Rather well delivered
The accidental king... John Vincent looks at a letter from George VI which lays bare his relief at mastering his speech defect in time for his coronation.
On the face of it, a film about a stuttering royal and his speech therapist doesn’t sound much like a box office winner. Yet The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth as the introverted King George VI and Geoffrey Rush as his exuberant Australian teacher, Lionel Logue, proved one of the best movies of 2010.
To give it some historical context, one-quarter of the world’s population looked to England for leadership in the 1930s – yet its own people questioned the temperament of their stammering monarch on his painfully reluctant ascension to the throne following the abdication of his brother Edward VIII.
Now fresh light on the unlikely friendship between the two has surfaced at auction in the form of a letter from the newly-crowned king to his speech doctor, revealing the monarch’s anxieties over his coronation and his subsequent relief at having successfully negotiated its pitfalls.
The letter of May 17, 1937, five days after the coronation, is offered at Woolley &
Wallis, in Salisbury, on July 22, together with a silver-gilt cigarette case he gave to Logue as a thank-you. Together, they are expected to realise more than £4,000.
“The Queen and I have just viewed the film of our Coronation, & I could not wait to send you a few lines to thank you again for your hard work in helping me prepare for the great day,” writes a relieved monarch on Windsor Castle-headed notepaper. “You know how anxious I was to get my responses right in the abbey, but my mind was finally set at ease tonight. Not a moment’s hesitation or mistake!”
He adds: “The same cannot be said of the Bishops, of course, nor the pen I used to sign the Oath; the ink got all over my fingers, but fortunately one can hardly make it out. The success was due to your expert supervision and unfailing patience with me and I truly don’t know how I could have done it without you.”
Logue first began helping the then Duke of York with his stammer in 1926. For the King’s radio broadcast on the evening of his coronation, the speech doctor whispered to him: “Now take it quietly, sir.” The “slow, measured pace” he had been taught to follow stood him in good stead both that night and for his wartime speeches.
In 1944, George VI appointed Logue a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and he was with him for the VE
Day broadcast on May 8, 1945. After his wife’s death that year, Logue took up spiritualism and died in 1953 in London.
Letter and cigarette case then passed to his brother, Herbert, before being given to Australian jeweller Charles McGowan as part payment for a pearl, diamond and sapphire necklace which cost £27
(worth about £1,300 today).