Foreign News: Entrancing Occupation

COMMONWEALTH (British Commonwealth of Nations)

The Queen-Empress Mary arose one morning last week at York Cottage, set off on foot across the fields to Sandringham. “By rights,” Sandringham, the Norfolk country seat of British royalty, should have passed to the present sovereigns upon their accession (1910). As a matter of record, the late Dowager Queen-Empress Alexandra (TIME, Nov. 30) clung so tenaciously to what she deemed her ipso facto rights that she was with difficulty persuaded to quit Buckingham Palace, and virtually “seized and held” as her London residence Marlborough House, the traditional residence of the Princes of Wales. Doubtless it never occurred to the Queen Mother Alexandra—born to reign if ever mortal was—that she should abandon Sandringham to a king-emperor who was, after all, her son. Filially meek, George V and his consort were content to dwell at York Cottage, on the fringe of Sandringham, whenever they sojourned with “the Queen”* in Norfolk.

But the Dowager has passed. Queen Mary—with what feelings who can say?—entered Sandringham last week to direct its renovation into a modern palace. One of the bedrooms has been unlocked only at intervals for 16 years. Within, everything, down to the minutest shirt stud has been kept by order of Alexandra exactly as Edward VII left it. Last week, Queen Mary, in the absence of George V who was hunting in Scotland, ordered and superintended a thorough cleaning preparatory to complete redecoration of this so-called “secret bed chamber.” One good job done, Queen Mary passed to another locked bedroom door. Impassive but expectant the royal attendants waited. Would Her Majesty order that room disturbed? On the bureau had lain undisturbed for more than three decades a little pile of silver and copper coins. They had been left there carelessly by Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, before he contracted influenza and died at Sandringham (1892). He, the eldest son of Edward and Alexandra (then Prince and Princess of Wales) was heir presumptive to the British Crown. Moreover his betrothal to Princess Mary of Teck had been announced and touted as a love match.

Upon his death, the Princess (“bowed with grief in her first youth” according to Victorian journalists) summoned all her self possession and was married, 18 months later, to her late fiance’s brother, who became George V. Did Her Majesty recall last week the notoriously blameless life of the late Duke of Clarence whose official biographer, J. Edmund Vincent, could find nothing worse to say of him than that at Cambridge he “went at shocking hours to bed”?

Presumably, after three decades, the personal effects of even so stainless a prince are better dusted and packed away.

Her Majesty, personally wielding a broom and duster according to despatches, assisted with the sweeping, tidying, supervised the packing, indicated that the ornate decorations of the late Duke’s bedroom should be torn out and replaced by a simple decor in cream and blue.

A newsgatherer, present at Sandringham last week cabled: “So entranced has the Queen been with her new occupation that she has refused to return to York Cottage for lunch each day, and has had baskets of cold food sent across the fields to her.”

* To her dying day, Queen Alexandra prevented the appearance of the title “Queen Mother,” on any official paper referring to “the Queen”—Herself. Though her daughter-in-law was de facto Queen, the redoubtable Queen Mother Alexandra actually forced the destruction of an entire edition of the Book of Common Prayer, printed by Messrs. Eyre & Spottiswoode, because they had included a form of prayer “for the Queen Mother.”