KING EDWARD’S COURAGE

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 141, 11 March 1930, Page 11

KING EDWARD’S COURAGE

REMINISCENCES OF SIR FREDERICK TREVES The “Dorset Year Book” includes a contribution by Mr. Newman Flower, who relates how Sir Frederick Treves had sent him a manucript of his reminiscences. “Before long I was aware that I was reading the finest book of reminiscences I had read for many years,” says Mr. Flotver. “The material about King Edward’s operation alone showed him a great figure of courage, a man who fought his doctors to go to his Coronation, and so keep faith with the British people. If ever the heroism of a British King was revealed it was revealed in that manucript. King Edward had hidden his malady in order that the public should not be alarmed. The doctors, the nurses, went to 'Windsor numbered and not by name, so that the arrival of these medical people should not be known. Treves was ‘Number Six,’ and he used to go to Windsor in a tweed cap and a tweed suit, and get off at a station before Windsor and walk the rest of the way. These were the instructions of a King to spare his people an iota of anxiety regarding the Coronation. When I read the manuscript I realised the pluck of the King who, against the advice of his doctors, came to London bowing in agony to the crowds that applauded him. I knew that these words of Treves’s would show rvhat a figure of courage the King had been. Then one morning my telephone rang violently. Answering it, I heard Treves’s voice at the other end. He said, ‘Bring the manuscript at once’ (to a certain bank). I met him there. He snatched the manuscript out of my hands greedily. ‘What are you going to do with it?’ I asked. ‘lt shall never be published,’ he answered, and locked up the manuscript in his private safe. It has never been published and it never will be. Indeed, I believe it. has been destroyed long since.”