A Foolish Display

For three days London's genteel West End looked like a battlefield. Near Buckingham Palace, squads of police grappled with leather-jacketed toughs, while chauffeured Bentleys delicately inched their way through. Wild-eyed girls with straggly black hair and blue-jeaned boys with golden tresses were frog-walked into paddy wagons. Some 200 people were jailed. Taking advantage of the chaos, a six-man gang waylaid the Dowager Duchess of Northumberland, sped off in a white Jaguar with her jewels, worth $200,000. Most shocking of all, for the first time in her eleven-year reign, Queen Elizabeth II was booed by her own people.

Cause of the trouble was the long-expected, long-disputed state visit to Britain by Greece's King Paul and Queen Frederika. Fearing precisely the kind of left-wing demonstrations that occurred last week, Greek Premier Constantine Karamanlis advised against the trip, resigned when the royal couple refused to bow to pressure and decided to go anyway. British political critics base their case against the King and Queen largely on the fact that Greek jails still contain about 1,000 prisoners seized more than a decade ago during the civil war; most are believed to be Communist, and the Greeks point out that they are being gradually released anyway (the original number of prisoners was 4,000). The Queen is also accused of Nazi sympathies, an old and absurdly exaggerated charge,* and of meddling too much in Greek politics, hardly a British concern. The anti-Greek chorus is made up of a motley collection of Communists, Socialists, antimonarchists, vague crusaders in search of new causes, ban-the-bombers (including that foolish sage, Bertrand Russell), all of them joined in the London streets by joyriding beatniks. Amazingly, they were also joined, in spirit, by Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson and Deputy Leader George Brown, who chose to boycott a banquet for the visitors--which could only raise questions about the mental health and stability of British politics.

Agents in Overalls. For the royal visit, the Macmillan government mounted a security force that outdid even the Bulganin-Khrushchev welcome in 1956. On hand were 5,000 police, including plainclothesmen disguised in everything from morning coats to overalls. As the royal procession of carriages clip-clopped from Victoria Station, where Elizabeth greeted them, to Buckingham Palace, a woman burst from the crowd and shrieked: "Release my husband!" She turned out to be Mrs. Betty Ambatielos, 45, the English wife of Antonios Ambatielos, a Greek Communist serving a life term for his part in the cival war.

That night, while the royal couples and 156 other guests dined in Buckingham Palace, 2,000 demonstrators poured into Trafalgar Square with banners proclaiming "Down with the Nazi Queen." The crowd seemed bent on storming the palace but encountered massed lines of bobbies blocking the way. Police helmets clattered across sidewalks, fists flew, traffic stalled, and prancing police horses bowled over crowds. Rioters fought off cops from atop a doubledeck bus. A few youths who made it to the Mall were stopped by flying tackles.

"Sieg Heil!" For the next night, so that the royal party could see Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in near-perfect security, the Foreign Office had bought up all 1,100 tickets to the Aldwych theater, distributed them to a select audience that included lead ers of London's Greek community. Shortly before curtain time, a false report that a bomb had been planted in the theater led to the additional spectacle of police in evening clothes combing the royal box with a mine detector.

Held back by six rows of police, 1,500 people outside greeted the royal arrivals with an ugly din of boos, hisses and mocking shouts of "Sieg heil!" and "fascist swine." Thousands of others cheered. After the play, Queen Elizabeth left the theater alone, and was greeted by another chorus of boos. She looked startled and dismayed. It was probably the first time that British royalty had been so publicly humiliated at home since Edward VII was hissed at Epsom in the last century after rumor involved him as a corespondent in a divorce case.

Worse than Woolly. Next day, Greek Premier Panayotis Pipinelis, who accompanied the King and Queen, granted Mrs. Ambatielos a 45-minute hearing, whereupon she calmed down. Back in Greece, 19 of the prisoners (not including Ambatielos) were freed. At week's end the royal couple quietly returned to Greece. Said Frederika before she left: "The decision to come to Brit ain for a state visit was the right one, absolutely right. I am not worried about these few people who demonstrated. The memory I have is of the warm reception we were given on our arrival."

In Britain the foolish display of the anti-Greek demonstrators left unpleasant echoes. Those behind the riots, wrote the Daily Mirror, "are not merely leading woolly-minded undergraduates in woolly-minded peace protests; they are providing a shield for mischievous Communist agitation." The paper noted that "Greece is about the only country in eastern Europe free from dictatorship," then posed a question that self-advertised idealists have yet to answer: When was the last time they demonstrated in behalf of the political prisoners of Lithuania or Estonia or Latvia or Poland or Hungary or Rumania or Bulgaria or East Germany or Czechoslovakia?

* Born Princess of Hanover, Frederika is a granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II (and a great-great-granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria, which also makes her a British princess and a third cousin of Queen Elizabeth). When Frederika was a year old, her family moved from Germany to Austria, where she spent most of her childhood. As a girl, she supposedly belonged to a Hitlerite youth group. In school in Italy during her late teens, at a time when three of her brothers served in the Wehrmacht, she was heard to defend Nazi Germany. That is about the only fact her critics can cite to support their case. After marrying Paul in 1938, Frederika fled Greece under Nazi bombardment, lived in exile in Egypt and South Africa until the end of the war.

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