Germanic associations by renaming his dynasty the House of Windsor. Absurdly, no one in Britain seemed able to agree on what the previous name was, although the Kaiser declared that he was looking forward to attending a production of ‘The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’ – one of his only recorded jokes. The king accompanied his change of name with a request that other members of the royal family relinquish all of their German names and styles and titles.45 Alice’s father, His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg, thus found himself relegated to being the Marquess of Milford Haven, while his family name was translated into English as Mountbatten. He admitted to finding the change ‘a terrible break with one’s past’46 and while staying with his elder son Georgie when his new title was announced, he wrote sadly in the visitors’ book: ‘Arrived Prince Jekyll, Departed Lord Hyde’.47
Yet Louis’ predicament was mild compared with the branch of his family in Russia, where the tsar had been forced to abdicate following the outbreak of revolution in March 1917. George V, the tsar’s first cousin, briefly considered giving him sanctuary but then had second thoughts, fearful that his apparent endorsement of the old tsarist regime would antagonize Russia’s new rulers, who remained Britain’s allies in the war.48 The offer of asylum was thus withdrawn.
In April 1918 the tsar and tsarina (Alice’s aunt Alix, who had become deeply unpopular in Russia due to her perceived Germanic aloofness and devotion to Rasputin) and their teenage children were taken to Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, where three months later they were executed. Alice’s other aunt, Ella, had carried on with her selfless work, refusing all offers of asylum from abroad. In 1918 she, too, was arrested by Lenin’s secret police and taken with other members of the imperial family and their retainers to the mining town of Alapayevsk, one hundred miles from Ekaterinburg. One night they were woken up and told to get dressed. They were then blindfolded and their hands tied behind their backs before being driven to the edge of a mine shaft, where they were thrown in. They were heard saying prayers until, it seems, they were eventually killed by a combination of hand grenades and burning brushwood. The martyrdom of Ella in particular (she was later recognized as a saint) would have a profound influence on the future course of Alice’s life – and by extension that of Prince Philip.
The new Greek king, Alexander, had reigned for only three years when, in October 1920, he was out walking his wolfhound, Fritz, in the garden at Tatoï and the dog was attacked by a tame Spanish monkey. While trying to release the monkey from Fritz’s teeth, the king was attacked by its mate and severely bitten in the leg. The wound was quickly cleaned and dressed but after two days a fever set in. Three weeks after that the king died from blood poisoning, aged twenty-six, leaving a young and beautiful widow, Aspasia, who was five months pregnant with their daughter Alexandra, Philip’s cousin, childhood friend and future biographer.
Winston Churchill later remarked that it was perhaps no exaggeration to say that ‘a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite’ – an allusion to Greece’s subsequent military campaign in Turkey, which was led by Alexander’s father Constantine, who returned to the throne after his son’s death. In the lead-up to this latest adventure, fearing Italian encroachment in the region, the Allies had agreed to the landing of Greek troops in Smyrna (now Izmir, on the west coast of Turkey), the wealthiest of Ottoman cities and the embodiment of that empire’s reputation for cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance. Smyrna had more Greek inhabitants than Athens and had been a long-cherished objective of Greek nationalists. In June 1920 the Greeks had advanced further into Turkish territory and in August, under the Treaty of Sèvres, they had gained Thrace while their administration of Smyrna and its hinterland had been extended for a further five years – after which the region was to be annexed if the local parliament so decided. Venizelos’s supporters boasted of having created a Greece of ‘the two continents and of the five seas’.
After King Alexander’s death, his younger brother Paul was invited by Venizelos to assume the throne, but he refused on the grounds that his father and elder brother had never renounced their prior rights. Venizelos then called a general election in November 1920 in which he offered the Greek people the freedom to vote for the restoration to the throne of Alexander’s father, the exiled King Constantine. To the amazement and dismay of virtually all foreign observers they did so, decisively removing Venizelos and his government from office in the process.
Andrea, by now balding and wearing a monocle, was at last able to return to Greece from Rome with his family. On arrival at Phaleron Bay he and his brother Christopher were ‘borne on the shoulders of the populace, frenzied with joy’ all the way to Athens, so Alice recorded, and he was then required to make a speech from the balcony of the royal palace ‘to the vast crowds gathered below’.49 A month later, on 19 December, King Constantine returned from exile to the throne amid much Greek rejoicing – although the Allies refused to recognize him.
Having previously criticized the campaign in Turkey, once in power it soon became clear that the new royalist government now planned to continue it with a spectacular offensive eastwards from occupied Smyrna towards the towns of Kutahya and Eski Shehir in the heart of Anatolia. ‘The morale of the army, its spirit and its certainty of success are high,’ wrote King Constantine. ‘God grant that we may not suffer disappointment! It will be a very hard struggle, which will cost us enormous sacrifices; but what a triumph if we win!’50 Andrea returned to the Greek army in the rank of major general and after years of depressing inactivity he was raring to go.
THREE
Boy’s Own Story
Alice had by this time just become pregnant again. When she told her parents the news three months later, in February, she was reposing at Mon Repos, the Regency villa on the island of Corfu that Andrea had inherited from his father. Originally built for the British high commissioner, the house stood in grounds scented with eucalyptus and cypress, looking out across the Ionian Sea towards Albania and northern Greece.
Unoccupied during their three years away from Greece, it was sparsely furnished and almost entirely lacking in modern comforts – there was still no electricity or gas or running hot water or central heating – however, after the traumas of the past few years, its seclusion made it the ideal place for Alice to await the birth of her fifth child. Andrea had remained in Athens, imploring the military authorities to give him a command in Turkey, but Alice had their four daughters with her, along with a Greek cook and cleaner, an English couple who acted as housekeeper and handyman, and an elderly English nanny, Miss Roose, who had once nursed Alice herself and now ordered in stocks of baby foods and clothes from London1 in anticipation of the new arrival, which everyone was hoping would be the longed-for boy.2
Alice went into labour on 10 June 1921 and was taken by the Corfiot doctor to the dining-room table, which he deemed the most suitable place in the house for this thirty-six-year-old princess to give birth. At 10 a.m., a baby boy was delivered. Registered in nearby Corfu Town under the name of Philippos, he was sixth in line to the Greek throne.
‘He is a splendid, healthy child, thank God,’ Alice wrote three weeks later to her aunt Onor3 at Darmstadt. ‘I am very well too. It was an easy delivery & I am now enjoying the pleasant fresh sea air on the chaise-longue on the terrace.’ In Andrea’s absence, she had to answer the ‘piles of telegrams’ herself, dictating three to four letters a day.4 The housekeeper Agnes Blower later recalled Philip as ‘the sweetest prettiest baby’ with a healthy appetite. When he was a little older, she prudently ‘put a stop to his being fed on those messy foreign dishes which the Greek cook concocted’ and instead made him ‘nourishing rice and tapioca puddings and good wholesome Scots porridge’.5
Andrea would have to wait several months before he saw his son. Having at last been given the command of a division, he had left Athens for Smyrna the day before Philip’s birth, accompanying his brother, King Constantine, who had placed himself at the head
