by a resting dancer in 1934. The publicity embarrassed the family, and Cissie's mother Florence Hill told a Press reporter that "Lydia" had gone into hiding under medical care due to shock at public attitudes, and that they knew no maharajah. It is not known whether the pressure of this publicity incited the Sultan to announce an engagement in May, 1938. Engagement and denial On 12 May 1937 the Sultan attended the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in London, and is said to have renewed the relationship with Cissie then, divorced his Scottish wife Helen née Wilson in March 1938, and sailed home in the same month to Singapore and Johor with his new companion and her mother. As they left England it was observed that Cissie was wearing a large diamond engagement ring. By May 1938 the young girl from Kent was back in Colombo where there were rumours of an announcement of an engagement before 9 September 1938 between the "platinum blonde" and "former glamour girl" Cissie and the 64-year-old divorcee Sultan, but on reaching Singapore the Sultan promptly denied any engagement. The Melbourne Argus quoted from the Daily Express that: "After the Sultan had divorced his wife recently he went to Ceylon and renewed his acquaintance there with Miss Hill, who was spending a holiday there with her mother. Later the Sultan, Miss Hill and her mother toured Sumatra. Yesterday they went to Singapore by air, presumably on their way to Johore." The public denial of the engagement may have been associated with political pressure from the British colonial staff at Singapore: "A cabaret-girl-Sultana the sahibs considered quite impossible. Social royalists, they ganged up and put moral pressure on the precedent-breaking Sultan by unanimously refusing his invitations, although Miss Hill was properly chaperoned at the palace by her mother. The Sultan had his revenge, by ordering the sahibs off his golf course, their children away from his bandstand" ". . . When Singapore's British society behaved stuffily toward his show-girl fiancee, the Sultan struck back by firing all the Britons in his service and planting shrubs on the fairways and greens of the golf course used by the sahibs, which was on his property." The British Colonial staff sent reports to England that the issue of marrying Miss Hill and a quarrel with the Governor of Straits Settlements had become problematic, and Cissie Hill