The Press: The Duke of Windsor, Journalist

One day last year, H.R.H. the Duke of Windsor was reported as saying that he might like to write a book. That was all the editors of LIFE needed to hear. They signed up the Duke for a series of three autobiographical articles on his youth and young manhood. The price was the author’s (and LIFE’S) secret.

Last summer, at Château La Cröe, his Riviera villa, the Duke set to work. In longhand, in red ink (he likes red ink), he wrote 50,000 words while his four raucous cairn terriers, tied to his table, kept him company. An un-raucous LIFE editor also attended him to make suggestions and keep reminding the Duke that the early life of a prince was not, as he kept tending to think, just like everyone else’s.

A true great-grandson of methodical Queen Victoria, the Duke had kept a diary. He also had scrapbooks, filled with informal snapshots, many taken with his own Brownie.

Princely Prose. The first article, which LIFE publishes this week, has a few remembered glimpses of the late Victorian era into which David was born, and many a richly detailed picture of the Edwardian era in which he was reared. He was christened Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, but “to my family I was and always have been ‘David.'” He recalled “the great Queen” as an old lady in a white tulle cap, black satin dress and “shiny black shoes with elastic sides. But what fascinated me most about her was her habit of taking breakfast in little revolving huts [in the grounds of her residences, Windsor, Balmoral and Osborne] mounted on turntables so that they could be faced away from the wind. Weather permitting, she would ride over to these shelters in a little carriage drawn by a white pony led by a Highland attendant.” When she died, “the Edwardian era had arrived in the genial shape of my grandfather; and the effect . . . was the same … as if a Viennese hussar had suddenly burst into an English vicarage.”

With some pain, the Duke remembered a childhood nurse who took him downstairs at teatime to see his parents, the future George V and Mary. “Before taking me into the drawing room, this dreadful ‘Nanny’ would pinch and twist my arm—why, no one knew, unless it was to demonstrate, according to some perverse reasoning, that her power over me was greater than theirs.” Eventually the cruel Nanny was caught at it, and fired.

Sometimes the world that survives him thinks of George, father of the Duke, as an amiable successor to the gay and worldly Edward VII, and of his mother, Queen Mary, as the ruler of the family. But the Duke describes his late father as a stern sea dog, a domestic martinet who lived on a clockwork schedule and refused to let David go to public (private) schools lest they teach him bad habits. (” ‘The Navy will teach him all that he needs to know.’ “)

Unprincely Life. At Sandringham, the Duke recalls, King Edward VII occupied the merrily run “Big House” while David lived with his family in a “Bachelors’ Cottage.” “When the whole family was assembled under the roof, together with a lady-in-waiting for Mama and an equerry for Papa, a governess for Mary and one or two tutors for my brothers and myself, ‘The Cottage’ was full to bursting, so much so that when a puzzled visitor asked where the servants slept, my father answered that he didn’t know, but supposed it was in the trees.” There were only two bathtubs in the house, both in his parents’ rooms. The royal youngsters took their weekly tubs in the nursery and, as they grew up, in their tiny bedrooms.

Every August the grouse season took David’s father to the Scottish moors. But his mother preferred to take her brood on a gay cruise “up & down the Thames, in our tiny electric launch, with a white tasseled top. . . .”

The first article takes the young Prince through the Royal Naval College at Osborne (he had trouble with math) and to Dartmouth (“I … even sang in the choir”). It closes in good serial form: with his grandfather on his deathbed, as the curtain came down on the Edwardian age.