The story so far; a file at the National Archives at Kew shows how Edward and Mrs Simpson were guarded – the work largely requiring the press and gawping public to be kept at bay – before and after Edward’s abdication as king in 1936.
The newspaper and magazine reports of the day, featuring the couple, were clipped and became a part of the Met Police file on bodyguarding of Edward and Mrs Simpson, file MEPO 10-35, during the pandemic freely downloadable at the National Archives website. The reports show that no matter where – driven to an aeroplane on the outskirts of London to fly across the Channel, boarding the Orient Express, coffee at a hotel, a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean – a bodyguard had to accompany Edward and Mrs Simpson. For no detail of what the couple (and anyone who was their guest or friend) wore or did was too small not to be noted and reported or photographed, and gawped at by a crowd.
Then as now, royalty had ways to try to have some privacy, at least sometimes. Once in France on that visit in July 1936, Edward VIII used an incognito; his trunks of belongings for instance were labelled ‘Duke of Lancaster’, a title used by among others King Henry V. At one port of call, Dubrovnik, the local mayor issued a proclamation asking people not to stare at or follow the king. Newspaper reporters followed the king to pick up any details they could. When his chartered yacht was at anchor in a bay in August 1936, one reporter told of how the king rowed a rowing boat by himself; in another, a naval rating rowed the king’s detective. After an hour the king landed on shore near a fishing village and waved to the detective to keep rowing about while the king walked on shore, watched only by his detective and two fisherman (one later interviewed by an English reporter).
The public’s interest in royals was such that state occasions became a hazard. An estimated two million attended the funeral of Edward’s father King George V in January 1936 in London; thousands were hurt by the crush. Those numbers prompted the authorities to urge King Edward – against his wish for as little pomp as possible – to make his coronation procession as long as possible so that crowds could spread along London streets – a May 1937 event that never happened.
By January 1939, as war with Germany became ever more likely, the Duke of Windsor’s unique position took on a more political risk, that police had to keep track of. A Special Branch typed memo to the Met Police Commissioner, Sir Philip Game, covered public reaction to, and possible risks arising from, a visit to Britain by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Special Branch noted anonymous letters against the visit, and that the British Union of Fascists were for the Duke, presumably for their own political ends. There was a ‘Society of Octavians’ (‘the membership of this body does not number more than a few hundreds’) that openly wanted the Duke to return to Britain. The author Compton Mackenzie was a member. While so far innocuous, as an organised body they ‘night very easily provide the means to start demonstrations which might quickly develop and cause conflicts between supporters and opponents’, if the former Edward VIII came to England, the report said.
Special Branch evidently had a friendly trade union leader who had forwarded an anonymous circular, strongly against the couple, and claiming that the couple in Britain would weaken the Crown and the country and aid Nazi Germany. SB also passed on press talk that the Duke was looking through newspapers to start a publicity campaign ‘to create an atmosphere favourable to the return of himself and the Duchess of Windsor’. When the Nazis conquered much of western Europe in the summer of 1940, the Windsors were taken from Portugal to Bermuda, well out of harm’s way. What if anything the Nazis might have offered to Edward, had Germany captured Britain also in 1940, and how the Duke of Windsor might have responded to such an overture, have been controversial ever since.
Pictured; King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson snapped by the press together on their 1936 summer holiday, while yachting in the Adriatic. From the National Archives file Mepo 10-35, freely downloadable from the National Archives website; visit https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/.
