Victoria. ‘She told Meg she was in bliss & to me too she said she is happy. I think she has anaemia of the brain from too much contemplation & starvation & is in a critical state.’10
Among those to whom the family turned for advice was Andrea’s sister-in-law, Marie Bonaparte, who had recently undergone psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud with the object of practising herself. She had also been helping to finance a new sanatorium at Tegel, on the outskirts of Berlin, established by a fellow Freudian, Dr Ernst Simmel. Tegel was the first clinic in the world designed to use psychoanalysis to treat patients and it was there that Marie recommended that Alice should go.
After several sessions, Simmel diagnosed Alice as ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ and suffering from a ‘neurotic-pre-psychotic libidinous condition’. During their discussions, she said that she believed that she was the only woman on earth, was married to Christ and ‘physically involved’ through him with other great religious leaders such as Buddha. Simmel consulted his friend Freud, who proposed ‘an exposure of the gonads to X-rays, in order to accelerate the menopause’ – the idea being that this would help to calm her down and subdue her libido. It is unclear whether or not she was ever consulted about this procedure, but it was carried out nevertheless. Shortly afterwards she began to feel better.11
As she felt stronger so she also began to feel bored, restless and homesick. At the beginning of April she discharged herself and went back to Andrea and the family at St Cloud. ‘I found everybody looking very well indeed and the season far more advanced than in Berlin,’ she wrote to her daughter Cecile. ‘The fruit trees are blossoming & the leaves beginning to come out, & the air is very mild & I must say I am truly delighted to be back after 8 weeks absence.’ She went on to say how nice it was of uncle Ernie ‘to invite us all for Easter & we are looking forward to it so much – I fancy Philip & I will come by train & the others by car, Fondest love & au revoir soon, your ever loving Mama.’12 Up the side of the letter she had scrawled ‘God Bless You’ and in the top left-hand corner she had drawn a cross.
However, it was soon clear to her family that she was little better than before she went away. In desperation, Andrea went to London and with Victoria saw two more doctors, who both advised that she should be interned in a secure sanatorium. ‘Andrea & I feel that it is the only right thing to do,’ Victoria told Nona Kerr, ‘both for Alice and her family. How hard it has been to come to this decision & what we feel about it you know. This Easter will be a miserable one.’13
Victoria’s brother Ernie, the Grand Duke of Hesse, had asked the whole family to the Neue Palais at Darmstadt for Easter. However, what should have been a happy few weeks’ holiday was, as Victoria had foreseen, overshadowed by their anxiety about Alice.
Soon after reaching Darmstadt, Victoria went to Heidelberg, the nearby picturesque university town, to consult a noted expert on insanity, Karl Wilmanns, about a suitable sanatorium for her daughter. Wilmanns recommended the Bellevue private clinic at Kreuzlingen on the south-western shore of Lake Constance, run by a pioneer in the field of existential psychology, Dr Ludwig Binswanger, who had studied under both Jung and Freud. He was especially interested in subjects with unusual creative ability – his patients included the expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the Russian dancer Nijinski, who was being treating at Bellevue for schizophrenia at that time.
Victoria was reassured by the fact that the proposed clinic lay ‘in a fine park of its own & has 3 separate establishments for closely interned patients, semi-interned & a so-called free section where the patients can go into town etc with a nurse. The patients are all higher class, educated people, so if Alice likes to make the acquaintance of any of them, she will find suitable companionship …’ Yet still she agonized over whether this was the right place for her daughter, who had arrived in Darmstadt looking physically healthier than she had been for some time and had behaved in many respects perfectly normally. ‘When she is enjoying being amongst us, I feel a brute,’ wrote Victoria to Nona Kerr, ‘& then again come moments when I clearly realize the need of her going away.’14
She wrestled with her dilemma for nearly three weeks before finally asking Professor Wilmanns to come and take Alice away. When he arrived at the Neue Palais, Alice was alone. Andrea and two of the girls had already left Darmstadt and Victoria had made sure to take all those who remained – Philip, Theodora, Cecile, Ernie and Onor – out for the day. Alice at first greeted Wilmanns warmly, but the atmosphere changed as soon as he told her what he had come for. When she tried to escape he restrained her and injected her with morphiumscopolamine to sedate her. She was then bundled into a car and driven south for several hours to Lake Constance, arriving at the Bellevue sanatorium at eleven o’clock that night.15
Alice’s committal on 2 May 1930 marked the end of their family life, although the children would not have realized this when they arrived back that evening to find their mother gone. Alice and Andrea’s marriage had been under strain for several years but it effectively finished at this point. They hardly saw each other from then on and, although they would never divorce, Andrea ‘relinquished his role as husband’, as Hugo Vickers puts it.16 He liberated himself from many of his responsibilities as father, too, shutting up their family home at St Cloud and thereafter leading a rather aimless life, drifting between Paris, Monte Carlo and Germany, interspersed with sporadic interventions in Greek affairs. He saw Philip now and again during the school holidays, but otherwise left him in the care of Alice’s family, the Milford Havens and Mountbattens.
The girls were by this time aged between sixteen and twenty-five, and they would all be married within eighteen months, so the disappearance of both their parents was of far less consequence for them than it was for their eight-year-old brother. Up until now, Philip had been doted on by both mother and father, to the extent that the girls had often felt the urge to squash their overindulged little brother.17 Alice had given him much of her attention, knitting him woollen jumpers, sleeping with him in the nursery when his nanny was away and telling another of his nursemaids in 1928 that ‘Philip is always very good with me’.18 Andrea, too, appeared to adore his only son, as the girls were made only too aware by the gales of laughter whenever they played together.19
In those days, fathers of Andrea’s background had a rather more hands-off approach to child rearing than they do today, when more is expected of both parents, even those from the upper classes. But even so, his virtual abandonment of his young son at this critical time is surprising. The most likely explanation seems to be that he had been so traumatized by his treatment at the hands of the Greek revolutionaries and depressed by his subsequent exile that he did not feel up to the task of raising Philip on his own after this latest crisis. He may also have felt, not unreasonably, that his son might be better off with Alice’s family in England than he would be with his father in his jaded frame of mind.
In recent years, as Alice’s mental health had begun to give cause for concern, her mother Victoria had already started to arrange many of the practical aspects of her grandson’s upbringing, such as where he was to stay at various stages during the school holidays. After the closure of the family home in 1930, Philip went to stay for a time with his grandmother at her apartment in Kensington Palace. However, another of the residents there, Philip’s seventy-three-year-old great-aunt, Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, was far from thrilled about the new arrival, muttering that the palace was not the right place for the ‘younger generation’.20 For this reason it was soon decided that Alice’s elder brother, Georgie, who had succeeded his father as the second Marquess of Milford Haven, should also take Philip in.
Georgie’s younger brother Dickie Mountbatten is more often thought of as Philip’s surrogate father, but although Philip would occasionally go and stay with him and Edwina at Brook House in London and Adsdean in Hampshire when he was young, it was only later that Dickie took on that role. From when Philip was nine until he was sixteen, it was Georgie who acted as the boy’s guardian, officially and in practice, turning up in loco parentis at school prize-givings and sports days, and providing a home for him during the shorter school holidays at Lynden Manor, the Milford Havens’ house on the Thames at Holyport, between Windsor and Maidenhead.
A