by Anne Sebba
Wallis was now thirty and desperate to find stability and a comfortable lifestyle. Ernest was not quite in the Espil or even the Da Zara league of dashing diplomats. But he had a certain world outlook that appealed, was well read and intensely knowledgeable about the classics, art and antiques among a wide range of other things. Wallis liked that in a man, perhaps aware of her own intellectual shortcomings. He was not bad looking either and, she believed, was moderately well off thanks to his family shipping company. Perhaps the key attraction lay in the fact that she could move to London with him and make a fresh start in a city where she was not known.
Ernest Aldrich Simpson was born in New York in 1897, one year after Wallis. His parents, the former Charlotte Gaines and Ernest Louis Simpson, had been married for more than twenty years at the time of his birth and already had a daughter, Maud, two decades older. A mere generation before, the Simpsons had been an observant Jewish family called Solomon who lived in Plymouth, in south-west England. Leon Solomon, the patriarch and Ernest’s grandfather, came to London in his twenties from Warsaw, where he was born around 1840. But within a few years he had married a Penzance-born Jewish girl, Rose Joseph, and quickly became the prosperous head of a family of twelve children. In the 1861 census Leon listed a butler, footman, coachman, coachman’s wife, groom and young professor of Hebrew studies in his household. He described himself as a ‘capitalist’. They were well-known worshippers at the Western Synagogue where, it was noted, he had not only bequeathed a magnificent torah mantle but in 1863, ‘unsolicited’, had enlarged the gallery and redecorated the entire synagogue at his own expense. In 1841 there were only about two or three hundred Jews in Plymouth and Exeter, while the total population of Jews overall in England was fewer than 40,000. Plymouth was a popular destination for those, economic migrants in today’s parlance, who had family and business connections in the area, as the Solomons clearly did; one Solomon Solomons was recorded as living there in 1769. Many Jews who chose to live in the south-west corner of England traded in and around the docks, shipping goods around the world. The Solomons had strong connections with other parts of the family in Hamburg which endured until the 1940s, when the Hamburg Solomons were all killed by the Nazis.
Ernest Louis, the seventh child of Leon, was a man determined to make his way in life. Like his father he left home before he was twenty, the only child of the family it appears to have left at this young age, and in 1873 went to America, changing his name to Simpson and becoming a naturalized US citizen shortly afterwards. He set up the shipping and brokerage firm Simpson and Spence in 1880, which still exists today as Simpson, Spence and Young. Within three years of his arrival in Amelisrival irica, Ernest Louis, aged twenty-two, married Charlotte Gaines, the well-connected daughter of a New York lawyer who was just nineteen. After Maud’s birth, Ernest Louis devoted all his time and energy to building up a flourishing business and, by all accounts, the marriage quickly soured. But in 1897, more than twenty years after they were married, a son was born, called ‘Ernest’ after his father and ‘Aldrich’ after Charlotte’s mother. Ernest Louis was by this time constantly travelling and often took a young French lady, Leah Métral, known as ‘Midget’ (or, by Wallis, as ‘the French Hussy’), as his very public mistress. Charlotte Simpson, not surprisingly increasingly aggrieved, was expected to put up with it.
Ernest Aldrich was always made aware of his dual British – American heritage and, aged twenty-one, was allowed to choose where he wanted to live. Perhaps because of tension in the New York home or perhaps because his sister, married with children, lived in Britain, Ernest decided while still at Harvard to leave for England without graduating and do his patriotic duty. It was a courageous decision in 1917 before the United States was involved in the First World War, to join the Coldstream Guards as a second lieutenant and fight if one did not have to. In the event, he remained in England training and was not sent to the trenches. But young Ernest was always living in the shadow of his steely and difficult father – a small man with a huge ego and ambition – and perhaps decided that this would be a way of proving his worth. At all events he survived the war unscathed and found friendships made in those months a source of strength in the coming years. He elected to become not just a British subject but as British as he could possibly be, obliterating any suggestion of foreignness let alone Jewishness. He wore his Guards tie most days.
According to his only son, being British and all the supposed traditional values that went with that became young Ernest’s code of behaviour from now on. Stiff upper lip may be a cliché but, underneath the neat moustache, Ernest’s lip was rigid. Belief in the monarchy, not spending more than you earn, behaving at all times like a gentleman, were inalienable principles for Ernest. ‘A gentleman never offended a lady unintentionally’ was a mantra for life that he ensured his own son grew up with. Having Jewish blood was an attribute never mentioned at a time when several clubs he wished to join would not have had Jews as members. Mixing with Jews was not something Ernest Simpson would have done and dinner-table conversation was, according to his son reminiscing about the 1950s, even casually anti-Semitic. What attracted Wallis to Ernest was probably his dependability, the air of security and breeding that he radiated. He was good looking and in love with her. She would not have known about his Jewish background at this point, if ever – he never once mentioned it to his son, who discovered only after his father’s death.3 But in any case Wallis in 1928 would have had only the haziest notion of what it meant to be Jewish. She had grown up avoiding Baltimore’s poor immigrant Jewish community, and she had not been part of Shanghai’s rich Jewish merchant scene which included Sassoons, Ezras, Kadoories and Hardoons, although she may have heard tales of their fabulous wealth. Ernest may even have been the first Jew she had known. When she wrote in her memoirs, without intentional irony, that Ernest had always yearned ‘to follow the ways of his father’s people’ she certainly did not have in mind that he longed to meet any Solomon cousins in the West Country.
However, Wallis probably was well aware of the society marriage that his sister Maud had made to Peter Smiley id ater Smin 1905. Peter Kerr-Smiley became a prominent Member of Parliament for North Antrim from 1910 to 1922 and ardent supporter of Sir Edward Carson with his ‘Keep Ulster British’ campaign. Family lore recounts that the name ‘Kerr’ was formally added to ‘Smiley’ at Maud’s insistence when she belatedly discovered that, as a younger son, her future husband would not inherit a title from her father-in-law, Sir Hugh Houston Smiley, created a baronet two years previously. She settled for a double-barrelled surname as consolation, taking ‘Kerr’ from her Scottish mother-in-law, Elizabeth Anne Kerr. The family was both well connected and prosperous as Sir Hugh had made a fortune in the Irish linen industry and his wife’s family owned a large sewing-thread business in Paisley, enabling them to create a fine home, Drumalis House in Larne, County Antrim, which reflected their wealth and position in society. But Drumalis passed to Sir John Smiley, Peter’s elder brother, and was never home for the Kerr-Smileys. They lived mostly in London, in a large house in Belgrave Square, which became Maud’s home after she separated from her husband. It was from here that Maud, a tiny, birdlike woman, dazzled as she carried on her various charitable works among the viscounts and countesses who became her friends and which was to give Wallis a basis for her launch into society.
In the spring of 1928 Wallis went once more to stay with her friends Herman and Katherine Rogers, now living in the South of France, to think about her future. They gave her time and space to decide, as she explained to her mother from London in July:
that the best and wisest thing for me to do is to marry Ernest. I am very fond of him and he is kind, which will be a contrast … I can’t go on wandering for the rest of my life and I really feel so tired of fighting the world all alone and with no money. Also, 32 doesn’t seem so young when you see all the really fresh youthful faces one has to compete against. So I shall just settle down to a fairly comfortable old age
… I hope this hasn’t upset you darling – but I should think you would feel happier knowing somebody was looking after me.
In May, five months after her divorce, Wallis had told Ernest, then living in London, that she was ready to marry him. She sailed to London later that month and based herself in a small flat in St James’s Street until they married and could look for a house together. They decided to have a registry-office wedding as soon as it could be arranged.
21st July 1928 was a sunny summer’s day and, wearing a yellow dress and blue coat that she had fortuitously just had made in Paris, Wallis was collected by Ernest’s chauffeur, Hughes, and driven to Chelsea Register Office. The other witnesses were Ernest’s father and nephew, Maud Kerr-Smiley’s son. Wallis described the setting as ‘a gloomy Victorian pile more appropriate for a trial than the culmination of a romance. The ceremony – “a cold little job” as Ernest later called it, was over in a flash.’ But then, as she wrote to her mother, who was ill and unable to make the journey across the Atlantic, ‘the second time round doesn’t seem so important’.
After a champagne toast in the Grosvenor Hotel, ‘a rambling soot-stained structure at Victoria Station’, where Ernest senior was staying – as ever without his wife – the new Mr and Mrs Simpson, with Hughes at the wheel, set off for Paris and Spain in a yellow Lagonda touring car that Ernest had bought for the honeymoon. Ernest spoke fluent French and, with his vast knowledge of art and architecture, acted, according toheiaccordi Wallis, as ‘a Baedeker, a Guide Michelin and an encyclopaedia all wrapped up in a retiring and modest manner’. For the moment, this was all she wanted from life and it was blissful. ‘I felt a security that I had never really experienced since early childhood,’ she wrote.
On their return, Maud, now in her fifties, set about helping to launch her new American sister-in-law. With her help, the Simpsons found a house to rent temporarily in the West End of London while they looked for a home of their own; 12 Upper Berkeley Street was available while its owner, Lady Chesham, was separated from her husband. It came with a small battery of servants and defective plumbing. Maud also gave luncheon parties – according to Barbara Cartland, then a young society hostess and fledgling novelist, the best in London – to introduce Wallis to her circle and teach her some of the niceties of British etiquette. Cartland, meeting Wallis when she first arrived, considered her not only ‘badly dressed but aggressively American. She also told us rather vulgar stories and I was shocked to the core.’ But Maud and Ernest were never close – the twenty-year gap was only one difference among many. And since Wallis was determined that the only way she would make a mark in British society was by standing out she was never prepared to conform in the way Maud had in mind for her.
Maud’s life revolved around fundraising for a number of good causes and launching her twenty-one-year-old daughter Elizabeth into society as a debutante. If Wallis could be relied upon to be amusing, she would be useful. The winter of 1928 – 9 was bitterly cold and foggy. Wallis, initially with few friends, was homesick and sometimes lonely, and considered London gloomy, grey and unfriendly. ‘It evoked in me a bone-deep dislike. There was about the city a pervading indifference, a remoteness and withdrawal that seemed alien to the human spirit.’ In her memoirs she explains her behaviour as something she had learned in the interests of her first husband:
I had been shaped in the circle of naval officers and their wives, where a woman learned to manoeuvre furiously for her husband’s promotion and where an American woman of my generation judged it important to be a little different or in any case interesting, and was prepared to pit her ideas spiritedly against those of the male … English women, though formidably powerful in their own sphere, were still accepting the status of a second sex.
But at least, in these first few months, she found Ernest’s company pleasant. Weekdays she spent shopping in the morning, keen to visit the butcher, baker and fishmonger in person in order to poke and prod and ensure she was given the right cuts of meat and portions of equal sizes – the latter was then considered an unusual request for hostesses who tended to serve a roast or stew and leave quantities, as well as presentation, to chance. But, for Wallis, attention to detail was always part of her desire to control her environment as far as she could. It was also necessary as a way of passing the time after Ernest left home at 9 a.m. when, as she admitted, ‘the day sometimes stretched vacantly before me’ until he returned, which was never before seven in the evening. Sometimes she met people for lunch or went to the hairdresser and continued with her old habit of reading the newspapers to make sure she was au fait with the latest news. Revealingly, she explained how she would scour the Court Circular, which monitored royal activities, but what a superficial picture that gave her of the country she had come to live in and the people she was to live among. For Ernestous. For E, hoping to be as successful as his father, the business was his existence. But he would happily spend evenings quietly at home reading, or admiring his fine collection of first editions. At weekends he would plan careful visits to old churches and other buildings in London or else to country towns famed for their ancient castles and cathedrals. At first Wallis was intrigued by everything Ernest had to impart. But this quickly palled. Parties were what she lived for, and without those she became bored.
Their routine was interrupted in the spring of 1929 by a trip to the United States to visit Wallis’s mother Alice, now bedridden with a cancerous tumour behind her eye which affected her spirit as much as her eyesight. She rallied sufficiently to meet her new son-in-law, but a few months later Wallis was summoned back across the Atlantic. This time Mary Raffray was there to greet her old friend when the ship docked inin New York. Alice was in a coma by the time her daughter arrived and died on 2 November 1929. There was no money to pass on, her savings having been all but wiped out in the Wall Street Crash that year. Wallis felt her mother’s poverty as a deep, personal injustice, and part of the ambition which consumed her for the rest of her life was predicated on a determination to avenge this cruelty.
Back in London Wallis now threw all her energies into decorating the flat they had found in a smart new block a stone’s throw from the rented house. George Street was nowhere near as fashionable as Belgravia, but Wallis had decided that it was better than Kensington, ‘where all the aunts in England live’ and it had a smart ‘Ambassador double-two-one-five’ telephone number. By moving in to 5 Bryanston Court Wallis, although well within childbearing years, was acknowledging that she and Ernest were not intending to produce a family of their own, nor does there ever seem to have been any discussion of inviting Ernest’s young daughter Audrey to stay. The apartment had a large and spacious drawing room and an elegant dining room with a spectacular mirror-top table large enough to seat fourteen, but it was hardly child friendly. In addition to the master bedroom with a large ‘pink plush’ bed, and a pale pink chaise longue, there was a small guest bedroom, ‘with an almost perfectly round bed of antique white, upholstered in oyster white satin, and [topped with] pink linen sheets and many pillows’, as well as a dressing room cum study for Ernest and two bathrooms. The staff of four – the precious cook, Mrs Ralph, a parlourmaid, a housemaid and a personal maid called Mary Burke, who was to prove most loyal – lived off site.
But planning the decor gave Wallis another activity. She described creating this home as ‘giving expression to her feminine interests’ and it is clear that the rooms for which she alone was responsible were ultra-feminine, pink and frilly. Where Syrie Maugham, wife of the novelist Somerset Maugham, whose dramatic white style was all the rage by 1928, helped advise, the look was more sophisticated. It was Maugham’s idea to have high-backed dining chairs upholstered in white leather and to set tall vases on the table filled with flame-coloured flowers. The drawing room was to be pale chartreuse with cream and beige furnishings, which would show off Wallis’s Chinese elephants and other precious pieces of chinoiserie. Once a week she and Ernest set aside a whole evening to go over the household accounts
together. All Wallis’s purchases, from frocks to fish, from partridges to peonies, were listed for Ernest to scrutinize one by one. Wallis recognized that life in England was extraordinarily cheap by American standards and in addition she now had a little trickle of capital from the unravelling of her uncle’s will. They may have lived slightly beyond their means but Ernest, witbut Ernmeticulously, paid all the bills and the couple were given extra funding by old Mr Simpson, who lived mostly in London at this time. In return, the least Wallis could do was to submit dutifully to a regular Sunday-evening dinner with this ‘tiny, dwarf-like figure with an unusually intelligent face, a goatee and piercing eyes that seemed to go right through one’. She came to despise him for not being more generous towards her and Ernest and she worried, having learned once how fickle old men could be when it came to wills, that he might leave all his capital to Midget.