That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (51 page)

Read That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor Online

Authors: Anne Sebba

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Royalty, #Rich & Famous

BOOK: That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
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The Duchess at a gala opening of the New Lido Revue in Paris, December 1959, displaying a variety of jewellery including the articulated panther bracelet, made by Cartier with her in mind and sold in London for the second time in 2010.
 
A rare fashion faux pas – the Duchess chatting to Mrs Aileen Plunkett at a Paris party in 1966 where both women are in the same dress, a stri
py shift by Givenchy.
 
Wallis looking elegant in a plain dark coat with white fur stole in London in 1967. This was a dedication ceremony for a statue to commemorate the centenary of the birth of her mother-in-law, Queen Mary.
 
The frail Duke, leaving the London Clinic in 1965 following an operation on his eye, flanked by nurses with the Duchess l
eading the way.
 
5 June 1972. The funeral of the Duke of Windsor at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Queen Elizabeth II is followed by the Duchess, veiled, and the Duke of Edinburgh.
 
Th
e Duchess looking haggard, May 1980. She was already ill but survived another six painful and reclusive years.
 
30 April 1986. The Queen Mother (
top right
) watches as the coffin of the Duchess of Windsor is carried
by Welsh Guards down the steps of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, before being laid to rest next to the Duke at Frogmore.
 
1
In 2009 this newly restored building reopened, trading on its connections with Wallis Warfield but refurbished in a splendid style which she would not have recognized.
 
2
In 1912, Governor Woodrow Wilson signed the country’s first mosquito-control law which declared malaria a reportable disease.
 
 
4
That year, Gull published his paper ‘Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica)’, in which he described two cases of young women he had treated for severe weight loss and two others treated by other physicians.
 
5
For example, the Prince wrote to Freda Dudley Ward on 13 December 1918: ‘I’ve got a major attached to me … & he seems alright though I think he’s a Jew; anyhow he looks it!!’ (Rupert Godfrey (ed.),
Letters from a Prince
(Warner Books 1999), p. 146).
 
6
Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic, had also been married twice, and twice widowed, by the tim
e she met the Prince of Wales, later King George IV, in 1784. They were married secretly the following year, though the marriage was considered invalid. The King married again, Caroline of Brunswick, in 1795, but continued his relationship with Mrs Fitzherbert.
 
7
In 1937 this was adapted as
Storm in a Teacup
, a film starring Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison, which acquired cult status as a minor British comedy classic.
 
8
In 1941 Lord Sefton married Wallis’s divorced friend, Josephine ‘Foxy’ Gwynne.
 
 
9
Queen Victoria’s faithful servant, with whom she was rumoured to have had an affair.
10
Years later, inexplicably taking his only son to show him the hotel, Ernest still refused to divulge the identity of Buttercup Kennedy, who was probably the boy’s mother.
 
11
Wallis, presumably funded by the King, later paid back these costs to Ernest under an agreement they had between them, according to Michael Bloch. This is further evidence of collusion. Wallis herself
refers to some IOUs in a letter to Ernest (
Wallis and Edward: Letters 1931 – 37: The Intimate Correspondence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor
, ed. Michael Bloch (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1986), p. 206, and private archive).
 
12
Nancy Dugdale has a more circumspect ve
rsion of Baldwin’s suggestion to which the King is supposed to have responded, ‘Mrs S is a lady’ (Nancy Dugdale diary, Crathorne Papers).
 
13
Nanc
y Dugdale later added that Baldwin, on reading this diary in February 1939, maintained that the exchange had occurred at Fort Belvedere on the occasion of his last meeting with the King. ‘TLD [Tommy Dugdale] says he is quite certain SB is mistaken and that the exchange is rightly placed in this interview at Buckingham Palace (Nancy Dugdale diary).
 
14
At least two kings in the eighth century, Ine and Ceolwulf, gave up their thrones voluntarily and embraced religion.
 
15
The only organization working openly for the Duke’s return was an obscure group called the Society of Octavians, membership of which was never more than a few hundreds, the majority of whom were Fascists. According to the police, ‘no person of any prominence has so far identified with them other th
an [the novelist] Compton Mackenzie, who is a member … generally speaking they are innocuous’ (HO 144/22448, Special Branch, 5 Jan. 1939, Note to Commissioner marked ‘secret’, NA PRO).
 
16
After the war, the new French government investigated Bedaux’s wartime activities and, on evidence that he had in fact sabotaged German factory production and protected Jewish property, awarded him a posthumous knighthood of the Légion d’Honneur. Fern lived on at Candé until 1974.
 
17
By early June 1941 most of the Balkans had fallen into Axis hands, culminating in the capture of Crete by German and Italian forces on 1 June 1941.
 
18
Henry was for a second time bundled off to America and did not see his father again until he was eight, by which time Ernest had married for the fourth time, a deeply happy marriage at last to the widowed Avril Leveson-Gower. Henry was sent to Harrow, an unhappy experience where he was teased for being the son of Ernest Simpson. Shortly after he left school Ernest also died. Henry was never really to know his father. In what he perceived to be a final ao bg tct of vindictiveness against her younger brother, knowing how hard Ernest had tried to conceal it, Maud decided after Ernest’s death to share some family secrets with Henry, principally that his grandfather was born Jewish and had changed his name from Solomon(s). This knowledge persuaded Henry to change his own name by deed poll to Aaron (or Aharon) Solomons in 1962 and emigrate to Israel, where he lived for many years, brought up a family and served in the Israeli army.
 
19
The Fort was eventually leased to the Hon. Gerald Lascelles, a nephew of the Duke, who had been imprisoned in Colditz and was a distant relation of his former Private Secretary.
 
20
Kathleen Kennedy married William ‘Billy’ Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, in May 1944. He was killed in combat three months later. Although widowed, she was at the heart of British society.
 
21
Gone with the Windsors
was such a good title that it was used again in 2005 by Laurie Graham for a work of fiction about the couple.
 

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