The Unofficial British Royal
Family Pages
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The Unofficial British Royal
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Sunday 10 December 2006 Princess AlexandraMy series on the Queen's cousins continues this month with her cousin Princess Alexandra. I'm writing about her before her elder brother, the Duke of Kent, in honor of her seventieth birthday this month. Last month I ended up writing a whole column about their parents, George and Marina. I wrote a column about Prince and Princess Michael of Kent in March, and so will not include them in this series. My colleague Ken Cuthbertson covered the Queen's Strathmore cousins, and among George V's grandchildren that leaves only Princess Mary's two sons, the Earl of Harewood and the late Hon. Gerald Lascelles. They were never considered royal and their children and grandchildren live private lives, so I'm not going to write about them (but they were discussed briefly in one of Ken's columns last year).George and Marina's daughter, Princess Alexandra Helen Elizabeth Olga Christabel, has been a working royal all of her adult life. As George V's only granddaughter besides Elizabeth and Margaret, she filled the role of dutiful princess when Elizabeth became Queen and Margaret did not always feel dutiful. Her birth seventy years ago this Christmas Day cheered up a royal family that was still reeling from the abdication of Edward VIII two weeks before. To mark the occasion, Princess Alexandra is the subject of the main feature and the quiz in this month's Royal Insight, the official online magazine of the royal family. It has some lovely photographs. When World War II broke out, little Princess Alexandra and Prince Edward were evacuated to the Duke of Beaufort's Badminton estate with their grandmother, Queen Mary. Although their parents visited when they could, Princess Alexandra would have seen relatively little of her father before his death when she was five years old. At Badminton the dutiful and proper Queen Mary became a strong influence on little Alexandra. Princess Alexandra was a bridesmaid at the wedding of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at the age of ten. She attended Heathfield School, and was the first princess to go to boarding school - in fact to any school. She graduated in 1952, the year of George VI's death, and Princess Marina was determined to train her daughter to become a working princess as soon as possible, to help the new Queen. Princess Marina sent her daughter first to a French finishing school; she had lived in Paris as a teenager herself and felt that some French style was useful for a princess. Then Marina and Alexandra made a surprising choice - Alexandra took a nursing course at Great Ormond Street Hospital, with the result that much of her charity work has been medical-oriented. By the mid-1950s Alexandra was a full-time working princess. Because she began her royal work so young, she has now been patron of some organizations for fifty years or more. Alexandra carried on a low-key romance with her future husband, the Hon. Angus Ogilvy, at the same time that Princess Margaret's love life was a constant subject of media attention. Angus was the second son of the Earl of Airlie, and the grandson of the Countess of Airlie who had been Queen Mary's best friend. His elder brother later became Lord Chamberlain to the Queen. He inherited little money and had to work for a living as a businessman in the City of London. The Queen was delighted by the match and gave a splendid ball at Windsor Castle the night before the wedding in Westminster Abbey on April 24, 1963. The televised wedding was watched by an estimated 200 million people, which is remarkable for someone so far from the throne. Angus did not wish to profit off his wife's position, and so refused the Queen's offer of a title and of a grace-and-favor apartment at Kensington Palace, instead leasing the Crown property Thatched House Lodge in Richmond Park, where General Eisenhower had lived during World War II. The Ogilvies had two children, James on Leap Year Day in 1964 and Marina in 1966. They are close in age to the Duke of Kent's children as well as Princess Margaret's children and the Queen's two younger children, with whom they attended nursery school in Buckingham Palace. Sadly, Princess Marina died in 1968 just when she should have been enjoying her grandchildren. A low point for the Ogilvy family occurred in 1969, when Angus Ogilvy was embarrassed by a corporate scandal at a company named Lonrho, on whose board he sat. Although he was not responsible, and the scandal did not reflect on his other business interests, he chose to resign all his directorships rather than risk causing his wife further embarrassment. He moved into charity work and eventually lived down the scandal. Twenty years later the Queen made him a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, so Alexandra became "HRH Princess Alexandra, the Honourable Lady Ogilvy." James Ogilvy attended Eton and then St. Andrews University in Scotland, possibly providing a role model for Prince William, who also went to both schools. He has had various jobs in business, and has published a luxury-brands business newsletter called "Luxury Briefing" for the past ten years. He married Julia Rawlinson in 1988. She was a business executive until 1993, when she went into charity work prior to becoming a mother. The Ogilvies live in Edinburgh with their two children, Flora, born in 1994, and Alexander, born in 1996. Marina Ogilvy created one of the first royal scandals of the 1990s when she first got pregnant out of wedlock and then sold an interview to a tabloid, generally criticizing her parents and claiming that they had pressured her to have an abortion. She married her boyfriend Paul Mowatt, a photographer, in February 1990, in a small wedding which her parents did attend. They had a daughter, Zenouska, three months later, and a son, Christian, in 1993, before divorcing in 1997. Marina soon reconciled with her parents, but the extended royal family took some time to forgive her. Zenouska is said to be a close friend of Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie of York. Marina Ogilvy was in the news in 2003, when it became public that she was receiving welfare assistance. The media criticized this because her home is a cottage in Windsor Great Park and her children attend expensive schools, while she has never really supported herself - officially she considers her career to be as a music composer. The Queen named Princess Alexandra a Lady of the Order of the Garter in 2003. Sir Angus Ogilvy, who had health problems for many years, died of cancer on Boxing Day 2004 at the age of 76. Princess Alexandra now has an apartment and her office in St. James' Palace, but continues to regard Thatched House Lodge in Richmond as her home. At the age of seventy she is continuing to be as dedicated to royal duty as her cousin the Queen. -
Margaret Weatherford
Previous columns can be found in the archive
This page and its contents are
�2007 Copyright by Geraldine Voost and may not be
reproduced without the authors permission. Margaret Weatherford's column is
�2007 Copyright by Margaret Weatherford who has kindly given permission for it to be displayed on this website.
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