Daily Mail, January 14, 2011
When, some years ago, the Queen Mother was asked by screenwriter David Seidler whether she would like a film to be made about her late husband’s struggle with his stammer, she replied: “Not in my lifetime”. Even as an old lady, and many years after his death, the memory of the distress that a speech impediment had brought King George V1 was still too raw.
Because he, by accident of birth, been fated to become King and the head of a worldwide Empire, at the very dawn of radio. The world wanted to hear the King speak, especially at the outbreak of World War II. And that he did only with the greatest difficulty.
This week, nearly nine years after the death of the Queen Mother, the film, The King’s Speech, about George VI’s relationship with the Australian speech therapist who did much to prepare him for radio broadcasts, opens across the country. Colin Firth plays the monarch in a BAFTA winning performance.
A bad stammer would have been upsetting but mainly a private matter when George VI was just Bertie, the young Duke of York and second son. Public speaking could be largely avoided. But when, after the abdication of his elder brother, Edward VIII, he became King, the misery and fear at having to speak publicly must have been crippling.
But what is it like to be anyone who can’t get his or her words out, whose explosive consonants repeat themselves unstoppably, whose face goes into rictus contortions at the struggle to speak, whose eyes sometimes close involuntarily, who blushes and gulps for air and whose entire body strains?
What is it like to be terrified of having to pick up a telephone, or buy something in a shop, or ask for a fare on the bus? What is it like to have a really bad stammer?
As someone who grew up with a crippling stammer, and who had one until well into his adult life and career, I can tell you one thing: it isn’t funny. Did King George VI hate the First World War song “K-K-K-Katy, Beautiful Katy” as much as every other stammerer ever since? I’m sure he did.
Not that we don’t find such insensitivity today. “Of c-c-course the king can curse,” ran a headline in a Sunday newspaper about the Colin Firth film. To most people it would seem an innocuous headline. But, believe me, stammerers winced internally when they read it, as recollections of mocking chants in the playground flooded back.
Nor is it only children who can be cruel. “C-C-Co-nn-olly!” one Latin teacher would call me, before later deciding I couldn’t be in the school choir because I was “too jerky”. He mustn’t have known that stammerers don’t stammer, or “jerk”, as he put it, when they sing? Though I could certainly sing, I was excluded from the choir.
But then, as most young stammerers quickly recognise, being excluded is part of everyday life. I was rarely asked questions in class because I could never speak to answer them. One French teacher suggested that I should run out to the front of the classroom and write the answer on the board because she didn’t have time to wait while I got the words out. Thirty seconds, maybe? I didn’t take up her suggestion. That would have meant making an even bigger exhibition of myself. So she didn’t ask me any questions. I became silent and invisible.
That’s common, too. Unable to display much personality other than that of someone who seems to be tearing his face apart in order to make conversation, who is bursting with frustration, and who, yes, is often fearful of being mocked, young stammerers tend to keep quiet. It’s easier that way.
There’s clearly far more understanding of stammering today than there was when I was a boy, but I strongly suspect that those who stammer are still often regarded as basically timid, nervous types. That, it’s assumed, is why they stammer.
Actually that’s back to front thinking. In my experience if stammerers appear any more nervous than anyone else it’s because they know they’re going to stammer, not the reason they stammer.
It was probably with this misapprehension in mind that my headmaster wrote to my mother when I was in the sixth form suggesting that he might be able to put a word in for me in some form of local government where I would never have to speak. It was a kind thought, but I had other plans.
Not that university was easy at first. After giving a class paper in my first few weeks, and thinking I’d done rather well, I was brought down to earth when my blunt tutor privately said to me: “I suppose you realise we couldn’t tell what you were saying most of the time”, and advised me to see the college psychiatrist.
As it happened I had, by then, been seeking help for years, at first from an elocutionist, later from a child psychologist and a speech-therapist. All kinds of techniques were tried, from breathing exercises, to copying the sounds on spoken records.
There’d even questions into my sex life. At fifteen I’d been asked by a buxom young speech therapist whether I ever did anything when I was alone of which I was embarrassed. It was only years later that I realised what she was talking about.
At university they were Freudian times. When explaining to the college psychiatrist how I had trouble speaking when asking for my fare in the Tube station, that is projecting my voice into the hole in the ticket seller’s window, I was asked whether I thought I might have a sexual problem. No, I’d never thought that, I replied. Not that I’d ever had any sex either.
You could say, to use modern parlance, that my stammer defined me. Plum, my wife recently admitted that before she introduced me to her flat-mates she warned them about my speech. And when we became engaged her aunt advised her that she was taking on someone with a serious handicap.
It was a problem, but somehow more for others than for me, because, in my head, I didn’t stammer, I was quick witted, even good with words. And perhaps having a stammer inadvertently made my career. I couldn’t talk, so I wrote, eventually forcing myself in my mid-twenties to the attention of Fleet Street, where I was given a job as an interviewer and my life changed.
Not that my speech changed much at first. Recently playing back some interview tapes made forty years ago I was shocked to realise how difficult it had been for me to speak then. But I was warmed, too, to hear how patient so many very famous people had been to me.
I still stammer, although not when you might expect. I frequently go on radio and television and address classrooms and halls full of people and speak just about fluently. Publicly my speech is no longer a problem. But, in truth, in those situations I’m faking it. Like an actor I’m playing the part of a person who doesn’t stammer.
But around the house with my family, or with friends who know me well, the stammer is usually there. I don’t act with them. I’m me. I suspect that when George VI relaxed at Buckingham Palace, having triumphed over his handicap and made an entire speech word perfect, he slipped back into his normal halting delivery with those closest to him.
Great progress has been made with the treatment of stammers in recent years, with the emphasis gradually moving away from psychological causes. But, although brain imaging studies show significant differences between the brain activity of people stammering and fluent speakers, there’s still no single explanation.
Generally about one per cent of the adult population stammer, with a slightly higher figure in children, nearly four times as many boys as girls having a problem. Nothing in the statistics suggest that the number of people who stammer is changing over the generations, but, as I seem to be less aware of it these days, perhaps speech therapists are helping children at a younger age.
As the Queen Mother didn’t want The King’s Speech made in her lifetime, I wouldn’t have written this article when my mother was alive, my articles on the subject then always making light of it. I hid the hurt with jokes, because there was absolutely nothing more she could have done to help me.
But if you have a child with a bad stammer don’t assume that because that child doesn’t complain he or she isn’t suffering torment inside. I don’t suppose George VI complained very much. But his widow felt his pain for the rest of her life.
