Shortly before her death – 55 years ago today – Prince Philip’s ‘old mum’ left a moving letter to her son.
She wrote to her ‘dearest Philip’ and told him to ‘be brave’ before she died at Buckingham Palace on December 5, 1969.
The heartbreaking letter read: ‘Dear Philip, be brave and remember that I will never leave you, and you will always find me when you need me most. All my devoted love, your old mama.”
However, the mother and son did not always have a committed relationship and Philip did not see her for seven years after she was sent to a sanatorium when he was nine.
Princess Alice of Greece, wearing her habit, with her son, Prince Philip, in 1957
Princess Alice with her husband Prince Andrew – a youngest son of the King of Greece
Princess Alice was born in February 1885 at Windsor Castle in the presence of her great-grandmother, Victoria, and grew up as an English princess.
Her parents, Louis, Prince of Battenberg, and Princess Victoria of Hesse and the Rhine, were German.
Alice was one of four, the others were sister Louise, brother Louis and George. Louise later became Queen of Sweden.
When she was a young child, Alice was diagnosed as congenitally deaf, but she could speak clearly and became a fluent lip reader.
She married into the Greek royal family when she married Prince Andrew – a youngest son of the King of Greece – in 1903, becoming Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark.
In 1914 the couple had four daughters – Princesses Margarita, Theodora, Cecilie and Sophie – and a revolution broke out in Greece, where she lived at the time.
Philip was born in 1921 and shortly afterwards the Greek royal family was exiled following the abdication of King Constantine I of Greece, who was forced to leave in 1917.
When Philip was just a toddler, his family fled to Paris on a British warship.
Once in France they lived on alms from relatives. The stressful period put pressure on Alice, whose fervent religious beliefs had slowly become more eccentric over the years.
After enduring a few tumultuous years, Alice suffered a nervous breakdown in 1930.
She began hearing voices and believed she was having intimate relationships with Jesus and other religious figures.
The late Queen Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, pictured in 1965
Princess Alice, who died 55 years ago today, took photographs in her younger years
The princess was sent to a sanatorium when Philip was only nine years old. He was taken for a picnic with his grandmother and when he returned, his mother was gone.
She was diagnosed as schizophrenic before being treated by Sigmund Freud at a clinic in Berlin.
On the advice of the famous psychoanalyst, her ovaries were irradiated with X-rays, which would cure her of her frustrated sexual desires.
This treatment is believed to have caused early menopause. There is also no evidence that Alice herself was consulted about this or agreed to the procedure.
After treatment, she was admitted to a Swiss sanatorium, where she was imprisoned for two and a half years.
During his childhood, Philip was sent to boarding school in England and Scotland.
He was sent from relative to relative during the holidays, including his uncle Lord Mountbatten.
Philip’s father, Prince Andrew, meanwhile, effectively left his wife to live with his mistress on the French Rivera, despite never having been divorced.
He died in Monaco in 1944.
When Alice was finally released from the sanatorium in 1932, she drifted among modest German B&Bs.
Philip did not reunite with his mother until he was 16 years old in 1937 at the funeral of his sister Cecilie, who had died in a plane crash.
Alice with her husband Andrew, pictured together in 1922
Alice sits in a car while her husband stands next to the vehicle in Athens in January 1921
Alice wanted Philip to return to Athens with her, after the restoration of the Greek monarchy in 1935. But Philip had already planned his future in the Royal Navy, so his mother was left alone in Greece.
In 1941, Alice was stranded in Nazi-occupied Greece.
Her brother, Lord Mountbatten, sent her food parcels which she distributed to those in need.
During the war, she hid a Jewish family on the top floor of her house, just meters from the Gestapo headquarters.
When the Gestapo became suspicious and interrogated the princess, she used her deafness as an excuse not to answer their questions.
“I suspect it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special,” Prince Philip said when he visited her grave in 1994.
“She was a person of deep religious faith and she would have seen it as a perfectly human action towards fellow human beings in need.”
Alfred Haimaki Cohen asked Alice for help with housing his wife and children.
His daughter, Evy Cohen, has previously credited the princess with keeping her family alive.
She told me The sun: ‘Princess Alice’s story of incredible courage must be remembered.’
Her father Alfred was a prominent member of the community of 8,000 Jewish people in Athens who encountered Alice’s lady-in-waiting and sought help from the Nazi persecution.
The royal family quickly offered the family shelter on the top floor of her home, just meters from the Gestapo headquarters.
Alice talks to Countess Mountbatten of Burma at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1953
Alice’s four daughters – Princesses Cecilia, Margarita, Sophie and Theodora in 1922
After the war, Philip proposed to Princess Elizabeth with a diamond ring from his mother’s tiara.
Alice sold the rest of her jewelry to found her own religious order, the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, in 1949 and became a nun.
She then built a monastery and orphanage in a poor suburb of Athens.
Alice still kept in touch with her family and when Philip’s niece, Princess Dorothea, married Prince Friedrich in 1959, she was pictured kissing the bride’s cheek on the big day.
The Daily Mail reported at the time: ‘Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Greece, was among the first to arrive. With her came her daughters, Princess Sophie, Princess Theodora and Princess Margarita.’
Alice remained in Greece until 1967, where a Greek military coup took place. Alice refused to leave the country until Prince Philip sent a plane and a special request from the Queen to take her home.
The last years of her life she lived with her son and daughter-in-law in Buckingham Palace.
Hugh Vickers wrote in Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece how mother and son were “too similar to agree on everything.”
He told how Princess Anne recalled “seeing her father marching out of her grandmother’s room, throwing irritated remarks over his shoulder.”
Alice, who spent the last twenty years of her life as a nun, was originally buried in a vault at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor.
Her dying wish was to be buried with her family in Jerusalem.
After the British royal family conducted “delicate negotiations with the Jordanian royal family,” the princess’s wish was granted in 1988, 19 years after her death.
Philip grilling with his daughter, Princess Anne, pictured in 1970
Prince William during a visit to the Church of St Mary Magdalene to pay his respects at his great-grandmother’s grave in June 2018
“Her burial site, the beautiful gold-domed Church of St. Mary Magdalene, at the foot of the Mount of Olives, is in East Jerusalem – one of the most sensitive places in the Middle East,” the Daily Mail reported at the time.
Prince William visited her grave in 2018 on the last day of his tour of the Middle East.
William was greeted by Archimandrite Roman, Father Roman, the head of the Russian Church Mission in Jerusalem, and Abbess Elizabeth.
He was taken to his great-grandmother’s crypt, where he placed flowers on her sarcophagus, picked from the garden of Philip Hall, the British Consulate General in Jerusalem.