The King's Speech by Mark Logue, Peter Conradi Read Free Book Online Page A

including electric shock therapy that had been tried on patients in Britain – apparently to no avail.
    Encouraged by his treatment of O’Dwyer, Logue went on to repeat his success with five other former soldiers – among them a G. P. Till, who had been gassed while fighting with Australian forces at Villers-Bretonneux on the Somme. When he came to see Logue on 23 April that year, Till’s vocal cords weren’t vibrating and what voice he could muster had a range of just two feet. Logue discharged him on 17 May after he appeared to have made a full recovery. ‘In fact, I could not stop talking for about three weeks,’ Till told the newspaper. ‘My friends said to me, “Are you never going to stop talking?” and I replied, “I’ve got a lot of lost time to make up.”’

O n 19 January 1924 Lionel and Myrtle set off for England aboard the Hobsons Bay , a twin-masted single-funnel ship of the Commonwealth and Dominion Line. They travelled third class. With them were their three children, Laurie, now aged fifteen, Valentine, ten and a third son, Antony Lionel (usually known in the family as Boy), born on 10 November 1920. The 13,837-ton ship, which had 680 passengers and 160 crew, had made its maiden voyage from London to Brisbane less than three years earlier. After forty-one days at sea, they steamed into the port of Southampton on 29 February.
    It was only by chance – and another of the spontaneous decisions that shaped his life – that Logue, by then employed as an instructor in elocution at the Perth Technical School, had found himself aboard the Hobsons Bay . He and a doctor friend had planned to take their families away for a holiday together. The Logue family’s bags were packed and their car ready to go when the telephone rang: it was the doctor.
    ‘Sorry, but I cannot go with you,’ he said, according to an account later published by John Gordon, a journalist and friend of Logue’s. 9 ‘A friend has fallen ill. I have to stay with him.’
    ‘Well, that holiday is over,’ Logue told his wife.
    ‘But you need a holiday,’ she replied. ‘Why don’t you go out East by yourself?’
    ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I went East last year.’
    ‘Then why not Colombo?’
    ‘Well,’ Logue replied, hesitantly. ‘If I went to Colombo I would probably want to go to England.’
    ‘England? Why not!’ exclaimed Myrtle.
    Rapidly warming to the idea, Myrtle had her husband call a friend who was head of a shipping agency. When Logue asked about the possibility of getting two cabins on a ship to Britain, his friend laughed.
    ‘Don’t be silly,’ the friend replied. ‘This is Wembley year. There isn’t a cabin free in any ship, and not likely to be.’
    The friend did not need to explain what he meant by Wembley. That April, George V and the Prince of Wales were due to open the British Empire Exhibition, one of the greatest shows on earth, in Wembley in north-west London. The exhibition was the largest of its sort ever staged and intended to showcase an empire at its height that was now home to 458 million people (a quarter of the world’s population) and covered a quarter of the total land area of the world. The exhibition’s declared aim was ‘to stimulate trade, strengthen bonds that bind Mother Country to her Sister States and Daughters, to bring into closer contact the one with each other, to enable all who owe allegiance to the British flag to meet on common ground and learn to know each other’.
    Three giant buildings – Palaces of Industry, Engineering and Arts – were constructed; so, too, was the Empire Stadium, with its distinctive twin towers, which as Wembley Stadium became the heart of English football until it was demolished in 2002. Some twenty-seven million people in total visited – many of them from the far corners of the Empire, including Australia.
    With all these people heading for Britain, the Logues’ prospects of realizing their dream seemed slim, but half an hour later the