GREAT BRITAIN: A Bit Near the Bone

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—I asked the Duke where he wanted the bed. He chuckled: "You don't think I'm sleeping in this, do you?" He pointed to the Queen's room, and said: "That's where I sleep."

—The Queen sleeps in a huge Victorian bed which is 7 ft. 6 in. wide. Her mattress is old and tightly packed with horsehair.

—The Queen never bought anything new if something old could be repaired.

—For years, as Princess Elizabeth, she never had a bathroom of her own. When a bath was installed for her, the bath was so pokey that she had to climb into it from the back.

These boudoir details appeared last week in London's lip-smacking Sunday Pictorial under the byline of William Charles Ellis, 51, boss of a pub in Hertfordshire called the Plough and Dial but, until last November superintendent of the Queen's weekend home, Windsor Castle. His chatter was the latest in a series of tattle tales about royal family life to appear in London's popular press, ranging from the governess' gabble of the 1950 The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford, to the more recent manly sacrifices of Peter Townsend, Princess Margaret's boy friend, as told by his friend, Norman Barrymaine.

By last week it was evident that the Queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, had had enough. A government official stalked into the Plough and Dial, handed Pubkeeper Ellis a royal injunction restraining him from publishing any further details about the royal family. The injunction pointed out that Ellis, on resigning, had allegedly given his word in writing—now required of all palace employees—that he would not publish any account of any incident or conversation that had come within his knowledge as a result of his royal employment.

Even Fleet Street reporters for Britain's brashest tabloids considered the Ellis articles to be "a bit near the bone."