WHEN TOLD THAT THEY HAD BEEN ASKED TO GO TO THE Bahamas, the Duchess’s response was to reach for an atlas. The Duke was better informed, but he had to admit they were one of the few British dependencies in the region that he had never visited. This was unsurprising. The islands stretched in a prolonged straggle from Haiti at one end to Florida at the other, twenty-nine of them with, according to the best authority, 661 cays or sandbanks, and 2387 rocks. Beyond their numbers, there was little in them to engage attention.1 ‘Mediocrity is the word for the Bahamas,’ wrote an admittedly embittered former resident. ‘The country is mediocre in everything. There are no rivers, fresh-water lakes, mountains. Even from the earliest days the people were mediocre.’2 Their total area was 5400 square miles, half the size of Wales. In 1940 half the seventy thousand inhabitants were clustered in the capital, Nassau, on New Providence Island; only two other settlements were larger than a village.
From the point of view of the Windsors the posting had a few redeeming features. Except for the high summer, when the heat and humidity were insufferable, the climate was close to idyllic. Nassau was less than two hundred miles from Miami and more than four thousand miles from London. American visitors flocked there for the winter season. There was an adequate if not remarkable golf course. But there was not much more to be said for the islands. In particular, their economy veered between the frail and the disastrous. There had been brief periods of prosperity as conch shells, then tobacco, then pineapples, then sisal and finally sponges had found a profitable market overseas, but always fashion changed or competitors with greater resources undercut the Bahamian producers. The latest period of relative affluence had come when prohibition in the United States had offered the islanders a marvellous opportunity to turn a dishonest penny by smuggling liquor into Florida. That too had passed. By 1938 total exports were worth only £182,000. Unemployment was high, under-employment endemic, especially in the Out Islands, that plethora of tiny settlements outside New Providence where the mainly black population scratched a precarious subsistence from fishing and the soil.
Such economy as there was, was controlled with unscrupulous thoroughness by a group of white traders living in Nassau. Their warehouses and offices clustered along Bay Street, the town’s principal thoroughfare, and they were known inevitably as the ‘Bay Street Boys’. When tourism from the United States began to flourish, it was these merchants who provided the necessary capital and reaped the profit. Some of the wealth filtered down to the predominantly black population, who lived for the most part in squalid settlements on the outskirts of Nassau, but most of it remained in the hands of the old trading ‘aristocracy’ – families such as Solomon, Higgs or Sands – or a rumbustious Canadian gold-mining millionaire, Sir Harry Oakes, who with his henchman Harold Christie brought new life to the islands in the years immediately before the war.
Traditionally, the British Governors, arriving from remote corners of the world with little knowledge of the region’s problems, and administering the islands with the help of a handful of hardworking Colonial Service officials, had ruled by courtesy of Bay Street. They did their best to stimulate the economy and ensure that the law was administered with justice, but they did nothing to undermine the power of the white oligarchy or to reform the political system by which it was kept permanently in power. The Duke of Windsor’s immediate predecessor, Sir Charles Dundas, had been more venturesome. His aim had been to end the Bahamas’ dependence on American tourism, which he felt to be precarious and degrading, and instead develop the Out Islands, by encouraging settlers to build up farms and even light industry. He tried to break the power of Bay Street by introducing the secret ballot, a measure which he felt sure would transform the membership of the Legislative Council and thus, in the end, the social structure of the Bahamas. After prolonged and acrimonious argument, the Legislature accepted the secret ballot for a trial period of five years and for New Providence Island only. The price Dundas paid was embittered resistance to any legislation which he tried to introduce into the Council, even when such laws were made necessary by the British war effort. It was not a happy atmosphere for a new Governor to find on his arrival.
The Duke of Windsor was under no illusion that some rich imperial plum had been pulled out for his benefit. ‘I naturally do not consider my appointment as one of first importance,’ he told Churchill,3 and whatever excitement he might originally have felt had been dampened by the bickering over his servants and the abortive visit to the United States. But he was still resolved to make the best of it; for all its insignificance it was a job of work, and if he did it well he would confound his enemies. The posting, he told Philip Guedalla, ‘may prove to be the first opportunity we have as yet had of really doing something to frustrate their game’.4 Quite what that something would be, he did not know, but he had no intention of being a fainéant head of state. The role of a Governor was to govern, and govern he would.
Reflecting on the possibility of promoting the Duke to some more important post, the then Colonial Secretary, Oliver Stanley, told Lord Halifax in 1943 that the Governor would have to be prepared ‘to take a part in a political fight which is often extremely bitter and unpleasant. I do not think, in the first place, that it is desirable that the brother of the King should be involved in controversy of that kind, and in the second place, I doubt whether a man with his training can really stand the give and take of party political warfare. Nor should I feel sufficient confidence in his judgment and experience when it came to really difficult decisions.’5 All these considerations applied with equal force in the case of the Bahamas – with greater force indeed; since few colonies could boast political in-fighting as bitter and unpleasant as that to be found in Nassau. The Governor was the chief executive, and the parish pump nature of Bahamian politics ensured that he would be directly and personally responsible for every decision, unable to shelter behind a protective wall of officials to whom he could delegate effective power. It was unlike anything that he had done before, as remote as could be imagined from the role of constitutional monarch who operates only on the advice of his ministers. In the Bahamas he would have advice enough, most of it contradictory, but in effect he would be the ministers.
If doubts of this kind disturbed Churchill, he must quickly have convinced himself that they must be suppressed for the greater good, and that anyway it did not matter greatly what happened in the Bahamas. What did worry him was that the Duke might continue to preach the same defeatist doctrines as had been heard in Madrid and Lisbon. One of the messages Monckton brought out to Portugal was that in his new position the Duke would have to be doubly careful what he said.6 The Prime Minister reinforced the warning with a solemn adjuration. From time to time, he told the Duke, he would find himself having ‘to express views about the war and the general situation which are not out of harmony with those of His Majesty’s Government. The freedom of conversation which is natural to anyone in an unofficial position, or indeed to a Major General, is not possible in any direct representative of the Crown. Many sharp and unfriendly ears will be pricked up to catch any suggestion that Your Royal Highness takes a view about the war, or about the Germans, or about Hitlerism, which is different from that adopted by the British nation and Parliament.’ Stories had been emerging from Lisbon of conversations the Duke had held which could be used to his disadvantage, particularly in the United States, where so many people would be listening with the hope of hearing something of the sort. ‘I am so anxious,’ concluded Churchill, ‘that mischief should not be made which might mar the success which I feel sure will attend your mission.’7 Given his mood on the eve of his departure from Europe, it is doubtful whether the Duke read this letter with any pleasure, or that he resolved in any way to change his habits. Certainly at dinner on his first night in Bermuda he outraged the Governor by announcing that, if he had been King, there would have been no war.8
Even without such solecisms, it is doubtful if the Windsors would have found the atmosphere of Government House, Bermuda, altogether congenial. The Governor, Sir Denis Bernard, was a blimpish figure, who, when he heard of the impending visit, announced ‘that he for one would take to his bed if that woman came into the house’.9 A few days earlier he had received a telegram from Lord Lloyd, instructing him that the Duchess was not entitled to a curtsey and should be addressed as Your Grace.10 The order was punctiliously observed. The Duke can have expected little else, but was sufficiently struck by the uniformity of the reception to enquire what orders had been given. He was shown a copy of Lloyd’s telegram and angrily drafted his own response. He had accepted the post in the Bahamas, he said, in the belief that the difficulties involved in his own and the Duchess’s official status could be overcome. Lloyd’s telegram, however, ‘reveals court attitude on this matter and emphasizes impossibility my accepting any post under the Crown. I therefore will not proceed to Nassau to take up my appointment.’11 Evidently he thought better of this drastic riposte: the telegram was never sent. To the Governor’s sister he said that it was all the Queen’s fault: ‘I don’t know whether we will be able to stick it down at Nassau if this sort of thing is going to go on.’12
Frank Giles, then a young ADC on Bernard’s staff, had expected to be repelled by the Duchess, but instead was dazzled by her: ‘She has, to an infinite degree, that really great gift for making you feel that you are the very person whom she has been waiting all her life to meet.’ He was struck by her ‘watchful, almost maternal devotion’ to the Duke, and the way in which she made sure he was punctual for his appointments and devoted sufficient time to preparing his speech for the arrival at Nassau.13 Gray Phillips thought equally well of her performance in Bermuda. She could not have been more dignified or naturally gracious, he told Monckton. Both of them had worked hard, with excellent results. ‘The Duke is a law unto himself with regards to popularity, but I can truthfully assert that the Duchess is running him very close. The Governor … was rather of the Kitchener of Khartoum type to start with, but ended up eating out of our hands!’14
When they arrived in Bermuda, the Special Branch officer who had been sent from London to escort them drew Giles aside and told him that the Windsors were in danger every moment of the day and night and must be constantly guarded.15 The Duke treated the situation less dramatically but still believed sufficiently in Primo de Rivera’s alleged plot to be ill at ease. He was not wholly reassured by a telegram from Monckton, saying that there was no foundation for the rumours and that it was safe for him to proceed,16 but he had no grounds on which to dispute the conclusion. On 15 August they set out on a Canadian cargo ship, the Lady Somers, on the last lap of their journey.
The outgoing Governor, Dundas, was openly irritated at being posted away two years before he had expected. ‘I don’t know why I should be pushed out to make way for him,’ he protested.17 When he presided over the first meeting of the Executive Council after the news became known, it was agreed that ‘no very special arrangements’ needed to be made for the new Governor’s reception.18 Once Dundas had gone, the occasion began to seem a little more special. Arrival day was declared a public holiday and the waterfront was beflagged.19 The arrival of a new Governor is always a great occasion in a colony; when the new Governor is also a former King Emperor and protagonist in one of history’s most celebrated romances, then expectation verges on hysteria. The appointment seemed to most people astonishing but to be welcomed. Red Bay Billy apostrophized the new Governor in the pages of the Nassau Daily Tribune:
Royal Son of Great Britannia
And the woman of his choice
Welcome to these Isles of romance
Hark! The Tropic’s luring voice.
Pulsing hearts of loyal nature
Heaven borne hymns ascending high
Kneeling ’fore the Throne of Mercy.
‘May God bless the Duke!’ they cry.20
No number of pulsing hearts could have made an arrival at Nassau in 1940 a very imposing occasion, but the Windsors carried it off with style. They ‘made a very good impression’, the American Consul, John Dye, reported; the Duke’s speech was ‘short, fluent and well-made’.21 The impression made on them was less favourable. Their reception was enthusiastic enough but in Nassau in August the summer is at its most oppressive, and under the searing sun the town seemed drab and tawdry. The writer Rosita Forbes referred to ‘the curious atmosphere of Nassau, self-irritant as an ingrown toe nail’,22 and it did not take long for this miasma to settle around the new arrivals. The Duke was resolved to make the best of it. ‘I think he feels himself in a sort of comic opera,’ Phillips told Monckton, ‘but on the whole he likes it very well.’23 The Duchess managed to keep a reasonably good face on it in public, but to her intimates poured out her disappointed bile. ‘Where did you stay when you came to this dump and why did you come here?’ she asked her aunt Bessie; and then again, ‘I hate this place more each day’, and again, ‘we both hate it, and the locals are petty-minded, the visitors common and uninteresting’.24
The shortcomings of Government House were one of the principal reasons for her disenchantment. Dundas had warned his successor that furnishings were threadbare and redecoration badly needed. The house was badly planned and insufferably hot in summer; the accommodation was inadequate and the garden ill cared for.25 It would not have taken the Duchess long to discover this for herself. The Director of Public Works admitted that the house was not only shabby but riddled with termites, and in need of a major overhaul whoever the new occupant had been.26 The Legislature had grudgingly authorized £2000 for the work, a sum that was patently insufficient. Work was at once put in hand. ‘We found Government House quite uninhabitable,’ the Duke told his old friend and predecessor as Governor, Bede Clifford, ‘and fled from the place after a week’s picnic and sandflies to make room for Frederick van Zeylen [the Director of Public Works] and Mr Sinclair the painter.’ A particular grievance was that Dundas had removed the ‘E R VIII’ cypher from the swimming pool because ‘he thought (he wasn’t sure mind you) that he was catering to public opinion at the time’. Luckily van Zeylen had kept the tiles, and the Duke was having them put back.27
The Duke at once wrote to Lloyd to say that at least an extra £5000 was needed to put the house in order (Lloyd sent the letter to Churchill, who minuted on it ‘Comment is needless’).28 Lloyd replied, no doubt with tongue in cheek, that the Duke’s ‘personal position and popularity’ was surely such that he could extract an additional £2000 or so from the Legislature. If £5000 had been available from public funds in Britain, then would they not be better spent on buying an extra fighter aircraft?29 The same idea occurred to the Daily Tribune, who hearing that the bill for Government House was now put at £7000, asked whether the money should not be devoted to buying a Hurricane to defend Buckingham Palace (which had just been bombed).30 The Legislature eventually provided an extra £2000 for structural repairs and the Windsors paid for most of the redecoration: ‘Both the Duke and the Duchess put a great deal of their own money into the improvements,’ attested van Zeylen.31
Whether the money might or might not have been better spent, the citizens of Nassau got a handsome and well-run Government House. The only survivor from the Windsors’ domestic staff remembers the Duchess as being excellent to work for: decided, efficient, concerned with every detail of the household, insisting on the highest standards yet never unreasonable, always appearing to take a genuine interest in the servants’ welfare.32 The service was grand without being pompous; at dinner parties the Duke’s piper would appear in the floodlit garden and march to and fro playing to the guests. The food and wine were excellent, though the Duke took little of either; René MacColl noticed that his lunch was invariably a plate of stewed fruit and a pot of weak tea, while he ‘drank sparingly of alcohol in the evening’.33 They entertained lavishly, with a reasonable tincture of old acquaintances to alleviate the local worthies. One of the oldest of the acquaintances was Alastair Mackintosh, a friend of the Duke for many years who was now living in Nassau with his two young children. To such a man the Windsors’ kindness and hospitality were limitless. His children left to attend school in Canada, and Mackintosh saw them off. ‘I loved them very much and felt lonely and unhappy. Driving into my courtyard, I saw a Government House station wagon and the Duke’s valet standing beside it. He handed me a note. It said, “The Duke and I know how much you will be missing the children, so please come and stay with us at once.”’34
One problem was to maintain a style appropriate to a royal Governor without giving censorious journalists too much of a chance to berate them for living in ostentatious luxury while Britain suffered. The Duchess generally had a surer touch than her husband. Etienne Dupuch, the editor of the Daily Tribune, wished to do an article about the Windsors’ daily life for use in an American magazine. The Duke co-operated, approved the copy and photographs, then decided the Duchess should see it too. She at once vetoed the project. ‘I am not questioning the Duchess’s judgment,’ wrote Dupuch. ‘I would say she was right because the pictures showed them living in luxury and security here while Europe was on fire … But why didn’t he realise this fact from the start?’35 The Governor’s contribution to public relations, as much for the sake of exercise as to save petrol, was to use a bicycle to go from Government House to their beach hut. An enterprising official produced a tandem and urged the Duke and Duchess to embark together. They obliged, but lost their balance and fell off before the tandem even left the grounds of Government House. The experiment was not repeated.36
The problems posed by the Duke’s inexperience were compounded by the fact that his most senior officials were also new to the colony. Dundas commended his principal advisers to his successor but regretted that the Colonial Secretary and the Attorney General were not yet au fait with Bahamian affairs.37 Leslie Heape, the Colonial Secretary – playing managing director to the Governor as executive chairman – had arrived only three months before from Grenada; he at least had previous experience of the West Indies and quickly proved himself a thoroughly competent and conscientious if unimaginative administrator. Eric Hallinan, the Attorney General, was a man of greater distinction than Heape, but had been less than a month in the Bahamas and had previously served in the very different environment of Nigeria. With the Chief Justice also a comparatively recent appointment, the only continuity was provided by the Receiver General, Robert Taylor. This was not fair to the Duke, commented the Daily Tribune, ‘and it is not fair to the colony’.38
The Colonial Secretary, the Attorney General and the Receiver General made up the government contingent in the Executive Council, ExCo, the cabinet, or perhaps more accurately the parish council of the Bahamas. They were balanced, or more often confronted, by five local residents, all representatives of the Bay Street interest, though Harold Christie, property developer and close friend of Sir Harry Oakes, had horizons slightly wider than those of his colleagues. Of the other four, effective power rested with Kenneth Solomon, a cunning and unscrupulous lawyer who also held the powerful position of ‘Leader for the Government in the House of Assembly’. As such he should have been the Governor’s closest ally, and indeed was happy to play that role provided the Governor confined himself exclusively to public relations and feathering the nests of the Bay Street merchants. Walter Moore, a pompous and frequently drunken nonentity, was technically the senior of the unofficial element of ExCo, but in practice left all the important decisions to Solomon.
Not that the decisions were that important save to those immediately involved. At the first meeting over which the Duke presided there was one item of real significance to the islands as a whole when the Council decided that, in view of the uncertain future of the tourist trade, the colony could not afford to lend the British government more than the £250,000 already promised from the Surplus Funds. Other items included a grant of a licence to Father Charles Blesch to practise as an Unqualified Medical Practitioner in the Out Islands, and the refund of import duty paid on a church bell for the Methodist Church on Eleuthera. The Governor undertook to consult Lord Beaverbrook about the possibility of opening a broadcasting station for the West Indies in the Bahamas.39 This was an unusually meaty agenda. The following week’s ExCo decided that Mr Tracy could not practise in the local bar, that Mr Wing Wong might bring his wife and children to the island, and that the Theatre Company should be allowed to put on performances if the Savoy Theatre was available for use.40 Not everything discussed was as dull as this – the Council at one time or another agreed that the showing of gangster films was an inducement to crime and should be stopped, that Basic English should not be introduced into the colony, that the sentence of death on William Bode should be commuted to life imprisonment – but it was trivial enough; as the Daily Tribune remarked, the Duke had neatly reversed Lincoln’s career and gone from White House to log cabin.41
Two centuries earlier the Executive Council had ceded its power to raise money to the House of Assembly. This least democratic of representative bodies was elected by a small proportion of the population in circumstances that made it inevitable the nominees of Bay Street would be in a majority. It represented, said Morison of the Colonial Office in 1940, nothing but ‘the merchant princes of Nassau, is selected in a manner reminiscent of the worst excesses of the unreformed Parliament of this country in the 18th century, and in performance shows itself to be irresponsible, crass or malignant’.42 It was in this unpromising forum that any reforming initiative launched by the Governor would inevitably founder; in the unlikely event, that is, that it had survived its stormy passage through the Executive Council. Theoretically the Governor had the last word, since he could at any moment suspend the constitution and impose his legislation by direct rule. In practice both Governor and Bay Street knew that this was a solution to which the Colonial Office would have recourse only reluctantly and if all else had failed. Only with endless patience, determination and finesse could a Governor begin to impose his will; even equipped with such virtues the odds were still against him. The money, the Duke ruefully told Guedalla in October 1940, was in the hands ‘of the unscrupulous merchants of Bay Street, and they are a very tough nut to crack’.43
Five members of the House of Assembly were black. They enjoyed no power. To Bay Street the black population was a source of cheap labour and a captive market; any move to improve its status, whether politically, socially or economically, was dangerous and to be resisted. It would be unfair to accuse the Bay Street merchants of being motivated exclusively by colour prejudice. They were almost equally prejudiced against Jews. At one of his earlier ExCo meetings the Duke reported he had received letters complaining about the attitude of certain hoteliers towards Jewish visitors. He proposed that the Council should disassociate itself from such behaviour. The Council happily consented, on the understanding that they should take no further action in the matter.44 Jews had always been discriminated against in Bahamian hotels and, so far as Bay Street was concerned, always would be. Anti-Semitism was, however, an optional extra; to be dispensed with if commercial advantage so dictated. Discrimination against the black population was a fundamental part of the structure of Bahamian life.
The less sophisticated of the black Bahamians welcomed the Duke’s advent as if he had been sent from heaven to redress their woes. Wild rumours spread around the slums of Nassau in August 1940; the new Governor had personally thrown open the jail doors, he had ordered the statue of Columbus outside Government House to be painted black.45 Every public utterance was scanned for evidence that he was aware of and sympathetic to their needs. When he spoke on Empire Day, he quoted the line from ‘Rule Britannia’ – ‘Britons never, never shall be slaves’. These were not mere words, he said, ‘but a very definite challenge which has been upheld by the bravery and devotion of generations that have gone before’. Probably he meant no more than a general appeal to solidarity in the face of the foe, but to his black listeners the reference to slavery seemed to have a special connotation. Only among the handful of black Bahamians who were qualified to take on the whites in the professions were there doubts about the Duke’s status as a champion of black rights. Etienne Dupuch, who as editor of the Nassau Daily Tribune was one of the leading spirits in the black movement, wrote that his paper’s initial distrust of the Duke arose from a statement he had once made commending the all-white immigration policy of the Australian government.46 The Duke cordially returned Dupuch’s suspicion. The editor was ‘a man of the agitator class’, he reported. He never lost an opportunity of stirring up racial disharmony. ‘It must be remembered that Dupuch is more than half Negro, and due to the peculiar mentality of this Race, they seem unable to rise to prominence without losing their equilibrium.’47
That remark betrayed the limits of the Duke’s liberalism. He believed that the black man was inevitably inferior to the white and was wholly unfitted to govern. He was ill at ease with them socially and would have found any sort of physical contact repulsive. In this attitude he was abetted by his wife. ‘As a Southerner, the Duchess is particularly well adapted to cope with colour problems,’ wrote Rosita Forbes, presumably with unconscious irony.48 Dupuch cites several instances in which the Duke allowed racial prejudice to distort his judgment: his refusal to appoint a well-respected black building contractor as liaison officer between American contractors and Bahamian labour; his objection to an all-black police force.49 Such instances have the ring of truth. Still less did the Duke feel inclined to defy the social taboos and invite black guests to his home. One of the main reasons he advanced – as Dundas before him had done – against the appointment of a black man to ExCo was that he would expect to be invited to Government House. ‘I am well aware that the official colour bar does not exist in the other West Indian Colonies …’ he wrote to the Colonial Secretary.
The Bahamas, however, which I can well understand from their proximity to the mainland of America, still maintain a very staunch and American attitude towards the coloured problem, and white Bahamians will not allow their wives to sit down to dinner with coloured people. One of the main local arguments against the inclusion of the coloured element into the social life of the Colony is that it would hurt the susceptibilities of the American winter visitors. I personally discard this one with the observation that no one in their right senses would ever be so tactless as to invite coloured people to meet American guests.50
There was nothing unusual about such an attitude. As he pointed out, he was reflecting the prejudices of the vast majority of his wife’s countrymen, and probably of the British as well. The Colonial Office took a more liberal line, however, and argued that the prejudices of the white Bahamians and American tourists should not be given too much weight ‘under modern enlightened conditions’. The Governor – above all this Governor – was in a very special position, ‘and a lead from you in the Bahamas would be very much appreciated by the coloured people and do much to help towards a more liberal attitude’.51 The Duke had grave doubts whether a more liberal attitude was in order. It could only encourage demands for radical political reform, perhaps even for self-government. Negroes were ill-equipped to meet the demands of the twentieth-century world, he told Churchill, ‘and while these liberal socialistic ideas of freedom and equality, regardless of race and colour, may sound fine theoretically, the forcing of these theories is to my way of thinking, both premature and dangerous so far as the Western Hemisphere is concerned’.52
Bay Street would have found nothing to complain about in such sentiments; where the Duke parted company with these myopic merchants was in his belief that, if the black Bahamians were so backward, then they deserved to be educated, fed, housed and generally looked after. The record of the Duke’s relationship with ExCo and the House of Assembly shows a consistent and protracted effort on his part to force through reforms that would be beneficial to the black population, against the embittered opposition of those who believed that any change would be to their financial and, in the long run, to their political disadvantage. He told Walter Monckton a few months after his arrival that he was dismayed by the standards of such services as health and housing for all except the rich: ‘I have personally rarely seen such slums and squalor as exist in most of the native settlements and many of the Out Islands have no doctor at all.’ He accepted that the Bahamas were making a generous contribution to the British war effort: ‘At the same time, I am afraid that it will always be a struggle to get Bay Street to devote money to any project that does not directly benefit themselves, and the color [sic] problem is particularly acute and bitter.’53
The Bay Street merchants took it for granted that the Duke would be an amiable figurehead who would act as a magnet to American tourists and not interfere in the serious business of misgoverning the islands. He proved instead disconcertingly conscientious. Those who worked under him were surprised to find that he read his papers carefully and pondered them before deciding on his future action: ‘I won’t let these pinkos push me around,’ he minuted on one Colonial Office instruction – not perhaps the response of an enlightened progressive, but equally not what was to be expected from a bored and dilettante idler.54 He wrote all his own speeches and before delivering one of importance would seclude himself for forty-eight hours till he had got it to his satisfaction: ‘And he wrote a good speech, among the finest delivered from the “throne” by a Governor of the country,’ wrote the generally hostile Dupuch.55 John Wilmot, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, reported to his master that the new Governor had buckled zealously to his task and had practically given up drinking: ‘The Dook’s working very hard,’ the Duchess had assured him.56 Brigadier Daly, who came out to inspect the wartime defence arrangements in the Caribbean, declared the Duke was ‘the most capable of the various Colonial Governors he had visited’.57 John Dye told the Secretary of State in Washington that, though the Duke might have been sent to Nassau to get rid of him, ‘he is taking his job seriously and is showing a keen interest in the welfare of the Bahamas’. Every day, reported Dye, he visited some centre of importance to the islands, usually accompanied by the Duchess, who was also active in Red Cross work.58
It is notable how often his wife was included in the compliments paid to the Governor. Both were ‘doing great work’, a friend from Nassau told Bede Clifford. ‘Really HRH … is charming beyond words. He has become really loved by all the people as he takes an interest in the high and the low, and the Duchess is very active in spite of not having been in particularly good health of late.’59 Privately the Windsors might grumble sourly about the triviality of their task and the squalor of their surroundings, in public they were good-humoured and enthusiastic. The Duke had not been transformed miraculously into a paragon of public-spiritedness and devotion to duty; what he did show was that, to an extent Hardinge and Lascelles would have felt inconceivable, when given a job of work to do and with his wife to support him, he would do it faithfully and with considerable ability.
His first important chance to show his mettle came when he opened the new session of the Legislature at the end of October 1940. He made a courageous speech, stressing his determination to foster local enterprise and to do something about the working conditions (where there was work) and unemployment (where there was none) of the black population. The Bay Street boys, expecting a more laissez-faire approach, were disconcerted but not greatly dismayed; flurries of exuberant activity were common in newly arrived Governors and generally came to nothing. John Dye was more impressed. The speech was ‘one of the most sensible and businesslike that has been delivered by a local Governor for many years’, he told Washington. No Governor before had suggested ‘a study of labor in connection with the cost of living’.60
But though in the long term something might and indeed had to be done to foster agriculture and light industry in the Bahamas, in 1940 the colony’s dependence on American tourism was dangerously complete. ‘Lamentable,’ the Duke called it. ‘This concentration of effort during the four Winter months in Nassau and complete neglect of the fate of the Out Islands was a bad enough policy in time of peace, but with the war … this state of affairs is unfortunate to say the least.’61 For the moment they made the best of it, indeed without the Windsors the best would not have been nearly so good. ‘We have patently been Exhibit A,’ the Duchess told Monckton, performing for the Bahamas the role that the Tower of London or Changing the Guard played for the British Isles.62 But with exchange controls and increased taxation in the United States inhibiting the would-be tourists, it was clear that the Windsors’ exhibition could not draw the crowds for ever. When the United States entered the war at the end of 1941, it merely applied the coup de grâce to what was already a tottering enterprise. Tourism stopped overnight. It was a disaster for the Bahamas. The Duke resolutely saw mitigating features. They had kept all their eggs in one basket for too long, now they would be forced to look elsewhere. In the long run the islands would be the stronger for it. But in the meantime, ‘the problem of transition presents many problems, the worst headache of which is, of course, unemployment. The task of finding useful employment for the large percentage of the coloured population, who have suddenly been laid off, is an added and interesting, if difficult, duty for me as Governor.’63
In the middle of 1941 the Duke made a determined effort to set about the problems of the poor and the unemployed. He introduced legislation which would have raised the minimum wage, provided an expanded programme of public works, and authorized the importation of agricultural machinery free of duty so as to encourage local farming. Bay Street might not unreasonably have claimed that this placed too large a financial burden on them at a time when they were already under pressure, and have sought to whittle down the effectiveness of the legislation. They scorned such half measures, however. The new proposals were rejected after cursory debate. Kenneth Solomon and the other Bay Street representatives on ExCo were notably lukewarm in championing the projects of the Governor.
Fortunately for the Duke he had recently been provided with a means to strike back at those who frustrated his reforms. Lord Moyne, who had taken Lloyd’s place as Colonial Secretary, was a man of notably advanced ideas – far more so indeed than the Duke of Windsor. He believed that in the end black rule must come to the West Indies, and he wished to prepare for it by gradually preparing the blacks for their new role and curbing the power of the white oligarchy. A means towards this end would be to change the composition of the Executive Councils of the various colonies, which were often in the grasp of a self-perpetuating clique of reactionaries who made up a majority of the members and did all they could to block the Governor’s reforming zeal. No white oligarchy was more in need of curbing, or more difficult to curb, than that of the Bahamas. Moyne’s proposal was that Governors should rarely appoint members to ExCo for a second term and never for a third, thus offering a chance to introduce new blood and change the balance of power within the Councils. If implemented, this would give the Duke the chance to get rid of the useless Moore before the end of 1941, and Solomon early the following year. It was a chance he grasped at. In November he read Lord Moyne’s letter to the members of ExCo and announced that neither Moore nor Solomon would be reappointed. Moore, who as well as being old, was crippled with sinus and what the Duke coyly described as ‘spells of activity of his right arm’,64 went without too much demur. Solomon was outraged and resigned without waiting for his term in office to expire, resolved to lead the opposition to the Governor’s reforms overtly in the Assembly, where formerly he had been content to do so behind the scenes.
Moyne would have liked to see at least one of the deposed members replaced by a black man. The Duke was still convinced that this would be disastrous. Fortunately for him Moyne’s Parliamentary Under Secretary, George Hall, visited the Bahamas in the autumn of 1941. Hall was a former miner and one of the socialist members of the coalition government; his views on colour were far less progressive than those of his aristocratic minister. He already had a high opinion of the Duke, gained from his recollections of royal visits to south Wales, and quickly decided that he was also a paragon among Governors.65 He needed little convincing that the Duke was correct in his view that to appoint a black man to ExCo would precipitate fearful troubles and paralyse the working of government. After personal discussions and various interviews among the Bahamian notabilities, the Duke told Moyne with some satisfaction, Hall ‘was, I think, able to get some insight of this Colony’s special problems’.66
The war, which had done so much to foment the growth of unemployment by the obstacles it placed in the way of tourism, was also to provide at least a partial solution. Long before they entered the war, the Americans showed themselves anxious to construct a chain of bases in the West Indies. The Bahamas provided one of the more eligible sites. The Duke, who believed passionately in the closest possible Anglo-American cooperation, would have championed such a move even if there had been no other advantages. As it was, he saw that the construction and servicing of the bases would prove an invaluable boost to the colony’s economy. In the eyes of the British government, indeed, he was too blindly pro-American in his championship of their activities in the area. ‘The Duke is rather apt to take a line of his own on these matters,’ wrote the Colonial Secretary, when the Governor proposed that Roosevelt should be invited to the Bahamas for the opening of the airfield, ‘as he does not appear to be nearly so apprehensive of American infiltration as most of the inhabitants of the West Indies and everyone here.’67 He now did all he could to forward the project and, being unusual among colonial Governors in that he had the ear of the President of the United States, he wrote to Roosevelt in January 1941 urging that a quick decision be made on the site where the air base was to be constructed.68 By the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, American money was already beginning to pour into the Bahamas. But this would take time to build up and would at the best never provide more than a temporary recourse. The economic weaknesses of the Bahamas called for more fundamental solutions.
At the end of 1941 the Duke set up an Economic Advisory Committee, to investigate all means by which the Bahamas, in particular the Out Islands, could be developed. As in ExCo, the Duke himself took the chair; unlike ExCo the Committee contained black members, in particular the radical editor of the Daily Tribune, Etienne Dupuch. Not surprisingly the Tribune lauded the new initiative with singular fervour: ‘We have maintained that this country needed the leadership of a man who could, by virtue of his position and authority, unify all groups and factions in the Colony in a concerted drive towards a fixed objective. There is only one man in the Colony who could fill this role, and that man is His Royal Highness the Governor.’69 To claim that the Committee transformed the economic condition of the Bahamas would both exaggerate the ingenuity of this little band of well-intentioned men and underestimate the determination of Bay Street to confound their best endeavours. It did useful work, however, particularly in the encouragement of agriculture in the Out Islands. The Bahamas remained grimly poor, but they would have been poorer still if the Committee had not existed.
One of the Duke’s most powerful allies in his efforts to build up the economy of the colony was a Swedish multi-millionaire, Axel Wenner-Gren. Wenner-Gren was an entrepreneur of outstanding ability, who had built up the great international Elektrolux Company and made himself one of the leading industrialists of his generation. Like many people who are good at making money, he believed that he had the answer to all the world’s problems and was constantly propagating naive and impracticable schemes for the resolution of international conflict and the preservation of perpetual peace. It was in this context that the Duke had already come across him. There had been talk before the war of an international organization which would coordinate all the various peace movements, and over which it had been suggested the Duke of Windsor should preside. Wenner-Gren was one of the business tycoons who had expressed himself as ready to finance the enterprise. He had met the Duke briefly in Paris and presumably expounded his ideas, but no record of the meeting survives beyond a brief mention in Wenner-Gren’s diary.70
It was the Duke’s predecessor, Dundas, who had encouraged Wenner-Gren’s involvement in the Bahamas. The Swedish millionaire had built himself a stately pleasure-dome on the insalubrious Hog Island, on the edge of Nassau, and undertook great works of drainage and the excavation of canals. In the Out Island of Grand Bahama he set up a crayfish cannery. In the scale of his international enterprises, his activities in the Bahamas were inconsiderable; for the colony they quickly became of the first importance. He and Harry Oakes were the only people who brought substantial sums of foreign capital to the Bahamas.
Shortly before the Duke arrived in Nassau, a letter to Wenner-Gren from a friend in Rio de Janeiro was intercepted by the British censorship. It told him that ‘a new and interesting family’ would shortly be arriving, ‘with which I assume you will at once become very friendly. I have met an old acquaintance who … states that family hold sympathetic understanding for totalitarian ideas … This should be of great significance for forthcoming development of events.’71 The significance of this somewhat cryptic message is hard to establish, but to the government in Washington it was additional proof that Wenner-Gren was a German sympathizer, a spy, a dangerous plotter, an enemy to liberty and all good American aspirations. It is impossible to see quite what made the Americans so convinced that Wenner-Gren was thus firmly in the enemy camp. In July 1940 the Under Secretary, Sumner Welles, told Morgenthau of the US Treasury: ‘I haven’t got a word of proof, but I have the most violently strong hunch that the man is acting as an agent for the German Government.’72 Harry Hopkins was equally convinced that Wenner-Gren was ‘violently pro-Nazi’, with equally little reason for his conviction.73 Wenner-Gren was supposed to be an intimate friend of Hermann Göring and close to the other Nazi leaders; in fact he met Göring four times, and only briefly, and there is no record of his knowing any of the other leading Nazis. For this misconception he was largely to blame himself, his vanity led him to claim close friendship with the great regardless of their political affiliations. He spoke about himself, with equally slender justification, as an intimate of Roosevelt; a boast which perhaps contributed to the inclusion of his name on a German black list of prohibited traders.74
He seems, in fact, to have been committed to no cause except that of peace and, more emphatically, of Axel Wenner-Gren. The Swedish Minister in Washington told Welles that he had known Wenner-Gren for many years and believed him to be very stupid and ‘obsessed with an overweening sense of his own importance’ but not an Axis agent.75 The worst that the FBI could find to say of him with any confidence was that he saw himself as a ‘high-class middleman’ between his contacts on both sides, and a seeker after a negotiated peace.76 A search of his papers in Nassau after he had been proscribed revealed nothing suspicious.77 A résumé of the story prepared by the State Department in December 1959 concluded that there was no evidence he had ‘indulged in acts prejudicial to the security of the United States’.78 Yet this lack of evidence did not shake the conviction of influential Americans such as the Assistant Secretary of State, Adolf Berle, and the diplomat George Messersmith, as well as Hopkins and Welles, that he was a dangerous man who must be restrained lest he do grave damage to the allied cause.
The Duke was delighted to find in Nassau a man of international culture, rich enough to provide many of the fruits of gracious living and sharing his general views about the folly of the war and the need to end it as soon as possible. Wenner-Gren’s diary abounds in references to their meetings: ‘Extremely pleasant and interesting conversation … He has a good memory and remembers very well our conversation in Paris’; ‘Pity that political considerations prevent closer social intercourse. Extremely interesting discussion’; ‘Long confidential discussion with Windsor; in many respects we share the same opinions.’79 When the Windsors had no convenient means of getting to Miami, he put his yacht, the Southern Cross, at their disposal – ‘Goering’s Pal and Windsors,’ was the Daily Mirror’s headline to announce the event.80 But as well as being an agreeable addition to Bahamian society, Wenner-Gren was the Duke’s trump card in his crusade to vitalize the economy of the Out Islands in the face of the rancorous opposition of Bay Street.
Left to themselves the British government would have welcomed Wenner-Gren’s investment in the Bahamas and paid little attention to his views on a negotiated peace, or even to his alleged German sympathies. However, Wenner-Gren’s enemies in Washington urged the British Ambassador, by then Lord Halifax, to take some action. The word was passed back and the Colonial Secretary, having studied the American allegations, sent the Duke a cryptic warning that Wenner-Gren was not a suitable companion for a British Governor. The Duke, not unreasonably, asked why. He shared his predecessor’s view that the Swede was neutral, well disposed to the allied cause, in addition to being ‘a very important and prominent resident of the Bahamas engaged in various development schemes most beneficial to this Colony’.81 He had no intention of discouraging him unless given much better reasons than so far vouchsafed. Lord Lloyd either thought it too dangerous to pass on the information at his disposal, or saw how flimsy the information was; anyway, for some months the sleeping dog was suffered to lie in uneasy peace.
Then Halifax returned to the charge and passed on the latest allegations of the State Department.82 Churchill was called in. Wenner-Gren, he warned the Duke, was ‘a pro-German International Financier with strong leanings towards appeasement, and suspected of being in communication with the Enemy’.83 The King had been told of his brother’s involvement with the Swedish magnate and wrote to his mother: ‘David really can do a lot of harm if he is not careful.’84 But in the Duke’s view it was the British authorities who were doing the harm; victimizing an innocent man and threatening to wreck the Bahamas’ most promising economic development. He wrote direct to Halifax to say that he was perplexed by the American suspicions. Could he please be given chapter and verse of what they had against Wenner-Gren?85 He would try, said Halifax, but it was ‘rather a delicate matter’.86 He had in fact already tried the previous day, and Sumner Welles had admitted ‘that I know of nothing specifically against him, but that his associations with high members of the German Government were obviously intimate’.87
In the face of this less-than-overwhelming evidence the Duke can hardly be blamed for sticking to his guns. He continued to see and entertain Wenner-Gren until well into the summer of 1941. In the end, however, he was defeated. The American government placed Wenner-Gren on the black list of those to be treated as enemy aliens, the British dutifully if unenthusiastically followed suit. Wenner-Gren wrote to the Duke to express his dismay at what had been to both of them ‘a humiliating affair. You are fully aware of my views … as I have been utterly frank with you during our conversations, and you must know that there is not and cannot be anything to reproach me for in my attitude towards British and US interests.’88 All the Duke could do was to try to mitigate the damage done to the Bahamian economy by ensuring that Wenner-Gren’s enterprises were allowed to carry on under governmental control.89 The British Embassy in Stockholm, which had been watching Wenner-Gren’s career with interest for many years, were amazed at the American readiness to assume his guilt and to debate only whether he should be shot or hanged; their own view was that he was ‘generally disliked and regarded as a pompous ass, but not guilty of any worse offences than extravagance, attempted social climbing and tax dodging’.90
The Duke was much criticized for his association with Wenner-Gren, but it is hard not to feel that in this case he – as well as the unfortunate Swede – was misused. On other points he is less easily defended. Given that Mexico had recently appropriated all British oil interests and diplomatic relations had been broken off, it was, to put it mildly, tactless of him to receive the brother of the President of Mexico, Maximinio Camacho, at the request of his friend Harold Christie.91 Even if he may be forgiven for thinking that the United States should keep out of the war, it was indiscreet, as well as ill-advised, to blurt this out to the anglophile American stockbroker Frazier Jelke. ‘Sir, you are certainly not a wishful thinker,’ observed Mr Jelke. ‘No, I have always been a great realist and it is too late for America to save Democracy in Europe,’ the Duke replied. ‘She had better save it in America for herself.’92 To his intimates he was even more disastrously frank. He told Aunt Bessie that, ‘The whole of mankind is going to suffer bitterly for the folly of this conflict’ and ‘I can see no ending to it all, let alone a victorious one’.93 When Russia entered the war he professed to be delighted but added gloomily that he supposed the British must be prepared eventually to adopt the hammer and sickle as their national emblem.94
There were those who thought that he was treasonable as well as defeatist. A report from a representative of the British Secret Service in Lisbon said that the Germans had recently approached Bedaux and asked him to establish whether the Duke of Windsor would be prepared to become King in the event of a German victory. Bedaux declined, but the report contained the transcript of a supposed conversation between Mrs Bedaux and the Duchess, in which the former referred to a talk between Bedaux and the Duke in 1937 and said that the question then discussed was ‘very prominent in the minds of certain powers today. We have been asked seriously of the possibility, and we, continuing to believe that both you and —— are still of the same opinion, have given absolute assurance that it is not only possible but can be counted on. Are we right?’ Everything is obscure about this: the timing of the conversation; its precise implications; the relationship between what the Duke might have said in 1937 and what he would have thought in wartime; the response of the Duchess, if there ever was one. What is most interesting, however, is the comment of the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, Alec Cadogan: ‘The paragraph is certainly capable of the blackest interpretations. But it would be difficult to get a conviction on it.’95 His remark illustrates vividly what dark suspicions of the Duke and, still more, the Duchess were nourished in the upper reaches of the Establishment, and how unlikely it was that the Windsors, any more than Wenner-Gren, would be given the benefit of the doubt.
The Duchess made her contribution to the sum total of the Windsors’ indiscretions. At the end of 1940 the Consul General in New York reported an article by an American journalist in which the Duchess was quoted as asking: ‘How can you expect the Duke to live here? I too wish to do our duty. But is there scope here for his great gifts, his inspiration, his long training? I’m only a woman but I’m his wife and I don’t believe that in Nassau he’s serving the Empire as importantly as he might.’ In case Bahamian susceptibilities were insufficiently stirred by these comments, the writer went on to describe Nassau as a ‘place of filthy shacks, hidden away where half-naked negroes live in unspeakable poverty and as a place lying sweltering, sweating, stinking’.96 But the crowning indiscretion came in March 1941 when Liberty magazine, shortly followed by the Sunday Despatch in London, published an interview between the Duke and an American novelist and broadcaster, Fulton Oursler.97 Whatever he did or did not say to Mr Oursler – and he claimed to have had many words put into his mouth – the Duke contrived to leave the impression that he saw no hope of a British victory. Nor was there hope of a change of heart in Germany. ‘You cannot kill 80m Germans and since they want Hitler, how can you force them into a revolution they don’t want?’ The only hope was for a Pax Americana: a peace imposed upon a discredited Europe by the New World, which would restore a measure of sanity to international relations. ‘The Duke of Windsor has given an interview to a magazine in the USA in which he pretty frankly disclaims all chance of an English victory,’ Goebbels is supposed to have commented, adding that they would not use it in their propaganda for fear of discrediting the speaker.98
The interview provoked Churchill into a magisterial rebuke. Whatever was meant, he said, the Duke’s words would certainly be interpreted as ‘defeatist and pro-Nazi, and by implication approving of isolationist aim to keep America out of the war’. Would the Duke in future please seek advice before making public statements of this kind?99 The Duke responded querulously. He had only seen Oursler on the recommendation of Roosevelt’s press secretary; he had been misinterpreted; ‘if as your message infers, I am more of a detriment than of assistance to these vital Anglo-American relations, I would rather resign’.100 A week later he struck back. An article in Life had quoted the Queen as referring to the Duchess as ‘that woman’. ‘I understand that articles about the Royal Family are censored in Britain before release, and this remark is a direct insult to my wife.’ His disillusionment with the Establishment in London was now complete: ‘I have both enjoyed and valued your friendship in the past,’ he told Churchill, ‘but after … the tone of your recent messages to me here I find it difficult to believe that you are still the friend you used to be.’101
But Churchill’s objurgations had an effect, or perhaps the progress of the war convinced the Duke that German victory was not inevitable after all. His change of heart is marked in the reports of his meetings with the American President. When Roosevelt met the Duke at the end of 1940 he was dismayed by the gloom which he irradiated and his obvious belief that the United States would shelter in isolationism. When they met again in the autumn of 1941: ‘He reported the Duke as being very robust on war and victory and his attitude generally showed a great improvement.’102 Two months later, with America in the war, he finally put aside the conviction that Britain would one day have to sue for peace as a nation already vanquished, or on the brink of defeat. He continued to believe that insistence on unconditional surrender was a policy certain to complete the damage which the war had already wreaked in Europe, but from the beginning of 1942 what concerned him was the terms the allies should exact, not the terms to which they might have to submit. His new attitude removed the most important of the factors that made him a potential embarrassment to the British royal family and government in his visits to the United States.