Connaught to Westminster

From shadowy and secretive retirement one day last week emerged George V's venerable uncle, the Duke of Connaught. Third and only surviving son of Queen Victoria, Arthur William Patrick Albert Windsor is the one member of the Royal Family today who dislikes publicity. Last week, habited in a sweeping mantle of ancient cut, he entered the gloom of Westminster Abbey preceded by the official known as King of Arms.

Thump! Thump! and Thump!--the King of Arms knocked on the door of Henry VII's Chapel, musty and magnificent.

"Who knocks?" cried the Abbey Surveyor from within.

"In the name of the King," replied the King of Arms, "His Royal Highness, the Great Master of the Most Honorable Order of the Bath demands entrance into the Chapel of the Order!"

As the portal opened, in strode Great Master Connaught to hold the fifth investiture of Knights of the Bath in a hundred years. It was Connaught who in 1913 revived most of the ancient ritual, for decades in abeyance. Theory of the origin of the Bath is that in medieval times a soldier might well stink so strongly that even his strong-nostriled King might find it necessary to have the heroic fellow washed before dubbing him knight. Last week there was no actual washing, and all 21 new knights appeared most cleanly. Under the stern Great Master's eagle eye they swore "to defend maidens, widows and orphans" and to "suffer no extortion" to be practiced which they are able to prevent.

Today 85, but still taking his setting-up exercises every morning, Connaught has been a holy terror all his life to every regiment he has honored by inspection. Unlike Nephew George V, whose object on such occasions is to have everything go off smoothly, Uncle Arthur feels it is his solemn duty to find rusty bayonets, loose buttons and noses with a whiff of liquor on them. Of a certain colonel the Duke once said, "He is just able to walk straight. That is sober enough for a civilian but very drunk for a soldier!" One of Field Marshal the Duke of Connaught's little rules, which he scrupulously observes: "No officer may swear in the presence of a superior officer, but he may use 'damn' to a subordinate."

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