Free That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor by Anne Sebba Page A

houses, street walkers, prostitutes in opium dens, prostitutes in nail sheds, who offered sex standing up, and prostitutes at wharves, sometimes called Saltwater Sisters, who as their name suggests catered to sailors and were on the bottom rung. There were, as in any city, special streets including the enticingly named Love Lane with both tea houses and sing-song establishments; and there were courtyard bordellos, which offered not only sex but places for Chinese men to socialize, and to smoke opium, gamble or play mah-jong, and permanently moored or cruising ‘flower boats’ which could be hired for the whole evening. In other words there were few tastes that were not catered to.
    Later, when Wallis became involved with the Prince of Wales, rumours arose that a ‘China Dossier’ had been compiled by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin on orders from Queen Mary detailing her lewd or undercover activities. But such a dossier has never been identified, even though spies abounded in Shanghai’s International Settlement and even though the Special Branch there apparently kept files on all important people in the city. Britain’s National Archives in Kew have several leather-bound marbled volumes from the country’s various consular posts in China indicating that the British government was very worried about the increasing anti-British resentment which burst forth during strike-related riots in the summer of 1924 and which it feared could be exploited by Bolshevik propagandists and spread to the whole of China. The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) received reports in August 1924 that Soviet consuls in Shanghai were openly supplying funds to Chinese students in the guise of relief.
    Another file headed ‘Bad Hats or Sundry Suspects’ contains some extraordinary material, including notes about Irish missionary priests shown to be members of Sinn Fein, arms smugglers, Bolshevik agitators and petty criminals, with or without a limp, who tried to get new passports and new identities. Gerve Baronet, wife of an Italian politician, comes under attack in a note headed ‘Peking Gossip’, while the maverick former member of the British House of Commons turned Buddhist monk Trebitsch Lincoln was being watched by Harry Steptoe, the SIS representative in Shanghai and Peking. But even at such a time of feverish activity and suspicion there is no mention of an Americaappf an Amn woman called Mrs Spencer acting in any unusual way.
    Nonetheless, in spite of numerous attempts, the worst that can be pinned on Wallis is a rumour that she appeared in a series of naughty postcards, posing in nothing more than a lifebuoy. There is even a whole book written about the story. But although serious authors insist that these images exist and Harriet Sergeant, author of a scholarly tome on Shanghai, writes of having interviewed a responsible ex-policeman who had seen them – ‘a former member of the International Settlement’s Special Branch told me that he had confiscated a number as pornographic material’ – no one today can provide the postcards themselves.
    The Astor House Hotel, something of a rabbit warren comprising at least four different buildings, but a favourite haunt of most naval wives and celebrities stopping off in Shanghai, is where Wallis and Mary Sadler appear to have stayed. Its faded grandeur still evident today, the Astor House Hotel was close by the Garden Bridge and a short walk from the main street, the Bund. The Bund was home to the grand banks, trading companies and newspaper offices, their magnificent neo-classical edifices graced with marble entrance halls on one side and overlooking the river with its constantly loading and unloading cargo ships and wharves on the other. Number 3 The Bund was the most exclusive place of all: the British, male-only Shanghai Club with its famous Long Bar. The Bund was also where the Palace Hotel was to be found. Wallis wrote that she stayed here, and she may have done on other occasions