Dan Snow's History Hit - Assassination, Fascism and The Abdication Crisis

Episode Date: July 5, 2020

Alex Larman has struck gold. He discovered one of the rarest and most precious things in the history world: an unknown source which shines a bright new light on its subject. He uncovered brand new documents relating to an assassination attempt on Edward VIII in July 1936, by George McMahon. Alex took me through the documents he found and the story they tell. We also discussed the Edward's challenging upbringing, his possible Nazi sympathies, the tumult of the Abdication crisis and his famous relationship with Wallis Simpson. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to History Hit. Sometimes a story breaks the news, some historical research that really strikes home with the public and Alexander Laman was responsible for a recent one. As soon as I saw it on Twitter that MI5 might have been colluding with an attempt to assassinate Edward VIII, I DM'd him. I said, Alexander Laman, you've got to come on this podcast immediately, and he said yes. So here he is. He's just written a great new book, The Crown in Crisis, Countdown to the Abdication, talking about Edward VIII and his fight with the British religious and political elite at the end of the 1930s over his potential marriage to a twice divorced woman. It was a crisis that would eventually see Edward abdicating from the

throne, handing over to his younger brother, Bertie, who became King George VI, father of the current Queen Elizabeth. Lots of amazing new material in this book, fascinating stuff about the scale of the crisis that threatened to rock British domestic politics at a time when the threat of fascism on the continent was growing ever more real. But among the revelations, this strange instant of the botched assassination attempt is most fascinating. Now, as ever with conspiracy theories, I always think cock up is more likely, but it's a nice little conspiracy theory versus cock up for you all to get into over the weekend. If you want to watch documentaries or listen to the entire back catalogue of this podcast, please go to History Hit TV and become a subscriber. It's a great way of supporting us.

We're so grateful to everyone. Thousands and thousands of people have signed on since lockdown began and we're going great guns. We're commissioning more and more original programming. The podcast is going to get better. I've even bought a new microphone which will enhance the sound quality and that's very exciting. To do that please go to HistoryHit.tv. It would be wonderful to have you on the team. Go to HistoryHit.tv, use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get to sign up for a month for free and your second month for just one pound euro or dollar but in the meantime everyone please enjoy alexander lahman alex thank you very much for coming on the podcast dan it's an absolute pleasure it must be one of those things you dream about when you're in historian school, that one day you will find that crumpled pile of overlooked paper that will contain some extraordinary revelation. First of

all, tell everyone what you were working on and then what you found. I've been working on for the last couple of years a new history of the abdication, which is called the Crowding Crisis. And what I thought while I was exploring it was that there were going to be more stories than made it into the public domain. And a couple of years ago, I was in Balliol College archives doing some research into actually a slightly different project, which was about Walter Monckton, who was Edward VIII's advisor and lawyer. And in Walter Monckton's archive, there's a document called He Was My King. And I started reading it and I got more and more intrigued

and excited by it, because what it is, is it's the memoir of this man called George McMahon. And George McMahon is best known today, if he's known for anything, as being the man who tried to assassinate Edward VIII in July 1936. And before now, we haven't known much about McMahon. We've always had the idea of him as being essentially a patsy, or somebody who was doing it purely to gain attention. But reading this extraordinarily long and involved autobiographical document, McMahon talks about actually being involved in a conspiracy, which was led by the Italian embassy to assassinate the king. It's so complicated, because I always thought the fascists rather liked Edward VIII and would have been happy to see him on the throne. So why is the Italian embassy trying to kill Edward VIII?

Well, what's very interesting is that the Italian ambassador at the time was not in fact a fascist or pro-Mussolini at all. He was quite an Anglophile and quite pro-Edward. So it is possible that of all things there was a kind of double bluff going on, whereby there were elements in the embassy which were more hostile towards Edward and which didn't share the ambassador's affection for him and would have liked to have seen him assassinated. But on the other hand, it's entirely likely that this wasn't driven by the Italians at all and that McMahon's involvement with the Italian embassy was almost coincidental,

and that the actual people behind it were a ragtag band of spies, comrades, and international communists. Oh my goodness. So you open the door, and of course there's just more questions. Do we believe McMahon? I mean, do we believe this account? Well, the first thing to say about McMahon is he was an alcoholic, he was a fantasist, he spent lots of time in prison for various offences. And certainly, I mean, he was my king is, if I say extraordinary, I mean extraordinary, both in terms of it's out of the ordinary, and it's barking mad, because there's all these things in it, like at one point, he announces that the full resources of Vatican

were to be put at the resources of the Italian embassy. And you think, I'm not sure that's entirely true. But what was really interesting was, I had this fantastic material, and I went to the National Archives, and I looked through all of the MI5 material that's been declassified, and there's an awful lot of corroboration. And you can see that McMahon was indeed a paid informant for MI5 throughout late 1935 and early 1936 and he was passing from on the information about the Italian embassy and their notes say that some of it was undoubtedly accurate even as some of it was nonsense so he was clearly in touch with people who at the very least wanted him to be seen as trustworthy by MI5 but the difficulty then came about because he started to give them information that there was to be seen as trustworthy by MI5. But the difficulty then came about

because he started to give them information that there was to be this assassination attempt on the king and they didn't believe him. This is the bit of the conspiracy theory that, again, just to ask more questions, do you think that the reason this story never came out was elements of MI5 wanted the king dead because he was a bit of embarrassment

or they were super embarrassed that they had overlooked the warnings and just classified all this information, buried it for a future sleuthing historian to find? Well, using all the information that I've got, it's the latter. I mean, you can clearly see in McMahon's trial and in the exchange of confidential documents, they were very embarrassed by what had happened,

which is why when he went on trial, it wasn't for attempted murder. It was for a fairly minor charge, which only carried when he went on trial, it wasn't for attempted murder, it was for a fairly minor charge, which only carried a 12-month sentence. And in fact, the charges related to treason were dropped during the trial. But there's all kinds of weird anomalies, like why, for instance, if he was this low-level fantasist, was he being prosecuted by the Attorney General? Which is a very high-profile case, when if you wanted it to go away why would you approach with all this pomp and pageantry and so I mean if you also look at what was happening by July 1936 Edward was universally unpopular king when it came to the higher echelons of his private secretary

hated him politicians mainly hated him his German sympathies were seen as embarrassing. And so you can imagine that there was an element in MI5, especially if you look at the Home Secretary, John Simon, who was no great admirer of Edward. He might have just sat back and thought, OK, if this man can kill Edward and there's nothing that links him to any of us, great. Because we can then blame all of this on some rogue dissident. And it's not our prop, guv. And you think, oh, it's funny how the word patsy can be used there, just as it could be

used 27 years later, isn't it? Well, I mean, that's explosive stuff. There can't be many other examples of members of the security forces following the Hanoverians in the 18th century. So in the last 200 years, there can't be many members of the security forces possibly contriving to facilitate the death of the sovereign. No, I mean, it's a fairly extraordinary claim, isn't it? Actually, I must say, it wasn't the first thing that occurred to me while I was researching and writing the book. As ever, if it's a choice between a cock-up and conspiracy, always go for cock-ups, it's more likely. But on the other hand, you look at just how febrile things were in the middle of 1936. And I've got other documents in the book which explore just how embarrassing Edward's German connections were. And you can think that there

may have been off-the-record meetings where people would have sat there and said, okay, we've got this man, McMahon, who says he's going to try and assassinate Edward. He's probably lying, he's probably mistaken. But what if he's not mistaken? Let's just give him a go. Well, let's get on to the rest of your book. Edward, very dashing. He looked every part, the princess of dashing Prince of Wales.

What's going on in his childhood? Well, I think you've got to go back to his father and his mother, actually. And as with so many kings and members of the royal family, he suffered for the fact that there were low expectations placed upon him by his parents. They openly preferred his younger brother, Bertie, who became George VI. And he had this very lifelong issue with anorexia and his weight. He took far too much exercise and he was always trying to have crash diets. So I think you can see him as being, to an extent, mentally unbalanced

at a very young age. There's actually a letter that he wrote while he was a student at Oxford to his old nanny, La La Bill. And in this letter, he's essentially saying, I've been an absolute fool to have overdone it, but your influence has been the thing that's helped me. And I think that when he didn't have good influences around him, he went off the rails. And so by the time that he became king, not only was he involved with Wallace Simpson, but also there weren't many people who he was listening to. And so you have this situation, I think, where a difficult, strange relationship with a very distant, very Victorian father, and indeed a very disapproving mother, meant that he was looking desperately for a mother substitute most of his life. And many of his earlier mistresses, he had these semi-masochistic, if not fully masochistic relationships with them. One of them he actually

wrote to and said, I need to be treated badly occasionally because otherwise I get appallingly soft and spoiled. So you have this idea that by the time that he was actually king, not only were his politics deeply embarrassing to his country, but his personal life was an absolute minefield as well. I've read some debate about the extent to which he was present in the trenches of the First World War. To what extent was that sort of a PR opportunity? And did he actually see the blood and the horror of the battlefield? He didn't. Essentially, he was kept a long way away from the trenches of the First World War. To what extent was that sort of a PR opportunity? And did he actually see the blood and the horror of the battlefield? He didn't. Essentially, he was kept a long way away from the trenches, because it would have been felt to be so

catastrophic to have had the future King of England having been either wounded or killed, or possibly even worse, captured. So it was very much a PR opportunity, which he, I think, resented, because what I would say in Edward's credit is that if you take away his immediately personal relationships, his great popularity was that he could connect with the ordinary man. And I think that in the trenches, he would have liked to have been in the thick of the fighting. And so he was awarded all of these medals, including the George Cross, which he didn't believe that he earned. And this, I think, made him feel appallingly guilty. His personal life is difficult to know

when you're discussing the sex life of someone who lived that long ago in a different age. He was regarded as a sort of dissolute shagger by various politicians, wasn't he? But actually, was he any worse than his grandfather over the Seventh had been, for example? You mentioned masochistic, right? I mean, was it just censorious,

sort of Edwardian and an older generation looking down on him? Well, he wasn't a second Edward the Caresser, that's for sure. But what was interesting about Edward VIII was that he was almost certainly somebody who needed quite specialised sexual techniques in order to achieve any kind of satisfactory result, which I think would indicate quite severe masochism. I mean, he was known as the little man, and I think that had a double-edged meaning. And so there was certainly a sense that although he was quite prolific in terms of his romantic conquests, I'm not sure many of them were taking place in a particularly romantic sphere. I think that a lot of the time,

it was about power. He knew that he could have any woman of the world he wanted, and so he did. about power, he knew that he could have any woman of the world he wanted, and so he did. Right, okay. So was there nervousness around his succession? Did the crisis precede his accession to the throne? Yes, I mean, George V was absolutely petrified about his son becoming king, because he knew that he'd be no good at it. And in fact, there's a famous saying that he once said, I hope to God that nothing will get between Bertie and Lilibet inheriting the throne and that my son will not. Because he knew that at absolute best, Edward VIII shirked his duty, but he wasn't very interested in actually doing what, first of all, Prince of Wales and then a king was supposed to be doing. He was much more interested in hedonism. He was much more interested in fulfilling his own ideals. And George V was a man who was dutiful.

He was obsessed by the concept of a king having this sacred duty upon him. And Ed VIII had absolutely none of that. And actually, if you look at their attitudes towards religion, it's quite interesting to see that George V, solidly Christian in the classic tradition, Ed VIII had no religious faith whatsoever. Oh, really? Okay. And then his famous affair with Wall Wallace Simpson, when did that begin?

Was that while he was still Prince of Wales? Yes. I mean, he met Wallace for the first time in 1931 at a lunch party hosted by her. And there's all these apocryphal stories that there was some kind of wonderful meeting of minds and sparkling repartee, but neither of them was particularly witty or particularly funny. So I don't think any of that took place. But then this friendship intensified and developed, and I think that in all likelihood their love affair began in early 1934, because by that stage he was giving her incredibly expensive jewellery, which was inscribed and things like that, and although he claimed that he was having a platonic friendship, the servants of a royal household could say for absolute accuracy

that they had proof positive that they lived together, which of course is a euphemism for having sex. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

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It was scandalous because Wallace was not only a divorcee, but she was also a married woman. So the idea that the future King of England was having an adulterous affair would have been seen as absolutely awful. Of course, it was widely known in the highest political circles that this sort of thing went on quite a lot. I mean, a lot of politicians at the time of themselves committed adulterers. But then I think Stanley Baldwin's remark that if she were what I'd call a respectable whore, I wouldn't mind, is the one you have to remember. That if she'd gone about her business and been a discreet royal mistress, Edward would have exceeded the throne and there probably would have been very little heard about it. But she wasn't discreet because she enjoyed flaunting herself and she enjoyed bullying Edward when they were together. And he was so utterly obsessed by her that he was incapable

of behaving normally. I love your idea. The current Queen Elizabeth II would have been an eight, nine, ten year old at this point. I love your reference earlier. So did George V think, I like the cut of her, even though she was sort of six, seven, eight years old? I think so. I mean, I think it was her and it was her mother as well, that he saw in them that there was going to be people who were dutiful, because he could see that Bertie was somebody who, he was shy, and obviously he had his well-known stammer, but he was also somebody who took the concept of being firstly prince and then king seriously, because he had his own long love affair, and he gave up the woman he

was with because he was told that it was unsuitable, whereas of course Edward VIII would never have done anything that he was told to. And so if you look at that contrast between the one son who was dutiful, accepted that he had to follow the family tradition, and the other son who described himself as the most modernistic man in England, you've got a collision there. And I think that contributed in large part to the two brothers who had been close falling out after Edward became king. Let's talk about the crisis now when he becomes king.

Who's the crisis between? Was Stanley Baldwin the prime minister? Yes, Stanley Baldwin was, I think, a really interesting character because these days he's not taken particularly seriously as a prime minister. But I would argue in many respects it's the high point of his reign because he was faced with the most impossible series of decisions. Because obviously it wasn't up to him to force the king to abdicate. But on the other hand, it wasn't in the king's own gift to abdicate when he wanted. So Baldwin was faced with a constitutional situation of unimaginable complexity and difficulty. And he had to somehow manage it so that he could remain in power, that his coalition he'd brought together wasn't dislodged either by Labour or by this,

I hope we can talk about this in a second, this shadowy King's party. And yeah, I mean, the actual crisis erupted at the beginning of December 1936 and lasted until December 11th when there was the abdication. And what precipitated the crisis? Edward's announcement he would actually marry her and make her Queen? What actually led to the crisis was that it was commonly known everywhere in the highest echelons of the country that the king was having this very torrid affair with Wallace Simpson. But there was nothing in the press about it. There's lots in the American press about it and in the European press. But because of Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of the Express and the Standard, having been one of Edward's greatest

supporters, every single story was kept out of the press and the Standard, having been one of Edward's greatest supporters, every single story was kept out of the press right up until the last minute. And when it was precipitated by Bishop Blunt, who was the Bishop of Leeds, giving a sermon in which he made what seemed like a coded allusion to the scandal going on, he almost certainly didn't. But it didn't matter because that led to the press thinking, right, now we can talk about it. And so it became common knowledge.

And Edward, thinking, right, we've got nothing left to lose, was bent on abdication, even as everyone around him, including Wallace, tried to stop him from abdicating. Yeah, so she kind of wanted him to abdicate. She wanted to be Queen Empress, I imagine, didn't she? I don't know, because the interesting thing is actually Wallace has been written about, I mean, more than Edward, and yet, to some extent, I still see her as a riddle wrapped within an enigma. There's almost a characteristic to Wallace that, because some biographers of her, most recently Anne Sebert,

have speculated that she might have been intersex, and I found no evidence to suggest that was true, and I found no evidence to suggest that was true. But certainly there's this dichotomy between the cliché that she was just interested in money, that all she wanted was status, and her own memoir, in which she portrays herself very much as somebody who was in over her head and never wanted any of it. But then certainly something I found interesting about her was she carried on writing to her former husband, Ernest Simpson, for years after the abdication.

And she and Ernest both referred to Edward as Peter Pan. And I think there's almost a contempt towards him, which was displayed throughout 1936 as well. And theirs was not a great love match, that's for sure. Oh, really? That's very sad to hear. But I also want to ask, to what extent was this crisis also mirroring the crisis in Europe? So come back to the beginning of our conversation, Edward's views on fascism towards Germany. Would the abdication crisis have been as acute if it hadn't been for the brewing crisis in Europe?

No, simply put. What it was, was that Edward's views on Germany were far more sympathetic than just about anybody else in that position of power and so he was seen by people like Robert van Sittard, the foreign secretary at the time, hugely hugely embarrassing because there's always a possibility that whatever the government was trying to do in terms of steering a very narrow path between correct relations with Germany but also staying very much on the right side of countries like France, Edward was essentially going against it. Because by the time that Hitler's

ally von Ribbentrop became ambassador in late October 1936, Edward had had quite a friendly relationship with von Ribbentrop before. And of course, it was speculated that Ribbentrop had actually had an affair with Wallace, because he had a habit of sending her 17 red roses at regular intervals. And this was supposed to be the number of times they'd slept together. Now, I think that's a completely apocryphal story. But on the other hand, there was definitely the sense, I mean, from 1935 onwards, that Edward was associated with German ambassadors, and their conversations were being fed back to Germany. Edward was making these very public comments about how he thought that Germany and Britain should be friends and they should be allies.

And so Hitler sent Ribbentrop to England with the express intention that there would be an English alliance with Germany that would come out of his embassy. So there's other things going on other than just the abdication. To what extent, my grandmother always tells me, that it did feel like a generational divide in the UK. Was there ever a chance Edward could reach over the heads of his conservative political elite and tap into a different generational energy? Yes, I think that if you look at all the footage of what was happening then, a lot of young people and the more working class

people, they all liked Edward, they were all sympathetic, they weren't particularly shocked by the idea. For Wallace was a twice-divorced woman, most of them had the attitude, let the king have who he loves. Because there was an enormous affection for Edward, he was seen as somebody who was one of them, he was seen as somebody who enjoyed having a drink, he enjoyed going out and having fun. But if you look at the older, more conservative elements, especially those in higher society, there was a pretty much a universal sense of horror that Edward had done these things. Because actually, one of the things I used during my research was Alec Harding's memoir, which is kept in the Royal Archives. And Alec Harding was his private secretary, and he absolutely hated Edward. And so you've got this page by page screed of absolute loathing for his employer. But essentially, it all came down to Edward not being seen as taking

the job seriously, that he had this extraordinarily great responsibility, which he then didn't live up to. Was there a day or an hour in which he thought he was going to fight? He was going to tap into that energy in the country and face down Baldwin and the politicians? Well, what happened was that there was this brief moment, which is actually, I think, being slightly underexplored, that Beaverbrook was interested in forming this thing called the King's Party, which essentially would have been an unelected, unaccountable political party, probably led by Winston Churchill.

And its central aim would have been simply to get rid of Baldwin and get rid of the coalition government and to keep Edward on the throne. And if the King's party had become a reality, that would have allowed Edward to remain king, to have married Wallace, crowned her his queen. But also, the trouble is the King's party also had fascist elements, such as Oswald Mosley. So the irony is, given Churchill's status as one of the great enemies of fascism,

that he might have found himself involved in a political party with these very strong fascist elements. So that's one of the great what-ifs of history. What did happen to that plan? Well, eventually it was defeated because there was about 40 Conservative MPs who might have joined the King's party, but there was never any formal grouping together. And Lord Beaverbrook, who would have been the mastermind behind it, was unable to actually come to an agreement with Churchill, who was actually more interested in

keeping Edward on the throne and keeping Baldwin and the like at bay. Because right up until the end of the crisis, Churchill was sending Edward jolly letters saying, you'll be fine till next September, nobody can force you out, battalions on all sides are amassing in your favour. And Churchill was right, nothing needed to happen. Although there were these elements that wanted Edward out as quickly as possible, he was the king and nobody could make him abdicate. He went because he wouldn't have been able to marry Wallace. I mean, that's the simple answer. And you keep thinking there's going to be a more complex answer, but that is actually

the truth, that he would not have been able to marry Wallace and remain king. And he saw it as more important that he married her than that he stayed on the throne. I mean, well, he just wouldn't get a license from the Archbishop of Canterbury, you mean? That's the thing. And in fact, when he did marry her in 1937, in France, it was all done in a rather underhand way, because the Archbishop of Canterbury would not allow it to be done in the normal fashion. So he was eventually married by a sort of rogue priest, which is quite an amusing idea. Well, I mean, members of the British royal family and the nonsense they drag us all through in order to marry the women they want to marry. I mean, honestly. And what about the relationship with Bertie, his little brother who became George VI? I mean,

did Bertie help push him out or was he sort of passive throughout? Bertie was horrified at the idea of his brother going because Bertie didn't want to be king and he was writing in November, well if I have to, I have to, but I'd really rather not because obviously he was not comfortable with the public speaking demands of the role involved. Edward was charismatic, Bertie wasn't very charismatic and so the relationship between them had been difficult throughout much of a year, because the Queen Mother, Elizabeth, and Wallace had a very bad relationship, because I suppose each of them was jockeying for position. Ultimately, if you have a Queen Mother, you're going to win that one. But virtually after the abdication, he had a very difficult and very strained relationship with Edward, and they never really reconciled until George VI's death in 1952 and it was mainly about money. Is it there wasn't enough? Well essentially Edward

lied to George in order to get an allowance of £25,000 a year. He said that he had next to no money as that he had over a million pounds in a combination of cash and investments but he was given this annual allowance which was paid for out of George's own pocket, because obviously Parliament would never have allowed public money to be used to subsidise Wallace for all eternity. But I found all these letters written between the two of them, which obviously my book doesn't actually cover, but it's a fascinating story because you see the growing anger and resentment on Edward's side that he's not been given the money that he would expect, that he's not been treated like a king anymore.

And on the other side, you see the new George VI's anger, that he is essentially being told to give his brother money. And it's interesting just how fragile the whole ecosystem is, that essentially it starts to collapse as soon as cold, hard cash is involved. At least nowadays, rogue members of the royal family can go and get lots of money for speaking fees. Perhaps there's an outlet there. This idea of Edward as a sort of Pétain-esque figure, a sort of Vichy figure, friendly towards the Nazis. I mean, do you feel that he was actively conspiring or was he just sort of naively friendly towards Hitler's regime in Germany?

I think that the best way of describing Edward is quite literally as a Nazi sympathiser. He had a great deal of sympathy personally with Hitler, what he was doing in Germany. He saw him as a reformer. A lot of his ideas about what he would have liked to have done in Britain if he'd had a chance were mirrored by what Hitler was doing in Germany. And I think that he liked the idea of his energy

and of what he was achieving. I don't think that Edward was personally an Nazi any more than I think Wallace was an Nazi but certainly their going to Germany in 1937 and meeting Hitler which was an astonishingly badly conceived thing to have done and of course has created no matter of embarrassment for Royal Family ever since was something that he should never ever ever have undertaken. Of course, if he had people around him who could have said, Your Majesty, this is a bad idea, then you imagine

that he wouldn't have done it. But no, he wasn't listening to anyone about stage and he went off and did it. And ever since then, we've always been asking, was Edward a Nazi? How bad was the crisis? Did it undermine legitimacy for the institution itself, do you think? I mean, Bob Boothby actually said at one point, if this crisis goes on much longer, we won't have a monarchy to worry about. I don't think that the monarchy itself could have collapsed because of the nature of what a constitutional monarchy is. But certainly there could have been chaos and there could have been a much worse outcome than there actually was. Well, thank you very much. Now, what's the book called? The Crown in Crisis, Countdown to the Abdication. Absolutely. Thank you very much. Now, what's the book called? The Crown in Crisis, Countdown to the Abducation.

Absolutely. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Dan. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review,

purge yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.