It’s not news to anyone that The King’s Speech is one of the best films of 2010. If you are one of the few people who haven’t seen it yet, then make some time, sneak past the ushers or download it on someone else’s internet. It is one of those rare films where everything, the acting, direction, script, sets, photography and costumes are all almost faultless. The film, for those few people who don’t know, is about George VI (known to his family as Bertie) and his relationship with Lionel Logue, a speech therapist who helped him overcome his debilitating stammer. Like any historical drama it has to take some liberties with the truth to tell the story but none of them are particularly jarring; they’re more of a gentle explanation of the background through dialogue and merging a few years into one event for the triumphant conclusion.

These days, when the monarchy seems so irrelevant, it’s worth remembering what it was at its rare best, where George VI personified a steadfast beacon of hope for people to cling to in the darkest of times.

During the Blitz, when the English, already deeply scarred by WW1, were at breaking point, it was George VI, together with his wife Elizabeth (the Queen Mother)and Winston Churchill, who held the Londoners together. The King and Queen refused to leave London, despite their very real danger - Buckingham Palace was targeted by the German airforce and was hit seven times during the blitz, about which Elizabeth famously said “I’m almost glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face”. And she did too, she and George VI regularly went out to talk to people who were cleaning up debris each morning, where their presence and genuine sympathy had a hugely uplifting effect on the populace.

The monarchs of England, their personality and relationship to the church and the military have often set the tone of their age. Charles II, the Merry Monarch, reigned over a louche age of great social change. Victoria, with her devotion to family and duty became synonymous with an empire that purported to value duty and honour above all things. Even Diana, in her beauty, her tragedy, her obsession with celebrity and her desperate attempts to understand and overcome her illnesses, gave identity to her era.

George VI and Elizabeth, in their courage, their devotion to position and country, their adherence to the gods of respectability and their staunchness in the face of adversity gave a focus for a new identity and were a bridge between the old Victorian values and the new post war Britain.

Despite the illusion projected to his people, the King was a shy, under-confident man. His mother was a cold and distant woman, who had never noticed the years of abuse her children were subjected to at the hands of cruel and neglectful nannies. His father had famously declared that “my father was afraid of his father, I was afraid of my father and I’m damned well going to see that my children are afraid of me.”

Fathers and sons, it’s often a little tricky but English Kings, from the Hanoverian to the Windsors, turned filial hatred into a family tradition, from Georges I through IV, Prince Albert and right through to the current Prince of Wales. Oddly, daughters, who were never valued as highly as sons in a family based on primogeniture, were usually treated with much more gentleness and affection by their royal fathers. Perhaps this is why Bertie, who had no sons, was able to escape the family curse with his own children. (Interesting aside: Bertie’s father, George V, was euthanized with a cocaine/morphine cocktail, partly to spare him more suffering and partly to ensure his death could be reported in the more prestigious morning papers!)

Bertie also spent months in leg splints to correct incipient knock-knees and was forcibly trained to change his natural left handedness; it’s not really surprising that such a child developed a severe stammer.

In the film, Logue was depicted as a speech therapist come psychotherapist who developed a friendship of equals with the King. In reality, however, they had a very different relationship. He never believed that the King’s stammer was psychological in nature; in fact his remarkable success in overcoming it seems to have stemmed more from mechanical tricks - breathing exercises, muscle strengthening and the like. He would also go through all the King’s speeches and change words likely to cause a problem (“His Majesty” rather than “the King” when referring to his father etc) and, in the beginning, standing with him to conduct him through the difficult parts. These things led to early successes that helped Bertie believe he could overcome his disability, which as any good psychologist will tell you, is at least half the battle.

There is also no evidence that The King and Logue ever discussed his childhood; their friendship was not one of equals. Throughout his letters and diaries Logue retained a deep reverence for the monarchy that sounds almost fawning to modern ears. Despite that, he was a warm, loving male presence in Bertie’s life and being 15 years older than the King, he was probably a counter to the effects of a stern disapproving father. There was a very deep affection on both sides; Bertie and Elizabeth were very grateful for Logue’s loyalty, discretion and success in helping Bertie overcome a stammer which would have made his Kingship impossible to manage.

Another thing Bertie and Logue had in common was their long, happy marriages. Myrtle Logue was a large, cheerful, adventurous woman of Germanic stock, several inches taller than her husband and tireless in her support of his work. She was a boxer, a fencing instructor, a golfer and, as Logue described her, his “spur to greater things”. They were happily married for more than 40 years and he never really recovered from her sudden death in 1945.

The King’s wife Elizabeth was the daughter of a Scottish aristocrat, who would have expected to lead a privileged but unremarkable life as the wife of some lucky Hooray Henry, organising shooting lunches and attending balls. She refused Bertie’s first proposals, partly because the initial one was made through an intermediary (as was required of the second in line to the throne) and partly because she didn’t want to live the complicated and public life of a member of the royal family. However, after she finally did accept him, they managed to have a warmly affectionate marriage until Bertie’s death in 1952.

Like most of her generation she was terrified by the prospect of the Second World War. Two of her brothers fought in the First World War, only one made it home (after years in a German prisoner of war camp) and he never recovered from his physical and psychological injuries. During that war, Elizabeth’s home was turned into a repatriation hospital. She was too young to do much of the actual nursing but she spent hours writing letters for wounded soldiers, reading to them and listening to them talk about their experiences. When she and Bertie married in 1923 she laid her bouquet at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, an impulsive gesture that caught the heart of the nation and has been copied by every royal bride since then.

She never forgave Edward VIII for his abdication. Despite the fact that it was a combination of lung cancer and arteriolosclerosis that caused Bertie’s death (he was a pack a day smoker for most of his adult life), Elizabeth always believed it was the stress of his ascension to the throne and the war years that killed him. The producers of The King’s Speech approached her in the 1970s to ask her permission to make the film. She told them that she was very happy for them to make it but asked only that they would wait until after she was dead because “the memory of those events are still too painful to think about”. They had to wait another 28 years but eventually the story of George VI, Lionel Logue and The King’s Speech was told. Beautifully.

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