Foreign News: Lucky

A handsome, wealthy young Briton came up from his country home one day last week to stay with his brother at the Ritz in London and have a talk with his doctor. Society reporters knew him as the Hon. Peter Beatty, one of Britain’s “most eligible bachelors.” Sportwriters had called him “Lucky” Beatty ever since 1938 when he became the youngest (28) owner ever to win the Derby at Epsom Downs (with Bois Roussel). In that same year Peter’s Foxglove II (purchased the night before the race from his good friend Prince Aly Khan) took the Gold Cup at Ascot. On that occasion, Peter invited 500 guests, including the Duke of Kent, to celebrate at a glittering ball in a specially built banqueting hall at his Regent’s Park mansion.

Peter’s nickname, however, seemed justified beyond mere turf victories. His father was one of England’s great naval heroes, the dashing admiral who fought the German fleet at Jutland in World War I. His mother, the only daughter of Chicago’s fabulously rich Marshall Field I, had left him a cool $1,000,000. Peter’s youth was divided between the playing fields of Eton and happy vacations in the Swiss Alps. As a young man he had his pick of Mayfair’s debutantes for company, and plenty of time and money to hunt and shoot and race.

There was only one hitch. Peter had been born blind in one eye. This handicap had kept him from going to a university after Eton. It had meant he had to have a special hunting gun designed for sighting with the left eye. And it had kept him from following his famed father’s profession until the outbreak of World War II. Then Peter went to North Africa as a commando and contracted an infection in the other eye. From 1942 on, Lucky Beatty had gone from one operation to another trying desperately to retrieve his waning sight. Last month a cornea transplantation in Geneva gave him brief hope. Soon afterward the darkness set in again.

In his first-floor suite at the Ritz last week, the day after he had seen his London doctor for the last time, Peter refused the breakfast proffered by his valet. “I am going up to see a friend on the sixth floor,” he said. Then in blue pajamas and red dressing gown, he groped his way up the stairs to the valet’s own room. A moment later a waiter looked up to see a red-clad figure sitting on the window sill. Then all that was left of Lucky Beatty lay crumpled on the pavement below.