Although Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, white Raja of Sarawak, British protectorate in northwest Borneo, has the power of life & death over 500,000 brown-skinned subjects, he has never been able to establish much discipline over his own family. Ever since Privateer Jamie Brooke, of Coombe Grove, England, "persuaded" the Sultan of Brunei to give him an East Indian kingdom in 1841, the Brookes have been a strong ruling dynasty. Sir Charles (grandnephew of Jamie) modestly records in the British Who's Who that he has "led several expeditions into the far interior of the country to punish headhunters" and "understands the management of natives." But Sir Charles sired three daughters, no sons.
The daughters have brought the reigning House of Brooke plenty of headaches. They came to be known as the Princesses Gold, Baba and Pearl, in spite of the fact that His Highness the Raja once scornfully pointed out to British newspapers that Sarawak has no legal Princesses. He gave his three daughters proper titles as Miss Leonora Margaret Brooke, Miss Elizabeth Brooke, Miss Nancy Valerie Brooke.
Leonora Margaret (Princess Gold) pleased her royal father by becoming the second wife of the late 2nd Earl of Inch-cape, P. & O. Co. shipping tycoon, making something like a royal alliance, considering the importance of P. & O. in the Indies. But Elizabeth (Princess Pearl) married Jazz Bandster Harry Roy. At her marriage the Roy Jazz Band played the leader's original composition Sarawaki as a wedding march. Nancy Valerie outraged her father's sensibilities even more by marrying Wrestler Bob Gregory. Still worse, Mr. and Mrs. Gregory promptly journeyed to Hollywood, where the by-now publicity-conscious Princess Baba announced an unfulfilled scheme of buying a rival kingdom to Sarawak and calling it Babaland.
In Sarawak, a rich tropical land of rubber, oil, antimony, edible birds' nests and rhinoceroses, it has long been recognized that a two-fisted male ruler was needed to make the kingdom's famed headhunters toe the mark. Heir Presumptive to the Sarawak throne was Sir Charles's brother, Bertram. But Bertram is now 63, too old to assume new burdens. So Anthony Brooke, Bertram's 27-year-old son, was named Raja Muda (Crown Prince).
Last autumn Crown Prince Anthony unexpectedly married a certain Kathleen Hudden at Rangoon, Burma. The petulant Raja was not long in letting it be known that he considered Miss Hudden a nobody. It was too much like the marriage of his two daughters. It indicated that the Crown Prince lacked the tough, buccaneering spirit of the Brookes' fighting ancestors.
Last week Raja Sir Charles issued a decree from his palace in Kuching, Sarawak's capital, blackballed Anthony Brooke as his heir with this terse announcement: "It appears to us that our nephew is not yet fitted for the exercise of the responsibilities of this high office."