The prince was met at the air base by Rosemary’s widower, Eric, then the two men travelled together to the hospital. As the prince and Rosemary had first been brought together by their shared compassion for a shell-shocked patient in a hospital ward, it was an appropriate place for Edward to publicly acknowledge his admiration for his former love and say a formal farewell. As the prince entered one of the children’s wards sixty voices called out from the beds: ‘God bless the Prince of Wales.’ The prince was touched by this unexpected welcome and said to the sister in charge: ‘This is indeed a pretty sight.’ Demonstrating his caring side, which had been such a bond with Rosemary, he expressed genuine interest in the work that was being done and insisted on being shown all around the hospital and talking to patients. He was particularly interested in the progress that had been made by one small girl called Mary Clewes. Thanks to the work of the hospital, in two years as an outpatient she had been completely cured of what had at first appeared to be an untreatable disability. ‘It is absolutely marvellous. I would not have thought it possible,’ he commented as he compared the child’s legs with her original plaster casts. Rosemary’s brother, Geordie, Duke of Sutherland, who was at the opening, noted that the prince did ‘everything in just the way that would have pleased Rosemary herself’.50 At the end of his visit, the heir to the throne paid tribute to the woman he had wanted to marry. He said:
You all know, the wonderful work Rosemary Ednam did all the years she lived in these parts. It was she who inaugurated the idea of this hospital and started the fund […] I now open this hospital, full of great thoughts and sacred remembrances.51
13
THE SOCIALITE WITH A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE
Once Freda was permanently replaced by Wallis Simpson, instead of being bitter, she gracefully retreated from the scene. She demonstrated the discretion which had made her such an ideal royal mistress. As one of her friends said, she had ‘pride, integrity and dignity’. She was determined to behave as well as she could in a difficult situation.1
However, Freda and Edward had not been the only ones affected by their sixteen-year-long relationship – her daughters Pempie and Angie had been involved too. They had provided the prince with the nearest thing he had ever had to a normal family life. When he cut off all contact with them Angie was very upset and angry. Fun-loving like her mother, Angie had developed a real rapport with the prince. Reflecting the closeness of their relationship, the only photograph of Edward that remains in Freda’s albums is from him to her youngest daughter. Sent in 1932, it shows him looking his most handsome in a uniform and it is signed: ‘Darling Angie from Little Prince’.2 Pempie was less hurt because she had not been as close to the heir to the throne. More serious and censorious than her younger sister, she had begun to see through him and she disapproved of his affair with her mother.3
Some of the prince’s family were also upset by the ending of the relationship. They had grown to respect Freda and saw her as a good influence on him. His brother Henry thought that she had been the best friend he had ever had.4 Lord Louis Mountbatten was particularly disgusted by the prince’s abrupt abandonment of Freda.5 He knew how important she had been to his cousin, writing: ‘There was something religious, almost holy, about his love for her. She was the only woman he ever loved that way. She deserved it. She was sweet and good, a good influence on him. None of the others were. Wallis’ influence was fatal.’6 Freda knew how weak and susceptible the prince was. She told one interviewer that his opinion on almost any subject frequently became that of the last person with whom he had discussed the issue.7 If he had remained under Freda’s influence it seems less likely that he would have made the links with Nazi Germany which were to tarnish his reputation. Her political views were moderate and tolerant.
Edward was to claim that one of the things that attracted him to Wallis in the early stages of their relationship was that she was the only woman to show an interest in his ‘job’. She had listened attentively about his plans to improve the situation for the unemployed. Evidently, he had forgotten the long years in which Freda had served as a shrewd sounding board. During her ascendancy, Freda had supported his ideas for social reform, not his fascist tendencies. Both Edward and Freda had always cared about social injustice. During the Depression, as unemployment increased, the prince toured industrial areas. He visited the Midlands, Tyneside, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Wales and Scotland. He was shocked when he saw crowds of unemployed men with nowhere to go; they were milling about the streets or standing outside labour exchanges and pubs. At a soup kitchen, he saw men wearing coats without shirts under them, and spoke to a miner who had not worked for five years. Picking a house to visit at random, he held the hand of an underfed woman who was in childbirth. He was appalled by the levels of deprivation and he wrote to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin about it. Although some of the men he met were apathetic, his sincerity impressed many of the unemployed; they believed he genuinely wanted to help them. After one visit, a New York Tribune reporter found the prince pacing up and down asking: ‘What can I do? What can be done?’8 As he spoke out about what he had witnessed, his support for the unemployed infuriated some of the upper classes and he was accused of being too political.9 In his memoir written many years later, he wrote that there was constant conflict within him between his desire to share in the social turmoil of the era and the constitutional restraints which prevented him saying anything too controversial or being overtly political.10
The slums he had visited were often so disgusting they left him feeling sick. Although as a member of the royal family his power was limited to suggestion, he was determined to do his best to improve housing.11 He invited the Labour politician Ramsay MacDonald and the Conservative Neville Chamberlain to dinner at York House with a dozen experts to discuss solutions. In 1934, he told the American ambassador that there needed to be a change in social conditions in England to relieve poverty and that it would be achieved either constructively or, if not, violently, which would destroy the country.12
The prince had become patron of the National Council of Social Service, which organised voluntary organisations. He was keen to encourage job creation and see social centres set up in deprived areas. With him as a figurehead more than 700 schemes were put forward to the council in one year.13 By the following year, 2,300 centres had been opened, helping up to a quarter of a million men and women.14 One evening when Edward returned from a tour of a depressed area he told Freda that more ought to be done for the families of the unemployed. He explained that too often clubs and centres were run by the wrong sort of people. He added: ‘People like you ought to run clubs.’15 In 1934, at the prince’s behest, Freda set up the Feathers Club Association, a society which helped the underprivileged in London who were suffering due to the Depression.
Edward allowed his crest of the three feathers to be used as the insignia of the charity and he became its patron. When the first club opened at Ladbroke Grove, the prince donated an electric refrigerator and carpentry and boot-mending tools. When the next club started at Notting Hill, Edward’s own furniture designer made benches which were also lockers.16 The clubs helped unemployed people in practical ways. They offered them nutritious meals at a minimal cost and, rather like a modern food bank, they distributed food. There were books and newspapers to read and classes which encouraged the unemployed to rebuild their self-confidence and get back to work. Most importantly, they were places where people could find companionship and compassion.
Under Freda’s leadership, eight branches were set up. Each time a new club opened Edward gave her a tiny version of the Prince of Wales’s feathers in diamonds, rubies and sapphires to add to a gold bracelet he had given to her.17 Ironically 1934 was the year Mrs Simpson usurped Freda’s position, but even when she was excluded from his life she continued with the charity work she had started in his name. Once the Prince of Wales withdrew, Freda’s old friends the Duke and Duchess of Kent, who were newly married, supported her work. Princess Marina emp
loyed a member of one of the Feathers Clubs to decorate her bedroom in Belgrave Square. The Duke of Kent visited a club in Marylebone. Many of the women members were waiting with their babies to see the duke, who was introduced by Freda. When he entered the centre for children aged between 3 and 5 it was very noisy. He asked: ‘Do they fight very much?’ Freda assured him that they all got on very well.18 Another lifelong friend of Freda’s, Winston Churchill, also helped by doing a broadcast for the Feathers Clubs. Freda was a very dynamic leader of the charity. She not only drew on all her society contacts; she also thought of ways the association could reach more people. She wanted the clubs to be included in housing schemes and factories which would increase the subsidies given to the charity.
Freda did not just care for people through her charity work; she gathered around her anyone in need of help. When a young Italian film director, Giancarlo Capelli, was about to be deported for overstaying his permit under the Aliens Act, Freda supported him. She accompanied him to Bow Street Magistrates and stood surety for him when his counsel applied for bail.19 Freda also had to step in when her sister Violet’s marriage fell apart. Violet had met her husband Lieutenant Douglas Blew-Jones when he was convalescing at her mother’s Nottingham hospital at the end of the First World War. The couple had married in December 1918 and then moved to the Blew-Jones’s estate in North Devon where they were very involved in the hunting set. During the 1920s and 1930s, the family exprienced financial problems; their daughter Bindy later recalled the embarrassment of being sent to answer the door to the bailiffs.20 When Violet turned to alcohol, Freda took her niece Bindy Blew-Jones in and gave her a home. Younger than Pempie and Angie, Bindy idolised her aunt and cousins. As a teenager, she was a troubled girl who was expelled from several schools. On one occasion Freda took her to the station to go to school, and by the time she arrived home she found her niece sitting on her doorstep. Freda tried to give Bindy some stability. She became more important to her than her mother and was the young girl’s emotional rock.21
Freda’s relationship with her own daughters remained as close as ever as they grew up. She was a very relaxed and easy-going mother. Angie said that they were allowed to do whatever they wanted, but they would not have wanted to do anything to upset her. If they did do something wrong, she was understanding. One day, Angie came to her mother sobbing about some misdemeanour; Freda just comforted her and said: ‘Don’t worry, we all make mistakes.’22
By the 1930s Freda had established for herself and her daughters a firmly rooted place in society. Mother and daughters attracted an interesting circle of men around them. While staying with Freda’s close friend Sir Philip Sassoon at Port Lympne in Kent, the artist Rex Whistler fell in love with Pempie. Freda commissioned Rex to paint a portrait of her two daughters. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1934. It was set in a garden, with a broken fountain in the background and a black manservant in green livery unpacking a picnic basket. The girls were dressed in white, high-waisted dresses with narrow black ribbons edging the flounces. Whistler’s aim had been to exemplify the spirit of youth. It was a great success, as one newspaper commented: ‘It’s done with more than a touch of nineteenth-century Romanticism and comes off triumphantly.’23
Brendan Bracken, the confidant of Winston Churchill and chairman of The Financial Times, was also fascinated by the trio. There were rumours of a relationship between Freda and Bracken, or Bracken and Pempie. He liked it to be thought that he was single because Pempie had turned him down. Whatever the nature of his relationship with the Dudley Wards, he was devoted to all three women. When Angie left her cloth doll, ‘Pinkie’, which she had had since she was a child, on a train in France, she was in tears over its loss. She had slept with the toy every night of her life. Most of her friends thought she was being childish, but Brendan was sympathetic. He sent a detective, at his own expense, to investigate in France.24
Brendan greatly admired the work Freda did for the underprivileged. He became a member of the Feathers Club Association Council. In 1935, he suggested that Winston Churchill should recommend Freda to become a member of the central housing advisory committee. He explained that Freda knew more about housing than any woman in the country and through the Feathers Clubs she looked after about 3,000 unemployed people. Brendan emphasised that she never sought publicity and only wanted to join the committee because she thought that she could do some good work on it.25 Churchill wrote to Kingsley Wood, minister of health, saying that he thought Mrs Dudley Ward would make a most suitable representative.26
Winston was already an admirer of Freda; they had known each other for many years and she was a great friend of his wife Clementine. Freda was often invited to Chartwell. Lady Diana Cooper recalled one visit when they all had fun splashing about in the swimming pool.27 Brendan Bracken told the prime minister’s doctor, Lord Moran, that Freda was among the few people who could shake Churchill out of his darker moods and make him talk. She would let Winston drink a glass or two of champagne and then get him chatting. He described her as ‘a brilliant talker’.28
In the years after her relationship with the prince ended, Freda had many admirers. In 1932 Rosemary’s widower, Eric Ednam, had become Earl of Dudley on his father’s death. According to his second wife Laura, Eric was in love with Freda and would have liked to marry her.29 In the years since his wife’s death many women had chased him, but no one measured up to Rosemary for him. He had an affair with Rosemary and Freda’s friend Lady Victor Paget (Bridget), who was also a former mistress of the prince.30 Rosemary’s mother Millicent, who was heartbroken after her daughter’s death, was very critical of his choice. She wrote to her son-in-law harshly, telling him: ‘All the time you associated with Bridget she was hardly the woman to succeed Rosemary, to whose purity and whose money, you owed so much.’31
When Eric’s affair with Bridget came to an end, Freda was another of Rosemary’s friends whom he hoped would fill the chasm left by her loss. Freda was often invited to Himley Hall for weekend house parties. In January 1935 Freda stayed there with Pempie, the other guests being Chips Channon, Emerald Cunard and her old friends Brendan Bracken and Sheila Milbanke. They arrived by train in bitterly cold weather. Chips Channon complained that although the house was modernised the bedrooms were cold. He described their host as being ‘lovable and yet so moody and irritable’, while Freda was ‘tiny, squeaky and wise and chic’.32
Perhaps one deterrent for Freda from marrying Eric was that he was still great friends with the prince. The two men had drawn even closer since Rosemary’s death; for years they telephoned each other at least once a day.33 The prince knew that Eric was grief-stricken from the tragedy and in 1931 he decided to take his old friend with him as aide-de-camp on his tour of South America. He thought the change of scene would do Eric good, while his friend’s industrial experience would be useful when he talked to South American financiers and industrialists. Eric was chairman of two colliery companies and of the family Round Oak Steelworks. He had also been president of the British Gas Industries. He had been examining the potential of America as a market for British steel products. During the trip Eric at times got depressed, finding it particularly difficult when they flew across the Panama Canal. It was the first time he had flown since Rosemary’s death and, according to the prince, ‘the poor boy was terribly upset’.34
Once Edward was with Wallis, Eric remained part of his circle. Lord Ednam was invited to weekends at Fort Belvedere and the new monarch knew that his old friend’s house was a place where his new mistress would be welcomed. A few months after Edward had become king, in April 1936, he came to stay at Himley with Mrs Simpson. Wallis wrote about her stay in a letter to her Aunt Bessie, saying that it had taken her seven years to get to that sort of elite house party. There were eighteen guests staying in the house and they were ‘the crème’ of society.35 Perhaps Freda decided not to get involved with Lord Dudley as she had had enough of moving in such incestuous circles.
The other main conte
nder for Freda’s affection was the sophisticated Pedro Jose Isidro Manuel Ricardo Mones, Marquis de Casa Maury. A Spanish–Cuban aristocrat and a racing driver, he was known as ‘Bobby’ to his friends but ‘the Cuban Heel’ to his enemies. He was an exotic figure, the opposite of many of the rather repressed Englishmen of the time. A profile of him in The Bystander described him as ‘slim and sad-eyed, pale and gently gesticulating, he has smiled his half-smile (just the right-hand side of the mouth is raised) through misfortune after misfortune right into success’. It added that he smoked endless cigarettes and his eyelashes were ‘probably the longest in London’. 36
Bobby loved speed and danger. He drove Bugatti racing cars and owned the first Bermuda-rigged schooner in Europe. He took up flying and owned three planes, before he lost his money in the Wall Street Crash.37 He was a risk-taker, but he was also deeply superstitious. He always carried a print of St Theresa with him wherever he went. His latest plane, Toi et Moi, had sacred pictures painted around the pilot’s seat. When it was named by Edwina Mountbatten at Stag Lane Aerodrome, Edgware, London, Bobby insisted that it should also be blessed and sprinkled with holy water by a Catholic priest.38
The marquis had previously been married to Cecil Beaton’s muse Paula Gellibrand, whose elegant, streamlined silhouette made her an art deco icon. She became one of Beaton’s favourite models. He recorded her appearance in words and images in The Glass of Fashion. He described her ‘perfect egg-shaped head’ which gave her a look of a Modigliani portrait.39 Paula knew just how to make a chic statement. For her wedding to Bobby in 1923, she dressed in the style of a nun, wearing a strikingly simple gown of white satin with a severe veil which perfectly showed off her ‘calmly contemplative’ face.40
Before Wallis Page 23