¶Citizens of Aberdeen, embittered because King Edward, instead of opening their new hospital, met Mrs. Simpson at their railway station on her visit to Scotland (TIME, Oct. 5), chalked Aberdeen streets with the John Knoxian exhortation: "Down with the American Harlot!"
¶In London, Mrs. Simpson and Mrs. Bingham, wife of the U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, both attended for the first time the same function, a musicale at the Yugoslav Legation.
¶A private telephone line last week connected Mrs. Simpson's town house with Buckingham Palace. Europeans recalled that Dowager Queen Marie of Rumania had a similar private wire from her palace to the home of Prince Barbu Stirbey until this was torn out by order of Her Majesty's angered son King Carol.
¶King Edward, after laying his Armistice Day wreath on the Cenotaph in Whitehall last week, was greeted in the Royal Box at Albert Hall by veterans who serenaded him with the song Who's Your Lady Friend? His Majesty then drove directly to dine a deux with Mrs. Simpson at her home.
¶After dining with Mrs. Simpson and making merry with friends who drifted in afterward, His Majesty left after midnight by sleeping car to review at Portland the Home Fleet, just back from "threatening" Italy in the Mediterranean (TIME, Sept. 30, 1935). The Royal Yacht Victoria & Albert on which King George and Queen Mary always put to sea to review the fleet was slept in by King Edward, tied to the dock at Portland. Rousingly cheered, His Majesty cried genially, "The last time I was at Portland, I was a midshipman!", proceeded to inspect the fleet from a fast admiral's barge.
¶From Portland the King sped to his snuggery, Fort Belvedere, 30 miles outside London, and was joined by Mrs. Simpson for the weekend. A reporter crawling that night among the giant rhododendrons ascertained that jazz was blaring and every window of the snuggery ablaze, before he was picked out by the electric torch of a constable too wise to make an arrest which would have made headlines.
¶That chipper little Irish columnist, Edward Arthur Donald St. George Hamilton Chichester, Marquess of Donegall continued silent in print about the King & Mrs. Simpson but complained in private of the service he is getting from a Milwaukee clipping bureau. It had already littered his house and office with 20,000 different clippings about the King & Mrs. Simpson last week when he canceled his order by cable. Next day the postman brought 6,000 more clippings and Lord Donegall deplored what his curiosity was going to cost him.
¶The Editor of the London Times, Mr. Geoffrey Dawson, screwed his courage up and up last week, not to the point of printing so much as a word about the King & Mrs. Simpson in the Times, but to the point of making a verbal intimation. Mr. Dawson was correct in assuming that this would be cabled to the U. S., whence it would speed to Buckingham Palace (where clippings by the bale were being sorted last week by Assistant Private Secretary Sir Godfrey Thomas) and be read by King Edward, perhaps with good effect. Said Times Editor Dawson: "The King is going to finish with Mrs. Simpson finally and gracefully."