THE CONVERSATIONS WITH PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DID NOT come about without a protracted battle. The prospect of the Windsors rampaging around the United States appalled the British government for two, contradictory, reasons. According to one scenario he, or more probably she, would speak indiscreetly, behave with impropriety, meet with ridicule or hostility, and generally become a source of embarrassment to the royal family and the nation. According to another he, or less probably she, would charm the American people and their leaders, be fêted and applauded, stimulate comparisons with the King and Queen unfavourable to the latter, and generally become a source of embarrassment to the royal family and the nation. The only acceptable visit to the United States by the Duke would be one that was entirely unobtrusive, and since neither the Duke’s temperament nor the interest of the American press made this a probable contingency, the best solution would be to keep him corralled in the territory which he governed.
When Churchill vetoed the Duke’s proposal that he should visit the United States on his way out to the Bahamas, he explained that this was because presidential elections were under way; no permanent embargo was intended.1 From then on a rearguard action was waged to postpone a visit for as long as possible. The government’s doubts on the subject were confirmed by a German broadcast stating that the Duke had accepted his job so as to be near Washington and able to work with Roosevelt for a negotiated peace. Monckton gloomily commented that this showed even the discussion of a meeting between the Duke and the President was filled with peril.2 Roosevelt himself, Mackenzie King told Princess Alice, was as keen as anyone that their meeting should be indefinitely postponed. Yet if the Duke visited the United States it was almost inconceivable that he should not call at the White House. ‘What trouble the dear boy continues to give wherever he goes,’ commented Princess Alice.3 In fact he had no sooner arrived in Nassau and taken a horrified look at Government House than he applied for leave to visit his ranch in Canada. Churchill was put out at the proposal that the Duke should abandon his post before he had even properly taken over. He was ‘very grieved to hear that you were entertaining such an idea’, Monckton wrote. The Prime Minister hoped that, when the people of Britain were suffering so much, the Duke ‘would be willing to put up with the discomfort and remain at your post until weather conditions made things less unpleasant’.4
‘Please stop any nonsense about David’s paying a visit to his ranch,’ Queen Mary appealed to the Earl of Athlone, now in Ottawa.5 For the moment the danger seemed remote, but Lothian, the British Ambassador in Washington, unwisely spoke to Roosevelt about a meeting with the Duke and got the answer that the time was not yet quite ripe but that the President planned to see him while visiting the site of the projected American base in the Bahamas. Lord Lloyd wrote crossly that, ‘I had just got the Duke, as I thought, clamped down securely in the Bahamas for a while, and now Lothian is stirring up the waters again.’6 Lloyd, advised presumably by his brother-in-law Lascelles, could always be relied on to take the lead in thwarting whatever the Duke of Windsor might want to do. At his instigation the Foreign Office instructed Lothian to tell the President that they wanted any visit paid by the Duke to Washington to be postponed for as long as possible, and that they hoped Roosevelt would keep clear of the Bahamas for the moment.7 The Duke for his part was convinced that the Foreign Office were not merely blocking his travel plans but blackening his name as well. ‘The persecution of the Windsors goes on relentlessly,’ he told Guedalla. ‘Lousy publicity’ was being diffused in America, ‘disgraceful and libellous lies’ being spread. It was all part of the same campaign as had used the American press in 1936 to drive him from the throne.8 ‘If Lothian advises that due to the American press he is against a visit to America, where I shall go to visit my family,’ the Duchess warned Monckton, ‘it does not come from the Americans but from London, and we cannot accept it.’9
Roosevelt paid little attention to Lothian’s hints and at the end of November told the Ambassador that he would shortly be cruising around the West Indies and looked forward to seeing the Duke while he was in Bahamian waters. By the time this news was received, the Duke had already applied for permission to visit Miami, so as to escort his wife who badly needed the attentions of a dentist. The Foreign Office had not contrived the clash of dates, but they were happy to take advantage of it. Lothian was told to discourage the President from pursuing his intention to meet the Duke, who ‘has been left in ignorance of the suggestion’.10 It seems unlikely that Churchill would have tolerated this slightly squalid piece of deceit if he had known of it; as it was, Colville minuted ‘Too late to show the PM’ on the copy of the telegram sent to Downing Street.11 The Duke did not remain in ignorance for long, but his chagrin at being absent from his post when Roosevelt was visiting it was quickly appeased when the President invited him to fly out from Miami to join him for lunch on his ship, the Tuscaloosa. He duly did so, and whatever dire consequences the Foreign Office foresaw from such a meeting, nothing much seems to have happened. The Duke was more pessimistic about the progress of the war than seemed suitable to his host; on the other hand, Hopkins told Churchill, he ‘spoke very charmingly of the King’.12
The visit to Miami too was a ‘success from every point of view’, according to the British Consul, James Marjoribanks; ‘Britain’s stock soared with the advent to Miami of our former monarch.’13 Wenner-Gren, who had put his yacht at the disposal of the Windsors when the regular passenger boat was cancelled at short notice, wrote in his diary of a ‘spectacular reception’, with tens of thousands of people watching both arrival and departure and hundreds of small boats escorting the yacht to sea when it departed.14 Indeed, the only feature of the visit which came in for some criticism was that Wenner-Gren had provided the transport and was in attendance, and even this did not attract much attention.
It was while he was in Miami that the Duke learnt of the sudden death of the British Ambassador in Washington. The American press, and indeed the Nassau Daily Tribune, assumed that the Duke was likely to be Lothian’s successor and that the visit to the Tuscaloosa had been made to sort out the details. There was no shortage of advice to the President from those who thought the appointment would be a great contribution to Anglo-American relations: ‘Such is the epic quality of the present world struggle,’ wrote George Weston, ‘that Edward of Windsor might well be more important in Massachusetts Avenue than in Buckingham Palace.’15 But there were as many to point out the hazards in placing the Windsors in a post of such diplomatic delicacy, and it seems unlikely that the idea of such an appointment was even contemplated in London. The Duke himself can have had few illusions on the subject, though he told an American journalist that he would accept the post if offered it, provided ‘I thought it was in the interest of our two countries’16 – a somewhat disingenuous comment which fuelled the speculation about his likely appointment.
It was instead the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who was given the job in Washington, and so it fell to Halifax to comment when the Duke asked permission to visit the States in April 1941 to study the Civilian Conservation Corps camps which Roosevelt had set up to help combat unemployment. The new Ambassador regretfully concluded that it would cause less trouble to let the Duke come than to stop him, since to do the latter would encourage those elements in the American press which were prone anyway to see the Windsors as martyrs. His enthusiasm for the visit was rendered still less ardent by the fact that Oursler’s article in Liberty magazine had only just appeared, and journalists would be eager to lead the Duke into fresh indiscretions. The Duke’s arrival, he wrote with some hauteur, would ‘inevitably be treated here as a “raree” show’, and everything possible would need to be done to keep him away from the press.17 Churchill, who had been outraged by Oursler’s interview, took a more robust line than Halifax and told the Duke bluntly that the visit ‘would not be in the public interest nor indeed in your own at present time’.18 The Duke huffed and puffed indignantly – ‘My first six months have been spent doing my utmost to strengthen Anglo-American relations, and I think I have had some success,’ he told Churchill19 – but short of resigning his post he could do nothing save submit. All he could manage was a brief call at Miami to meet his financial adviser, Edward Peacock; during this visit he refused all invitations to private parties on the grounds that his country was at war: ‘He seems to have acted with considerable discretion,’ commented Eastwood of the Colonial Office.20 It was July before the Duke finally obtained permission to spend most of the hottest months of August and September on the mainland, and even then the start of the visit had to be postponed to avoid any risk of his meeting the Duke of Kent. The Duke wrote bitterly to Halifax that Kent’s presence in America would give the press a chance to ‘rehash the sordid story of the feud between my family and myself; a feud which, as you know, is not of my making’. He hoped that his brother would be kept away from Florida: ‘Even if there is disunity in high places in Great Britain, it is very important that it be concealed as much as possible from the over-curious American people.’21
The Duke had frequently pleaded that he should be sent a press officer, to come between him and persistent journalists and to protect him from mishandling by the likes of Oursler. The best that could be done was to detach René MacColl from the Embassy at Washington for a few days to coach the Duke for the exposure to the press he would inevitably endure when in the United States. ‘MacColl arrives next Friday,’ the Duchess told Monckton. ‘I understand he’s very nervous over it all. I believe he thinks HRH is for “appeasement”, “negotiated peace”, and all the rest of the lies pinned on the Duke.’22 MacColl for his part was more nervous about the Duchess than the Duke. ‘That she dominated the Duke was clear to the least perceptive,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘I have rarely seen an ascendancy established over one partner in a marriage to quite so remarkable a degree.’ She made him happy, MacColl believed: ‘He seemed to revel in being with the Duchess.’ But her approval was essential to him and he sought it constantly. Once in America an American journalist asked him to make the V sign. The Duke started to comply, then caught his wife’s eye. ‘She shook her head. The Duke dropped his arm.’23
MacColl was assigned to the Windsors as public relations officer while they were in the States. His role was not that usually associated with the title: ‘The rule seemed to be that the Duke must say as little as possible, must hold no press conferences, give no interviews, make no statements.’24 MacColl’s main problem was coping with unfriendly questions about the amount of luggage with which the Windsors found it necessary to travel. ‘Could not the more frivolous side of things be soft-pedalled?’ asked the Duke hopefully, but the answer was all too obviously that it could not. The press took inordinate interest in such picturesque if trivial detail. Estimates as to the number of pieces ranged from thirty-five to eighty, seventy-three being the best authenticated figure. He had never intended to say an unkind word about the Windsors, wrote Henry McLamore of the Washington Star with unconvincing benevolence, but ‘you almost have to question the sanity of a man or woman who would start on a short trip with 58 bags and trunks full of clothing’.25 Even Lord Halifax observed the phenomenon. The Windsors, he told Alexandra Metcalfe, had behaved ‘most sensibly and ordinarily’ except for ‘their ridiculous amount of luggage of which the papers were so critical … I was a little outraged at being presented with a bill for £7.10.0 for hire of a lorry to take their luggage to and from the station.’26
This superfluity of luggage, together with the costliness and splendour of their suite in the Waldorf Towers – the ‘Millionaire Stratosphere’, as MacColl called it – and the energy with which the Duchess made up for her year’s deprivation from the delights of serious shopping, lent the trip an air of extravagance and self-indulgence. In the House of Commons a Labour member, Alexander Sloan, asked whether the Minister was aware of the bitter criticism in the American press of this ‘ostentatious display of jewellery and finery at a period when the people of this country are strictly rationed’. The Minister rather wetly replied that the cuttings in question had not been drawn to his attention,27 a defence so pusillanimous as to annoy the Duke even more than the original accusation.28
In fact, though the Duchess would have done well to exercise more restraint in the style of her travelling, the trip was well conducted and certainly did nothing to ruffle Anglo-American friendship. The Duke saw Roosevelt twice, and the President told Halifax that the visit had gone off well: ‘He said that the Duke had been very firm on the question of war and victory and that she had produced a better impression on him than he had expected. I told him I had been through exactly the same experience the only time I had met her.’29 A large dinner party was given for them at the Embassy; it was ‘quite calm’, reported Halifax, ‘and they both seem to have been very charming to everybody’.30 At luncheon the Secretary for the Navy and his wife were invited so that the Duke could talk about the Bahamas bases. ‘The Duchess’s behaviour was completely correct,’ Halifax told the King, ‘and in one tiny detail I thought she acted with considerable tact by making Mrs Knox go in to luncheon in front of herself.’31 (The surprise of otherwise sensible people when they found that the Duchess of Windsor did not swear in public or dance drunkenly on the table is one of the more curious features of such reports.)
The visit to the ranch in Canada passed off equally smoothly. The Athlones had been dismayed at the news of the visitation. ‘I hate the idea but there is no means of stopping him,’ the Governor General told Queen Mary. ‘I only hope he will not come here.’32 The King assured him that he was safe, Churchill was warning the Duke that he could not include Ottawa in his travels, ‘as Aunt Alice won’t, and cannot from my point of view, receive her. How I dislike the perpetual troubles over David … but it will make him realize, or rather her, that they cannot do as they like.’33 The Canadian crowds were invariably welcoming and large, though not in comparison with the vast throngs which had greeted him as Prince of Wales. Indeed the largest crowds were in Baltimore, where the Duchess fell into the category of ‘local girl made good’, and the couple were mobbed enthusiastically whenever they appeared in public.
In Washington on their second visit the Duke had a long and important talk with the Ambassador. Halifax reported it to both Churchill and King George VI, in terms that were varied to suit the recipient but did not differ in essentials. To Churchill he said that the Duke felt ‘pretty bitter about being marooned in the Bahamas … I must say it certainly sounds pretty grim. He said that he had done his best to play the game and avoid making difficulties, but that his family had not responded, and he never wanted to see them again … I should guess that he will want to pay periodic visits to the United States, which personally I think it would be rather cruelty to animals to prevent him doing.’34 To the King, Halifax laid greater emphasis on his rejoinders to the Duke’s protestations that he was monstrously ill-used. He had told the Duke that he underestimated the deep shock caused by his abdication, the effects of which still lingered on. It was too early even to think of living in England. The Duke said he had no intention of doing this unless all the obstacles were removed by his family. But he could not stay for ever in the Bahamas: ‘He wondered how long the war would continue, and where they would live after it was finished. He didn’t think that France would be much of a place to live in, and thought that the New World would be all right, but it was very expensive! He said that he was very happily married and had got the most wonderful wife … He certainly looked very well, and was clearly very happy with her.’35 The fact of the matter, commented the King, was that the Duke, as a former monarch, could never live in England. ‘We know this, so does Winston, but we can never tell my brother so in so many words. He has got to realize it for himself.’36
The Duke did indeed want to ‘pay periodic visits to the United States’, but in spite of what he had said to Churchill, Halifax never got used to the idea. One reason was that he was convinced, for no noticeable reason, that the Duke had his eye on the Embassy for himself. When Monckton visited Washington on the way to the Bahamas, Halifax asked him ‘to keep his eyes and ears open for signs of whether the Duke was thinking about one day filling my job’.37 Monckton reported that the Duke seemed terribly bored, though he was ‘very popular with the negro population and doing his job very well’. He seemed to have no idea of taking up residence in Massachusetts Avenue, if anything it was some sort of job in Latin America on which he had set his heart.38 Halifax was unconvinced; a year later he was telling the Colonial Secretary that the Duke, by his frequent visits, was grooming himself for the Embassy: ‘I don’t think myself that would be a very good plan, although it might indeed be quite a popular appointment with the Americans.’39 It was not until the middle of 1945 that Halifax conceded the Duke had ‘evidently given up the idea of being Ambassador here if he ever had it’.40
The criticism of the Windsors’ ostentatious extravagance never stopped; some of it was justified, more was not. In August 1944 a Philadelphia engineer called William Harman wrote to the Ambassador to complain about the Windsors’ night-clubbing and party-going while allied soldiers were dying in Europe. Halifax passed on the letter to the Duke, who wrote to Harman a dignified and temperate reply pointing out that they had not entered a single night-club since the war began and that the only parties they had been to had been given for military personnel. ‘You have been misrepresented and I have been misinformed,’ admitted Harman. ‘For myself, I want to withdraw what I said.’41 About the same time an English journalist, Sydney Moseley, received the blast of the Duke’s displeasure over newspaper stories reporting that, for her appendicitis operation at the Roosevelt Hospital, the Duchess had reserved ten rooms and the attentions of eight nurses. In fact she had one room and the same nursing as anyone else. The Duke ‘was genuinely upset about this …’ wrote Moseley. ‘This was false and unfair.’42
A problem which exercised the American Treasury as well as the newspapers was where the money came from for what were obviously highly expensive trips. Much nonsense has been talked about the Duke’s finances at this time: that Wenner-Gren held $2.5 million on the Duke’s behalf (a report based on the unverified surmise of an unidentified American agent43); that Sir Harry Oakes subsidized him from money illicitly transferred to Mexico; even that he was on the payroll of the Mafia. There is no reason to believe anything so picturesque. Substantial sums had been given to the Duchess of Windsor by the Duke while she was still Mrs Simpson and after her marriage, and some of these were invested in the United States. In December 1941 she had two current accounts in the Chase Bank, one at that time containing $9000, the other $29,931.44 In September 1940 Monckton had pointed out that the Duchess was still an American citizen and thus liable to pay tax on all her income, even though she was not resident in the United States.45 Whether the American tax-collectors took their share is unknown; even if their exactions had reduced her income to an unacceptably low level, there would still have been no shortage of dollars since J. P. Morgan and Co. had been instructed by the British government to provide any sums that the Duke might require.46
The Duke also had dollar securities in his own name. These led to a somewhat acrimonious exchange between Monckton and the Palace. All British citizens were required to declare their holdings in foreign property or securities so that these could be mobilized when exchange ran short. In August 1940 Monckton told Churchill that he thought the Duke would be prepared to comply with this.47 But when it came to the point the Duke proved reluctant to put at risk what he regarded as his economic lifeline. Peacock asked Ulick Alexander to support an approach to the Prime Minister urging that the Duke should be exempted from the obligation to register his holdings. Alexander refused. ‘The King also had a certain amount of money in America, and he at once surrendered it and accepted English money in exchange. I didn’t see why the Duke shouldn’t do the same.’48 When the Duke needed to raise French francs to pay the expenses of his household at Cap d’Antibes, the Federal Reserve Bank said they could only provide the exchange with the authorization of the British Embassy. Once again the Treasury came to the rescue, Horace Wilson unenthusiastically approving the transfer of the necessary funds from the Duke’s sterling account in London.49 Whether the Duke was justified in asking for badly needed foreign currency to be applied to such ends, and whether Wilson should have acceded to the request, are matters for individual judgment. It is clear, at least, that there was nothing covert or illegal about the transaction.
The Windsors were in Washington in June 1942, when news began to filter in of violent rioting in Nassau. It did not come wholly as a surprise. Work on the American air base meant not only an inflow of capital and the provision of badly needed employment, but also of foreign foremen and skilled workers who were vastly better paid than the Bahamian labourers. This might have been tolerable, but there was no shortage of mischief makers – communists, and ‘men of Central European Jewish descent, who had secured jobs as a pretext for obtaining a deferment of draft from the Army’, the Duke dubbed them50 – who told the Bahamians that the American contractors were ready to pay far higher wages to the locals if the Bahamian government had not imposed restrictions. There was some truth in this – one of the reasons for the Duke’s presence in Washington was to negotiate a modestly increased wage for the labour force – but the discrepancy between the two rates of pay would still have remained glaring. A few hotheads demonstrated; the authorities mishandled what could have been a minor disturbance; disaffection spread; all the latent hatred for the selfish white oligarchy overflowed; a mob surged down Bay Street, looting and destroying; the police and the handful of British troops on the island opened fire. The violence died down, only to be renewed next day. To the alarmed administration it seemed as if the forces of law and order might quickly be overwhelmed.
To the Duke the worst danger seemed that the Americans would conclude the Bahamas was no place in which to build a base, and pull out of the operation. He at first tried to persuade the American censors to embargo all news coming from the colony, but it proved to be too late and the attempt was quickly abandoned.51 Meanwhile, he agreed with the President that a hundred American marines should be flown to the island, ostensibly to protect American installations, in fact to help preserve order.52 If he had consulted Whitehall before taking such a step there would have been much havering and no guarantee that permission would eventually be given; as it was the marines played an unobtrusive role but the knowledge of their presence gave immeasurable reassurance to the civil authorities. Having taken these steps the Duke borrowed an aircraft from the Secretary to the Navy and himself flew back to Nassau. His presence stiffened the resolve of the authorities to restore order and offered some hope to the black population that their worst grievances would be remedied. It remained to repair the damage and apportion the blame.
On 8 June, a week after the outbreak of the violence, the Governor broadcast to the colony. His address was a nice balance of stern reprimand and sympathetic understanding; he emphasized that further violence would be rigorously repressed, promised free lunches for the workers and his best endeavours to secure an increase in the basic wage, and announced the setting up of an official and independent enquiry to establish the causes of the riots. The speech was remarkable in that it won approval from both the Nassau newspapers, which usually agreed only to differ. The Guardian called it ‘A speech of high quality … it will long be remembered as a model of leadership’, while the Daily Tribune praised it as ‘balanced and firm … the result of thorough consideration and careful thought’. Remembering the suspicion, if not animosity with which the Tribune had greeted the Duke’s arrival, it is remarkable to find it concluding that ‘The feature which now stands out above all others is the fact that it was eventually resolved by the dominating personality of one man, His Royal Highness the Governor … HRH approached the gigantic problem calmly and efficiently. He held conferences day and night. He acquainted himself with every possible aspect of the question … he handled a delicate situation with tact and dignity, resolution and authority.’53
The Duke was convinced that, though it was a dispute over wages which had sparked off the trouble, ‘sinister racial feelings have been aroused on both sides’, and these were the product of the selfish short-sightedness of the Bay Street oligarchy.54 An official enquiry, presided over by someone from outside the Bahamas, was essential if this was to be established and made public. The Colonial Office doubted whether such a commission was necessary, but the Governor insisted that otherwise Bay Street would set up its own enquiry and put the blame for the trouble on the administration.55 Whitehall gave way and a retired colonial judge, Sir Alison Russell, was eventually appointed. Bay Street were far from satisfied by the setting up of an enquiry which they foresaw might be critical of their system: to their minds only two questions needed answering – who in the administration was responsible for letting the violence get out of hand, and how soon would they receive compensation for the damage done to their property? They set up their own Select Committee and summoned members of the administration to appear before it. Convinced that the Committee would be hopelessly prejudiced, and encouraged by Walter Monckton who happened to be visiting him, the Duke refused to let his officials give evidence. Kenneth Solomon, for the Assembly, took legal opinion and found an elderly professor of jurisprudence who ruled that the Governor had acted improperly. A legal officer at the Colonial Office concluded that the professor’s report was either ‘an exceedingly careless piece of work’ or ‘not a bona fide opinion’. The law officers of the Crown concurred and instructed the Duke to rebuff the protests of the Assembly.56 The Assembly’s Select Committee went ahead undaunted and produced a report which, to no one’s surprise, concluded that there were no underlying causes responsible for the riot. ‘I consider that the Report is steeped in local politics and I trust, therefore, that its findings will be judged in that light,’ wrote the Duke.57
‘HRH seems to have managed this very well,’ minuted Mr Rogers of the Colonial Office. ‘An appreciative reply seems called for and I submit a draft (a bit fulsome perhaps).’58 It cannot have been half as fulsome as the tribute of the Bahamian radical and leader of the black population, Dr Claudius Walker. ‘Two years ago when the radiowaves broadcast the news of Your Royal Highness’s appointment … the deaf heard and the dumb spoke, the blind saw and the crippled leapt for joy. Your reputation as a humanitarian and King had preceded you … You are not just another Governor for one class of people but the Governor for all colours and classes of people.’59 It is not necessary to take such a rodomontade too seriously, but it would equally be unjust to deny that the Duke had in fact handled the situation well and deserved the plaudits of both the Colonial Office and the black Bahamians.
He returned in triumph to Washington to complete his visit. In theory it was there that agreement had to be won to an improvement in the basic wage, in practice it was the Colonial Office who needed to be convinced. He had recommended an increase of one shilling a day; the Whitehall view was that this was too large for comfort and might have dangerous implications for the rest of the Bahamian labour force, but that the question was ultimately one for the Duke to decide.60 ExCo considered that sixpence would be sufficient but cabled the Duke in Washington that they too would accept whatever he concluded was best.61 As soon as he was back in Nassau he broadcast to the island announcing an increase of a shilling a day. ‘My endeavours … met with no little opposition,’ he declared – ingeniously giving the impression that it was the Americans, not the British, who had made the difficulties – ‘and at one time I feared that I might have to return empty-handed.’ The authorities, however, had been persuaded of the justice of the Bahamian cause. More than ever, he was a hero in the eyes of the black people.
The British Army Staff in Washington now curdled the blood of the Colonial Office by predicting further violence, possibly fomented by the Germans, at the time of the forthcoming elections to the Legislative Council. The Duke was unimpressed and rejected any idea that the elections should be postponed.62 He proved right, but he had barely returned to Nassau before it seemed that he might have underestimated the dangers of the situation. On 29 June 1942 fire devastated the commercial centre of the town. The Duke plunged into the maelstrom and did a useful job helping to bring the blaze under control,63 then waited apprehensively for a report on the causes of this new disaster. Fortunately, the mischief was traced to an arsonist intending to defraud his insurance company. There was, ExCo concluded with relief, ‘no apparent connection with the recent riots’.64
Russell’s report, when it finally appeared, proved a justification of everything that the Duke had preached for so long. It roundly condemned the Bay Street system; called for a reform of the tax structure, above all for the imposition of an income tax; made recommendations for new labour legislation; and urged the adoption of a secret ballot in the Out Islands as well as New Providence. The Governor was unenthusiastic about the ballot but only took exception to one of Russell’s recommendations, the encouragement of birth control; not because he was against it himself, but in recognition of the fact that ‘the negroes ignorantly view this beneficial measure as a subtle way of gradually exterminating their race’. One omission also he found regrettable, the failure of the report to consider the issue of racial hostility as a prime cause of the riots. He understood why the commission had shirked the issue but, ‘I personally disagree profoundly.’ Race was at the heart of the trouble: ‘I regret to say that the flame of local race antagonism is still fanned by a certain section of Bay Street … and by negro agitators.’65
The issue of the secret ballot was to dominate the last two years of the Duke’s administration. It was not a matter particularly close to his heart; he doubted whether it would make any noticeable difference to electoral results on the Out Islands, and anyway believed that it was economic and social, not political reform that was urgently needed in the Bahamas. It was the policy of the Colonial Office, and as such he accepted that it was his duty to promote it, but left to himself he would have given it the lowest of priorities. He was not left to himself, however, and by the end of 1942 found himself urged by Whitehall to push the reform forward urgently even at the expense of a confrontation with Bay Street.
It was irritation at what he felt to be ill-informed and misguided pressure which led him in January 1943 to write a long letter to the new Colonial Secretary, Oliver Stanley, in which he set out his views on the main problems facing the Bahamas. Any Governor who sought to achieve greater justice and prosperity for the masses, he maintained, was bound to run foul of Bay Street and its mouthpiece, the House of Assembly. In his case the conflict had been almost continual. Nevertheless, ‘although I cannot claim to have achieved a great deal in the two and one-half years of my Administration, I am at least satisfied that I have started balls rolling in different directions and that my position as Governor is considerably stronger than when I arrived here’. He believed in reform, not revolution. Bay Street was actuated by ‘pure avarice and greed’, but the black Bahamians were ‘a backward people and far more African in their mentality than the casual observer could possibly discern’. It was essential that the white minority should retain political control, ‘it would be disastrous for the well-being and economy of the Bahamas should the negroes get the upper hand for a long time to come’. Bay Street must be educated, not roughly coerced or brushed aside. He saw his role as being one of keeping the peace and holding a balance between the ‘progressive’ Colonial Office and the reactionary white colonists. ‘The Constitution of the Bahamas falls between two stools, for it is representative but not responsible and possesses none of the advantages of either self-government as in the British Dominions or Government by an official majority as in the case of the Crown Colonies.’
In this worst of possible worlds, the Executive Council could not rule but could effectively paralyse any activity by the Governor of which it disapproved. The ‘low standard of intellect and integrity of the community as a whole’ made it inevitable that ExCo would continue to be an obstacle to reform or even reasonable government. There was no body of moderate opinion in the Bahamas: on the one hand the elite consisted of ‘a reactionary white group of merchant lawyers’, on the other a ‘motley collection of lower class whites, high yellows and coloured agitators’.
He ended by reiterating that the black Bahamian was unfit to rule, and that the encouragement of equality of races in the United States, now being pursued by ‘certain people in high places in Washington’, had dangerous implications for the colony. It was his appreciation of this danger which had led him to adopt policies more conciliatory towards Bay Street than Stanley’s Colonial Office officials sometimes approved. An open breach with the House of Assembly would hurt neither the Governor nor the politicians, ‘but only the welfare of the masses, which may as a result be denied the necessary legislation to improve social and economic conditions’.66
Claudius Walker would hardly have recognized his ‘Governor for all colours and classes’ in the author of this cautious and conservative epistle, but the Duke would have accepted the title without demur. He was a paternalist, genuinely concerned for the welfare of the black population, and the fact that he found them ill-equipped to manage their own affairs did not affect the reality of his benevolence. He considered that the setting up of the ‘Windsor Training Farm’ in a previously derelict corner of New Providence, or the establishment of an Out Island Department in Nassau, did far more for the black Bahamian population than the secret ballot or the appointment of a black man to ExCo could ever do. Another proposal to which he attached particular importance was the Bahamas Labour Scheme, by which several thousand unemployed Bahamians were shipped under contract to Florida where farm labour was desperately needed. The Colonial Office, presumably feeling it undignified that British citizens should be exported to do manual labour in a foreign country, at first raised objections but the Duke persisted; conditions in the Out Islands in particular were so desperate that there was little alternative except starvation. He recognized that the scheme ‘would only be a temporary solution of our difficulties, and might well be the cause of a lot of discontent in the long run’, but at least it would buy time in which his plans for the development of the Out Islands could be pursued.67 By early 1945 five thousand Bahamians were working in Florida, with another five hundred on the way.68 Since their wages were high by Bahamian standards, and their contracts stipulated that at least a quarter of their income had to be remitted home, the benefit to the islands’ economy was considerable.
But for the war there would not have been room for the Bahamian labourers in Florida, otherwise there was only the presence of American forces in Nassau to indicate that the British Empire was involved in a desperate conflict. In March 1942, however, possibly because of some intercepted radio traffic, the Colonial Office suddenly took alarm at the thought of a German submarine landing a raiding party at Nassau and abducting the Duke.69 To his surprise he was told that he was to be provided with a personal escort: ‘It was my idea to send you a Company of Infantry to guard Government House,’ the King wrote proudly, ‘and I am glad that the 4th Camerons, my own special Battalion, should have been selected for the task.’70 One of Hoover’s agents reported that the Duke was ‘very much worried for fear of being kidnapped by the Germans and being traded for the release of Rudolf Hess’,71 an interpretation of events which makes the Duke sound more alarmist than he was; he never asked for the guard and welcomed it mainly as providing some new faces about the place. He drew the line at having an electrified fence erected around Government House or at taking an escort with him whenever he travelled outside Nassau.72 Churchill was inclined to accept the Duke’s line on the second point but to insist on the fence: ‘The right rule is, one may always take a chance but not offer a “sitter”.’73 The Duke persisted: local drunks would undoubtedly blunder into the fence and electrocute themselves and the black population would think it was aimed against them.74 Churchill dropped the idea.
The Duke’s own personal war with Bay Street was growing more violent, however little he might relish it. In response to his long profession of faith Stanley replied sympathetically but firmly. The constitution of the Bahamas was under severe scrutiny in London; it would only survive if it could be shown that under it there could be introduced ‘the sort of reform which everybody today considers a minimum’.75 In April the House of Commons debated colonial administration in the West Indies. The Duke personally got a good press, but Stanley wrote to tell him, ‘there is a genuine feeling on the subject of politics in the Bahamas, which may well develop into very outspoken criticism unless appeased by substantial measures of reform’. Income tax and the secret ballot were the two most significant innovations urged by Stanley.76 The Duke accepted that he must act; his only stipulation was that, since the introduction of income tax would be opposed by everyone affected, white or black, it would be better to isolate Bay Street by concentrating first on the secret ballot.77 He spoke to everyone in the Assembly who was likely to be at all sympathetic to the cause, and explained to them that on the introduction of the secret ballot might depend the survival of the constitution. Then, on 30 November, he opened the Legislature with a speech in which the need for constitutional reform was starkly set out.
The response was more one of incredulity than of outrage; the proposal, it was generally supposed, could be no more than a bargaining counter which would be dropped in exchange for acceptance of some of the Governor’s social legislation. Given half a chance, the Duke would have been happy to treat it as such. ‘Quite frankly, I am not convinced that all the Out Islands are yet ripe for the Secret Ballot in their present backward state,’ he told Stanley. ‘The whole question is most delicate and fraught with difficulties and is one which, if I take too firm a stand, is likely to produce a clash not only with the House of Assembly but with the unofficial members of my Executive Committee. This is a risk which I personally deem it imprudent to run at the present juncture.’78 Two months later he had grown more robust. He had been converted, he told Stanley, by Professor Richardson, his economic adviser, who had arrived in the spring of 1943 and quickly established himself as a very considerable influence on the Duke in every field of activity. He now believed there was a chance that the Assembly might accept the secret ballot. But what if it was rejected? Should he dissolve the House? ‘I have since childhood been taught to avoid politics like the plague,’ he told Stanley, ‘and as a brother of the King it would … be most undesirable were I to become involved in a highly contentious political conflict which is fundamentally a racial one.’ Besides, he concluded rather touchingly, so far he had done well for the community in his charge: ‘I wish my administration to be remembered as a constructive one when I leave and not clouded … by so unpopular an incident as dissolving the House of Assembly.’79
Stanley regretfully agreed, satisfied that even if the Duke did dissolve the House an election would be unlikely to change things very much, and the Governor would then either have to abandon the cause or suspend the constitution – not a course ever to be taken lightly, least of all in wartime. But he insisted that the Duke should first do his best to persuade the Assembly to accept the ballot – possibly the strength of opinion in London might induce some of the less recalcitrant to change their minds.80 The Duke accepted the instruction, though he became ever more convinced, he told Richardson, that ‘white Bahamian resistance to the Secret Ballot is the right one at the present time; for the alternative, namely the rule of Messrs Milo Butler, Bert Cambridge etc is too terrifyingly awful to contemplate’.81*13 As he expected, the House rejected any extension of the secret ballot, though it agreed that the device should become permanent in New Providence. As a quid pro quo it accepted the Duke’s pet legislation, the Out Island Development Plan, by which £400,000 was allocated over a period of eight years for the improvement of these benighted areas. The Duke, at least, was satisfied that the bargain was a good one for the Bahamas. And when, in February 1945, he was able to tell Stanley that there had been a change of heart in the Assembly and it seemed likely that the secret ballot would after all be extended to all the Bahamians,82 he had some right to reflect that he had done his job well and that Whitehall would in the end be able to have its cake and eat it too.
It was singularly unfortunate for the Duke that his very real achievements as Governor should have been overshadowed by a lurid scandal in which he played a less than impressive if peripheral role. His tenure of office in the Bahamas is associated in popular memory more than anything with the murder of Sir Harry Oakes. On 8 July 1943 the body of this rugged yet flamboyant magnate was found, charred and battered, in the bedroom of his house near Nassau. Oakes was ‘a very fine and charming old man’, the Duke told Marjoribanks; ‘the Santa Claus of New Providence … very popular in the community’. He was a Santa Claus with enemies, however, and one of them had now murdered him, the Governor told Stanley, ‘in circumstances as grim and gruesome as any crime concocted in the imagination of Edgar Wallace’.83 When the news was brought to the Duke he at once made his first blunder and tried to clap an embargo on the news – a move that would have been pointless in any case and was made doubly so since word had already reached the American mainland, whence a flock of journalists was shortly to descend on the Bahamas.
Next he made a still worse mistake. He concluded that the local police force was ‘entirely unequal and unequipped’ to deal with such a crisis.84 It is not surprising that he reached this decision. Even before he arrived in the Bahamas the Acting Governor had telegraphed him, in connection with the possible assassination attempt, that the local detectives were ‘not to be relied on to undertake skilled investigations’.85 Heape confirmed that his view had not changed when he told the Colonial Office in November 1943 that a murder of such complexity was ‘beyond the capacity of any small police establishment such as we have here’.86 Hallinan, the Attorney General, also believed the Governor was probably correct in calling in reinforcements.87 But it was in the choice of those reinforcements that the Duke erred sadly.
In peacetime it would have been automatic procedure to appeal to Scotland Yard. In wartime, however, with flights hazardous and spasmodic, it might have taken weeks before a detective had arrived in Nassau. A telephone call to Washington would have produced equally efficient assistance, but here too there would have been some delay. The Duke was consumed by a sense of urgency, believing that what evidence there might be would soon be destroyed in the heat of the Bahamian summer. It was essential that detectives come at once. It is a common weakness of those in the highest places to believe that people with whom they are personally acquainted possess some special quality denied to other mortals. While in Miami, the Duke had been impressed by the efficiency of Captain W. E. Melchen who had been assigned to guard him by the Miami police. He telephoned Melchen, a call which was intercepted and transcribed by the American authorities, told him Oakes was dead, and asked him to come out with one or two of his men to investigate. It was, he said, a ‘very, very urgent matter’. There was no need to bring a passport and Pan American would hold the midday flight. It was imperative the investigation begin that day.88
The true horror of the Duke’s blunder was not to become apparent for a little while, but he now compounded it by making up his mind who had done the murder before the investigation had even begun. Sir Harry Oakes was known to have quarrelled violently with his son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny. The Duke disliked de Marigny, who had been less than respectful towards the royal Governor.89 He did not hide his views; the behaviour of the American detectives suggests strongly that they went to the scene of the crime determined to find de Marigny guilty. The Duke could hardly have expected, however, that Melchen’s deputy, Barker, would manufacture evidence to help secure a conviction.
Who in fact killed Sir Harry Oakes is a mystery and probably always will be. A plethora of theories has been put forward, some convincing, some grotesque. What is certain is that when the murder came to trial, the case against de Marigny collapsed and Barker in particular was exposed as a dishonest bungler. The Duke thought it wisest to leave Nassau while the trial was on, and talked to Halifax about the case. He told the Ambassador that he thought de Marigny was probably guilty but was unlikely to be convicted.90 The evidence does not support the first part of his view. The jury had no hesitation in acquitting, though for reasons which were obscure then and remain so today they added a recommendation that de Marigny be deported forthwith from the Bahamas.
This recommendation the Duke pursued with vengeful eagerness. Since the United States would not receive de Marigny, he could not be deported by the Pan American flight; to wait for a suitable boat would involve a longer delay than the Duke could endure, Transport Command must send an aircraft to remove him.91 The Colonial Office, who had been doubtful about the wisdom of importing American police from the start, approached Transport Command, but without much zeal. The Command predictably said that all their planes were needed for military purposes. He was convinced, the Duke then telegraphed, that a failure to deport de Marigny ‘would constitute a deplorable evidence of the impotence of the local Government and have very serious effect on the Colony’s reputation throughout the world’. Duly impressed by this prognostication, the Colonial Secretary approached the Secretary of State for Air. Sir Archibald Sinclair supported Transport Command. The Duke now threatened that unless a place was quickly provided he would appeal direct to Churchill. Stanley passed this on to the Air Minister. ‘Your first reaction may, I fear, be to resent the tone of the telegram,’ he wrote, ‘but you will realize that in this particular case we all have to make allowances.’ Sinclair showed no signs of yielding, and then the news came that de Marigny had already left the Bahamas under his own steam, leaving the Duke looking like a man who had been beating down a door with a sledge hammer only to find that it had never been locked.92
The Duke thickened the smoke of mystery that hung around the case by posting the Commissioner of Police, Colonel Erskine-Lindop, to another West Indian island before he was able to give evidence at the trial. The truth of the matter, the Duke told Stanley, was that the transfer had already been gazetted at the time of the murder. Lindop had been so upset by the criticism meted out to him in the Russell report into the riots that ‘he lost heart and more or less sat down on the job awaiting transfer … The result was a general deterioration of the Police Force, both as regards discipline and efficiency, until it got to a very low ebb, and as the state of the Police Force is my direct responsibility, became a situation I could not tolerate.’93 He would have done well to tolerate it for a few weeks more; the disappearance of Lindop inevitably led to rumours of a cover-up. In fact the Bahamian police had been so effectively divorced from the investigation that Lindop had little to contribute in the way of evidence and certainly nothing that could not have been said perfectly well by his deputy – but this did little to check the tide of gossip.
The Duke had made a fool of himself. There were those who suggested, and still suggest, that he had done far worse. Many accusations have been levelled at the Duke by those who thrive on sensation; most of them suggesting that he received some sort of financial reward for his performance and was operating, consciously or unconsciously, as the agent of international criminals, probably the Mafia. All that can be said of these is that no evidence has ever been produced which would stand up in court, and that such conduct would have been contrary to everything that is known about his character. Even if the distinctly shaky thesis that international crime was somehow involved in the Oakes murder be accepted, no one has ever produced any fact which even implies the possibility of the Duke’s complicity, still less of any motive that could have been strong enough to impel him into taking so appalling a risk. He can fairly be accused of impetuosity and bad judgment, and of allowing his dislike of de Marigny to impair what should have been his complete impartiality. This is quite bad enough, without dredging up fantastic slanders from the sludge of unsubstantiated gossip.