Dawson of Bloomsbury

"Dawson of Penn," a frock-coated name, a faintly snobbish name, precisely the right name for the King's Physician in Ordinary --so thought many a U. S. citizen last year when George V lay near Death and the sun never set on fresh bulletins signed "Dawson of Penn" (TIME, Dec. 3, 1928 et seq.).

Last week, on the first anniversary of the day George V fell ill, the Royal Society of Medicine celebrated with a banquet. The Prime Minister of Great Britain was there to tell a little story in his warm Scotch way. Baron Dawson proposed His Majesty's health, adding in impeccable bedside tones: "Tonight is a suitable moment to state that the King in his recovery goes on from strength to strength."

When he had drained the toast. James Ramsay MacDonald said:

"The first time I visited Buckingham Palace as a guest of the King, a distinguished looking man, whom I had been informed was Lord Dawson, came and shook my hand in a most familiar fashion, saying. 'Have you forgotten me?'

"Then he reminded me of a night when we had a frugal supper together in a Bloomsbury restaurant--it must have been 40 years ago--when he was a medical student and I was a city clerk. Our combined wealth was insufficient to save us from walking as far as Holloway station.

"Could any of you, with all your capacity to forecast, then have said to both of us: 'Gentlemen, you will bid each other good night tonight at the corner of Holloway station, and it will be your fate not to meet again until invited as guests of His Majesty to partake of his hospitality at Buckingham Palace?"

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