Andrew Lownie live - The Scandalous Exile Of The Duke And Duchess Of Windsor.

[Music] [Music] ladies and gentlemen welcome to the 2021 digital isle of wight literary festival before we go any further can i ask all those of you in the room please to turn off your mobile phones so you are not embarrassed later on and we don't have to point at you um we're delighted to be back in the ballroom of northwood house with an invited audience uh social distance of benefactors sponsors friends and volunteers it's wonderful to see you all and wonderful to get this glorious festival underway this year we're delighted that our loyal sponsors have continued to support us our thanks to red funnel northwood house and rouse limited who have enabled us by their generosity to stream this digital festival free of charge we'll give them a round of applause for it very good i can't think of a better way of starting this festival than with an author whose books are not only well-researched biographies but also incredibly readable as a devourer of biographies and if you're the same you'll know that is not always the case but having read andrew looney's book about the mountbattens i can attest that they are extraordinarily readable oh look somebody's phone already is isn't it nice it went off now rather than in the middle the fair yeah the fairies come um this is andrew's latest traitor king the scandalous exile of the duke and duchess of windsor that's whetted your appetite i shall say no more except to thank andrew enormously for coming along and welcoming andrew lenny [Applause] well ladies gentlemen and those transitioning um thank you very much alan for that kind introduction um i had one the other day and they said do you want to speak now or should we let them enjoy themselves a bit longer i feel a bit with the sponsors i always remember i love coming here i'm so grateful you've asked me to come back i always remember the spawn the the the difference you pay to your sponsors before each each talk and clearly how valuable they are to you and i'm thinking of some of the wonderful sort of productions one could put on with the appropriate sponsor so for example macbeth with scottish widows the flying dutchman sponsored by klm anyway we're here to talk about the traitor king and this is a slightly unusual take on the duke winter they've been scores of books in the duke and duchess of windsor but they all focus on the abdication and in my view the abdication can't really be understood unless you understand his character and what actually happened afterwards he actually lived for 36 years after 1936 and wallace for another 50 years and i always felt reading these books that they sort of they talked about some of the things he did after 1936 the way that he was perhaps involved with the nazis and they always passed it off as he was an innocent dupe he was he was naive but nothing more and it always seemed to me that um there was more to it than that and so i began to go into the archives these archives have been there for a long time no one's bothered even looking at them i have to say i didn't go looking at the archives in this country because they've all been weeded but i went to portugal and france and spain and my best source was the bahamas where there's actually a mirror set of the british files in the bahamas which have not been weeded i mean they have probably now but um not when i did my research so i think by looking at the story from 1936 onwards i think we get a completely different take on the abdication actually why i would argue baldwin and politicians maneuvered himself and maneuvered him into a position where he had to abdicate uh churchill famously said our won't fight and also i think it explains the attitude of the royal family afterwards it wasn't the bitterness of the abdication is actually down to the fact that he was the traitor king it's a very emphatic title there's no question mark there when i started it historians all said to me good luck uh you know this is the end of your career before it's even started and the very reassuring thing was to find that the first review we had in the tls said that he's made his case and other reviews have said the same so what i would propose to do the next three and a half hours is just to go through just to go through a quick rundown of of the story the book actually begins in december 1936 but just a little bit of background here's this angelic looking boy born in 1894 the duke of well the prince of wales i think the other interesting thing you have to understand is really what a difficult and emotionally barren childhood both he and wallace have they were actually drawn together uh all of georgia fifths and queen mary's children were pretty damaged by their upbringing george v was a tyrant queen mary was just a completely cold woman and wallace also had the same experience her father died when she was um very young she was brought up in sort of genteel poverty by an uncle who has her mom ran a sort of boarding house and she was always desperate after that for security and actually for some sort of um luxurious lifestyle anyway here they are as they grow up that's him in his garter robes and there she is this is a young woman and she really escapes her family by marrying this airman called wynn spencer who turned out to be a complete bully uh and a drunk and she ran away from him very quickly and went to china where she learned all sorts of sexual techniques i'm sold and he meanwhile was going around the empire also learning sexual techniques ostensibly to thank the empire for their help during the war also to help teach him kingship but mainly to keep him away from all the married women in london that he was chasing and this was one of them lady freda dudley ward married to a liberal mp he was always very keen on much older woman mother figures um married and i thought it was quite revealing the this relationship went on for many years he was almost like a father to her two daughters in fact he used to give them a pearl each year for their birthday to build a necklace but as soon as he met wallace in 1931 he never even um did a dear john letter to her he literally the first she discovered of it was when the palace switchboard wouldn't put through the calls to her and the children suddenly were cut out no no more pearls but it's very interesting if you look at the correspondence he writes and baby talk to her he never actually grew up both physically because of some mumps he suffered as a child and also emotionally he actually didn't need to shave very often and that's how he kept these very youthful looks wallace then married a man called dennis simpson who's half american you've been at harvard you've been in the granular guards and ran a shipping company and actually um one of the the interesting things there is that she never really fell out of love with him she she she enjoyed the status of being the prince of wales mistress but actually she let security be married to to earnest and she never wanted to marry the the um prince of wales it was only because he threatened to kill himself that she was emotionally blackmailed into doing so and that again gives us a fresh insight into the the marriage which was not the great love affair that everyone has has written about this is another person that she's supposed to to have uh had a love affair with uh jokiming ribentrop the german ambassador in london he was certainly a close friend of hers supposedly he sent her 17 carnations every day to mark the number of times they'd made love since they didn't meet 17 times i'm not quite sure what that meant um but he was a very important figure the germans realized that edward was very pro-german he was 14 16 german his mother was a german princess he spoke fluent german he felt he was german and he liked getting dressed up in austrian gear and eating schnitzel and stuff like that um and as a result of that he wanted as king to be much more involved politically than the constitutional monarch really should be and this was raising warning signs amongst the politicians and the civil servants in the royal household he was also incredibly indiscreet and because he was so pro-german particularly through his friendship with with his cousins people like prince philip of hesse and the duke of saxo goberg there were warning signals going up right through the 1930s wallace was also because she was close to ribbon drop uh in fact robin trump had sent agents to to there was one called stephanie von hollenhauer who actually went to the apartment beside her in branston court so there was this is the setting for the abdication and indeed what happens later on and this is the other interesting thing we again think of them as extremely monogamous but one of the one extraordinary things is this is the only monarch in british history who was bogged by mi5 they actually in 1935 went into buckingham into um st james's park and and basically tapped the telephone lines and so the great thing is biographers love we love mi5 uh having to taps and surveillance because we get all the detail of what happened so the extraordinary thing is mi5 said this wallace is rather suspicious and then discovered that not only was uh wallace having an affair with this car salesman called guy trundle as long as as long along with the duke but he was having an affair with some austrian woman at the same time so again it's a slightly more complex and nuanced picture than perhaps the the books that the madonna version should we say um anyway he his real the place he really loved going was this place called fort belvedere in windsor great park houston detained there but again there were great concerns he would leave his red box open uh there were germans coming to to stay it was um it was it was his bolt hole but at the same time it was a place of great insecurity this is the funeral of his father george v in january 1936. his father had said that boy will ruin himself within a year well it didn't take a year 324 days is as long as he reigned the abdication crisis we all think of stretching out through 1936 but actually no one really in this country knew about it until december literally the week before he went that's when the press started writing about it so it was extraordinary rapid um in a sense fall from grace this is him on the nathan cruz in october 1936 when he went around the adriatic taking various people diana cooper was there dickie mountbatten and there was some coverage in the foreign press and that's when people realized how intimate they were and how familiar they were with each other but it's very interesting if you read lady diana cooper's diary from the nalin which is churchill college archives she writes about how wallace comes up to her and says look don't leave me alone with man he's so boring i really want nothing more to do with him and this was in october 1936 before she married him normally you get bored afterwards um and this is when the the whole book begins i begin on the night of the abdication he goes down he gives the abdication speech in windsor castle with lord wreath beside him and then he literally um is driven to say goodbye to his family they're all in tears these events have rather overtaken them bertie is stammering and is almost uh completely neurotic he never expected to to become king and queen mayor of course is still very cold and he then is driven with his private detective down to portsmouth to catch a boat across to the continent originally he was due to go in a book a boat called the hms enchantress but that thought was very appropriate so they switched it to hms fury anyway he goes across he goes across to um she's in the south of france are waiting for her degree absolute to come through and he uh goes to austria to stay at the home of the rothschild family this place called ensenfield and he goes there waiting for the decree to come through now he's an appalling house guest he plays not only the accordion but the bagpipes till three o'clock in the morning the definition of gentleman is someone who can play the bagpipes but doesn't um he keeps his adc fruity metcalf up all night and then paul fruity has to work the next morning he runs up huge telephone bills which he expects kitty to um to to pay for um she puts on lavish christmas parties for him which he doesn't bother to attend she gives him these wonderful presents and he gives her a signed photo of himself uh so it's it's not really a very happy uh moment this is also the moment when he negotiates the financial settlement with his family and the deal is that he'll get twenty five thousand pounds a year which is what the youngest younger son of the of the king would have got um and he has to give up his life share in balmoral and sandringham he plays hardball he says look if i don't get more money i'm going to lease it to a syndicate of american businessman but george vi really discovers that actually he doesn't need any uh money he saved so much money from the civil list over the last few years and the duchy of lancaster income that if he goes to parliament and ask for money and they ask you know what's the situation they'll never get any money again so the royal family actually pay him his 25 grand and hope he'll go away but it's it's it's it's something of great um uh well it's beginning of the of the family feud uh anyway he eventually gets married uh in june 1937 at this place called the chateau de candi in the loire uh and um he's very sad to to discover that um his brothers and indeed bat who be who he'd been best man for can't come aren't allowed to come to the wedding uh he really has no family there nor does she apart from her aunt bessie and so we have here herman rodgers to the right of wallace who in fact was a very close friend and the man that actually she was always said that she was most deeply in love with and then fruity metcalf the man the left the book is filled with people called things like fruity and baba i really recommend it um and then here you may recognize randolph churchill on the far right and the man with the big nose further down is the reverend robert jardine and he was a minister from darlington who actually just he felt that they should have a religious ceremony and so he actually um left the church of england because they banned anyone marrying him in a religious ceremony and came out to to marry him he then lived off the proceeds the rest of his life touring america and that's a shattered candy which you can go and visit to this day so they get married there and um this is the first of his rather unfortunate friends the man who lends him shattered candy is called charles beto he's franco-american he's actually a german agent he's got huge uh investment of companies he's a time and motion study person has huge companies in germany and is very close to the nazi regime and he basically all these people are targeting the jew they know he's vulnerable they know he's susceptible to their blandishments and so the deal is that he'll um have the use of the castle but he that the duke and the duchess will go and tour germany in october 1937 uh and this becomes a bit of a propaganda uh coup for the germans but a bit of an embarrassment for the british government and anyway this is where they went and had the honeymoon a very strange place because it was reputed that um a woman had killed all seven of her husbands on their honeymoon there but anyway they went to this place um it's just outside vienna and um then this is charles bedo uh very fetching with his wife fern um uh and so this is where they plotted their their tour of germany in october 1937. and here we are i don't know if he's just uh if he's giving the nazi salute or he's just waving but basically he went and saw hitler he visited goring he went to visited ss troops you saw a concentration camp uh it was all um all stunned without telling anyone so it was a bit of a sort of bit of a blow when the when the british discovered what he was up to um and so that was in since i call this the scandalous exile of the duke and duchess windsor this is the first of the scandals um and of course bertie was trying to establish himself on the throne he wasn't very confident they knew that a lot of the duke supporters were mostly heights in fact they've been huge demonstrations on the night of the 12th of december 36 they'd actually come down to buckingham palace we want our king there'd been huge rallies the next day and there was a real concern with the met that actually unless he was sent out into exile he could be a focal point for these mosleyites so he has to be kept in exile and so he goes and because he you know likes to live rather extravagantly he takes the lease of this house the chateau de la cua in antib if i say it's now owned by roman abramovich you'll get some idea of how luxurious it is and he also takes the lease of this house in paris and actually what he wants to do is to set up almost an alternative court he wants to give wallace the lifestyle that in some ways he's had to abandon and he does that partly because he's got lots of money and partly because he gets lots of other people to pay for it so this is just to sort of give you an idea of what the place looks like they they were extraordinary um they lived an extraordinarily luxurious life so for example they would entertain generally 24 for dinner and one night when they only had six to dinner the butler said what's happened she said yes but they are all kings so that's the small dining room anyway when war broke breaks out um chamberlain sends uh a plane to pick them up to bring them back 3rd of september and the duke and the duchess refuse to get onto it they say it's not going to take all our luggage we can't go back so will you send a destroyer so dickie mountbatten pops up with hms kelly and they go back with their 80 pieces of luggage so this is him uh back at the war office and he he's offered two jobs he can be regional commissioner in wales or he can be the liaison officer to the french first army oh he says i'd like to go to wales so georgia 6 says you should better go back to france so he goes back to france and this is a very good opportunity for the british because the british are very keen to discover what the french defenses are of course they've got the famous imagino line and they're quite deferential to the royals and so they let him go and do these reports on the defenses and he reports on how poor morale is actually how bad the defenses are people can just come around the side and he gives these reports to the british the problem is he also gives them to charles bedo and charles beto gives them to the germans the germans changed their invasion plan and we all know what happened on the 7th of may 1940 they went round the side of the maginot line so this was a second scandal basically a former king of britain betrayed the french plans that let the germans actually invade france so uh he then uh basically after a while a few months he gives up in doing this job he's rolled board he goes and plays golf and then the of course the germans are moving in on paris and rather than stay at his post one night he says to fruity metcalf see you in the morning fruity fruity says fine next morning fruity comes in and the duke has sculpted with the car and the petrol and and legged it down to the south of france leaving fruity to spend the next two weeks hitching his way back through the troops to get back to britain so that's how he treats his friends anyway that he then gets to south of france uh churchill says look the only way you're going to get out now is to go to um spa to portugal and we'll send a flying boat and pick you up and bring you back he gets in he goes first of all to spain and this is when something called operation willy begins and this is the attempt by the germans to basically um entrap him and and persuade him to come back if britain's invaded or britain sues for peace as a british peta figure as a good lighter figure now one of the extraordinary things when i was researching this book was to discover the number of peace overtures that went on not just up to september 39 but right through the summer of 1940 and indeed into 41 and that they were taken very seriously sometimes they were allowed to run to see what would happen but churchill when he was saying we'll fight them on the beaches was actually discussing uh suing for a negotiated peace with with the germans and that's understandable because if you think of the german advance going through it did look pretty pretty um tricky one of the other interesting questions for historians is why did the germans halt their advance on the north canal to allow the british expeditionary force to escape and no one's really been able to answer this i think i can because if you look at the correspondence that was going on with the duke with the germans in this exactly the same moment you can see that hitler thought that he could do a deal that he could save the british army i mean he was he's not just talking to the duke he was talking to lord halifax and all sorts of people but he could do a deal with them the duke would then come back and they could turn their attentions the germans on the real threat which was communism and that was the view of the duke of windsor that actually the real threat to the british empire wasn't the germans it was the russians and that of course was was what appeasement was about but that was up to september 1939 it was not what was being uh discussed in the summer of 1940. one of the other scandals is he goes about the duke of windsor in the january 1940 goes back and actually tries to create a peace party in britain with beaver brook and this he's again been monitored by um various people so we get accounts in chamberlain's diary what he hadn't realized is that his police protection officer david storio was filing reports on who are you seeing what he was saying back to the met in the home office into the royal household again those reports are in the archives not here but elsewhere so this is a place called cascas outside lisbon and this is where he gets involved with a german agent called regardo esperitos de santo who was a banker there in fact he's the bank a banker for the for the nazis and this is where a lot of the plotting goes on in fact we now have accounts from portuguese secret service files events files how the jew got rid of his protection he was going in and out of the german embassy and we also know from documents were discovered after the war which were never meant to be discovered german what we call the captured german documents which were meant to be burnt but actually were found we have in fact chapter and verse so all the things that were going on at this time in terms of the telegrams and the correspondence which was pretty dynamic dynamite stuff which we'll come to a little bit later so there he is basically intriguing with uh um desanto he doesn't report any of these approaches to the british that of course they know about them in fact the germans allow his maid to go up to paris to recover some linen for him he delays his stay there to see what's happening in terms of of the world events by insisting that his valid who's been called up for military services is retained and he basically he even we even have quotes of him saying to hitler if you really want to to um to get britain to to capitulate you just need to bomb them like hell and that's in the captured german documents and this is the man who organized operation willie's a man called walter schellenberg who was a german ss officer a very um bright ambitious man and he in fact was uh offered the duke large sums of money to um go and wait out the war in switzerland until he could be brought back but churchill is monitoring all this uh and we have of course the ultra decrypts but also he's got um people in the household reporting back at one point he threatens him with a court martial and then they decide the best solution is to to deal with him to contain him is to send him off to the governor to be governor of the bahamas so that's what they do and here he is getting on the boats to go off to the bahamas it's a posting he described as exile bahamas is very small it's it's it's it's so inconsequential in terms of of colonial office appointments that you don't even get your k if you go there um but anyway he's sent off there now one of the really interesting things is that he remains in contact he says i'm going off you know clearly the events haven't panned out as we thought but i'm ready and waiting when the call comes and he communicates with just esperanto as preacher santo by code um or root anyways bermuda saying i'm ready to come back when you want me so this is communication with the enemy in code during war that is a capital offense but of course that's all being covered up lord haha was executed for far less than this so anyway he gets to to the bahamas it looks quite nice that's government house it's just been done up for him but he says i don't like it um can you redo it and they said well it's gonna cost us about five spitfires to do this he says i don't care i'm going to either go to my ranch in canada or go home so they spend five spitfires doing it up to make it look like that and meanwhile he goes and stays with a man called harry oaks who is probably the richest man of the bahamas he's a canadian who's there as a tax exile um there they are in their in their finery and that's harry oaks and harry oaks is to play quite an important part in the story one of the great mysteries of this time in the bahamas is an event that took place on the 8th of july 1943 at this place here westbourne on that morning harry oaks is found murdered in his bed uh he's had i think probably a boat hook uh thrust into his face uh he's then being set a fire his face on fire and his gentles on fire and he's been covered with feathers to make it look like a voodoo killing the duke is one of the first people to be informed and instead of ringing and getting the local policeman chief of police to deal with it in fact he arranges that chief of police to be seconded immediately to trinidad instead of calling in scotland yard instead of calling the fbi from new york instead of calling in someone from the air from the base it was a police section there he calls in two cops from miami two crooked crops who were part of mayor lansky's criminal enterprise down there and they come and uh what they do is they immediately arrest this man here alfred de marini harry oakes's son-in-law who the duke doesn't like there's no evidence of course but that doesn't matter they'd if they produce their own evidence they find that there's a there's a fingerprint of his in on a screen in the room where the oaks has been killed until the defense actually show that the print is not an original print it's been taken off a glass and actually been put onto the screen by the two crooked cops uh now we saw why why is this happening well the answer is this man harriet harold christie who's another part in some ways this triumphant he's a property developer his best client is harry oaks harry oaks discovers that he's been double-crossing him and says he's not going to do any more business with with christy christie oakes and the duke are also involved in a money-making operation to take money out of the bahamas and their course currency restrictions and invest it in a german bank the banco continental uh in mexico in fact they've all put in well the duke hasn't but uh oaks has put in five million that's five million is of course never accounted for and is distributed i think between christie and the duke and this is the other uh rather dodgy character of the duke gets to know it's called axel venagran he's uh the founder of uh um uh um electrolux uh he was he's very close to the nazis he's actually called goring's pal he's a tax exile also in the bahamas he comes almost immediately after the duke arrives in august 1940 he then develops this big estate called shangri-la with these very deep harbours which the authorities think are being used to refuel german u-boats and there are huge numbers of files both in the german sorry in the in the british and the american uh intelligence communities where they actually say uh and write to the duke saying don't get involved with axel venagren he's basically um a german agent and the duke says oh well he gets a nice yacht i like going on it and i'll make my own friends i want to thank you very much so um you can see there's some very dubious characters hanging around the duke um they're the duke is hard at work in some ways the the the um posting is the making of wallace she she gets involved with the red cross we've got a picture over here she gets involved with children's clinics and uh serves in a canteen for um servicemen on the base the duke does very little partly because it's very difficult for him to do anything because the island is run by a group of businessmen the bay street boys of which christie is one and basically he can't do much he doesn't have many many powers and frankly he has no interest in rocking the boat so instead he plays golf uh he goes to strip shows he just drinks um there's an extraordinary account by a man called patrick skeen catling who's still alive who's posted the island and met him on the golf course one day the duke was was driving in his cadillac from hall to hall and then and he then said get in get into the car and i'll take you somewhere where i go every thursday and they drive down to one of the black townships and suddenly all these little black boys run out with sticks and they actually parade in front of the duke who takes the salute in the car and then he drives off and he does that every thursday so he's replicating his life in britain the life that he sort of was maneuvered out of throughout his life and there'll be plenty of occasions like that at the end of the war he lobbies atlee and churchill for a job and they say no way you've got very unfortunate friends we can't trust you uh basically we want you we don't want you to come back your best thing in america the problem in america is he would have to pay tax but he does come to some arrangement where he spends half the year here at the waldorf house astoria and half the year in france the french basically make him give him a tax status and he's able to um and and cheap accommodation cheap rents uh duty-free and all sorts of things now this uh figure here is alan lussels who's the monarch's private secretary he's a key figure in the story lassell's in fact even before he became king said to baldwin i hope he kills himself in a steeple chasing steeple chase accident because we really don't want him to be king and baldwin says i agree and also um records in his diary uh which are again at churchill college cambridge the fact that of the discovery of these german documents but he also confirms uh that have uh from intelligent sources that the the duke was communicating with the germans in code during the war offering to come back as as as addicted as a fact as a petal figure and this other chapter looks bit the same another man with a mustache and bald head guy little director of mi5 again an incredible sorceress historians because he kept a diary all through the war which he wasn't supposed to do and so he records all these events and again he confirms all the investigations into the duke of windsor during the war uh as this traitor in fact poor old georges six has told the news about this because from these captured german documents as he comes out he goes out to the ve day crowds to take the chairs and as he walks in all the other cells tells him by the way your brother was consorting with the nazis um because what happened was at in may 1945 the germans were retreating and a man called von losch who decides that this will be his calling card says he's a sort of clerk in in the foreign ministry says all these files buries them in the in the in the forest and when the british in fact the american army come through he leads them to these files and there is chapter and verse all the dealings with the duke of windsor the other interesting thing is um and it's been a great mystery against historians when anthony blunt was interviewed in 1963 by peter wright michael dean the queen's private secretary said look he may mention a trip at the end of the war to a place called cronberg this is kromberg that has nothing to do with his treachery so just don't go there it's always rather intrigued peter wright and historians have always wondered what was there at cronberg that was that blunt was sent there on a mission to recover in uh the end of the war and we now know uh i actually found a diary in cable college oxford a man called david price who was an officer at cronberg uh at this time and just casually one day wandering around he said he went to the library opened the drawer and it's filled with correspondence and the due of windsor to prince philip of hesse who was actually a nazi general that was what uh blunt was going to pick up and of course that was his calling card when it came to the immunity later on so that is another little sideshow now we get to another scandal the ednam lodge robbery 1946 in berkshire the couple have come back to stay with their friend the earl of dudley they've come back with all their jewels they don't put them in the safe though they're offered the chance to say they put them under the bed that night a cat burglar climbs in through an open window takes the jewels and there's a big hoo-ha millions of pounds of jewels have been stolen no one has ever been caught for the robbery and so they claim on the insurance it's all they can do well the mystery is solved after their death when there's a huge auction of the duchess of wallace's jewelry you know where i'm going with this and there are all the jewels that were supposed to be installed in 1946 which they claimed on insurance so we're really not getting a very good picture are we so you think prince andrew is bad so they have another house this is another house is in paris and they tend to all they do basically he's interested in gardening golf his stocks uh and entertaining and they mixed all sorts of people maria kalas i think that's clark gable there daryl zanuck all sorts of people as a wonderful story that rex harrison's son told me of going they're going to have to have dinner with rex harrison and ellie palmer and portino and they read that harrison couldn't stand them and so when he drove them back down to portugal they were an open-top jeep he tried to drive as quickly as he could and as swerve as much as he could in the hope that they might just go off but anyway they hung on for dear life anyway this is the house you probably associate with them in the wider balloon which is where they live for the last part of their life oops god well that's the end of it thanks very much oops god what's happened there oh god okay this is a man called jimmy donahue jimmy donahue was the heir to the woolworth millions uh he was a playboy figure and he became wallace's lover in fact there's some suggestion the duke was also attracted to him and one of the one of the great benefits of jimmy was he always picked up the bill and that's what the winds is really like but he also made wallace feel young he was fun to be with and the duke was busy writing his booker king's story and so wallace spent a lot of time with him in various nightclubs now the extraordinary thing about what about jimmy donahue is he was bisexual so the the wits wits would quip that actually she'd swapped a king for a queen um and now let's see if we get to the next one there we are and again uh by going to the french archives you probably can't read this but um the the french everyone was basically everyone was bugging the duke of windsor so the the british were bugging him the fbi had people um doing surveillance and and telephone taps and the french were doing it and so this is the surveillance report uh of the night with jimmy donahue coming back and staying the night with um wallace all the previous books have said oh he was gay it was all platonic and there's no evidence for it well here is evidence of him spending the night with her on this night actually the duke was at his mom's funeral it says something about jimmy donohue this i think is very poignant picture it's a picture at the el morocco nightclub new year's eve 1957. i'm afraid i didn't get the whole of the zebra um sofa there but this is a real pathetic picture isn't it they rather they've been crowned um on new year's eve uh and they've sort of had to enter the joke because everyone else is picking up the bill anyway the family feud they realized they've got to somehow sort this out uh in fact he's playing very badly and in the in in the press and so when um in 1967 they're invited back to unveil a plaque to queen mary uh in the mall so you can see them they're the queen mom and various people but they're not invited to stay at buckingham palace they're not even invited to the lunch afterwards i think i have to go and have lunch with with marina duchess of kent um the only house that they owned was this house called the mill just outside paris which would go to every weekend where he was able to create a garden very like an english garden and where they would entertain and which she did up now one of the myths again of wallace is that she was a woman with great style okay i'm going to just give you a try vox pox anyone got a house like that maybe that's that's that's the big thing in west coast and there we are pink and green always goes well so the report sort of they did get the report 1972 in may 1972 the queen on a state visit to paris does go up and see the duke they know that he's dying and um that is buried and and um attempts are made to to basically keep him on side because of course now what they're worried about is that his stuff should go back to the royal family i mean the garter robes all the artifacts he's got the correspondence all these things there's a damaged limitation exercise going on and this is the um duchess actually trooping the color uh which happened just afterwards she comes back for the funeral one of the myths is that this was a great love affair well the the night nurse who was there when the duke of windsor died said that though wallace had a room two doors away from him and every night he would call out wallace she never once visited him in the last two weeks of his life he died in the arms of the night nurse not of wallace anyway here she is looking rather um harrowed rather upset she's actually heavily tranquilized she for the first time she's brought to buckingham palace only because they're worried that she'll make a scenic clearages and there she is uh the prince philip is brought in with the duke with the mountbatten to basically ensure that she agrees that all this stuff should be sent back to the royal archives uh where it had it has been brought back now the royal archives is is a bit like a restaurant with no menu you just go in there and you give them what they want that you to have which is generally very little um so basically stuff goes into the royal archives and and never really comes out and that's what's happened to his papers becomes under the the grip of this one called metrobloom who is a very uh sinister french lawyer who basically starts selling off some of the property and supposedly to pay hospital bills but i think a lot of it goes into her own pocket the judge just lives on for another 14 years in 1986 she's basically a vegetable by then some of you may have seen some of the pictures she just lives off a diet of vodka which she drinks from a silver tank head she has to be carried everywhere she's in a darkened room uh all her friends are kept away from her and she's just controlled by metrobloom so this is her service in george's windsor and finally the two are reunited at frogmore she still hasn't been given her treasured hrh status which of course is totally illegal all her sisters-in-law had it the irony is that she ended up with a morganatic marriage the very thing that everyone said she couldn't have in 1936 so it's a pretty tragic story it's a very sad story but it also i think gives us a slightly different take on on actually the abdication i think frankly wallace saved us from a terrible king and um they were quite right baldwin the others to basically push him into position where he he was forced to abdicate he could have fought it he could easily have won and there could have been a compromise he could have decided to marry her after he was crowned he could have uh insisted that she had this morganatic title so um the history i think what you know was changed in those that week in 1936. there's lots of other stuff i mean the currency smuggling the the black market dealings lots and lots of stories in the book how badly they treated their staff poor old sydney the the bahamian butler who served with them from 1940 till the 1970s his wife died and he asked if he could go home early to to take care of his children at five she said if you go at five don't bother coming back and time and time again people are sacked as few and they underpaid their staff because they thought it was a privilege to work for them and they were completely nuts so for example the lamb's lettuce in the salad had to be cut to the same size the sheets were on twice a day the lu roll they they perforated and put it in piles i mean it was an extraordinary weird life he really liked just speaking german and so the poor golfers in palm beach he would just suddenly break into german with them and know what was going on and then at the middle of meals he would start conducting music um this is not the picture you get i'm afraid in the official lives but it's the picture you get in traitor king and we're very happy to answer some questions [Applause] first of all thank you what a what a pair of lives an amazing story so thank you what was the biggest surprise to you i mean it seemed to me surprised after surprise was i was sitting here but given you our history and you've written before what was the insight that really even hit you as well to be able to back up the the traitor king instinct that i had and to have the lesser and little confirmation that was very important the other was to discover that um they were bisexual and they used to be uh there was a guy called scotty bowers in hollywood he'd go to the beverly hills hotel and he would procure young boys and girls for each of them and they pretended they'd never been to the beverly hills hotel the bisexuality of the duke his affair with a man called walter chrysler who was the son of the car manufacturer and some of that stuff's hinted at in chips channel and nikki haslam knew about it uh who knew them it's a live course so those are two things i think just the just the sheer dishonesty of the man when you see if people were i mean for example he used a man called john wadolf who was a secretary to do some of these currency black market dealings uh and then when um basically when it was discovered they tried to put the blame on another secretary called anne siegram and she was sacked wadalov threatened to go to the papers with the story and there's long discussions again about how to to basically see him while he was paid off but he was making millions from things like that that they were taking uh they were sponging off people they were being paid to attend events they would even vet guest list that they went to um uh is an extraordinary thing and of course there's a fascinating parallel with modern life can you think of a couple with uh uh i've got to be careful what i say are not very bright a charismatic prince who marries an american divorcee is manipulated taken away from his friends and family bad parenting is blamed falling out with the loved siblings and sisters in law debates over finances and security um the curation of the story through tamed journalists and book publishers the way that they sue everyone [Music] i don't know i it's i sort of feel maybe something like that happening now so there's a playbook um if one could just you know they would look at it yep i'm sorry history repeating itself of course um first of all how long did it take to do the research it was some time i imagine and will this become a film because it would make a wonderful one i think i'd love it to be a film it's a great film um yeah absolutely um i mean we've got any human heart which deals a little bit with the bahamas i did it very quickly i have a full-time job but i my matt baton book came out in august 2019 so two years ago i started researching then and of course we then got straight into the lockdown archives were closed so i researched the book basically from august 2019 through till february this year i wrote it between february and may and it came out a few weeks ago so it was quite quick yeah first booked i mean my guy burgess took 15 years so i thought i better speed up a bit the friendship with mountbatten and churchill is fascinating because clearly they were very close friends originally on with the prince of wales did that come to a sudden end or did that endure through the duke of windsor's life well the relationship with with matt batten actually did endure interestingly enough they fell out i mean the the prince had been his best man then um there was this falling out of the abdication because dickie basically saw the way the wind was blowing and didn't come out as his best man but actually it looking at the royal archives which i finally got into the other day um they did actually keep in touch matt batten and wallace didn't get on so he only really they would only do it when wallace went to get a facelift she had about six of them um so that's when he would sort of meet her churchill churchill relationship he of course had been the great proponent of the king's party but i think he got fed up when he saw what he was up to during the second world war and actually they were both invited on a nationalist yacht in the 1950s and churchill refused to go he said i will not be on the same vote as that man but even so churchill and eisenhower tried to to suppress the whole story of the margberg files they tried um there's all this fascinating correspondence and eisenhower i was prepared to agree to it it was only because they that the documents were with american historians that they were actually um saved but they delayed the publication until 1957 uh and even then it was all dismissed as basically you know people trying to keep in with with the german authorities but it's it's actually dynamic stuff and it was the love story entirely one-sided that that he was besotted with her she knocked with him why then did she give in well he wasn't sorted with her she was the mother figure um and uh it was a sub dom relationship so uh for example the more awful she was to him the more he loved it and he loved being sent to bed in tears um so it was weird she liked having that sense power over him which course gave her a great lifestyle and i think she felt he'd given up the throne for her she could hardly then disappear um and so she was stuck with him which is why she had these affairs she also had to fail with a guy called russell knight who was a singer and actor and i think there are others too which i just didn't find so um they sort of they sort of rumbled along um together as this couple um but she basically bossed him around and he never really grew up um he he he liked the fact that she she she was this mother figure to him and she she was the child that he never she never had it's a very strange thing i've got a whole chapter on their sexual relationship which i recommend uh in some ways your your title sort of undersells itself in a sense traitor king is far more than just a traitor what do you think drove this man in terms of his behaviors we've got sexual drive political drive is it risk taking criminality i mean with your assessment and depth of research what do you think is behind the behaviors of this person well i think he's just very self-entitled and i think he'd been spoiled as a child he'd been emotionally deprived of affection so he's looking for something he he was actually very inadequate as a as a man not very bright and when churchill gave him a copy of his speeches he said i'll put in the shelf with the others and when he went to a mozart concert he said i like that did he write anything else um but i think he he he i think he regretted the fa he realized that you know he regretted the abdication he he felt he'd let wallace down she was always berating him she was you know terrible terrible rise where she gave him a hard time and if that's why he gave her all the jewelry that's why he wanted to have the state visit in germany so he was always trying to please her and he had no interest he had no inner life um he was anti-semitic he thought hitler was a good thing even in the 1960s his one of his best friends was also mostly he was just a very dishonest inadequate figure and i think people realized that i mean there was this great gap between the public image of this very charismatic prince and and the reality of what he was like so um that's why everyone wanted to basically contain him and keep him away um with them not doing too much damage um but it's yeah um i don't know what drove him i don't think he was sufficiently reflective to even sort of think it through i think he was very vain he loved clothes and he was called pants across the sea where he had his jackets made in london his trousers made in america for some reason with a zip and stuff but he was very vain and i think he was very flattered by the germans so um and and he felt he'd basically copped up and he wanted to try and make amends in some way he thought he could be he was a little man who thought he could be a big man i'm not invited to buckingham palace garden parties anymore uh you mentioned um the auctioning of wallace's jewelry what happened to the estate what happened who inherited the estate uh was given to the institute foster pastor a council charity in paris uh and michael block uh who worked with mitra bloom wrote several books based on the papers uh quite sympathetic books and then the institute pasteur um used the money from the sales for their work but they gave the papers and things to the royal archives everything ended up in the royal archives like hotel california it goes one way um uh some of the furniture as a thank you for the french government they gave to the french government to and they had extraordinary collections of mice and china and things which went to to um to museums um and then there was some stuff like some picture book album picture albums which they gave to the gardener and that's actually fortunately the only stuff that we've been able that that fortunately they did that because as a result that was then sold on the open market and we've now confined it the reason i discovered about the walter chrysler thing was that one love letters to walter chrysler were actually sold at auction in the states they wouldn't they wouldn't be in the national archives or if they were they were under lock and key we know that the queen mother loathed the duke of windsor how much of what you've told us this evening do you suppose the royal family no or new and have you sent them a copy of your book well she was called the the witch of glams by wallace and and cookie in cookie yeah and that woman um actually funnily enough the queen mum was meant to be in the steely one who said you know this awful woman actually bertie was equally steely if you look at the correspondence the royal family i think knew pretty early on i'm sure they were brief very early on uh and that's why they were so angry with them and and really didn't want anything to do with them wallace never was entertained by the royal family until that 67 episode the queen met for the first time after the application then um the uh my first book guy on on john buckin was actually given by the royal household as a christmas gift to all their staff um i'm not sure this one will be um when the palace has been asked to make comment they've said no comment so we just don't know what they think i would have just said look you you know you know you think it's bad now look at how bad it was before but it's interesting that we've not had i normally get lots of reviews for my books i've not had many reviews of the book and though we had good ones you know from the tls and others uh the times and sunday times for example we fought over cyril from my book last time haven't covered it the guardian the observer no one wants to touch the story i think what actually made you decide to write it well when you um trying to find ideas for biographies you want to find a subject uh which you think you've got a new take something new new material or a new interpretation you've got to have actually got to find think that there's this material that you can you can draw on and you've got to think of the market and the great thing about the crown is is really made the market for raw biography great because you can then you know everyone knows and states who these people are and the other thing is the royal biographies of traditionally not shall we say had been synonymous with archival research i mean what happens is a journalist goes and talks to the police protection officer or whatever it is and and they write their story no one actually goes and looks in the files to try as historian historic serious historians look down on raw biography that they don't think it's important but actually these are fantastic characters complex and important roles in society and everyone knows who they are so they're you know they're good subjects i'm not quite sure what i'm going to do next i mean maybe andrew and fergie but um but you know i would i'd love to find stuff but it's really difficult to find good subjects that that will that will get me invited here i think time for a drink isn't it [Music] ladies and gentlemen on your behalf enormous thanks to andrew lonely [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you very much for participating in the isle of wight literary festival if you've enjoyed this presentation please consider making a donation follow the donate now button from the home page of our website you can also benefit from great discounts by ordering via blackwell's bookshop from our home page [Music] we'd like to thank the loyal sponsors and supporters who've sustained the isle of wight literary festival over the past years without their financial contribution it will be difficult to attract the many wonderful speakers we've hosted while keeping ticket prices down this year their support has enabled us to provide the digital festival free of charge [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Isle of Wight Literary Festival

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Length: 58min 53sec (3533 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021