Vancouver, Dominion of Canada, September 1925
Yet Another Royal Visit
Ed McCurdy
Staff Writer
The Evening Star
Having swallowed a snootful of liquors Arrested in garters and knickers Ne’er to be crowned He’s Canada-bound While all of Westminster snickers.
Nothing gives this reporter more astonishment than our province’s appetite for royal visits, and our eagerness to foot the bill.
Over the past year, Vancouver’s capacity for obsequious toadying has brought us a parade of dukes, earls and lords (English, Scottish and Welsh) whose unearned wealth and family history somehow renders them holy; by all appearances, a title and an overbite will confer sainthood on a toad.
No bridge, building or ship can be considered safe until christened by an English nobleman. No civic anniversary is worth observing without the presence of an aristocrat with a chest full of inherited gongs.
Our current occupant of the welcome mat is His Royal Highness The Prince George, whose purpose is, nominally, to pay homage to the city that bears his name—when the truth of it is that the prince has been temporarily exiled to our remote corner of the empire while the London press makes a meal of his latest indiscretion.
Over the past few months, His Highness has provided the public with a veritable smorgasbord of succulents: ill-advised affairs with married women, a fondness for alcohol in quantity, and a taste for morphine and cocaine—the latter courtesy of one Kiki Preston, an ex-patriot American socialite known as “the girl with the silver syringe.”
The most recent disgrace has to do with a sighting of the prince, accompanied by the playwright Noël Coward, both in a moist and windy condition, swanning about Soho in women’s clothing.
Mistaking them for prostitutes, a policeman invited the two gentlemen to the constabulary, where things were quickly sorted out—but not before some anti-royalist on the force alerted London scribes. Having been proclaimed on the pages of the Tatler and the Daily Mail, Westminster must now ensure that the event does not enter the pages of history.
But here in the colonies, a Royal is a Royal. British Columbia’s ruling class welcomes any opportunity to host the prince and to bask in the royal sun, courtesy of the taxpayer.