Whatever his shortcomings as Prince of Wales, King Edward VIII, and wartime Governor of the Bahamas, David Windsor was and is by common consent held to have been a progressive and enlightened Duke of Cornwall.

A significant appointment made in this Ducal capacity was that of Walter Monckton to the post of Attorney. Monckton was to become a key player in the Abdication crisis, a command performance that laid the foundation for an intriguing political career.

Walter was a main guest at the Duke's wedding in France, in the early summer of 1937, an event seized upon by press and radio editors seeking diversion from the grim despatches then emerging from war torn Spain. The British Government was standing aloof from this conflict, but not so those home based concerns with an interest in the development and distribution of armaments.

Within three years Britain was itself sliding into war, and Walter's deftness in handling the media won him the directorship of the Ministry of Information. In this role he would have helped suppress news of the sinking of the troopship Lancastria, a loss that claimed more lives than did those of the Titanic and Lusitania combined.

And wartime work would soon take him to the US where his efforts on behalf of his elected masters surely attracted the scrutiny of FBI chief, J Edgar Hoover….one who was very early and very firmly into the Cold War mentality that came to inform Washington's world view for the remainder of the twentieth century.

A formidable American military presence was established in Cornwall in 1943. Reduced in manpower (if not firepower) it remains, to this day, a constant throughout the post war period when the concept of an 'Anglo-American Special Relationship' has come to mean a variety of things to a variety of Prime ministers and Presidents.

Korea, Suez, Vietnam, The Falklands .... different campaigns, but each with a Cold War context doing much to define the scope of respective top commands, and, likewise, shape the consequences for quiet folk living quiet lives in quiet parts; to the south of Truro for instance, and to the east of Shrewsbury.