The Peoples King (10 page)

Wallis fully understood what was going on. 'One gets tired of having
people make a fuss over you because they want to see HRH', she
complained to her aunt.
¹²⁰
She knew, though, that it was important
not to alienate anyone. 'I have tried awfully hard this year to be nice
to the natives,' she wrote, 'answering thousands of notes, going to
boring parties."
²¹
With wry humour, she congratulated herself on
managing to cope so well in Edward's world, given her limited means.
'I imagine anyway I am doing far far better than Thelma on far
far less', she told Bessie, referring to Edward's previous lover, Lady
Furness.
¹²²
'I enjoy meeting and seeing all these people', she wrote in
another letter, adding that 'some times it seems strange to think of
those days of struggle in Earl's Court [an apartment building in
Baltimore] and the other flat where mother had the cafe and was
forever working herself to death to give me things."
²¹
In June 1935,
Wallis told her aunt about a recent court ball at which the Prince had
danced with her directly after the opening dance with the Queen. She
had been thrilled by Edward's public display of devotion and by the
attentions of the court. 'I really know them all now and must say they
are grand to me', she reported with pleasure. But she was under no
illusions. 'Naturally,' she added dryly, 'only for the duration of my
length of service.’
¹²⁴

Wallis Simpson had never been heard of by the general public in
Britain when Edward visited South Wales in November 1936. They
knew nothing about the most important thing in his life - the woman
he adored. But they
did
know about his concern for the welfare of the
poor, which was further demonstrated on the royal tour. It wasn't
only in South Wales that people witnessed Edward's ready sympathy
with the unemployed of the valleys, for the following week newsreel
reports of the royal tour were shown in every cinema of Britain. It had
been filmed by all five of the newsreel companies - Gaumont-British
News, Movietone News, Pathe, Paramount and Universal. The cover­age of the tour was highly sympathetic to the King: it followed him as
he walked among the poor, visited their homes, mixed mortar at their
instruction, doffed his hat and nodded his head, and showed his
evident distress at their sufferings. 'Bringing the whole problem of the
Depressed Areas out of the shadows into the floodlight of world
attention,' announced Pathe Gazette's
The King Visits South Wales,
'His Majesty's visit to South Wales is not only a promise of new life
but a gesture of sympathy.' It stressed the King's plea for urgent action:

But beneath all this His Majesty saw the disillusion and suffering brought by
long workless years. His visit has cheered them as nothing else could. And as
he leaves there is a new found faith that some solution will be found. Let no
one belittle the magnificent work that is being done by the social services. But
social service is not enough. These men want work. New industries must be
brought to the stricken areas of South Wales.'

Through newsreels like these, people all over Britain were made aware
of Edward's visit to South Wales.

In 19 3 4 there were over four thousand cinemas in England, Scotland
and Wales, and going to the 'pictures' was the most popular form of
entertainment for just about everybody except the very poor (who
could not afford the tickets) and the very rich (who disdained it). By
the middle of the 1930s, some twenty million people in Britain each
week saw the newsreels, which were shown before the feature films.
These newsreels gave suburban audiences and people throughout
Britain all kinds of new knowledge about their own and other coun­tries. Watching the reports of Edward's visit to South Wales, they
learned not only about the latest exploits of their King, but also about
the plight of the people living in the Special Areas. This was driven
home to cinema-goers by the scenes of unemployed families and pale,
thin children against a backdrop of disused pits and grassed-over coal
tips. In the middle of these scenes was Edward, his slight but regal
figure commanding viewers' attention. Without his visit, newsreel
directors might not have sent film crews to South Wales to film this
story of human suffering amid industrial decay. Edward had brought
the distressed areas into the news.

Edward had been a dominant figure in the newsreels ever since the
end of the Great War, first as Prince of Wales and then, when he
ascended the throne on 20 January 1936, as King. Audiences saw him
on his numerous visits to the industrial areas and the inner cities,
touring factories, visiting housing estates, opening hospitals and
inspecting lines of ex-servicemen in Britain and in France. Films such
as 50,000
Miles with the Prince of Wales
showed his overseas tours.
²
When he became King, commented Sir John Simon, who was then
Home Secretary, Edward was the most widely known and most univer­sally popular personality in the world.
³

His popularity came not simply from his being the newsreels'
favourite star. He earned it with his warm personality and genuine
concern for people, whatever their background, age or status. He won
Charlie Chaplin's esteem by sitting at a party with his host's mother,
who was in her eighties, until she retired; only then, remembered

Chaplin years later, did he join the rest of the group and have fun.
⁴
He was remembered for many such acts of kindness. A woman wrote
to the King to tell him that

When you visited Sydney NSW it came to your knowledge that my late Aunt,
one of the oldest inhabitants of that city, and who had seen the wedding of
your Grandfather, was longing to see you. You caused her to be brought to
you, yourself hand her to a seat, and chatted with her for some time. Such
kindly consideration will never be forgotten by members of my family . . ,
⁵

Another woman wrote to express her gratitude to him for 'listening
to my appeal re the railway Arabs', who were homeless children living
near railway lines.
⁶
His interest in the poor was especially appreciated.
One mother described him as

The man who moved among them with sympathy and with a Christ-like
understanding, and in so doing compelled the people to learn of the terrible
distress, bravely borne, by the peoples of the distressed areas . . . you had trod
their slums, entered their homes, spoken to them words of hope, actions kindly
and kingly, such as no High Church bishops, archbishops, and lesser Church
lights had condescended to do.
⁷

Marcus Garvey, the President of the General Universal Negro
Improvement Association, told King Edward that 'the Negro race'
regarded him 'as a true friend'.
⁸

Edward was no socialist, though. His concern for the poor and his
keen sense of social justice were genuine and heartfelt, but he shared
the political attitudes of most of the upper classes: he did not support
the Labour Party and he did not want to see any fundamental change
in the structure of society. He put his faith in David Lloyd George, the
Liberal Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, and then, when the Liberals
were no longer a political force to be reckoned with, in the Conservat­ive Party. However, he objected strongly when the Conservative-
dominated National Government failed to meet the most basic needs
of the poor and the long-term unemployed. Like Harold Macmillan
and other Tory paternalists, he felt a keen sense of obligation towards
those who were less well off. In fulfilling his own responsibilities,
notably for the vast estates of the Duchy of Cornwall in London and
the West Country, he sought to act as a fair and decent landowner.
His official biographer, Philip Ziegler, records that he invested a great
deal of money in new machinery for the Cornish tin mines, and set up
a farming concern run on cooperative lines. In London, he regularly
visited his estates in Kennington, and the housing in areas of the
borough which he owned was much better than in the parts for which
the Council was responsible.
⁹

He may not have been a socialist, but he was driven by democratic
ideals. One ex-miner described him as 'a real democratic King, The
Common People's King (as the snobbish aristocracy will have it)'.
Using imagery that drew on the experience of his working life as a
miner and a washer-up, he told the King, 'You have constantly been
mining under the feet of the snobbish aristocracy. You have washed it
up and dried and drained it wherever you went.
¹⁰
Edward was seen
to share the same concern for the poor as the Democrat President
of America, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been re-elected with a
landslide victory in early November 1936. Roosevelt had promised 'a
new deal for the forgotten man' and was the architect of the New Deal,
a package of social reforms to benefit the poor and the unemployed.
Certainly, the long-term problems created by the Depression were
similar on both sides of the Atlantic. Charlie Chaplin's film
Modern
Times,
which came out in 1936, drew attention to these problems -
unemployment, poverty, strikes and riots.

To many Americans who supported the Democrats, King Edward
VIII seemed to display the same qualities as their President. 'You &
Roosevelt. What a Democratic combination! What a team!' wrote a
man living in Birmingham, Alabama, to the King." An estate agent
in Philadelphia told the King that 'you and President Roosevelt are
the two Greatest men in the world, you and he believe in the good
things for all of us'.
¹²
Edward himself admired Roosevelt enormously.
In 1934 he told the American Ambassador, Robert Bingham, that
Britain needed leadership of the kind that Roosevelt was giving to the
United States, with the aim of relieving poverty and distress.
¹³
Edward
could be 'a very serious young man on serious questions', said the
American writer Alexander Woollcott in 1936, adding, 'That is what
will get him into trouble one of these days with the Tory prigs and
bigwigs.'
¹⁴