Wallis Spencer arrived in Washington in the spring of 1921 with her husband, Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., a Navy aviator just reassigned from California. By the end of the year he was on a ship to Shanghai. She stayed in town.
For most of the next four years, the future Duchess of Windsor was a young, separated Navy wife working the edges of Washington society. Almost nobody who lived through it would tell that story the same way after December 1936.
A Baltimore childhood
She was born June 19, 1896, at Square Cottage in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, where the family had retired for the summer because of her father Teackle Wallis Warfield’s tuberculosis. He died that November in Baltimore. She was not yet five months old.
The widow Alice and the infant Wallis moved into her grandmother’s Baltimore home at 34 East Preston Street. Wallis’s uncle Solomon Davies Warfield, a Baltimore banker and postmaster who later ran the Seaboard Air Line Railway and the Old Bay Line, paid for her education. She was schooled at Oldfields in Glencoe and presented at the 1914 Baltimore society debut.
Money was tight enough that the debut gown became the subject of detailed reminiscence in the local press twenty-two years later, when the same papers were trying to reconstruct her childhood from scraps.
Pensacola, and a Navy marriage
In April 1916 she went to visit her cousin Corinne Mustin at Pensacola Naval Air Station and met a lieutenant named Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., one of the Navy’s earliest aviators. They married seven months later at Christ Episcopal Church in Baltimore, November 8, 1916.
Spencer’s postings shuffled them west. Pensacola through April 1917. Then San Diego, where on November 8, 1917 he reported as the first commanding officer of what became Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado. By the spring of 1921, the Navy had ordered him to Washington.
A small house in Georgetown
The 1936 biography by Edwina Wilson, Her Name Was Wallis Warfield, written just as Wallis was becoming famous enough that the record would soon stop being trustworthy, gives the cleanest account of the next stretch. Spencer left for China within months of arriving in DC. Wallis stayed in town and “began to pick up the threads of her life before her marriage.”
“For a time Wallis Spencer shared a home in Georgetown with Mrs. Luke McNamee, whose husband, absent on duty, was chief of the naval intelligence office… The little house where Wallis Spencer and Dorothy McNamee lived in in Georgetown was unimpressive, viewed from the street. Inside it was charming.”
Wilson, page 70. The book never names the street.
There was a stretch when she also took the Frederick Neilson apartment temporarily, while the Neilsons were back in New York. Her mother Alice was up in Maryland working as hostess and manager of the Chevy Chase Club. Her aunt Bessie Merryman was in Washington and saw her often.
Soixante Gourmets, and Felipe Espil
If there is a specific corner of DC where Wallis Spencer was actually seen in those years, it is the Hotel Hamilton at 14th and K NW. Wilson has her frequently at the Soixante Gourmets luncheons there, the city’s French-speaking lunch society. That is where the Argentine diplomat Felipe Espil, first secretary at the embassy, came into the story.
He became her serious romantic interest before she left for China in 1923. He would not be the last man to outpace Spencer in her estimation. He may have been the first.
What the plaque on Woodley Road says
Walk up to St. Thomas Apostle Church on Woodley Road in Woodley Park, at 2807 27th Street NW, and on the grounds there is a Cultural Tourism DC marker called “Woodley Road Neighbors.” Half of it is about Father Thomas A. Walsh and the church of the catacombs. The other half:
“In the 1920s, her mother, Alice Montague Warfield, ran a boarding house on Woodley Road across the alley from the school building that was originally built to house St. Thomas School.”
The marker does not give a street number. That detail is not in the surviving record. The popular telling on the internet places this boarding house on 27th Street NW in Cleveland Park. The 1936 Wilson biography places Alice at the Chevy Chase Club. The marker, which sits on the actual ground, says Woodley Road. I would take the marker.
Whether Wallis lived there herself looks unlikely. She was already remarried and in London by 1928, the year Alice took the new last name Allen after a Washington remarriage to Charles Gordon Allen. The Woodley Road boarding house seems to have been Alice’s livelihood after that.
The pivot
Wallis sailed for Paris and then Shanghai in 1923. Her divorce from Win Spencer was granted in Warrenton, Virginia, in December 1927. She married Ernest Simpson in London on July 21, 1928. The marriage notice in the family-of-record column gave her mother’s address as Washington, not Baltimore.
In 1934 she went on the Nahlin yacht cruise with the Prince of Wales, chaperoned by Aunt Bessie of Washington. In January 1936 Edward became king. By autumn his desire to marry her was consuming British political circles. On December 10 he signed the Instrument of Abdication. On the eleventh he broadcast to the Empire that he could not carry the throne “without the help and support of the woman I love.”
What remains
The Biddle Street house in Baltimore is still standing. 212 East Biddle, the rowhouse Wallis’s stepfather John Freeman Rasin had bought, where Rasin died in the parlor in 1913. Baltimore Heritage has it on their walking tour.
The Hotel Hamilton at 14th and K is long gone. The Soixante Gourmets are long gone. The little house in Georgetown is a needle in a haystack and the record never named the street.
The marker on Woodley Road is still there.