Voice coach who helped Kate Middleton deliver her vows
Anthony Gordon Lennox, Anthony Gordon
who has died of cancer aged Lennox
48, was often described in 1969-2017
the media as a voice coach, or image consultant – especially after he was brought in to help Kate Middleton deliver her wedding vows in 2011. But the terms don’t really do justice to the range of his work, or the sophistication of his techniques, said The Daily Telegraph. Working on Question Time had taught him that when people are under pressure, they often struggle to communicate their thoughts clearly. He urged his clients to shed the carapaces that they had adopted to get to the top, and to show their more normal, human side. “Naturally open himself, he would challenge clients’ thinking and, having deconstructed their identity, instil the confidence to find the best in themselves.”
The nephew of the 10th Duke of Richmond, Anthony Charles Gordon Lennox was born in Madrid in 1969, where his father, a career diplomat, would later become the British ambassador. His mother, Mary, was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Alexandra. As a young boy, he learnt from his parents the art of putting people at ease; often, he would ask visiting dignitaries disarmingly direct questions, said The Times, and found that once they’d got over their surprise, they were quite happy to sit down and tell him their favourite colour, or what they’d eaten for breakfast. Educated at a prep school in Seaford, he was destined for Eton. He failed to get in the first time, but doors tended to open: the wife of the Spanish ambassador to London, Marquesa de la Cruz, recruited a dozen elderly nuns to pray for him, and he was duly admitted at the second attempt. At the University of Exeter, he settled on a career in the media. This time, it was his mother who came to his aid: she consulted a friend, Alexandra Henderson (Lady Drogheda), who was a producer on Question Time, which led to a job as a gofer on the programme. He observed what made the panellists effective, and discovered his talent for putting even the most anxious of them at ease.
In 2004, he started his own business. He helped David Cameron come across as less aloof, and he was rumoured to have helped Samantha Cameron tone down her cut-glass accent. Prior to 2011’s Royal wedding, he not only coached Kate Middleton, he also prepared her dyslexic brother James – who’d never even read the lesson at his school chapel – to deliver a reading in Westminster Abbey. However, most of the people he helped were not high-profile public figures, but the CEOS of big businesses. On meeting a new client, he would often ask them what they loved. After a few minutes of telling him about their children, or their football team, the client would turn and say: “This is all very well, but I thought we were here to improve my presentation skills?” to which Gordon Lennox would reply, “We just have.” His technique was to get “his clients to transfer their enthusiasm for everyday things into those most trying moments in front of a large audience. To many, this was a revelation.”