Some historians have claimed that when her first husband was posted to gunboat patrol

Some historians have claimed that when her first husband was posted to gunboat patrol duty in the South China Seas, Wallis joined him in Hong Kong, where he took her to one of the colony’s singing houses, a high-class brothel in Repulse Bay. It was there, and later in Shanghai, it was said that the future Duchess of Windsor learnt the sexual skills, including the celebrated “Singapore Grip” in which contemporary gossips said she was expert. Spencer turned out to be a moody, violent alcoholic who used to go out for the evening leaving her tied to the bed After five years of unhappiness she divorced him. The next year she married the safe and sentimental businessman Ernest Simpson, with whom she moved to London.

Though she moved in Baltimore social circles and married an American naval aviator, Earl Winfield Spencer, her first marriage was unhappy. But Ernest was to be away on business and so the prince suggested she should bring her Aunt Bessie instead. She did and it took the older woman no time to realise that the prince was in love with her niece She could see it, she told Wallis, “in his every glance”. When Wallis replied that she was in control of the situation, her aunt warned, “I can see no happy outcome to such a situation.”Her niece did not want to hear. Her relationship with the Prince was the stuff of fairy tales for a woman such as Wallis, who had been born out of wedlock and brought up as the fatherless poor relation of two distinguished American families.

While the prince and his friends played golf, Wallis walked the prince’s pugs, Cora and Jaggs. So touched was he by her affection for his dogs that one afternoon he turned up at Bryanston with a Cairn terrier under his arm – for her. They named him Slipper, and he became an important symbol of their relationship; the dog is much in evidence in the photographs we reprint today from the second of Edward’s private albums which have been passed to The Independent by a family friend who was given the collection by Wallis, then Duchess of Windsor, in 1972 when Edward died in exile in France.In the summer of 1934 Edward invited the Simpsons to join him in Biarritz. Wallis told Aunt Bessie in one letter that Ernest was flattered by the prince’s attention It seems he had little option. At Fort Belvedere it was now Wallis Simpson who planned the menus and rearranged the furniture.