He explained to Wallis that he had learned to crochet from his mother as a young boy. At half past six each evening at Sandringham, Edward and his siblings were called in from the school room and sent to their mother’s boudoir where they would sit at her knee, while she crocheted or embroidered. Queen Mary taught them gros point, which Edward kept up, and perfected while recovering from a riding accident. He returned to this hobby during his time on the Western front in France. On long car journeys he crocheted to kill time. He later said that he was ‘understandably discreet about my hobby at first. It would hardly have done for the story to get around that a major general in the British Army had been seen bowling along the roads behind the Maginot Line crocheting.’
While the women all wore simple evening dresses, Edward sported a kilt in Balmoral tartan and produced a small cigarette case from his silver sporran. After cocktails, the small party went through to the dining room – the wood-panelled room seating only ten – where they ate oysters from the Duchy of Cornwall oyster beds, followed by roast beef and salad, pudding and a savoury. After coffee in the drawing room, Edward taught Wallis to play a card game called Red Dog, while others attempted a complicated jigsaw puzzle that was laid out on a long table in front of the main window. Dancing followed in the hallway. Suddenly, the prince tired. Before going to bed, he announced the rules of the Fort: ‘There are none. Stay up as late as you want. Get up when you want. For me this is a place of rest and change, I go to bed early and get up early so that I can work in the garden.’
The following morning, when the maid bought Wallis breakfast to her room, she was informed that His Royal Highness had finished his an hour before and was in the garden. When the Simpsons entered the drawing room, they saw the prince on the terrace outside in baggy plus fours, a thick sweater, hair tousled, hacking at the wild undergrowth with a machete-like billhook, dogs at his heels. Ernest Simpson, not a natural athlete, was ill-equipped to respond to the prince’s insistence that all guests help him wage war against the dreaded laurel bushes. ‘It’s not exactly a command,’ a fellow guest informed Ernest, ‘but I’ve never known anybody to refuse.’ Crossing the lawn, brandishing murderous-looking weapons, the house party resembled more a band of revolutionaries ready to do battle than an elite group of guests staying with the Prince of Wales at his country retreat. After two wearying hours in the winter chill the guests returned for a fortifying hot and cold buffet lunch laid out in the dining room. That afternoon, the prince took Wallis and Ernest around his home, even showing them his bedroom, on the ground floor, off the hall. It was spacious and charming with red chintz curtains framing spectacular views of his beloved garden.
Later that afternoon, the prince went for a tour outside with his gardener. When he returned, he disappeared to the basement. Thelma explained to a perplexed Wallis that at the same time every day he liked to take a steam bath, and was as proud of having installed this as he was of his central heating. He later appeared wearing a bright yellow polo neck, his face flushed red, yet ‘radiating utter contentment’.
As an original thank-you note, Wallis and Ernest composed the prince a jaunty poem on their return to Bryanston Court. As etiquette demanded, it was signed by Wallis only.
Sir –
Bear with me and do not curse
This poor attempt at thanks in verse.
Our weekend at ‘Fort Belvedere’
Has left us both with memories dear
Of what in every sense must be
Princely hospitality.
Too soon the hours stole away,
And we, who would have had them stay,
Regretful o’er that fleeting slyness,
Do warmly thank Your Royal Highness.
But with your time I make too free –
I have the honour, Sir, to be
(Ere too long my poetic pencil limps on)
Your obedient Servant,
Wallis Simpson.
After their fairy-tale weekend, Wallis and Ernest returned to the real world. They did not see the prince for much of the rest of that year, 1932 – a year Wallis pronounced ‘dismal’. Ever preoccupied with worsening money worries, she wrote to her Aunt Bessie that Ernest’s shipping business was struggling as the world lay in the trough of the Depression.
Britain had also been suffering from the severe economic downturn. Hardest hit were the industrial and mining areas of the north of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, where unemployment reached 70 per cent. Over the previous few years the Prince of Wales had made extensive tours of Tyneside, the Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales. He visited hundreds of working men’s clubs and schemes for the unemployed, seeking out the areas of rawest poverty. Although he was sometimes met with sullen apathy, which perturbed him, the prince persevered, inviting himself into slums, eager that the people would not think the monarchy had forsaken them in their misfortune. In 1929 in Winlanton, Durham, he visited the house of Mr Frank McKay, a seventy-four-year-old miner, whose wife had just died. The prince offered his sympathies to the family and ‘expressed a wish to go upstairs to the room where Mrs McKay lay dead’. As he left, the miners cheered him on the way back to his car. George Haynes, General Secretary of the National Council, remembered the Prince of Wales’s ‘way of approach; his transparent interest and concern, and the immense regard people had for him. He had a charisma in those days which was unique.’ However, the prince was quickly marked down by the establishment as a ‘dangerous subversive’.
The prince would return from his public duties painfully aware that ‘there was always something lacking’. In spring 1932, King George V had what was for him, an uncharacteristically intimate conversation with his son. He told Edward that while he was still worshipped by the public, he could not expect to survive the erosion of his reputation caused by the increasingly damaging revelations surrounding his private life. The king cited Edward’s liaison with Lady Furness and asked his son if he had ever thought of marrying ‘a suitable well-born English girl?’ Strangely, the prince replied that he had never supposed it would be possible.
‘What he meant by this was that he liked these married women and he loved Americans,’ explained Hugo Vickers. ‘The prince loved golfing pros and tycoons. According to his Private Secretary he became like a little boy in their presence. He thought that English girls were boring and thought that zinging cocktail girls were what he liked. There was never any question in his mind that he would marry an eligible British girl.’
There were suggestions that Princess Ingrid of Sweden might make a suitable bride, but it was never seriously contemplated at York House or Buckingham Palace. Earl Mountbatten of Burma prepared a list of seventeen European princesses who were ‘theoretically possible’, ranging from the fifteen-year-old Thyra of Mecklenburg-Schwerin to twenty-two-year-old Princess Ingrid, but these were made with little conviction. No one who knew the Prince of Wales now believed that he would ever marry. The despairing king said to Stanley Baldwin: ‘After I am dead the boy will ruin himself within twelve months.’ He apparently later confided to the courtier, Ulick Alexander: ‘My eldest son will never succeed me. He will abdicate.’
This was a view shared by the king’s youngest surviving son, Prince Henry, who became the Duke of Gloucester. ‘My brother and I never got on, I’m afraid,’ Gloucester later said of his relationship with Edward. ‘We had a hell of a row in 1927. I’d said to someone I didn’t think he’d ever be king and it was repeated.
