In Scotland, where optimism is unfashionable, able editors were dourly convinced last week that the Press has not seen the last of the non-gossip features of the Edward & Mrs. Simpson story. Its gossip aspects last week were just bursting into brightest bloom.
In the Glasgow and Edinburgh view, history will soon begin to record that altogether too many subjects of King George VI are altogether too unsatisfied with what little they know about how Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin secured the abdication and departure of King Edward (TIME, Dec. 21). The fact that Edward VIII had apparently quit, and was even being called contemptuously a "quitter" last week, failed to appease the patient resolve of Scotsmen to know all, sooner or later. The adjournment of the House of Commons in London last week was welcomed by Scottish constituents as an opportunity to get their Scottish M. P.'s on the carpets of their homes during the Christmas holidays and make them come clean. About results of this discreet procedure the Scottish Press will speak in its own time, tersely.
The bulk of U. S. newsorgans meanwhile were off in full cry after they knew not what. They expected to find it by sniffing around Mrs. Simpson in Cannes and around the Rothschild Castle in Austria. To many U. S. editors, dispatches from their regular Vienna correspondents were a revelation last week, and soon some of these correspondents will be fired. For many years they have in Vienna performed with the dexterity of long practice the service of inventing daily over coffee and whipped cream what is happening simultaneously in Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia, Athens, Bucharest, Prague and even Warsaw.
This was not to say that no correspondent had succeeded last week in establishing sound news pipelines into the Rothschild Castle, but it was to say that as yet 95% of stories printed about the Duke of Windsor were obvious, blatant fakes. They unmasked to some hitherto naive editors the whole Vienna school of whipped-cream journalism, and (which will prove much more expensive) they unmasked it to the world public as well. Hereafter money is going to be spent getting much nearer to the facts of life in each royal Balkan sty and snuggery.
The name which chiefly emerged from the Windsor & Simpson Story-of-the-Year with credit was the name of William Randolph Hearst. There have been only two real Simpson scoops and Mr, Hearst personally scored Scoop No. i when he learned in England from King Edward that His Majesty was not just fooling around but was firm in his resolve to marry (TIME, Nov. 2). Scoop No. 2 is under stood to have been secured for Mr. Hearst by Miss Marion Davies in transatlantic conversation with her friend Mrs. Ernest Simpson. This scoop was the information that, while Edward VIII was firmly resolved to marry, it was a morganatic marriage which the King contemplated and not a marriage which would create a Queen. Both Scoop No. i and Scoop No. 2 were played by all Hearst papers in dignified, unequivocal language and both proved absolutely right.