However, not everyone lived such privileged lifestyles. There was also desperate social unrest and, twelve days after the royal princess was born, there was a general strike for the first time in British history. The strike, which bought the country to a standstill, was precipitated by the government’s withdrawal of subsidy to the coal industry and a dispute between the mine owners and the miners against a proposed reduction in their wages at a time when the whole country relied on coal.
Many people, including King George V, had some sympathies with the miners and how they had been treated by the owners, but for a while there seemed to be a serious threat to public order. People pulled together to do the essential tasks that the strikers had abandoned, such as unloading food ships at the docks, conducting and driving buses and so on. Meanwhile, society girls acted as waitresses to help feed the stand-in workforce.
It was into this world of social unrest and unemployment on one hand and immense privilege on the other that the princess was born. Her father, the Duke of York, was the second eldest of four brothers, the sons of King George V and Queen Mary, and second in line to the throne. Her mother, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, was the daughter of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, and one of those wonderful people who light up a room with their energy when they enter. Elizabeth had at first refused the duke’s proposal of marriage, anxious she would not enjoy the rigours of royal life, but he was persistent and she finally accepted. On 26 April 1923, she became the first commoner in 300 years to marry into the royal family.
Almost three years later to the day, the duchess went into labour on a dark and dismal April night, with the rain lashing at the windows of the upstairs bedroom, which had been converted into an operating theatre for the birth. The doctors in attendance were Sir Henry Simpson and Walter Jagger and, in the early hours of the morning of 21 April, Sir Henry decided to perform a Caesarean section as the baby was in the breech position. As was the custom then, Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks was present and sent a message to the Lord Mayor of London to advise him of the imminent birth. Nothing was mentioned about the Caesarean.
A few hours later, it was officially announced that ‘Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York was safely delivered of a Princess at 2.40am this morning’. The Court Circular recorded that the King and Queen, who were in residence at Windsor, ‘received with great pleasure the news that the Duchess of York gave birth to a daughter this morning’.
Many of the national newspapers were able to run the news of the birth as part of their headline news the same day and the Morning Post reported the scene: ‘Outside the big grey façade of 17 Bruton Street a crowd stood, oblivious of the heavy showers of rain, waiting . . . Presently a neat, efficient nurse came and looked down into the street. The upturned faces must have all asked a question, for it was with a nod and the most reassuring smile that the owner of the uniform withdrew.’
‘I must have been one of the first people outside members of the family to see the princess,’ recalls Mabell, Countess of Airlie, in her memoirs. ‘I called at 17 Bruton Street on 22 April, the day after her birth: although I little thought then I was paying homage to the future Queen of England, for in those days there was every expectation that the Prince of Wales (who was holidaying in Biarritz) would marry within the next year or two.’
At the time of her birth, the little princess was third in line to the throne, immediately after her father and his glamorous elder brother, the Prince of Wales. Behind her were her uncles Prince Henry, who was later the Duke of Gloucester, and Prince George, later the Duke of Kent, and her aunt Mary, who became the Princess Royal.
British Vogue hailed the birth of the new princess, although the Prince of Wales was their biggest pin-up, with his extreme good looks winning him film-star status. He hunted with the Quorn, played polo and steeplechased; he dined at Ciro’s in Paris; he danced at the Embassy Club in London and set fashions in dress in much the same way as the Duchess of Cambridge does today. His plus fours, Prince of Wales checks, Fair Isle sweaters and Breton berets and straw boaters all helped the fashion business and, added to that, his expressions of sympathy for the unemployed made him even more popular.
The Yorks, by contrast, represented domestic bliss. According to Vogue, the duchess’s dictum – ‘I want her to be a frilly baby’ – had been taken up by nannies throughout Mayfair at the time of the princess’s birth. An approved account by a former member of the household bears testimony to this, when the author describes the baby princess’s wardrobe changes. ‘White frocks for the morning. For the afternoons – a waisted frock with a simple bodice, short sleeves and the all-important little skirt composed of tiny flouncy frills. Londoners were charmed to catch glimpses of her driving in the park in a pink frock with an old-world sun-bonnet and gravely holding above her head the smallest of pink parasols.’
Like most small children, she was fond of animals and when she was tiny played with her grandmother Lady Strathmore’s two chows, whom she loved to stroke and would clap and chuckle, beating her heels on the floor when she saw them. Her other greatest delight was to pat her father’s large hunters and see him ride away in his hunting kit from Naseby Hall in Northamptonshire. The duke and duchess took this house for the hunting season and the princess spent much of the winter there with her nanny, Clare Knight, in attendance. She also loved her grandfather King George V’s grey parrot Charlotte and used to select lumps of sugar to give to the bird while her grandfather was ill.
Later, when the duke and duchess moved from the Strathmore residence in Bruton Street to their own home at 145 Piccadilly, the soot-covered nursery windows held a great fascination for the little princess. Not only could she see the working horses pulling their heavy carts outside, but when she heard the clop of multiple hooves, she knew she would catch sight of the soldiers and horses threading their way under the arch that led to Constitution Hill.
Her christening took place on 29 May in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace, which was later destroyed by a bomb. It was presided over by Archbishop of York Cosmo Gordon Lang, and her godparents were Lady Elphinstone (her aunt); Arthur, Duke of Connaught (great-great-uncle); Queen Mary and King George V (paternal grandparents); the Earl of Strathmore (maternal grandfather); and Princess Mary, Viscountess Lascelles (aunt). The occasion was described by Mabell Airlie, who was in attendance to Queen Mary as one of her ladies of the bedchamber on that day: ‘She was a lovely baby although she cried so much all through the ceremony that immediately after it her old-fashioned nurse [Clara Knight] dosed her well from a bottle of dill water – to the surprise of the modern young mothers present and to the amusement of her uncle, the Prince of Wales.’
The baby was named Elizabeth Alexandra Mary – after her mother, her great grandmother and her grandmother – and she wore the gown of cream satin Honiton lace that had been worn by all of Queen Victoria’s nine children and subsequently by every royal child until 2004. She was baptised with water from the River Jordan, which had been sent from the Holy Land for the christening. The bottle of holy water was delivered by Mabell Airlie to Bruton Street the day after the general strike ended, and she had to push through the crowds outside to gain entrance. ‘There are always a few people waiting to see her,’ the Duke of York told her when she finally got through, ‘but there have never been so many as today.’
It was a pattern that was to last her whole life. But in the 1920s and for much of the 1930s, the idea that Princess Elizabeth might become Queen was hardly considered, least of all by the Yorks, who were looking forward to gradually expanding their family. They expected to be pushed down the line of succession by the children from any union the Prince of Wales might make, little realising what was to come.
Although Prince Philip once described himself as ‘a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction’, the blood in his veins is royal on both his mother and father’s side and they could claim royal connections going back generations. Both he and Princess Elizabeth were
great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria and as such were distant cousins. Philip’s father, Prince Andrea, was the son of King George I of Greece, a Prince of Denmark who had been handed the Greek throne. The family were Danish rather than Greek, if they were anything, though it would be more accurate to describe him as a member of the inter-related tribe of German princelings who had come to occupy many of the thrones of Europe. One of the King’s sisters, Alexandra, married the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, and another married Alexander III, the Emperor of Russia. Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was born in the Tapestry Room at Windsor Castle in the presence of her great-grandmother Queen Victoria and died some eighty-four years later at Buckingham Palace.
Prince Philip’s father was tall, handsome and intelligent and an officer in the Greek army. He had four brothers who loved playing practical jokes on each other. Prince Philip recalled: ‘Anything could happen when you got a few of them together. It was like the Marx brothers.’
When Philip’s parents got engaged in 1903, the Prince and Princess of Wales (later King George V and Queen Mary) gave a party for them at Marlborough House in London attended by King Edward VII, who declared that ‘no throne in Europe was too good for Alice’. Their wedding in the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, the ancestral home of the Battenbergs, was a lavish affair that October, attended by royalty from across Europe, including Queen Alexandra of England and a great gathering of European grand dukes, princes and princesses.
For days before the ceremony, there were spectacular parties in Darmstadt. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia brought the Russian Imperial Choir with him from St Petersburg to entertain the congregation. At the Russian Orthodox ceremony, the second of three the couple went through, Alice, who had been born profoundly deaf, misheard the questions. She said ‘no’ instead of ‘yes’ when asked if she freely agreed to the marriage and said ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’ when asked if she had promised her hand to another. Although she could lip read, on this occasion she was thwarted by the voluminous facial hair of the Russian priest.
The formalities completed, there was a family banquet at which Tsar Nicholas over-indulged himself to such an extent that he hit Alice in the face with a satin shoe as she drove away in the royal carriage. She managed to catch the shoe and hit the Tsar over the head with it, leaving him in the road roaring with laughter.
After a brief honeymoon in Schloss Heiligenberg, one of several castles the Battenberg family owned, the couple sailed to Greece on the royal yacht Amphitrite. Alice was now a member of the Greek royal family, although she had never set foot in Greece, having been brought up with her parents in England. After a short stay in the royal palaces in Athens, Alice and Andrea moved to Corfu.
Their family home was called Mon Repos, a substantial villa built in the classical style in the 1820s by the British High Commissioner, Sir Frederick Adam, for his Greek wife. Although lacking in services such as gas and electricity, it was a palatial home by the standards of Corfu. Standing in grounds thick with orange and lemon trees and gardens scented with eucalyptus and pines with views across the Ionian Sea, it would eventually be inherited by Andrea from his father in 1913. He referred to Mon Repos as his ‘royal chateau’.
The island was Homer’s ‘beautiful and rich land’ and Odysseus’s last stop on his journey home to Ithaca. Mon Repos is on the Kanoni Peninsula south of Corfu town on the site of the ancient capital, Corcyra. The residence is shabby but the rooms are beautifully proportioned and it is not hard to imagine how lovely it once was. A small plaque on the outside gates is all there is to say it was the birthplace of Prince Philip, as the interior is now a museum and the dining room where he was supposed to have been born is empty, apart from a few glass cases with displays on the history of the Mon Repos estate.
Andrea and Alice had four daughters between 1905 and 1914 before, after a gap of seven years, Prince Philip was born on 28 May 1921 (later adjusted to 10 June when Greece adopted the Gregorian calendar). The family doctor decreed that the dining-room table was the most suitable place in the house for the delivery. As an officer in the Greek army, Andrea was away fighting the Turks at the time of the birth, so Philip’s first few months were spent in the company of adoring females who doted on him.
The housekeeper, Agnes Blower, when interviewed many years later, said that Philip with his blue eyes and blond hair was ‘the sweetest, prettiest baby’. She added that the family were ‘as poor as church mice’. Perhaps her memory was failing, as Andrea employed (in addition to the housekeeper) an English nanny, Miss Roose, a Greek cook, an English couple and some local footmen. While the four daughters were growing up, there was also a French governess. Even in exile years later, Andrea had a valet serving him until his dying day. The house was well stocked with baby food and clothes, which Nanny Roose ordered from London.
Philip was three months old when he made his first visit to England with his mother and sisters. In spite of the long journey, they wanted to attend the funeral of Philip’s maternal grandfather, Admiral of the Fleet Prince Louis of Battenberg, by then the Marquis of Milford Haven. The family travelled by train to London from Athens via Rome and Paris. Nanny Roose, a maid for Alice and Andrea’s valet made up the party.
The family may have lived in relatively straitened circumstances, but there were always funds for travel. One month later in Corfu, Andrea, back from the front, summoned the local mayor to Mon Repos for the official registration of Philip’s birth. With the Queen Mother Olga of Greece as his godmother, he was given the name of ‘Philippos’ in the registry of births. This was followed by a formal christening in the Orthodox church in Corfu City. Cheering crowds lined the streets leading to the church where a band played and the city officials watched the baby Philip being immersed in the font.
In July 1922, the family and their entourage travelled to London again for the wedding of Alice’s younger brother Lord Louis Mountbatten (Uncle Dickie to Philip) to the heiress Edwina Ashley. The grand wedding took place at St Margaret’s, Westminster, with the glamorous Prince of Wales as best man and King George V leading the congregation of royalty from all across Europe. All four of Philip’s sisters were bridesmaids, dressed in white and delphinium blue. Philip was deemed too young to attend and remained with Nanny Roose at Spencer House where they were all staying.
But this relatively settled life was about to be thrown into chaos, as the ongoing Greco-Turkish War was about to take a decisive turn after three years of fighting in the aftermath of the First World War. One month later, the Greek forces were routed by the Turks at Smyrna. Greek casualties were heavy and more than a million Greeks became refugees.
The earlier Greek advance, in which Andrea had participated, had turned into a crushing Turkish victory, and by the autumn of 1922 the Greeks had been driven out of Asia Minor, so ending a presence there which dated back 2500 years. Smyrna, the main Greek town on the Asian mainland, was sacked, and a young Aristotle Onassis was among those who escaped and he fled to Argentina to start his own meteoric social climb.
Meanwhile, there had been growing opposition to the war in Greece, and immediately after the fall of Smyrna the nation rose in revolution. Prince Andrea was arrested, charged with treason and faced death by firing squad, a fate that had befallen several of his fellow officers.
‘How many children do you have?’ Greece’s new military leader, General Theodoros Pangalos, asked his royal prisoner.
‘Five,’ Andrea replied.
‘Poor little orphans,’ the general said.
The only advantage Andrea had at that time was that he was a relation of the British royal family, and that might have proved no advantage at all had George V not been consumed by the memory of what had happened to his other royal relations, the Romanovs, three years earlier. As Marion Crawford, governess of Philip’s future wife, made a point of explaining, history is ‘the doings not of a lot of dusty lay figures in the past, but of real people with all their problems and bothers’. Even if Crawfie
did not apprise the young Elizabeth of the fatal part her grandfather had played in their tragic outcome, the King himself was all too aware.
In February 1917, Russia had fallen to the Bolsheviks and Tsar Nicholas II had been deposed. He was George V’s first cousin (their mothers were sisters); the two men knew each other well and were on friendly terms, sometimes meeting and frequently exchanging letters. They even looked alike. ‘Exactly like a skinny Duke of York [the future George V] – the image of him,’ one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting once observed of Nicholas. When Nicholas appealed to his cousin for asylum in Britain, George V made it his personal business to ensure that it was refused. Where would he stay, the King wanted to know? And who was going to pay for his upkeep?
The prime minister, David Lloyd George, had initially offered the imperial family the sanctuary they sought. The King, however, aware of the social instability and the corresponding upsurge in republicanism the First World War had generated in Britain, was concerned that Nicholas would bring Russia’s revolutionary chaos with him. Sacrificing family blood on the altar of expediency, he ordered his private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, to write to the foreign secretary, Lord Balfour: ‘The residence in this country of the ex-Emperor and his Empress . . . would undoubtedly compromise the position of the King and Queen.’
The offer was duly withdrawn, and on 16 July 1918 Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, their four daughters and their young son were shot and bayoneted to death in a cellar in Ekaterinburg in the Urals. There is no record of George V having expressed sorrow, much less contrition, at his own role in the tragedy.
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