and ability and charm Georgie was as remarkable as any of them. From the age of ten he had had a workshop in his father’s castle at Heiligenberg, with lathes and a forge and foundry; by fifteen he was designing and constructing his own working models of steam engines – he later laid out a spectacular model railway at Lynden. He was said to solve problems of higher calculus ‘for relaxation’,21 and at Dartmouth the second master pronounced him the cleverest and at the same time the laziest cadet he had taught. As a young naval officer he was supremely inventive, although his inventions were, as Philip Ziegler puts it, ‘as likely to be directed to the comforts available in his cabin as to the wider interests of the Royal Navy’.22 Among his creations was a system of fans, radiators and thermostats for air-conditioning his quarters when afloat, and a device controlled by an alarm clock for making his early morning tea, twenty years before any such contrivance appeared on the market. His enthusiasm helped fire his nephew’s budding interest in invention and design, and when Philip grew up he, too, would be forever in search of the latest gadgets.
Georgie’s technical expertise was allied to great resourcefulness and skills of organization, and those who knew him best confidently predicted a brilliant career, and that he would, like his father, eventually succeed to the position of First Sea Lord. However, he did not have the obsessive ambition of his more dazzling younger brother, nor such a rich wife. So in the late 1920s, with German inflation having more or less wiped out his inheritance, and the Great Depression threatening everything else, he left the Royal Navy in order to make some much-needed money in business. After a spell at a brokerage house on Wall Street, he went on to become chairman of the British Sperry Gyroscope Company, and a director of Electrolux (of which his brother-in-law, Harold Wernher, was chairman), Marks & Spencer and various other companies.23
His business career was partly necessitated by the extravagance of his wife Nada, who once ordered a tub of champagne to soothe her feet after winning a Charleston contest in Cannes, whereupon her hostess was presented with a huge bill which read ‘Champagne for Marchioness of Milford Haven’s feet’.24 Nada was the great-grand-daughter of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (after whose mother she was named), and daughter of Grand Duke Michael Mikailovich, who had been banished from Russia on account of his morganatic marriage and thereafter divided his time between the stately Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath, from where Nada was married,25 and a lavish villa at Cannes, where he was remembered for distributing ‘lovely Fabergé things’ and for introducing Edward VII to Alice Keppel, his mistress-to-be. To begin with he could afford to give his daughters substantial allowances – £2,000 a year, with extra for jewellery and travel expenses – although the flow of funds dried up with the Russian Revolution.
Dark and attractive, Nada was an engaging character, outgoing, rebellious, full of life and verve. Her niece Myra Butter remembers her as ‘off the wall, the best fun, completely different, very bohemian’.26 Even her grandchildren occasionally found her too boisterous, such as when she was ‘squirting you with the garden hose or pouring a night pot full of water on people out of the window’.27 Among other attributes, she also gained a reputation for her fluid sexuality: her girlfriends included Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, the American society beauty who regularly stayed at Lynden while Philip was there.28 Nada and Georgie were nonetheless devoted to one another, both of them by nature adventurous and risqué, and both dedicated to the good life. They smoked cigars together after dinner, took their son David, who was two years older than Philip and became a great friend, to a brothel in Paris when he was seventeen to round off his education and amassed one of the largest collections of pornographic books in private hands – an extensive library of ‘blue’ literature, photograph albums and marked catalogues for such enticing titles as Lady Gay: Sparkling Tales of Fun and Flagellation and Raped on the Railway – ‘a true story of a lady who was first ravished and then flagellated on the Scotch express’.29
The Milford Haven ménage was completed by their mentally retarded daughter, Tatiana, born in 1917, for whom they later retained an elderly woman to act as her companion.30 There were also extended visits from Nada’s younger brother, Count Michael ‘Boy’ de Torby, who had great charm and painted well, often on rice paper or silk, but whose bipolar illness occasionally rendered him ‘decidedly odd, mooching about’. He complained of all the ‘terrible pills fighting inside me’ and when he felt his depression returning he would say ‘I’m afraid I must go back’, and have to be rushed to Roehampton.31 All in all, Lynden Manor was unlike any home that Philip had previously experienced.
Alice was visited from time to time at Bellevue by various members of the family and at other times they kept in touch by letter. Three weeks after her admission, she learned that Philip would be going to prep school at Cheam in England that autumn and, according to Cecile, although initially nervous, he was now ‘thrilled’ at the prospect.32 In the meantime, Philip was to spend his ninth birthday with the Hessian side of his family at Wolfsgarten, which had originally been built as their hunting lodge yet was nevertheless equivalent in size and layout to that of an average Oxford college. He relished the more relaxed and jollier atmosphere he encountered, in contrast to the regime of his grandmother Victoria, who tended to be quite stern with him.33
On this occasion the family was gathering to celebrate the engagements of the younger two of Philip’s sisters. The youngest, Sophie, a very pretty girl, was not yet sixteen when she agreed to marry Christoph of Hesse, her handsome second cousin once removed, with whom she had fallen in love while staying with her great-aunt Irene at Hemmelmark on the Baltic. Thirteen years Sophie’s senior, ‘Chri’ was charming, extroverted and amusing. He had studied agriculture and spent the so-called ‘golden years’ of the Weimar Republic floating between various family schlosses, lending a languid hand to the running of their estates. He was a keen horseman and talented dressage rider, competing across Europe, but above all he was obsessed with flying and with motorcycles and cars – his passion was such that he would often sleep in a new car for the first few days after acquiring it. Recently laid off from a job in a factory producing engines, he was now reluctantly selling insurance in Berlin. While the marriage offered Sophie a welcome sanctuary after the break-up of her own family, for Christoph it represented a safe harbour after a series of stormy love affairs during the 1920s.34 There was nothing arranged about their union and it proved to be one of lasting mutual devotion, undiminished by his subsequent staunch attachment to the National Socialist cause.
In 1939, shortly after reporting for active service with the Luftwaffe, he would write to tell her:
I miss you and long for you. It is simply terrible. I am so depressed and so miserable that I shall be pleased to get away from this house [their Berlin-Dahlem home] in which we have spent those lovely happy years together and enjoyed having our little Poonsies [their children]. Oh darling if only you were here! When I enter the house I think how often the door used to open like with magic and then you angel were there waiting for me smiling or laughing and giving me a thrill of happiness I feel a lump in my throat to think of it. I love you, love you, love you, my angel, and you mean everything to me … lovingly as your old adoring Peech [Christoph].35
Philip came to know Christoph well while visiting Sophie during holidays in Germany before the war and years later described him as ‘a very gentle person, interestingly enough [in view of his politics], and very balanced actually. He was kind and had a good sense of humour. So he actually was the complete opposite of what you’d expect, I suppose.’36
Sophie’s eighteen-year-old sister, Cecile, meanwhile, had been snapped up by another cousin, Grand Duke Ernie’s twenty-three-year-old son and heir, George Donatus of Hesse, known in the family as ‘Don’, like Christoph an avid sportsman and a fan of fast cars and aeroplanes. Though in Alice’s estimation ‘such a sensible, dear boy’,37 he, too, was to join the Nazi party, in 1937, along with Cecile.
Alice felt understandably wretched at being excluded from all the celebrations and when she received flowers from her daughters as a token of their engagements she spent much of the day crying. Five days after Philip’s birthday, Cecile wrote to her from a ‘terribly hot’ Wolfsgarten, reporting that they had been bathing ‘everyday at least twice including Philipp [she used