Happy King

Every train and plane from the Balkans brought to Britain last week pictures of King Edward looking really happy for the first time since he came to the Throne. Previous shots of His Majesty had been so notably lugubrious as to start the rumor that "since his father's death, King Edward has never smiled." At least one British weekly took the new pictures last week as text to prove that "top-drawer" Britons decidedly bore Edward VIII, while he visibly expands in such company as that of Mrs. Simpson, "a real wisecracking American."

To this subject London Journalist Robert Seeds, son of Sir William Seeds who was King George's Ambassador to Brazil (1930-35), contributed by quoting last week part of a recent conversation between King Edward and the Rt. Hon.

Stanley Baldwin who is considered in House of Commons circles set to retire from the Prime Ministry after the pomp and glory of the Coronation. According to Mr. Seeds, the old-fashioned Prime Minister was speaking strongly to the King about his projected modern holiday with Mrs. Simpson when His Majesty cut the conversation, saying with sarcasm: "Look here, if you don't stop it, Baldwin, I won't attend your beastly old Coronation." The King on his Balkan holiday last week went about with Mrs. Simpson and his other guests taking pictures with a small German camera. Once when a police-man seized a camera from a press photographer who was snapping King Edward, His Majesty intervened. Taking the camera away from the policeman, Edward VIII handed it to the cameraman, saying with a grin, "Here, take your camera back." Trunks belonging to His Majesty were labeled inconspicuously with his incognito "Duke of Lancaster" but great capitals fully six inches high proclaimed the trunks of MRS. ERNEST SIMPSON.

War Minister Alfred Duff Cooper, who was aboard the chartered royal yacht Nahlin, kept vainly radioing ashore that the King was traveling incognito as the Duke of Lancaster. Nevertheless, the next Balkan fortress passed would blaze away a 21-gun royal salute. The Duke of Lancaster delighted during the week to slip off the Nahlin with Mrs. Simpson, she in the stern and he at the oars of a skiff.

The first State papers requiring royal signature arrived from London and were signed by His Majesty. When the Nahlin anchored off Corfu, bemonocled King George II of Greece went aboard, but nothing was seen of his eligible sisters, Princess Irene and Princess Catherine. To happy King Edward VIII was attributed by Yugoslavs this prophecy: "There will be no war. The British people do not want one and the World generally had enough unpleasantness during the last War" (see p. 16).*

--Yugoslavs also attributed to His Majesty the following "cocktail" which they said he was known to have personally invented, mixed and shaken aboard the Nahlin: two jiggers each of gin, Dalmatian chartreuse and Dalmatian champagne, dash of lime juice, teaspoonful of sugar, strip of lemon peel, one olive, ice. In Washington, D. C. this was taken seriously enough for the Mayflower Hotel's Barman Jack Williams to mix it with authentic chartreuse and champagne. Reported a "United Pressman: "It tastes like an empty lard can . . . has an unsavory green color. . . . That cocktail of the King is the world's worst." As would naturally occur in shaking an effervescent beverage like champagne, the shaker blew up in the Mayflower barman's face, caused him to affirm: "I guess the King didn't shake champagne in a closed shaker, no matter what the cables say." Snorted less obliging U. S. barmen when asked for a "King Edward Cocktail," "That's no cocktail, that's a punch--with fruit salad!"

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