Many know it, King George VI was a stutterer and had to fight this handicap to make it a strength. All this with the help of Lionel Logue, the Australian speech therapist who helped him greatly. We tell you more about it.
The king George VI had to fight to prove he was capable. Being a stutterer represents a certain difficulty for many, but for a king it was not even an option. With the many speeches he had to make, King George VI had to be helped by a specialist to overcome this handicap. He, including his daughter, Elizabeth II, wrote a moving text about him.
It was the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, who came to his aid. Thanks to his expertise and his humanity, he allowed the sovereign, whose eldest son of William inherited his first name, to control your speech, and gather the crowds. Lionel Logue was born in 1880 in Adelaide, Australia and moved to London in 1924. He had a practice there at 146 Harley Street in the City district. He soon became known for his treatments for speech disorders veterans of the Great War and school children. Elisabeth Bowes-Lyon, Albert’s wife, future Queen Mum (Queen Mother), walked through the door of his practice in 1926. She asked him to overcome the stuttering of her husband the Duke of York, who had given his daughter a fond nickname, when other speech therapists did not had not reached. Lionel Logue accepted his requestand changed the fate of the latter.
How did Lionel Logue manage to help King George VI?
The day of October 10, 1926 was marked by the very first meeting between the two men. This did not turn out to be encouraging since Albert Frederick Arthur George turned quickly when the speech therapist asked him about his childhood. Of the family trauma were indeed the cause of the king’s stutter. The expert then warned him: “I can heal you, but it will take a lot of effort”.
Then, results arrived after a lot of hard work. The speech therapist’s diary revealed that in just under a year (between October 1926 and December 1927), the two men had eighty-two dates to improve the diction of George VI. And this through complicated phrases to repeat. As : “I have a sieve full of sifted thistles and a sieve full of unsifted thistles, because I am a thistle sifter” or, in French, the very famous phrase “a hunter who knows how to hunt without his dog is a hunter who knows how to hunt”, especially to use in theater lessons. Although the speech therapist’s methods were considered ‘unorthodox’ at the time, they ended up working. And the relationship between those who worked hand in hand has continued to evolve for the better.