GREAT BRITAIN: Happy Birthday

King George VI officially turned 53 last week (his real birthday is Dec. 14). Some 1,500 soldiers of His Majesty’s Guards were given a special ration of barley sugar, designed to carry the Guardsmen through the rigorous birthday ceremony (see cut), the first full-dress “Trooping the Color” to be held since 1939. Footguardsmen of the Welsh Guards donned scarlet tunics and towering bearskins, to stand at rigid attention. They were joined by plumed horsemen of the Household Cavalry. To take the salute, the King himself, not yet sufficiently recovered from his leg ailment to ride horseback, drove over from Buckingham Palace in an open carriage, closely followed by the Duke of Gloucester and Princess Elizabeth, sidesaddle on her chestnut gelding Winston.

Gloucester’s mount got out of hand and had to be pulled back into line by two Guards officers. Elizabeth’s Winston, pestered by a swarm of thunder flies, began to curvet alarmingly. The King looked around anxiously as his daughter, trimly uniformed as a Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, brought her mount under control. The King walked over to congratulate Elizabeth on her horsemanship. The only other near-casualty reported was a drummer who fainted in the heat and lost his hat. His flanking comrades held him erect until the show was over.

A Strange Life

Before he was inducted at Fort Riley, Kans., in 1942, Delbert Eugene Hill was a professional entertainer in the U.S., billed as “America’s Only Lady Magician.” The Army put him in Special Services Division, shipped him off to England to amuse the Air Force. He did so well that he was once chosen to take part in a command performance before Queen Mary. By V-E day, he had become manager of the Burtonwood Air Base theater. Out of the blue, he received a reclassification notice; his new job was cleaning latrines.

Private Hill went over the hill. He put on one of the costumes he used as a female impersonator, lit out for London and a magician’s job. Billed as “Donna Delbert, the Female Fire-Eater,” Hill toured music halls up & down Britain for four years, until one evening in 1947, when he met pretty, 28-year-old Betty Ardoino in an Islington pub.

After three months of woman-to-woman friendship, Betty recalled in London’s Sunday Pictorial, “Donna asked me if I would like to share the digs. I agreed. I watched her unpack. Donna had exquisite transparent cami-knickers, little lace panties, corsets, lots of nylons. We talked for a time. Then Donna gave me my first shock. She asked: ‘Would you mind if I smoked a pipe?’

“Later that evening, I learned the truth. From that moment we led a strange life. It was only when we had a lovers’ quarrel that he used his normal deep man’s voice. Other girls never guessed.”

Early this year, Fire-Eater Donna left for a provincial tour. One day Betty got a letter from a woman who said she was living with Donna and would not give him up. “That made me see red,” Betty said. “I wrote to the police.” The bobbies found Hill adjusting his falsies at his lodgings in Newcastle, arrested him when they discovered an Army pass in his handbag made out to “Delbert E. Hill, Private First Class.” Last week, a U.S. Air Force general court-martial found the fire-eater guilty of desertion, sentenced him to two years’ hard labor with a dishonorable discharge.