Foreign News: Scheherazade in Fulham

Magic carpets and wishing lamps are hard to come by these days in London’s middle-class Fulham. Nevertheless, pretty, honey-blonde Katherine Scott had no intention of living out her years in Marville Road and some day marrying a young shipping clerk or a £5-a-week railroad carter like her father. One glamorous day, when Cinemactor Ray Milland came to London, 16-year-old Katherine wangled an interview with him and Ray promised to get her a screen test. Katherine told all her friends, and the garish News of the World sent a photographer around to take her picture.

In his suite at the Savoy Hotel, swarthy Prince Haroun-al-Raschid Abbasi, 23, descendant of Bagdad’s Caliphs, and heir to the fabulously wealthy throne of Bahawalpur in the Punjab, idly leafed through the News of the World. His eye lit on Katherine’s picture. Could he, he asked by the next mail, come and congratulate such a lucky girl in person? The two arranged a rendezvous outside crowded Walham Green Underground station. Then the Prince went to Fulham to meet the family. They called him Harry.

That was last spring. Last week, in London’s dingy Caxton Hall Registry Office, the scion of Scheherazade’s famed Caliph made the London carter’s daughter his Princess. The bride’s father did not attend. Said he: ” ‘Arry asked me to give me daughter away—but I said I couldn’t afford to lose a whole day’s pay.” Said Princess Katherine: “My life will be devoted to my husband and my duties to his subjects.”