Omnibus of Scandal

British courts last week settled three major scandals that have kept London newspapers humming for months.

Lady Louis & Negro. Returned from Malta, Lady Louis Mountbatten, wife of King George's first cousin once removed, stood before Lord Chief Justice Baron Hewart and heard herself exonerated of the charge of consorting with a Negro. London's sensational tabloid weekly People had blurted: "Famous Hostess Exiled. ... A scandal which has shaken society to its very depths . . . concerns . . . one of the leading hostesses in the country, a woman highly connected and immensely rich. Her associations with a colored man became so marked that they were the talk of the West End.-- One day the couple were caught in compromising circumstances. . . . The society woman has been given the hint to clear out of England for a couple of years, and the hint comes from a quarter which cannot be ignored. . . ."

For this indiscretion People apologized, offered heavy damages, which Lady Louis regally refused. Her counsel, Norman Birkett, explained that her departure for Malta, where her husband is in Naval service, "had given an opportunity for the lying, malignant and poisonous tongues of scandal to wag. . . . The most atrocious libel of which I have any knowledge in all my experience. . . . She had been informed of the identity of the colored man. . . . She has never even met him."

Heavily underscoring the vindication, King George & Queen Mary had Lord & Lady Louis Mountbatten to luncheon last week, not before she was legally vindicated but immediately afterward.

Mrs. Barney & Lover. Before the Hon. Mr. Justice Humphreys and a jury of ten men & two women in Old Bailey appeared Mrs. Elvira Dolores Barney, accused of murdering her lover Thomas William Scott Stephen after a cocktail party in her West End flat. One dawn last month a physician, hastily summoned, found Mrs. Barney, whose husband is a U. S. radio crooner, anxiously kissing Stephen's cooling corpse. A revolver lay nearby. While Mrs. Barney awaited trial her father. Sir John Mullens, was reported to be liquidating the Mullens gems to raise the huge fee of her defender, lean Sir Patrick Hastings, the Clarence Darrow of Great Britain. Last week Sir Patrick was in fine fettle. After witnesses had testified to Mrs. Barney's love for Stephen, and she had explained that the revolver went off while he was trying to keep her from shooting herself, Sir Patrick cried, "Her life was tragic, tied to an American brute whom she could not divorce! . . . Even one of us some day may have a daughter for whom we may have to make excuses. ... It is conclusive evidence of her innocence that her fingerprints were not found on the revolver. There is no evidence here upon which you could be asked to hang a cat."

"The finest defense speech I have ever heard," beamed Justice Humphreys. "There is not the slightest doubt that there was a struggle for this revolver." With the judge's charge in mind Old Bailey's ten men & two women promptly found Mrs. Barney not guilty, looked concerned when she and her mother simultaneously fainted from relief.

Rector of Stiffkey. After three months of deliberation the Worshipful Frederick Keppel North, Chancellor of the Diocese of Norwich, and an ecclesiastical court last week returned a verdict in the case of Rev. Harold Francis Davidson, rector of Stiffkey (pronounced "Stewkey"), accused "of permitting 17-year-old Barbara Harris to sleep in his bed, of immoral conduct with Rose Ellis, 30, over a period of ten years, of embracing Betty Beach, actress, while she was clad only in her nightie," etc., etc. (TIME, April 11). Mr. Davidson explained he had been engaged in the commendable occupation of saving lost souls in London's streets. His son & daughter heard Chancellor North call his defense a tissue of lies. "He told us," observed the Chancellor, "that one night while walking in Leicester Square he picked up a young prostitute, Rose Ellis, and gave her food, money and lodgings. I pause for a moment to say there is no blame attached to him for that. . . . But from that night began an association that lasted more than eleven years." Brokenly convicted. Rector Davidson stumbled from the ecclesiastical court, went in search of a vaudeville engagement. Said his wife, still loyal: "I am preparing to get a job as a cook or housekeeper."

--Last week hungry-looking Nancy Cunard, famed and open Negrophile, left New York where she had been living in Harlem, for Havana. Reporters were kept out of her stateroom by big, black Anselm Colebrooke, who sailed on the same ship in a cabin engaged for him by Miss Cunard, daughter of Lady Cunard. In Weymouth, Mass., Blackamoor Colebrooke was wanted by the police in connection with a motorcar theft, also wanted by his white wife and six offspring.

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