The German Documents
On 12 April 1945, Captain David Silverberg, part of the American First Army, was advancing through the Harz Mountains when he came across an abandoned German vehicle with papers strewn around it. Stopping to look at the papers, he noticed that one was signed by Joachim von Ribbentrop. His interest was aroused and he quickly found whole archives located in local castles, including a copy of the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact at the nearby Schloss at Degenershausen. It was the almost complete archive of the German Foreign Ministry and a verifiable treasure trove.
As the material was in the Soviet zone of occupation, it was quickly moved to Marburg Castle in the American zone – some 400 tons of documents transported in a convoy of 237 trucks in shuttles over several days – where they were examined by a team under Dr Ralph Perkins of the State Department and Colonel Robert Thomson of the Foreign Office.
There were to be other discoveries. Karl Loesch, the assistant to Hitler’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt, had been captured and was now bartering his freedom for some sensational information. Loesch, who had an English mother and had been at Oxford, approached Thomson and, in return for safe passage, led him to a large country house above the village of Schönberg, twenty-five miles from Mühlhausen, telling him that a microfilm set of the ministry’s most confidential papers had been made by Ribbentrop in 1943.1
‘We had to descend, rather uncomfortably, a steep ravine banked with pine trees,’ wrote Thomson in his report. ‘Our guide halted at a certain spot where he and Captain Folkard with iron bars soon scraped the soil from a waterproof cape covering a large battered metal can. This Captain Folkard brought to the top of the declivity and placed under guard at the mansion.’2
There they found buried further microfilm files of the German Foreign Ministry in several metal suitcases. One series from State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker was entitled ‘German-British Relations’ and included a volume on the Duke of Windsor, which would come to be called the ‘Marburg File’. The material was immediately removed for safekeeping to SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). There the British, realising the sensitivity of the material, immediately tried to prevent its sharing with the Americans, but two copies had already been made. One was now in the United States at the State Department.
The documents were flown to the SIS technical branch at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, where the Foreign Office’s historical adviser, Ernest Llewellyn Woodward, declared the Loesch cache authentic. On 30 May, the MI5 officer Guy Liddell noted in his diary:
Bill Cavendish-Bentinck rang me up about the case of Carl von Loesch, who was formerly attaché to Ribbentrop’s dienststelle in this country. He has come into possession of the secret archives of the German Foreign Office. They had been photographed and at the last moment it was decided to burn them. Von Loesch managed to bury them and the SD who were doing the job merely burned the empty boxes thinking they were burning the archives.3
By July 1945, the State Department had accumulated 750,000 documents and microfilm and by August, 1,200 tons of files were held under joint Anglo-American control inside the American zone. The Loesch material was especially important, showing the close collaboration between Hitler and Franco, the text of non-aggression agreements made between Germany and the Soviet Union immediately prior to the Second World War, and the revelation that Oswald Mosley had been funded by Mussolini’s government.
On 19 June, there was a meeting at the Foreign Office to discuss the ‘finds’ of German and Italian documents. ‘We are left with an embarrassingly large quantity of documents (far more than we expected), which throw light on every major aspect of German and Italian policy,’ stated one memo.4
‘The whole Windsor problem has recently been complicated by the discovery among the German Foreign Office archives at Marburg of a set of top-secret telegrams between Ribbentrop and Stohrer (German Ambassador in Madrid), regarding certain alleged overtures made to the Windsors by German agents when they were marooned in Portugal in May 1940,’ wrote Tommy Lascelles in his diary on 12 August:
If the Windsors’ reactions were as implied in this correspondence (which both Godfrey Thomas, to whom I showed them, and I agree cannot be wholly discounted; internal evidence indicates that there is at any rate, a substratum of truth in it), the result is, to say the least, highly damaging to themselves. Only one other copy of this set of telegrams is said to be in existence, and that is in American hands; the Foreign Office are taking steps to recover it. Meanwhile, I advised the King to discuss the whole thing with Bevin, and to urge him to let both Winston and Walter Monckton read the telegrams.5
The next day the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, advised the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee – a Labour government had just been elected – that ‘we should try to persuade the United States Government to co-operate with us in suppressing the documents concerned’ and felt ‘a disclosure would in my opinion do grave harm to the national interest.’6
On 15 August, VJ Day, Lascelles cornered Lord Halifax after the King and Queen appeared on the balcony at Buckingham Palace ‘and made him read the Marburg telegrams. I had actually received them from the Foreign Office the day before, but had deliberately withheld them from the King, thinking that they would certainly upset him and that he should not be troubled with them on the eve of making two major speeches.’7
Two days later, the Chiefs of Staff Joint Intelligence Sub Committee met to discuss the ‘Release of Captured German Documents’ and decided that publication should be deferred and the circulation of the documents restricted.8 On 20 August, the British sent an aide-mémoire formally asking the State Department to destroy the Windsor file or hand it over to the British for ‘safekeeping’, arguing, ‘It will be appreciated that the documents in question have no bearing on war crimes or on the general history of the war.’9
Guy Liddell of MI5 saw Lascelles at his club on 23 August, Liddell recording in his diary the next day, how he was then taken to:
look at certain papers on which he wanted advice. These papers were in fact German Foreign Office telegrams which had been found at Marburg . . . The telegrams in question were dated about June – July 1940 and sent by Stohrer and Hoyneigen-Huehne (sic), the German ambassadors in Madrid and Lisbon respectively to Ribbentrop.10
He continued, ‘There were also some from Ribbentrop to the ambassadors and one I think either to or from Abetz. The fact that Abetz had something to do with the scheme subsequently revealed in the telegrams might suggest that Charles Bedaux was behind the whole thing.’11
Liddell added that ‘the Duke was staying in Lisbon as the guest of Esperito Santo Silva, the head of the bank of that name, which of course is known to us as an agency for the transmission of funds to German agents’:12
He clearly rather felt himself in the role of mediator, if his country had finally collapsed, but he did not think the moment opportune for any sort of intervention . . . Before the Duke left he fixed up, according to the telegrams, some kind of code with Espirito Santo Silva in order that he might fly back to Portugal from Florida if his intervention was required. It was further stated that about 15 August a telegram had been received from the Bahamas by Espirito Santo asking whether the moment had arrived.13
MI5 began to check telegrams sent during the period and decided to interrogate Walter Schellenberg, who was now in Allied custody. ‘Ernest Bevin is au fait with all the information given above and is endeavouring to recover the copies and films of the telegrams in question since, if by any chance they leaked to the American press, a very serious situation would be created. 14
He continued:
I gather that Censorship obtained during the early days of the war a telegram from Madame Bedaux to the Duchess in the Bahamas which seemed to be of a singularly compromising nature. There were a lot of blanks in this telegram but the sense of it seemed to be that the question of either the Duke’s mediation or of his restoration was discussed at some previous date and Madame Bedaux was anxious to know whether he was now prepared to say yes or no.15
Attlee decided to share details of the captured documents with Churchill, writing, ‘Although clearly little or no credence can be placed in the statements made, nevertheless I feel sure that you will agree that publication of these documents might do the greatest possible harm.’16 ‘I am in entire agreement with the course proposed by the Foreign Secretary and approved by you,’ Churchill replied the next day. ‘I earnestly trust it may be possible to destroy all traces of these German intrigues.’17
On 5 September, the 490-page dossier was signed out from Marburg on the orders of General Eisenhower, then the military governor of the American occupation zone, and sent to the Foreign Office. With the original at the Foreign Office and a microfilmed copy at the State Department, the only other existing copy of the Windsor file was the microfilm in British possession. It was promptly destroyed. The battle between British officialdom and American academia was about to begin.
On 27 August, David Harris, a Stanford University history professor seconded to the State Department as Assistant Chief of Central European Affairs, sent a memo to his boss John Hickerson, arguing that the Windsor file had historical value and the episode was a ‘significant chapter in German and Spanish manoeuvres toward a negotiated peace with the United Kingdom in 1940’, continuing that:
in my judgement the documents are an essential part of the diplomatic record of 1940. There is I believe a moral responsibility resting on this government to preserve all the records in its possession, an obligation which takes precedence over a tender feeling for the ultimate reputation of the Duke of Windsor.18
The arguments raged over the autumn until in October, the new American Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, informed Lord Halifax that for legal and historical reasons, the United States would not destroy the Marburg file, but provided a sop. The Windsor file would not be mentioned at the Nuremberg trials and ‘The British Government is assured, however, that the Department of State will take all possible precautions to prevent any publicity with respect to the documents in its possession relative to the Duke of Windsor without prior consultation with the British Government.’19
* * *
It was not only the Windsors whose private messages were being discussed. On 14 May, Tommy Lascelles recorded in his diary that Queen Mary, who had spent the weekend at Windsor, had sent for him ‘ostensibly to discuss the possibility of guarding against the heirs of the Duke of Cambridge making undesirable use of two boxes of his letters deposited in their names in Coutts bank.’ More importantly, he was alerted to the correspondence between the Duke of Connaught and his long-term mistress Leonie Leslie, Winston Churchill’s aunt.20
The King was exercised about what might happen to them and Sir Owen Morshead, the Royal Librarian, was asked to rescue them.21 This was to be just one of several missions by members of the Royal Household during 1945 to ‘liberate’ papers and artifacts in Germany for ‘safe-keeping’.
At the beginning of August, Morshead and Anthony Blunt, recently appointed Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and still a member of MI5, left by military plane for Germany. En route they went to Schloss Wolfsgarten, where they interviewed Prince Louis of Hesse.22 Officially, their mission was to recover correspondence at Schloss Kronberg between Queen Victoria and her eldest daughter, the Princess Royal, who had married Frederick III of Prussia in 1858.
The 4,000 letters known as the ‘Vicky letters’ were kept at the schloss just outside Frankfurt, which was the main residence of George VI’s cousins, the von Hessen family. The letters contained details of Queen Victoria’s relationship from the age of fifteen with the Captain of the Royal Horse Guards, the 13th Lord Elphinstone, twelve years her senior, who, when the affair was discovered in 1836, was exiled to India as Governor of Madras.23
Guy Liddell noted in his diary on 15 August, ‘Anthony has returned from Germany and has brought with him Queen Victoria’s letters to the Empress Frederick. They are only on loan.’24 The 73-year-old Princess Margaret of Hesse had agreed to the transfer of the letters, but the problem was that the Americans were less keen to surrender any property. Kathleen Nash, the female American captain in charge of the castle, which had been commandeered as a social club, said she could not let any papers go as they were the property of the US Army. Whilst Blunt distracted her, the packing cases of documents were loaded onto a waiting lorry.25
Yet Blunt’s role in the collection of the letters seems to have been minor. In his report of the rescue, Morshead hardly mentioned Blunt and only justified his presence ‘since he had in any case to go out to Germany on business I had brought him with me, for agreeable companionship and because his German is excellent.’26 So why was Blunt there? What other business did he have? Morshead may have removed Vicky’s letters, but no artwork was taken and Blunt simply made an inventory of thirty-one English works that belonged to the Empress.27
From Kronberg, Blunt travelled to Schloss Marienburg, near Saxony, property of the Princes von Hanover. Prince Ernst August von Hanover was close to the Nazi hierarchy – he had joined the SS in 1933 – and there was concern that some correspondence there might reveal pro-German sentiment by British royals. There was also a worry that important cultural artifacts might fall into the hands of the advancing Soviets.28
In 1979, Blunt was publicly revealed to have been a Russian spy since the 1930s, though he had privately confessed to the intelligence services in 1964. The MI5 officer Peter Wright, who interrogated him, was informed by the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, that Blunt had undertaken an ‘assignment . . . on behalf of the Palace – a visit to Germany.’ Wright was told not to ‘pursue the matter . . . strictly speaking it is not relevant to considerations of national security.’29
It looks like the trip to Kronberg was a cover for a fishing expedition, which suggests there was something else the Royal Family was worried about. ‘George VI had every reason to believe that the Hesse archives might contain a “Windsor file”, because Prince Philipp of Hesse had been an intermediary, via the Duke of Kent, between Hitler and the Duke of Windsor,’ claimed Prince Wolfgang of Hesse to the Sunday Times.
It was a belief supported by the wartime intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper, later Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University.30 It is confirmed by Andrew Sinclair, who spent eighteen months researching a biography of Vicky, The Other Victoria, who wrote that Blunt had retrieved ‘the Duke of Windsor’s correspondence with his German princely cousins, some of whom held high office in the Nazi party.’31
John Loftus, a lawyer with the US Justice Department, interviewed two former US military intelligence officers from the SHAEF T-groups attached to General Patton’s forces, who confirmed they had seen references to communications between the Duke of Windsor and Hitler. The documents had been found in a ‘villa that was owned by a close relative of the Duke which was occupied as an American officer’s club.’32
Douglas Price, an aide to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was stationed at Friedrichshof in the summer of 1945. In the library he found an ornate cabinet containing letters between the Hesse family and the Duke of Windsor, dating back to when he had been Prince of Wales. It seems that these were the documents that Blunt had been sent to retrieve.33
According to the intelligence magazine Lobster, Blunt had also been sent to retrieve the minutes of the Duke of Windsor’s 1937 meeting with Hitler, which were missing from the captured German documents.34
Donald Cameron Watt, the British historian who was part of the team dealing with the captured German documents at Whaddon Hall, later told the Sunday Times:
Among the 400 tons of documents there was a section relating to the Duke of Windsor. Everything we thought should have been in this file was indeed there – with one exception. For example, we found all the Lisbon material and we found accounts of Windsor’s conversations with Ribbentrop and various German officials. The exception was there was no account of the conversation with Hitler in October 1937. There was simply no trace of this in the archives.35
The Windsors, unaware of what was happening with the captured documents, quietly left the Bahamas for Miami in early May 1945. They spent time with friends in Palm Beach, and then spent several months at a flat at the Waldorf Towers in New York, whilst they decided what to do. The Duke had lost $100,000 drilling for non-existent oil on his Canadian ranch and needed to make up his losses. He briefly toyed with the idea of a business career in America and visited Cleveland, Ohio, at the end of June to study industrial methods, courtesy of Robert Young, but decided it was not for him. In July, they were the guests of the Canadian philanthropist and banker Isaak Killan at his fishing lodge in New Brunswick, causing British officials to worry he might be lobbying to become Canadian governor general.36
In August, they stayed at the Washington embassy as the guest of Sir John Balfour, the First Secretary. Balfour had met the Duke pre-war and had always felt ‘in spite of the hold on popular affection which he had acquired as Prince of Wales, he was unfitted to be King . . . My disquiet about the King was heightened by reports that innate pro-German sympathies were colouring his views on the subject of Nazi Germany.’37
Balfour found no reason on his visit to revise his opinion, regarding him as ‘a mixed-up, unstable character’:
On the third evening of his stay, the Duke asked us to invite to dinner an elderly American friend of his – a railroad tycoon named Young. Both of them seemed oblivious to Nazi misdeeds and were at one in thinking that, had Hitler been differently handled, war with Germany might have been avoided in 1939.38
By September, the Windsors were back in Paris. Duff Cooper, recently appointed British ambassador in Paris, reported that the Duke ‘seems to be making himself a bit of a nuisance, “talking big” to various French officials whom he meets at dinner, and telling them how to run their own country, which naturally they don’t like. He was always given to holding forth, and indeed, as long ago as 1926, showed increasing signs of becoming a hearth-rug bore; with increasing years, he may be developing George IV’s tendency to arrogate to himself capabilities, and performances which are actually beyond him . . .’39
His wife, Lady Diana Cooper, equally disparaging, thought ‘both looking as thin as if just out of Belsen. She grown a little more common, and he more pointless, dull and insipid.’40
Shortly afterwards the Duke flew to London, staying at Marlborough House with Queen Mary. He had two objectives – to secure acceptance of Wallis from his family and a job from the new Labour Government. He failed on both counts. It was the first time he had seen his mother since 1936 and his brother since 1940 and the reunions, according to Tommy Lascelles, went ‘far better than expected’, but ‘I gather that the King has at last convinced him that there is no possibility of his Duchess ever being “received” or getting the title HRH.’41
‘Quite like old times; very well informed, knew everything that was going on,’ Queen Mary told Owen Morshead about the visit. ‘But still persisting about my receiving his wife, when he promised he’d never mention the subject to me again. His last words when he was going away – “Well goodbye – and don’t forget: I’m a married man now.” Don’t forget, indeed: as if one ever could!’42
There was equally little comfort from Attlee. The Duke had hoped there might be a role for him as an Ambassador at Large in the United States. ‘I would concentrate on the public relations aspect . . . Such a job would require my bringing Americans and visiting Britons together, providing a good table and a comfortable library for informal talks and helping along what Winston Churchill called “the mixing-up process”.’43
But there was the continuing concern, as Halifax reported to the Foreign Office, that ‘press reports of society engagements in Newport, New York and Long Island would, as they have done before, tell heavily the other way.’44 And there were the questions about some of his associates. ‘The Duke has certain disagreeable personal skeletons in his cupboard – e.g., Axel Gren, Bedaux and Ricardo Espírito Santo Silva, all proven German agents,’ wrote Lascelles in his diary, after the Duke had asked to be made Ambassador at Buenos Aires. ‘No professional diplomat with such associations would ever be given an important embassy – or indeed employed anywhere.’45
Sir Alexander Cadogan noted in his diary at the same time that ‘the King fussed about the Duke of Windsor’s file and the captured German documents.’46
But Churchill could see the merit of giving the Duke something to do. As he told the King, ‘I would even go so far as to say that there might be serious disadvantages in utterly casting off the Duke of Windsor and his wife from all official contact with Great Britain, and leaving him in a disturbed and distressed state of mind to make his own life in the United States.’47
In mid-November, Churchill spent the day with the couple in Paris and drew up a memo, ‘Concerning His Desire for Official Work in America after 1945’.48 But nothing was forthcoming.
In March 1946, Tommy Lascelles suggested to Halifax that the Duke buy a house:
somewhere in the southern states, and make it a centre of private hospitality . . . where he could bring together worthwhile Americans, English and foreigners . . . with this he could continue some line of his own (stock-raising, arboriculture, agricultural research, etc.) which would give him an interest, and which, with his considerable means, he could well afford to do on a useful and even profitable scale . . . The King feels strongly . . . that the USA is the only place in which he can live, and that he should be urged to make it his permanent home as soon as possible. He must not settle in the UK . . . The King hoped if Duke did settle in US it would be possible for British Embassy to establish a friendly and unofficial relationship with the Duke whereby HRH’s wish to make himself useful in the sphere of Anglo-American understanding may be encouraged, and when necessary, controlled by private advice.49
The problem with the United States was taxation. The Duke had considerable wealth and, since diplomatic status was not being offered, he had no wish to pay tax, especially if it was backdated. Kenneth de Courcy, the editor of a series of international finance and intelligence magazines who had suggested the Duke adopt the role of roving foreign affairs expert lobbying those in power, continued to press the couple to stay close to the Royal Family and to:
set up a suitable home in England which should, at first, be visited for very short, sharp and brief periods for business and private purposes only . . . I think the public and the government should be allowed slowly to get used to the idea of Your Royal Highness and the Duchess coming over for private purposes from time to time. Slowly and wisely the thing could become habitual and presently the whole thing would be accepted by everyone as perfectly normal and harmless.50
Hearing that Fort Belvedere, which had been abandoned during the war, might be sold or leased, the Duke offered to buy it back. It was immediately taken off the market.51
It was clear that the couple’s exile was to be permanent.
1 Details of the collection at the National Archives can be found at http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C8595, and the Loesch letter at FO 371/46712, TNA.
2 The Thomson report, quoted Andrew Morton, 17 Carnations: The Windsors, the Nazis and the Cover-Up (O’Mara, 2015), p. 245.
3 Liddell diary, 30 May 1945, KV4/196, TNA.
4 ‘Notes for 19 June meeting’, FO 371/46713, TNA.
5 Duff Hart-Davis (ed.), King’s Counsellor, p. 351.
6 Bevin to Atlee, 13 August 1945, FO 800/521.
7 Duff Hart-Davis (ed.), King’s Counsellor, p. 352.
8 CAB 79/37/21, TNA.
9 Record Group 59, CDF, 1945–9, 862.4016-862.42, Box 6836, NARA.
10 Guy Liddell diary, 24 August 1945, KV 4/466, TNA.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Attlee to Churchill, 25 August 1945, Annex D CAB 301/179, TNA.
17 Churchill to Attlee, 26 August 1945, Annex D, CAB 301/179, TNA.
18 Harris to Hickerson, 27 August 1945, Record Group 59, Lot File 78D441, Historical Office Records relating to the German Documents Project, 1944–83, Box 6, Historical Office, National Archives, quoted Morton, 17 Carnations, p. 282.
19 Byrnes to Halifax, 11 October 1945, Record Group 59, Lot File 78D441, Box 13 Historical Office, National Archives, quoted Morton, 17 Carnations, p. 284.
20 The relationship lasted from the mid-1890s until the Duke’s death in 1942.
21 Duff Hart-Davis (ed.), King’s Counsellor, pp. 324–5.
22 OMGUS Records, p. 130, Ardelia Hall Collection, NARA.
23 The story is told in Roland Perry’s The Queen, Her Lover And the Most Notorious Spy In History (Allen & Unwin, 2014).
24 Guy Liddell diary, 15 August 1945, KV4/ 466A, TNA. Cf. US Colonel John Allen memo, ‘on 3 August 1945, however, the Victoria letters were officially received by Sir Owen Morshead and Major A.F. Blunt for transfer to Windsor Castle, England’, RG 260, OMGUS Education and Cultural Relations, Box 226, Colonel John Allen to G-5 USFET, 6 August 1946, NARA, quoted Jonathan Petropoulos, Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 338.
25 The Vicky letters were returned in December 1951 and can now be seen at Schloss Fasanerie. The Morshead/Blunt mission is documented in RG 260, OMGUS Education and Cultural Relations, Box 226, Colonel John Allen to G-5 USFET, 6 August 1946, NARA, quoted Petropoulos, p. 338. Also RA M SS A/1 report of Owen Morshead, 9 August 1945, and RA MSS Sir Owen Morshead’s Mission to Germany 3–5 August 1945, quoted Petropoulos, p. 339. The visit alerted Nash that there might be other valuables in the castle. Together with her boyfriend, later her husband, Colonel Jack Durant, she stole the family’s fabled collection of jewellery, worth up to $6 million. Quickly apprehended, Nash was sentenced to five years and Durant to fifteen years. Only a small percentage of what had been stolen was ever recovered.
26 RA Add M SS A/1, report of Owen Morshead, 9 August 1945, quoted Petropoulos, p. 339.
27 ‘Hesse Crown Jewels Court-Martial’, p. 95, NARA.
28 Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt (Macmillan, 2001), p. 316. Details of the mission to Duke of Brunswick can be found in FO 371/65327, TNA.
29 Peter Wright, Spycatcher (Viking, 1987), p. 223.
30 C. Simpson, Leitch and Knightley, ‘Blunt was Emissary’, Sunday Times, 25 November 1979.
31 Andrew Sinclair, London Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 18, 24 September 2015.
32 John Loftus interview, John Costello, Mask of Treachery (Collins, 1988), p. 461.
33 Interview Douglas Price, Edward VIII: Traitor King (Channel 4, 1996).
34 Lobster, summer 2015, referencing a Daily Telegraph report from 1978.
35 Sunday Times, 25 November 1979.
36 See DO 127/54, TNA.
37 ‘Encounters with the Windsors’, p. 5, Sir John Balfour papers, Columbia University.
38 Ibid, pp. 8–9. He writes in similar vein in his autobiography: John Balfour, Not Too Correct an Aureole (Michael Russell, 1983), p. 108.
39 Lascelles Diary, 9 November 1945, Duff Hart-Davis (ed.), King’s Counsellor, p. 367.
40 Lascelles Diary, 11 October 1945, Counsellor, p. 361.
41 Lascelles diary, 6 October 1945, Counsellor, pp. 356–7.
42 Owen Morshead, ‘Notes on conversation with Queen Mary’, 18 February 1946, A AEC/GG/12/OS/2, quoted Shawcross, p. 600.
43 New York Daily News, 11–16 December 1966.
44 Halifax to FO, 4 March 1946, RA GV EE 13/48, quoted Ziegler, p. 506.
45 Lascelles diary, 5 October 1945, Counsellor, pp. 355–6.
46 Cadogan diary, 25 October 1945, ACAD/1/15, Churchill College Archives.
47 Churchill to George VI, 18 November 1945, RA GV EE 13/41, quoted Ziegler, p. 505.
48 It is reproduced in Bloch, Secret File, pp. 315–18.
49 Halifax papers, A4.410.4.10, quoted Sarah Bradford, King George VI (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), pp. 445–6.
50 Kenneth de Courcy to the Duke of Windsor, 14 March 1946, de Courcy, Box 3, Folder 5, Hoover Institute.
51 In 1955 it was sold to his nephew Hon. Gerald Lascelles on a 99-year lease, which was taken up in 1976 by the son of the Emir of Dubai. Edward & Mrs Simpson was filmed there in 1978.