The King’s speech, the Queen’s ears... and the voices of a nation

IT was a lively debate some 40 years ago in the House of Commons. A Nationalist MP was speaking. He was very, very Scots and someone hollered about his ‘incomprehensible’ speech.

George Thomas, Mr Speaker, arose. He was rather strange and very, very Welsh. ‘There are many accents in this House,’ he lilted. ‘I’ve often wished that I, too, had an accent.’ MPs cracked up in hilarity and the ugly tension was defused.

Regional accents fascinate. They can also irritate. In Britain, of course, they are closely linked to social class and even today many go to rather sad lengths to upgrade their voices.

Michael Forsyth, in his pomp, never sounded like a laddie brought up in an Arbroath council house. Malcolm Rifkind’s extraordinary purr fell somewhere between Loyd Grossman and Miss Jean Brodie. And, occasionally, the cracks show. Fanny Cradock, that terrifying pantomime dame of a TV chef, tried to talk like a duchess, but the odd West Ham vowel slipped out occasionally.

The Duke of Windsor, sometime Edward VIII, never quite lost a Cockney twang, legacy of a beloved childhood nanny. And, though the Queen has worked hard over the decades to lower her pitch and shed some of the oddest pronunciations, she still goes ‘orf’ and pronounces ‘yes’ as ‘ears’.

Margaret Thatcher, poor old duck, had to reinvent her speech twice – first, when the grocer’s daughter became all posh; and, secondly, when she became Tory leader and sounded far too grand for the rest of us. She worked hard to lower the tone, to sound less shrill.

The outcome was a sort of feigned insincerity – as Keith Waterhouse once wickedly joked, ‘She always talks as if your dog has just died’ – but, still, it was much less off-putting than the garden party drawl of her earlier career.

FOR those who wanted to sound classy in the days when many paid for lessons in elocution, there were two options. One was to learn ‘received pronunciation’, or BBC English: broadly, a tidied-up version of the Home Counties accent. ‘It is the business of educated people to speak,’ grated one elocution textbook, ‘so that no one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed.’

The other, and now largely forgotten, model was mid-Atlantic speech, a confection of private schools in the eastern United States and made famous by Hollywood.

Such actors as Bette Davis or Cary Grant did not speak ‘American’, they spoke in this clear, cut-glass way that was almost English.

Other lifelong users of the accent included Gore Vidal and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but it is now most unfashionable and, in Britain, received pronunciation is only decreed for newsreaders on the BBC World Service. Radio 4 in recent years has ruthlessly dropped such beautiful speakers as Edward Stourton and Charlotte Green.

Some accents are plain confusing. One would expect Jo Swinson – a girl who went to school in Milngavie – to talk like someone from Milngavie, but there is also a strange ooh-arr rural English quality, perhaps the influence of her Hertfordshire-reared husband.

Not that I am one to talk: my own accent is essentially Highland but with elements of north Argyll, Lewis, and Harris, with a tendency to turn West End Glasgow when very cross. (I am probably channelling some of my less herbivorous teachers.)

And there are contexts when it is rather important to have an accent. One reason why so many silver-tongued Irish have prospered on our airwaves – Eamonn Andrews, Terry Wogan, Gloria Hunniford – is, surely, because their speech had no connotation of class.

During the war, too, the BBC began deliberately using newsreaders such as Wilfred Pickles, a proud Mancunian, as it was thought their speech was much harder for dastardly Germans to successfully mimic.

Yet snobbery endures, and in both directions. Some modern politicians – William Hague, Ed Miliband and (in his own SNP sphere) Michael Russell were undoubtedly hampered by their speech.

Iain Gray I always viewed with some suspicion because his accent sounds far too demotic for a man who went to a gracious private school.

There are all sorts of variants we tend to overlook unless we move around a lot. What, to a Scot, is simply a ‘roll’ is, to most of England, a ‘bap’.

Most of us pronounce ‘often’ with a silent ‘t’, but most English

do not. And you might shudder at the glottal stop of the ordinary Glaswegian, but pronouncing ‘wa’er’ without a ‘t’ is no more irrational than a Viscount ‘drorring his barth’.

In Scotland, of course – and till really very recent years – children were actively educated out of their natural speech, even if it was perfectly good Scots. Such charming usages as ‘we were sat at the table’ or ‘I seen him yesterday’ won immediate reproach; the unthinkable ‘I ken what you mean’ invited the belt.

OF course, in such contexts children often adopt different voices for different settings. I knew boys in my father’s Partick Highland congregation who spoke in soft Hebridean at Sabbath school, fluent Gaelic to their parents and entire Glaswegian in the playground. (For some reason their parents, and mine, had an entire horror of the Glasgow accent.)

There are certainly still spheres of life – notably, academia – where a strong regional accent puts you at a disadvantage. (Though not a Highland one: Hebrideans have reached the top of every profession I can think of and, indeed, so many prosper in the

BBC one hears dark mutters about the ‘Gaelic Mafia’.)

But the great foe of native speech, everywhere, is TV. There will always be the great accents: Yorkshire, Glaswegian, Geordie or Brummie. But the little ones are perishing by the dozen every year.

Not so long ago you could meet someone from Lewis and guess, within a few sentences, from which district they hailed. That is now only true of our oldest people, those who have spent the best part of their lives without television.

There have been strange changes. The Flow Country in Caithness is properly pronounced to rhyme with ‘plough’, but almost everyone now rhymes it with ‘throw’ because that is what broadcasters call it.

The most dramatic, broadcast impact on our speech was that long-running Australian soap, Neighbours. By the midNineties, teenagers were damning geeky classmates as ‘dags’ when they were not ‘dobbing off’ school or imploring the family pooch to ‘rack off’.

Worse, it sparked an epidemic of ‘upspeak’, youngsters ending every sentence in such a way that it sounds like a question. It infuriated at the time but much less now, in an age when, you know, even Prince Harry sounds right common.