Surprise

No newlywed princess need watch her figure. She can be sure that everyone else is doing it for her. Ever since Princess Margaret married Commoner Antony Armstrong-Jones a year ago, London waist watchers have had a field day. But after two premature press guesses proved wrong last summer and fall, the susurrus of the rumor mills gradually died away. Last week the watchers were taken by surprise when Kensington Palace announced that Princess Margaret was "expecting" a baby in October or early November.

The Common Touch. As pints were raised in pubs and Welsh mums wiped away a happy tear, the man of the hour was Tony Armstrong-Jones, the onetime bohemian and free-lancing photographer, who until only recently has had his critics. Once the bloom was off the groom, Britain's royalty-revering public made it plain that it was watching ex-Playboy Tony with a tolerant but suspicious eye, intent on making sure he did right by their Meg. Trouble was, there was little publicly that he could do. Royal protocol made working for a living unthinkable, and Tony had no wealth of his own, so Parliament upped his wife's allowance from $16,800 to $42,000, and Tony had to move into one of his in-laws' houses on the grounds of Kensington Palace. The butler promptly quit and told all, complaining that Tony was far too democratic for any royal servant to work for. To keep busy around the house while his wife was out working at her royal duties, Tony designed and built an elaborate balsa-wood model of an aviary for the London Zoo. Sniffed the bumptious Daily Express: "Mister Armstrong-Jones must now be ranked as one of the leading aviary designers in the country--a not overcrowded profession."

Through it all, Tony kept a stiff, smiling upper lip. His popularity took a turn for the better when he took an unpaid, five-day-a-week job in a design center, despite his rather nebulous assignment: studying methods of consumer product testing. But the real breakthrough came when Buckingham Palace let Tony present the prizes in a schoolboy photographic contest in London. Delighted to talk on a subject he knew intimately, Tony wrote his own speech, delivered it well. Afterward, reporters and cameramen whom he had known in his single days hesitantly gathered round. He broke royal family precedent to chat with them, and Britain saw Tony in a new, kinder light. Last week's news that Margaret soon would produce an heir was the clincher. Cooed Daily Mail Columnist Eve Perrick: "Whatever the future of Armstrong-Jones as a public figure, of one thing he can be justly proud. As a husband, he is a definite hit."

Fifth in Line. If the prospective father was beaming, the chroniclers of Britain's blueblood lines were cracking their knuckles. The offspring will be fifth in line in succession to the British throne, after Queen Elizabeth's three children and its mother. But since children take title from the father, the child will be born a commoner. The possibility that agitated royalists: Britain's throne might some day be occupied by somebody called Mr. (or Miss) Jones.

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