Foreign News: Bump

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Queen Mary's stately maroon Daimler has all the old-fashioned dignity of its royal owner. One day last week both received a nasty bump. Returning from a visit to the Royal Horticultural Society gardens with Queen Mary, Captain Lord Claude Nigel Hamilton, her controller and equerry, and Lady Constance Harriet Stuart Milnes Gaskell, a woman of the bedchamber, the high old limousine was caught on the right by a truck loaded with steel, skittered sideways, struck the curbing and overturned. The occupants were tumbled among automobile cushions and flowers, and the doors jammed shut. But eyewitnesses soon unscrambled the royal party and the Queen Mother climbed out on a ladder supplied by a housepainter. Queen Mary smiled bravely, murmured, "Oh dear!" and was assisted to a nearby house where she sipped a cup of tea before returning home to Marlborough House.

Worried court physicians found that she had escaped with bruises and a bumped eye. Among the scores of bouquets and sympathetic messages from Britain's great was a modest bunch of irises and narcissuses with a note attached: With best wishes for a speedy recovery.

A. B. Cooper (the lorry driver).