by Noel Hynd
As Oakes grew into his teens he decided that Maine was not for him. He didn’t like potatoes or lobster and he wasn’t fond of hunting or fishing. He saw a possible escape through a sound education at Bowdoin College, where he earned expenses by playing semipro baseball and waiting on tables. He graduated in 1896 at the age of twenty-one. Like everyone else in the civilized world who could read or hear, he had become interested in the fortunes that were being made by prospectors for gold in the Klondike. He kissed Maine goodbye and set to blaze a trail north, to a land that made Maine in the winter look like a summer resort.
He encountered everything the Klondike and Alaska had to offer except gold. The dogs pulling his supply sled died in the white wilderness and Oakes had to snowshoe it for uncounted days. His feet froze. He lost his moneybag. Men with less moxie cracked up under tests far less severe, but Oakes emerged from the crucible with flinty eyes and a jutting jaw. He had hit the North too late to get his share of the shiny stuff but by God, he would find it someplace else. He was young and the world was wide.
The scuttlebutt around the camps was that the Philippines were loaded and just pining for smart diggers. He bummed his way to San Francisco, looking and smelling like a fugitive from a garbage dump. He shipped to Manila as a galley cook. As in Alaska, he arrived too late. Next stop: West Africa. It was the same story there; the pay dirt fields had already been staked out.
Harry Oakes was twenty-eight when, in 1903, he showed up in Australia, still on the prowl for the yellow stuff. But he found something else. In Sydney, where he took odd jobs to meet expenses, he stayed at a boardinghouse where a pretty girl who sat across the groaning board began to put him off his feed. He wondered why. He came to the realization that, for the first time in his life, the little guy with the bow and arrow had shot him straight through the heart.
The girl, who was almost ten years younger than Oakes, was an attractive doll named Eunice McIntyre. She worked in a jewelry store. She was gentle and sweet. Caught up in the mysterious attraction of opposites, she was enchanted by the stony, barrel-chested adventurer.
But Oakes didn’t have the cash to tie the knot. For the first time in his life, the lad from Maine found himself riddled by indecision. He wanted to marry Eunice McIntyre and he wanted to lay hands on a quick fortune in gold. He couldn’t have both, for there wasn’t any gold in Australia. At least, not for him.
His boarding house bill began to pile up, and he couldn’t find a job anywhere in Sydney. Oakes had a lumberman’s appetite. The woman who ran the boardinghouse, sensing that he would eventually eat her into insolvency, lowered the boom on him. He would either pay up, she informed him, or get the old heave-ho.
Miss McIntyre paid up for him. Moreover, she lent him money for passage back to America. “I’ll never forget you for this, Eunice,” he assured her. “When I make a strike, I’ll come back and marry you.”
For several years after leaving Australia, Oakes followed his nose around the world. In 1911, when he was as far as ever from the end of the rainbow, he got wind of gold deposits in northern Ontario, near Porcupine Lake. He was in Nevada at the time, broke as usual. He bummed his way to the Middle West, then struck north toward his destination. He was riding in a rattling passenger train in Ontario, bound for Porcupine Lake, with no money and no ticket. When the conductor came through and asked for his ticket, Oakes went through the motions of searching his pockets for it.
“Well, what do you know about that?” he said. “I seem to have lost it.”
That was no dandruff out of the conductor’s hair. The passenger could pay cash. But the passenger didn’t have any cash. The conductor studied Oakes with all the enthusiasm of a loan shark studying questionable collateral, left the car, and returned with two brakemen. The train came to a stop and the man who one day was to be knighted by the King of England was tossed to hell off.
Oakes stood in the Ontario wilderness watching the train disappearing into the distance. He walked many miles to the nearest settlement, a place called Kirkland Lake. He gave the landlady of a boardinghouse there a song and dance, moved in, then went out on the town to rustle up something, anything.
He fell into conversations with some locals. He heard tales about gold thought to be in the vicinity. Oakes rubbed his chin. By God, maybe this was it. He went into the local hardware store and began a pitch to the proprietor to let him have some digging equipment on credit. The proprietor, a large and powerful man, tossed Oakes out the door, the future baronet’s second heave-ho in two days.
The proprietor of the local laundry, a Chinese immigrant bearing the celebrated moniker of Lee, happened to be passing as Oakes flew into the street. He helped Oakes to his feet and inquired as to the nature of the difficulty. The Asian gentleman was fascinated by Oakes’ recital of the long string of events leading up to the tossola. He offered to grubstake Oakes.
Oakes accepted.
On the shores of Kirkland Lake in 1912, Oakes struck gold. Not just gold, but one of the great mother lodes of North America. He established a mining company, and almost overnight, Harry Oakes was transformed from a hobo into a man worth more than three hundred thousand dollars. He sold his holdings, pocketed his cash, and then promptly did three things.
First, he went to the Chinese man who had grubstaked him, Mr. Lee, and paid him off in full. Then Oakes asked him what it was he would like to have more than anything else. Mr. Lee, for some obscure reason, had all his life dearly wished to own a movie theatre.
Oakes may have been somewhat startled to hear of this unusual ambition, but he didn’t let that stand in his way. He ordered construction begun at once, and as soon as the theatre was finished he made a present of it, free and clear, to his benefactor.
Second, out of spite, he built a hardware store right next to that of the man who had so enthusiastically thrown him out into the fresh air, and made a policy of selling everything below cost. In about three months his enemy was out of business.
Third, he looked up the conductor who had tossed him off the train and put him on a pension for life. By the Oakes reasoning, if this conductor had not had him bounced off the train at that point, he would have ridden past the town where he struck his first gold.
With his grudge settled and his debts paid, Oakes went on the prowl for another and bigger strike. Soon the lightning struck again. He found gold in another Canadian spot, christened the mine the Lake Shore, and, almost before he realized it, was a multimillionaire.
Lake Shore Mines soon became the second largest gold mine in the world. Now, in 1923, at the age of forty-eight, Harry Oakes lit out for Australia. In Sydney, he headed straight for Eunice McIntyre, the girl who had, two decades before, given him enough money to get out of the boardinghouse, out of town, and out of the country. He had corresponded with her all that time. In storybook fashion, she had believed in him and waited for him. They were married.
As a wedding present, Oakes presented his wife with a half million-dollar mansion on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. But one address, even though it was a mansion, was not enough for Harry Oakes. He built a house in Newport and another in Palm Beach, and began to circulate among the wealthy elites. He learned to sip tea with the little finger of his right hand stiffly perpendicular, to carry on a conversation without swearing, and to give his seat to a lady. At heart, he was still a roughneck, but he was a most acceptable gentleman in circles where money was more important than anything else, for by this time he was worth several million dollars.
By 1935, after he had been married for twelve years, Harry Oakes, sixty years old, had sired five children: two daughters, of whom Nancy was the elder, and three sons, all younger. Although Oakes, everything considered, was a loving father, he was especially devoted to his eldest child, Nancy.
Now, with millions piling upon millions from the gold mine, with a devoted wife and a fine family, plus the home in Canada and two in the United States, Harry Oakes decided to go to England. There he purchased a magnificent town hous
e in London, a country estate, and a hunting lodge in Scotland. He began to make lavish gifts to English charities. Then in June of 1937, when he was sixty-two, he was created a baronet on the King’s Birthday Honors List. Thus, the onetime boy from the backwoods of Maine became Sir Harry Oakes.
Early in 1938, Sir Harry received a visitor at his town house in London.
The caller was a dark eyed, moonfaced man of middle years by the name of Harold Christie. Christie, by this time a highly successful real-estate operator in the Bahamas, boasted that he could accommodate a land buyer with anything from a lot to an island. This meeting between Oakes and Christie was to be the beginning of a fine and lucrative friendship.
It was real estate that Christie had come to see Sir Harry about. Real estate and taxes.
The Second World War was already looming. Income taxes in Britain were becoming increasingly tough and were likely to become even tougher. Sir Harry’s income was about three million dollars a year and as a British subject, he was wide open to taxes that would confiscate practically all of it. Sir Harry had perhaps fifty million dollars scattered here and there around the globe by this time, but he still turned purple every time he thought of the amount of dough he was forking over every year to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
“Why not come to Nassau, become a resident, and take advantage of the practically nonexistent tax on large incomes that we have there?” Christie suggested.
Sir Harry blinked. “Really?” he asked.
“Really!” Harold Christie said.
Sir Harry was more than interested.
Christie, ever the shrewd businessman, had just the property to sell: a twenty-bedroom estate once owned by Maxine Elliott, the noted American actress. Brother Christie could let Sir Harry have the place for a song: say the equivalent of five hundred thousand dollars. Sir Harry and Lady Oakes took off for Nassau by steamship to look the place over.
They were enchanted by it, and bought it for cash. That was in 1939.
Once in Nassau, Sir Harry and Lady Oakes quickly became socialites in a very society- minded neck of the world. They tossed lavish parties, with buckets of champagne and tubs of caviar. Sir Harry’s belligerent attitude, however, had not diminished with the years, even if his manners had improved. One night he went into the British Colonial Hotel, Nassau’s largest, and became incensed at the headwaiter because the headwaiter—new and not familiar with Sir Harry’s little ways—seated the Oakes party at an inferior table.
Now Sir Harry, according to Lady Oakes, did something that many men have wished they could do to even a score. He made a telephone call to New York next morning to the Munson Steamship Company, the owners of the hotel. He closed a deal for the purchase of the hotel for one million dollars in cash. That night he went back to the hotel, deliberately late so that the best tables were already taken, and ran into the same headwaiter.
Sir Harry pointed to a choice table. “Seat me there!” he said.
“But that table is occupied, Sir Harry,” said the waiter.
“So what?” said Sir Harry. “Throw those people out.”
The headwaiter said he couldn’t do that.
“No?” said Oakes. “Well, I bought this damned place this morning and you’re fired!”
The longer Sir Harry Oakes lived in Nassau, the better he liked the place. Although he made occasional trips out of the country, he spent as much time as possible at Westbourne, even in the hot summer months. All the while he was engaging in various business enterprises, mostly real estate, with Harold Christie. Christie, rising in power and importance, became one of the governors of the Bahamas. Eventually the two men—Sir Harry with his tremendous wealth and Christie with his official position and general know-how—were, between them, practically running the islands.
Then along came a major quirk in history.
Edward VIII was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Empire, and Emperor of India, from January 20, 1936 until his abdication on December 11 of the same year. He was the eldest son of George V and Mary of Teck. He became king on his father’s death in early 1936. However, he had never shown much fondness for royal protocol. Months into his reign, he caused a constitutional crisis by proposing marriage to Wallis Simpson, already his mistress, a strong-willed American from Baltimore who had divorced her first husband and was seeking a divorce from her second.
The prime ministers of the United Kingdom and the Dominions opposed the marriage, arguing that a divorced woman with two living ex-husbands was politically and socially unacceptable as a prospective queen consort. Additionally, such a marriage would have conflicted with Edward’s status as the titular head of the Church of England, which at the time disapproved of remarriage after divorce if a former spouse was still alive.
Edward knew that the British government, led by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, would resign if the marriage went ahead, which could have forced a general election and would ruin his status as a politically neutral constitutional monarch. When it became apparent that he could not marry Wallis and remain on the throne, Edward abdicated.
He was succeeded by his younger brother, George VI, a frail youth with a severe speech impediment who appeared not up for the role history was about to cast upon him.
After his abdication, the former Edward VIII was created Duke of Windsor. He married Wallis in France on June third, 1937, after her second divorce became final. Later that year, the couple toured Germany.
During the Second World War, he was at first stationed with the British Military Mission to France but, after private accusations that he held Nazi sympathies, he was appointed Governor of the Bahamas. Thus, the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor arrived in Nassau on August 17, 1940.
Local officials met them, along with an honor guard of local police, starchily resplendent in pith helmets and tunics. The ex-King wore a khaki uniform and peaked military cap. He looked uncomfortable in the soaking humidity and scorching heat. The Duchess wore a light linen dress in a floral pattern and smiled easily. She was also, like her husband, sweating profusely. The reception was warm, however, in every way.
As was usually the case in the realms of power and politics, appearances deceived. Most Bahamians felt the Duke was there voluntarily. He was not. He was there privately kicking and screaming. The Duke had referred privately to the posting in the Bahamas as “third rate.” But the couple was seen as the victims of official snootiness on the part of the Crown. He had given up his kingdom for the woman he loved. That was the official story line, believed by a dismayingly large segment of the gullible public.
Inability to accept personal responsibility or make a cogent decision were themes excised from public discussion. He arrived as a handsome rebellious figure, thwarted from the possibility of becoming a dynamic monarch, an instrument of great influence and social change, all because of his devotion to the woman he loved.
Little could have been farther from the truth. Windsor was wealthy beyond reason, privileged beyond description. He was well known privately for ducking out on entertainment expenses such as dinner and parties, not paying private contractors who didn’t dare pursue the money involved, and even slipping out of debts run up at casinos in France and Monte Carlo. He had been trained for a lifetime to accept the position of King and he had walked away from it in his mid-thirties, leaving his younger brother, who became George VI, sobbing on the shoulder of his mother, Queen Mary.
The truth of the matter: the royal couple were a royal pain to the royal family, and always would be. They had been assigned to a remote posting on the other side of the Atlantic because to have them on the loose in Europe would be to sabotage the allied war effort against Mussolini and Hitler. The Nassau assignment had been thrust upon the Duke by Winston Churchill who privately referred to the couple as “feckless and reckless.”
Few members of the public at large knew at the time how much the Windsors had compromised themselves with their political leanings in the late 1930s. On a 1937 tr
ip to Germany, Edward—then the Prince of Wales—had met with Hitler.
The Prince was enthralled by him. Windsor wasn’t an astute student of history, or anything else, but he had arrived at some uncomfortable conclusions over the events of the Twentieth Century. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, for example, had proven to the world that the monarchies of Europe were vulnerable to the downtrodden masses. The execution of the Russian royal family had put an exclamation point on it. Repercussions troubled the royal heads of London, who didn’t take kindly to the notion of suffering the same fate as the royal family in France in the Seventeen Nineties.
The Russian revolution, and the spread of Bolshevism that it enabled, was a fear that the crowned heads of western Europe shared every day. There was a possible new order out there and it was ready to do away with The Duke and others like him. The unwashed masses were equally ready to dismantle their royal properties and holdings. The rise of the new Labor Party in England was further proof.
It would be generous to say that the Duke was not a towering intellect. And to him, Hitler was a refreshing antidote to the leftward march of history. Hitler was an anti-Communist. He was also a vicious anti-Semite. There again he scored points with the Duke. The most powerful merchant bankers of Europe were mostly Jewish families, clever scheming foreigners with hidden agendas, in the Duke’s view. They too were parvenu and posed yet another threat to the established social and economic order. Hitler’s glorified militarism and brand of Fascism was also a thrill for Windsor. The dual goals of blocking the scourge of communism and the spread of Jewish influence, combined with raw military power, was electrifying.
Edward was joined in this fascination by his bride-to-be, Wallis Simpson, who was even more of a Fascist than he was. Wallis Simson was nominally from Baltimore, but resolutely southern in her ancestry, upbringing and attitudes.
“Southerners know how to treat colored people,” was a pearl of wisdom she hissed to friends on frequent occasions. She was enthralled by Nazi goose-stepping, arrogance and posturing and said so publicly. The Nazis offered a system that claimed it uplifted the strong, where she included herself, against the undeserving weak, which meant non-whites and non-Christians in general.