Spiritualist Lionel Logue & 'The King's Speech"

Lionel & his beloved Myrtle

It seems The King's Speech is proving a big hit with Australian audiences and the talk in Hollywood is of the film sweeping the boards at the Academy Awards.
The speech therapist Lionel Logue became a life long friend of King George V1 but what is less known is that when his beloved wife Myrtle died in 1945 Logue, until then a Christian Scientist became a believer in Spiritualism and regularly attended services to see if he would get messages from his wife. Logue died in 1953.
 The Sydney Morning Herald today writes about him :


Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue honed his skills with shell-shocked soldiers. Then came his biggest challenge - a stammering future monarch, writes Steve Meacham.
Fleet Street labelled him ''The Quack Who Saved The King''. Some reporters went still further, questioning whether the British monarchy would have survived the Abdication crisis in 1936 without the intervention of an obscure self-taught speech therapist from Australia.

King George V1

They even speculated whether the famed spirit of the Blitz would have been quite so resolute had ''Bertie'' - King George VI - not made his calming radio broadcasts to a nation at war. Yet since Lionel George Logue died in April 1953, his name has faded into obscurity, hardly warranting a historical footnote.

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