30,000,000 Edwards

On sale in England last week went the new Edward VIII postage stamps: Ha'penny, penny-ha'penny and tuppence-ha'penny. Only by the firmest insistence was His Majesty able to get this most unprecedented royal British issue past its critics in the Post Office. The new stamps have simple, modernistic and almost photographic profile views of Edward VIII which really look like him (see cut).

Around the head is no frame; no collar is visible; on the stamp appears not even the King's name but simply the word POSTAGE, the denomination and a very small crown off in a corner. When Post Office wickets opened to sell this issue last week, critical officials spoke of "testing the new stamps" and of substituting something more usual if they proved unpopular. In rushed hordes of the King's subjects and bought hand-over-fist some 30,000,000 Edwards. After this not even the crustiest oldster could well call the new King's stamp decision wrong.

Simultaneously leading London papers announced that they were printing last week no pictures of the King and an absolute minimum of text about his Balkan pleasure cruise. It had become all but impossible to get a fresh picture of Edward VIII which was not a picture of the King & Mrs. Simpson. At a moment when His Majesty was in fact making Balkan policemen, who seized press cameras, give these back to their owners (TIME, Aug. 31), the London Sunday Dispatch declared that it was not printing any such pictures and would also print no stories from the royal yachting cruise "unless these contain matter of proper national interest--such as the whereabouts of the King."

The rest of the world meanwhile received news pictures of a stately private palace, with immense Ionic columns and heroic figures on the roof (see cut) in which Mrs. Simpson is to live on her return to London, according to both Associated Press and United Press which announced "she will move in early in Octo-ber."

The whereabouts of Edward VIII last week were Greece (see p. 22), and Turkey. At Istanbul the greatest statesman in the Near East, Kamal Ataturk, who overthrew the Turkish Sultanate and Caliphate, abolished the fez and is rapidly making the Turkish Republic a powerful and modern State, undertook to send the British royal party comfortably home overland. For this purpose the Turkish Presidential Train was transferred from Asia to Europe by ferrying it across the Bosporus. Quitting the $1,350,000 chartered royal yacht Nahlin and chuffing into Bulgaria, Edward VIII in a general way made for London, giving out that his whereabouts will include some further vacationing in Vienna.

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