Before Wallis

by Rachel Trethewey

  6

  ‘FREDIE MUMMIE’

  Although they had great fun together, the prince’s relationship with Freda was never just about partying. Edward rarely felt at home in his parents’ palaces, and Freda provided the domesticity he craved. He wanted them both to have their own homes in London where they could meet and have some privacy. He told his mother’s friend and lady-in-waiting, Mabell, Countess of Airlie, that he did not want to marry for a long time, but at 25 he could not live under the same roof as his parents. He needed to be free to lead his own life. He also told the countess that he had stopped spending half an hour before dinner with his mother. As Lady Airlie knew, this time had been very precious to them both. She begged Edward not to stop making these visits to his mother but Queen Mary’s role as confidante was over; she had been usurped by Freda.1

  The prince persuaded the king and queen to let him move out of Buckingham Palace into York House, which was part of the redbrick Tudor St James’s Palace. When the prince first arrived in his new home it was a ‘rabbit warren’ of asymmetrical rooms filled with hideous Victorian furniture.2 Freda helped to create an atmosphere of informal intimacy at York House. She introduced chintzes and lighter panelling. The walls of the sitting room were decorated with survey maps of the world on which the British Empire was marked red. Instead of eating in the formal dining room Freda and the prince would dine on a table in front of the sitting-room fire.3 When friends came around she would sit at his feet leaning against his legs.

  When Freda was not there Edward was lonely rattling around in seventy-five rooms. From 1919, when Freda moved into a grand, Grade I John Nash house in Cumberland Terrace, the prince spent more time there than in his own home. He usually arrived at 5 p.m. and stayed to dinner or until it was time for his evening engagement. He would then return to her house later that night. He told her that he only felt at home in her house.4 As Freda got to know his brothers better, they would also drop in and tell her their troubles. Prince George became great friends with Freda.5

  Freda’s husband, Duddie, seems to have accepted his wife’s relationship with the heir to the throne. There is a photograph of Freda standing between her husband and her lover in the early 1920s; she looks completely composed and in control, casually holding a cigarette in her hand, while the two men look slightly less comfortable. At first Freda and Edward hoped that Duddie did not suspect anything, but as time went on it was inevitable that he became aware of what was going on. For generations, Duddie’s family had served the Crown, and now, as his wife did so in a less conventional way, he chose not to rock the boat. His attitude made the affair possible. It is hard to know William Dudley Ward’s motivation, but it is likely that he would not have wanted the scandal involved in divorcing his wife and the detrimental effect this would have had on his political career and on his daughters. Instead, he and his wife led increasingly separate lives. Freda still attended some constituency events and family weddings with him, but in London they did their own thing.

  Although the prince demanded much of his mistress’s time and energy, he was away for long periods. Always sensible and balanced, Freda developed a very full life of her own. She still sometimes had to play the role of political wife and during the general election of December 1918 she supported Duddie, helping him to campaign in his Southampton constituency. She visited the slums and reported back to the prince about her experience of working people’s homes and her impressions of their general spirits and conditions. She was a good influence on Edward politically. As one biographer has said, she was ‘not the kind of woman a playboy Prince was supposed to want as his playmate’.6 She preferred thinking people to the cocktail set and was very interested in politics. One friend described her as one of the brightest women he had ever known; she had strong opinions and was willing to express them.7 Her husband’s uncle, Lord Esher, wrote to the prince about a lunch he hosted with the Liberal politician Philip Sassoon, the Labour MP and trade union leader Frank Hodges and Herbert Smith, a leader of the Miners’ Federation. When Freda joined them Lord Esher described how she held her own in the ensuing highly political conversation. She was totally at ease with the politicians and debated animatedly with them.8

  The prince was also political but, as he explained in his memoir, he was expected to remain not only above party and faction but be apolitical. He found this particularly difficult because he had an independent and questioning mind.9 Like most of his class, he feared a Labour government, but he believed that the injustices in society should be redressed and he was particularly concerned about poor housing and unemployed ex-servicemen. In 1913, 1.2 per cent of the workforce had been unemployed; by 1920 the figure was 9.8 per cent.10 From 1919 the prince toured the country visiting slums in South Wales and Glasgow, gaining a greater understanding of industry and working men than any of his predecessors. He was no radical crusader, but he did believe in moderate reform. On his Duchy of Cornwall estates, in both the West Country and London, he improved the working conditions and housing for his tenants. Politically, he sympathised most with Lloyd George and the radical wing of the government.11 According to Lloyd George’s private secretary and mistress, Frances Stevenson, the prince and prime minister were fond of each other.12 It seems that Freda and her husband had similar political views. Duddie was a close ally of Lloyd George; the prime minister was the godfather of their youngest daughter, Angie. Although Duddie was not popular in his constituency as he was rarely there due to his additional responsibilities in parliament and at court, he was re-elected.

  Freda was only a part-time wife, but she was a full-time mother. She was devoted to her two girls and they came first for her. There are dozens of photographs of her pretty daughters, dressed identically in various imaginative outfits. From an early age, they appeared in society magazines with their mother. In The Tatler in 1920, there was a full-page photograph of Freda leaning over the back of a chair with her angelic daughters, a mass of ringlets and frills, on either side of her.13 The girls were usually dressed in matching outfits or fancy dress. At a midsummer fete in aid of infants and welfare funds at Ham House, Richmond, Angie appeared as a butterfly with lopsided wings while Pempie pirouetted around as an ethereal fairy.14

  However, the girls were never just designer accessories to Freda’s image. In contrast to many of their contemporaries, in the Dudley Wards’ house there was no divide between the nursery and the drawing room. The girls were included in their mother’s busy social life and she took them with her whenever possible. In 1921 Pempie was photographed with her mother outside Number 12 Downing Street when Freda was visiting her friend Philip Sassoon, the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary.15 It was a case of ‘love me, love my daughters’.16 Freda even put on a new type of ‘half-and-half’ party to entertain her girls and their friends. These occasions were officially children’s parties but ones ‘which grow up a little towards their close and offer just as much for adults as infants’. When Freda gave one of these parties at Philip Sassoon’s Park Lane house, society mothers and their offspring flooded in. A band played upstairs and the girls, dressed as gipsies and dairymaids, danced with their schoolboy partners, who then took them down to tea in the dining room with ‘a most gallant and sophisticated air’. The children were then given balloons and gifts. As one gossip columnist commented, they were ‘half babyish’ with their balloons but then, as they remembered that they were at a party, they flirted with their feather fans ‘with the air of grown-up minxdom which is so amusing’.17 At the end of the party many young men arrived, including the Prince of Wales. They drank cocktails with the glamorous mothers, who then left the children with their nannies before going off for the evening to their more adult parties.

  Early in her relationship, Freda introduced her girls to the prince.18 Edward genuinely adored her children and enjoyed playing with them. He wrote to Sheila Loughborough: ‘I am so fond of those two babies and they are so sweet to me and we all have such fun together sometimes the four
of us!!’19 Pempie and Angie saw so much of their mother’s lover that he was soon treated as an honorary uncle whom they called ‘Little Prince’. He contrasted their close relationship with Freda with his own childhood. He told Angie how lucky she was to have a loving mother.20 Rather than resenting Freda’s bond with her daughters, he relished it. He would come to see the girls when Freda was away and sit with them cutting out patterns and pictures until their bedtime at 7 p.m. He invited them to see a Charlie Chaplin film he was screening and wrote an affectionate letter to Pempie when she had a fever and was unable to come. When they developed flu and then whooping cough he shared Freda’s worries about them and wished that he could join her in her vigil by their bedsides. He never forgot their birthdays. Freda’s younger daughter Angie became very close to the prince. As she grew older he took her on outings and had her to stay without her mother.

  When they were together, Edward and Freda created a happy environment for the girls. They never rowed; Freda told an interviewer that he was the gentlest, kindest, most thoughtful man imaginable.21 Angie recalled how the heir to the throne always gave in to her mother; if she made a proposal to him he would reply, ‘Anything to please, anything to please.’22 Freda explained that if she asked him for anything he was very generous and would give it to her immediately. However, unlike Wallis, she never exploited his generosity. He brought her gifts back from his tours and sent her sentimental presents, but there is no record of him giving her priceless jewellery. Freda used her power over him more for other people’s benefit than her own. She once asked him to bail out a friend of hers who was heavily in debt for several thousand pounds. The prince immediately wrote out a cheque without asking any questions.23

  Soon much of London society and the government knew about Freda and Edward’s trysts. However, the affair was kept secret from the public; there was not a whisper of it in the newspapers and only the couple’s closest friends knew how serious the relationship really was. The prince and Freda were seen playing golf, going to the races and staying at country house parties together. They behaved as if they were a married couple. Edward turned down invitations to parties if Freda was not invited. They most enjoyed socialising in small groups with other couples. When the prince’s equerry, Piers ‘Joey’ Legh, and his girlfriend, Sarah Shaughnessy, were invited to tea with them at Freda’s house, Sarah commented on how natural and happy they seemed together.24 Lady Diana and Duff Cooper also socialised with them. After an amusing lunch party at the house of artist Sir John Lavery and his wife Hazel, Duff noted that Freda seemed only to want to put the prince at his ease and for him to appear at his best. He described her manner towards and about him as ‘perfect’.25 Winston Churchill also met the couple at a dance in Lavery’s studio. After telling his wife, Clementine, about stepping on the prince’s toe while dancing and making him yelp, he added that ‘the little lady’, as he called Freda, was ‘very much to the fore’.26

  When rumours reached the king and queen about their son’s relationship with a married woman they tried to find out more. Their old friend, Lord Esher, who was Duddie’s uncle, was invited to Balmoral, but he refused. Lord Esher was very fond of Freda and always told her to be discreet like Edward VII’s mistress Mrs Keppel.27 He thought that the king knew nothing about the affair, but Queen Mary wanted to know all about Freda. Lord Esher told a friend that he was not willing to be pumped for information and did not want to put his nose into ‘what some day will prove a hornet’s nest’.28

  When his parents eventually asked the prince about his new relationship, he denied it, saying that he did not know Freda better than anyone else. When they later discovered the truth they were horrified. The king snobbishly dubbed Freda ‘the lace-maker’s daughter’. When Freda’s friends heard about this comment they made a joke of it and started calling her ‘Miss Loom’, after the weaver’s daughter in the card game Happy Families.29 Freda knew that the king and queen regarded her as ‘a scarlet woman’. She believed that they were always pushing the prince to marry someone of his own rank.30

  In fact, Freda’s family deserved to be respected. While Rosemary Leveson-Gower had the perfect aristocratic pedigree, Freda Dudley Ward had a model middle-class background. The Birkins represented the backbone of post-war British society. Freda’s parents were highly regarded in Nottingham. Her father had fought bravely in the war; in August 1914, he had raised the 1st/7th Battalion (Robin Hoods), The Sherwood Foresters. Although he was aged 50 and did not need to volunteer, he became their commanding officer and went with them to France. When he led his men into action at the Battle of Hooge in July 1915 his skull was fractured by an explosion, and he was brought home to England in a hospital ship. For a year afterwards, he suffered from the effects of concussion. His injury was to affect him for the rest of his life, leaving him with frequent headaches.31

  Freda’s mother Claire was also very involved in the war effort, working tirelessly as president of the American, French and Belgian Red Cross committees that were formed in Nottingham. She was commandant of a Voluntary Aid Detachment and she turned Lamcote House into an auxiliary hospital for officers. She also acted as a Red Cross searcher, helping families trace men who had been reported missing. Her war work was recognised when she was awarded the Médaille de la Reconnaissance française, the Medaille de la Reine Elisabeth of Belgium and the American Red Cross Medal.

  The Nottingham Journal claimed that if local people were asked, ‘Who is the best-known lady in Nottinghamshire?’, nine out of ten would reply: ‘Mrs Charles Birkin, of course.’32 After the war, Claire became the stalwart supporter of every good cause in the area. She became president of the Women’s Institute and president of the Nottinghamshire Cancer Campaign. She was very warm and inclusive, and her charity fundraising events involved people from all sections of the community. Lamcote House was used to host fetes for her favourite charities, while her family and friends were persuaded to take part in the amateur dramatics she staged.33 Claire was a confident woman with strong opinions. During the 1920s she was very active in the local Conservative association, becoming president of the City of Nottingham Women’s Conservative Association.34 She was such a good public speaker that it was suggested she might stand for parliament.

  Freda had learnt a great deal from her dynamic mother, and even when she was the darling of London society she spent a great deal of time with her family in Nottingham. She often stayed at her parents’ Lamcote House. She drew on her society connections to help her mother’s charity work. One year, Freda, her two daughters and her sisters starred alongside the actress Gladys Cooper in a matinee Mrs Birkin put on at the Empire Theatre, Nottingham, in aid of the Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund of the National Union of Journalists.35 Another year, Freda and her friends appeared in a series of tableaux arranged as Dresden porcelain figures from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Freda posed as ‘Summer’, one of the Four Seasons.36 Flushed with their theatrical success, Claire formed ‘Mrs Birkin’s Players’. They put on plays Freda had adapted from children’s books in the village hall at Radcliffe-on-Trent. Pempie and Angie took the lead roles in front of an audience of children from the village school. The performances raised money for ‘Miss Penelope Dudley Ward’s fund for the Children’s Hospital, Vincent Square, London’.37

  Although Freda pretended to her parents that she was just friends with the heir to the throne, they soon recognised the reality. It seems that her father disapproved of his daughter’s adulterous relationship as much as the royal parents did. Edward complained that he was not invited to lunch at Lamcote when he was picking Freda up. At first, it was hoped by both sets of parents that the prince’s long trips abroad would undermine the relationship. After the popularity Edward achieved during the war, Prime Minister David Lloyd George saw him as one of the country’s greatest assets in securing the loyalty of the empire. It was at the prime minister’s suggestion that throughout the 1920s the heir to the throne was sent on a series of tours to thank the countries of the dominions a
nd colonies for their contribution to the war and build a bond between those countries and their future king. In August 1919 Edward went to Canada for three months. Initially, Freda had considered being there at the same time as him because Duddie had business interests in Canada. She consulted Sarah Shaughnessy, the girlfriend of the prince’s equerry Joey Legh, about it. Freda told Sarah how unkind people were gossiping about her relationship with Edward. Sarah advised her not to go to Canada as it would fuel further gossip, so Freda reluctantly decided to stay in England.38

  Before their tearful goodbye, Freda and the prince exchanged spider mascots; Edward had a ‘Mrs Thpider’ seal on his watch-chain while Freda kept ‘Mr Thpider’. As Edward set sail on HMS Renown he wrote to his lover to tell her that both he and Mrs Thpider were crying inside. Once in Canada Edward was mobbed wherever he went. His boyish vulnerability and charm made a tremendous impression. As he spoke in his slightly cockney accent, he seemed eager to please and friendly.39 He symbolised youth and hope for the future. During the trip, his right hand became so bruised from endless handshaking that he had to use his left. Girls threw themselves at him; 14-year-olds would jump on his car and ask for a kiss, while others would wait for hours to give him flowers or chocolates. Newspapers noted with whom he danced and how many times. However, Edward assured his lover that he was not attracted to anyone but her. This was not the whole truth; he had a flirtation with Sarah Shaughnessy, who was in Canada visiting her family. At first their conversations were about Freda, but soon the prince was dancing with Sarah most evenings. He paid her so much attention that their friends on the trip thought he might propose. Sarah was an American and the daughter-in-law of a British peer. As she had been widowed in the war she was free to marry. Edward’s other equerry, Claud Hamilton, and Sarah’s friend Lady Joan Mulholland thought such a match would be a good thing and ‘save the British Empire’. They agreed to do their best to make it happen, but they admitted there were two difficulties standing in the way: Freda and Joey.40 Inevitably, nothing came of the plan; in 1920 Sarah married Joey Legh.41 As usual, the prince told Freda half the story. He played down just how much he danced with Sarah and how attractive he found her, instead emphasising that he only thought of her as a link to Freda. Although they could not marry, Edward assured his mistress that he considered himself to be a ‘married man’ and she was his ‘little wife’.42