The house that Marie lent Andrea and his family was pleasantly surrounded by apple trees and gravel paths but had barely enough room for the family and their small staff. (It has since been demolished, along with Marie’s mansion, to make way for modern blocks of flats.) Philip’s sister Sophie later remembered that ‘there were always problems paying the bills’, although George and Marie’s son Peter was under the impression that his mother ‘paid all their expenses for years’.23
The extent of the family’s penury at this time is unclear. On arrival in London, Andrea told one newspaper that he had managed to bring some money with him from Greece,24 although Philip later doubted that he had ever received his army pension.25 He had a small bequest from his brother Constantine, and before that he had inherited an annuity from his father as well as Mon Repos, where the Blowers and their unfriendly dogs had stayed on as caretakers, antagonizing the local population by denying them access to the only good bathing spot near to Corfu Town.
Andrea continually worried about the threat of confiscation hanging over Mon Repos, however, and in May 1923 he wrote to his saviour Gerald Talbot refuting the notion that he was going about criticizing the revolutionary government in Greece. ‘Since I am in Paris I see nobody and I go nowhere,’ he pleaded. However, he suspected that others
wish to believe or rather make others believe the story of my dark doings abroad in order that they may lay hands on my property. I am awfully sorry to bother you with all this, but you are the only one who can help me and I hope you can see your way to letting the Foreign Office in London know that I flatly and absolutely deny the charge of carrying on any kind of propaganda. It would be idiotic of me anyhow to poke spokes in [the British counsellor] Bentinck’s wheels while he is trying his level best to save my house in Corfu!26
On the same day, he shot off another letter to Bentinck in Athens, expressing himself ‘astonished’ by the American chargé d’affaires’ suggestion that he had been spreading propaganda. ‘I cannot think where he gets his information from. I went to America to recuperate, and I can assure you that I did what I could to forget politics, revolutions and wars. When I was asked by newspaper men whether I had been imprisoned and in danger of my life, I answered in the affirmative because I could not very well tell them that I had been perfectly free … I’m afraid you will have to take my word for it.’27
In the event, Mon Repos never was confiscated, although many Greeks continued to believe that it rightfully belonged to the Greek state, as it had originally been given to ‘the King of the Hellenes’, and was not transferable.28 In 1926 Andrea leased the house to Dickie Mountbatten, providing a modest extra source of income, and in 1937, having won a legal case over its ownership, he sold it to his nephew, King George II.29
Alice, meanwhile, had inherited a tenth of her father’s estate, but this had been substantially depleted by the Bolshevik revolution and the catastrophic inflation and currency devaluation in Germany – which effectively wiped out the proceeds from the recent sale of Heiligenberg Castle, where her father had spent his youth. She also received a small allowance from her brother Georgie. However, by royal standards, the family was certainly not well off.
Andrea was never comfortable about receiving handouts, but he was at least fortunate in having several close relations with considerable sums to spare. After Christopher’s wife Nancy died in 1923, the money she left took care of the children’s school fees and other items that Andrea could not afford.30 Then there was Dickie Mountbatten’s new wife Edwina, who had inherited almost half of her grandfather Ernest Cassel’s estate, conservatively estimated at £6 million, and could thus be justly described as ‘The Richest Girl in Britain’.31 Edwina found subtle ways of helping without offending Andrea’s pride – when ordering clothes, she stipulated extra wide hems so that they could be later handed down to her nieces and adjusted if need be32 – and in 1924 she also took out an insurance policy for her nephew Philip.
According to his cousin Alexandra, as he grew up Philip was himself ‘trained to save and economise better than other children, so much so that he even acquired a reputation for being mean’.33 Alexandra – whose version of events was later disputed by Philip – was the originator of the Dickensian legends portraying the boy in patched clothes, making do with no toys and forlornly staying behind after school on wet days because he had no raincoat.34
Neither Alice nor Andrea had paid jobs in Paris. Alice volunteered in a charity boutique in the Faubourg St Honoré, called Hellas, selling traditional Greek tapestries, medallions and honey, with the proceeds going towards helping her fellow less fortunate Greek refugees. The shop did quite well, not least because its customers appreciated the novelty of being served by a princess.35 Andrea tended to become restless and depressed when he had nothing to do, but, as an émigré Greek prince experienced only in soldiering, he was not especially employable in Paris. Instead he devoted much of his time to writing a personal account of the Greek debacle in Turkey, Towards Disaster, which was eventually published in 1930, translated into English from his original Greek manuscript by Alice. Designed to justify his actions at the battle of Sakaria and thereby redeem his reputation, the book’s indignant tone served more effectively to show how embittered he remained almost a decade after the events in question.
Otherwise, he took the children for long walks in the Bois de Boulogne or motored into the centre of the city to meet fellow exiles and hear about the latest depressing developments in Athens.36
The death of Andrea’s brother King Constantine had done little to quell anti-royalist feeling in Greece and in December 1923 Colonel Plastiras succeeded in persuading the cabinet that the continuance of the Glücksburg dynasty was ‘a national stigma which should be blotted out’. King George II and his queen, Elizabeth, were thus required to leave the country in a steamer bound for Romania.37 In February 1924, in the national assembly General Pangalos launched a scathing attack on Andrea, reiterating his responsibility for the defeat at Sakaria and saying he would have been executed but for the intervention of a ‘semi-official British envoy’ (i.e. Talbot) who had come to Greece with a ‘sackful of promises’.38 On 25 March the revolutionary constituent assembly issued a resolution proclaiming Greece a republic, forbidding the Glücksburgs ‘their sojourn in Greece’ and authorizing the ‘forcible expropriation’ of all property belonging to the deposed dynasty.39 Any hope that Andrea and Alice might be able to return home was effectively extinguished at this point.
Unable to return to Greece, they put down more permanent roots at St Cloud, where another of Andrea’s brothers, Nicholas, and his wife Ellen and their three daughters were also now living, as was Margarethe ‘Meg’ Bourbon, daughter of George and Andrea’s uncle Waldemar, and her family. On Sundays Big George and Marie would often hold family lunch parties together but otherwise Marie tended to live with her father in the centre of Paris while pursuing her career as a psychoanalyst. Left on his own next door, Big George would come over each evening, we are told, to say his prayers with Philip and kiss him goodnight.40
Many of the earliest recorded glimpses we have of Philip are on holiday. In the summer of 1923, at Arcachon, on the coast south-west of Bordeaux, his aunt Louise found the two-year-old to be ‘quite too adorable for words, a perfect pet, so grown up & speaks quite a lot & uses grand phrases. He is the sturdiest little boy I have ever seen & I can’t say he is spoilt.’41
In