March 23, 2011

by David Freeman

Finest Hour 150

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The King’s Speech: A film directed by Tom Hooper, written by David Seidler, with Colin Firth as George VI, Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth, and Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill, released 2010.

Professor Freeman teaches history at the University of California Fullerton.

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In 1925, HRH Prince Albert, Duke of York, the twenty-nine-year-old second son of King George V, made his first broadcast speech at the closing of the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Addressing an audience of 100,000, his words came haltingly, and he was acutely embarrassed. One man listening that day, a speech therapist recently arrived from Australia, remarked, “He’s too old for me to manage a complete cure, but I could very nearly do it.”

One year later, with the Duke and Duchess about to visit Australia, Lionel Logue, his reputation outweighing his lack of medical credentials, was brought in. Therapy had been sought before, never with success, but the Duke and Logue hit it off from the start. HRH left their first meeting brimming with confidence. After two months of treatment, his delivery was significantly improved, and the Australian tour was a fine success.

King George V was delighted. Although he had verbally abused his children when they were young, he admired the adult “Bertie,” his favored son and preferred successor. But primogeniture was not to be questioned in those days, and so arose the 1936 Abdication Crisis.

Once Edward VIII had abdicated and the Duke of York had become George VI, the latter asked Logue’s help preparing for his Coronation broadcast. Logue continued to prepare the King for big speeches until the end of the Second World War, but by Christmas 1945, the King felt confident enough to manage on his own. Far from feeling discarded, Logue enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing his work was complete. “You know, Ma’am,” he said to Queen Elizabeth, “I feel like a father who is sending his boy to his first public school.” The Queen patted his arm and replied, “I know just how you feel.”

This compelling story is nicely dramatized in The King’s Speech by screenwriter David Seidler, a Londoner whose own childhood stammer led him to see George VI as a hero. In fine Shakespearean fashion, Seidler telescopes events and takes some liberties with the facts in order to tell a dramatic story in a reasonable amount of time.

In 1935, King George V is shown hectoring the adult Bertie about being tongue-tied, causing the Duke to turn to Logue ten years later than he actually did. (In reality, Bertie’s stammer was never debilitating, as Andrew Roberts wrote: “In fact it was relatively mild, and when he was concentrating hard on what he was saying it disappeared altogether.”)

Roberts also noted that his brother never taunted Bertie for his stutter, or accused him of wanting to usurp his throne, adding: “the ludicrous old lies about Joachim von Ribbentrop sending Wallis Windsor seventeen red roses every day, and her working as a geisha in Shanghai, are trotted out to blacken her character and make the Yorks look better.” Improbably, the film suggests that Logue used the Duke’s family nickname and worked in a ramshackle office; in fact Logue had a smart set of rooms in Harley Street.

After the Abdication of his brother, and George VI’s successful Coronation speech (which is skipped), the action fast-forwards to the start of the war, when the King has to deliver another major broadcast and calls upon the faithful Logue for assistance; this segment represents how the King prepared for all his broadcasts until the end of the war.

Into this mix Winston Churchill is dropped rather gratuitously. Since all but the final scenes in the film take place during Churchill’s Wilderness Years of the 1930s, WSC’s screen-time is both brief and contrived. No doubt the point is to illustrate that George VI was the sovereign whom Churchill served in the war, when the Royal Family, like Churchill himself, helped maintain public morale. In any case, Timothy Spall shows enough character and Churchillian diction in his fleeting appearances to suggest that given the chance at an expansive portrayal, he would do a splendid job.

Churchill is first shown disapprovingly waiting upon Edward VIII at Balmoral. He next appears privately suggesting to the Duke of York the use of George as a regal cognomen instead of Albert, which “sounds too German.” There is no evidence that this idea originated with Churchill, but the scene serves to make it clear to the audience that “Bertie” became George VI.

Finally, Churchill appears in 1939, newly-installed as First Lord of the Admiralty, encouraging the King by saying he too once suffered from a speech impediment, which he turned to his advantage. In reality, Churchill never overcame his inability to pronounce the letter “s,” but the intention here is to convey that Churchill and his Sovereign had something in common.

The most moving footage is the King’s successful war broadcast on 3 September 1939-fictitiously attended by Churchill, Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury, as if they had nothing else to do that day.

The King’s Speech won Best Picture and Best Actor Oscars in an off-year-it’s not exactly Gone with the Wind, after all-and is a touching, well-acted film. Planting explanatory lines, however ahistoric, in the mouths of characters is an acceptable dramatic practice to move the story along. Most of this is minor and forgivable, except for one howler: Stanley Baldwin is shown submitting his resignation as Prime Minister in 1937 on the grounds that he had been wrong about Hitler and Churchill had been right, and informing the King that Chamberlain would succeed him.

In fact, the supremely self-satisfied Baldwin retired for the sake of retiring, certain that Neville Chamberlain would continue his policies. It would be two years before major British leaders conceded that Winston was right. And, of course, it is the Sovereign’s prerogative whom to send for as Prime Minister. Even the smug Baldwin would not have mentioned a successor unless the King asked-and had he thought Winston had been right, he would have suggested Churchill.

If the film makes for better drama than it does history, it nevertheless gets one thing absolutely right. It was the Duke’s wife, later Queen Elizabeth, as charming as Helena Bonham Carter plays her, who encouraged Bertie to see Logue, offered moral support, assisted in the therapy sessions, and provided her testimonial to Lionel Logue in a bittersweet footnote to history.

When in the 1950s the sad task fell to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother of selecting George VI’s official biographer, she chose John Wheeler-Bennett. If Wheeler-Bennett wrote with particular sensitivity about the matter of the King’s speech, it probably stemmed from the fact that he was himself a former patient of Lionel Logue.