GREAT BRITAIN: Shot

At 9 o’clock one evening this week the Duchess of Kent, chatting merrily with Lord and Lady Portarlington, got in her car outside her house in London’s Belgrave Square and drove off with her guests to the cinema to see Wuthering Heights. Not until she returned hours later did the Duchess learn that she had narrowly missed being shot by an assassin.

As the Duchess’ car left the gates, a man standing on the sidewalk raised a sawed-off shotgun, fired wildly. Thinking the noise to be a motor backfiring, the Duchess drove on. Policemen, summoned by a motorist, found the man sitting on the pavement beside his shotgun and a racing bicycle on which he had arrived. As all London buzzed with the attack on the popular, pretty Duchess, wife of the youngest brother of Britain’s King George VI, Scotland Yard announced that its prisoner had just arrived in London from Australia, where the Duke of Kent is to go next fall as Governor General.