King george vi biography stammer vs stuttering

The Oscar-winning film, The King’s Speech, does an excellent job of showing how George VI’s stammer affected his life and reign.  With the help of the Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, Bertie (as he is called in the movie) explores the roots of his speech impediment which lay in his childhood, particularly in his relations with his martinet father, George V.  “My father was scared of his father, I was scared of my father,” George V threatened his sons, “and I’m dammed well going to see that they are scared of me.”

They were.  The king forced his left-handed second son to write with his right hand, and put splints on him to strengthen his knocked knees.  His nanny (who name is not recorded) tyrannized the baby Bertie, pinching him before handing him to his mother, the formidable Queen Mary, so that he started to cry, prompting her to thrust him back into his nanny’s malignant care.  Being a second son Bertie felt inadequate when compared to his brother, the empty, yet charismatic Edward VIII.  (After he abdicated, Alistair Cook called him  “a Prince Charming who was at his best when the going was good.”)

George VI was not the only British monarch who stammered badly.  As a child Charles I (1625-49) had such a severe stutter that his father, James I, threatened to cut the cord beneath his tongue to try and cure it.  He also threatened to make the boy wear iron braces to cure his rickets.  While Charles had a loving nanny in Lady Elisabeth Carey, when James inherited the English throne his family deserted the three-year-old Charles, leaving him in Scotland when they moved to London.  Three years latter, when he rejoined them, Charles, a priggish boy, had to live in the decadent court of his homosexual father.  The first thing Charles did after James died in 1625 was to clean up his father’s court.  His older brother, Henry, bullied him so badly that Charles tried to buy him off with pr

• In December 1936, King George VI took the British throne following his older brother Edward VIII's abdication.
• Unfortunately, George VI had a stutter that made it hard for him to give speeches to the British public.
• The King ended up attending speech therapy before his iconic address in 1939.

King George VI never intended to be the King of England — but that's exactly what happened when his older brother, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne in December 1936 in order to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

Despite the nontraditional start to his reign, George VI went on to become a symbol of strength and hope for the British people throughout World War II and beyond, reigniting their faith in the country's monarchy. It's this rise and reign of the unexpected King that is chronicled in the second episode of CNN docuseries The Windsors: Inside the Royal Dynasty, which airs on Sunday at 10 p.m.

Unsurprisingly, the journey to becoming a successful and beloved King wasn't an easy one for George VI. He was thrown into the job unexpectedly, of course, but his anxiety about taking on the role was only compounded by the stammer he had struggled with ever since he was a young boy.

As is shown in the Oscar-winning 2010 movie The King's Speech, George VI (who was known as Albert or "Bertie" to those closest to him) struggled with a stutter from a young age. After being named the Duke of York in 1920 (but long before he became King), he feared that his stutter would prevent him from effectively giving important speeches to his people, so he began seeing a speech therapist from Australia named Lionel Logue.

But this is where the highly acclaimed drama parts ways from the truth: Because there are no logs of what, exactly, Lionel and the King did during their sessions, we can't be sure of what exercises the speech therapist had George VI practice. (What yo

In November 2010, worldwide movie audiences were presented with a most interesting and unusual movie release with The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth as King George VI and Helena Bonham Carter as his wife Elizabeth.

Unfortunately, history may have forgotten the courageous and inspiring story of Prince Albert who stuttered badly and never dreamed that he would ever be king when his older brother, King Edward VIII, abruptly abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee.

In an interview after the completion of the filming of The King’s Speech, producer Iain Canning said, “His brother was famously charming and Bertie was considered the dull-witted one with little charisma.” When Prince Albert, who was known as Bertie, ascended to the throne to become King George VI, it is an understatement to say that his life changed drastically.

The film deals solely with George VI’s stuttering and his relationship with Lionel Logue, an Australian speech therapist retained by the Prince to help him overcome his stuttering in the years before, during and after the 1936 abdication by his older brother. While countless other movies have had characters who stutter, this is the first one to focus on the lead character’s stuttering and speech therapy.

Like many people who stutter, Prince Albert had met with failure in several speech programs. When Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush in the movie, saw the Prince give a speech in public, he turned to his son and said, “He’s too old for me to manage a complete cure. But I could very nearly do it. I’m sure of that.”

In his 1982 biography King George VI, Denis Judd writes, “Lionel Logue’s methods were neither extravagant nor particularly controversial. However Logue’s approach was not purely psychological and many of his patients had been reassured that their difficulties could be partly caused by incorrect breathing.

He required his patients to undertake da

An Update on Stuttering

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In “The King’s Speech,” a recent movie set in pre-World War II England, soon-to-be King George VI has to conquer a stammer (Americans call it a A speech disorder in which sounds, syllables or words are repeated or prolonged, disrupting the normal flow of speech. These speech disruptions may be accompanied by signs of struggling, such as rapid eye blinks or tremors of the lips.stutter) that has hindered him since childhood and makes public speaking an agony. With the help of a speech therapist, the king learns how to control his stutter enough to get through a speech. But King George never completely defeated his stutter. Although he managed to overcome the characteristic repetition of sounds at the beginnings of words, in old films you can still see him pausing, grimacing, gathering his courage and moving on as best he can.

More than 50 years later, therapies for those who stutter aren’t that different from the king’s. Many, like King George's, focus on learning ways to minimize the impact of the disorder. They involve learning to speak more slowly, regulating breathing, and gradually progressing from single-syllable responses to longer words and more complex sentences.

Stuttering affects more than 3 million people in America and another 60 million worldwide. Approximately 75% to 85% of those who stutter in childhood will outgrow it when they become adults. However, there is currently no way to know who will stop and who will continue. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to stutter, a difference that increases even more in adulthood, when men are 3 to 4 times more likely to stutter than women.

People have recognized stuttering as a speech disorder for thousands of years. They’ve speculated about what causes it for just as long. In King George’s time, it was thought to stem from childhood emotional trauma or an unhealthy attachment to a parent, usually the mother.