Hugo Vickers on the Duchess of Windsor, at 5x15

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Hugo Vickers on the Duchess of Windsor, at 5x15

04 May 2011

Speakers: Hugo Vickers

“A reviewer once said to me, at a time when he ought to be reading the ‘Beano’, he was evidently reading ‘Whitaker’s Almanack”. Hugo Vicker’s royal obsession clearly gripped him from a young age; yet it was the figure whose name dared not be spoken in the Vickers household, Wallace Simpson, or “that bad woman” as his mother described her, that captivated Hugo Vickers the most.

Vickers shows us a lesser-known side of The Duchess of Windsor, dwelling only briefly on the abdication crisis, he considers instead a time of her life that has more personal resonance for him, her final years. Here he paints the portrait of a widowed woman, detached from those who cared for her and at the mercy of “a dishonest lawyer, an avaricious banker, a doctor taking instructions from the lawyer, and also a sly butler”. We sense all the time that his interest is a personal one, motivated by time spent he spent in Wallace Simpson’s residence in Cannes. Vickers' plea is not for us to fall for this controversial character, but rather for us to sympathise on a human level with her undignified demise.