The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  King George V is quoted as having ‘exclaimed passionately’ a few weeks before he died:

  I pray to God that my eldest son will never marry and have children, and that nothing will come between Bertie and Lilibet and the throne.

  We are not told to whom he is supposed to have made this observation. It could, presumably, only have been to Queen Mary, and in strict privacy, and she is unlikely to have repeated it. However, there is no reason to doubt that such were indeed the thoughts of the old King. Edward VIII made sure that his father’s prayer was answered.

  Nevertheless, many people, Churchill and Lloyd George among them, were very sorry to see him go. At the time of the abdication Lloyd George was in the West Indies; in those days the journey took weeks and he could not get home to take part in the House of Commons debate. He cabled to his MP son and his MP daughter: ‘… Had King not as prince and sovereign exposed continued neglect by government of chronic distress, poverty and bad housing conditions amongst his people in realm, convinced they would not have shown such alacrity to dethrone him. You may make any use you like of this telegram.’

  With such high-powered statesmen on his side there must have been a temptation for the King to sit tight, but he was resolved not to divide the nation. In the interest of continuity, he abdicated. Sir Colin Coote, in his obituary of the Duke wrote: ‘It was very largely due to him that his going was not cataclysmic. His determination that what he did should not be politically upsetting was as strong as his resolve to do it.’

  The Duke himself shall have the last word: ‘I played fair in 1936,’ he said, ‘but I was bloody shabbily treated.’ The late James Pope-Hennessy quoted this. He had planned a biography of the Duke of Windsor, and it is a thousand pities that he did not live to write it. The Duke is apt to bring out the governess in people, but there was no trace of the governess in James Pope-Hennessy’s make-up; only vivid intelligence and humour.

  Edward VIII: The Road to Abdication, Donaldson, F. Books and Bookmen (1978)

  Goody-Goodies

  In the last war Lady Donaldson had a farm; the description of her experiences is the best part of this memoir. Apparently she has already published two farming books, so there may be readers aware of her courage and skill in the enterprise. Her last venture, battery hens, seems less admirable.

  She and her husband were lifelong members of the Labour Party, but left for the more seductive ‘Alliance’. Far from breaking the mould of British politics it was so fragile that it came to pieces in their hands, losing handle and spout like an eggshell china teapot. She writes as if we were still living in 1988, before the world completely changed after the fall of communism, praising Crosland’s book The Future of Socialism. Would there not now be more point in reading Taine?

  It is sad to be told how nearly the biography of the Duke of Windsor was written by James Pope-Hennessy, so witty and perceptive. Frances Donaldson’s book was a bestseller and she goes through the story again here. It is a pedestrian affair compared with what it might have been. Both Donaldsons were what Churchill used to call goody-goodies, which though very nice is somewhat inhibiting for writing on Edward VIII. Where Pope-Hennessy in the fragments that remain, makes the reader laugh aloud, but always with a scene of pathos and waste, she is unconsciously comic, as when she says the Duke cruelly left his assistant Major Metcalfe behind in Paris when France was falling. It would have been much more unkind to drag him south, Metcalfe’s goal being England where his wife lived. From Paris to London was easy compared with sailing from Bordeaux or Nice.

  As to Freda Dudley-Ward, a very charming person, if she felt about the then Prince of Wales in the way described, what was she doing as his greatest friend for sixteen years? Could there have been a touch of snobbishness? Followed by a hint of the woman scorned? The account somehow fails to add up. It is an abiding mystery why people who find the Duke of Windsor unsympathetic and feel he would have made a ‘bad king’ (whatever that may be) should nevertheless be so critical of his abdication. They ought to be delighted that he gave them the slip.

  Frances Donaldson is more successful with the Waughs, whom, unlike the Windsors, she met and knew quite well. Her friendly description might do something to counter hostile biographies of recent years about this excellent writer and wonderfully clever and amusing companion to his cronies. He was not at his best when drunk, but who is?

  A Twentieth-Century Life: A Memoir, Donaldson, F. Evening Standard (1992)

  Surrounded by Love

  I knew the Duchess of Windsor fairly well for a good many years; she and the Duke were our neighbours in the Vallée de Chevreuse, and we often dined with them in the Mill house at Gif, where the Duke had made a lovely English garden round a millstream. They often came for luncheon or dinner with my husband and me, about five miles away at Orsay.

  I was fond of the Duchess, and very much admired her wonderful efficiency, her great talent for making comfort and happiness for the Duke, her delicious food, and her unfailing high spirits. Nobody more appreciated wit and humour than she did. In conversation, as Cole Porter once said, she always threw back the ball. She was one of the most outstanding hostesses I ever knew. She made everything fun, and nobody in her house was ever allowed to feel out of things. The French loved her and appreciated her elegant appearance; she wore her clothes so well and chose them so cleverly.

  Of course, as everybody knows, or at least everyone who knew them, the Duke adored her until his dying days. He thought her completely perfect in every single respect.

  When he died she must have missed his love and admiration more than words can say. He was happy when she was there, sad when she was not, for nearly 40 years. There is no doubt about this deep and unchanging love. She felt he had given up so much for her sake that she simply had to devote her life to him, and this she did.

  The last years were terrible. She was alive, and yet not alive. Doctors have become very clever at keeping the heart beating. Who knows what she suffered? I do not mean so much physical pain, or even discomfort, but who can tell whether someone in her condition feels sorrow, has illusions, or nightmares? Nobody knows. What we do know is that her nurses loved her.

  So did her devoted couple Georges and Ofélia; their loving care of her was marvellous in its unselfish devotion.

  The Duke, as he often said, felt very bitter that she was refused the title of Royal Highness. The Duchess, except for his sake, did not mind this curious piece of illnatured bad manners in the very slightest. It seemed to her, though it did not to him, something completely trivial and unimportant. His wish that she should be buried by his side in Frogmore is granted.

  When he lay in state at Windsor fourteen years ago, sixty thousand made the journey to pay their last respects. He was greatly loved, and for his sake she was loved by many. I have been shown some of the hundreds of letters she used to get on birthdays and other anniversaries, full of touching affection for a lady the British people can never have seen. She has been much maligned, but they had paid no attention whatever to spiteful books or newspaper stories.

  The Times (1986)

  Debunking a Dark Fairy Tale

  A few years after the death of the Duke of Windsor in 1972, the Duchess, aged 80, had a brain haemorrhage and nearly died herself. Unfortunately she was saved by clever doctors and lived on for a decade: a living death. Her heart beat strong, but she had to be fed artificially through the nose. Her mind and memory had gone. She had three nurses and the best medical care as a rule, in her house in the Bois de Boulogne, with sojourns at the American Hospital in Paris. She became paralysed, but no details of the course of her long illness have ever been revealed. Her affairs were looked after by Maître Blum, her lawyer.

  Apparently in 1980 Lord Snowdon wanted to photograph the Duchess for the Sunday Times, but this was of course impossible. However, he got in touch with Maître Blum, and Caroline Blackwood, who was to have written the text, became fascinated to the point of obsession with the old lawyer, who guarded t
he Duchess so secretively and with the aid of press cuttings sued anyone who libelled her. Nevertheless in her account, which she herself calls a ‘dark fairy tale’, she has made a cardinal error which persists from beginning to end.

  It was not Maître Blum who stopped people seeing the Duchess, it was the doctor. The notice in the hall which the butler could show to callers who persisted in demanding to go up to her room was signed by him. Visitors made her blood pressure rise, and he forbade them. In any case she was in no fit state to wish for them so far as we know, though sometimes Maître Blum said she was sitting up listening to Cole Porter.

  At my last visit she never spoke, but lay staring like the Greek mask of tragedy. I was appalled and haunted by the thought of her total loneliness and helplessness. Friends were all very well, but in a medical context only relations count. Only they can question and badger and insist, and examine and cross-examine. The Duchess had no relations of her own, nobody at all.

  My view, as time went on, and it has not changed, was that the in-laws should have done what they could. They probably paid for her very expensive treatment, but a member or trusted friend of her late husband’s family, accompanied by a famous neuro-surgeon and a lawyer, should have gone over to Paris from time to time to see for themselves. The doctor would most likely have agreed with the French doctors, but a second opinion is in order. They had not only a right but a duty to do something of this kind; a duty to a very old woman who had been married for thirty five years to their close relation. Perhaps they did! There was so much secrecy surrounding the Duchess and her illness that I for one have no idea.

  Who can ever know what a human vegetable feels? Did she feel pain? Did she have nightmares? Nobody knows, but the heart beats, therefore she is ‘alive’. Among the secrecy and uncertainty there was one comfort: the presence in the house of Georges the butler. Like all those who worked for her he was fond of the Duchess, and above all he was there. Daily visits by lawyer and doctor were no insurance as to what went on most of the time. Georges promised me that he would telephone at once if any of the nurses was less than kind and gentle. I went to see him in the morgue-like house, just to have a talk now and again. He was absolutely trustworthy.

  Of course a photograph was out of the question, but Snowdon and Caroline Blackwood decided to switch to Maître Blum. She consented to pose, and gave an interview which sounds to have been a furious quarrel. According to the author Maître Blum had a crazy view of the Duchess’s character and way of life. She screamed at the idea of her heroine at a night club, or downing a drink or two, and insisted she had spent her evenings reading or listening to classical music. She obviously had no idea that the 75-year-old Duchess went gaily off to learn the Twist, and drank vodka out of a silver mug. She said all the books about her were lies, but the Duchess was much more fun and more gallant and unusual than Maître Blum, who scarcely knew her, seems to have imagined.

  Maître Blum had a power of attorney, the Duchess had great possessions. Her jewels were amazing. None of them had anything to do with the Crown Jewels, as asserted here, but they became more valuable year by year. Queen Alexandra had left some personal jewellery to the Duke, but it must have been swapped or recut, as the Duchess only wore modern jewellery, most of it bought by the Duke for his beloved. He did not spend millions. The millions were realized by Sotheby’s after the death of the Duchess; her things fetched huge prices, partly because they had been hers.

  Caroline Blackwood writes of ‘royal swords’ so craved by Lord Mountbatten that they were always hidden when he was expected. They otherwise lived on the piano for all to see. They were made of dark jade, sharpened to a razor edge, and had been used for executions in Burma. The victim stood erect, and with one tremendous swipe by the executioner the head was severed from the body. These ancient swords had been given by the Burmese to the Prince of Wales on one of his Empire tours. Probably Mountbatten longed for them because he called himself ‘of Burma’. Where are they now?

  This book is full of mistakes, as becomes a fairy tale. Unity Mitford shot herself not in 1945, but in 1939 on the outbreak of a war she did not wish to live through. She was never ‘incapable of speech’. The man who got pictures of the Duchess looking half dead took them from the road, he never got near a window. The Duchess was being carried into the garden. I never called the Duchess Wallis, or Hitler Hittles, nor did I say General Spillmann was Prussian; I met him and knew he was from Alsace.

  All these inaccuracies cast doubt on the wild things Maître Blum is quoted as saying, and the little jokes and ironies fall flat. They are too repetitive. As to the description of Michael Bloch, Maître Blum’s assistant, it is a silly caricature. He is a clever writer who made use of the Windsors’ papers for some informative books.

  When she died at last, in 1986, the Duchess left her money to the Institut Pasteur, a fact not mentioned here. Her funeral at St George’s Chapel at Windsor was attended by all her household, they went with the Royal Family to the burial at Frogmore. The Queen decorated Georges Sanègre for his devoted service.

  Friends had places in the choir, I was put next to Laura Marlborough, who whispered: ‘I went to see Diana Cooper last night. When she heard I’d hired a car to come here she said “Oh! Do take me!” but I said sorry chum, no way, I’m not going to lug you up the steps.’ Laura and Diana Cooper were two of the old ladies interviewed by the author for her gruesome little book. She has padded it out with chunks of extracts from the Windsors’ memoirs. Its theme is suffering and death, and the ethics of modern medicine, more and more in question as the century ends. At present the Hippocratic oath to save life reigns supreme.

  All this interspersed with many a giggle. Yet had it come out when she wrote it in 1980 (1970 she says, but that must be another mistake as both Windsors were alive in 1970), I should have welcomed it, spite and all.

  Unfortunately, the author was too afraid of Maître Blum, who inconveniently lived to be 95. Any light shone upon that secret misery would have been better than nothing. Now, though every anti-Windsor story is raked up and raked through, none of them new and all so far away, it seems pointless.

  The Last of the Duchess, Blackwood, C. Evening Standard (1995)

  A Gay Life

  James Pope-Hennessy was a charming and gifted homosexual. Affectionate, talented, beautiful to look at, he was addicted to very rough men. Generous, improvident and always hard up, at the age of 57 he was commissioned to write a book about Noël Coward for which he was to get a large advance. Chance acquaintances who heard this piece of news were ignorant enough to imagine that the money would be in his cupboard; they were dishonest enough to wish to steal it, and brutal enough to threaten James with a knife unless he showed them where to find it. When he cried out they gagged him in such a way that he choked to death. Len Adams, described by Peter Quennell as James’ ‘best, staunchest and most resolutely patient’ friend, arrived too late to save his life. He had been out shopping, for this frightful tragedy happened in the daytime. This, at least, is the story of James Pope-Hennessy’s death as I heard it at the time. It is more than seven years ago, but Peter Quennell evidently thinks everyone knows it, while in fact young people do not.

  This book consists of letters, a scrappy diary, and short sketches of the royal personages James interviewed when he was researching for his biography of Queen Mary. According to his diary my husband and I met him in 1950, dining with the painter Derek Hill; I think it was Len Adams who arranged it. We remained friends and sometimes went to his house in Ladbroke Grove; he often sent his books to Mosley, whom he describes in his diary as ‘so remarkably intelligent’. Peter Quennell speaks very highly of Verandah, a travel book about the grandfather, Sir John Pope-Hennessy, who governed various colonies. My own favourite is his incomparable biography of Queen Mary. It is incomparable because it succeeds in giving a real, accurate portrait of its subject, and in being perfectly polite, and yet there is a laugh on every page. The only royal portraits to compare with it are t
hose which were kept hidden for several generations, like Saint Simon’s. Yet there was nothing to offend, none of the impertinent, boring insults of the authors now busy publishing libels on the Duke of Windsor.

  Pope-Hennessy’s hilarious account of life at the Windsors’ Mill in France is the best thing in the book, and of the Duke he has this to say: ‘I was startled to find that… he is not only the one member of our royal family for whom one needs to make no allowances whatever, but that he is exceedingly intelligent, original, liberal-minded and quite capable of either leading a conversation or taking a constructive part in one. He is also one of the most considerate men I have ever met of his generation.’ This makes one regret that Lady Donaldson, who, though not as clever as James Pope-Hennessy, is no fool, so resolutely refused to meet the Duke when she wrote her life of him. She was probably afraid that her preconceived idea of him might be upset. James wrote the above in 1959 when he had become something of an expert on royal personages all over Europe, as he gathered impressions from them about Queen Mary. He was a good letter writer, but with his books he took endless trouble, re-casting, re-writing, working really hard to achieve excellence.

  He had a number of devoted women friends to whom most of the letters are addressed. In his expressions of love, admiration and esteem for them one clearly sees the fatal exaggeration of his delightful nature, its fickleness, the way he found the irresistible star of one moment the near-bore of the next. He was not a faithless friend, but his wild enthusiasms cooled rather quickly, and collapsed like an overdone soufflé.