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| Aeolienne |
Does Wallis Simpson deserve a blue plaque?Tanya Gold: Why Wallis Simpson should get her blue plaquePeople hated her because she refused to conform to our grotesque 1930s society Tuesday, 10 June 2008 Independent.co.uk For more than 70 years, Wallis Simpson has been bullied by the sneering British establishment and they aren't finished yet. The story of this interesting, complex woman has been told by her enemies. She was the ambitious American bitch-slut who stole our King and made him shake hands with Hitler. Thank God for wonderful Queen Elizabeth, the sainted Queen Mother, who scrubbed the stain of Wallis from our throne! English Heritage, giver of blue plaques to People Who Matter, is the latest to bitch-slap her corpse. Last week, it denied a request by a member of the public to stick a plaque outside Wallis's 1930s London home. But Wallis matters. She drew to the surface many of the foul bigotries of the age: xenophobia, ageism, rampant snobbery and a desire for women to be submissive, uneducated, unthreatening little dolls. The slut came from a poor family in Baltimore and was married off at a very young age to an abusive alcoholic. The conventions of her day would have had her stay and rot. But Wallis was harder than that. She divorced him and married adoring Ernest Simpson, who took her to London and pushed her up the social ladder. And then one night in 1931, at the age of 36 (the corpse! the corpse!), she was introduced to Edward, Prince of Wales. He was the original playboy: easily bored, trivial and obsessed with his wardrobe. Edward fell in love with her, and it is not hard to see why. She was witty: "I look 100 and weigh 110," she said. "You can never be too rich or too thin." She wasn't a passive English gel, who liked shooting birds and riding horses. She bossed him around and made him put on her shoes, but she never wanted him to give up the throne. She warned him: "You and I can only create disaster together". When it became clear that Edward wanted to marry Wallis more than he wanted to be Emperor of India, the British elite drew horns on her head. The charge sheet was long. She was a whore. She was a Nazi. She was a spy. She was a hermaphrodite. She was a sadist. She enslaved the Prince by dark sexual arts, which she learned while traveling in the Orient (the Orient of course). She was a gold-digger. She was in the Mitford sisters' revolting phrase Non-U (common). She was (gasp!) American. She was divorced and, in the near-theocracy of the Church of England then, this was blasphemy. She was the Jezebel of Bryanston Square. Against this Wicked Witch of the West, the English establishment presented its own glorious Glinda Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. She was everything Wallace was not: submissive to her dull husband, sexually unthreatening, with veins of purest toff blood. Elizabeth was far more of a bitch than Wallis. She was an unsympathetic, anti-Semitic snob who fought to ensure that Wallis was excluded from British public life for her transgressions, even though it was Wallis who made her queen. Elizabeth succeeded. Edward and Wallis fled into exile, and she was only allowed back into British society when she was old and broken. When she died, she was buried next to Edward at Windsor; her corpse was welcome in the royal mausoleum. The exile broke them both. Having given up the throne, Edward spent the rest of his life mourning for it. After his death, Wallis became a recluse and spent her last years paralysed and unable to speak. She wrote her own epitaph: "You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance." So why today does English Heritage continue this old, old vendetta? Its official reason is an affair that she allegedly had with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. However, there is no evidence that this actually happened. It is true and unforgivable that she visited Germany in 1937 and shook the Fόhrer's hand. But she did not "make" her husband into the Nazi he became. It was his idea: he wanted to play the King and Nazi Germany was the only country that would have him. Wallis spent her life as a whipping girl for her husband's failures as king. Nobody could accept that Edward didn't want to rule us; it had to be witchcraft, didn't it? After all this, hasn't she at least earned a blue plaque? Every second house in Hampstead has one, and so does the Tyburn Tree the site of British hangings. Is Wallis less important than a tree? People hated Wallis because she refused to conform to the conventions of the grotesque society of 1930s Britain. Isn't it time when our future King has married his own mistress, and had his own divorce to stop tossing mud at the ghost of Mrs Simpson? View and make comments at: you've been visited by the link shortening fairy |
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| Stacey |
What an angry article 
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| Brownbear |
The ex-King also betrayed military secrets to the Germans whilst a serving officer. He was so chummy with the Nazis that they forwarded his linen, flatware and silverware from his Paris apartment after he fled (rather than, as ordered, rejoining his regiment). Then he hung around in Portugal chummying up the the Germans who he thought would restore him to the throne. He ought to have been court-martialled and shot.
Simpson was just a silly American trout and adventuress who thought she'd hit the jackpot, got it wrong and was by then stuck with the bum deal she made. In a way she did us a favour be making it possible to get rid of one of the most worthless individuals ever to have reigned. I would, however, have thought she was too insignificant, indeed nugatory, a figure in herself for anyone to object much to her plaque, though again it's difficult to see what she did particularly to deserve one. A nothing person. |
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| dpack |
vive le republque
royal and nazi ,nice |
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| Chez |
Nugatory is a fantastic word.
And the rest of what BB said. |
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| mochyn |
No, I'd rather Marge Simpson got one. | ||||
| Quail By Mail |
I heard somewhere that Wallis, the ladies clothing store, was named after the 'king-stealer'. | ||||
| boisdevie1 |
I'm not that keen on the whole blue plaque thing. It implies that some people are more important than others. I'm a democrat so I think we're all important. | ||||
| gnome |
all this blue plaque stuff is a bit silly isnt it? okay, a plaque on the wall of someone like shakespeare's birthplace or whatever is one thing, but "the butler of the aunt of a second duke once slept here" is taking things too far. she wasnt born there, she wasnt english, she was of little historical consequence - hardly heritage is it? | ||||
| Jonnyboy |
Give it 30 years and Paul Burrell will have one. | ||||
| Gavin Bl |
I like the blue plaques, I particularly like the place in london that has one up for Handel and one for Jimi Hendrix, about 300 years apart.
Simpson should have one I guess, but then I extended my argument to 'Should Oswald Mosley have one?' - and then you're going down 'Neo Nazi Shrine' territory, which ain't so good. Hmm 
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| Jonnyboy |
On reflection I think she should have one. Only giving historical prominence to 'our kind of people' seems like a slippery slope to me. | ||||
| wellington womble |
I've got a pair of jeans (via BHF) from there. They are a really good fit. I don't have an opinion on the lady herself. It's a very angry article. Quite offputting. |
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| sean |
History is the lays of the victors. |
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| Chez |
Exactly. Although she did win in a way - if what she got was what she was actually playing for. I wonder what the author's bias is - as other people have pointed out, the anger behind the article is obvious. There must be some button or other that the story pushed for the writer. Hmm. May go off and google ... |
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| Jonnyboy |
There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting. | ||||
| sean |
Blue plaques would be more something that you looked at from the road to truth though, wouldn't they? "Ooh look, that house by the road has a blue plaque on it." | ||||
| Chez |
But people's truth differs. I understood that a lot of the enmity for Wallis Simpson from the establishment was generated by the Queen Mother - who was supposed to have originally been quite keen on the Prince Of Wales. She wasn't the saint she was made out to be, apparently - my Grandma worked 'below stairs' in some of the country houses of the Leicestershire hunting set they used to hang out with and she wasn't liked all that much. |
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| oldish chris |
When I become famous there will be a problem. Due to redevelopment the blue plaque that should be placed on the spot where I was born will be the fast lane of the M1 (southbound) half a mile before it ends at Brent Cross.
So, if I can't have one.... |
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| Chez |
You could use them as 'Road To Truth Waymarkers'. Guided walks along The Official Road To Truth. |
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| Chez |
You *can* have one. It's just that everyone seeing it will be dead an instant afterwards 
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| oldish chris |
One blue spot and three red smudges
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| Chez |
A very memorable epitaph
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| vegplot |
I prefer plaques which commemorate where a person died rather than lived, it more pointist. You can only die in one place but can live in hundreds.
I rather enjoy Eyam and they were nobody's, just normal people but far more poignant and interesting. |
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| sean |
Eyam?
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| vegplot |
Plague village, full of plaques to dead people. Lovely place. |
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| sean |
Oh, is that the one where they put themselves into voluntary isolation? | ||||
| vegplot |
That's the place. Excellent presentation in the church. Very sad. Good tea shop (which isn't in the church). |
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| gnome |
a nice idea - but a bit impractical - you wont be able to move for blue plaques in many hospitals and rest homes, and many plaques will end up on roads, railway lines,bridges, and bodies of water. or in trhe case of many pop stars,the hotel's toilet doors. |
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| Aeolienne |
I remember my grandmother (who was in her early 20s at the time of the Abdication) saying "Of course you know the Queen Mother never forgave Mrs Simpson and King Edward VIII for what they did." Said as if she approved of the QM's refusal to forgive. This sounded all the more odd when I learnt the story of my grandmother's origins. My great-grandfather was first married to a woman who became an alcoholic and had to be shut up in some institution. But it was impossible for him to divorce her, so he moved in with another woman (my great-grandmother) and fathered two children out of wedlock. It wasn't until thirty years later that the first wife died and my great-grandparents were able to get married. By this time he had been disowned by most of his family for "living in sin".
So my great-grandfather was condemned for nothing more than the crime of wanting to be with the woman he loved - and my grandmother apparently appproved of the royals dishing out the same treatment to a member of their family. One rule for commoners and another for the ruling classes, I suppose. |
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| Chez |
I think a lot of the disapproval came because the throne was his *duty* - and he neglected that for personal concerns. I can see that - he had a job to do and he welched on it. For example, he made all sorts of promises to the Welsh miners about what would happen when he became King. And then he legged it and abandoned them and the promises he'd made. |