KING OF THE CASTLE

Evening Star, Issue 22671, 10 June 1937, Page 20

KING OF THE CASTLE

LUNDY ISLAND'S OWNER To the North Devon Infirmary at Barnstaple, England, recently came a surprising patient. She was pretty 15-year-old Rosemary Lewin; her reason for attending the hospital was commonplace, though serious enough—an acute attack of appendicitis. It was where she had come from—and how she had come—that was unusual. Youthful Miss Lowin had flown in an open cockpit plane across 21 miles of storm-stricken sea and land from Lundy Island, in the Bristol Channel, whore she had been staying as a guest ot uncrowned “ King Martin—or to give him his full and more officially recognised name, Martin Coles Harman. Harman himself is real enough, with his 6ft of bulk and air of dominance, but his history reads like the product of a scenario writer’s imagination. Starting his career as a clerk in a banking house, by 1924 lie had earned and saved enough to pay £25,000 for an investment company of his own. In less than 10 years the Harman financial interests had grown to the very respectable sum of £10,000,000. But not. apparently, hv very respectable methods, since in 1933 Harman was arrested on a fraud charge, and received a sentence of 18 months’ imprisonment. At the time he was running, among other enterprises, a hank of his own. gold mines, cement, rubber, and artificial silk factories and distilleries. Before the disaster to his financial career which followed his arrest Harman had bought outright for £16,000 Ihe rocky 1,500-aore domain of Lundy Island. Of this territory he announced himself monarch ; for it he issued special currency and postage stamps—none of which acts of Royal prerogative was, alack, recognised by the Great Rowers. But despite this absence of international recognition tho island remained dear to its “ king,” and to it he retired on his release from prison. . There to-day lie spends his self-imposed exile. On its foreshore a chiselled stone displays the following lack of welcome: — “ This island is entirely private pro perty. There are no nubile roads, footpaths, or rights-of-way whatsoever thereon.”