Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was a little known member of the British royal family, who lived a tumultuous life of tragedy, but also of great philanthropic work in Greece.
Princess Alice, who was the mother of Prince Philip and became the mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II in 1947, spent half of her life in Greece.
She loved the nation and its people so much that at one point she started calling it ‘my country’.
This privileged but troubled woman, who was the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, was born on 25 February 1885 in Windsor Castle.
Her father was Prince Louis of Battenberg and her mother was Princess Victoria of Hesse and the Rhine. She was christened “Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie.”
Despite the fact that she was born deaf, her mother demanded that she engage in adult discussions from an early age, so that Alice, shortly before she reached adulthood, could read the lips of her interlocutors in many languages.
Not only did she learn to lip-read; she also spoke English and German fluently.
In 1903 she married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark (known in the family as ‘Andrea’), the fourth son of King George I of Greece and Olga Constantinovna of Russia. Prince and Princess Andrew settled in Greece and had five children.
Carefree living in Europe and Corfu
The princess led a relatively carefree life by traveling Europe and doing her charity work between 1905 and 1914, while Andrew was devoted to his military career in the Greek army. She was honored in 1913 for her work at the Royal Red Cross.
In June 1917, when World War I raged, the royal family was forced into exile in Switzerland due to the insistence of the pro-German king Constantine I that the country should remain neutral despite the insistence of Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos. to join the Entente.
However, King Constantine was later banished. After the war and the 1920 referendum, Constantine I returned to Greece with the rest of the royal family.
In June 1921, Princess Alice had Prince Philip, her fifth child, who would later marry British Princess Elizabeth, who would later be crowned Elizabeth II.
The family lived in the royal residence in Corfu during Philip’s birth. However, the relative peace of those short years would not last. After the Little Disaster in 1922, the king and his uncle were unwanted in the country and had to flee into exile in Paris.
Prince Philip and Alice flee
The baby prince Philip was chased away from Greece hidden in a crate of oranges.
In fact, his father, Prince Andrew, was even sentenced to death by an extraordinary military court, but his sentence was later reduced to exile.
Princess Alice was so shocked by the events that she used mysticism as a consolation, and she began to embrace the Greek Orthodox faith. Tragically, she also suffered a nervous breakdown.
In February 1930, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was transferred against her will to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where she consulted her therapist Sigmund Freud for a further diagnosis.
Freud, as he so often, diagnosed the woman as suffering from sexual frustration. As a result, her therapist decided to order electric shock therapy and cause premature menopause by bombarding her ovaries with X-rays to destroy her sex drive.
Although Princess Alice tried many times to escape from the sanatorium, she ended up staying there for two years, where her husband visited her only once. He preferred to spend his days in the south of France, drinking and playing cards, surrounded by women.
After her release from the sanatorium, Princess Alice traveled through Europe without anyone knowing her true identity. She had no contact with her husband or even her children for more than seven years.
In 1937, however, her daughter, Princess Cecilie, along with her son-in-law and two of her grandchildren, died in an air crash in Ostend, Belgium. She and Prince Andrew met again for the first time in six years at their funeral.
This tragic event at least made Princess Alice resume contact with her family. But in 1938, she returned to Athens – completely alone – to work with the poor, while living in a small two-bedroom apartment in the Kolonaki area.
Although she had few resources and was basically starving, she managed to set up a truck for the sake of helping young children who had no food at all. When her own money ran out completely, she traveled to Sweden to raise the necessary funds.
Charity work in Greece
After the outbreak of World War II, she bravely continued her charitable work with the same intensity.
During the German occupation of Greece, she faced the irony that two sons-in-law had to fight on the German side and one son (Philip) fought in the British Royal Navy.
It is said that a German general who asked her visited: “Is there anything I can do for you?” she answered, “You can take your troops out of my land.”
During that time, Princess Alice sheltered a woman of Jewish descent, Rachel Cohen, with her five children in her own home.
A few years later, when a member of the Cohen family happened to meet her in Rome and thanked her, she replied, ‘I just did my job. ‘
In 1949, Princess Alice founded the “Christian Brotherhood of Martha and Mary” in Athens, which offered both a clinic and a school for nuns. It was then that she began wearing the clothes of a nun that she would wear for the rest of her life as she continued her philanthropic work.
Princess Alice remained in Greece until mid-1967, but still traveled the world to raise money for her cause.
After the coup on April 21 and the establishment of the dictatorship of the colonels, her son Philip, who was now the husband of the Queen of England, asked his mother to return to her homeland.
Princess Alice has spent the last two years of her life in a single room at Buckingham Palace, with her son and his family.
She died on December 5, 1969 at the advanced age of 84. She left no possessions behind because she gave everything she ever had to those in need.
The princess was initially in the St. George’s Chapel is buried in Windsor Castle, despite her express wishes that she be buried at St. Mary Magdalene’s Monastery in Jerusalem.
Her wish finally became a reality on August 3, 1988, when her body was reburied there.
In 1994, Princess Alice was honored as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ for hiding the Cohen family in her home in Athens during World War II.
In 2010, the brave, undisputed princess was also posthumously called a ‘hero of the Holocaust’ by the British government.