Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 1929. ROYAL FAMILY'S INTIMATE LETTERS

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 25, 30 January 1929, Page 10

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 1929. ROYAL FAMILY'S INTIMATE LETTERS

A perplexing and painful problem, of which oilier phases have recently atlracled a good deal of attention, is presented by the news from Berlin and London which we publish to-day. Letters from King George, Queen Mary, and the Prince of Wales have been sold by public auction in Berlin, and extracts from them have been transmitted to London for publication. It is satisfactory to Icarn that at least one London editor took steps to prevent the publication and that others were protected from th"c temptation to take a different course by the action of the News Agency which had supplied the extracts. At the request of Lord Claud Hamilton, the King's Equerry, it has withdrawn them from publication for twenty hours, but his statement to the "Daily News" and the nature of the case do not leave much room for the hope that the lime can be extended. Though he declares that "it is impossible offhand to decide whether the letters are genuine," his admission that their genuineness is "exceedingly probable" removes any reasonable ground for doubt. But the formal reservation makes one wonder • why there was any need for his statement on the point to be "offhand" and provisional. Auctions in Berlin are presumably preceded by advertisements, and one might have supposed that there are British diplomats and journalists in Berlin who would have made it their business to give timely notice of the proposed sale of such documents as these. It also appears highly probable that in the ordinary course of business the auctioneers themselves would have taken good care that information should be sent, at any rate through the normal trade channels, to the country from which the letters came, and to which they were of greatest concern. Yet London seems to have been completely taken by surprise.

The lack of publicity must be one of ihc reasons why such poor prices were realised. The highest figure mentioned is £11..105, which was given for a letter from Queen Mary daled the 19th June, 1916. Another from the King, dated the 16th April in the same year, ran it close willi a bid of £11 ss. The only oilier prices mentioned are £4 6s and £6 ss, given for letters written by the King and the Queen respectively away back in 1893, the year of their marriage, but whether before or after that event we are not told. A total of less than. £34 for the four principal items certainly suggests such poor advertising as to make the oversight of the British authorities less culpable than it at first sight appeared. Surely wfth a normal amount of publicity the autograph signatures alone should have been worth all the mceney realised even if there had been no letters accompanying them. The same feeling which has suspended the publication of the letters in England would doubtless have forbidden a sale at Sotheby's, but we shoiv3d be much surprised if a private stile to Mr. Rosenbach or Mr. Gabriel Wells would not have fetched better prices for four duly authenticated Royal autographs than an average of some 40 dollars each. Nor would the objections taken in England have in any way spoiled the New York market for either a private, or a public sale. They would, on the contrary, have been more likely to improve it, since the substance of the letters would have thereby acquired a special interest and importance to add to their autograph value.

The intentions attributed to purchasers of the letters are a further indication of how badly the matter has been mismanaged all round.

Some of the letters, says the Berlin correspondent of the "Morning Post," wore bought by a Genwan Prince and others by a Berlin dealar. The intention in both cases is to send the letters to England.

But in the peculiar circumstances of this case publicity has had exactly the opposite effect to what it usually has. Instead of helping the market in England it has ruined, or at any rate depressed, it. ■ The chief value of the letters in that market a week ago would have been to a purchaser who desired to spare the King and the Queen the annoyance and the distress that the public exposure of their private feelings and affairs would involve, especially at a time when the King's protracted illness has loaded them with a heavy burden of suffering and. anxiety. Tbe strength of that feeling is testified by "the furore created in newspaper circles" in London by the news from Berlin. Last week £100 from the Secret Service Fund would have been well spent in the purchase of the letters in order to suppress them, and the same amount could have been raised for the sai/ne purpose from scores of private sources. It is not easy to assess indignation, sympathy, or anxiety in money, but the appearance of the long message from London on the subject certainly suggests that escape from the trouble which the mere apprehension of the public has already aroused would have been cheaply purchased at ten times the sum named. But after apprehension has passed into certainty this inflated value will have vanished. The mischief will have been done, and suppression will be impossible. It-seems quite clear that it is only

the private aspect of the correspondence that has caused tlie excitement in London.

Tho. letters are in nowise sensational, says the. "Morning Post's" correspondent, merely comments on current events, and family affairs.

This general testimony is confirmed by the' mention of the two letters which have attracted the particular attention of the London pressmen, namely,

one written by the Queen when evidently under great emotional stress after the deatli of the Duke of Clarence in 1893, and another nffer the King's illness in 1925.

It would be cruel to publish such intimately personal documents at such a time, but the question of international complications does not arise. The smallness of the prices confirms this testimony to the public unimportance of the letters, but a remark of Lord Claud Hamilton's suggests that he has some misgivings on one point.

The Queen's letters about tho Germans, for instance, vibrato with the feeling of that time, he says. 1 expect that Germans were writing and feeling much the same about us at that time (the death of Kitchener).

vVs the Queen's letter already mentioned as having obtained the highest price was dated the 19th June, 1916, and the Hampshire with Lord Kitchener on board had been sunk by a German mine just a fortnight before, it seems probable that Lord Claud Hamilton was thinking of some expression in that letter when he made this remark. It would have been well, indeed, if the whole correspondence could have been purchased and suppressed, but the matter has gone so far thai it is not easy to see that the twenty-four hours allowed for further consideration can materially improve on the first impressions which Lord Claud Hamilton communicated to the "Daily News":— There's nothing we can do. If tho letters wore sold and paid for they are now the purchasers' property. We are powerless.