Balls & Balls & Balls

Astonished Balkan natives beheld last week the spectacle of a great white yacht from which small white objects flew, each with a sharp ping as it left the deck and a plop as it was lost in the Adriatic. Each ping-plop cost about 15 dinars, the peasants learned, and in the rural Balkans that is enough to buy a needed shirt or a night's drunken carouse (35-c-). They had always heard that "the English Milords are all rich" and they could well believe it last week, watching King Edward & Friends drive off his chartered $1,350,000 yacht Nahlin the first few dozen of 3,000 golf balls which His Majesty had taken along, this number being vouched for by the London Daily Mail.

In London, a midnight edition of the Daily Mirror was first to break the carefully guarded secret of who were the King's women guests (TIME, Aug. 17 et ante). Immediately, however, the Daily Mirror was so overcome by its own daring that the entire story was killed out of the 3 a. m. edition which had been originally scheduled to carry a fetching picture of Mrs. Simpson with a dog in her arms. In Europe the story broke as soon as the King and Mrs. Simpson began to go shopping in small Yugoslavian waterfront towns, she speaking for him in German which some of the villagers understand.* At Sibenik the King and Mrs. Simpson picked out three dolls, total cost of which was only 15 dinars. His Majesty paid with a 20 dinar bill (50-c-) and Mrs. Simpson said in German, "Keep the change." The King also bought a Yugoslavian fisherman's coarse shirt, put it on and at night went fishing with a lantern for zubach, a species of carp. Around him hovered more than 100 small craft, some of whose occupants were Yugoslavian detectives trying to look like fishermen. Under these trying circumstances, His Majesty did wonders in catching two zubach.

With the King and Mrs. Simpson were Lord and Lady Brownlow and the most Bohemian of Britain's fashionable hostesses, Lady Cunard, the rich onetime Maude Alice Burke who married into the Cunard family and now calls herself "Emerald" Cunard. Her daughter Nancy is renowned for the handsome young Negro bucks she has introduced into select British circles.

Expected to join the royal party were Lord and Lady Louis Mountbatten and the King's youngest and favorite brother, the Duke of Kent, with his elegant, dashing Greek wife Marina. In a unique tribute to this pair last week newsorgans of Sydney, Australia urged that if the King can not come to the 1938 celebration of the 150th anniversary of the founding of that Commonwealth, he should send the Duke and Duchess of Kent and they should bring with them Princess Elizabeth, eldest daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, who may some day be England's Queen Elizabeth II.

Clever Marina was credited in London with having something more immediate in mind last week. Beauteous as herself are her kinswomen, the two sisters of King George II of Greece. The Duchess was apparently resolved that these eligible Princesses, Irene and Catherine, shall meet bachelor King Edward on his holiday. In Athens the newsorgan Patris flatly declared that the engagement of His Majesty to one or the other of Their Royal Highnesses "will soon be announced." The Princesses were en route to the idyllic isle of Corfu where King George II was said to anticipate entertaining King Edward.

In London the Admiralty announced that one of the two great capital ships to be laid down by Britain in 1937, the first since the War, will be named the King Edward VIII.

*The late King George spoke German extremely well as does Queen Mary. King Edward speaks French fluently, Spanish fairly well, German poorly.

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