LONELY PRINCE

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 April 1937, Page 4

LONELY PRINCE

RENOUNCED BALKAN THRONE

A man who might have been to-day head of the strongest. Balkan kingdom, celebrates each anniversary of his renunciation —in an asylum, writes Duncan Forbes in the “Sunday Dis pat ch.” II is 27 years since the heir to the throne of tiie pre-war Serbia. Crown Prince George, renounced his right of succession on March 15. limit.

But not a single citizen of Yugoslavia—the kingdom Prince George would have inherited —celebrated the day. No reference to him was allowed in the Press, nothing reminded the Serbian people of the leader they lost. No lonelier royal figure exists than Prince George, eldest son of <ne late King Peter the First of Serbia, whoso grandson, the boy King Peter, docs not oven know that his great-uncle, “the man who might, have been king,” is still alive. Prim e G>orgc, v ho is now ip. vnis Die '•< ••< utrie son of the Karaguorge dynasty, which returned to Serbia after the murder of King Alexander

Obrenovich and Queen Draga in 1903. He had early shown signs of his incipient burst, of insanity, and in tits of fury he would turn on his servants and beat them. On one occasion, he commanded his troops to charge a stone wall, and laughed when they obeyed. Of his own free will he renounced the succession, realising in his saner moments that he was too unstable to be king. Before this, diplomatic circles had been shocked by the imprisonment, at the command of his father King Peter, in a Belgrade, fortress after ho had slapped his military instructor, a French colonel, in the face. Bat iticac peccadilloes amt icculricities were quickly forgotten when in H»il Serbia was plunged into lim World War. I’rime George soon became a popular hero to the Serbs for his incredible bravery.

He seemed to bear a charmed life. At the height of the fierset Austrian bombardment of Belgrade he would order his chauffeur to drive him, with a number of timorous staff ollicers, up and down the Sava river-front in full view of the binoculars of the Austrian gunners. Shells fell all round the solitary car, but Prince George refused to hurry. "Let us stop and observe the enemy positions,” he would say to the staff officers crouching in the bottom of t he car. On one occasion a shell fell so near the car that two ollicers were blown into the road, but Prince. Geroge escaped wit bout a scratch Swu'd in huml, he headed many a cliai’ge at the enemy batteries. But the war unhinged his mind fur--1 her, and when peace came bis wild ness and eccentricity became more noticeable than ever. Nobody was

surprised when one day madcap Prince George disappeared. He had been certified by two physicians as insane and removed to confinement in a strongly-guarded asylum near Nish, in Serbia. The asylum lies only a few miles from the main railway line which' links Constantinople and Calais, and the thundering Orient express can be seen through the trees by the lonely - imprisoned man who might have been king . . . It symbolises for him the freedom, the contact with the great outer world, Vienna, Paris, Belgrade, which he can never regain.