill to keep the appointment,’ Oerton recalled.191

  Then there was a scurrying and Lionel Logue himself appeared in pyjamas and dressing gown, trying to push in front of the nurse.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I want to see him. And his mother.’ But the nurse hustled him away.

  My mother, reasonably enough perhaps, though she seemed not to take in the pathos of what had just happened, complained that our appointment should have been cancelled before we set off from Devon. I myself was moved and saddened to have caught this glimpse of him. It proved to be the last.

  Logue’s condition continued to worsen, and he eventually fell into a coma. He died on 12 April 1953, 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. Oerton thought back to the last abortive session with Logue when he turned on the radio and heard a bulletin that began: ‘The death has been announced of Mr Lionel Logue.’

  The obituaries that appeared in Britain, Australia and America were brief given the closeness of his relationship with the King – a reflection of the discretion with which he had always carried out his work. ‘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,192 which sandwiched him in 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 speech 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.193 ‘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.’

  Logue’s funeral was held on 17 April at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, in South Kensington. He was cremated. The last person to enter the church, after the family, was a tall man of military bearing, bowler hat under his arm, who marched down to a front pew and was the first to leave at the end of the ceremony – the representative of the Queen. The Queen Mother and Australian High Commissioner also sent envoys. Afterwards the mourners went to Valentine’s house. Logue’s will, details of which were published in The Times that October, revealed his estate was valued at a fairly modest £8,605 – the equivalent of about £180,000 today. Logue’s work with the King had brought him prominence and honours – although strangely, given the closeness of their relationship, not a knighthood. But it had not made him a wealthy man.

  Epilogue

  More than half a century on, it is difficult to identify the precise techniques that Lionel Logue used to treat the King. Although Logue left behind not only a diary, but also his letters and a myriad of newspaper cuttings and other mementos – upon which we have drawn extensively for this book – his patient records have disappeared. The sole exception is the record card he filled out after his first consultation with the then Duke of York in October 1926. Nor did Logue write up his cases in academic journals or publish papers detailing his techniques. This is not surprising, perhaps, given his lack of formal medical education – or indeed of any academic training in the course of a career that took him from drama and elocution to the newly emerging field of speech therapy.

  The King did not leave any record of his dozens of sessions with Logue either – or at least not one that has been publicly accessible. His wartime diary, although running to several volumes, provides no insight into their relationship. He did, however, acknowledge the success of the breathing exercises Logue taught him; in his last letter in December 1951 (quoted in Chapter Fourteen), he described how Clement Price Thomas, the surgeon who removed his cancerous left lung, had praised his diaphragmatic breathing. Important, too, was the considerable effort Logue put into going through the texts of the King’s speeches, removing words and phrases he feared would trip him up. In a sense this was not so much curing his problem as finding a way of living with it – yet by eliminating the largest of such stumbling blocks, Logue helped to build up the King’s confidence, ensuring that the speech as a whole proved less daunting.

  It is nevertheless possible to piece together a picture of what went on in Logue’s consulting room from the testimony of other former patients, many of whom wrote to share their experiences after the publication of our book, The King’s Speech, and the release of the film of the same name in 2010. Necessarily, most of the surviving patients were children at the time they had their consultations, almost all of them boys. All agreed on the importance Logue placed on breathing technique – a point made succinctly in a postcard dated 6 April 1951 that Alan Elliott, his teenaged patient from Northern Ireland, sent to his grandmother:

  Dear Granny

  I’m having a grand time in London. Mr Logue (the speech man) says my breathing has been wrong from the start.

  Love,

  Alan

  Logue, himself, was more forthcoming in a letter he wrote to his young patient the same day:

  My Dear Boy,

  Of course you can write to me, any time you like, & I will always answer.

  So glad to receive such a cheerful letter, & to know that you are getting to grips with your speech defect. It is bound to be harder, reading in school, you have an audience. In the same way you will find it easier to speak to certain people.

  I would take a breath (not too big) between each word, & when you come & see me again we will probably alter all your exercises. It will depend on how you have progressed. Make sure when you do your exercises that you do not hold yourself stiffly. When reading, never go at more than 100 words to the minute. If you speak too quickly you will lose control of your speech, hence the defect.

  Speech never stays on the same level, so do not worry if you are not so good at times, you soon pick up again.

  Please remember me to your parents.

  With every good wish,

  Lionel Logue

  An insight into Logue’s technique was provided by Duncan Smith, who was taken as a seven- or eight-year-old to see him in 1951 or 1952. Although he had only a couple of sessions, Smith, who went on to work as a management consultant in a number of countries, said they contributed hugely to the ‘almost cure’ of his stammer – which in later life troubled him only when he was very stressed or tired. Retired and living in Virginia when he contacted us, Smith could still vividly recall the breathing and relaxation exercises that he had been taught:

  ‘The breathing exercises consisted of: (1) exhale, then breath in slowly through my nose to the full capacity of my lungs, pause, then breath out slowly through my mouth until my lungs are completely e
mpty, pause; (2) repeat this three times; (3) repeat, except this time only exhale half the air, pause, and then exhale the rest of the air and pause; (4) repeat this three times; (5) repeat, except only exhale one third of the air, pause, exhale another third, pause, exhale the final third, pause; (6) repeat this three times; (7) repeat, except this time only exhale one quarter of the air, pause, exhale another quarter, pause, exhale another quarter, pause, exhale the final quarter, pause; (8) repeat this three times.’

  The emphasis was on doing all this slowly, making sure the lungs were completely filled after inhaling and completely empty again after exhaling. Logue told him that this exercise should be conducted in a relaxed pose – standing, legs apart, hands on hips. Smith was also taught to consciously relax his whole body, focused on each part in turn, starting from the feet and moving upwards.

  Just as important were Logue’s attempts to tackle the underlying reasons for the impediment through conversation – ‘not about the psychological cause of my stammer, but more about how to gain the confidence I needed to reach my full potential, how to identify and prioritize the important things and not get agitated about the unimportant things’, Smith recalled.

  ‘I can distinctly remember the calm and friendly encouragement I received from him in our conversations: stay calm and relaxed, your views are really worth something, there is nothing that you cannot aspire to, keep your options open and opportunity will come your way, be interested in and empathetic with other people, etc.

  ‘This actually was a significant confidence builder for me and I now believe it helped to put me on the path of exploring options, taking risks, not being afraid of consequences (the “worst case” was generally tolerable, and rarely happened anyway). Plus if I stammer then people just have to accept that and I should not be crippled with embarrassment. I did not get a complete cure of my stammer from LL, but I believe he gave me an important roadmap for building my confidence and gradually experiencing the disappearance (almost) of my stammer.’

  Stephen Druce, who visited Logue as a ten- and eleven-year-old in the mid-1930s once a fortnight from his prep school in Wimbledon, also still had a vivid memory of their sessions and of ‘the breathing exercises, and above all the elocution tricks and methods used on all the letters and sounds. He was charming, considerate, and clearly knew how to secure the confidence of a small boy. But a hard task master.

  ‘The important elocution side of the method (if it should be called that) became a route into normal speech and gradually became assimilated into normality by the time I was fourteen/fifteen or so. The secret was to know exactly how to formulate each start point of difficult words and sound combinations to overcome any blockages.’

  Logue’s friendly manner – and sense of humour – also made an impression on one of his few female patients: Mary Graham née Ewart, who was born in 1925, was taken by her mother every Tuesday to his Harley Street practice, starting during the 1930s and continuing after the war. ‘I was delighted to “escape” school for an afternoon,’ she recalled. ‘I was enthralled by his kindness, charm & friendliness. Having lost my father in 1937, he became a father figure. I made him a sleeveless navy blue sweater.’

  ‘He was also very witty,’ she continued. ‘I loved the story of him and Myrtle attending the Cenotaph service when her knicker elastic broke. Myrtle nudged Lionel, and, looking down, he saw the knickers round her ankles. She stepped out of them and put them in his pocket.’

  Logue’s methods did not always bring success, however. Richard Oerton – one of Logue’s last patients – saw him on and off for five years, but continued to struggle with his speech; the headmaster of his preparatory boarding school in Chichester claimed the sessions were actually making his stammer worse. ‘When my father reported this to Logue, he spoke briefly about the pettiness of some schoolmasters and said that it was bound to be worse during a period of transition,’ Oerton said.

  They nevertheless pressed on. Logue, he said, ‘offered a few techniques, such as starting a word softly and slowly, but I think his main concern was to give me the experience of fluency: he got me to read aloud, sometimes from newspapers (he favoured editorials in the Daily Express), and sometimes from exercise cards which he had prepared. I recall, for example, being made to intone, “This, that, these, those”, “Lip, lap, lop”, and similar sets of words, many times. And there was one exercise which sometimes reduced me, to Logue’s delight, to helpless laughter: “Benjamin Bramble Blimber borrowed the baker’s birchen broom to brush the blinding cobwebs from his brain”’.

  Despite all this, the stammer refused to go away. ‘It may well be that Lionel Logue helped other people more than he did me, and it may also be that I could have been more committed than I was,’ Oerton added.

  ‘But I doubt whether his methods achieved anything very wonderful. To breathing and verbal exercises, I think he added some “techniques” to alleviate or control stammering and they may have helped people. Probably his “good fatherliness” helped them more. But clearly – as his relationship with the King showed – he could not produce the simple ease of speaking which most people have. Nor, to this day, can anyone else, so far as I know.’

  Logue’s methods worked better with David Radcliffe, who, like Oerton, was a patient in the early 1950s, while he was in his second or third year at Oundle School in Northamptonshire. Both he and his elder brother, Tony, struggled with their speech, but while Tony was able to stutter out words, David developed ‘an acutely embarrassing total stoppage’. ‘I would just clam up, and stand there looking like an idiot, and while I would be trying to get myself under control, people with misguided kindness would harass me with helpful suggestions,’ he recalled. ‘At times I felt like saying “Would you please shut up, and give me time to deal with this” (and for some reason I never felt that these words would be difficult to get out), but I never had the courage to try doing that.’

  Radcliffe went on to Cambridge University and a career in academia; when he contacted us he was Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. He remembered Logue as a ‘very dignified and smartly dressed man, in black jacket and pinstripe trousers.’

  ‘Logue’s treatment, as I recollect, was of course first of all to diagnose exactly what kind of stammer I had,’ he recounted.

  ‘This was a weird experience for me, because I found that I was quite able to talk quite freely about my problem without stammering. I felt like a fraud. I wondered whether he was going to take me seriously. For me it was a new experience, but of course for Logue it must have been a well-known phenomenon.

  ‘Although few people would recognize it in me now, I think once a stammerer, always a stammerer. But certainly it was Lionel Logue who helped me to cope with my disability, and turn things around for the rest of my schooldays and university. And I think there was something, too, in the example of King George, who after all was King through all my childhood, and very much a hero of the war years, which framed much of my childhood. If he could do it, so could I.’

  Illustrations Insert

  The Logue family (from left: Laurie, Antony, Myrtle, Lionel, Valentine) relaxing at their summer house on Thames Ditton island, Surrey, c. 1932.

  Myrtle on Thames Ditton island, c. 1932.

  Lionel at work, with the same photograph of Myrtle on his desk, c. 1936.

  The Logue family on the steps of Beechgrove, before Laurie’s wedding in summer 1936.

  An offical photograph of Lionel, c. 1937.

  Laurie in his Royal Corps of Signals uniform, June 1940.

  Myrtle on the lawn of Beechgrove, 1940. With petrol rationed, the Logues used sheep rather than a lawnmower to keep the garden grass in check.

  Lionel and Myrtle with Tov, their cairn terrier, in 1940.

  Beechgrove under snow during the ‘big freeze’ of early 1940.

  The Christmas card sent by the King and Queen to the Logues, 1940, showing the Royal Family in the bombed part of Buckingham Palace.

  Lionel in
his ARP uniform and gas mask in September 1940.

  St Paul’s Survives, published on the front page of the Daily Mail on New Year’s Eve 1941, showed the cathedral wreathed in smoke while everything around it burned after heavy bombing.

  The King, making his annual Christmas Day broadcast, 1944.

  The King meets residents during a visit to Bristol following an air raid, December 1940.

  The Christmas card sent by the King and Queen to the Logues, 1945.

  Lionel looking frail on his way to a Buckingham Palace garden party with Laurie and Joe, c. 1950.

  Notes

  This book draws extensively on the Logue Archive, which is made up of diary entries by Lionel and Myrtle Logue, letters Lionel received from the King and drafts of those he sent him, together with a variety of documents, mementos and other items collected by the Logue family Material taken from the archive – including verbatim accounts of conversations between the principal actors – is quoted without attribution.

  1 Theo Aronson, The Royal Family at War, London: John Murray, 1993, p. 13.

  2 Letter to authors.

  3 Aronson, op. cit., p. 94.

  4 Robert Wood, A World in Your Ear, London: Macmillan, 1979, p. 130.