Slow News Day!

Pete's Points
It is not often that you open up the news (in this case the Guardian) and see stuff that reads like this.

Why raise an interesting side story about a claimant to the throne of England who died in 1947 leaving no male heirs unless it is a really slow news day? I know that Britain is reputed to be a hotbed of royal watchers but publishing stuff that is this old and irrelevant can only give joy to those whose lives are entwined with the publication of material from the National Archives.

Papers reveal how claim on throne rattled King

Alan Travis, home affairs editor
Friday July 28, 2006
The Guardian

King Anthony, a former Shropshire police inspector who insisted he had a better claim to the throne than King George V, provoked panic at the palace when two doctors refused to silence him by quietly certifying him insane.

Details have emerged from the National Archive of the royal family's anxiety at the way Anthony Hall, who was said to be tall and always impeccably dressed, drew crowds of up to 800 people to hear his claims of direct lineage from Henry VIII. Across the West Midlands, he used his 1931 campaign meetings to denounce King George, the Queen's grandfather, as a "pure blooded German" with no right to rule Britain.

. . . The chief constable of Birmingham reported to the palace that, after a swansong meeting in the Bull Ring, Hall finally left the city, ending the public campaign of the last Tudor claimant to the throne. Hall is believed to have died in 1947 leaving no male heirs.