'Queen Wallis'

Newsstand sales in the British Isles are the virtual monopoly of a Pickwickian middle-class firm on the walls of whose offices hang life-size portraits of members of the family who died for Queen (Victoria) & Country. It was not a matter of direct government censorship last week but of Pickwickian family pride that for the first time all sales of U. S. newspapers and magazines which mentioned King Edward and Mrs. Simpson (see p. 16) abruptly ceased in England. This was such risky tampering with freedom of the press that those responsible retired, self-abashed, behind closed doors. Queries by the Associated Press as to when sales of U. S. publications would be resumed in Britain were answered by purse-lipped silence.

J. P. Morgan was picked by Reynolds Illustrated News of London fortnight ago as likely to intervene with U. S. editors at the personal request of the Duke & Duchess of York (TIME, Nov. 2). Up to this week Banker Morgan remained scrupulously neutral. The editor of the New York Woman was, however, called on the carpet by Sister Anne Morgan and obliged to remove Miss Morgan's name from his magazine's Editorial Advisory Board because she objected to its having described the relations of the King and Mrs. Simpson in terms of infatuation.

During the week U. S. columnists for the first time seriously took up the matter. Newspundit Walter Lippmann of the New York Herald Tribune applauded the fact that nowhere in the British Isles had any newspaper or magazine yet coupled the names of the King and Mrs. Simpson, or the facts of their friendship and her divorce. This had been done only by a mimeographed London weekly tipsheet, The Week, of negligible circulation. Pontificated Pundit Lippmann: "The reticence of the British press cannot be put down to an effort of the King to suppress knowledge of his regard for Mrs. Simpson. The true explanation is that the British press is forbidden by a recently enacted law to make a public spectacle out of any divorce case. It may print only the bare facts of the legal proceedings."

A columnist who knew the answer to this was the New York World-Telegram's sharp Westbrook Pegler. "They do have their laws in England," he wrote, "but if a story is big enough an English paper can go ahead and print it--and get away with it, as the late Lord Northcliffe proved in his historic expose of the shell shortage in the early days of the World War. Under the Defense of the Realm Act, Northcliffe could have been locked up in the Tower and hanged. . . .

"The present case is the greatest divorce story in the history of journalism. . . . Moreover, the English are thorough masters if not the inventors of the 'I hear' and 'they say' school of journalism, the questioning innuendo and the sly hint which get the story across without laying it on the line, and they could handle this one in that familiar technique. . . . One can only decide that in the present case the press of England has lifted its cap to a fast grounder and let it roll to the outfield to cool off."

The London Times lifted its hat by inserting at the foot of a column of provincial news items on an inside page the minuscule heading Undefended Divorce Suit: Case at Ipswich Assizes and the bare fact that a Mrs. Simpson had won her decree nisi. The undignified and blatant organs of the British Press Lords were equally suppressive of what was obviously NEWS. "The British Press," declared the Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill, "has freedom plus responsibility!"

John Drinkwater was the next Big Name to attempt the difficult feat of explaining to the British public that there was something in the air which they had not been able to read and that for this they should be thankful. Without naming Mrs. Simpson, Mr. Drinkwater compared her by analogy to a cigar. "When King Edward VII was first seen in public smoking a cigar, indignant imbeciles sent a bagful of letters to his mother, Queen Victoria," recalled John Drinkwater, and he wound up loftily: "Certain foreign papers with some circulation in this country have been busy with our King's private life . . . malicious gossip ... as ridiculous as it is contemptible."

In the U. S., radio broadcasting stations are always easily scared into self-censorship and these last week generally forbade their comedians to use the name of Mrs. Simpson in any jest or gag. Such gags went out by the dozen from Wall Street and Broadway, the mildest being, "have you heard that her husband, Ernest Simpson is writing a play called The Unimportance of Being Ernest? The hero cries, 'my only regret is that I have but one wife to lay down for my King!' "*

In Canada the Press broke out in a rash of stories about King Edward's good works, physical fitness and sympathy with the poor, in an effort to "blanket" the effect on Canadians of the Mrs. Simpson stories they read in U. S. newspapers last week. These were freely sold in the Dominion. In Toronto three weeks ago an editor showed to 60 distinguished local citizens a batch of U. S. clippings and 59 citizens opined that Canadian papers should not couple the names of the King and Mrs. Simpson. In South Africa similar discretion prevailed, but in Australia, though news of Mrs. Simpson's divorce was minimized last week, she had just previously been given tremendous play as a friend of Edward VIII.

Dictators Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini long ago banned as "frivolous" any news stories about such women as Mrs. Simpson or King Carol's Mme Lupescu. In France the test is purely whether such men as King Edward and King Carol are friendly to France. They are considered friendly at the moment and therefore nearly all French papers cheerfully omit Mrs. Simpson and Mme Lupescu, as a political courtesy to Their Majesties. Last week Le Soir of Paris happened to feel like giving the story a whirl and did it up brown with six pictures each of King Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson. While Le Soir was about it, the staff pasted Mrs. Simpson's head on a regally robed figure to show how she would look as "Queen Wallis," and headlined: "PRESS RADIO UNITED STATES ANNOUNCES MARRIAGE EDWARD VIII AND AMERICAN."

With all U. S. picture agencies scouring their files for Early Simpsoniana, there came to light a snapshot showing that in 1912 in Baltimore the present Mrs. Simpson wore a monocle. In Omaha and Minneapolis scattered distant cousins of Wallis Warfield Simpson were routed out by reporters who found them unanimous in the opinion that "King Edward would be lucky to get one of the Warfields of Maryland," and that, "If you ask me, I think Wallis would make a good Queen."

*Boldly Playwright Clifford Bax offered this week at a London little theatre his new piece The King and Mistress Shore. Jane Shore was the mistress of King Edward IV and after his death was, by order of King Richard III, frog-marched through the streets of London to be reviled by the populace and finally imprisoned for what was declared to be the crime of "committing adultery with His Late Majesty." The Lord Chamberlain, who acts as Britain's play censor, has no power to ban productions in such little theatres where entrance is supposed to be ''by subscription to members only."

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