"Mr. & Mrs. Windsor"

In the right little, tight little parishes of England last week, devout Anglican Church folk again buzzed about the Duke of Windsor. Curates placed the tips of their fingers together and cast up their eyebrows. It will certainly be awkward, they opined, for the Bishop of Nassau, Dr. John Dauglish, to have to decide whether Communion may be administered to His Royal Highness, the new Governor and Commander in Chief of the Bahamas, or must be withheld as it normally would be from the husband of a divorcee. In London the Daily Express of Aircraft Production Minister Lord Beaverbrook, who was strongly pro-Edward VIII at the time of abdication, tried to get an Anglican cleric to clarify the tricky Church problem.

Declared this Church dignitary: "If I were he [the Bishop of Nassau] I should keep up friendly social relations--go to functions at Government House and so on. If the Duke presented himself for Communion without giving me notice, I think I should give him Communion; to avoid public disgrace, I wouldn't pass him over at the altar. But I should see him privately afterward, and ask him not to come again."

While the 2,000,000 buyers of the Daily Express were mulling this over, the trim U. S. passenger-carrying freighter Excalibur of 9,359 tons was on an eight-day voyage across the Atlantic, featuring on her list: "Mr. and Mrs. Windsor . . . the American Ambassador to Italy William Phillips and his daughter . . . the American Ambassador to Poland and Mrs. Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr. ... the American Minister to The Netherlands and Mrs. George A. Gordon."

"Mrs. Windsor" went aboard at Lisbon well before sailing time with three cairn terriers and a Sealyham, 52 pieces of luggage, a portable sewing machine, golf clubs, four wicker crates of old Madeira and port wines, and a 1940 limousine and trailer. "Mr. Windsor" tarried ashore with Portuguese Banker Espirito Santo (Holy Spirit) Silva, who had been host to the Duke & Duchess. The Excalibur waited, and on the pier waited the British Ambassador to Portugal and Lady Selby, the British Minister Sir Noel Charles. Royal Maxim No. 1 is "Punctuality is the politeness of kings," but Windsor was a solid 40 minutes late, rolled up at last with Banker Holy Spirit Silva, embarked with his staff of three, all Old Etonians.

The Duke: "It gives me great pleasure to be sailing on a ship flying the American flag." In Washington it gave the State Department jitters that British warships were said to be following the Excalibur to guard the Duke from seizure by German or Italian war craft. U. S. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles declared it would be an "inconceivable" violation of U. S. neutrality if the Excalibur were "convoyed" by British warships.

Undoubtedly the Duke would have preferred to fly over on a Clipper, but the Duchess is always firm in saying: "I don't like to fly." The first of her three husbands was a U. S. Navy flier, and Mrs. Wallis Spencer undoubtedly saw and heard of enough deadly crashes to make her hate aircraft as much as she hates cats. Says she: "I pray that trains will never stop running!"

Leaving Lisbon, the Excalibur moved steadily as a train across a bright, glassy Atlantic, and the Duke went up on the bridge to wave to a Clipper which soared overhead, and exchanged radio greetings with its skipper. Resting aboard the Clipper, unaware of the waving Duke, was Refugee Baron Eugene de Rothschild at whose Austrian castle Edward lived in seclusion after his abdication and before his marriage to Mrs. Simpson. In a suite of cabins aboard the Excalibur, enclosing a private veranda, the Windsors entertained the U. S. diplomats & wives privately, but often walked their dogs on the public decks. Old friends from Washington days are the Duchess and Mrs. Gordon. Years ago wealthy Alice, when she periodically returned to Washington with clothes she had bought in Paris, would encourage impecunious Wallis to have them copied for herself by a seamstress. Today, although the Duchess of Windsor spends thousands on her clothes, her old portable sewing machine is still taken along from thrifty force of habit. At Buckingham Palace, she as Mrs. Simpson induced King Edward to make drastic housekeeping economies, and at Government House in Nassau last week the staff expected to be held on a tight rein.

Sir Charles Dundas, the departing Governor of the Bahamas, who has now been named Governor of Uganda, British African protectorate, planned to slip away from Nassau this week before the Wind sors should arrive. London dispatches said that Sir Bede Clifford, who from 1932 to 1937 was a successful and popular Governor of the Bahamas, is about to be sent back to Nassau, reportedly to assist the Duke with his work as Governor.

Frantic was the rush of U. S. summer trippers hoping to glimpse the Windsors in the Bahamas. The cruise ship Acadia cleared from Manhattan for Nassau with 40% more passengers than she ever carried before. To Bermuda went the President Roosevelt, with reporters and cameramen celebrating in the bar.

The Excalibur prepared to make an unscheduled stop Aug. 8 in Bermuda, and the Duke & Duchess said they would debark there although there were reports that Her Grace would go on to Manhattan to visit a plastic surgeon (see p. 30).

How long they will stay in Bermuda the Windsors said was "indefinite." The New York Sun said the $1,000,000 Astor yacht Nourmahal might take them to Nassau. The British liner Britannic took 15 more pieces of Windsor luggage to Manhattan last week, whence they will be shipped to Nassau, but the Duke was said to have had to abandon in France the bulk of his official luggage, trunkfuls of uniforms and cases of stars and orders.

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