clothes, she stipulated extra wide hems so that they could be later handed down to her nieces and adjusted if need be32 – and in 1924 she also took out an insurance policy for her nephew Philip.
According to his cousin Alexandra, as he grew up Philip was himself ‘trained to save and economise better than other children, so much so that he even acquired a reputation for being mean’.33 Alexandra – whose version of events was later disputed by Philip – was the originator of the Dickensian legends portraying the boy in patched clothes, making do with no toys and forlornly staying behind after school on wet days because he had no raincoat.34
Neither Alice nor Andrea had paid jobs in Paris. Alice volunteered in a charity boutique in the Faubourg St Honoré, called Hellas, selling traditional Greek tapestries, medallions and honey, with the proceeds going towards helping her fellow less fortunate Greek refugees. The shop did quite well, not least because its customers appreciated the novelty of being served by a princess.35 Andrea tended to become restless and depressed when he had nothing to do, but, as an émigré Greek prince experienced only in soldiering, he was not especially employable in Paris. Instead he devoted much of his time to writing a personal account of the Greek debacle in Turkey, Towards Disaster, which was eventually published in 1930, translated into English from his original Greek manuscript by Alice. Designed to justify his actions at the battle of Sakaria and thereby redeem his reputation, the book’s indignant tone served more effectively to show how embittered he remained almost a decade after the events in question.
Otherwise, he took the children for long walks in the Bois de Boulogne or motored into the centre of the city to meet fellow exiles and hear about the latest depressing developments in Athens.36
The death of Andrea’s brother King Constantine had done little to quell anti-royalist feeling in Greece and in December 1923 Colonel Plastiras succeeded in persuading the cabinet that the continuance of the Glücksburg dynasty was ‘a national stigma which should be blotted out’. King George II and his queen, Elizabeth, were thus required to leave the country in a steamer bound for Romania.37 In February 1924, in the national assembly General Pangalos launched a scathing attack on Andrea, reiterating his responsibility for the defeat at Sakaria and saying he would have been executed but for the intervention of a ‘semi-official British envoy’ (i.e. Talbot) who had come to Greece with a ‘sackful of promises’.38 On 25 March the revolutionary constituent assembly issued a resolution proclaiming Greece a republic, forbidding the Glücksburgs ‘their sojourn in Greece’ and authorizing the ‘forcible expropriation’ of all property belonging to the deposed dynasty.39 Any hope that Andrea and Alice might be able to return home was effectively extinguished at this point.
Unable to return to Greece, they put down more permanent roots at St Cloud, where another of Andrea’s brothers, Nicholas, and his wife Ellen and their three daughters were also now living, as was Margarethe ‘Meg’ Bourbon, daughter of George and Andrea’s uncle Waldemar, and her family. On Sundays Big George and Marie would often hold family lunch parties together but otherwise Marie tended to live with her father in the centre of Paris while pursuing her career as a psychoanalyst. Left on his own next door, Big George would come over each evening, we are told, to say his prayers with Philip and kiss him goodnight.40
Many of the earliest recorded glimpses we have of Philip are on holiday. In the summer of 1923, at Arcachon, on the coast south-west of Bordeaux, his aunt Louise found the two-year-old to be ‘quite too adorable for words, a perfect pet, so grown up & speaks quite a lot & uses grand phrases. He is the sturdiest little boy I have ever seen & I can’t say he is spoilt.’41
In the autumn of 1924, aged three and a half, he made his third trip to London, but the first one about which he could later remember anything. He was taken by train and boat from Paris by his nurse, and was met by Alice, who had gone on ahead to visit her mother, at Victoria Station. Philip was ‘very pleased and excited’, Alice recorded, and ‘discovered the first policeman by himself & pointed him out to me. Also the buses were his joy, & I had to take him in one this afternoon. Of course he made straight for the top, but it was too windy and showery to go there, but he was reasonable and went inside …’42
Philip was about four when he and two of his sisters and Miss Roose first went to stay with the Foufounis family, staunch Greek royalists and fellow émigrés from the revolution, who had a farm just outside Marseilles. Philip became great friends with the children, Ria, Ianni and Hélène, and was treated as part of the family. Their newly widowed mother doted on him to such an extent that Hélène recalled becoming ‘terrified she would switch her affections completely from me to him … the little blue-eyed boy with the most fascinating blond-white hair seemed to have everything I lacked. In my mind he became a great danger, and I became ridiculously jealous.’43 For her own part, Madame Foufounis later recalled: ‘He [Philip] was with us so often people used to ask, “Are you his guardian or his governess?” I was neither, yet much more. I loved Philip as my own.’44
Philip also spent summer holidays with the Foufounises at Berck Plage near Le Touquet in the Pas-de-Calais, where he and his sisters would go to stay for up to three months at a time. The eldest Foufounis girl, Ria, was in plaster up to her hips for four years as a result of a bad fall, and Hélène later described how Philip would sit for long periods next to her bed talking to her, refusing to be lured away by the other children. One day a spectacularly insensitive guest bought some toys for all the children except Ria, explaining to her that ‘you can’t play like the others’. The others were stunned by this, none more so than four-year-old Philip, whose eyes ‘grew wider and bluer. He looked at Ria, who was trying very hard not to cry, then he ran out of the room and returned ten minutes later with his arms full of his own battered toys, and his new one, and he put them all on Ria’s bed saying, “All this is yours!”’45
In other respects Philip was a boisterous, mischievous boy. Each day after lunch, he and Ianni would take Persian rugs from the drawing room through the French windows and lay them out in the garden for their siestas. One afternoon the boys disappeared with the rugs and after an hour’s search they were found walking from door to door down the road with the carpets on their shoulders, emulating the Arab salesmen they had seen selling oriental wares on the beach.
Their various misdeeds earned them regular spankings from the Foufounises’ governess, a fierce – and, incidentally, kleptomaniac – Scottish woman called Miss Macdonald although known to the children as Aunty. Hélène described how on one occasion after Ianni and Philip had broken a large vase, Ianni received his usual beating, whereas Philip vanished. Hélène eventually spotted his frightened blue eyes behind a French window and heard him call out to Miss Roose: ‘Nanny, let’s clear.’ When Aunty heard this, too, she rushed towards Philip, who ‘straightened himself, looked her squarely in the eye, and said: “I’ll get my spanking from Roosie, thank you”.’ And he did.46
Other holidays were spent at Panker, the Landgrave of Hesse’s summer house on the Baltic coast, with Philip’s Prussian aunt, Sophie, Constantine’s widow, and a collection of royal cousins, including the deceased King Alexander’s young daughter Alexandra, whose first memory of Philip was as
a tiny boy with his shrimping net, running eagerly, far ahead of me, over a white expanse of sand towards the sea, [then] splashing merrily in the water, refusing to leave it, running and eluding every attempt to capture him. Long after I have returned to my nannie and the waiting towel, Philip is still there until he is finally caught and dragged out forcibly, blue with cold, yelling protests through chattering teeth.47
Like the Foufounises at Villa Georges, they kept pigs at Panker, and Philip loved feeding them, although he later professed to have ‘absolutely no recollection’ of an occasion recounted by Alexandra in which he was said to have released the pigs from their sties and herded them up to the lawn where they created havoc
