The King’s Speech was a huge critical and commercial success when it was released at the end of 2010, picking up seven BAFTAs and four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Tom Hooper, Best Actor for Colin Firth for his memorable portrayal of George VI, and Best Screenplay for David Seidler. It must have been watched by at least forty million people at the cinema alone. In the years since, millions more have viewed it on DVD, Netflix, Amazon and on television.
It is not difficult to understand the film’s appeal: the story of the future King’s battle with his life-long stammer and the help he received from Lionel Logue, his irreverent Australian speech therapist, clearly struck a chord with audiences. Cinema-goers revelled in its Englishness, were touched by Firth’s performance as the gentle, vulnerable monarch and applauded Geoffrey Rush’s portrayal of Logue with his determination to cut through protocol to help his royal patient. It helped that the story was true: George VI did have a stammer and, yes, he was helped by an Australian commoner who used highly unconventional methods.
For me the film meant something much more: Lionel Logue was my grandfather, but he died in 1953, twelve years before I was born, so he was always something of a mystery. His story was told to me when I was a child, but I never paid too much attention to what seemed like ancient history – even though, growing up, I became fascinated by the medals, signed royal photographs and mementoes scattered around the house.
In fact, it wasn’t until my own father, Antony – the third of Lionel’s three sons – died in 2001 that I began to appreciate the role that my grandfather had played in the history of the royal family. It fell to me to organize his personal papers, which had passed first to his eldest son, Valentine, an eminent brain surgeon, and then, on Valentine’s death in 2000, to my father, who had locked them away in a tall grey filing cabinet in his study.
Coming face to face with my grandfather for the first time, on 31 August 2010, at a private screening of the film at the Odeon in Panton Street, London, was an extraordinary experience. It was a year earlier, when Seidler’s script was already written and the shooting of The King’s Speech was about to begin at Elstree Studios and on location around London, that the film-makers got in touch with me. Although I, too, live in London, the connection came via an academic website published by Caroline Bowen, a Sydney-based speech and language pathologist, which at the time was the only online source of information on Lionel Logue. The producers were excited to learn I had my grandfather’s papers, most of which had never been seen before. As the papers were transcribed, Hooper and Seidler rewrote the script to incorporate the gems of information that I found.
None of this, though, could fully prepare me for seeing Rush as my grandfather, alongside Firth, Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen and Jennifer Ehle as my grandmother Myrtle. It was surreal to see my father depicted as a ten-year-old boy. I still remember the day when I was invited on the set and met Ben Wimsett, who played him. A scene they were filming particularly resonated with me: Rush’s character hovered over my father and Valentine while they recited Shakespeare. It reminded me of a scene from my own childhood when I struggled to do the same, while my father, who had a prodigious memory, repeated verbatim the lengthy passages he had learnt as a boy.
The success of the film provided me with a series of even more surreal experiences: during the first few weeks following its release, I made countless newspaper and television appearances in both Britain and America, during which I was asked to talk about ‘the real Lionel Logue’. Then came the Oscars themselves, when I was invited to a party at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. As the ceremony ended in triumph for The King’s Speech, the room filled with every Hollywood star you could mention. The celebrations went on until dawn.
I went to another party later that day hosted by the film’s producers, Simon Egan and Gareth Unwin, at a luxury villa in the Hollywood Hills. Glimpsing Simon’s fifteen-month-old daughter, I thought she would look cute photographed with the Oscar, so I handed her the statuette and stepped back to take the picture. She lost her grip just as I was clicking the shutter, and the Oscar fell to the ground with a loud bang, bouncing down the stone steps. Everyone at the party fell silent. The horror was evident on everyone’s face – not least mine, where it was mixed with embarrassment and shame.
The statuette suffered several dents: it had a bashed head, damaged shoulder and a dented stand, and gold plating had flaked off the chest. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was contacted immediately, and, to my relief, it turned out they have an ‘Oscar Hospital’ to cope with the all-too-common injuries sustained by the statuettes during victory celebrations. When Simon went to have it repaired, he was half expecting to see a queue of sheepish Oscar winners in there with their own damaged statuettes nursing hangovers.
There is only so much you can show in 118 minutes, however brilliant the director – and Hooper, for whom this was only his second feature, was certainly that. That was why, after having become involved in the making of the film, I also set out to tell the real-life story behind the events it depicted, working with Peter Conradi, a journalist with the Sunday Times. We entitled our book The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy. Published to coincide with the film, it was a bestseller in both Britain and America and translated into more than twenty languages.
During the more than a quarter of a century they worked together, my grandfather remained loyal to the King, respecting his privacy and the confidential nature of the treatment he gave him. He chose to remain behind the scenes, largely silent, rarely giving interviews, never publishing his work or having his methods scrutinized by peers or teaching them to students. He also always worked alone. Perhaps this was because he felt like an imposter, never having received any formal training or qualifications, and was forced to battle the prejudices of established medical institutions, as well as a degree of anti-Australian sentiment.
Yet he was immensely proud of his achievements, as became clear to me when I examined the papers he left behind. The hundreds of pages I transcribed included correspondence between the King and my grandfather from their first meeting in 1926 – when the future monarch was still Duke of York and, as second son of George V, never expected to be King – until his death in 1952. The letters from the King, the majority on Buckingham Palace headed paper (but with a few sent from Sandringham and from Windsor Castle), were handwritten and signed George R. The draft replies from Lionel were scribbled in barely legible handwriting, always in pencil on Basildon Bond paper. Occasionally, he would note down anecdotes so as not to forget them, using whatever came to hand: an empty envelope, the cover of a book, a scrap of paper, all of them painstakingly filed for posterity.
There are also four large scrapbooks in which Lionel – or perhaps Myrtle – had carefully pasted press cuttings, almost all of them relating to the King’s struggle with his speech impediment and the treatment my grandfather gave him. One has ‘1937’ embossed in gold leaf on its front cover. This was a memorable year for Lionel, following the King’s accession to the throne after the abdication of his elder brother, Edward VIII, in December 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, and marked a turning point in his career. Into the scrapbook have been pasted all the paperwork surrounding the coronation that May, including his and Myrtle’s invitation to Westminster Abbey, photographs of the pair of them in their court dress, and all manner of tickets and scraps, however trivial.
Inevitably, over time, the frenzy that surrounded the film faded, and my life returned to normal, leaving me to reflect on a crazy two years and the relentless pace and unquenchable appetite of the publicity machine that had monopolized my time and, for a while, had taken me in as one of its own. Those involved with the film moved on to other projects, but for me there was no question of turning my attention elsewhere. There was still more that I wanted to find out about my grandfather.
The speech that the King made in September 1939 on the outbreak of war – which formed the climax of the film – was not the end of his relationship with Lionel Logue. Far from it; it was the beginning of an even more intense phase of their work. With Britain’s very survival as an independent nation at stake, the King found himself thrust further into the limelight. This meant greater pressure, too, on my grandfather, who was to play a crucial role in preparing the King for the countless speeches he made during the course of the conflict.
Constraints of time and space meant we were able to consider the war years only briefly in our first book. The King’s War sets out to study this period in considerably greater depth. The main elements of the story will be familiar to those who read The King’s Speech: quotes and some descriptive passages that were first published there are necessarily repeated here for completeness. Yet the years that have passed have also given us the opportunity to go back into the archives and tease out more material relating to the two men. We have also made greater use of the diary kept by Myrtle, which provides a very different perspective on her and Lionel’s life in wartime London.
We have been able to enrich our narrative with the reminiscences of some of those whose lives were touched by Lionel Logue. At the end of the Introduction in The King’s Speech, I appealed to readers to write in with their memories of my grandfather. It proved a shrewd move. In the months and years since, countless people have sent me letters and emails: former patients, the children and grandchildren of patients or people who knew him; even the nurse who cared for him in hospital. Others have approached me at events at which I have spoken about the book.
Some told me what it was like to have been my grandfather’s patient, describing the techniques he encouraged them to employ to tackle their stammers. Others shared snippets about his life or copies of letters they exchanged with him. I have been presented with an inscription discovered inside a book cover and a letter discovered in a second-hand shop in New Zealand. Others wanted to know what – if anything – I had found in the archives about them or their fathers.
The result is not just a more detailed portrait of the two men’s relationship from 1939 onwards than we were able to provide in our first book. We have also set out to put this relationship into a broader context. This is essentially a story of two families at war – the Windsors and the Logues – whose respective experiences of the conflict were in many ways so different, yet in some respects so similar.