Great Houses

COMMONWEALTH

(British Commonwealth of Nations)

One morning last week Albert, Duke of York, hunting with his brother Edward, Prince of Wales, spurred like a true royal Briton after the ruddy wisps of a bedraggled fox-brush.

Meanwhile the Duchess* of York, busying herself less royally, set about to direct a score of thick-sinewed titans who swarmed into White Lodge, the pleasant ducal residence at Richmond Park. Under her watchful eye the defter titans packed costly gold and silver plate, shifted it into panting moving vans already piled with trunks and boxes and chugged away.

The Duchess in her sleek, silent motor sped ahead of them to Curzon House, Curzon Street, Mayfair. As the brawny packers unpacked, she gazed approvingly about her at the comfortable Georgian spaciousness of her new winter home. Court gossips have it that she and the Duke found the suite of apartments at their disposal in Buckingham Palace "a bit awkward for entertaining" and White Lodge, "too far out of town." Curzon House is at the very focus of London's fashionable West End, and moreover near Chesterfield House, the town residence of Princess Mary and Viscount Lascelles.

Chirped irrepressibles: "If the Prince of Wales would only marry and move out of St. James's Palace, the Duke of York might have that! Croaked others, "The Queen Mother will be 81 in December. Marlborough House and Sandringham Hall may soon be vacant."

*Before her marriage, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, third daughter of the Scottish Earl of Strathmore. In 1921 the Duke of York and Princess Mary were entertained at Glamis Castle, the ancestral seat of the Strathmores. Britishers say that the Duke thrice proposed before she accepted him. They were married, as everyone knows, in April, 1923.

*Queen Alexandra retains this "dower house," in which she and King Edward spent the first years of their married life. For many months she has lived in retirement at Sandringham, where her daughter Queen Maud of Norway paid her a long visit last winter.