King, Queen & Pack

Last week in Old England:

P: King George in the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace invested 19 strapping miners with the King Edward medal for working nine dangerous hours to save a miner comrade.

P:Queen Mary, having sat in a chair exhibited at the British Industries Fair, looked pleased when a rich American rushed forward, bought the chair, and 36 more just like it.

P: Malcolm MacDonald, 31-year-old bachelor son of the Prime Minister, returned to the Treasury his entire salary as Under Secretary of State for the Dominions ($5,200 current exchange). "I shall get along nicely," said Bachelor MacDonald, "on what I receive as a Member of Parliament" ($1,400).

P: The Marlborough, the Emperor of India and the Benbow (all antiquated battleships) will be scrapped at once, announced the Admiralty. On the scrapheap also goes the battle cruiser Tiger.

P: Englishfolk deluged British Broadcasting Corp. with demands that it cancel a program entitled "The Sinking of the Titanic."

Wrote Protester Sir Arthur Rostron who commanded the Carpathia when she picked up some Titanic survivors: "That horrible scene will always haunt me. . . ."

P:Vickers, Ltd., world's most famed makers of war paraphernalia, were ordered by the Air Ministry last week to stop work on the largest fighting and bombing sea plane ever begun in Great Britain, a monster weapon of destruction with a cruising range of 1,300 mi. "This economy," said a spokesman sadly, "is a distinct blow to the Empire's progress. Had she proved successful, we planned to build another ship almost twice as large and correspondingly more powerful." Vickers, Ltd. will some day build a plane with which New York can be bombed from London or vice versa, for they sell to any good customer.

P: Dr. Alan Gray, former organist of Trinity College, Cambridge and a composer of note, discovered with horror last week that he had rented the local Y. M. C. A. hall to exhibitors of Soviet posters who were displaying Lenin's famed slogan "Religion is opium for the people."

Worse still, pious Dr. Gray discovered that the exhibition was sponsored by Prof. J. B. S. Haldane, acknowledged one of the Empire's foremost scientists. In a twinkling Dr. Gray cancelled the exhibit, turned the rascals out.

P: Concealing themselves in motor trucks, tube stations and in every ambush which ingenuity could devise, several hundred London bobbies lay in wait one night for several thousand English unemployed.

Marching down Whitehall the unemployed chanted "We want work, not charity!" Suddenly the bobbies charged. For 20 minutes they fought the unemployed, beating them back from Parliament Square. When order was restored, English fair play permitted a handful of unemployed men and women, carefully picked by the bobbies, to enter Parliament and state their views to George Lansbury, M. P., Leader of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

P:Less than one-third of the members of the House of Lords own almost one-tenth of all the land in England, Scotland and Wales, stated The Labor Magazine last week. Members of the House of Lords also hold over twice as many company directorships as Members of the House of Commons. The mythical "average peer" holds if directorships, is one-half a Board Chairman.

Biggest landowner is the Duke of Richmond who owns more than a quarter million acres (23 times the acreage of Bermuda). His Grace Charles Henry Gordon- Lennox, 8th Duke of Richmond (creation in 1675), Earl of March and Due d'Au-bigny (French creation in 1683-84), is a Colonel in the Sussex Yeomanry and the author of A Duke and His Friends. Hi: principal addresses: Goodwood, Chichester; Molecomb, Chichester; Gordon Castle, Fochabers, Banffshire; and Glenfiddich Lodge, Dufftown, Scotland.

P:London's famed "Gold Rush" (TIME, Feb. 22) continued, the English hastening to sell their hoarded gold sovereigns (worth 20 shillings) for 28 paper shillings. Tens of thousands of English gold coins were shipped every day to Paris, where frugal Frenchmen bought and stuffed them into socks, clocks and crocks.

Excluding royalty, there are only 20 Dukes in England. One of these goldrushed last week. Carrying a coronet under his arm as though it were a derby hat, His Grace (the Press shielded his name) entered a dealer's shop, escorted by his daughter, and plunked the thing down. The dealer wrote out a check for 15,000 paper pounds, gave it to the Duke who beamingly departed, announced that the coronet had been worn by the Duke and his ancestors at openings of Parliament for over 100 years.*

*The fantastic purchase price of -L-15,000 (52,000 gold dollars at last week's rate of exchange), the dealer accounted for by saying that "the coronet was set with valuable gems." A proper ducal coronet consists of a circlet of gold from which rise eight strawberry leaves also of gold. Peers below the rank of duke have to wear more ornate coronets. These may not be made of gold, must be made of silver gilded to look like gold. They must also be embellished with silver balls which the English call "pearls," but never with real pearls or gems of any sort. Thus a real duke in his mere gold coronet is usually able to slip past tourists unobserved at the opening of Parliament, bold barons bearing the brunt. A new ducal coronet may be bought from Cartier in London for about $1,000, but a headgear of some sort set with precious stones might be sold to the right tourist as a "ducal coronet" for $100,000.

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