The Pastrycook & the King

Are kings worth what they cost? Pastrycook Alfred Bell, 48, thinks so. Last week Alfred stood looking through the grubby show window of an empty little shop in the main road of Bedhampton, a Hampshire village. He smiled broadly as he pictured the cookies and cakes and pies he would bake to fill it. "It's all the King's doing," he cried. "God bless the King!" After the first World War, in which he served as an R.A.F. observer, Alfred had opened up his own pastry shop in London's Ealing. In World War II, Alfred joined the R.A.F. again. His house at Croydon was bombed one night while Alfred was at home on leave. Alfred, his wife and their six children survived, although Alfred was left with a crippled leg, his wife with a weak heart. After the war the Ministry of Labor rated Alfred as "unemployable." Four times he had applied for a permit to open a pastry shop in Bedhampton, to which he had moved. Four times he had been refused. Opening of new pastry shops was strictly forbidden because of the shortage of fats, flour and sugar.

Last April, Alfred sat down in his red-curtained sitting room and wrote a letter to the King at Buckingham Palace, telling His Majesty the whole story.

A few days later, King George VI was sitting at his Georgian walnut desk in the lofty blue and white study of the palace, reading the morning's mail. Among the letters with embossed headings he saw Alfred's cheap writing paper and careful penmanship. He reached for it, read it twice, then handed it to his secretary with instructions.

It took four months of bureaucratic gear-grinding for the King's instructions to bear fruit. Last week, an official buff-colored envelope flopped on to Alfred's doormat. Inside was a letter signed by Food Minister Strachey's private secretary: "Your letter . . . was referred by the King to the Minister of Food who, by His Majesty's command, has given it careful consideration and has decided that ... an exception to the general rule . . . may be made in your case." Said Alfred: "When my wife and I realized what the King had done, we burst into tears."

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