When most of his Eton contemporaries would have been obsessed with the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, Hugo Vickers was obsessed with the royal family, and especially the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He read the duke’s memoirs and watched A King’s Story, he kept newspaper clippings and sent off for their autographs. And then — cue drum roll — “In August 1968 the Duke of Windsor materialised before my very eyes.”
The 16-year-old Vickers had wangled himself a place in the organ loft of St George’s Chapel (he was friends with the organist) to watch the funeral of Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent. All the royals were there, which was thrilling enough, but then he had an unexpected bonus — the Duke of Windsor walked in. Vickers was close enough to observe that “He had the saddest eyes I think I have ever seen in a man.” It was his only sighting of the duke.
Four years later, in May 1972, Vickers was working for Burke’s Peerage and suggested he should visit the Windsors’ house in the Bois de Boulogne to check their biographical details. The duke’s private secretary, John Utter, was helpful, as was the duchess’s secretary, Johanna Schütz, but Vickers came away without catching a glimpse of the duke or duchess. In fact the duke was already dying, of throat cancer, and died just a week later. Vickers donned a black tie and went into mourning. Acting as a steward at the funeral, he looked after Schütz, who said vaguely that he must come and visit them one day. “I took it as a golden invitation” — and was back at the Bois de Boulogne five weeks later. Utter, “a confirmed bachelor”, evidently took a shine to him and asked him out to dinner. Several more visits followed, though the nearest Vickers ever came to the duchess was hearing her voice on the phone talking to Schütz.
When the duke died, the duchess was 75 and somewhat afflicted by Crohn’s disease (and possibly vodka), but she was able to maintain her normal routine for the next two years, going to dinner parties, entertaining friends, and attending couture shows. Money was not a problem — the duke had left her his entire fortune — and the house was fully staffed with a butler, chef, sous-chef, parlourmaids, gardeners, chauffeur, nightwatchman, concierge. But the duchess felt increasingly pestered by visits from Lord Mountbatten, who wanted her to set up a foundation, to be run by him and Prince Charles. When he started telling her what bequests she should leave in her will, the duchess was so outraged she asked her French lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum, to attend all further visits from Mountbatten. Eventually, she dismissed her English lawyers and put Blum in sole charge of her legal affairs.
In early 1976, the duchess suffered a haemorrhage from a perforated ulcer, spent several weeks in the American Hospital in Paris and went into steep decline. At first, she could still talk, and was visited by friends such as Diana Mosley, but she was increasingly confused — one of her last visitors, Prince Michael of Kent, said that she chatted away but made no sense at all. Finally visitors were banned on doctors’ orders, and the duchess remained in her bedroom for the next 10 years.
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By now, Utter had retired, and Blum had taken charge of the household. She gradually shed most of the old staff, replacing them with nurses. The duchess’s pugs were dispatched to new homes and the heating in the greenhouse was turned off. Blum said they needed to practise these economies to pay the nursing bills. Schütz had promised the duke that she would stay with the duchess to the end, but Blum dismissed her in 1978. For the next eight years, while the duchess lay speechless and immobile in her bedroom, there was nobody in a position to stand up to Blum. The duchess had no family of her own, and the British royal family didn’t want to know. When she finally died in 1986, most people in Britain were surprised to learn that she had lived so long.
It is a sad story — but one that has already been told more vividly in Caroline Blackwood’s The Last of the Duchess (1995). Vickers adds a great deal of detail but one has to be as obsessed as him to care which pictures or pieces of jewellery were sold on what date, for what prices and to whom. His case, essentially, is that Blum gradually stripped the house and sold off many items or donated them to French museums while her charge was still alive. Blum (who herself was 88 and blind by the time the duchess died) presumably wanted to ensure that her fortune went to France rather than to Britain, which she did very effectively — apart from a few bequests, it all went to the Louis Pasteur Institute.
I kept wondering why this book was published now, and obviously in great haste, but didn’t find the answer until page 429 in the acknowledgments, where Vickers reveals that he was a historical adviser on the film The King’s Speech, “which was a tremendous boost for me in many ways”. You betcha. Hence the urgent need to fill a volume with odd combings from his filing cabinet — seating plans for the duke and duchess’s funerals, vast genealogies for all the branches of her family, potted biogs of everyone she ever met. The second half of the book is a useful short account of the duchess’s life but containing nothing new.
Buried somewhere within this mishmash, you feel, is a potentially much more interesting story about how a childhood obsession can colour a whole life. In the long years of the duchess’s seclusion, Vickers would sometimes stand outside the Bois de Boulogne house at night just to see which lights were on. Shortly after her death, he and a friend went to the house and managed to persuade the butler to let them in and up to the duchess’s bedroom. So near, and yet so far! So sad, and yet so risible.
Only the best will do
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Vickers’s ‘interest’ in the Duchess of Windsor dates from 47 years ago and a newspaper photograph of her visiting New York that is ‘as fresh in my head today as it was when it appeared’. He cut out the snap and treasures it still. Equally striking must have been another photograph of her he saw years later, when he was doing genealogical research on her and the duke for Burke’s Peerage — a ‘stylish’ and, to most of us, rather showy Cecil Beaton picture, that Vickers loftily assumes was simply used ‘to assist her to pass through immigration control’.