GREAT BRITAIN: Work for Wales

Eight hours, plus four hours overtime every day last week was the stint of brawny fellows toiling with haste and mighty thwacking in the wing of St. James’s Palace called “York House,” famed bachelor quarters of Edward of Wales.

Definitely His Royal Highness is preparing for indefinite bachelorhood. He has refused to move into huge, regal Marlborough House (TIME, Dec. 21, 1925), especially renovated at large public expense for no other purpose than to accommodate a Prince & Princess of Wales. Last week at his own expense the occupant of York House started extensive alterations which would be silly if he intended soon to wed.

Not to be altered are the rooms H. R. H. calls his “flat”—the bedroom, study and bath on the first floor. But destruction and chaos reigned last week in the chambers previously occupied by sleek, cheerful Private Secretary Sir Godfrey Thomas and august, bumbling Sir Lionel Halsey, Comptroller of the Household. With ripping of plaster and bashing in of bricks all these rooms are being thrown into one large apartment, a bachelor’s ballroom where 100 guests may eat, imbibe and prance.

Ousted to make room for merrymakers, Sir Godfrey and Sir Lionel have moved down a long corridor to small but cozy quarters adjoining the office where all but closest intimates of H. R. H. will now be received. Sagacious, this arrangement will keep out of the “flat” all tedious titled acquaintances, obstreperous suppliants, cranks.

To keep royal blood at its best, all windowpanes will be of the glass that best admits the ultraviolet rays of London’s little sunlight.

As a royal whim, the entrance way, recently paved with silent, hygienic rubber blocks, was repaved last week with oldfangled flagstones.

A snooping carpenter divulged that on an upper floor of York House there is a room furnished with a golfer’s practice net, previously unsuspected by the British public. .