There are not many seaside towns that can claim to have hosted one of the most talked-about women in the world at the height of her notoriety — and remained completely indifferent to the fact. But that is exactly what Felixstowe managed in the autumn of 1936, when Wallis Simpson arrived quietly and found, to her considerable relief, that the town simply wasn't interested.
Simpson had come to Felixstowe for a very specific reason: she needed to establish residency in order to file for divorce from her second husband, Ernest Simpson, at the Ipswich Assizes. The divorce was the necessary precondition for any future marriage to King Edward VIII, who had made clear he intended to abdicate rather than give her up. The world's press was circling. The establishment was appalled. And Wallis Simpson was sitting in a small rented cottage by the sea, listening to the waves.
Her own account of the stay, recorded in her memoirs, is wonderfully deflating. "My first impression of the little house in Felixstowe was dismaying," she wrote. "It was tiny, there was barely room for the three of us — two friends and herself — plus a cook and a maid, to squeeze into it. The only sounds were the melancholy boom of the sea breaking on the deserted beach and the rustling of the wind around the shuttered cottages."
What she found most remarkable, though, was the complete absence of curiosity from the locals. "No hint of distant concern penetrated Felixstowe," she wrote. "When I walked down to town for the mail and the newspapers not a head turned... on fair days, we used to walk alone on the beach and for all the attention ever paid to us, we could have been in Tasmania."
For a woman who had become the subject of global fascination — and considerable hostility — the anonymity of Felixstowe was a genuine gift. The divorce was granted on 27 October 1936. Edward VIII abdicated in December. And Wallis Simpson became the Duchess of Windsor, the woman for whom a king gave up his throne.
Felixstowe, characteristically, had noticed none of it.
