1THE YEARS BEFORE AND THE VOYAGE EAST


USS CHAUMONT

THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

JULY–SEPTEMBER 1924

So be it, I thought. Win and I have failed in the West. Perhaps in the East we can find our way to a new life together.

—Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, The Heart Has Its Reasons

BEFORE CHINA

When Wallis decided to head to the Far East, she had just turned twenty-eight, hoping for adventure, but also aiming to rekindle her estranged marriage. Her husband had been posted to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong with the US Navy’s South China Patrol, and Wallis hoped their relationship might revive in a different environment, especially if her husband had, as he claimed, quit his heavy drinking. Wallis’s Baltimore upbringing had been relatively staid, a home of strict conventions, fixed opinions, and one in which divorce was not just scandalous but inevitably seen as a failure on the woman’s part. And so Wallis Warfield Spencer felt compelled to try again. She also admitted to her mother shortly before deciding to leave America for Hong Kong, “The truth is, I suppose, I still love him.”* It was ultimately to be a doomed attempt, and she was to eventually break free of the conventions of her upbringing. But she departed America with some hope.

Her father, Teackle Wallis Warfield, had died of tuberculosis in 1896, aged just twenty-seven, barely three months after Wallis was born in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. She later maintained she’d been raised in “relative poverty,” though Wallis’s widowed aunt Bessie Merryman declared that it was “not exactly Tobacco Road.” Teackle was “a retiring, ailing boy who worked insignificantly as a clerk in Baltimore, but the family had what were called ‘good connections.’”† Until the age of six, Bessie Wallis Warfield (she dropped the “Bessie” early, so her biographer Diana Mosley claimed, as she considered it a “cow’s name”) lived with her wealthy railroad baron uncle, Solomon Davies Warfield, “Uncle Sol,” at his home, Manor Glen, eighteen miles outside of the city.‡ Later, her mother, Alice, decided they should move in with Aunt Bessie back in Baltimore.

Thanks to the continued largesse of Uncle Sol, Wallis attended the prestigious, private all-girls school Oldfields, which elevated feminine decorum over an inquiring mind. She did not excel academically but did become an accomplished equestrienne.§ Wallis formally came out as a debutante on Christmas Eve 1914, a celebration rather dampened by the start of the war in Europe.

Two years later, in April 1916, Wallis went to visit her married cousin and close childhood confidante Corinne Mustin (née DeForest Montague) in Florida.¶ Corrine’s husband Henry was a pioneering US Navy aviator who commanded the Pensacola air base. There she was introduced to Earl Winfield “Win” Spencer Jr. Eight years older than Wallis, Spencer was a naval aviator. Tanned and handsome, he looked good in his uniform and had an engaging smile. “I have just met the world’s most fascinating aviator,” she wrote in her diary.** He was attracted by her “sapphire blue eyes and contagious laugh.”†† It was a whirlwind romance, and they married in Baltimore that November. Wallis was just two years out of school, barely twenty, and naive. The newlyweds honeymooned at the popular Greenbrier Resort at White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia.

The son of a Chicago stockbroker, Win Spencer had graduated from the US Naval Academy, becoming a pilot, but had been (maybe due to his excessive drinking) denied an opportunity to go to the war in Europe. Instead, he was left behind in San Diego to establish the Naval Air Station North Island, training other pilots to go to France. Win’s constant griping about being left out of the war and stuck in the backwater of Coronado meant that Wallis also came to resent being stuck in California, particularly as she had to endure Win’s tantrums and ragings.

The problem was that Win drank … heavily. He had a quick temper, which was accelerated by his frustration at his stalled career. The couple lived in regulation married quarters for what felt like a very long four years. Wallis’s life was, she openly admitted, boring.‡‡ Endless evenings of navy talk with other navy wives over endless rubbers of bridge (a talent that would come in useful later in China) and gin. Some of the wives became good friends. The Spencers were close to Kitty Bigelow and her navy pilot husband, Ernest. But then Ernest was posted to France in 1917, and Kitty followed him to Europe as a nurse. Wallis was left alone as Win drank and fumed about being stuck in California while other men were seeing action. The situation was not helped by the fact that Win’s younger brother Dumaresq, known as “Stuff,” was a volunteer pilot with the Escadrille de La Fayette, a unit of the French air force composed mostly of American volunteers. Dumaresq Spencer crashed and died in France in January 1918.

Coronado was a notoriously tedious place. In his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, published in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s main character, Amory Blaine (who does serve in the US military in World War I), recalls his mother spending time there: “Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown.”§§ It was an incestuous atmosphere ripe for combustible rows and angry shouting matches.

Wallis had first discovered Win’s temper on their honeymoon, when he’d found out the Greenbrier was a “dry” hotel. He’d had to resort to surreptitiously swigging from his silver hip flask. Win’s drinking was immense—his regular tipple was a large consommé bowl filled entirely of dry martinis.¶¶ Then in Coronado, things got worse, spiraling into what was to become an all-too-familiar cycle of anger and violence followed by abject apology and apparent remorse. Wallis would recall that Win would sometimes force her into the bathroom, lock the door, and switch the lights off, leaving her there till morning, telling her she was in “solitary.”*** He was a mean drunk. While his behavior was intolerable, Wallis was a young woman of a certain time and upbringing, and at this point, she questioned her own, rather than her husband’s, behavior. The prevailing ethos, instilled in Wallis from childhood, was that marriage was for life and a wife should accept her condition and try harder to please her husband. But though she stayed with Win, it was clear to her that the marriage was falling apart.†††

Win eventually escaped Coronado. He was assigned to the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington, DC. This appointment, it seems, was probably arranged by the bureau’s first assistant chief, Henry Mustin, the husband of Wallis’s cousin Corinne, and so it is entirely possible that Wallis herself pulled some strings to get them out of the rut of Coronado.

But it didn’t improve his temperament much. The bureau was another no-flying, deskbound job. Win continued to drink heavily enough for their neighbors to complain to the management at the Hotel Brighton of their constant arguing. Still, Wallis sought to avoid scandal and stayed with Win. They fought; he took to locking her in the hotel bathroom. His drinking, the anger, violence, and occasional blackouts came to a head when he deserted Wallis for four whole months without explanation. But still Wallis couldn’t leave. She consulted her aunt Bessie in Baltimore but found little support—“Divorce! It’s unthinkable.”‡‡‡ Win returned, and the marriage limped along until February 1922, when he was reassigned to the US Navy’s South China Patrol stationed in Hong Kong.

With Win gone to Asia, Wallis moved back to Baltimore. But she regularly paid social visits to neighboring Washington, mingling on the fringes of the capital’s diplomatic circle, staying with cousin Corrine, and evidently enjoying her newfound freedom from Win. “I was often out quite late. Whatever the hour, my mother was always waiting for me, sitting up in bed, reading or sewing when I came in. She never failed to ask me where I had been, what I had done and with whom. I always told her.”§§§

But perhaps not everything that went on. Before long, Wallis embarked on an affair with a Latin American diplomat. Felipe Espil was the thirty-five-year-old first secretary at the Argentine embassy, a slim, well-dressed, handsome man, noted conversationalist, and a wine connoisseur.¶¶¶ Some biographers of Wallis have pondered why the debonair and stylish Espil was attracted to the relatively unsophisticated Mrs. Spencer. Yet a newspaper society page report, noting her appearance in the capital, suggests she was already keen on fashion and making a striking impression. Remarking that “Mrs Winfield Spencer is on a visit to the city while her husband is stationed in China,” Wallis is reported to be wearing “a lovely gown of cream lace and georgette … long bodice and no sleeves. A cane-like effect of georgette hanging from the shoulders fell into a short wispy train at one side.”****

The liaison with Espil was intense but short-lived. He was a devout Catholic (at least in some respects) and would not consider marrying a divorcée. Wallis was heartbroken when he ended the affair.

* * *

Win had been in Asia for over two years by the summer of 1924. The US Navy’s South China Patrol was constituted of only two gunboats—the USS Helena and the USS Pampanga, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Win Spencer. The Pampanga was nominally based in Hong Kong but regularly patrolled the coast from the British colony as far as the Pearl River estuary and up to the Chinese city of Canton (Guangzhou). Unfortunately, as with Coronado and Washington, DC, the South China Patrol did not prove a happy posting for Win. Though a navy man, he was a flyer by choice and interest. While he was promoted to lieutenant commander in Hong Kong and handed command of the Pampanga, the ship was a rather aged vessel, and there was no aviation component to the job. Named after a Philippines province, it had started service with the patrol in 1919, though it had been built for the Spanish navy back in 1887 before being captured during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Additionally, Win didn’t much like the intense humidity of southern China. He found the summers brutal and complained that conditions on board the small boat were squalid and the “gobs” under his command coarse.††††

Still, after his disappointment at missing out on the fighting in Europe in the Great War, he did see some action in China. There were regular anti-piracy patrols up and down the China coast and in the waters between Hong Kong and the Portuguese colony of Macao. Then, in late 1923, political agitation in the city of Canton, ostensibly over a customs dispute, meant the Pampanga was sent up the coast from Hong Kong to moor off the foreign enclave of Shameen (Shamian) Island to ensure the safety of the approximately five hundred American nationals living, working, and proselytizing in and around the city—more than any other nation at the time. Several gunboats of the Royal Navy, a squad of French soldiers, as well as a hundred US Marines deployed from Manila were ready to evacuate foreign nationals if the situation deteriorated. In the end, apart from a crowd that gathered to throw some stones and tell the “foreign devils” in no uncertain terms to leave, the situation eventually calmed. Still, a clash between French troops and Chinese nearby at the Bocca Tigris Fort on the Pearl River left forty Chinese and five Frenchmen dead.‡‡‡‡

A few months later, things got difficult again as the Pampanga, still under Win’s command, was ordered back to Canton and then farther inland to Wuchow (Wuzhou), almost on the border with Vietnam and the French Indochinese empire. It was a challenge to Win’s navigation skills, as the river got extremely narrow as it approached Wuchow. But he had to stay at full steam if possible; it was an urgent mission. Two American missionaries, two Europeans, and twenty Chinese were being held captive by an estimated three hundred bandits in the hills outside Wuchow. They were demanding $2,000 in gold (over US$3.6 million in 2024 money), a hundred pistols, a thousand rifles, and a large quantity of ammunition. It seems the approach of the Pampanga and the prospect of armed bluejackets storming the bandit lair led the kidnappers to cut their losses and release the hostages.§§§§

Later, in 1924, the South China Patrol and the Pampanga were back on the Pearl River again, once more heading up to Canton. In June, the crew of the Pampanga was involved in protecting the foreign enclave of Shameen after Vietnamese independence activists hurled a bomb into the dining room of the British Concession’s Victoria Hotel, attempting to assassinate the visiting governor of French Indochina.¶¶¶¶ A few weeks later, in August, the Pampanga was back at Shameen yet again as various warlord factions skirmished, threatening an American Baptist mission close to the city. All the missionaries and their families were safely evacuated.*****

These were febrile times in Canton—labor disputes raged, factional fighting intensified, and banditry was on the rise in and around the city of two million people, surrounded by a province, Kwangtung (Guangdong), of many millions more. Win and the Pampanga were back in Canton again in September as the strikes and fighting escalated and took on an increasingly anti-foreign complexion. Several American bluejackets were wounded rescuing stranded Americans in the city.

Southern China may have been uncomfortably hot and humid for Win, but he couldn’t complain that he wasn’t kept busy and seeing his fair share of action and challenging situations. But what he wanted was for his wife to join him in Hong Kong.

* * *

Thirty years later, looking back with a certain nostalgia, induced perhaps by the passing of time, Wallis claimed that she suffered extreme loneliness after Win had left for Asia. Presumably, though, life hadn’t been all bad. The affair with Felipe Espil in Washington was followed by her first trip outside the United States, to Paris to visit her recently widowed cousin Corrine. The ever-dependable Uncle Sol paid her fare. Diana Mosley claimed Wallis did seriously consider divorcing Win in France, but it would have cost a lot of money, and she couldn’t afford it.††††† Meanwhile, a stream of letters and telegrams from Win arrived in Paris. He wrote that he was lonely, that he missed her. Couldn’t they try again? He vowed to Wallis in his letters that he had quit drinking in Hong Kong.

Wallis was perhaps feeling fragile after the disappointment with Espil. She couldn’t stay in Paris with Corrine indefinitely. She was still married, even if reluctantly. If she went to China, then the navy would arrange the transportation. Win wrote repeatedly claiming six months of sobriety, begging Wallis to come to Hong Kong and try again. Wallis wondered if, perhaps in a strange and exotic environment on the other side of the world, they could perhaps reset their marriage. It was a big decision. Not only the task of trying to reboot a failing relationship on the other side of the world, but with Win in China for nearly two years already, she could not have failed to see the alarming news in the newspapers of the strikes and troubles in Canton that had at times spilled over into Hong Kong, as well as the ever-present scourge of piracy in the South China Sea. The American press reported the Pampanga’s involvement in various missions; Commander Spencer was frequently mentioned. But if she had been reading the papers, the news from southern China didn’t deter her.

Wallis later wrote in her memoirs, “So be it, I thought. Win and I have failed in the West. Perhaps in the East we can find our way to a new life together.”‡‡‡‡‡ She agreed to sail to Hong Kong and booked passage east as a naval officer’s wife on the US Navy transport ship Chaumont.

THE SLOW BOAT TO CHINA

In her memoir, The Heart Has Its Reasons, published in the mid-1950s, many eventful years after her Asia sojourn, Wallis looked back on herself as a relatively inexperienced young woman bound for Hong Kong on the “original slow boat to China.”§§§§§ The USS Chaumont certainly wasn’t in a rush, nor was it much in the way of a stylish ride—a bare-bones US Navy transport ship that meandered down America’s East Coast, through the Panama Canal, and then across the vast Pacific, making stops at the American naval bases at Honolulu and Guam.

The Chaumont had been launched into service in 1921 from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Transports typically had just two classes of accommodation: first and second. As the wife of a serving officer, Wallis sailed first class, but on a navy transport, that was still fairly basic. The Chaumont was essentially a refitted cargo ship rather than an ocean liner, and so the accommodation was rudimentary. The Chaumont could, at full capacity, carry 1,300 troops with an additional couple of hundred crew and civilian passengers. In 1924, when Wallis boarded the Chaumont, it was serving as a designated transpacific troop carrier sailing between the United States and the US naval base at Manila in the Philippines.

The Chaumont embarked for its six-week voyage from the navy yards at Norfolk, Virginia, on Thursday, July 17, 1924. It was scheduled to take a very long and roundabout route to the Philippines via the Panama Canal. The main cargo on this voyage was actually almost exclusively navy wives and children sailing to join husbands and fathers at their postings. Cabins were assigned according to the rank of the husband. As the wife of a lieutenant commander, Wallis was assigned a mid-rank cabin on the second deck, which she shared with two other women—the wife of a captain stationed in the Philippines and another woman traveling to China to marry an officer in the Marine Corps. The privileges, or the misfortunes, of rank extended throughout the ship. The higher your husband’s rank, the closer you were seated to the captain’s table in the dining room.

The voyage was initially a rotten experience for Wallis. She spent the first week confined to her cabin with a feverish cold and nausea. She described herself as “half-dead,” barely able to rise from her bunk, suffering terribly from seasickness. She avoided the communal areas of the ship, as everybody was smoking, which accentuated her nausea. By the time the Chaumont had crawled down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and reached the Panama Canal, Wallis was no better and had a high fever. But the ship’s doctor prescribed nothing more advanced than dry toast and ginger ale with a little chicken broth or beef tea for dinner. She continued to suffer severe seasickness all the way to Panama City.

Kay Manly, an old friend and fellow navy wife, was stationed with her husband in the Panama Canal Zone and found a physician for Wallis.¶¶¶¶¶ After two days’ recuperation ashore at the Manlys’ home, Wallis declared herself much improved and was able to rejoin the Chaumont for the next leg of the voyage—out across the Pacific to Hawaii, arriving for a few days’ stopover in Honolulu. On what must have been a rather slow news day, a nationally syndicated social column that ran in numerous newspapers across America noted:

Mrs Wallis Spencer has been sick for a week.******

Fortunately, after Hawaii, Wallis’s seasickness receded, and things aboard got rather better. Many of the higher-ranking officers’ wives disembarked, their husbands stationed at nearby Pearl Harbor, and so Wallis was moved up to a better-situated cabin.

By the time they completed the eleven-day transpacific voyage to the naval base at Guam in the western Pacific, Wallis and a few of the other wives had forgotten their initial seasickness but were now suffering serious cabin fever. Though ostensibly not permitted, a group of them insisted on going ashore while the Chaumont discharged supplies for the base. The adventurous gang rented a thatched hut on the beach at Apra Harbor for the two-day stopover. It may have seemed exotic, but Guam was in fact a closed port operated by the navy and more like a vast dockyard than an island paradise. The women were perfectly safe in contrast to some heightened reports that they had disappeared into the jungle and gotten lost!

In the few days the Chaumont was anchored at Guam, Wallis found time to lunch with the outgoing governor and former navy captain Henry Bertrand Price. Price was not exactly scintillating company, being quite obsessive and known to discourse at great length about his twin passions of modern highway technology and self-sufficient agricultural techniques, both of which he desired to implement on the island. Wallis was introduced to breadfruit, mangoes, and custard apples.††††††

Eventually, in late August, the Chaumont reached its final destination, Manila Bay. After a couple of days in the heavily American-influenced Philippines capital, Wallis transferred to a much better-appointed Canadian Pacific Steamship Company liner, the RMS Empress of Canada. In 1924, the sleek, white-painted Empress had barely been in service for two years since her construction and was by far the largest passenger vessel sailing the transpacific routes from her base in Vancouver, with stops in Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and China. Just a year before, the liner had arrived at Tokyo Harbor a day after the Great Kanto Earthquake, which devastated Tokyo, Yokohama, and the surrounding hinterland. The liner immediately converted into an evacuation ship and rescued nearly a thousand refugees, transporting them to the safer port of Kobe 250 miles away from the quake zone.

Most of those joining the Empress of Canada in Manila were what the crew dismissively referred to as “Army and Oil,” either being in the military or working for one of the big American oil companies selling into China—Socony, Texaco, Asiatic Petroleum. Wallis had just two days of comparative luxury on the Empress of Canada, largely remaining in her well-appointed cabin before she stepped out on the deck and found they had sailed into Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour on September 5. She had been at sea for just over six weeks.


Copyright © 2024 by Paul French