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

phone rang again: it was the shipping agent, who seemed excited.
    ‘You are the luckiest man,’ he told Logue. ‘Two cabin bookings have just been cancelled. You can have them. The ship sails in ten days.’
    ‘I’ll tell you in half an hour,’ Logue replied.
    ‘It’s this minute or never.’
    Myrtle nodded and Logue didn’t hesitate. ‘Right, we take them,’ he said.
    The journey, which lasted almost six weeks, gave them plenty of time to get to know the passengers and crew. They made a particular friend of the master, a Scotsman named O. J. Kydd, who eight years later was to invite Logue to join him on his holiday at his home near Aberdeen, and showed him Holyrood Castle, Glencoe, the Pass of Killiecrankie and dozens of other places that he had read about as a boy.
    It is not clear if Logue and Myrtle were planning to emigrate or merely to have another look at the country they had left a decade earlier. In any case, there were few ties to keep them in Australia. Both their fathers had long since died; in 1921 Lionel’s mother, Lavinia, also passed away; Myrtle’s mother, Myra, followed in 1923.
    The Britain in which the family landed was a country in turmoil. The First World War had caused an enormous upheaval and putting the country back onto a peacetime footing proved a huge challenge, too. David Lloyd George vowed to turn Britain into a Land Fit for Heroes, but jobs had to be found for the returning soldiers, while the women who had taken their places in the factories had to be coaxed into returning to the home. Optimism quickly faded as the immediate postwar boom turned to bust in 1921, public spending was slashed and the jobless total surged. The war had plunged Britain deeply into debt.
    Even the imperial triumphalism symbolized by the events at Wembley was illusory: Britain was finding it difficult to shoulder the economic burdens of defending its empire, which had acquired another 1.8 million square miles of territory and 13 million more subjects thanks to the Treaty of Versailles, in which Lloyd George and the leaders of the other victorious Allied powers carved up the world.
    The political landscape was changing, too. Stanley Baldwin, who became Conservative prime minister in May 1923, failed to win a majority in a snap election that December, opening the way for Britain’s first Labour government. And so, in January 1924, Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a Scottish farm labourer and a housemaid, was asked by George V to form a minority administration, with the support of the Liberals. The King was impressed by MacDonald. ‘He wishes to do the right thing,’ he noted in his diary. ‘Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government!’
    The government did not last long: Labour was defeated in the election that October, paving the way for the return of Baldwin and the Conservatives, who were to dominate British politics over the next two decades, through the General Strike of 1926, the Depression of the 1930s and, eventually, the Second World War.
    Such dark days lay ahead; Logue had more pressing problems. He and Myrtle may have originally intended to come on vacation, but they soon decided to stay longer. But how could he support his family? He started to look around for jobs, but it wasn’t easy. He had brought with him savings of £2,000 – worth many times more than it is today but still not sufficient to keep a family of five for very long.
    The enormity of what he had let himself and his family in for must have begun suddenly to dawn on him. He knew no one and had carried only one introduction: to Gordon, a Dundee-born journalist ten years his junior, who in 1922 had become chief sub-editor of the Daily Express (and was to go on, from 1928 until 1952, to become a highly successful editor of its sister paper, the Sunday Express ). They were to remain on close terms for the rest of Logue’s life.
    Logue settled his family in modest