Governor
The entry of America into the war ended all talk of a negotiated peace and made protection of the Duke ever more important. At the end of March 1941, Montgomery Hyde, during his security inspection of the Bahamas, had been appalled that there were no proper passport checks, security files were kept in the Governor’s private office rather than the Colonial Secretariat, defence was limited to thirty ‘coastal watchers’, and there were only two guns larger than machine guns.
Now a year later, Churchill, remembering Operation Willi, provided a Personal Minute for the Chiefs of Staff Committee. ‘The danger is of a kidnapping party from a submarine. The Germans would be very glad to get hold of the Duke and use him for their own purposes. In my opinion continued protection against an attack by 50 men during darkness should be provided. Very considerable issues are involved.’1 There was also a concern that occupation of the islands could provide a base for attacks against the United States.
The Americans agreed to set up air and sea reconnaissance stations in New Providence and a string of intelligence posts throughout the islands, and a squadron of bombers and fighters were put on call in Florida. In March, a company of Cameron Highlanders arrived for the defence of Nassau and Government House, reinforcing the existing protection of an armed police guard of four NCOs and twelve men.
At the end of April 1942, after long, secret negotiations between London, Washington and Nassau, in which the Duke had played an active part, it was announced a major base would be constructed under Lend-Lease by the Americans on New Providence using local labour. The Bahamas were now to be a staging post for transport command for planes built in California en route to service in North Africa, a school of operational training for the RAF, and a base for ocean patrol and air-sea rescue work during the anti-submarine campaign in the Caribbean and West Atlantic. The building programme came to be called ‘The Project’. The security and economic problems would be sorted in one go.
The Duke had embarked on his governorship with ambitious plans for reform. John Dye, the American consul in Nassau, thought his opening of the Legislature in October 1940 ‘one of the most sensible and business like that had been delivered by a local Governor for many years . . . It may be true that he and his Duchess were sent out here to get rid of them, so to speak, but he is taking his job seriously and is showing a keen interest in the welfare of the Bahamas.’2
The new Governor made clear his reformist intentions saying that he would appoint an Advisory Board to look at wages and that he wished to encourage local enterprise, improve working conditions and deal with unemployment. However, he soon ran into opposition. Technically the wartime Defence Regulations gave him dictatorial powers, but the island’s government was complicated and the Governor’s powers limited.
Assisting the Governor on the Executive Council was his deputy the Colonial Secretary, Leslie Heape, and the Attorney General, Eric Hallinan. ExCo, as it was more often known, set policy on issues like immigration, but it had no money raising powers. That was the prerogative of the twenty members of the lower chamber, the House of Assembly, who were elected every seven years. This was dominated by local merchants, called the Bay Street Boys, as most of their businesses were located on Bay Street in Nassau.
The Bay Street Boys were corrupt, reactionary and they ruled entirely in their own self-interest rather than for the 90 per cent Black population. As they made most of their money importing food and drink and the House of Assembly earned revenue from import duties, there was no incentive to improve local agriculture. The Bay Street Boys kept non-whites out of public life – they were not even admitted to any of the major hotels – and refused to provide funds for public secondary education, or anything that might improve their social or economic mobility.
‘In brief, this body represents nobody but the “merchant princes” of Nassau, is selected in a manner reminiscent of the worst excesses of the unreformed Parliamentary system of this country in the eighteenth century, and in performance shows itself to be irresponsible, crass or malignant,’ ran one Colonial Office report about the parliament shortly before the Duke’s arrival.
‘As things stand, however, the constitution of the Bahamas is more or less in the form in which it was as originally created and we would only have an opportunity to alter it in the event of the House taking some step which was a danger to the external security of the Empire, or in the event of the Colony becoming bankrupt. Neither of these eventualities seem likely at the moment . . .’3
The Duke’s predecessor, Sir Charles Dundas, had tried to stimulate agriculture in the Outer Islands by encouraging large farming estates run by farmers from Europe and America, and to weaken the power of the Bay Street Boys by trying to introduce income tax and secret voting, but he had been thwarted.
The advice from the Bay Street Boys to the Duke was clear:
He will learn . . . that the best way to govern the Bahamas is not to govern the Bahamas at all. If he sticks to golf, he will be a good Governor and they’ll put up statues to him. But if he tries to carry out reforms or make any serious decisions or help the niggers, he will just stir up trouble and make himself unpopular.4
Wallis had also thrown herself into war work, giving her, hitherto, rather aimless life some purpose. She was automatically President of the Red Cross and of the ‘Daughters of the British Empire’ and she helped with the YMCA, and the Nassau Garden Club. She arranged for locals to be taught the basics of hygiene, diet and nursing, promoted courses in domestic service and started a class in needlepoint. On her trips to the United States, she lobbied department stores to stock Bahamian jewellery and weaving.
Shocked by the high infant-mortality rate amongst the non-white population, she set up a clinic for the children of mothers with syphilis. She worked closely with Alice Hill Jones, a local Black nurse trying to lower infant-mortality rates, providing a car to save her travelling to outlying areas by public transport. Here, every Wednesday afternoon, the Governor’s wife worked, weighing and washing babies, changing diapers, feeding them and rocking them to sleep. When the House of Assembly refused to grant funds, the Duke signed over income from one of his charitable trusts.
By September 1942, the airbases were completed and there was growing unemployment. The Duke then arranged for 5,000 Bahamians to work in the US, mainly Florida, as agricultural labourers. The new initiative, nicknamed ‘The Contract’, after the document they had to sign, lasted six to nine months and required the men to remit 25 per cent of their earnings home. Not only did it help the United States, which was short of labour, but it provided employment and taught agricultural skills that the Bahamians were able to use on their return. By July 1944, almost 6,000 people, a twelfth of the population, had been involved in ‘The Contract’.
Many of the Duke’s attempts to diversify the economy, however, continued to be scuppered, with the House rejecting his plans for a public works programme, income tax, laws on shop workers’ hours, trade union rights and workmen’s compensation. He was constantly frustrated in his attempts to raise wages in line with the cost of living, which had risen 30 per cent during the war.
Nevertheless, he did set up an Economic Investigation Committee – the first official body in the Bahamas on which non-white men were represented substantially – to develop the islands. When it could not agree on a chairman, he appointed himself to the role. The result was the equivalent of F.D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation camps, which came to be known as the Windsor Training Farms.
But an underlying tension with his economic initiatives was Whitehall’s lack of confidence in his abilities and concern that he stray into politically contentious areas. In May 1942, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Cranborne, wrote to Churchill, irritated because Windsor wanted to take a trade delegation to Washington, arguing that ‘the subjects for discussion are of too trivial a nature to justify his personal participation as Head of the delegation, and that especially in the matter of contracts such procedure would be embarrassing to the State Department and might cause resentment.’5
More importantly, doubts also remained about his loyalties. In February 1942, an American Naval Intelligence Officer, Commander C.A. Perkins, had reported to US Naval Intelligence that there was reason to believe ‘considerable Nazi funds have, during the past year, been cleared through the Bahamas to Mexico’, and that the Duke of Windsor may be an ‘important Nazi agent’.6
According to Perkins, Wenner-Gren had made huge investments in Peru, including building a harbour at Chimbote Bay, and in Mexico, where he was involved in highway construction and setting up an ‘Export Control Board’. There were press reports that the Windsors planned to visit the Duke’s cousin, ex-King Carol of Romania, who lived in Mexico. ‘Carol’s consort, as well as the society group at this resort, constantly have been reported pro-Nazi,’ Perkins wrote. ‘Such associations indicate that there may be something to the reports received by this office that the subject (Duke of Windsor) is pro-Nazi.’7
Wallace B. Phillips at the Washington Office of Naval Intelligence replied, accepting that the Duchess was ‘bitterly anti-British’, that Wenner-Gren was ‘up to no good in Mexico’ and that the Duke’s former equerry, Frank Budd, now living in Mexico, required investigation. ‘We shall have to take some steps to determine his relationships both to the duke as well as to the Nazis.’8
* * *
In April 1942, unbeknownst to the Duke, the Duchess wrote to Queen Mary: ‘It has always been a source of sorrow and regret to me that I have been the cause of any separation that exists between Mother and Son and I can’t help feel that there must be moments, however fleeting they may be, when you wonder how David is.’9 She suggested that the Queen receive the departing Bishop of Nassau, John Dauglish, who ‘can tell you if all the things David gave up are replaced to him in another way and the little details of his daily life, his job, etc., the story of his flight from France leaving all his possessions behind.’10
Queen Mary did see Dauglish, a former navy chaplain, and was interested in her son’s doings but, when he talked about the Duchess, ‘He met with a stone wall of disinterest.’ Her only reaction was in a letter to the Duke a few weeks later, in which she added, ‘I send a kind message to your wife.’11
The family remained suspicious of Wallis’s intentions, with the King writing to his mother, ‘I wonder what is the real motive behind her having written . . . I must say I do feel a bit suspicious of it!!!’ adding he’d just seen the prime minister, who had received a letter from the Duke asking for a change of post. ‘A coincidence!!’12
The Duke was indeed anxious to be moved elsewhere. After a visit from Lord Beaverbrook, he wrote to Churchill in April, ‘(1) that I cannot contemplate remaining in the Bahamas as Governor for the duration of the war and (2) that I feel confident that I could serve my Country best in some appointment in America, or failing that, in Canada.’13 The letter was shared with the King, but there were no slots for him.
The suggestion of a roving ambassadorship in Latin America was also dismissed. ‘I fear I cannot report to you any advantage in a visit by the Duke of Windsor to South America at this time. It would certainly arouse suspicions in Washington,’ minuted Anthony Eden to Churchill, adding that the Duke did not have sufficient ‘authority and first-hand knowledge’.14
The South African prime minister, Jan Smuts, asked for his views on the offer of the Governorship of Southern Rhodesia, argued against such an appointment on the grounds of the strong republican sympathies in neighbouring South Africa and concerns about the Duke’s ‘attention and judgement’.15
There were discussions about federating the British West Indies – the printed index to the Foreign Office Political Department for 1942 has a reference under the Duke’s name of ‘Proposed Governor-Generalship of British West Indies if raised to Dominion status’ – but there was no federation.16
On Monday 1 June 1942, the Duke arrived in Washington, partly on a private visit to sort out his business affairs and partly to discuss defence and trade matters. No sooner had he arrived than he received news of demonstrations at the building of the new airbase. What had merely been a strike and march to the Colonial Secretariat, to lobby for an increase in the daily rate of pay, had quickly escalated into something more threatening.
The acting governor, Leslie Heape, and the commissioner of police, Reggie Erskine-Lindop, were slow to respond, by which time several of the demonstrators, many drunk, began looting in Bay Street. Several people were killed and fifty were injured. Some of the long-standing grievances, concerning poverty and racial prejudice, were beginning to come to the surface.
The Duke returned immediately, accompanied by a hundred US Marines sent by Roosevelt, concerned about the security of the airbases. A public emergency was declared and order restored. ‘This morning about 1500 workers have returned to work, representing about sixty per cent of workers previously employed,’ wrote the Duke to the Colonial Office on 6 June, ‘but work cannot yet be said to be normal and workers are being guarded by American soldiers.’17
Concerned about the interruption of work on the military project and worried that the Americans might pull out of the project, he immediately began addressing the men’s grievances, which included problems with transport for the eight-mile journey from Nassau to the building site, food at lunchtime, the timing of wage payments, and differential pay rates for Americans and local workers.
On 8 June, he broadcast to the island, promising free lunches, to raise wages by one shilling a day, and an independent enquiry by a retired colonial judge, Alison Russell. Not only did the Duke face the anger of the Bay Street Boys, who felt law and order had broken down to their detriment, but Whitehall was aghast that an agreement that the Americans employ local labour at the local going rate, rather than the rate paid for imported labour, might be changed. The Duke now had critics on all sides.
The crisis was, however, the making of him. ‘The feature which now stands out above all the others is the fact that it was eventually resolved by the dominating personality of one man, His Royal Highness the Governor,’ reported the Nassau Tribune. ‘HRH approached the gigantic problem calmly and efficiently . . . he handled a delicate situation with tact and dignity, resolution and authority.’18
The Duke resumed his American trip, having a three-hour lunch with Roosevelt on 15 June and then seeing Churchill on 23 June, but Wallis’s activities in New York were causing concern at the Colonial Office. It is difficult to establish exactly what happened, as many of the documents are redacted or have been retained, but Wallis appears to have had a series of meetings with Gaston Henry-Hay, until November 1941 the Vichy ambassador to America, and a man closely monitored by the FBI, not least because Nazi agents operated from his embassy.
‘As our source in question is a particularly delicate and secret one, may I ask that this letter should be seen by the minimum possible number of people,’ wrote Clifford Thornley to the Colonial Office in one of the heavily redacted reports.19 One of them was the prime minister himself.
The Duke was now back on the islands and faced a new challenge – a complete block of buildings between Bay and George Streets had been burnt down, arousing suspicions of further civil unrest. It turned out to be a storekeeper setting his own property on fire to collect the insurance but, again, the Governor earned new respect when he was seen to be personally taking charge of operations.
However, in spite of improved popularity ratings, the Duke remained bored and unhappy with his posting. The writer Patrick Skene Catling, then an eighteen-year-old Pilot Officer, had an unexpected encounter on the golf course:
The Duke, as usual by tea-time, was drunk. Not very drunk, not yet arrogant and clumsy, but sufficiently soft in the head to have driven his Cadillac convertible along the fairways of Nassau’s premier golf club. This was before electric buggies. Evidently, he was not in the mood for long walks between shots; and, after all, he was the Governor . . . He had given me a friendly wave as he drove the car past me on the sixteenth fairway. He finished his game quickly and was well ahead of me in the bar. In the early stages of drinking, he had a charmingly whimsical, some said boyish, slightly tilted smile. Free for the afternoon from the Duchess’s surveillance, he was able to indulge in playful informality.20
The Duke, dressed in a lime-green shirt and shocking pink doeskin trousers, offered Catling a drink. ‘After more than one drink, he became quite chatty, asking some of the questions that strangers ask in casual barroom encounters,’ and then suggested ‘let’s go for a ride.’21 They headed ‘Over the Hill’ to the Black ghetto. ‘Part-way down the far side of the hill, I was surprised when the Duke produced an Army cap with the scarlet band of superior rank and jammed it jauntily on his well-groomed fair head.’22
Turning off the main road, they drove ‘along a narrow, unpaved road with a row of dilapidated wooden shacks on each side, and announced his arrival with long blasts on the horn.’23 Fifteen small boys in shorts ran out carrying rifles. The Duke stood up in the car, his expression stern and ‘commanded the boys, in a high-pitched, military shout, to “Fall in”’, which they duly did. He ‘proceeded to drill them in accordance with the protocol of the Brigade of Guards’.24 He then tossed them some silver coins. ‘How His Excellency laughed! I thought he was an awful shit and a fool, but I was grateful to him, and I am still, for demonstrating so vividly that warfare is absurd.’25
* * *
The death of his younger brother, George, Duke of Kent, whom he had not seen since 1937, in an air crash on 25 August, only further brought home the Duke’s separation from his family. At the memorial service in Nassau’s cathedral, he broke down in tears and a period of depression followed. ‘My thoughts go out to you, who are so far away from us all, knowing how devoted you were to him, and how kind you were to him in a difficult moment in his all too short life, kindness I for one shall never forget; he always remembered it, for he was very fond of you,’ wrote Queen Mary to him on 31 August. ‘I hope you will write often to me now, as you used to do. Please give a kind message to your wife, she will help you to bear your sorrow.’26
The death had brought some thaw in family tensions. ‘He was in some ways more like a son to me, and his charm and gaiety brought great happiness to York House those years he lived with me,’ replied the Duke. ‘Remembering how much you and I hated the last war, I can well imagine how our feelings about this one must be the same – a deep-rooted conviction that it could have been avoided.’ He ended by saying he was longing to see her again, ‘always hoping that maybe one day things will change and that I shall have the intense pride and pleasure of bringing Wallis to see you . . .’27
It was not just the isolation from his family but from the world outside. ‘Although our life is a busy one, it seems cramped and isolated so far from the centres of interest and we certainly feel very much out of touch with the people who are directing the momentous events and framing the policies, which will so profoundly influence the future of mankind,’ the Duke wrote to Sibyl Colefax, after she had written to him about his brother’s death. ‘Who knows that maybe someday we shall get a more interesting job and a better opportunity of pulling one’s weight!’28
It was a feeling shared by Wallis, who wrote to an old friend, Edith Lindsay, ‘How I long for the sight and sound of human beings – my mentality is getting very dire after over two years here and only two months leave.’29
By late summer, the new airbase at Windsor Field was completed and 4,000 RAF troops were stationed on coastal watch duties alongside the US Army Air Force, hunting submarines, supporting convoys, and providing a vital link in the supply chain across the Atlantic. Wallis, realising the colony needed more facilities and organisations for the new troops, founded a canteen for Black members of the Bahamian Defence Force and ensured it was supplied with all it needed from playing cards and ping-pong balls to staff and girls for dances.
She persuaded Frederick Sigrist to lend the Bahamian Club as another canteen for airmen, where her afternoons were spent cooking bacon and egg to feed thousands of British RAF officers, now stationed as part of a Coastal Command training programme. ‘My real talent was as a short-order cook,’ she later wrote. ‘I never kept track of the number of orders of bacon and eggs that I served up, but on the basis of forty an afternoon, and three hundred and sixty-five afternoons a year for nearly three years, I arrived at a rough total of about forty thousand. And that’s a lot of eggs.’30
‘No one has any idea how hard she worked,’ recalls one friend from the Bahamas. ‘With the Duchess, it wasn’t just raising money – she did plenty of that – but she went beyond what other Governors’ wives had done. She got in, rolled up her sleeves and worked. I’ll never forget her returning to Government House one night. She had been away for twelve hours, first at one hospital, then a school, a clinic, a canteen. Her energy was palpable, contagious. She walked in and immediately began planning what to do the next day.’31
‘I never worked harder in my life,’ she later wrote. ‘I never felt better used. I have to keep busy. I couldn’t stay here if I didn’t.’32 But the hard work took its toll on her health. ‘I have been having a really bad time with my old ulcer – just dragging myself around, half-doing too many things,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘I don’t seem able to find 3 weeks off to put myself right once again . . . Everything gets more difficult every day on the way of supplies, etc. – but I have nothing to really complain of except my stomach and the fact that we are left here so long.’33
Her involvement with child-welfare agencies fulfilled her maternal urge, which, hitherto, had had no other outlet. Every Christmas she helped organise a children’s party at the airbase for which she paid personally, where the children watched Mickey Mouse movies, were given Coca-Cola, sweets, ice-cream and some pocket money. The war work had given her a new sense of purpose, having previously focused only on the Duke, his needs, their houses and entertaining.
For perhaps the first time in many years, she was thinking of others rather than herself. ‘I really admire the way Wallis has thrown herself into all her various jobs,’ wrote Rosa Wood to Edith Lindsay. ‘She really is wonderful and does work hard. I do hope that people everywhere are realising all the good she is doing. I think she has such charm and is always amusing to be with, I really don’t know what I would do without her.’34
But the enhanced responsibilities, which could have brought them together, threatened to drive the Windsors apart. Whilst she made a point of getting to know people – the children, mothers, servicemen – and made the most of her situation, the Duke had become increasingly accepting of his exile and political impotence. He was bored by trivial political matters – the duty on an imported church bell, the endowment of a public library, or overcrowding in Nassau prison (average number of inmates 146).
He bicycled each day to Cable Beach to swim – a tandem proved not to be a success and was abandoned after the couple fell off before it had left the grounds of Government House – and played golf most afternoons. His ADC, John Pringle, remembered how to lift his spirits he would take his official car out to the airport and ‘hurtle it down the darkened runway over and over again’.35
Bert Cambridge, a local jazz musician and Black politician, recalled how he was ‘summoned to the Governor’s residence, not in his political capacity but in his musical one – to accompany the striptease artistes who gave private performances for the Duke. The Duchess . . . took it all in her stride; there was not, perhaps, much other entertainment to be had in the Bahamas.’36
Above all, he began to drink heavily. ‘He drank, as he had always done, but the effects became more noticeable,’ wrote his biographer Michael Pye.37
What had been binges on his great Imperial tours, kept carefully separate from his official appearances, were now sessions that happened all too publicly. He looked and acted drunk. He became loud and indiscreet. The Duchess was patient until a fund-raising evening at the Collins mansion on Shirley Street, where the Duke was too obviously full of whisky to fulfil his duties. She forbade him cocktail parties, cut entertainment except for their American visitors and a handful of politically necessary guests, took control.38
In November 1943, submitting names of local candidates for the New Year’s Honours List to Churchill, the Duke reiterated his plea that ‘after five and a half years, the question of restoring to the Duchess her royal status should be clarified . . . I am now asking you as Prime Minister to submit to the King that he restore the Duchess’s royal rank at the coming New Year’s, not only as an act of justice and courtesy to his sister-in-law, but also as a gesture in recognition of her two years’ public service in the Bahamas.’39
The Palace’s position was clear. Writing to Churchill on 8 December, George VI enclosed a memorandum explaining why Wallis could not use the title ‘Royal Highness’. ‘I am quite ready to leave the question in abeyance for the time being, but I must tell you quite honestly that I do not trust the Duchess’s loyalty.’40
The memo, marked ‘Private and Confidential’ read:
I have read the letter from my brother with great care, and after much thought I feel I cannot alter a decision which I made with considerable reluctance at the time of his marriage . . . When he abdicated, he renounced all the rights and privileges of succession for himself and his children – including the title ‘Royal Highness’ in respect of himself and his wife. There is therefore no question of the title being ‘restored’ to the Duchess – because she never had it . . . I know you will understand how disagreeable this is to me personally, but the good of my country and my family come first . . . I have consulted my family, who share these views.41
The news was transmitted to the Duke by Churchill three days before Christmas.42
* * *
In May 1943, the Duke paid his third visit to America, visiting Bahamian labourers in northern Florida, seeing executives of General Foods in New York about the possibility of setting up fishing and canning operations in Bahamas, and socialising in Palm Beach. He had two meetings with Roosevelt, was invited by Churchill to hear him address Congress – where both men were given standing ovations – and lobbied for a new appointment.
The best that Churchill could come up with was Governor of Bermuda, marginally up the pecking order and a better climate, but further from the United States and, after three days consideration, the Duke refused.43 As Wallis wrote to her aunt, ‘I can’t see much point in island jumping. I’m for the big hop to a mainland.’44
Through Halifax, the Duke now asked for Wallis’s letters to be exempt from postal censorship because of his diplomatic status, a request that was refused by the State Department. Adolf Berle wrote to Cordell Hull:
Quite aside from the shadowy reports about the activities of this family, it is to be recalled that both the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were in contact with Mr James Mooney of General Motors, who attempted to act as mediator of a negotiated peace in the early winter of 1940; that they have maintained correspondence with Bedaux, now in prison under charges of trading with the enemy and possibly of treasonous correspondence with the enemy; that they have been in constant contact with Axel Wenner-Gren, presently on our blacklist for suspicious activity etc. The Duke of Windsor has been finding many excuses to attend to ‘private business’ in the United States, which he is doing at present.45
Reports about the couple’s controversial views and associations had continued to be passed to the authorities. In October 1942, a letter from Gerald Selous, the trade commissioner in Vancouver, was forwarded to Sir John Stephenson at the Dominions Office, reporting that Baron Maurice de Rothschild, had ‘set various drawing-rooms of Vancouver “goggling” with his tales, amongst which that he saw much of the Windsors . . . that the Duke had told him they loathed Nassau, that they daily regretted having left the South of France, that he (the Duke) was on very friendly terms with Ribbentrop and Goering, and that he was sure the Germans would not have bothered them (the Windsors) at all.’46
The following April, the First Secretary at the British embassy in Washington, Sir John Balfour, wrote to Oliver Harvey at the Foreign Office after Marcus Cheke, the First Secretary in Lisbon, minuted a meeting with a young Spaniard called Nava de Tajo.
De Tajo had known the Duke pre-war and then met him again in the summer of 1940, and he had relayed the Duke’s views, which Balfour thought were ‘of interest as corroborating what one has heard on the subject from other sources’:47
It was clear from the conversation of HRH that he expected the British Cabinet to resign in the near future, and to see the creation of a Labour Government which would enter into negotiation with Germany. He expected also that King George VI would abdicate, following a virtual revolution brought about by the fact that the ruling classes had utterly disgraced themselves and that he (the Duke of Windsor) would be summoned to return to England to occupy the throne. HRH also spoke of how England would become the leader of a coalition consisting of France, Spain and Portugal, while Germany would be free to march against Russia! . . . HRH said he thought the age of constitutional monarchy had passed, evidently believing that an age of fuehrers such as Petain, Franco and Salazar, had opened . . . He also expressed himself with some force about the present Queen of England, whom he termed ‘an ambitious woman’.48
What of Charles Bedaux, last viewed abandoning the American tour for the Duke in November 1937? He had continued his activities, happy to do business with anyone who served his interests, but also suspected by all. In October 1940, he had gone to North Africa to work with the Vichy governor general, Maxime Weygand, on developing railways, power plants, and water and coal production. In return for his services, his confiscated Dutch companies had been returned.49
A State Department official, who had met Katherine Rogers in Portugal in August 1941, reported that she had denounced Bedaux as a collaborator. An FBI memo noted:
Mrs Rogers stated that she had definite information that Mr Bedaux was using his talents on behalf of the Germans in acquiring for the account of certain German individuals and for himself large properties in and about Paris, and that he travelled about without apparent restrictions, and with all indications that he was persona grata to the German occupying forces.50
She had also reported that the Château de Candé had been the only building in the surrounding area not bombed by the Germans.
Herman Rogers had also given a statement to the FBI, after a routine interview by the Bermuda censorship authorities, telling the British that Bedaux:
had always held pro-Fascist views. At the time of the battle of France, he had personally welcomed the German General Staff to his house near Tours. He was now installed in an office in Paris in the Rue des Petits Champs, where he controlled a large German staff. The work of the office was to organise Jewish industries taken over by the Germans in France, and to see that the maximum production . . . was achieved.51
Bedaux had been automatically arrested by the Germans after Pearl Harbor, but released after the intervention of Otto Abetz. Returning to North Africa, he began plans to build a pipeline across the Sahara carrying water and peanut oil. Later he had worked with the Germans to camouflage refineries at Abadan against Allied bombing.
According to the December 1941 war diary of General von Lahousen, head of the Abwehr Division II, Bedaux demanded various conditions for his involvement in the Abadan refinery, including being given the rank of major-general in the Wehrmacht, and was described as an agent of the ‘First Magnitude’.52
In September 1942, he had again been picked up – and imprisoned with his wife in Paris Zoo in a cage usually used by monkeys – but was released, after persuading General Otto von Stülpnagel, commander of German forces in Occupied France, that he could best serve the interests of the regime in French North Africa.
In October 1942, Bedaux had arrived at the American consulate in Algiers and brazenly told the minister, Robert Murphy, he was on a mission on behalf of the German government. Shortly afterwards, he and his 33-year-old son were arrested by the French, on American orders. Two FBI agents were sent to interrogate him, but were killed when their plane crashed. Subsequently two more FBI agents were sent, though Algiers was outside their jurisdiction.53
Hoover immediately wrote a confidential memo for his senior FBI staff, outlining the incriminating evidence that Bedaux carried linking him to the Germans, which included two German passports, a pad for sending coded messages, and instructions to spy on ‘military formation’, ‘armaments’, ‘troop movements’, and ‘the acquisition of military codes’.54
‘Bedaux has not only been pro-Nazi and pro-Fascist since the collapse of France, but was very much so in his sentiments for a number of years before Munich,’ an OSS Report stated. ‘His pro-Nazi sentiments can perhaps be described as those of a conscientious believer in Hitler’s “New Order” in Europe.’55
The Duke’s old friend was in deep trouble, but it was a more recent friend, the richest man in the Bahamas, who was to bring his next problem.
1 Churchill to COS Committee, 28 February 1942, CHAR 20/63, Churchill College Archives.
2 844E 001/60, NARA.
3 Monson memo, 12 May 1940, CO 23/712, TNA.
4 Geoffrey Bocca, The Life and Death of Harry Oakes (Weidenfeld, 1959), p. 89.
5 Cranborne to Churchill, 20 May 1942, CHAR 20/63, Churchill College Archives.
6 Letter from Commander Perkins to US Naval Intelligence, Washington, 11 February 1942. NND 883021/SIS Intelligence Reports/29 November 1941–31 March 1942, NARA.
7 Letter from Commander Perkins to US Naval Intelligence, Washington, 11 February 1942. NND 883021/SIS Intelligence Reports/29 November 1941–31 March 1942, NARA.
8 Wallace B. Phillips to C.A. Perkins, 18 February 1942, NND 883021/SIS Intelligence Reports/29 November 1941–31 March 1942, NARA.
9 Heart, p. 356.
10 Heart, p. 356.
11 Heart, p. 356. According to Peter Coats, the Duchess told him that after she wrote to Queen Mary, she received a reply with a brooch. ‘At the time of your marriage my heart was too full to think of wedding presents, but I hope that you will accept this now. It belonged to Charles I.’ Peter Coats, Of Generals and Gardens (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), p. 273.
12 George VI to Queen Mary, 5 May 1942, RA GV CC 13/12, quoted Ziegler, p. 487.
13 The Duke to Churchill, 18 April 1942, CHAR 20/63, Churchill College Archives, and CO 967/125, TNA.
14 Eden to Churchill, 14 May 1942, CHAR 20/63, Churchill College Archives, and FO954/33A/210, TNA.
15 Smuts to Churchill, 25 May 1942, CHAR 20/63, Churchill College Archives.
16 Knowledge Management Department, FCO to author, 11 November 2020.
17 Duke of Windsor to Colonial Office, 6 June 1942, FO 371/30644, TNA.
18 Nassau Tribune, 9 June 1942.
19 Clifford Thornley report, 9 July 1942, FO 1093/24, TNA.
20 Patrick Skene Catling, Better Than Working (Liberties Press, 2004), p. 1.
21 Catling, p. 3.
22 Catling, p. 4.
23 Catling, p. 4.
24 Catling, p. 5.
25 Catling, p. 5.
26 Queen Mary to the Duke of Windsor, 31 August 1942, RA DW Add 1/156, quoted Ziegler, p. 384.
27 The Duke of Windsor to Queen Mary, 12 September 1942, RA GV EE 3, quoted Ziegler, p. 485, & RA QM/PRIV/CC9, quoted William Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (Macmillan, 2009), p. 552.
28 The Duke of Windsor to Sibyl Colefax, 8 October 1942, Folio 6, MS Eng c3272, Colefax papers, Bodleian.
29 Duchess of Windsor to Edith Lindsay, 30 August 1942, MHS, 1772, Windsor collection, Maryland Historical Society.
30 Heart, p. 355.
31 Greg King, The Duchess of Windsor (Aurum, 1999), p. 371, citing private information.
32 New York Post, 5 June 1943.
33 Bryan and Murphy, p. 443.
34 Rosa Wood to Edith Lindsay, 25 October 1942, Ms 1772, Windsor Collection, Maryland Historical Society.
35 James Owen, A Serpent in Eden: The Greatest Murder Mystery of All Time (Little, Brown, 2005), p. 62.
36 Owen, p. 209.
37 Pye, p. 56.
38 Pye, p. 56.
39 The Duke to Churchill, 10 November 1942, CHAR 20/63/84–93, Churchill College Archives.
40 George VI to Churchill, 8 December 1942, CHAR 20/52/96–100, Churchill College Archives.
41 CHAR 20/52/96–100, Churchill College Archives.
42 Churchill to the Duke, 22 December 1942, CHAR 20/63/107, Churchill College Archives.
43 The offer was made on 10 June 1943, CHAR 20/100/10, Churchill College Archives, and FO954/33A/213, TNA, and refused 13 June 1943, CHAR 20/100/15, Churchill College Archives.
44 Michael Bloch, Secret File, p. 200.
45 Adolf Berle to Cordell Hull, 18 June 1943, 811.711/4039, NARA.
46 Gerald Selous to Ian Maclennan, 16 October 1942, CO 967/125, TNA. Maurice was a cousin of Eugene de Rothschild. He also claimed that the Duke had lobbied Roosevelt to request he be made Ambassador to Washington. See DO 127/42, TNA.
47 John Balfour to Oliver Harvey, 3 April 1943, FO 954/33A/212, TNA.
48 John Balfour to Oliver Harvey, 3 April 1943, FO 954/33A/212, TNA.
49 More details, Higham, Trading with the Enemy, p. 184.
50 Memo, 24 November 1941, FBI file 100-49901.
51 FO 1093/23, TNA.
52 December 1941, war diary of General von Lahousen, Hoover Institute.
53 One of those killed was Percy Foxworth, who had previously reported on the Duke.
54 Hoover to Tolson, Tamm and Ladd, 4 January 1943, FBI file 100-49901.
55 15 January 1943, RG 226, OSS report, NARA. Bedaux died from an overdose on 18 February 1944 in Miami shortly before he was due to be indicted for Trading with the Enemy. Suspicions persist it was not self-administered. After the war the French Government awarded him a posthumous knighthood of the Légion d’honneur on the grounds he had worked against the Germans, but his MI5 file confounds this with extensive references to his espionage activities on behalf of the Germans, KV2/4412, TNA.