STORIES OF HER MAJESTY

Chronicle (Levin), 9 April 1946, Page 4

STORIES OF HER MAJESTY

Telling "stories of the Royal Family," a short time back Louis Nickolls, special corresponderit , accredited to Buckingham Palace, described his job thus: "After I got back home from Canada and when, eventually, I got fiemobbed from the R.A.F., I became special correspondent (there are only three of us) accredited to the Palace for one of , the big British news agencies. In other words, I cover the Palace for news, and wherever the King goes on any pubiic occasions I go to report what happens." Nickolls was talking in the BBC overseas service, and he went on to say in their travels through Britain their Majesties meet hundreds and thousands of people of all sorts and elasses, everyone of whom would say the same thing — "that the King and Queen have the most happy knack of putting people at their ease." A number of men and women from the American Red Cross, who were. invited recently to a tea party, found when they arrived that the King and the Princesses were there, too. . Several of the guests told Mr. Nickolls afterwards that they'd gone expecting something very formal, and were absolutely astonished at the free and easy way the Kihg and Queen moved around them. He recalled, just before the Coronation, going up to Scotland to the Queen's home at the old Castle of Glamis '--to get some background material for an article on her childhood. Donald, a gardener who'd spent most of his life working on the family estate and was now nead gardener, spoke of the Queen as a young girl, how she used to climb trees and go riding bare back in the park with the boys of the family; slip over to the farm for a glass of milk from the dairy and sometimes raid the greenhouses. "Ah,"- Nickolls said to Donald, "You little thought, then, I expect, that the little girl who raided your greenhouses would one day be Queen of England." Donald thought it over for a minute, At last he nodded his head and spoke: "That's true," he said, "but then, ye ken, at that time I didna' think that one day I would be head gardener