Lady Thelma Furness & Edward VIII

Lady Furness was the identical twin sister of Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt (the maternal grandmother of Anderson Cooper.) She first met the Prince of Wales at a ball at Londonderry House in 1926^[14] but they did not meet again until the Leicestershire Agricultural Show at Leicester on 14 June 1929.^[15] The Prince asked her to dine and they met regularly until she joined the Prince on safari in East Africa early in 1930, when a closer relationship developed.^[16] On the Prince’s return to England in April 1930 she was his regular weekend companion at the newly acquired Fort Belvedere until January 1934. On 10 January 1931 at her house Burrough Court, near Melton Mowbray, she introduced the Prince to her close friend Mrs Wallis Simpson and, whilst visiting her sister Gloria in America between January and March 1934, she was supplanted in the Prince’s affection by Mrs Simpson.^[17] Reacting to the Prince’s coldness later that year she threw herself into a short-lived affair with Prince Aly Khan.^[18] 

Lady Furness died in New York City. As her niece, Gloria Vanderbilt, recalled, “She dropped dead on Seventy-third and Lexington on her way to see the doctor. In her bag was this miniature teddy bear that the Prince of Wales had given her, years before, when she came to be with my mother at the custody trial, and it was worn down to the nub”.^[1][20](.)