Today marks the 85th anniversary of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh’s beloved sister, Princess Cecilie of Greece and Denmark, who was killed while eight months pregnant in a plane crash that also claimed the lives of six others.
It marked a tragic end to the life of Prince Philip’s ‘favourite sister’, affectionately known as ‘Cecile’, whose demise was portrayed in traumatic scenes in The Crown Season 2.
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Born in June 1911, Cecilie was the third of Princess Alice of Battenberg and Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark’s five children. She had a happy childhood but also witnessed the Balkan Wars and the First World War, which had dramatic consequences and led to her family’s exile in Switzerland, and then in France.
In 1931, she married Georg Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse, her first cousin once removed. Initially distant from the Nazi movement, she joined the Nazi Party at the same time as her husband in May 1937.
She welcomed three children, Prince Ludwig, Prince Alexander and Princess Johanna. In November 1937, Cecile and her family embarked on a trip to the UK, where they were to attend the wedding of her brother-in-law Louis, Prince of Hesse to Margaret Campbell Geddes.
However, the aircraft in which they were travelling crashed after hitting a factory chimney fog near Ostend. Also killed were her mother-in-law, her husband, their sons aged six and four, a lady-in-waiting and the best man.
Firemen found the remains of an infant, prematurely delivered when the plane crashed, lying beside Cecile’s body, suggesting the pilot tried to land because she had gone into labour.
Prince Philip, then 16, was particularly close to Cecile and described being called into his headmaster’s study at Gordonstoun to be told of her death as one of the worst moments of his life. Years later he wrote: ‘I have the very clearest recollection of the profound shock with which I heard the news of the crash and the death of my sister and her family.’
Cecilie was buried with her husband and three of her children, including her stillborn son, in Darmstadt at the Rosenhöhe, the traditional burial place of the Hesse family. Photos from their funeral shows Prince Philip flanked by grieving relatives, all wearing distinctive Nazi uniforms. One is clad in the uniform of the Brownshirts; another wears full SS regalia.
Cecile and Georg's surviving daughter, Johanna, was adopted by Prince Ludwig and Princess Margaret but died two years later from meningitis.
The horrific event became common knowledge after it featured in the penultimate episode of The Crown Season 2, entitled Paterfamilias, which explores Prince Charles’s unhappy school days at Gordonstoun, interwoven with flashbacks to his father’s time there.
The Netflix series suggested – wrongly – that in November 1937, Philip was due to spend half-term with 26-year-old Cecile. This arrangement was portrayed as suiting his sister, who was apparently terrified of flying, because it would have enabled her to avoid travelling to London for the wedding.
But Philip then punches a fellow pupil and as punishment is forced to remain at school during the holiday, leaving Cecile no choice but to accompany her family to London.
Philip rings his sister hoping she will support him. Speaking from a German airport, she tells him she agrees with the head’s decision and says she is now ‘obliged’ to fly to the wedding. The camera then cuts to her boarding the plane. It is true that Philip travelled to Germany for the funeral. But what happens next in The Crown, say Royal experts, is pure fiction.
The sprawling web of the Royal Family is dotted with lesser-known figures whose names have been lost in the sands of time. Among them is the Duke of Edinburgh’s niece, Princess Beatrix of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, who passed away 25 years ago this week.
The princess, who spent time in Britain with her royal uncle and his wife, the Queen, was born to Nazi parents and endured a broken engagement before becoming a lifelong companion to Margaret, Princess of Hesse, according to royal authority The Royal Watcher.
Born in 1936, Princess Beatrix was the only daughter to Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg and Princess Margarita of Greece and Denmark, the eldest of Prince Philip’s four sisters. Princess Margarita’s youth was characterised by upheaval.
the young Princess grew up in Weikersheim Castle, alongside her four brothers, Princes Kraft, Georg Andreas, Rupprecht and Albrecht. The beautiful, stone-walled castle was a Medieval seat in Southwest Germany, and later a Renaissance residence of the princely House of Hohenlohe.
The Princess was related to multiple members of the royal family, as well as being in line to the British throne. Not only was she the niece of the Duke of Edinburgh, but she was also the granddaughter of the Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg and Princess Alexandra of Edinburgh and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, as well as the granddaughter of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg.
Her parents were members of the Nazi party from 1937, using their family connections to promote a rapprochement of Nazism within the United Kingdom, though without success. Due to their Nazi support, the family was ostracised by the British royal family at the time of the marriage of Prince Philip, Margarita's only brother, to Princess Elizabeth of the United Kingdom in 1947. Over the years, though, the couple was reintegrated into the life of the European elite. This culminated in their invitation and presence at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953.
After this, Princess Beatrix became a fixture in European High Society through the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, Princess Beatrix got engaged to her first cousin, the Margrave of Baden, son of Berthold, Margrave of Baden and Princess Theodora of Greece and Denmark. The engagement was broken off that year, and the Margrave eventually married Archduchess Valerie of Austria in 1966. Princess Beatrix, however, remained unmarried for the rest of her life.
She joined her family when they hosted the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh at Schloss Langenburg in 1965, and also doing the Prince and Princess of Hesse at Schloss Wolfsgarten. For the rest of her life, the Princess functioned as a secretary and companion to ‘Peg’, the Princess of Hesse, at Schloss Wolfsgarten. She passed away less than a year later, in 1997.
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