Best wishes and a birthday broadside

Press, 11 March 1983, Page 3

Best wishes and a birthday broadside

PA Wanganui Good-will messages poured into Wanganui Collegiate School yesterday, Prince Edward’s nineteenth birthday. Greetings came by mail, telegram and telephone. Prince Edward, who is on the staff of the school, said yesterday that he expected it to be “a normal working day.” The headmaster, Mr lan McKinnon, indicated that a private function was to be held at the school to mark the birthday, but he declined to give details beforehand. Prince Edward is nearing the end of his two-term tenure as a housemaster and junior teacher at the school. He will return home when

the first term ends, early in May. A Royal variety concert will be staged in Wanganui on April 30. It will be held in honour of the Prince and will be a public farewell occasion. In London, the Prince was accused by the tart-tongued Fleet Street columnist, Jean Rook, of being “priggish” and “astoundingly pompous.” This followed up the publication of an interview with him by two New Zealand journalists, David Scoullar and Mary Bryan, in “Woman” magazine, in which Prince Edward was quoted as saying he hated the news media.

He was also quoted as saying he did not think he was cut out to be a teacher.

Miss Rook, whose newspaper, the “Daily Express” bills her as “the First Lady of Fleet Street,” said “Prince Edward, after six months of it, doesn’t like teaching. He doesn’t feel schooldays are the happiest of his life, though he’s made his fellows sore by scraping, very thinly, into Cambridge. He has now announced he ‘hates the media.’ .. “I don’t feel the priggish and, at 19, astoundingly pompous Prince Uncharming need fret too much about the media,” she said. “Or lurk in the shadows of his mother’s Throne, his big brother's towering popularity, Andrew’s hugely more exciting image, or the daily growing interest in little William.”