Sickened Prince

Smart is King George's youngest son Prince George. He thought up in his schooldays a way to outwit Queen Mary. She gave him only four shillings a week pocket money, exacted his word of honor not to borrow. Honorable, he priced his own autograph at two bob (shillings), sold as many as he could, clipped his father's autographs out of letters, priced and sold them for a quid (pound), but his mother's autographs he kept. Smart again, the Prince while serving under a British naval captain chosen by Queen Mary, gave his superior officers the slip in California, dashed off for a night of frolic in Hollywood, later escaped from the Royal Navy altogether by contracting "chronic seasickness." Next put to work at the Foreign Office and diligently tutored by its bureaucrats, H. R. H. developed symptoms so alarming that his withdrawal from the Foreign Office became imperative." It must always be borne in mind," his comptroller, Major Ulick Alexander, warned the nation on Prince George's 27th birthday, "that his digestion is weak and, what perhaps is not generally known, that he suffers from insomnia" (TIME, Dec. 30, 1929) Since 1929 Prince George and Edward of Wales, chums in revelry, have sailed, golfed and danced their way around South America without seasickness, quaffed many a beaker without indigestion and stayed up so late at Fort Belvedere (their base of operations 22 mi. from London) that insomnia is out of the question. Last week, smart Prince George performed one of his rare public acts, set literary London by the ears, stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy. Taking as his text what he called "sex novels" Prince George announced: "I am sure that Dr. Samuel Johnson would have quickly sickened, as I have sickened, of novels which only exist on a disproportion ate interest in sex. I have read dozens of famous novels, many of which should have been operated upon for gangrene at a point approximately two-thirds of the way through." Promptly half the novelists in England attacked this view, upholding the "realistic novel" as a worthy form of art. But shoulder to shoulder with the Prince who has sickened of the Navy, the Foreign Office and the sex novel stood last week Baron Gorell, Chairman of the Society of Authors (British).

This able peer was never so happy as when pushing through Hyde Park in a pram his infant son, the Hon. Timothy John Radcliffe Barnes, now grown big enough to toddle. Defending Prince George against literary scoffers, Baron Gorell, a partner in the publishing house of John Murray, cried: "We should all heartily back the stand taken by His Royal Highness. I am told, moreover, that interest in what we used to call the

'sex novel' is now on the wane, unless the novel is very well done. I have just published a novel myself which has been described as 'having a respect for the decencies'--presumably because that is so unusual a thing." Books written by Author-Publisher Lord Gorell include: Babes in the African Wood; Rosamund; Plush; Gauntlet (1931). To the Baron last week Prince George wrote a gracious acknowledgment on the stationery for which he recently designed his own monogram: an Old English G, surmounted by a coronet and surrounded by the Garter. (Same monogram on his handkerchiefs.) "Prince George is," declared a St. James's Palace spokesman recently, "the artist of the Royal Family. He plays various instruments and improvises even better than the Prince of Wales." Three, even two years ago Palace spokesmen were saying that King George was grooming Prince George to become the Governor General of a Dominion; they hinted New Zealand.

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