Duke of Windsor

Attached is a 1936 article that addressed the issue of self-imposed censorship that the British press corps practiced during much of the Wallis Simpson scandal:

Innuendo about King Edward’s friend Mrs. Wallis Simpson, previously barred from London newspapers, crept in last week and even colored the august columns of the London Times.

In 1935 Edward VIII, while still a prince, wished to launch a national thank-you offering to the younger generation:

‘The Prince’, said The News Chronicle of London, ‘has put his finger on the weakest point in our present social structure. The State shows at least some concern for infancy and childhood, for the blind and defective, for the widow and the aged. The task of helping youth at the most critical age has been abandoned almost entirely to voluntary agencies, and the Prince wisely does not seek to supersede, but to reinforce and extend them.’

Written a year and a half prior to his abdication, it was written to serve as a profile of the royal and it lays out for the reader the man’s personal preferences as well as his training.

Often reluctant to accept conservative advice, the Prince is aggravated when would-be mentors say something he wants to do ‘really shouldn’t be done, you know’. Thus, long before the problem of kingship are his in fact, the Prince has turned serious.

With an odd sense of foreboding, the very young Edward VIII wrote these words at the age of nine:

…And here he was, at the end of twenty months, a king out of a berth…sent away from his kingdom almost without a single protest from those who he had tried to aid.

I find great pleasure in my talks with the woman who first aroused me to a sense of my kingly duties.

She jokingly refers to herself as the instigator of my downfall.

The primary topic of the article pertains to some hot water that the Duke was stewing in at the time for having attended Catholic services; even as the ‘Former Defender of the Faith’, this was seen as very bad form.

With the news that he was now dependent on checks from his family
the newly minted Duke of Windsor had to learn to cut coupons and bargain:

In the Vienna hotel where he gets a private haircut, he protested that $1.26 seemed a little steep for the brief use of an empty hotel room. The manager sliced the fee in half.