Among the noblest thoroughfares of Europe, Oxford’s curving High Street was ornamented until 1982 by a large cluster of white Prince of Wales feathers sprouting above the windows of Hall Brothers the tailor.

This decorative motif alluded to the patronage brought to the business by the future, never-to-be-crowned Edward VIII during his undergraduate time here between 1912 and the outbreak of the First World War.

Hall’s, later to be taken over by another smart tailor, Ede and Ravenscroft, the country’s oldest, was the port of call at the time for any fashion-conscious young man – and Prince Edward was certainly that.

It remained so for a slightly later generation of undergraduates as the maker of the Oxford bags in which Harold Acton and his coterie of fellow aesthetes helped to define the Roaring Twenties.

Acton and his closest associate Brian Howard were both at Christ Church, by some distance Oxford’s smartest college, to which one might have expected the heir to the throne to be sent, as Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s youngest son had been 40 years earlier. A haemophiliac, he was destined to die of that condition aged only 30.

But instead of ‘The House’, George V and Queen Mary opted for Magdalen College, the institution most would consider next in the pecking order (though perhaps not the alumni of St John’s or New College).

The capture of the prince brought joy unconfined to Magdalen’s President of the day, Sir Herbert Warren, than whom there was no bigger snob in Oxford at the time, and possibly ever.

James Lees-Milne – something of an expert in the field of snobbery, as observer and practitioner – writes entertainingly about him in his 1970 memoir Another Self (in which, inter alia, he invented a totally false account of wanton destruction at Rousham House, Oxfordshire, that supposedly converted him to the cause of conserving ancient buildings). Lees-Milne’s own admission into Magdalen, he reveals – and this story is true – was only achieved by the invention at interview of forebears of rank elevated enough to impress Sir Herbert.

Prince Edward’s time in Oxford naturally figures in a fine new biography of him, Edward VIII, by Ted Powell – a Cambridge academic and later (rather surprisingly) a solicitor – just published at £25 by Oxford University Press.

That the subject does not loom large is suggested by the book’s subtitle, An American Life. Here is a study that focuses on Edward’s identification with, and love of, all things American.

These included its cars (he chose a Buick in favour of a Rolls-Royce), its entertainers (household names like comedian Will Rogers and the jazz musician Duke Ellington were among his friends), its sports (he and Lord Mountbatten became pioneer surfers on a 1920 visit to Hawaii) and, of course, its women, none more loved than the Southern Belle Wallis Simpson.

His near-insane passion for her was to cost him his crown, and all the deference, influence and respect that went with it, including – over the last, almost certainly – much of his own.

Wallis emerges here – as all the evidence, fairly examined, surely indicates that she should – not as a scheming ensnarer of the prince but as a shrewd, sensible woman anxious to avert calamity yet unable to do so because of Edward’s perverse determination to have his own way in the matter of his love life, even to the extent of threatening suicide should this be denied him.

All this drama was far in the future when the painfully shy young prince began his Oxford studies (such as they were – he rarely opened a book and quit before his final year).

He was often to be seen about the place in the company of his tutor, Dr Henry Hansell. The pair were soon dubbed – in the light of Edward’s girlish face, pink cheeks and soft golden hair – Hansell and Gretel.

The prince was slight of build (barely eight stone and only 5ft 6in), as can be seen in the photograph on the left – those legs! – which was taken a few weeks after he left Oxford and was about to go off for service – well back from the front line – in the First World War. The uniform, by the way, is the full marching kit of a Guards recruit.

To the young daughters of his first great love, the half-American Freda Dudley Ward, he was the “little prince”. One of these girls was the mother of actress Tracy Reed – the one-time landlady of The Bear, in North Moreton, near Didcot – who was pictured in Gray Matter recently with her third husband, the Dr Finlay actor Bill Simpson.

Tracy’s first spouse was the upper-crust actor Edward Fox who was to play her grandmother’s ardent swain in TV’s Edward and Mrs Simpson. What a chain of coincidences!

In his diminutive stature, Edward was reminiscent of his niece, the late Princess Margaret. He resembled her, too, in rarely being without a fag in his mouth and in his sometimes petulant behaviour – seeming to encourage informality from those around him but falling on them like a ton of bricks when he judged insufficient respect was being paid to his royal status.

Powell tells of a time he visited Magdalen and was greeted by undergraduates leaping to attention in the junior common room. Asking them to be seated, he said he wanted to be treated without ceremony as an ordinary member of the college.

“The next time he came,” Powell writes, “no one stood up, at which the prince asked curtly if this was the way to treat the heir to the throne.”

There are similarities, too, to the Prince of Wales of the present, including the capacity to be “appalled” – the word of both – about things. (Private Eye has long taken the mickey out of Brian – its name for Charles – over this.)

In Edward’s case this included slum housing. On one visit to examples of this he told journalists: “This sort of thing is a f***ing shame” – his language was ever foul – before heading back to the delights of Fort Belvedere, his mansion in Windsor Great Park, with its Chippendale furniture and wall full of Canalettos.

Dandy prince kept shop staff busy

THE Prince of Wales Feathers that once adorned the facade of Hall Brothers the tailors – as I mention in the article on the left – are now to be seen in the flagship Chancery Lane store of Ede and Ravenscroft.

This company, the country’s oldest tailors, took over Halls in 1980 and two years later was instructed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office to remove “all representations and emblems of the Royal Arms and Emblems” from the High Street shop by June 1.

This was in accordance with a then fairly new ruling that such warrants must expire ten years after the death of those granting them. The Duke of Windsor – who as Prince of Wales awarded the warrant in 1923 – died on May 28, 1972.

The Oxford shop is still permitted to use the wording “By Appointment to his late Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, 1923-1936”.

That I am able to state this with confidence owes everything to the kind assistance given to me by Gemma Field, Ede and Ravenscroft’s group archivist and records manager.

Gemma was able to convey to me the extent of student Edward’s patronage of Hall’s through copies of ledger entries from his years as Magdalen College between 1912 and 1914.

His first purchases, on November 12, 1912, were a slate-coloured cashmere motor muffler, another muffler in fawn cashmere and a fawn woollen waistcoat, at a total price of just under £3.

Lovat red check golfing hose, a “shooting suit” with large game pockets, and lots of motoring caps and gloves testify to his various extra-curricular activities.

Was there sleuthing too? One might think so from the purchase (December 6, 1913) of a “blue and fawn check cloth deerstalker”.

That Edward was mad on caps can be seen from dozens of orders. On September 15, 1913 no fewer than seven were supplied in assorted styles. What a dandy!