The King Is Dead

Death, as it must to all men, came in a bursting bomb to a king of whom most people had never heard. Through London, last fortnight, news finally reached the world that King John Sydney Clunies-Ross IV of the Cocos Islands* had died last August, of shock, following a Japanese air raid.

The private Ross realm embraces a minuscule archipelago (a score or more coral islets), lying in the vastness of the Indian Ocean midway between Australia and Ceylon. The Cocos Islands have belonged to the Ross dynasty ever since John Clunies-Ross I, Scottish skipper of an East Indiaman, settled there with his family in 1827. The Rosses are absolute rulers of their coconut-growing Malay subjects. By royal fiat the Cocos Islands positively admit no immigrants or ever re-admit emigrants.

Ross IV was a strapping, handsome man with high cheekbones inherited from his Malayan mother (a royal Sulu princess). His chief relaxations from the cares of kingship were listening to whispers of the faraway world that arrived over his private station (the objective of the Japanese bombing) and reading whodunits (he owned a library of 5,000 books). The only white woman in his kingdom was his consort, Queen Rose, a petite Cockney cashier about 25 years his junior, whom he had married in London.

The autocrats of the Cocos mint their own bone money (metal coins, they believe, might cause their subjects to become money mad), make and administer their own laws, order executions (by drowning at sea), give each native who marries a house as wedding present. Each king has provided a bronze bust of himself for the royal gallery, each has maintained an unfailing cellar of matured Scotch whiskey in the royal "palace" (a sprawling teak-and-tile mansion).

All Ross rulers so far (they hold a 999-year lease granted by Queen Victoria) have been benevolent monarchs. Last week King John Clunies-Ross V, 19, was still in England with his mother, Queen Rose, his brother, "Prince" Charles and his sisters, the "Princesses" Elizabeth and Inin. As soon as he can, he will return to his realm to receive the genuflections of his subjects in a crownless coronation ceremony. The kings of Cocos usually wear old straw hats.

*Not to be confused with Cocos Island, about 550 miles southwest of Panama.

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