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Post by Admin on Feb 14, 2014 2:00:06 GMT
THE British government bugged the phone of King Edward VIII at the height of the abdication crisis in 1936, it has been revealed in files just released by the National Archives. The Church of England had made it clear they would not accept Edward's mistress, the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, as Queen and the view was shared by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. In November 1936, with the King showing a marked reluctance to give up his mistress, Home Secretary Sir John Simon ordered the General Post Office (GPO) to tap the King's phone calls to Wallis. She was lying low in the south of France at the time, while Edward was at Fort Belvedere, in Windsor Great Park, considering whether to renounce the throne or his love for the 40-year-old American. In the end, of course, love won out, and he abdicated in December that year, less than 12 months after his accession. The newly-released files, among hundreds collected by successive Cabinet secretaries over eight decades, shine a light on the febrile atmosphere gripping Britain in the weeks leading up to the abdication. Such was the depth of hostility felt towards Wallis Simpson that someone threatened to bomb her home overlooking Regent's Park. The files show that in November 1936 Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Philip Game informed the Home Secretary that, as the result of the threat, security was stepped up. A police diagram shows how the extra beat involved three "old and experienced constables" walking a 700-yard loop around the block "eight hours each for 24 hours". The diligence failed to snare any would-be assassin but did result in the prevention of "pressmen and photographers making a nuisance of themselves on one or two occasions". As for bugging the King's phones, the files reveal that a memo marked 'most secret' and dated 5 December was sent from the Home Office to GPO chief Sir Thomas Gardiner. It stated: "The Home Secretary asks me to confirm the information conveyed to you orally, with his authority by Sir Horace Wilson that you will arrange for the interception of telephone communications between Fort Belvedere and Buckingham Palace on the one hand and the continent of Europe on the other." Disappointingly, for all lovers of intrigue, the files contain no records of any intercepted calls. Five days after the memo was sent, Edward made his final decision, choosing a life in exile as the Duke of Windsor over life as King of England. On December 10, Edward executed an Instrument of Abdication which was given legal effect the following day, bringing to an end his 326-day reign. His brother George – father of Queen Elizabeth II – succeeded to the throne while Edward and Mrs Simpson married and settled in France.
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Post by Admin on Feb 17, 2014 3:02:57 GMT
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL never forgave the Duke of Windsor for giving up the British throne, according to papers that are being kept secret at the request of the Royal Family. Letters in which Churchill attacks the Duke for his abdication and subsequent marriage to Wallis Simpson have been excluded from an archive of the wartime Prime Minister's correspondence and only last week were reclassified as top secret until 2011. The restrictions cover two folios of documents that were removed before the archive was presented to Churchill College in Cambridge in 1974. Academics who have worked on the collection say that the secret documents reveal the full extent of the animosity between the men. They are also thought to provide further evidence of the Duke and Duchess's pro-Nazi views. They are known to include several angry exchanges prompted by the Duke's desire to advise Churchill on how to conduct foreign policy. In one of the excluded letters the Prime Minister tells the Duke bluntly that he cannot accept advice from someone who "had given up the greatest throne in world history". The existence of the letters will surprise many who had previously assumed that Churchill was forgiving of the former king's decision to abdicate. It is thought that his references to the crisis are being kept secret at the request of senior members of the Royal Family. The Queen Mother is believed to be particularly sensitive about the events of 1936 and is known to have referred to the Duchess of Windsor as "that woman" and "the lowest of the low". An academic who has worked on the archive said: "They are being hidden at the moment because even after all this time this is still a sensitive subject. Members of the Royal Family were alive at the time and still have strong feelings about the events surrounding the abdication. The whole issue is like a festering wound." Louise Ellman, the Labour MP who has campaigned for greater disclosure on the issue, said: "I do think it is time the truth was made known and we should not try to protect people." Churchill remained loyal during the abdication crisis and fought tirelessly for a compromise that might have let Edward keep the throne. His lobbying surprised many colleagues and threatened his political career more than once. Disappointed by Edward's decision to stand down, he was steadfast until the end. During a Commons speech he declared that "no Sovereign has ever conformed more strictly to the letter and spirit of the Constitution than his present Majesty". Despite such sentiments, several letters show that Churchill and the Duke did clash. The most frequent cause of hostility concerned arrangements for the Duke's posting in 1940 as Governor of the Bahamas. Churchill took umbrage at the Duke's almost endless demands concerning everything from staffing to dental appointments. The disclosure that further documents are being withheld has surprised Churchill's descendants. Lady Soames, Churchill's only surviving child, said she assumed that everything was on display. "I thought it was a complete archive," she said; however she declined to comment on her father's relationship with the Duke. Sir Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Churchill, said: "I have never seen the letter about Churchill and the issue of the abdication. If I had I would have published it." A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said: "The papers are held by the Public Records Office in Kew. Their status is reviewed every 10 years." Earlier this year it emerged that letters had been removed from the archive of the first Viscount Monckton, the Duke's lawyer and intimate adviser, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It was feared that they might embarrass the Queen Mother by disclosing further evidence of her animosity towards Mrs Simpson.
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Post by Admin on May 13, 2014 5:48:05 GMT
MAY 12, 1937: King George VI was crowned on this day in 1937 – five months after becoming the monarch following the shock abdication of his brother Edward VIII. The unexpected new monarch and his wife, Queen Elizabeth of Bowes-Lyon, were enthroned in a lavish ceremony at Westminster Abbey in London. Two million Britons lined the streets to watch the procession from Buckingham Palace despite many others having lost their faith in the monarchy amid the crisis. A British Pathé newsreel shows crowds cheering as a succession of presidents and prime ministers, including Britain’s Stanley Baldwin, were ferried by horse-drawn carriage to the Abbey. Then members of the royal family, including a young Princess Elizabeth, the future monarch, leave Buckingham Palace. Finally King George V, who had formerly been Prince Albert, Duke of York, and Queen Elizabeth, who later became the Queen Mother, left in a gold-crested carriage. The glittering affair helped steady the nerves of a nation still shocked by the former king’s abdication just 326 days into his reign after sparking a constitutional crisis. Effervescent Edward, whom Bertie replaced as the new monarch, quit the throne so that he could marry unpopular U.S. divorcee Wallis Simpson. The Government threatened to resign if he married her, and could have dragged Edward into a general election and would ruin his status as a politically neutral, constitutional monarch. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin believed that, although the king was popular, people would not accept a divorced woman with two living ex-husbands as queen. Marrying Mrs Simpson would also have conflicted with Edward being head of the Church of England, which opposed the remarriages of divorced people with living former spouses. Edward exiled himself in France and Bertie took over – but decided to rule as King George VI to emphasise continuity with his popular father. With monarchy discredited (Labour MP George Hardie said the crisis did ‘more for republicanism than 50 years of propaganda’) the new sovereign tried to restore trust.
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Post by Admin on Jun 1, 2014 22:17:15 GMT
Mary Soames, who was 91, died peacefully at home yesterday evening surrounded by her family, after a short illness. She was the youngest of the five children of the wartime prime minister and his wife Clementine. One of her sons, Nicholas Soames, who is also Tory MP for Mid Sussex, said: "She was a truly remarkable and extraordinary woman, who led a very distinguished life." Her death has been described as having "extraordinary timing", as Britain prepares to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Normandy landings on Friday. Mary Churchill accompanied her father as aide-de-camp on several of his overseas journeys, including his post-VE trip to Potsdam, where he met with US president Harry S Truman and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. She worked for the Red Cross and the Women's Voluntary Service from 1939 to 1941, and joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service which she served in London, Belgium and Germany in mixed anti-aircraft batteries, rising to the rank of Junior Commander - the equivalent to captain. She married the Conservative politician Christopher Soames, who became Baron Soames, in 1947 and they had five children - Nicholas, Emma, Jeremy, Charlotte and Rupert. She later lived in London, but according to the National Trust who now manage the property, often visited the house. There, her red brick playhouse dubbed the Marycot, has been refurbished so visitors can experience what life was like for eight year-old Mary Churchill. She also returned to Westerham for a service marking the 40th anniversary of her father's death in 2005. Lady Soames served many public organisations, including the International Churchill Society, Church Army, Churchill Houses, the Royal National Theatre and the National Benevolent Fund for the Aged.
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Post by Admin on Aug 20, 2014 18:41:33 GMT
Taking one year with another . . ." the chancellor likes to say in his Budget speech, but one year is not like another: some years are more equal than others. In the past century, 1914, 1929, 1956 and 1989, all for different but obvious reasons, have a particular resonance, and so does 1936. There are few to match it in terms of high drama, with Hitler's remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, the "Nazi Olympics" in Berlin and, at home, everything from the Jarrow march to the royal crisis. This was "the year of three kings", opening with the death of George V and his succession by Edward VIII in January, and closing with Edward's abdication in December. As the months went by, the national atmosphere was a mixture of manic gaiety and acute apprehension, and by the turn of the next year few could escape a sense of foreboding. In The Last Dance, his stimulating and highly readable portrait of 1936, Denys Blakeway sets the scene with a kind of metaphor that is none the worse for being fairly blatant. The Queen Mary, last of the great Cunard liners, was launched in the summer. In late December she sailed into a storm in the Atlantic. Although mighty and magnificent in appearance, the ship had been badly designed, without stabilisers, and she rolled so badly in a heavy sea that it became almost impossible for her 2,000 passengers to remain on board, as pianos careered terrifyingly across ballrooms. Likewise Britain and Europe careered out of control. Using a technique rather like film-editing (he is a television producer by trade), Blakeway cuts from the dying king at Sandringham to John Cornford, the communist undergraduate poet, at Cambridge. Days before the king's demise came the death of Rudyard Kipling, the embodiment of everything hated by Cornford, who could not know his own fate before the end of the year. Then we cut again. Shortly after the glamorous new king ascended to the throne, George Orwell set off on the northern journey that would produce The Road to Wigan Pier ("for which Wigan would never forgive him", as Blakeway drily writes). That book has left an indelible image of "the 1930s", enhanced by the poignant story of the Jarrow marchers trudging to London from their desolate Tyneside home town (and being shown much kindness on the way - not least, Blakeway notes, by provincial Conservatives ashamed of their own mean-spirited government). And yet, as A J P Taylor pointed out long ago, that picture is misleading. For those British people in work - the great majority - the 1930s were easily the best time there had ever been, with rising prosperity and an undreamt-of standard of living. Blakeway takes us to the Ideal Home Exhibition in March, along with the vast numbers who visited it. This was a year when more than 300,000 new houses were built. Because Blakeway is giving an impressionistic or pointillist portrait, he can pick and choose. He doesn't mention one of the year's highest dramas, the Moscow Trials, but pays much attention to the Olympics and the Spanish civil war. Although the Games were a publicity triumph for the Third Reich, Lord Decies wrote grimly on his return from Berlin that what he had witnessed there was "a new race . . . ready to go anywhere under the orders of the Führer". Tragedy mingled with absurdity. At the beginning of July, the surrealist Salvador Dalí appeared at the New Burlington Galleries in the West End of London wearing a deep-sea diver's suit, a stunt that nearly suffocated him. Just over a fortnight later, Francisco Franco's rebellion began the civil war in Dalí's home country, and as the young painter Julian Trevelyan said, "for the next three years our thoughts and consciences were turned to Spain". It is not true, as the book suggests, that those who went off to fight in Spain were generally young intellectuals: most of the volunteers in the International Brigades were working-class men, many of them miners. In fact, Blakeway then says as much, and there are one or two other contradictions, as well as repetitions and the odd outlandish misprint: the "anti-Marxist Moscow militia POUM" in which Orwell served in Catalonia must mean "anti-Moscow Marxist . . .", although this is the kind of gremlin that computers can introduce and no amount of proofreading can expunge. This past is indeed a foreign country where they did things differently. Manners and mores have changed so much that it is hard to believe 1936 is within living memory. In particular, sexual life was a mixture of desire, repression and hypocrisy. Homosexuality was still a criminal offence, and it is heart-rending to read the lines written by David Strain, a young Belfast draper whose remarkable diary Blakeway found in the archives. He recorded "feeling absolutely desperate", and wrote: "I have never known or had a moments real love [sic]"; if only "I could meet a boy I loved, and of whose love I was assured, I would give up all". At the same time, the prime minister was coming to silent terms with the fact that his son was living with his boyfriend. Stanley Baldwin was often called a humbug, but that wasn't quite right. As the year wore on, his life was dominated by the new king, or rather the king's liaison with Wallis Simpson, a twice-married American adventuress with whom Edward was infatuated. It wouldn't matter if "she were what I call a respectable whore", Baldwin said, but Edward was determined to marry her, whatever the consequences. One man looms over the story - not quite the ghost at the feast, but maybe the bad fairy. Winston Churchill had been out of office since 1929, his fortunes sometimes rising but more often falling. His year began on holiday in Morocco, where his crony Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, bet him £2,000 (worth £75,000 today) that he could not give up alcohol until his 62nd birthday the following November. "Life would not be worth living" on that basis, said Churchill, but he did accept an offer of £600 - several times a miner's annual wage - to refrain from brandy and other spirits. Not that this much cramped his style. He was seen drinking large quantities of beer at lunch, followed by "five large glasses of port", and there were important occasions when he was clearly acting under the influence. He took up the cause of Edward and his mistress, firing off letters that read very much as if they were written in vino, if not quite veritas - "Sir, News from all fronts! No pistol to be held at the King's head! . . . It's a long way to Tipperary." By the end of a year that had been "the hinge of the decade", and the end also of this absorbing book, the Queen Mary was limping home with all her furniture nailed down, Cornford had been killed at the front near Córdoba the day after his 21st birthday, Edward had abdicated and Churchill's career was at its lowest ebb. Even Churchill might have been astonished to be told where the country, and he, would be within three and a half years. But one young man was not alone in saying, "We knew then that another major war was inevitable". The Last Dance: 1936 - the Year of Change Denys Blakeway John Murray, 448pp, £25
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