GREAT BRITAIN: Plot, Press & People

In Buckingham Palace last week Queen Mary awaited King Edward. Ready for His Majesty too was a multi-volume Scotland Yard dossier pasted up out of clippings to show what the World press thought of the King's yachting trip (TIME, Aug. 17 et seq.). Ready to be promptly received in audience last week was Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, just let out of quarantine after passing several weeks at home with chicken pox. Ready were prominent Jewish friends of Edward VIII to exhort him on the subject of the British Expeditionary Force now speeding to Palestine to crush Arab insurgence and make it a true "Jewish homeland." Ready was the India Office with suggestions requiring His Majesty's approval before it can be settled whether there will be a Coronation Durbar. And ready to be unpacked was a large truckload of souvenirs acquired by the King in the Balkans, including Bulgarian rosewater and pots of a kind of jam he liked in Greece. As son went in to dine with devoted mother a crowd, cheering outside Buckingham Palace in the deep dusk, glimpsed only the white flash of His Majesty's starched shirtfront, concluded from the low visibility of King Edward's face that he must have become very tanned.

Fleet Street has not forgotten how heavy fines running up to $2,500 each were exacted from some of London's principal newspapers for their reporting of the incident in which figured an herbalist named George Andrew McMahon, his revolver and King Edward (TIME, July 27). The nature of this incident as ultimately aired in court was something upon which Fleet Street found it financially safer not to comment last week. Almost alone was the Chicago Tribune in sending its Correspondent David Darrah to report what the herbalist's lawyer Alfred Kerstein had to say as he moved to appeal the case to a higher British court this week.

In the lower court McMahon related that in 1935 "a member of a political body in England'' introduced him to agents of a foreign government who offered him employment as a spy and later took him to "a certain baron" whose name the prisoner wrote on a piece of paper and passed to the judge. This baron was a member of the Embassy staff of the foreign power in London, and McMahon offered to describe in detail the room in which they met. Upshot was an offer to McMahon, so he said, of $750 to shoot King Edward. Snapped horrified Attorney General Sir Donald Bradley Somervell: "I suggest the story of this plot is the product of your imagination!"

"I wish to God it were," the prisoner replied. He said that with eight operatives of the foreign power watching him he had in fact only slithered his revolver under the hoofs of the King's horse, asked the jury to have him imprisoned for a long term as only in jail would he be safe from vengeance by the foreign agents he had betrayed. In ten minutes the jury found McMahon guilty of "unlawfully and willfully presenting near the person of the King a pistol with intent to alarm His Majesty," and the judge sentenced him to one year in jail.