The Weird Windsors - uncensored: Explosive notebooks of an official royal ...

The official life of George V’s widow, Queen Mary — published in 1959 six years after her death at 85 — is regarded as one of the finest royal biographies. But late author James Pope-Hennessy, who interviewed members of the Royal Family, former courtiers and ladies-in-waiting, omitted some of the juiciest — and funniest — material, knowing it would never get past the royal censors.

Here, in this extract from his newly-published private jottings, is an extraordinarily detailed account of the few days he spent in 1957 with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at the converted mill house they had just bought near Paris. It was 21 years since the Duke — Queen Mary’s eldest son — had, as Edward VIII, abdicated the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorced American socialite.

At 12.30, I was at the Gare du Nord (in Paris), where the long blue station wagon (Cadillac) of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor was waiting, with a plump pigeon-shaped English chauffeur, dressed in discreet black with a black rosette in his cap.

We drove out through jammed streets to Le Moulin de la Tuilerie, which the Duchess has converted into her Petit Trianon. The car hooted at the wooden door in the gatehouse, and this was opened. We drove to the front door where the liveried butler (French) and an English footman were waiting.

I was directed to walk across the sunny courtyard to the French windows of the Duke’s study, a colossal room made from a barn, with great log fires smouldering either end, French windows in the middle, maps of his world tours on the walls, souvenirs and uniform buckles everywhere.

‘This room,’ the Duchess told me, ‘represents the Dook’s life.’

The floor is covered with a curious tufted carpet in three shades of green, very fresh and pretty: ‘What a pretty carpet, Duchess; I’ve never seen one like it before.’

‘Ah call it mah lawn.’

The Duke of Windsor is, on first sight, much less small than I had been led to believe; he is not at all a manikin, but a well-proportioned human being. Just then his hair was blown out in tufts on either side of his head, and he was looking crumple-faced and wild.

He has his father’s eyes, and some, I fancy, of his mannerisms. He was drinking milk; for what the Duchess calls ‘that lil’ old ulcer’. I should say she is on the whole a stupid woman, with a small petty brain, immense goodwill and a stern power of concentration.

Like her house, she is tremendously American, and specifically Southern — it was like being back in Montgomery, Alabama, without the tree moss.

I should therefore be tempted to classify her simply as An American Woman par excellence, were it not for the suspicion that the Duchess is not a woman at all. She is one of the very oddest women I have ever seen.

She is flat and angular, and could have been designed for a medieval playing card. The shoulders are small and high; the head very, very large, almost monumental; the expression is either anticipatory (signalling, ‘I know this is going to be loads of fun, don’t yew?’) or appreciative — the great gig-lamp smile, the wide, wide open eyes, which are so very large and pale and veined, the painted lips and the cannibal teeth.

There is one further facial contortion, reserved for speaking of the Queen Mother, which is very unpleasant to behold, and seemed to me akin to frenzy.

Her high smooth flat forehead is cloven by a deep vertical line of concentration. Her neck makes her age (61) apparent — a tendency to wattles. Her jawbone is alarming, and from the back you can plainly see it jutting beyond the neck on each side.

She is wildly good-natured and friendly; but with both of them one somehow feels that so much enthusiasm might suddenly gel up and one would be in the limbo reserved for the many, many people who have treated them badly or turned out a disappointment. I like having my jokes laughed at; but there’s no need to make the mill-beams rock with appreciation of them.

The house itself is full of very pretty colours and ideas and objects. Every conceivable creature comfort is conscripted, to produce a perfection of sybaritic living. They are like people after a cataclysm or a revolution, valiantly making the best of infinite luxury.

It is, of course, intensely American, but I would think consciously aimed. The Queen Mother at Clarence House is leading a lodging-house existence compared to this.

My room in the stables was very pretty and convenient, and prepared or planned by a perfectionist; there was nothing on earth that you might conceivably want that wasn’t there — every kind of writing paper, nail file, brush, fruit, ice-water; the bathroom loaded with scent bottles like a counter at a bazaar.

After pottering in my bedroom, I wandered up the hill past the millstream, attracted by a stream of German oaths. Round the corner of the house I found the Duke, wearing a cerise felt baseball cap. He was jumping about rather wildly, and shouting ‘Jawohl, Jawohl’ and other military German expressions to a troop of French gardeners who were lugging the stone base of a sundial on to its mount.

The Duchess, flat against the inside of the drawing room window, was looking on in a disinterested angular way, one hand on the window pane.

‘Are the gardeners German?’ I inquired. ‘Well, no — one is Alsatian and one is Spanish, and that lil’ boy is only 14.

‘But as the Dook’s German is sort of better than his French, he likes to talk German with them.

‘Now I hope you’ll get in your talk with the Dook this afternoon,’ she continued. ‘You must catch him; but you’ll find the Dook is kind of a slow starter’ — said with a great wide smile.

About 3.30pm the Duke came in, sitting on the sofa opposite my chair to talk. The pugs gambolled about — Disraeli, Trooper and Davy Crockett.

‘We did have a fourth, called Peter Townsend (the divorced Battle of Britain pilot whom Princess Margaret had wanted to marry),’ the Duchess explained with her least nice grin. ‘But we gave the Group Captain away.’ The whole atmosphere was intensely unstrained and unshy, owing, I should say, to the Duchess and the job she has done on the Duke. He talked with complete freedom, even of the delicate subject to which he obliquely refers as ‘1936’.

‘My mother (Queen Mary) loathed the country,’ he said. ‘She used to say to me: “I was born in Kensington and I am a Londoner.” She hated Sandringham; Balmoral was a bit better; but we were always there too long. Sandringham was dreadful.’

He added: ‘Off the record, my father (George V) had a most horrible temper. He was foully rude to my mother.

‘Why, I’ve often seen her leave the table because he was so rude to her, and we children would all follow her out; not when the staff were present, of course, but when we were alone.’

I remarked that I was puzzled by the shutting down of his mother’s high spirits after marriage.

‘Well, you’re right there, I think. My father was a very repressive influence. I well remember when he used to go banging away for a week or two at some shoot in the Midlands; we used to have the most lovely time with her alone — always laughing and joking.

‘She was a different human being away from him.’

He said suddenly: ‘You realise there are only three completely royal persons alive now? My sister, my brother and myself.’

Tea was a serious, perfectionist meal, with the Duchess struggling manfully with the teapot (she evidently hates tea, and looks very out of place pouring it out; but the Duke drinks, she assured me, cup after cup all day; ‘He leaves haff the cup, too, so it gets cold,’ she added.

When we got to the drawing room again, the Duchess settled herself on a low wide day-bed, her legs tucked up; she does not curl up but somehow dismantles herself, so that she looks like a puppet lying in the wings of a toy theatre.

Duchess: ‘We-e-ell, and has the Dook been much help?’

‘Oh, a tremendous help, Duchess; I can’t tell you.’

Duchess: ‘He was pretty close to his mother, you know. I suppose you’ve had to see everybody about yah book?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘The Duke’s sister has been very helpful, and the Queen Mother.’

Duchess

read more from dailymail.....