CHARLES EUGENE BEDAUX was a real bosses’ man. He was a French-American millionaire who made his fortune developing and implementing work study — ways of measuring just how hard workers were working in order to pay them less. His method used a stopwatch and clipboard.

His was one of the very first of these systems and became famous and popular among greedy big bosses and notorious and hated by workers and their trade unions. His was known as the Bedaux system or sometimes simply the “B system.”

His early work record was far from respectable. At 14 he was working as a pimp around the brothels in the Pigalle region in Paris. We will never know if it was here he first used clipboard and stopwatch to see if the customers were getting value for money. 

He hated anybody who supported the workers, trade unions, the Labour Party or the Communist Party. One of his particular hates was the Daily Worker — forerunner of today’s Morning Star. 

He did all he could to undermine the paper, both up front legally and also illegally undercover using spies and stool pigeons, just as he had when organised labour had opposed his wage-cutting work study techniques. 

Bedaux was extreme in his right-wing politics and became a solid supporter of many fascist groups and latterly standing solidly with Hitler and his Nazis.

He was also great friends with the British royal family particularly Edward VIII — the king who was forced to abdicate because of right-wing sympathies with Germany, Hitler and his Nazis and also his desire to make a twice divorced American, Wallace Simpson, his wife and queen of England and empress of much of the British empire.

It was of course Edward VIII’s abdication that opened the way for his brother king George VI to take the throne and, when he died early, his daughter Elizabeth to take the throne for the next 70-plus years.

Elizabeth always got on well with her uncle, the abdicated Edward, the Prince of Wales, who she, and the rest of the royal family confusingly called Uncle David. 

It was Uncle David in the famous photograph teaching his young niece Elizabeth how to do the Nazi salute.

Bedaux spent much time and money big game hunting and exploring unknown regions. He would often take Edward the Prince of Wales with him. Bedaux always picked up all the bills. 

After Edward’s abdication it was Bedaux who financed the king and Wallace Simpson’s expensive lifestyle. They both hated to spend any of their own ample fortunes. He provided the king and Wallace with several luxury homes on the Continent rent-free. 

On June 3 1937, Charles and his wife Fern Bedaux hosted and paid for the wedding of Wallace Simpson and Prince Edward at their own Chateau de Cande in France. It would be a posh, fancy and expensive do but with not a single representative of the British royal family attending the wedding.

Bedaux ensured there were many senior German Nazis on the guest list as well as fascist leaders from Britain, Europe and the rest of the world. He fixed it that Adolf Hitler would send a message of congratulations to the almost royal couple.

The bosses’ best right-wing mate even organised a rather special honeymoon — a fact-finding trip around Nazi Germany. Bedaux arranged the couple’s entire spectacular visit. 

It would include schools, colleges, factories, farms and even a very disinfected and cleaned-up concentration camp where amazingly there were no inmates to be seen.

On the trip they very publicly met Hitler and many other leading Nazis. On arriving in Berlin they were welcomed by the Nazi SS band playing God Save the King in their honour.  

In the streets crowds chanted: “We want the Duchess.” Parties and receptions followed, and the Duchess, who had felt snubbed in England, noted with satisfaction that all the leading Nazis bowed or curtsied to her. 

They also called her “Your Royal Highness,” something the British royal family and other members of the British Establishment had noticeably refused to do back in Britain.

The Windsors toured German factories, coalmines and even the training school of the elite Death Head Unit of Hitler’s SS. Everywhere they went Edward rewarded his hosts with a fulsome speech in praise of Nazi Germany and its achievements and he always finished his speech with a fulsome Nazi salute. 

After the surrender of France to the Germans in 1940 and the occupation of Paris, Bedaux became even closer to leading Nazi and Vichy figures. He was even appointed as an economic adviser to the Vichy puppet regime and the German reich.

Vichy France is the common name of the French state headed by Marshal Philippe Petain during World War II. It claimed to be independent, but actually adopted a position as a total puppet of Nazi Germany, which occupied its northern and western portions before occupying the remainder of Metropolitan France in November 1942. 

Bedaux’s German connections were not restricted to occupied France. He undertook many undercover actions for the Nazis in places like Persia and Iraq.

In 1944 he and his son were arrested by the free (non-puppet Nazi) French on behalf of the US Office of Strategic Services and transferred to the Americans. He was kept in custody without charge for a year and then was eventually flown to the US to await charges of trading with the enemy and treason. 

While in FBI custody he managed to buy enough barbiturates to kill himself and avoid further legal action from the allies. He died by his own hand on February 18 1944 in Miami, Florida.

Meanwhile back in Britain Winston Churchill led a huge campaign to destroy all the secret Nazi papers that explained how when the German invasion of Britain was complete and triumphantly successful, extreme right-wing Edward would be restored to the throne as the first Nazi king of Britain.

The Germans had microfilmed their records and some canny German librarians had buried the films secretly on large estates deep in the German countryside.

Churchill knew there were many high-ranking politicians and aristocrats who had fascist views and had been active fascists before the war who would be embarrassed if all the German and Nazi papers were made public. 

They too wanted to destroy the evidence that the Prince of Wales and his wife Wallace Simpson were both dyed-in-the-wool Nazis and long-term supporters of Hitler and his Nazi Party as well as home-grown British fascist groupings like Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists.

They also knew and supported William Joyce who went on to be Lord Haw-Haw and broadcast Nazi propaganda radio programmes from Germany during the war. 

Haw-Haw was sacked from his paid position with Mosley’s Blackshirts when Mosley was forced to drastically reduce the BUF staff shortly after the 1937 elections. Joyce promptly formed his own breakaway organisation, the National Socialist League.

The files were not destroyed but they were hidden away and are only now becoming available to modern historians who are publishing books like Traitor King by Andrew Lownie and 17 Carnations by Andrew Morton. Both reveal the truth about our traitor king who might well have returned to the throne as a Nazi king more than 70 years ago.

Who knows what other shocking secrets were hidden away forever and what other royals, aristocrats and high-ranking politicians and lords were able to keep their reputations and positions secret so they could continue running this country? 

No doubt many are still keeping their fingers crossed that their skeletons stay hidden in their cupboards — including cupboards in Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.