How the King found his voice

The King’s Speech, the new film starring Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter, tells the story of the Duke of York, later King George VI, from 1925 until the outbreak of war in 1939, largely through the prism of the Duke’s struggles against the stutter from which he had suffered since the age of eight. These were difficult and dangerous years for the House of Windsor, comprising as they did the death of King George V and accession of King Edward VIII, the Abdication Crisis later that year, and the rise of fascism, culminating in Britain’s declaration of war against Germany.

“George VI’s reign will go down in history,” wrote a characteristically waspish Evelyn Waugh, “as the most disastrous my country has known since Matilda and Stephen”. As it spanned the German annexation of Austria, the Munich crisis, the Dunkirk evacuation and fall of Singapore, the emergence of Soviet Communism in Eastern Europe, the Age of Austerity and the loss of India, Waugh might have had a point, but as this movie makes clear, the King himself, and his beloved wife Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, led blameless and even heroic lives as they saw their people through these disasters.

George VI exhibited many of the qualities of his father George V, and indeed his father’s reign served as the template. Both were ex-naval second sons not expected to accede to the throne, both took Britain through devastating world wars soon after their accessions and, fortified by strong-willed wives and profound Christian faith, they both won the admiration and even love of the British people. Even their handwriting was alike. Yet where George V had presided over the first modern shock to the British Empire, his son had to face the start of its unwinding, while still fervently believing in its capacity to do good.

Born on the Sandringham estate on December 14, 1895 – the anniversary of the death of the Prince Consort – the second son of the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George V and Queen Mary) was unsurprisingly christened Prince Albert. A shy, weak and somewhat lachrymose child, the young Prince endured considerable ill-health, contracting gastritis as a result of his nurse’s negligence and walking with his legs in splints to overcome incipient knock-knees. He also grew up in the shadow of his elder brother, the future King Edward VIII, who seemed to have all the attributes in terms of charm, looks, confidence and sporting ability that “Bertie”, as the family called him, seemed to lack. It was hardly surprising that, aged eight, he developed a stammer, although it was not so chronic an affliction as this movie depicts.

Colin Firth accurately depicts the Prince’s bravery in the face of his afflictions. ''Bertie’’ suffered gastritis and seasickness as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, but raised himself from his sickbed to fight in the battle of Jutland as a sub-lieutenant in 1916. The following year, he had to undergo an operation on a duodenal ulcer. Later in life his entire left lung had to be removed, which presaged his tragically early death at 56.

It was in his marriage to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in April 1923, that the Duke made the soundest decision of his life. At every crisis of his life, he had beside him a wife who became part business-manager, part private-secretary, part public relations adviser. Living at 145 Piccadilly and in Windsor Great Park, the couple, who were joined in 1926 by Princess Elizabeth (our present Queen) and in 1930 by Princess Margaret, the family led a happy domestic life. In 1926, the Duke visited the brilliant Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue – played superbly by Geoffrey Rush – and embarked on an intensive course which helped control, but never eradicate, his stammer. There were occasional state visits, to East Africa and Sudan in 1924 and to Australasia in 1927, in which the Duke spoke to parliament in Canberra without stammering once.

By the time of the death of George V – played as a tough martinet by Michael Gambon – on January 20, 1936, the Yorks had, of course, heard rumours about the Prince of Wales’s love life, but little could have prepared the Duke for the conversation with his brother on November 17, when the new King made it clear that he intended to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée, even if it meant forsaking the throne. The film is at fault in depicting Edward VIII taunting and sneering at his younger brother; in fact they were friends.

After a series of meetings and conversations, featuring among several others, Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister (played well by Anthony Andrews, despite little physical resemblance), and Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury (played as a pompous punctilio by Derek Jacobi), it became clear that nothing could be done to change the King’s mind. Winston Churchill is depicted by Timothy Spall as supporting the abdication, whereas in fact he opposed it.

The night before the abdication, the Duke wrote in his diary of ''the awful and ghastly suspense’’, and when he saw his mother Queen Mary (played as a cold automaton by Claire Bloom), he ''broke down and sobbed like a child’’. The swift and ruthless way in which the ex-King and his new wife, now the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, were cut out of official life probably owed more to Queen Elizabeth’s innate political appreciation of how the couple’s glamour could still harm her husband’s position than from a sense of spite. The film wisely avoids speculation.

It concentrates instead on the King’s address to the nation hours after Neville Chamberlain had declared war against Germany. The scene is fairly absurd from a historical point of view – Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill were not present and there were no cheering crowds outside Buckingham Palace – but it is true that the broadcast was delivered without significant stammering, as were several of his wartime broadcasts. The movie seeks to attribute this entirely to Logue’s brilliance, which is Hollywood’s prerogative, but the King’s growing sense of self-confidence, partly instilled by his wife, probably had just as much to do with it.

Once hostilities had begun, the King and Queen threw themselves into the primary business of a Royal family during wartime, that of bolstering national morale, and it is for this work that they are chiefly remembered today. The King’s most famous broadcast came three months after this film ends, on Christmas Day 1939, when he quoted, with great effect, from the poet Minnie Louise Harkins:

''I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year,

'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown’,

And he replied: 'Go out into the darkness,

And put your hand into the hand of God.”’

Hollywood does not often depict the Royal family in a particularly positive light, but The King’s Speech emphasises the quiet, unassuming heroism of the King and Queen. If the supporting characters – George V, Queen Mary, Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson – come off as harsher figures than they really were, it is a small price to pay in a medium where historical accuracy has always taken second place to dramatic effect. In real life the Duke of York was perfectly able to conduct stammerless conversations when he wasn’t under any pressure, but that fact would have detracted from the movie’s overall power. The portrayals by Firth and Bonham Carter are sympathetic and acute, and the movie’s occasional factual bêtises should not detract from that. Above all, the film is an affectionate portrait of a king who never sought the limelight, indeed whose whole constitution rebelled from it, but who overcame his instinctive loathing of public speaking for the good of his country. Colin Firth recently admitted that before this film, he didn’t know that

George VI had been married to the late Queen Mother. Thanks to this film, which will hopefully garner many Oscars, millions of people will now.

Andrew Roberts’s 'The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War’ is published by Penguin.