Edward vs George: The Windsors At War (Ch4)
Remind you of any-one? In 1937, the former Edward VIII, who had renounced the throne months earlier, staged a fake ‘royal visit’ because he wanted to see cheering crowds applaud his American wife, Wallis.
She loved every minute of it – men bowing and kissing her hand, women curtseying, everyone calling them ‘Your Royal Highness’ . . . in German, of course, because the visit was to Nazi Berlin.
Even 30 years later, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor appeared to have no conception of how people would despise them for this.
One consequence was a searing stab of vengeance by a Jewish film-maker, Georg Stefan Troller, that forms the mainstay of the two-part documentary Edward vs George: The Windsors At War.
Troller, a Viennese-born survivor of the Holocaust, is still alive at 102 and sharp as a rapier. He described how easy it was to get the Windsors to consent to a TV interview at their Paris home in the 1960s: he offered them $1,000, worth about £8,000 at today’s values.
‘It was Wallis on the phone,’ he recalled, ‘and she said, ‘Well, if we can’t make it more than that, we’ll accept it.’
The Duke lounged on camera, chatting in German and evidently expecting an easy ride in return for his hospitality. Instead, Troller asked what it was like, ‘living in exile’.
Aghast, the Duke waved his hands at the camera, signalling them to stop filming. He was not an exile, he protested. He was merely living abroad, and could return to Britain if he chose.
Jewish film-maker, Georg Stefan Troller (pictured) is a a Viennese-born survivor of the Holocaust and is still alive at 102. He described how easy it was to get the Windsors to consent to a TV interview at their Paris home in the 1960s
Troller described how the Duke was his wife’s ‘slave, bringing cushions for her, bringing his dogs to her, continuously working at making that woman happy’. This image is a still from The Windsors at War
Troller pressed on. If Hitler had won the war, he asked, would the former king have consented to serve as ‘governor’ of England?
‘He exploded! ‘No, no, not this question. That’s not on our list. I will not answer, go away please.’
But Troller had seen more than enough. He described how the Duke was his wife’s ‘slave, bringing cushions for her, bringing his dogs to her, continuously working at making that woman happy’.
Once he had been a king and emperor. Now, he was the president of a dog breeders’ association.
This hour-long opener didn’t labour the modern-day parallels, but they were inescapable.
Though the declared focus of the show was the feud between the Duke and his younger brother King George VI, it was the enmity between their wives that came across most sharply.
‘Wallis was like a diamond,’ remarked one catty historian, ‘and the Queen Mother was like a pudding.’
Collector Richard Lobel opened a Windsor photo album, never shown in public before, that revealed the Duke and Duchess off duty.
In a couple of pictures, he was stripped to the waist, weeding the garden. In another, she was beaming proudly as she poured a cup of tea, as though she were launching an ocean liner.
The camera took a tour of the couple’s mansion in the Bois de Boulogne. It is deserted and empty, almost derelict — as hollow as the life Edward VIII made for himself.