The Duchess Of Windsor, page 53
Two completely different legends surrounding the Royal Family and the Windsors themselves need to be exploded, for both directly affected the perception of the Duke and Duchess. In London, during the war, a great mythology arose about the Royal Family. Scenes of the King and Queen visiting bombed districts, digging victory gardens, or knitting for soldiers became legendary, ensuring the devotion of their subjects, who were thereby assured that neither George VI nor Elizabeth, not to mention either of their two daughters, enjoyed any extra privileges during the time of national crisis because of their positions. The Windsors, on the other hand, were—and continue to be—unfairly castigated for what has been termed their conspicuous consumption during the war.
When discussing the Duchess during the war, for example, Frances Donaldson, one of the more balanced writers on the subject, fell into the trap of bearing the animosity of the Royal Family and court in her biography of the Duke. Of Wallis, she wrote: “The Duchess was the more unpopular. Her pre-occupation with her appearance, her jewelry and her clothes was unsuitable to the role of Governor’s wife on a small group of islands. It may or may not have been true that she visited Miami every week to have her hair done or that while she was in Nassau her purchases from New York averaged a hundred dresses a year at an average of $250 a dress, but these things were said in the American Press and were generally believed.”3
The fact is, however, that the Duchess of Windsor was not unpopular at all during her tenure in the Bahamas. Here Donaldson is guilty of condemnation based on demonstrably false facts; it would have been an easy matter to add that the stories in the newspapers concerning the Duchess were largely favorable or that the assertions she traveled to Miami to have her hair done or purchased hundreds of dresses in New York were inaccurate. In repeating the charges and leaving them unanswered, she has done no more than any number of writers before or since; unfortunately, the damage to Wallis’s reputation as a result is almost impossible to overcome.
Both Wallis and David were acutely conscious of the dichotomy between the press they received and the coverage extended to the King and Queen. They were also aware, unlike the majority of the British public, that the oft-repeated stories concerning privations at Buckingham Palace during the war were not quite accurate. It was true that Buckingham Palace had been bombed; but of course only a small portion of its six hundred rooms had been damaged, and unlike the vast majority of those whose homes were destroyed in the blitz, the King had five other houses untouched by the ravages of war. Queen Elizabeth’s oft-repeated statement “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face” was thus something of an exercise in good public relations.4 It is true that the Royal Family was issued ration books; but they also owned thousands of acres of farmland and agricultural concerns, which kept their table stocked with fresh beef, game, and vegetables. Life at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle carried on as luxuriously as before; George VI even continued to order special toilet paper from America throughout the hostilities, sent by courier courtesy of the British embassy in Washington, D.C.5
Most irritating to Wallis were the inaccurate stories concerning her rumored extravagance where clothing was concerned. In fact, the Duchess spent far less on clothes and purchased fewer items than her rival Queen Elizabeth. Ordinary clothing rations in England during the war began at sixty-six coupons per person; as the war progressed, the number was reduced to forty-eight. In contrast to this, the Queen, like all other members of the Royal Family, received 1,277 clothing coupons a year—a fact which the public never learned.6 When Wallis appeared at a hospital tour or charity benefit, her choice of clothing was subject to criticism: The British press maintained that the Duchess cared too much about her appearance, that she dressed inappropriately for such duties during a time of war. But Queen Elizabeth, touring the East End of London and meeting those who had lost everything they owned, was always immaculately turned out, with coats and matching dress, suede shoes and gloves, diamond brooches and her famous halolike hats. “If the poor people had come to see me they would have put on their best clothes,” Elizabeth declared.7 The Queen, with the immense publicity resources of Buckingham Palace behind her, managed to become celebrated for such remarks; Wallis, on the other hand, who dressed for such occasions in a much more sedate fashion, was subject to criticism. The double standard hurt, but there was little she could do to fight against the establishment in England. Instead, she turned her attentions to the job before her, and in examining her work, the second legend—that of the frivolous Windsors—can finally be put to rest as well.
Wallis readily assumed those traditional duties associated with the wife of the governor-general. She became president of both the Bahamian Red Cross and the Nassau chapter of the Daughters of the British Empire. She involved herself with charity work, hospitals, and schools and lent her name and presence to benefits that raised money for the underprivileged. But she also went beyond the ordinary boundaries that previous governor-generals’ wives had followed. Wallis had always been a woman of action, and this was never more true than during her tenure in Government House. Nor did she approach her new work cynically: No one who worked with her during these years had any doubt as to her sincerity. Given her anomalous position, made even more uncomfortable by the continued animosity of the Royal Family, Wallis was not required to do anything in her role as governor-general’s wife; that she did so—and did so well—is to her credit.
The scope of her work was all the more impressive because Wallis deliberately chose to involve herself in the most difficult and least fashionable problems: infant welfare, unwed mothers, education, and health care, and nearly all of her efforts were directed toward assisting the native Bahamian black population. Given her strong southern heritage and ingrained color prejudices, this was remarkable. Even more so was the extent of her actual work. “The Duchess of Windsor, American-born, is the only person known who has practised philanthropy, at least in the interests of health for the poor Negros,” declared a contemporary report by the Rockefeller Foundation.8
“No one has any idea how hard she worked,” recalls one friend from the Bahamas. “With the Duchess, it wasn’t just raising money—she did plenty of that—but she went beyond what other Governors’ wives had done. She got in, rolled up her sleeves and worked. I’ll never forget her returning to Government House one night. She had been away for twelve hours, first at one hospital, then a school, a clinic, a canteen. Her energy was palpable, contagious. She walked in and immediately began planning what to do the next day.”9
One of her first works was founding the Bahamas Assistance Fund, designed to improve the health care and education of the mainly black population of the out islands. The Bahamian legislature, not surprisingly, proved uncooperative in granting funds, and so the Duke of Windsor signed over the income from one of the charitable trusts he had founded when Prince of Wales.10 It became one of Wallis’s pet projects and one to which she devoted her not inconsiderable talents as an organizer.
The Duchess’s involvement with child-welfare agencies was deliberate, for it fulfilled in her a maternal urge which otherwise had no outlet. “The one thing missing in our lives was a child,” she would later tell one friend.11 Although Wallis was not a particularly motherly figure—her streak of independence and sophisticated tastes meant that her patience with children was limited to carefully controlled periods of exposure—it is clear that she had moments when she actively sought to fill the void through her social work.
Both she and David delighted in entertaining both children and soldiers at Government House. For Christmas, 1942, she and David decided that they would not give each other presents and instead spend that money on soldiers and children. They went to Miami on a shopping spree. Wallis purchased Kodak cameras, shaving kits, diaries, billfolds, and pipes for the soldiers and toys for the children. She and the Duke provided hams and turkeys for all the troops and gave a number of dinner parties and dances on their return, during which the men were presented with their gifts and took their turns dancing with the Duchess.12
This work also provided Wallis with an important sense of fulfillment. Previously her achievements had amounted to little more than taking care of her husbands and decorating houses. Now she could put her energies to productive use and, perhaps more important, experience the satisfaction of actually seeing results which directly affected the lives of others. The vast difference between providing a comfortable bedroom for David and potentially saving the lives of hundreds of children was not lost on her; Wallis, in both her head and heart, engaged in something she knew to be important. For perhaps the first time in her life, she threw herself into her work for others.
Wallis tried to involve herself in projects already under way when possible, for she felt it better to fund a proven program than risk important dollars on the unknown. She met and befriended Alice Hill Jones, a native black nurse who had for some time been working in local hospitals, trying to lower infant-mortality rates. Jones paid frequent visits to outlying communities, and Wallis soon learned that she had to use public transportation to reach her destinations; one day shortly thereafter, Wallis showed up unannounced at Jones’s house, with a brand-new four-door Plymouth sedan, the Duchess’s gift to help in her work.13
Shortly after, Wallis began to pay regular visits to the weekly clinics held by Jones at Western High School. According to Jones, the Duchess was “awfully distressed to see what a terrible problem we had to deal with and how bad the facilities were. There and then she said she was going to set up a proper clinic, and that very night she rang America to arrange it all.”14 Jones quickly had a string of permanent clinics, courtesy of the Duchess of Windsor and the money of her husband’s friend Axel Wenner-Gren. But Wallis’s involvement did not stop here, for she continued to involve herself actively in Jones’s work.
Every week, on Wednesday afternoons, Wallis personally assisted in Jones’s clinics. Her approach was direct, hands-on. She helped Jones weigh and wash babies, change their diapers, feed them, and rock them to sleep. She also poured hundreds of her own dollars into obtaining proper supplies. “My heart sinks when I see the doctor write out the prescription for an undernourished case—milk, cod-liver oil, and fruit juice—because we can’t cope with it,” she declared. “But one day we will.”15 Her commitment, financial and personal, made the difference, and soon the clinics were operating at a level of care at least comparable to similar institutions in America. “In her class and her time,” writes Michael Pye, “she could hardly have hoped for such achievement; when the chance was offered, she took it brilliantly.”16
Her work also extended to adult education as well. Through her hospital work, Wallis became aware of the difficulties facing the native Bahamian population, particularly in the area of sexually transmitted disease. The syphilis rate among blacks was extraordinarily high; due to the nature of the disease, no one—least of all the wife of any previous governor-general—had done anything to try to improve the situation. There was no mechanism in place in the Bahamian public-health system to deal with the epidemic, nor was anyone inclined to tackle such a sensitive subject—no one, that is, until the Duchess of Windsor came along. With no assistance—practical or financial—forthcoming from the Bahamian legislature, Wallis once again utilized her private resources, founding a clinic for those suffering from venereal disease.17
What Wallis did was extraordinary. Not only did she break the stringent color barriers which existed in the Bahamas at the time, but she took on the most controversial and unfashionable social causes as well. She became the first governor-general’s wife to have such intimate contact with the native black children. She also broke taboos which still existed in the British Royal Family. At the same time that Wallis was thus engaged in her war work, her dedicated enemy, Queen Elizabeth, was making her reputation touring the bombed slums of East End London; the approaches of the two women, however, could not have been more different. The Queen, richly attired, maintained a careful distance; the gloves she habitually wore rarely came off, and she certainly never took on such unpopular projects as the Duchess. The smiling face of the Queen, with her steely determination, was featured around the world in photographs and newsreels; such public displays led Hitler to once describe her as the most dangerous woman in Europe. Wallis, on the other hand, rarely carried out any of her work in the public eye; she certainly never publicized—in ways which the Royal Family, with their advisers, actively sought to do—her work as an example of her personal sacrifice and devotion to the war effort. She saw what needed doing and did it without concern for the consequences to her reputation.
“She very much resembled a 1940s version of the late Princess of Wales,” recalled one friend from the Bahamas. “The Duchess managed to do exactly those same sorts of things for which Diana became so famous—breaking the barriers of social stigma where disease was concerned, taking off the gloves, and meeting people face to face, on their level, touching them person to person. The contrast to the Royal Family could not have been more great; but they continued to demonize her, ignoring her work. And the Duchess, bless her, never cared—she wasn’t in it for the glory. She wanted to make a difference.”18
This human touch—previously dormant—came to fruition during the war years. Wallis had a genuine ability to mix easily with those people she met, whether simple workers or members of European aristocracy. Once, during a visit to the Valley Forge Army Hospital in Pennsylvania, Wallis was asked to help distribute some fifteen hundred roses to wounded soldiers. To help speed the process along, one man from each ward was to receive the bouquets on behalf of his fellow patients during a special presentation ceremony in the recreation room. The selected soldiers were called to the platform one by one; Wallis went through several of these presentations, listening to their stories of battle and injury, before she decided that the wounded deserved better. She declared that she would personally hand-deliver the remaining flowers—with nearly a thousand left! The remainder of the afternoon’s engagements were canceled so that Wallis and David could walk from ward to ward, from bed to bed, handing out flowers and taking time to chat with each man about his experiences. There were no newsreel cameras there; it was a spontaneous gesture from her heart, one of many such incidents that for the most part went unnoticed, especially in the British press.19
In late summer of 1942, Windsor Field was completed, and some four thousand RAF troops arrived in Nassau to share coastal watch patrols with members of the U.S. Army Air Force, which was already present. As a result, there were hundreds of soldiers wandering the streets. Although incidents were few, Wallis was quick to recognize the urgent need for some form of canteen or recreation center to keep them occupied. With her customary energy, she undertook several plans to establish organizations for the soldiers in Nassau.
She founded a canteen for the black members of the Bahamian Defense Force. Of necessity, the institute was segregated; it would have been impossible—with both the American and British armed forces segregated—for Wallis to do otherwise. But she took as much care over the club as any of her other endeavors, personally selecting the games and furnishings and visiting from time to time to engage the soldiers in conversation.20
Wallis also managed to take over the lease of an unused wing of the Royal Victoria Hotel in downtown Nassau. Here she created a hostel for the survivors of wartime shipwrecks off the Bahamian coast—an all-too-frequent occurrence. With each new wreck, Wallis was ready: She would rush from Government House to the hotel, welcome the survivors, find out what they needed, and try to make them comfortable.21
To accommodate the RAF and U.S. troops, Wallis, as president of the Daughters of the British Empire, took over the Masonic Building on Nassau’s downtown Bay Street. She helped fit out the building and arrange the entertainments: There were weekly dinners, movies, and dances for the troops, many of which Wallis herself directly presided over.22 But perhaps Wallis’s most accomplished achievement—and certainly the one that consumed her greatest energy—was the founding of the Bahamian Club on Nassau’s West Bay Street.
The Bahamian Club resulted from the severe overcrowding of the other recreational facilities designed for the troops. Wallis approached her friend Frederick Sigrist and asked if he would be willing to lend his newly purchased Bahamian Club, a large, ungainly building which had formerly housed a casino populated largely by tourists and the rich white inhabitants of Nassau. Once the club was fully outfitted, Wallis devoted herself to its operation wholeheartedly. Every morning, she reported for work at the club to personally assist in the kitchen making breakfast. The sight of the Duchess of Windsor standing behind the large stoves, asking how the men wanted their eggs, was something which none of the soldiers ever forgot. Wallis happily posed for photographs, gave out autographs, and chatted with the men as she continued her work.23 According to military censors, the subject of meeting the Duchess and being served by her was the most common topic in all letters from military personnel stationed in Nassau.24
This work now filled Wallis’s days. With mornings spent at the Bahamian Club, she devoted her afternoons to the Red Cross and the infant-welfare clinics. In the evenings, she arranged dinners, receptions, and dances to benefit her charities and to entertain the troops. Even this was not enough, and she continued to push herself harder and harder. Wallis started a needlepoint class for a hundred black women in an effort to promote Bahamian crafts. She became director of the Dundas Civic Center, which trained young Bahamians for employment and provided job-placement assistance. She raised money for the local YWCA and the Nassau Garden Club and funded, out of her own pocket, a local program which delivered hot meals to shut-ins throughout the Nassau area. “I never worked harder in my life,” she declared. “I never felt better used.” She said that she was exhausted by all the work but exhilarated as well. “I have to keep busy. I couldn’t stay here if I didn’t.”25
