Plot, Press & People

In Buckingham Palace last week Queen Mary awaited King Edward. Ready for His Majesty too was a multi-volume Scotland Yard dossier pasted up out of clippings to show what the World press thought of the King's yachting trip (TIME, Aug. 17 et seq.). Ready to be promptly received in audience last week was Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, just let out of quarantine after passing several weeks at home with chicken pox. Ready were prominent Jewish friends of Edward VIII to exhort him on the subject of the British Expeditionary Force now speeding to Palestine to crush Arab insurgence and make it a true "Jewish homeland." Ready was the India Office with suggestions requiring His Majesty's approval before it can be settled whether there will be a Coronation Durbar. And ready to be unpacked was a large truckload of souvenirs acquired by the King in the Balkans, including Bulgarian rosewater and pots of a kind of jam he liked in Greece. As son went in to dine with devoted mother a crowd, cheering outside Buckingham Palace in the deep dusk, glimpsed only the white flash of His Majesty's starched shirtfront, concluded from the low visibility of King Edward's face that he must have become very tanned.

Fleet Street has not forgotten how heavy fines running up to $2,500 each were exacted from some of London's principal newspapers for their reporting of the incident in which figured an herbalist named George Andrew McMahon, his revolver and King Edward (TIME, July 27). The nature of this incident as ultimately aired in court was something upon which Fleet Street found it financially safer not to comment last week. Almost alone was the Chicago Tribune in sending its Correspondent David Darrah to report what the herbalist's lawyer Alfred Kerstein had to say as he moved to appeal the case to a higher British court this week.

In the lower court McMahon related that in 1935 "a member of a political body in England'' introduced him to agents of a foreign government who offered him employment as a spy and later took him to "a certain baron" whose name the prisoner wrote on a piece of paper and passed to the judge. This baron was a member of the Embassy staff of the foreign power in London, and McMahon offered to describe in detail the room in which they met. Upshot was an offer to McMahon, so he said, of $750 to shoot King Edward. Snapped horrified Attorney General Sir Donald Bradley Somervell: "I suggest the story of this plot is the product of your imagination!"

"I wish to God it were," the prisoner replied. He said that with eight operatives of the foreign power watching him he had in fact only slithered his revolver under the hoofs of the King's horse, asked the jury to have him imprisoned for a long term as only in jail would he be safe from vengeance by the foreign agents he had betrayed. In ten minutes the jury found McMahon guilty of "unlawfully and willfully presenting near the person of the King a pistol with intent to alarm His Majesty," and the judge sentenced him to one year in jail.

Said Lawyer Kerstein: "Our appeal will probably be based on the ground that the judge misdirected the jury." Indicating that in his opinion Hon. Mr. Justice Greaves-Lord had charged in such a way that the jury thought McMahon had suddenly made up and told in court for the first time a fantastic story, Lawyer Kerstein declared, "McMahon had 'told the same story to the War Office and to the police months ago. . . . Military intelligence officers had details of the main part of the plot and verified many of McMahon's statements. . . . The foreign power concerned is Germany."

However much or little truth there was in this,* British newspaper readers had scant opportunity to judge or obtain pertinent facts last week, and at the annual meeting of the British Institute of Journalists at Edinburgh their President Hugh W. Dawson read a hot attack on those British forces which he said tend constantly to "restrict the scope of free criticism and give the newspapers pause before they expose a public scandal." Including British law as now administered among these stifling forces, British Journalists' president cried: "There seems to be a tendency in courts of law, particularly on the part of English juries, to regard newspaper faults which come under their notice as calling for vindictive punishment." Conditions in Scotland are better, opined Mr. Dawson, but he raised a rallying appeal to obtain by House of Commons action greater freedom of the press in Great Britain.

Meanwhile Britain's press, resuming the regular Fleet Street routine on King Edward's return, generally told last week how distressed His Majesty appeared as he looked at pictures of working class slum houses shown to him at a new Housing Exhibition. His comment: "Pretty grim!" At sight of a poster reading Rents Still Too High, His Majesty nodded and inspected maps showing where they are too high--among other places in areas privately owned by King Edward. With what British papers described as a "grimace," His Majesty pointed out his own Duchy of Cornwall from which the yearly revenue exceeds $500,000. He gave respectful British social workers this advice: "The people you want to get at are the officials.

... I hope this exhibition will rouse the people of this country!" Next day King Edward, with three newspapers under his arm and accompanied by the Duke of York, took a train at Euston Station for Balmoral, the Royal Scottish Seat, where he will shoot. To the astonishment of his Scottish deerstalking guide who found a fine stag for His Majesty this week, the King at the crucial moment dropped his gun, whipped out his new German miniature camera, snapped the stag.

* Since many Germans presume Edward VIII to be pro-German, this must work against giving credence to McMahon. On the other hand, numerous European observers consider that the fanatic Nazi secret terror squads who have done so many murders in Eastern Europe work on the assumption that Germany has nothing to lose and something to gain from any sudden shock to one of the regimes with whom Adolf Hitler is trying to make headway with his demands for colonies and land. Frequent have been charges that Nazis instigated the assassination of Yugoslav King Alexander. Sick almost unto death of a strange poison lay last week Rumania's greatest anti-German statesman Dr. Nicholas Titulescu, six times Foreign Minister.

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