Background
Born in New York City, New York, and educated at The Hill School and Harvard, Simpson was briefly a captain in the Coldstream Guards during World War I. His father, Ernest Louis Simpson, a cofounder of the international shipbroker Simpson, Spence & Young in 1880, was a British citizen whose original surname was Solomon. His mother, Charlotte Woodward Gaines, was American, daughter of Royal Aldrich Gaines, a New York lawyer, and his wife, the former Laura Walker. He had an elder sister, Maud (1879-1962; married Peter Kerr-Smiley, MP, in 1905).
Simpson renounced his United States citizenship shortly after leaving Harvard and became a naturalized British citizen.
"In his younger years he was described as tall, with blue eyes, blond, curly hair, a neat blond moustache and a fastidious dresser," according to an article in The New York Times.
Read more about this topic: Ernest Aldrich Simpson
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