One of the few misfortunes slightly to darken my otherwise
very happy life was that from the age of about 6 until I was 16, I was
afflicted by a pronounced stammer making me, in PG Wodehouse’s phrase, sound
like “a soda syphon trying to recite Gunga
Din”. No doubt the causes of this stutter lay in some dark and long
forgotten childhood neurosis, but in any event I muddled through, probably
giving more excruciating embarrassment to my listeners than to myself and I am
now quite offensively fluent.
A stutterer quickly learns some devious stratagems. My most
dreaded words were those beginning with a “k” or a hard “c” and I carefully
avoided having to say “cacophony” or “culinary”. The nightmare scenario would
have involved reading aloud “King Kong cooks cabbage” but this unlikely
combination mercifully never actually appeared. As a compensation of some kind,
I enjoyed singing, where nobody ever stutters, and I also took to writing
essays, quietly amusing myself but perhaps boring the pants off others, as at
this very moment!
Stuttering is quite common – I am always surprised by how
many of my acquaintances say “me too” when I talk of my youthful stuttering
days. There is indeed a kind of freemasonry between stutterers. I much softened
my attitude towards Ed Balls on learning he had been a fellow sufferer and we
are in royal company too with the Stuart dynasty’s James I, Charles I and James
II all stammering and, PG again, “making a sizzling sound like a cockroach
calling to its young”. Most famously George VI was hopelessly tongue-tied until
he was coached by the maverick Australian therapist Lionel Logue and given
confidence by his feisty wife and future Queen Elizabeth.
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| A Stutter conquered - George VI |
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| Demosthenes |
Some famous orators have been stutterers too. The great
Athenian statesman Demosthenes (384-322 BC), was considered alongside
Cicero to be one of the greatest orators of the Ancient World. His Philippics denouncing Philip of Macedon
were a high-point in rhetoric; yet Demosthenes in his youth had a speech
impediment and he was said to have benefitted from filling his mouth first with
marbles before declaiming – which sounds rather drastic.
It is wrong of me to make light of stuttering for it can
bring pain, anxiety and humiliation to sufferers. I remember a school friend
who stammered terribly and he stamped his feet violently trying to extract the
right word; he prospered later as a civil engineer. Another friend could hardly
enunciate a single phrase with any coherence. Meeting him years later, he still
stumbled but he was master of his trade. He happily sold the retail business
his wife and he had created for many millions.
A role model for stutterers might be a businessman I knew
called Roy Withers. He had a very pronounced stammer, contorting every sentence
he spoke and it stayed with him all his life. He earned a first in engineering
at Cambridge, became managing director of the Davy Corporation and then became
chairman and a leader of the buy-out of shipbuilder Vosper Thornycroft, a very
successful enterprise. Before taking the chairmanship he frankly spoke of his
stammer and said he would understand if the company’s backers rejected his
candidacy on that account. Yet Roy was such an acute entrepreneur, such a clear
thinker and such a patently honourable man that he had irresistible appeal. An
accomplished golfer and a fine painter, he embodied the best qualities of an
English gentleman. A happy memory of Roy was his huge pleasure as my bank’s
guest at the Last Night of the Proms lustily singing Land of Hope and Glory with no trace of a stutter.
SMD
6.08.14
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014
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