by Diana Mosley
The English seemed to Wallis very snobbish about titles and positively off their heads when it came to royalty. She could not get over the interest shown in the most trivial doings of the King and Queen. She thought this obsession was universal, while in fact it was a feature in those days of exactly the circle she had married into: with the middle-class Simpsons she experienced this particular snobbery at its most potent.
When, however, Wallis says in her memoirs: ‘Queen Mary had only to change her coat to start a new style’ she is obviously having a quiet laugh to herself, because Queen Mary never changed her coat. She adhered to the fashion of her youth and though everyone liked her iron-clad appearance, long skirts, frizzled hair, waisted dresses and toques made of massed pansies, nobody would have dreamed of copying them, when the fashion was for the short, shapeless chiffon shift, shingled hair and the cloche hat.
The winter of 1928 was exceptionally cold and there were terrible London pea-soup fogs, now a thing of the past. The fogs were made of a combination of sea mist with the smoke of innumerable coal fires; they penetrated the inside of London houses even when the windows were tightly shut, and when the fog lifted everything was grimy and there was an acrid smell. In Wallis’ house there was no central heating, but it had a coal fire in every room. This extremely gloomy winter lowered her usually high spirits and began to get her down. Simpson was meticulous and once a week they went through the household books together. Perhaps Wallis thought this too was an old English custom, like reading the Court Circular in The Times to see what the King and Queen had been up to. How was she to know that Simpson was unique, with his ledger and his tiny writing making a note of every ounce of sugar or pound of hake? ‘There was no trace of the skylark in Ernest Simpson,’ wrote Wallis.
In 1928 Wallis married Ernest Simpson and they settled in London at 12 Upper Berkeley Street.
When spring came, the Simpsons were planning to go abroad for a holiday, but Wallis got a cable from Aunt Bessie to say her mother was seriously ill. They went to Washington; this was the first time Ernest had met his mother-in-law. They liked each other, and she was obviously relieved to see that Wallis had settled down with such a solid, sensible person. After three sad weeks Aunt Bessie made Wallis go back to England; the doctor said her mother might live for several years more. Simpson, who had left long before, met her at Southampton. England in June was lovely, and he planned a series of journeys to show her the cathedrals and castles he so much admired. Every weekend they drove to a new sightseeing centre. That summer they also looked round for a London house of their own, and finally took a flat in a new block, Bryanston Court. For the first time in her life Wallis had her own home and was able to furnish and arrange it in her own way. She bought old furniture and made the rather unpromising flat cheerful and pretty. She was beginning to make friends, but so far she had not really had a good time in London; English people are harder to get to know than Americans or than the foreign colony in Peking and Shanghai.
A call from Aunt Bessie in October made her dash over to America once again, but she only arrived in time to see her mother die, on 2 November 1929. She was very sad; her mother was one of the few people Wallis really loved. Aunt Bessie was another.
CHAPTER SIX
Ich Dien
Our little systems have their day:
They have their day and cease to be.
Tennyson
AFTER THE WAR, even in England, things had changed. Lord Cromer wrote: ‘In spite of the increasing labours and devotion to public duty of the King and Queen during the last three years the fact remains that the position of the Monarchy is not so stable now, in 1918, as it was at the beginning of the War… No stone should be left unturned in the endeavour to consolidate the position of the Crown. The Crown is the link of Empire and its fate is inseparable from that of all British Possessions.’ So it seemed at the time; nobody then foresaw that less than half a century later Britain would have virtually no ‘Possessions’, but that the island would cling tenaciously to its traditions and its Monarchy.
The stone King George decided to turn, with the encouragement of Lloyd George, was the popularity of his heir. Lord Esher had written in his diary in 1915 of a talk he had with Queen Mary. ‘She is proud of the Prince of Wales. I tried to make her see that after the War thrones might be at a discount, and that the Prince of Wales’ popularity might be a great asset.’ After 1918 it was obvious that Lord Esher was right, and the King resolved that the ‘great asset’ should be used to cement the Empire and strengthen its ties with the mother country. He sent the Prince away on a series of tours of the Empire, each of which in those days of travel by sea took months of his life.
Wherever he went he was greeted by vast, cheering crowds; there were endless banquets and balls and ceremonies of every kind at which all eyes were upon him. Every word he spoke was treasured, repeated, commented upon. People who saw him, or met him, or talked with him, were ‘charmed into raptures’, just as the grumpy French general on the Italian front had been. He looked so young with his gold hair and china blue eyes and his smile—young and also vulnerable. In fact he was quite tough and he had the family obstinacy, but his boyish and vulnerable appearance was another asset, arousing as it did chivalrous as well as maternal feelings in the thousands of men and women in the crowds.
The Prince of Wales with Winston Churchill outside the House of Commons in 1919. Between the two men there was a strong bond of affection.
The Prince during his visit to America. This photo was to become his wife’s favourite.
When he was in a carriage or motor car driving through the throng people did not confine themselves to cheering. Particularly in Australia, the unfortunate Prince would hear the shrill cry: ‘I touched him!’ over and over again. ‘Owing to the hearty disposition of the Australians the touches are more like blows, and HRH and Admiral Halsey arrived half blinded and black and blue,’ wrote a member of his staff. The Prince’s right hand became so swollen and sore that it had to be bandaged and he shook hands with his left. In Canada too his reception was violently enthusiastic. Huge crowds gathered, and ‘again and again they broke though and swamped the police lines’ wrote the Prince. ‘They snatched my handkerchief, they tried to tear the buttons off my coat.’
From Canada he went to visit ex-servicemen in America, and in New York he was given a ticker-tape welcome. He said that it was thrilling beyond description. Through the snow-storm of ticker-tape and torn-up telephone books he rode on the back of a motor ‘bowing and waving like an actor who had been summoned by a tremendous curtain call.’ He possessed in supreme degree the royal grace of memorising faces and putting names to them, so that nobody was ever hurt at being forgotten, since he forgot nobody.
After the war all the royal family’s German relations had lost their thrones and rights and positions; the little German courts made fun of by Thackeray long ago were shadows, the Reich a republic. A Protestant wife had to be found for the Prince, but marriage with a German princess would have been highly unpopular as a result of the war and its attendant unbridled anti-German propaganda. For the King and Queen this question of the Prince’s marriage was a constant nagging worry. While he was away on his tours the worry receded, only to become acute once more on his return. Some of the older friends of the royal family ventured to speak to him on the subject, and he said to Lady Salisbury, his equerry Bruce Ogilvy’s aunt: ‘It’s no good, Lady Salisbury. Bruce and I are two old bachelors. Neither of us will ever marry any woman unless we really love her.’
The most interesting of his tours was his visit to India. Before he left, the King told him that the sort of democratic behaviour he had indulged in hitherto would be quite out of place in India; it would be misunderstood. He enjoined the Prince, as he so often had before but with renewed emphasis, ‘Never forget who you are.’ He sailed for the Far East in the Renown, a squash court had been built in the ship so that he could get some exercise on the voyage. Captain Ogilvy went with him. ‘We
saw and did everything. We stayed with all the Governors and a great many of the Maharajas … the latter like an Arabian Night’s dream. The most fantastic luxury and the jewels out of this world.’ They hunted every sort of animal, including rhino. It was in India that the Prince made the acquaintance of Major ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, who became a great friend and equerry.
The exhausting Empire tours were considered a tremendous success, but they left him with not only the desire but the absolute need for a time of relative solitude during which he could renew his strength before setting forth once again. It was during these rests, when he hunted in Leicestershire or danced at the Embassy Club, that King George pestered him with advice and admonitions. Everything was wrong, particularly the Prince’s clothes if in some tiny way they differed from the King’s own conservative style of dressing. His friends were not the very ones his father would have chosen for him. Because the King himself always went to bed at eleven he considered this was the proper time and that to stay up later was almost immoral. The very word ‘night-club’ was abhorrent to the King. Edward VII had been fond of the Marlborough Club, but that was a day club and for men only. George V felt no need for a club of any kind whether by day or night, and to him a night-club sounded almost orgiastic and not at all the sort of place where the heir to the throne should spend his evenings.
The Embassy Club in Bond Street was perfectly respectable, but the King had naturally never seen it and to him it was dissolute. As if by magic he always seemed to know when the Prince, often accompanied by his favourite brother Prince George, had been there. The all-seeing eye was apparently provided by Evelyn Duchess of Devonshire*, Queen Mary’s Mistress of the Robes, whose informant was perhaps her youngest son, Lord Charles Cavendish. If in all innocence he told his mother where the Prince had been seen the night before, she quickly told the Queen, who told the King, who could not resist scolding, although his son was now thirty.
The King doubtless thought there were still, despite the war, enough great houses in London where the Princes were invited to balls and parties, and where their fellow guests came from England’s old families. Why did they have to go to the Embassy Club? He failed to understand why a party of six friends should be a relaxation for the Prince in a way that a ball where he was a centre of attention could never be. The Prince obstinately insisted that his private life was his own, a source of annoyance to his parents all through the twenties.
After Princess Mary’s marriage to Lord Lascelles in 1922 the Prince of Wales’ brother Bertie, now Duke of York, wrote to him: ‘Papa and Mama will miss her too terribly, I fear, but it may have a good effect in bringing them out again. I feel they can’t possibly stay in and dine together every night of their lives.’ But this is what the King and Queen did, it was what the King liked to do.
The Prince of Wales, because of what they called ‘David’s fads’, among which was his ‘tiresome golf’, came in for a good deal of criticism. He no longer lived in ‘the awful palace’ but had arranged York House, embedded in St James’, for himself. He described it as ‘a rambling, antiquated structure, a veritable rabbit warren with passages interrupted by unexpected flights of steps leading to unsymmetrical rooms full of ugly Victorian furniture, brass beds and discarded portraits of former Monarchs.’
He appointed two equerries,* Lord Claud Hamilton and Captain Piers Legh, son of Lord Newton. Another equerry, Bruce Ogilvy, has described the Prince’s life at York House.
My first job in the morning was to play squash with HRH at the Bath Club with a heat bath and massage after. He was mad keen on keeping fit and wore about five sweaters and the result was that any indiscretions of the night before were well eliminated! After that, various interviews with all sorts of different people. The equerry on duty had to keep them talking until he was ready to see them, and that could be interesting. After interviews, lunch out as no meals except breakfast were provided at York House. Then probably nothing till the evening, when one accompanied him to some public dinner where he had to speak. He spoke very well and though the speeches were provided by Godfrey [Thomas] and Tommy [Lascelles]** he often put in remarks, generally very shrewd, of his own. After official duties for the evening were finished one was free to pursue one’s own night life. He always had a special table reserved for him at the Embassy Club.
There was plenty of hard work for the Prince when he was in England, and in the time he had to himself he continued to see his friends and people he liked who were not always considered ‘suitable’ by the palace, people who amused him or who had simply become familiar enough so that he felt at ease with them. To the Prince, the most important of these friends was Mrs Dudley Ward, a delightful young woman who had two little daughters. He loved the whole family and saw for the first time at close quarters what devotion between a mother and her children could be. His happiest hours were spent with Mrs Dudley Ward, he often dropped in for a chat or they dined with a few friends. Once when he invited her to his box at the Albert Hall for the annual Remembrance Day ceremony, during community singing of
Hullo! Hullo! Who’s your lady friend?
Who’s the little lady by your side?
the great audience of ex-servicemen stood up laughing and clapping and cheering and faced the Prince of Wales’ box where he sat with Mrs Dudley Ward.
In his history of English fox-hunting Raymond Carr says the Prince was ‘a bold horseman.’ He has himself described the fun he had hunting with the Beaufort and then with the great Leicestershire packs. He stayed at Craven Lodge, Melton Mowbray, a club founded by Captain Mike Wardell, where his horses were stabled. A neighbour at Melton, Monica Sheriffe, remembers the Prince: ‘He was always very friendly and fun out hunting. Madly brave and loved by all the farmers. He was so marvellous looking with that golden hair, and fascinating cockney voice.’3 Bruce Ogilvy, who often hunted with him, says he was ‘courageous, loved jumping fences but knew absolutely nothing about hound work. Unless he had had a fall he was always there or thereabouts at the end of a hunt.’ Unfortunately for him, every time he had a fall it made front-page news, with the result that there was a general impression that he never stopped falling. It became a music hall joke. Even in America, Cole Porter wrote a song called ‘Let’s Fall in Love’, which contained the lines:
Snails do it, quails do it,
Horses that have thrown the Prince of Wales do it,
Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.
When he took to riding in point-to-points journalists and photographers gathered in the hope he would fall. He won a race at Hawthorn Hill, but in the Army point-to-point their wish was granted; he fell on his head and was concussed. This was the signal for a letter from the King, in March 1924, telling him to give up steeple-chasing. He must have had the impression that whenever he enjoyed doing something it was banned by the King.
That summer he went to Long Island with a polo team. In the evenings there were parties, and his every move was accompanied by typical American publicity, something which in those days was only just beginning in England. Headlines like ‘PRINCE GETS IN WITH MILKMAN’, or ‘HERE HE IS GIRLS—THE MOST ELIGIBLE BACHELOR YET UNCAUGHT’, were typical. When he got back to London and went to see his father, he found him with a heap of American newspaper cuttings. King George was outraged by their effrontery. The Prince tried vainly to calm him, saying Americans pay little attention to newspaper headlines. Henceforward the King, while avoiding an outright ukase, saw to it that his sons did not go to America; he put irremovable obstacles in their way. This the Prince regretted; he loved America and considered it the country of the future. One piece of effrontery had not hit the headlines. When a newspaper reporter asked the Prince whether if he fell in love with an American girl he would marry her, the laughter which greeted the question drowned the answer. It was ‘yes.’
Mrs Dudley Ward.
The Prince of Wales riding in a point-to-point in March 1924. A bad fall provoked a letter from the King telling him to give up steeple-chasing.<
br />
Not only in America did the Prince get in with the milk. Bruce Ogilvy, his equerry at Windsor Castle during Ascot week, wrote:
He hated it. The guests for the week were not at all young and on the whole not very gay. I used to enjoy it. The food and rum rations were of course super and one could always have a ride or a game of tennis or squash in the morning before going racing.
The evenings were very dull. Penny poker usually, after dinner. Once or twice during the week after everybody had gone to bed HRH and I motored up to London and met Freda Dudley Ward and some of her friends at her house and we used to dance to the gramophone and have supper. On one occasion we were motoring back in the small hours, the Prince driving his own car. There was practically no traffic and he was driving at the rate of knots when a large lorry came out of a side road and very nearly collided with us. The Prince by a brilliant bit of driving switched onto the grass verge. We skidded and humped along for about three hundred yards, eventually getting back on the tarmac safely. I have often wondered what the headlines in the paper next day would have been had there been a bad accident.
