The King's Speech Read Online Free Page A

night was strong and deep, resembling to a startling degree the voice of his father,’ reported the Star . ‘His words came through firmly, clearly – and without hesitation.’ Both men couldn’t have wished for a better accolade.

A delaide in the 1880s was a city overflowing with civic pride. Named in honour of Queen Adelaide, the German-born consort of King William IV, it had been founded in 1836 as the planned capital of a freely settled British province in Australia. It was laid out in a grid pattern, interspaced by wide boulevards and large public squares, and surrounded by parkland. By the time of its half centenary, it had become a comfortable place to live: from 1860 residents had been able to enjoy water piped in from the Thorndon Park reservoir, horse-drawn trams and railways made it easy to move around, and by night the streets were lit by gas lights. In 1874 it acquired a university; seven years later, the South Australian Art Gallery opened its doors for the first time.
    It was here, close to College Town on the outskirts of the city, that Lionel George Logue was born on 26 February 1880, the eldest of four children. His grandfather, Edward Logue, originally a Dubliner, had arrived in 1850 and set up Logue’s Brewery on King William Street. The city at this time had dozens of independent breweries, but Edward Logue’s did especially well; the Adelaide Observer attributed its success to the good water and the ‘more than ordinary skill’ of the proprietor, who was able to produce ‘ale of a character which enables him to compete successfully with all other manufacturers of the nut brown creature comfort’.
    Logue never knew his grandfather; Edward died in 1868, and his brewery was taken over by his widow Sarah, and her business partner Edwin Smith, who later bought her out. After several mergers, the original business was eventually to become part of the South Australian Brewing Company.
    Logue’s father George, who was born in 1856 in Adelaide, was educated at St Peter’s College and, after leaving school, went to work at the brewery, rising to the position of accountant. He later became licensee of the Burnside Hotel, which he ran together with his wife Lavinia, and then took over the Elephant and Castle Hotel, which still stands today on West Terrace. It was, Logue recalled, a perfect childhood. ‘I had a wonderfully happy home, as we were a very united family.’
    Logue was sent to school at Prince Alfred College, one of Adelaide’s oldest boys’ schools and arch rival of St Peter’s. The school enjoyed considerable success both academically and in sports, especially cricket and Australian Rules Football. By his own admission, however, Logue struggled to find an academic subject at which he excelled. His epiphany came unexpectedly: kept back for detention one day, he opened a book at random: it was Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha . The words seemed to leap out of the page at him:
Then lagoo, the great boaster,
He the marvellous story-teller,
He the traveller and the talker,
He the friend of old Nokomis,
Made a bow for Hiawatha;
    Logue went on reading for an hour, entranced by the words. Here was something that really mattered: rhythm – and he had found the door that led him into it.
    Even as a young boy, he had been more interested in voices than faces; as the years passed, his interest and fascination in voices grew. In those days, far more emphasis was put on elocution than today: every year in Adelaide Town Hall, four boys who were the best speakers would recite and compete for the elocution prize. Logue, of course, was among the winners.
    He left school at sixteen and went to study with Edward Reeves, a Salford-born teacher of elocution who had emigrated with his family to New Zealand as a child before moving to Adelaide in 1878. Reeves taught elocution to his pupils by day and gave ‘recitals’ to packed audiences in the Victoria Hall or other venues by night. Dickens was one