Traitor King

by Andrew Lownie

  According to Perkins, Wenner-Gren had made huge investments in Peru, including building a harbour at Chimbote Bay, and in Mexico, where he was involved in highway construction and setting up an ‘Export Control Board’. There were press reports that the Windsors planned to visit the Duke’s cousin, ex-King Carol of Romania, who lived in Mexico. ‘Carol’s consort, as well as the society group at this resort, constantly have been reported pro-Nazi,’ Perkins wrote. ‘Such associations indicate that there may be something to the reports received by this office that the subject (Duke of Windsor) is pro-Nazi.’7

  Wallace B. Phillips at the Washington Office of Naval Intelligence replied, accepting that the Duchess was ‘bitterly anti-British’, that Wenner-Gren was ‘up to no good in Mexico’ and that the Duke’s former equerry, Frank Budd, now living in Mexico, required investigation. ‘We shall have to take some steps to determine his relationships both to the duke as well as to the Nazis.’8

  * * *

  In April 1942, unbeknownst to the Duke, the Duchess wrote to Queen Mary: ‘It has always been a source of sorrow and regret to me that I have been the cause of any separation that exists between Mother and Son and I can’t help feel that there must be moments, however fleeting they may be, when you wonder how David is.’9 She suggested that the Queen receive the departing Bishop of Nassau, John Dauglish, who ‘can tell you if all the things David gave up are replaced to him in another way and the little details of his daily life, his job, etc., the story of his flight from France leaving all his possessions behind.’10

  Queen Mary did see Dauglish, a former navy chaplain, and was interested in her son’s doings but, when he talked about the Duchess, ‘He met with a stone wall of disinterest.’ Her only reaction was in a letter to the Duke a few weeks later, in which she added, ‘I send a kind message to your wife.’11

  The family remained suspicious of Wallis’s intentions, with the King writing to his mother, ‘I wonder what is the real motive behind her having written . . . I must say I do feel a bit suspicious of it!!!’ adding he’d just seen the prime minister, who had received a letter from the Duke asking for a change of post. ‘A coincidence!!’12

  The Duke was indeed anxious to be moved elsewhere. After a visit from Lord Beaverbrook, he wrote to Churchill in April, ‘(1) that I cannot contemplate remaining in the Bahamas as Governor for the duration of the war and (2) that I feel confident that I could serve my Country best in some appointment in America, or failing that, in Canada.’13 The letter was shared with the King, but there were no slots for him.

  The suggestion of a roving ambassadorship in Latin America was also dismissed. ‘I fear I cannot report to you any advantage in a visit by the Duke of Windsor to South America at this time. It would certainly arouse suspicions in Washington,’ minuted Anthony Eden to Churchill, adding that the Duke did not have sufficient ‘authority and first-hand knowledge’.14

  The South African prime minister, Jan Smuts, asked for his views on the offer of the Governorship of Southern Rhodesia, argued against such an appointment on the grounds of the strong republican sympathies in neighbouring South Africa and concerns about the Duke’s ‘attention and judgement’.15

  There were discussions about federating the British West Indies – the printed index to the Foreign Office Political Department for 1942 has a reference under the Duke’s name of ‘Proposed Governor-Generalship of British West Indies if raised to Dominion status’ – but there was no federation.16

  On Monday 1 June 1942, the Duke arrived in Washington, partly on a private visit to sort out his business affairs and partly to discuss defence and trade matters. No sooner had he arrived than he received news of demonstrations at the building of the new airbase. What had merely been a strike and march to the Colonial Secretariat, to lobby for an increase in the daily rate of pay, had quickly escalated into something more threatening.

  The acting governor, Leslie Heape, and the commissioner of police, Reggie Erskine-Lindop, were slow to respond, by which time several of the demonstrators, many drunk, began looting in Bay Street. Several people were killed and fifty were injured. Some of the long-standing grievances, concerning poverty and racial prejudice, were beginning to come to the surface.

  The Duke returned immediately, accompanied by a hundred US Marines sent by Roosevelt, concerned about the security of the airbases. A public emergency was declared and order restored. ‘This morning about 1500 workers have returned to work, representing about sixty per cent of workers previously employed,’ wrote the Duke to the Colonial Office on 6 June, ‘but work cannot yet be said to be normal and workers are being guarded by American soldiers.’17

  Concerned about the interruption of work on the military project and worried that the Americans might pull out of the project, he immediately began addressing the men’s grievances, which included problems with transport for the eight-mile journey from Nassau to the building site, food at lunchtime, the timing of wage payments, and differential pay rates for Americans and local workers.

  On 8 June, he broadcast to the island, promising free lunches, to raise wages by one shilling a day, and an independent enquiry by a retired colonial judge, Alison Russell. Not only did the Duke face the anger of the Bay Street Boys, who felt law and order had broken down to their detriment, but Whitehall was aghast that an agreement that the Americans employ local labour at the local going rate, rather than the rate paid for imported labour, might be changed. The Duke now had critics on all sides.

  The crisis was, however, the making of him. ‘The feature which now stands out above all the others is the fact that it was eventually resolved by the dominating personality of one man, His Royal Highness the Governor,’ reported the Nassau Tribune. ‘HRH approached the gigantic problem calmly and efficiently . . . he handled a delicate situation with tact and dignity, resolution and authority.’18

  The Duke resumed his American trip, having a three-hour lunch with Roosevelt on 15 June and then seeing Churchill on 23 June, but Wallis’s activities in New York were causing concern at the Colonial Office. It is difficult to establish exactly what happened, as many of the documents are redacted or have been retained, but Wallis appears to have had a series of meetings with Gaston Henry-Hay, until November 1941 the Vichy ambassador to America, and a man closely monitored by the FBI, not least because Nazi agents operated from his embassy.

  ‘As our source in question is a particularly delicate and secret one, may I ask that this letter should be seen by the minimum possible number of people,’ wrote Clifford Thornley to the Colonial Office in one of the heavily redacted reports.19 One of them was the prime minister himself.

  The Duke was now back on the islands and faced a new challenge – a complete block of buildings between Bay and George Streets had been burnt down, arousing suspicions of further civil unrest. It turned out to be a storekeeper setting his own property on fire to collect the insurance but, again, the Governor earned new respect when he was seen to be personally taking charge of operations.

  However, in spite of improved popularity ratings, the Duke remained bored and unhappy with his posting. The writer Patrick Skene Catling, then an eighteen-year-old Pilot Officer, had an unexpected encounter on the golf course:

  The Duke, as usual by tea-time, was drunk. Not very drunk, not yet arrogant and clumsy, but sufficiently soft in the head to have driven his Cadillac convertible along the fairways of Nassau’s premier golf club. This was before electric buggies. Evidently, he was not in the mood for long walks between shots; and, after all, he was the Governor . . . He had given me a friendly wave as he drove the car past me on the sixteenth fairway. He finished his game quickly and was well ahead of me in the bar. In the early stages of drinking, he had a charmingly whimsical, some said boyish, slightly tilted smile. Free for the afternoon from the Duchess’s surveillance, he was able to indulge in playful informality.20

  The Duke, dressed in a lime-green shirt and shocking pink doeskin trousers, offered Catling a drink. ‘After mor
e than one drink, he became quite chatty, asking some of the questions that strangers ask in casual barroom encounters,’ and then suggested ‘let’s go for a ride.’21 They headed ‘Over the Hill’ to the Black ghetto. ‘Part-way down the far side of the hill, I was surprised when the Duke produced an Army cap with the scarlet band of superior rank and jammed it jauntily on his well-groomed fair head.’22

  Turning off the main road, they drove ‘along a narrow, unpaved road with a row of dilapidated wooden shacks on each side, and announced his arrival with long blasts on the horn.’23 Fifteen small boys in shorts ran out carrying rifles. The Duke stood up in the car, his expression stern and ‘commanded the boys, in a high-pitched, military shout, to “Fall in”’, which they duly did. He ‘proceeded to drill them in accordance with the protocol of the Brigade of Guards’.24 He then tossed them some silver coins. ‘How His Excellency laughed! I thought he was an awful shit and a fool, but I was grateful to him, and I am still, for demonstrating so vividly that warfare is absurd.’25

  * * *

  The death of his younger brother, George, Duke of Kent, whom he had not seen since 1937, in an air crash on 25 August, only further brought home the Duke’s separation from his family. At the memorial service in Nassau’s cathedral, he broke down in tears and a period of depression followed. ‘My thoughts go out to you, who are so far away from us all, knowing how devoted you were to him, and how kind you were to him in a difficult moment in his all too short life, kindness I for one shall never forget; he always remembered it, for he was very fond of you,’ wrote Queen Mary to him on 31 August. ‘I hope you will write often to me now, as you used to do. Please give a kind message to your wife, she will help you to bear your sorrow.’26

  The death had brought some thaw in family tensions. ‘He was in some ways more like a son to me, and his charm and gaiety brought great happiness to York House those years he lived with me,’ replied the Duke. ‘Remembering how much you and I hated the last war, I can well imagine how our feelings about this one must be the same – a deep-rooted conviction that it could have been avoided.’ He ended by saying he was longing to see her again, ‘always hoping that maybe one day things will change and that I shall have the intense pride and pleasure of bringing Wallis to see you . . .’27

  It was not just the isolation from his family but from the world outside. ‘Although our life is a busy one, it seems cramped and isolated so far from the centres of interest and we certainly feel very much out of touch with the people who are directing the momentous events and framing the policies, which will so profoundly influence the future of mankind,’ the Duke wrote to Sibyl Colefax, after she had written to him about his brother’s death. ‘Who knows that maybe someday we shall get a more interesting job and a better opportunity of pulling one’s weight!’28

  It was a feeling shared by Wallis, who wrote to an old friend, Edith Lindsay, ‘How I long for the sight and sound of human beings – my mentality is getting very dire after over two years here and only two months leave.’29

  By late summer, the new airbase at Windsor Field was completed and 4,000 RAF troops were stationed on coastal watch duties alongside the US Army Air Force, hunting submarines, supporting convoys, and providing a vital link in the supply chain across the Atlantic. Wallis, realising the colony needed more facilities and organisations for the new troops, founded a canteen for Black members of the Bahamian Defence Force and ensured it was supplied with all it needed from playing cards and ping-pong balls to staff and girls for dances.

  She persuaded Frederick Sigrist to lend the Bahamian Club as another canteen for airmen, where her afternoons were spent cooking bacon and egg to feed thousands of British RAF officers, now stationed as part of a Coastal Command training programme. ‘My real talent was as a short-order cook,’ she later wrote. ‘I never kept track of the number of orders of bacon and eggs that I served up, but on the basis of forty an afternoon, and three hundred and sixty-five afternoons a year for nearly three years, I arrived at a rough total of about forty thousand. And that’s a lot of eggs.’30

  ‘No one has any idea how hard she worked,’ recalls one friend from the Bahamas. ‘With the Duchess, it wasn’t just raising money – she did plenty of that – but she went beyond what other Governors’ wives had done. She got in, rolled up her sleeves and worked. I’ll never forget her returning to Government House one night. She had been away for twelve hours, first at one hospital, then a school, a clinic, a canteen. Her energy was palpable, contagious. She walked in and immediately began planning what to do the next day.’31

  ‘I never worked harder in my life,’ she later wrote. ‘I never felt better used. I have to keep busy. I couldn’t stay here if I didn’t.’32 But the hard work took its toll on her health. ‘I have been having a really bad time with my old ulcer – just dragging myself around, half-doing too many things,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘I don’t seem able to find 3 weeks off to put myself right once again . . . Everything gets more difficult every day on the way of supplies, etc. – but I have nothing to really complain of except my stomach and the fact that we are left here so long.’33

  Her involvement with child-welfare agencies fulfilled her maternal urge, which, hitherto, had had no other outlet. Every Christmas she helped organise a children’s party at the airbase for which she paid personally, where the children watched Mickey Mouse movies, were given Coca-Cola, sweets, ice-cream and some pocket money. The war work had given her a new sense of purpose, having previously focused only on the Duke, his needs, their houses and entertaining.

  For perhaps the first time in many years, she was thinking of others rather than herself. ‘I really admire the way Wallis has thrown herself into all her various jobs,’ wrote Rosa Wood to Edith Lindsay. ‘She really is wonderful and does work hard. I do hope that people everywhere are realising all the good she is doing. I think she has such charm and is always amusing to be with, I really don’t know what I would do without her.’34

  But the enhanced responsibilities, which could have brought them together, threatened to drive the Windsors apart. Whilst she made a point of getting to know people – the children, mothers, servicemen – and made the most of her situation, the Duke had become increasingly accepting of his exile and political impotence. He was bored by trivial political matters – the duty on an imported church bell, the endowment of a public library, or overcrowding in Nassau prison (average number of inmates 146).

  He bicycled each day to Cable Beach to swim – a tandem proved not to be a success and was abandoned after the couple fell off before it had left the grounds of Government House – and played golf most afternoons. His ADC, John Pringle, remembered how to lift his spirits he would take his official car out to the airport and ‘hurtle it down the darkened runway over and over again’.35

  Bert Cambridge, a local jazz musician and Black politician, recalled how he was ‘summoned to the Governor’s residence, not in his political capacity but in his musical one – to accompany the striptease artistes who gave private performances for the Duke. The Duchess . . . took it all in her stride; there was not, perhaps, much other entertainment to be had in the Bahamas.’36

  Above all, he began to drink heavily. ‘He drank, as he had always done, but the effects became more noticeable,’ wrote his biographer Michael Pye.37

  What had been binges on his great Imperial tours, kept carefully separate from his official appearances, were now sessions that happened all too publicly. He looked and acted drunk. He became loud and indiscreet. The Duchess was patient until a fund-raising evening at the Collins mansion on Shirley Street, where the Duke was too obviously full of whisky to fulfil his duties. She forbade him cocktail parties, cut entertainment except for their American visitors and a handful of politically necessary guests, took control.38

  In November 1943, submitting names of local candidates for the New Year’s Honours List to Churchill, the Duke reiterated his plea that ‘after five and a half years, the question of restoring to
the Duchess her royal status should be clarified . . . I am now asking you as Prime Minister to submit to the King that he restore the Duchess’s royal rank at the coming New Year’s, not only as an act of justice and courtesy to his sister-in-law, but also as a gesture in recognition of her two years’ public service in the Bahamas.’39

  The Palace’s position was clear. Writing to Churchill on 8 December, George VI enclosed a memorandum explaining why Wallis could not use the title ‘Royal Highness’. ‘I am quite ready to leave the question in abeyance for the time being, but I must tell you quite honestly that I do not trust the Duchess’s loyalty.’40

  The memo, marked ‘Private and Confidential’ read:

  I have read the letter from my brother with great care, and after much thought I feel I cannot alter a decision which I made with considerable reluctance at the time of his marriage . . . When he abdicated, he renounced all the rights and privileges of succession for himself and his children – including the title ‘Royal Highness’ in respect of himself and his wife. There is therefore no question of the title being ‘restored’ to the Duchess – because she never had it . . . I know you will understand how disagreeable this is to me personally, but the good of my country and my family come first . . . I have consulted my family, who share these views.41

  The news was transmitted to the Duke by Churchill three days before Christmas.42

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  In May 1943, the Duke paid his third visit to America, visiting Bahamian labourers in northern Florida, seeing executives of General Foods in New York about the possibility of setting up fishing and canning operations in Bahamas, and socialising in Palm Beach. He had two meetings with Roosevelt, was invited by Churchill to hear him address Congress – where both men were given standing ovations – and lobbied for a new appointment.