REBUFF FOR KING

Taranaki Daily News, 5 January 1935, Page 5

REBUFF FOR KING

UNIVERSITY "CHARACTER.” "I HAVE PUT MY FOOT IN IT.” An amusing story of King Edward and Queen Alexandra is told by Mrs. E. S. Stewart, daughter of a headmaster of Sherborne and wife' of a former master at Caius, Cambridge, in “Sherborne, Oxford and Cambridge,” says the Daily Telegraph. King Edward and Queen Alexandra, she says, often used to visit in her old age Mrs. Tylden, sister of St. John’s College, who was a well-known Oxford “character,” and lived to be 106. On one occasion roars of laughter were heard from Mrs. Tylden’s room, and when the King came out he said; “I put my foot in it just now.” "Mrs. Tylden had a great objection to open windows, and the nurses had to take their chances of airing the rooms. Just before the King and Queen arrived Mrs. Tylden had gone upstairs to rest. “She had to be brought down to see them, and in the short interval the drawing-room windows had been opened. So the King said, ’I see you like fresh air,’ and Mrs, Tylden said hotly, ‘No, I don’t at all, and they oughtn’t to have opened the windows.” Mrs. Tylden used to give tennis parties, but had a great objection to people going ,up to the net, and' if anyone did so would call out, “Go back, young feller”

Mr. Rudyard Kipling sat next to her at luncheon when he visited Cambridge to receive an honorary degree. “His first remark as we sat down was, ‘Do you take away your husband’s clothes before they are worn out?” I said gravely, ‘Well, I have to, you know. When I married he had sixteen frock coats, all slightly worn. I had to take away some and make him wear out the rest.’ He sighed. ‘I know. When I married I had 365 shirts bought all over the world. I had to wear them out.’” As a young woman Mrs. Stewart several times met and danced with Oscar Wilde, “a very tall, unusual-looking young gentleman with longish black hair and a long, pale face, very well dressed.” She says that as “a very simple, unsophisticated girl” she never found much to say to him, but he did not seem to mind, and did most of the talking himself.

At a fancy dress ball, where he appeared as Prince Rupert, he declared that he was perfectly happy that night because he had buckles on his shoes, and that it was the sorrow of his life that he had been bom with dark hair. At another of their meetings: “He discoursed about daffodils, ‘our most perfect flower,’ and added, ‘I lived upon daffodils for a fortnight.’ Then something made him look round suspiciously at me, and, finding I was smiling, he said hastily, 'I don’t mean I ate them,’ and I said, ‘No, I thought it sounded a little like Nebuchadnezzar.’ ”

Mrs. Stewart claims that her husband, as colonel of the Cambridge University Volunteers, originated the idea of the O.T.C.