The Press: Doctor & Duke

In Bridgeton, N. J., last week Editor Isadore Levine of the Bridgeton Record wrote in his weekly gossip-column: "A number of physicians' cars have been seen parked near a Burlington Avenue home. It must be an interesting 'case'." When

Dr. Leslie E. Myatt saw the item, he marched to the Record's office with a horsewhip. When Editor Levine came out, he cracked him twice. Editor Levine scuttled to a magistrate where he got a warrant for Dr. Myatt's arrest, planned to sue for $50,000.

Meanwhile in Britain where it takes much less impudence by the Press to stir up much more trouble than in the U. S., the tall, hard-living Duke of Westminster last week started a libel suit against his 26-year-old niece, Lady Sibell Lygon, and Editor W. G. A. Wayte of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. Owner of 600 acres on London's fashionable West End, the Duke of Westminster has an income of $1,225,000 a year out of which he pays $50,000 in alimony to the two wives who divorced him for adultery. He was a grandfather at 46. In 1930, at 51, he married his third wife, Lelia Ponsonby. He has a taste for shawl-collared evening coats, a disdainful extravagance which causes him to use his footmen instead of the mails for messages to his friends. Lady Sibell, whose mother, the Countess of Beauchamp, is the Duke's sister, had opportunities to learn more about her gay uncle last year when she worked as receptionist in the London hairdressing establishment which the second Duchess of Westminster started after her divorce. What caused the Duke of Westminster's libel suit last week were a few paragraphs which Lady Sibell printed in her regular chit-chat column in Oxford and Cambridge Magazine last month:

"I am somewhat shocked, being patriotic, by the behavior of one who, although he is my uncle, should know better. . . . I refer to the Duke of Westminster. He is one of the richest Englishmen. His money should do good in and to England. Instead of shouldering his responsibilities, he has two houses in France, a pack of boar hounds also in France, a yacht on which he spends a good deal of his time in foreign waters, and now I see he is no longer going to have any race horses in England. He has sent his string over to France. Is this setting a good example? "Dukes, I understand, are made to look up to. We are told they stand by their country. Where should we be if we copied them? "Perhaps this behavior is because His Grace has met with troubles in England, but I think one shouldn't shirk his duty. One should put personal pettinesses on one side—life isn't beer and skittles, even to a duke. And a duke should know he is able to stand up to trouble, and he should know where his duty lies.