For Sydney Johnson, the Duke of Windsor's death meant not only the loss of his employer but also the job he had held for almost 30 years. Given the kind of bond he shared with the Duke as well as the Duchess, Wallis ( Lia Williams), it’s safe to conjecture that the valet was in the heyday of both his professional and private domains.ĭeath is often tumultuous in more ways than one. As a valet, Johnson also had the time and money to fall in love and raise four children with the woman of his dreams. Johnson became the Duke’s valet somewhere around the 1960s – a position that highlighted the kind of trust and affection the Duke and the Duchess harbored for him. Johnson was working as the Windsors' footman when the couple decided to move to Bois de Boulogne Villa (more commonly known as Villa Windsor) in Paris in 1952 and was given the honor of accompanying them. Johnson, a god-fearing individual, who believed in actually earning a livelihood rather than just getting paid for doing the bare minimum (though the definition of "bare minimum" would undoubtedly cause some heated arguments in a capitalist world), soon bagged a number of much-warranted promotions at the Duke’s Government House residence. In 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill made the Duke of Windsor take on the role of the governor of the Bahamas – a move that would allow Europe at large to ignore his Nazi sympathies. Thanks to his honorable name, or perhaps a lucky stroke of fortune, Johnson was hired by none other than the Duke of Windsor, aka Edward VIII ( Alex Jennings), who, after his abdication, had been exiled from the soil of Britain. Like many an unfortunate man in a society that promotes the institutionalization of racial discrimination, he worked his fingers to the bone at a dead-end job that offered no proverbial ladder to climb. Sydney Johnson was born in 1923 on Andros Island in the Bahamas, which was then one of the many British colonies.
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