REPAID WITH INTEREST

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXX, Issue 13670, 18 June 1942, Page 7

REPAID WITH INTEREST

A ROYAL GIFT FINE GOODWILL GESTURE A two - century - old gift of English Queen Caroline, which was fused ' ) help build Stratford, sturdy | home of the famous Lee family of Virginia, was repaid recent 1 ;' at the British Embassy in Washington. To Viscount Halifax, the British Ambassador. Airs Robert Wort h Bingham, widow of the former United States Ambassador to G real Britain, presented the J 1 ! pounds sterling labour l.thiO dollars L swelled by about one-third that amount as interest, in behalf of the Robert E. Lee .Memorial Foundation, of which she is the Kentucky director. Airs Bingham is now national president of Bundles for Britain. Seventeen other directors of the foundation were present. The British Embassy will despatch this l.tiOU dollars “Queen Caroline Fund” to Lady Astor, the Foundation's director for England, who personally will present it to Queen Elizabeth. With the fund will go a message to Her .Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, from Mrs Charles D. Lanier, of Greenwich, Conn., president of the Foundation, commemorating a small but significant page in the story of British-American friendship.

It was in 172 9 that Queen Caroline, reigning in England in the absence of her husband. King George 11, made a queenly restitution to one of her colonists, Thomas Lee. As justice of the peace, serving the crown, Lee had imprisoned members of a band of criminals who, in revenge, burned Lee's home. The crown was petitioned in his behalf, and Queen Caroline s.ent him 300 pounds to help finance the building of a new home, Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County, Virginia, which stands to this day as then built. Robert E. Lee, hero of the South, was horn there, as were the famous Lee of the Revolutionary War, and it has thus become one of this country’s - most revered patriotic shrine, preserved by the Robert E. Lee Memorial Foundation.

Remembering the story of Queen Caroline’s connection with the building of Stratford, Mrs Bingham, when she w - as in England as wife of the Ambassador, purchased a fine, fulllength portrait of Queen Caroline which she brought to America and presented to Stratford Hall. Last spring, when Virginia gardens were shown throughout the for Bundles for Britain, the board of directors of Stratford voted to make a further gesture of friendship for the British people, so gallantly defending their homeland, by returning the long-ago gift of Queen Caroline which first made possible the Lee Foundation’s historic holdings. A box labelled “Queen Caroline Fund” was set up beside her portrait, and passing tourists from all over America added their bit to the good will gesture.