28th, four days after the decision was made. By the early 1980s she was still protesting to biographers that the couple had been given false hope marriage was possible and she would have ended the relationship sooner had she been informed otherwise. The Daily Mirror on 28 October discussed The Timess editorial with the headline "THIS CRUEL PLAN MUST BE EXPOSED". Although Margaret and Townsend had read the editorial the newspaper denounced as from "a dusty world and a forgotten age", they had earlier made their decision and written an announcement. End of relationship On 31 October 1955, Margaret issued a statement: "Thoroughly drained, thoroughly demoralized", Margaret later said, she and Townsend wrote the statement together. She refused when Oliver Dawnay, the Queen Mother's private secretary, asked to remove the word "devotion". The written statement, signed "Margaret", was the first official confirmation of the relationship. Some Britons were disbelieving or angry while others, including clergy, were proud of the princess for choosing duty and faith; newspapers were evenly divided on the decision. Mass-Observation recorded indifference or criticism of the couple among men, but great interest among women, whether for or against. Kenneth Tynan, John Minton, Ronald Searle, and others signed an open letter from "the younger generation". Published in the Daily Express on 4 November, the letter said that the end of the relationship had exposed The Establishment and "our national hypocrisy". Townsend recalled that "We had reached the end of the road, our feelings for one another were unchanged, but they had incurred for us a burden so great that we decided together to lay it down". The Associated Press said that Margaret's statement was almost "a rededication of her life to the duties of royalty, making unlikely any marriage for her in the near future"; the princess may have expected to never marry after the long relationship ended, because most of her eligible male friends were no longer bachelors. Barrymaine agreed that Margaret intended the statement to mean that she would never marry, but wrote that Townsend likely did not accept any such vow to him by the princess, and his subsequent departure from Britain for two years was to not interfere with her life. "We both had a feeling of unimaginable relief. We were liberated at last from this monstrous problem", Townsend said. After resigning from the RAF and travelling around the world for 18 months Townsend