I recently met up with Tronson, who has a wonderful white beard and bubbles with enthusiasm, while I was in Brisbane covering the 8th Annual Christian Medical Conference there, and he began by sharing about how the story of the "King's Speech," paralleled his own.
In the film, the storyline follows Bertie (Colin Firth) after the death of his father King George V (Michael Gambon) and the scandalous abdication of King Edward VIII (Guy Pearce). The man, who is suddenly crowned King George VI, has suffered from a debilitating speech impediment all his life, and with Great Britain on the brink of war and in desperate need of a leader, his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), the future Queen Mother, arranges for her husband to see an eccentric speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush).
After a rough start, the two delve into an unorthodox course of treatment and eventually form an unbreakable bond. With the support of Logue, his family, his government and Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall), the King overcomes his stammer and delivers a radio-address that inspires his people and unites them in battle against the Nazis.
"Anyone who saw The King's Speech, well that paralleled my own story. That was me!," Tronson told me. "I had always found it difficult to speak as I had a stammer from the time I was a boy.
"I undertook a speech therapy course at the New South Wales University Clinical Sciences when I was twenty-five and I learned by just joining all the words together. My stutter has never stopped completely, but now I have techniques whereby I can I can speak reasonably clearly.
"My adult children knew, while growing up, that their dad had a speech impediment, and when they came home from seeing the movie, they all cried as they realized what I had gone through."
Tronson then spoke about his earlier days, stating, "My dad was a pioneer dairy farmer and the family moved to Canberra, the nation's capital, when I was about ten and I was there for about six or seven years while growing up.
"I always wanted to be a locomotive train driver, so I left home and became at trainee engineman at sixteen and went on to 'fire' the big thirty-eight class steam locomotives.
"Australia is such a huge country and the railways played a vital part in our development. Today, there's lots of railway tracks with big fast trains -- big freighters, super freighters and fast passenger trains -- but, of course, as the airline industry got going, so our passenger train system declined."
So how did he become known as the Footplate Padre?
"Some forty years after I began in the railways, I started writing books about the railways in Australia and I have now completed sixteen," he said. "I was contacted by the editor of On Track online railway magazine who said, 'I have read your books and I'd love you to become our Footplate Padre. So that's how it began and every month, I write a railway story from my books and I add in some Christian input."
Tell us a little bit about how you found the Lord and was your family a Christian family?
"Yes, I grew up in a Christian home and I had a fantastic field hockey coach called Bill Hillier and Bill owned an Austin A30," he said. "Now for those people who know what an Austin A30, it is a tiny little car that was launched in the early 1950's, and he would pick up us eleven hockey players, all under twelve, and we would squeeze in. The only place for the hockey sticks was out the window.
"Bill was a fine Christian man and he showed me what Christian love was. It didn't matter that I couldn't speak properly; that didn't matter at all to him.
"It was Bill, but also our pastor, the Reverend F.P McMaster, who told me about the Lord. Fred McMaster was at the Canberra Baptist Church for twenty-nine years and he was a man who had undue influence upon generations of young people growing up in the Canberra area, including myself.
After he had accepted the Lord as his personal Savior, Tronson said that he was baptized at sixteen years and nine months.
He then explained how he felt God's call to full-time ministry while he was on a train at the age of twenty-five.
"I was on a locomotive at the time and I was thinking about these things because when you're parked in a shanty yard, and you might be there for one or two hours waiting for your train's turn to go, there is a lot of time to ponder and think and I always had my Bible with me. It was then that I just felt the Lord's call and it was almost like when Jesus said, 'John, do you love me more than this?' and I just loved the railways. So I knew that I had to let this go.
"After I went to college and became a minister, I began to write these railway books and it was as though the Lord gave it all back to me. So I got engine drivers all around Australia to send me their anecdotes and now have a wonderful niche market."
Like most Aussies, Mark Tronson is passionate about sports, including athletics, cricket, field hockey and rugby.
"Sport is absolutely huge here, but the only thing that really matters to the average Aussie and is that we beat England at whatever the sport may be," he laughed.
Tronson founded an organization called Well Being Australia that assists exhausted sportspeople to get some respite.
"It all began when I was playing field hockey and I was a top-line hockey player," he explained. "I represented New South Wales in that sport and won the triple jump in Queensland. So sport was my thing and, after I became a minister and was writing about field hockey for the newspapers, I got an invitation to attend an international congress on sports missions organized from the States and I came back from that with a real vision. I wondered why we didn't have chaplains in professional sports in Australia.
"At the time, I was working for two days a week with the Inter-Church Trade Industry Mission, which placed chaplains in industry and commerce. I was also serving for two days a week as chaplain at Shell Australia, so I went to the Baptist Union here and said, 'Why can't we get this going here?
"I visited the heads of churches and they said, 'Mark, you've got the vision; you run with it, but we don't have any funds.' So in 1982, my wife Delma and I, decided to 'live by faith' and we have continued to do so all of these years. Since then, we've raised four children now we're grandparents -- all on God's giftings!"
He then explained what Well Being Australia does.
"Initially, we placed chaplains in professional sports," he said. "Then in 2000, the sports ministry went on their own and Well Being Australia retained the things which I was personally interested in. I had worked with 250 volunteer clergy who were as cantankerous as me and the stress levels were all too much so the heads of churches released the sports ministry to go off on its own.
"I retained just my cricket ministry for the Australian cricket team and also our respite work which is for athletes from the Australian Institute of Sport. We built a respite center not far from Canberra where the athletes came to get away from the stress of their life. Now, we've built three of these.
"Each facility is quite different. We are not allowed to touch dietitian foods so feeding is completely out of our scope. Basically, we provide them with a facility and we also get time to speak with them. So that's the agenda. Our latest one is a simple three bedroom house near the ocean where you can see the beautiful blue water and that is simply a place to chill out."
Mark and Delma now also have a respite centre for "burned out missionaries".
"It is a gift and there's no charge for these people who are simply exhausted from being on the mission field and just take some time out," he added.
Now, Mark Tronson has become deeply involved in 2012 Olympics in London.
"My role since 2000 has been to prepare a document -- a protocol of ideas -- which goes to the host Olympic city," he said. "It details how to put together a religious services program because you've got the five major faiths involved and it is politically correctness to the enth degree.
"Now, that's what happens within the Olympic Village and not what happens outside, which is a different scenario. Inside the village, you have Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Jews and the three major Christian groups --- Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox. They each get their own space and they've each got their own facilities and it can get a bit tricky."
Is sharing of the Good News of the Gospel allowed?
"It doesn't quite work like that because holy books are permitted inside the Olympic Village," he said. "So it's not a case of saying somebody saying to a Christian chaplain, 'Can you tell me about Jesus?' The chaplain does not say, No, I can't do that here. Come outside on the footpath and I can.' There's a lot more integrity than that. But outside the Olympic village then you've got a citywide outreach campaign. That's called More Than Gold.
"For instance, YWAM people are coming to London from all around the world and you've got Mission Bridge people also from all around. There will be evangelists everywhere.
"One key group is Lay Witnesses For Christ International with Dr. Sam and Sharon Mings," said Tronson. "They've been doing this in a very specialized way since 1984 and they've got links with Olympic athletes including people like Carl Lewis, Madeline Mims, and what they do is they get access into the Olympic village residents by other Olympians and that's where evangelism takes place; not in the center.
"See so this is a whole different scenario and then they also have a massive rally in a big church somewhere and Carl Lewis and all these Olympians will be there and thousands come and it's televised around the world.
"It's fantastic and London's going to have that too."
Mark Tronson then said, "What happens in the Olympic Village is that I make a commitment not to be involved. My work takes place beforehand and it's always a key issue of who's the director of the project and because I have some input in that area I've been very pleased to say that there are and were two very fine Christian men. One in Vancouver, who was David Wells, and the one in London, John Boyers, who is also the chaplain to the Manchester United Football Club. So they have been very strategic appointments."
I concluded by asking Mark how people can pray for him and his wife, Delma.
"There are a couple of areas that people can pray for us," he said. "One is that there is integrity in the ministry as that's absolutely fundamentally important. People want to see integrity and without what we do is nothing. It doesn't matter who's doing the work either inside or outside of the Olympic Village. Whether it's a rally, integrity is very important.
"Secondly, I am asking for prayer for those who are holding up the arms of prayer for the Olympics outreach and for our own personal work. Aaron held up Moses arms as he prayed and our family has five elderly ladies who pray every day for one hour for Delma myself and our ministry. So please continue to pray for the holding up the arms for those who are out there doing the work.
For more about Mark Tronson, go to: www.bushorchestra.com where you can see a video from Mark and learn more about his multi-faceted ministry. You can also see an interview I did some time ago with Mark for Safe Worlds IPTV at tv.bushorchestra.com/videopages/DanWooding_MT.html
To learn more about More than Gold in the UK, go to www.morethangold.org.uk or www.ywam.org/fr/News-Stories/news/Forever!-2012-Games-Outreach-is-Underway
Note: I would like to thank Robin Frost for transcribing this interview.