Beyond the Bahamas
The Windsors were not happy. The Duchess was exhausted from her war work and increasingly suffering stomach pains, the Duke was caught between the strictures of the Colonial Office and the Bay Street Boys. His allies, Leslie Heape and Eric Hallinan, had now moved on to other postings and he felt exposed in his dealings with local politicians.
‘I really feel that neither of us can stand this place either physically or mentally for another year,’ wrote Wallis to her Aunt Bessie in January 1944. ‘I do not think the Duke would hesitate to throw his hand in for this is no place for him and to think he is dumped here solely by family jealousy.’1
That month, Oliver Stanley, the Colonial Secretary, told Churchill that the Duke had asked to resign.2 The Duke was now looking beyond the war and the Bahamas and lobbying hard for a job as a roving ambassador in the United States, or as Canadian governor general. At the Palace, there were serious discussions about the ‘Windsor problem’.
‘As you know, I was once closely associated with the Prince of Wales, and since that association began, nearly 25 years ago, I don’t think any problems in my life have given me so much anxiety as those arising from his,’ wrote Tommy Lascelles to Churchill’s private secretary John Martin.3
Lascelles outlined four possibilities for the Duke:
1. Undertake Ambassadorial or Pro-Consular jobs abroad.
2. Live in this country as a quasi-younger brother of The King.
3. Live in this country as a private individual, and devote his great wealth to some useful object in which he is interested.
4. Do ditto in the USA.4
All of them had their problems. With regard to the first option, he felt ‘that there is in the British cosmos no official place for an ex-King. How can a man who has renounced the British Crown personally represent the Sovereign, or even impersonally HM Government?’ He argued the Duke could not distinguish between ‘the wood of the public weal apart from the trees of private inclination’ and that he had a ‘Rehoboam-like tendency to take up with undesirables, and dangerous associates. The latter may have diminished; but, from the episodes of the scoundrel Bedaux and the egregious Gren, it doesn’t look like it.’5
The second and third options were impractical – ‘there is no room for two Kings in England’ – and would cost him £20,000 in taxation, leaving just the fourth.
The Prince, I understand, is one of the richest men in the world, without encumbrances of any kind. He could make himself a charming home – a thing he has never yet had; he could make wonderful use of his money by furthering some of the many schemes that have successively caught his interest. Stettinius told me that he is at present absorbed in the de-hydration of vegetables. That sounds a somewhat dreary hobby for a man’s middle-age but it is just as useful, and maybe as amusing, as agriculture, stock-raising and so on . . .
He concluded ‘that the best chance for the Prince’s own happiness and for the peace of the world at large, is that he should adopt course (4).’6
Churchill’s response was ‘that someone acceptable both to the King and the Duke should be sent out to talk all this over with the latter in order to ascertain what he wishes, and what he will or will not do.’7 It was time to call in Walter Monckton.
Discussions carried on through the summer. The King suggested a South American ambassadorship, but Halifax was less keen, preferring the Duke settle as a private citizen in France or the United States. There was talk of the governorship of Madras and Churchill suggested Governor of Ceylon. Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister, was adamant there was no possibility of the Duke succeeding the Earl of Athlone as Governor General of Canada.8
Finally in a telegram to Churchill, marked ‘Strictly Private and Personal’, the King made the family views clear. ‘In any discussion as to his future perhaps you would put forward my conviction, which you already know, namely that his happiness will be best promoted by making his home in the USA. Repeat USA.’9
Meanwhile the Windsors were back in the United States, staying with their friend Robert Young in Palm Beach. There Wallis was admitted to the Roosevelt Hospital in New York for the removal of her appendix – when it was discovered she had stomach cancer.10
Another crisis presented itself. In New York the Duke called in the FBI to reveal that he was being blackmailed by a former girlfriend, Rhoda Tanner Doubleday, with whom ‘he ran around with (her) quite a bit, over a period of five or six years’. Doubleday had been a nuisance for some time, writing to him after his marriage, ‘claiming he should have married her’, and then in 1941 threatening to write about their relationship in her memoirs – he had put the matter in the hands of his lawyers. In October 1943, on a visit to New York City, he had ‘received some jewellery from her together with a note saying that the least he could do was to purchase her jewellery. This, too, he later turned over to his attorney.’11
Tanner was the same age as the Duke and had come out as a debutante in 1913. Two years later, she had married Felix Doubleday, part of the publishing family – they had divorced in 1924, she later suing him for $10,000 in back alimony. From 1924 to 1932 she had moved in the same circles as the Prince of Wales and they probably had an affair during this period.
Returning to the United States, she began a relationship with the businessman Harold McCormick, successfully suing him for $65,000 for breach of promise when he didn’t marry her. The following year the FBI noted she had had an abortion and threatened to file rape charges against the thoroughbred racehorse owner Louis Rowan, 21-year-old son of the Italian Princess Orsini. A heavy drinker and mentally unbalanced, by August 1944 she was working as a sales lady at the Gunther Fur Shop on Fifth Avenue.
An FBI agent, Jerome Doyle, saw the Duke at the Waldorf Towers on 29 August. ‘The Duke was very, very impressed with the information obtained,’ FBI deputy director Edward Tamm told Hoover. ‘As a matter of fact, Mr Doyle stated he [the Duke] almost fell off his chair three times when he realised what he had almost become mixed up with. He wanted to be sure you understood how much he appreciated this information.’12 The Duke heard no more from Mrs Doubleday and the matter was hushed up, but it was yet more evidence to the authorities of the embarrassments in his private life.13
This was not his only involvement with the FBI. In June, the journalist Helen Worden had published a long and critical profile of the Duchess in the magazine American Mercury, based on interviews with a number of acquaintances and various retailers Wallis frequented, suggesting that the Duchess was profligate, ambitious – ‘it was her dream that the Duke would be appointed Viceroy of India . . . She hoped the Duke could be Great Britain’s ambassador to the United States’ – and mean:
At the end of her first New York visit as the Duchess of Windsor, she called in the detectives who had been assigned to guard the royal suite which she and the Duke occupied at the Waldorf. ‘I have a little memento for you,’ she told them. Very seriously, she distributed eleven hotel postcards, each autographed by the Duke and herself.14
In the article, Worden had said of Wallis that ‘An autographed photograph of von Ribbentrop once hung over her toilet table in Nassau, according to a friend who visited her last winter. When this friend commented on the picture, the Duchess said she had known and liked von Ribbentrop before the war.’15
The Duke’s reaction was to ‘demand a correction of criminally libellous statements’.16 Worden fought back, replying in the October issue of the American Mercury:
My information about the von Rippentrop photograph came from a friend of the Duke and Duchess, who had been their house guest in Nassau . . . The Duchess was reported as saying that von Ribbentrop was her friend before the war and she could see no reason why the fact of the war should make it necessary for her to remove the picture. My information came from a source in which I have complete confidence.17
The Duke asked the FBI to investigate and find out if there was a vendetta against the Windsors in publishing circles, hinting that, as Worden was Jewish, that may have been the motivation. The FBI director J. Edgar Hoover approached Jerome Doyle, chief of the US Special Intelligence Service, who undertook ‘a discreet survey of SIS contacts in New York city to ascertain if there were any concerted efforts being made in literary circles in New York to injure the character of the Duchess of Windsor.’18 He found nothing to support the Duke’s suspicions, including on Worden’s background, raising questions not only about the couple’s loyalties, but judgement. ‘Miss Helen Worden makes her case well and it is a damaging one,’ stated one Foreign Office memo that was following the spat.19
The article also drew attention to the Duchess’s extravagance, describing her expenditure on recent shopping trips:
She also ordered six costumes from Valentina, five suits from Saks-Fifth Ave and a dozen or more sports things from Hattie Carnegie. She bought between twenty and thirty hats, chiefly from Miss Jessica of Bergdorf-Goodman, Walter Florell, and Braagaard, the latest rave in men milliners. Her purchases, since she moved to Nassau, have averaged a hundred dresses a year. Most of them cost about $250 apiece, though many ran much higher. Mainbocher’s black afternoon dresses are now $500.20
Worden continued:
All of her lingerie is hand-made. She hunts the kind of little out-of-the-way shops which delight most women. She discovered such a one on West 57th Street run by a French refugee, and asked the woman, over the phone, to bring her collection to the Waldorf. The woman refused. A customer, hearing the conversation remarked, ‘I should think you’d find it a great honor to serve the Duchess.’ ‘Madame,’ was the reply, ‘it is an honor I cannot afford.’
I’ve run across a lot of modists and jewelers who say they wouldn’t take the Duchess’ accounts on a bet that she never pays her bills. Some say that is one reason she bought at so many shops on her last visit – that she was staggering her orders because of the OPA freezing of accounts.21
In mid-September the Duke, partly influenced by Wallis’s health, met Churchill at Roosevelt’s estate at Hyde Park and obtained permission to resign from the Bahamas, on condition that he did not return to Britain. The next day Churchill reported to the King how the Duke ‘hoped that he might perhaps be found some work in France at the head of some Anglo-French organisation or other.’22
But there were problems there. After a conversation about such a return with the French foreign affairs minister, Rene Massigli, Oliver Harvey wrote to Churchill that:
in view of some of the acquaintances that the Duke and Duchess had previously had in France, it would really be preferable that they should stay away until the situation had been cleared up. What Monsieur Massigli evidently had in mind, although he did not say so, was that he feared that the Duke and Duchess might seek to renew acquaintance with many who had turned out to be collaborators, and this would cause a most embarrassing situation.23
In October, whilst the Duchess was recuperating from her operation at Hot Springs, Virginia, the Duke had written to Churchill asking again for a job ‘if there was any sphere in which it were considered my experience could still be appropriately utilised.’24 He continued, touching on the subject of his return to Britain, that ‘I would not have thought that my presence in their midst could any longer be considered so formidable a menace to the solidarity of the monarchy.’25 He also pressed for a meeting with his brother, stressing he was entitled to do so solely on grounds of protocol as a former Colonial governor:
It could never be a very happy meeting, but on the other hand it would be quite painless, and would at least have the merit of silencing, once and for all, those malicious circles who delight in keeping open an eight year wound that should have been healed officially, if not privately, ages ago.26
With the end of the war looming, ‘The Windsor Problem’ had resurrected itself. Tommy Lascelles, writing in his diary, had noted that Churchill had urged:
the Royal Family should bury the hatchet and ‘receive’ the Duchess, but the King thought ‘such a gesture is wrong in principle, and would imply that the Abdication had been all a mistake’; and I have no doubt that a number of people all over the Empire might so interpret it, and ask themselves, ‘If the Duchess of Windsor goes to luncheon at Buckingham Palace, what was all the row about in 1936?’27
Lascelles conveyed the Palace’s response at the end of December. ‘I do not think there is any point of difference between the attitude of the King and that of the two Queens as to a meeting with the Duke of Windsor. All of them would be glad to see the Duke; none of them wishes to see the Duchess.’28
The following day, John Martin minuted to Churchill a conversation with Lascelles:
He explained orally that he did not feel he could say in writing that the King was unwilling to see the Duke; but in fact HM would not be sorry if his brother did not come to England for the next ten years. The chief objection, however, is of course to meeting the Duchess . . . There is no doubt that the King’s preference would be that the Duke should settle in America, or failing that in France, but that at any rate he should not bring the Duchess to England.29
The position was clear: the Windsors were not welcome in Britain and henceforth they must make their home either in France or the United States. The Duke took six weeks to respond.
‘We most certainly do not wish to expose ourselves unnecessarily to insults that can be so simply avoided, by travelling some other way to the continent of Europe, when the time is ripe for us to do so,’ he wrote to Churchill on 12 February. ‘We shall therefore make our plans accordingly.’30
Members of his staff were also making plans for their future. George and Rosa Wood, who had accompanied the Windsors on their flight from the South of France in June 1940 to the Bahamas, now wished to leave the islands. Their request was seen as a personal betrayal.
‘Our goodbye unfortunately was a very unpleasant one,’ wrote Rosa to her friend Edith Lindsay:
The moment the Windsors knew we were leaving they both suddenly became very nasty – made out that we were letting them down and only used them while it suited us. Almost funny when George worked for the Duke for four years without one penny pay, and I certainly did ALL to help Wallis. A very unpleasant ending and undeserved . . . it has somehow left us with a bitter and disillusioned feeling.31
On 15 March 1945, the Duke resigned as Governor of the Bahamas, several months before his term was officially up, but neither he nor Wallis could face another humid summer. It was dubbed the ‘Second Abdication’.32 Reviewing his tenure two days later, the Nassau Tribune wrote: ‘We know of many views held by His Royal Highness in which we are in strong disagreement, but we have grown to respect him because he is no politician – he doesn’t bluff and he is no hypocrite . . . We were sorry to see the Duke come to the Colony as its Governor. We are more sorry to see him leave.’33
The Duke’s record was mixed. Much of his time in his final months had been spent dealing with a commission into the behaviour of the unpopular police commissioner, Colonel Lancaster, and poor morale, pay and working conditions in the police.34 He had introduced various programmes that had brought employment, but had failed to introduce income tax, though London had supported such a measure, and there had been little political, economic or social reform. His own views on self-government and race are clear in a report he sent to Churchill in November 1942:
Those with experience of regions where the population is predominately coloured, realize that negroes in the mass are still children both mentally and morally and that while these liberal socialistic ideas of freedom and equality regardless of race or colour may sound fine theoretically, the forcing of these theories are to my way of thinking, both premature and dangerous so far as the Western Hemisphere is concerned . . .35
Wallis had done better, improving conditions whether the need for birth control, clinics for syphilitics, or canteens for soldiers, but there had been no official recognition in any Honours List.
‘Should it ever be considered that there was any sphere in which my experience could still be appropriately utilised, my services will be available,’ the Duke wrote to Churchill.36 But the offers were not forthcoming and the couple faced an uncertain future.
Their past would now catch up with them with a discovery in the Harz mountains.
1 Wallis to Bessie, 6 January 1944, Bloch, Secret File, p. 211.
2 Oliver Stanley to Churchill, 6 January 1944, CHAR 20/148/1, Churchill College Archives.
3 Alan Lascelles to John Martin, 30 May 1944, CHAR 20/148/37–9, Churchill College Archives.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Churchill to Lascelles, 27 June 1944, CHAR 20/148/44–5, Churchill College Archives.
8 He was succeeded by Earl Alexander of Tunis in April 1946.
9 King George VI to Churchill, 16 September 1944, Char 20/148/55, Churchill College Archives.
10 Without access to medical records, biographers have been unable to verify the type of cancer, or even if it was simply a major internal operation. Contemporary accounts refer only to her appendix being removed. In 1951 she was supposedly diagnosed with cancer of the ovaries or womb, but if so it is unlikely she would have lived to the age she did.
11 FBI report to Hoover, 4 September 1944, FBI File 62-76544-3.
12 Tamm to Hoover, 14 September, FBI file HQ 94-4-6650.
13 She did, however, make approaches to his cousin Louis Mountbatten in 1961 after the death of his wife Edwina. Doubleday died aged ninety-one in 1986.
14 American Mercury, June 1944.
15 American Mercury, June 1944.
16 Guardian, 25 September 1944.
17 Helen Worden papers, Box 79, Folder 3, Columbia University.
18 Edward Conroy to Hoover, 1 August 1944, FBI file HQ 65-311113.
19 23 November 1944, J. Donnelly, FO 371/38705, TNA.
20 Helen Worden papers, Box 79, Folder 3, Columbia University.
21 Helen Worden papers, Box 79, Folder 3, Columbia University.
22 Churchill to King George VI, 19 September 1944, CHAR 20/148/58, Churchill College Archives.
23 Oliver Harvey to Churchill, 8 November 1944, CHAR 20/148/64, Churchill College Archives, and FO 371/42121, TNA.
24 The Duke to Churchill, 3 October 1944, CHAR 20/148/5–7, Churchill College Archives.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Lascelles diary, 9 November 1944, Duff Hart-Davis (ed.), King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), p. 269.
28 Tommy Lascelles to John Martin, 20 December 1944, CHAR 20/148 28–9, Churchill College Archives.
29 John Martin to Churchill, 21 December 1944, CHAR 20/148 26, Churchill College Archives.
30 The Duke to Churchill, 12 February 1945, CHAR 20/202/2, Churchill College Archives.
31 Rosa Woods to Edith Lindsay, December 1944, Amory notes, CAP, Box 845, quoted Andrew Morton, Wallis in Love, p. 282
32 Lascelles noted that the Duke’s resignation letter to the Colonial Office contained ‘two bad grammatical errors’. Hart Davis, p. 299.
33 Nassau Tribune, 17 March 1945.
34 See CO 23/785, TNA.
35 The Duke to Churchill, 10 November 1942, CHAR 20/63 /84–93, Churchill College Archives.
36 The Duke to Churchill, 22 March 1945, CHAR 20/202/30, Churchill College Archives.