Her Lotus Year: Who Really Concocted the “China Dossier”?

Who really concocted the slanderous “China Dossier” purportedly detailing Wallis’s bad behaviour, criminality and sexual loucheness in Shanghai in 1924? I’d bet on Harry Steptoe, then head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service in Shanghai for much of the 1920s and 1930s. More Mr Bean than Mr Bond in many descriptions, but loyal to a fault….

In the spring of 1938 Britain’s Air Ministry sent its deputy head of intelligence, Wing Commander Fred Wigglesworth to China to review British intelligence in the region. From Shanghai he reported back: ‘Both at Hong Kong and at Shanghai I was asked by many if I knew “Steptoe”. No, who was he? Oh, he’s the head of the secret service organisation at Shanghai – he’s the arch-spy-everyone in China knows who and what “Steptoe” is!’ Steptoe’s cover at Shanghai was Vice-Consul with an office in the consular building on the Bund.

Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…