Henry & Alice, Duke & Duchess of Gloucester

Hello!
I made a little research on this board and I could not find a thread about Alice, by marriage duchess of Gloucester. I was almost shocked, because I think she´s the only one between the daughters-in-law of George V & Mary without a thread.
Anyone shares my interest about the princess Alice?

Yse!  I would love to see photos of her jerwelry and photos of her with her family as she lived to be 102 if I am correct.

TampaBay

There used to be a very large thread on Alice, full of great photos. I suppose it is one of the lost threads? 

Lady Alice Christabel Montagu-Douglas-Scott was born at Montagu House, Whitehall, on Christmas Day, 1901, the third of the five daughters of the 7th Duke of Buccleuch and the former Lady Margaret Bridgeman, daughter of the 4th Earl of Bradford.







Her father was a close friend of King George V — they had served together in HMS Bacchante as lads — and he had also been a Unionist Member of Parliament for a Borders constituency so was able to represent privately to the King conservative opinion over the controversial issues of the day. Lady Alice’s father became heir to the dukedom of Buccleuch when his elder brother slipped on a wet rock while deer-stalking and shot himself in the arm. He bled to death.

Lady Alice’s ancestry was a distinguished one. She descended from Charles II through James, Duke of Monmouth, and from the dukes of Marlborough and Montagu. She was a collateral relation of “Old Q” — the 4th Duke of Queensberry, notorious for his rowdy escapades with the Prince Regent.



Rather unusually for one of her generation and background, Lady Alice became, in 1914, one of 80 pupils at a girls’ boarding school, St James’s at West Malvern. She passed the duration of the First World War there, representing the school at hockey and cricket. She then went to a finishing school in Paris. It was during the 1914-18 war years that she suffered a frightening brush with death that was to determine her destiny. While swimming in the Solway Firth she was carried off on a current, and in the despair of that moment made a vow that if God saw fit to save her life she would make selfless use of it in return.Minutes later she found herself back in shallow water, but she never forgot her promise.

For a while she was reluctant to come back to England but, by the age of 34, she was ready to settle down and "make use of her life".  She returned to Britain on Jubilee Day 1935 and was invited to stay at Windsor for Ascot by the Earl and Countess of Athlone, who were very close friends of her parents. Her long friendship with Prince Henry, perhaps the most straight-forward and certainly the most Hanoverian of the royal princes, blossomed into love, thanks to the particular attentions of the Athlones, and the betrothal met with the warmest approval of the King and Queen. Henry and Alice’s brother, Lord William Scott, were brother officers in the 10th Hussars. Princess Alice and Prince Henry were temperamentally well suited. Both disliked pomposity and most enjoyed country pursuits. The Royal Family were delighted with the choice, especially as the bride’s father was such an old friend of the King. The wedding was set to be solemnised at Westminster Abbey, but the death shortly after the engagement was announced of the Duke of Buccleuch and the frailty of King George V changed the setting to a more private one in the chapel at Buckingham Palace, to the relief of the shy bride.

The wedding took place on November 6, 1935, with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret as two of the child attendants. The honeymoon was spent at Boughton. Despite the relatively private nature of the wedding, a crowd of more than a million lined the London streets on a raw November day to wave the couple off on their honeymoon. To a pre-war generation the bride would always be remembered by the fittingly romantic epithet she earned on that ride to the station - the Winter Princess.

One of my favorite royal wedding dresses--so chic. I love the flowers too!








Her dress was actually a pale pink--due to her age, 34, and the recent death of her father, Alice didn't want to wear white:

Bejewelled:

In the autumn of 1938, having suffered a second miscarriage, she went with Prince Henry to Kenya to recuperate. Prince William was born in 1941, and Prince Richard, the present Duke of Gloucester, in 1944. William would die, just weeks after his brother's marriage, in a flying accident at Wolverhampton. The Duchess wrote later: “I was completely stunned and have never been quite the same since, though I have tried to persuade myself that it was better to have known and lost him than never to have had him at all.” 

With her 2 sons, William and Richard:

Royal life and royal duties held little allure for the new Duchess. She later recounted that the Scott sisters used to attend Palace garden parties only long enough to hand in their cards and depart by a side gate. But she took the view that in her long years of freedom as a spinster she had had “a very good innings” and that it was time she did “something more useful” with her life. The Gloucesters settled in the Royal Pavilion at Aldershot, where the Duke, a dedicated soldier, was much occupied with military matters.

A mere few months after their wedding, King George V died, and his death was swiftly followed by the convulsive episode of the Abdication. The young Duchess was a great support to the widowed Queen Mary at this time, and it was while she was staying at Marlborough House that Edward VIII came to dine to tell his mother about Mrs Simpson.

The Duke of Windsor wrote later: “I felt especially sorry for poor Alice. Shy and retiring by nature, she had all unwittingly sat down at my mother’s table only to find herself caught up in the opening scene of one of the most poignant episodes in the annals of the British Royal Family. Never loquacious, this evening she uttered not a word. And when at last we got up to leave the table she eagerly seized upon the interruption to protest that she was extremely tired and to ask that she be excused.

After making her curtsy she almost fled from the room.”




The Duchess undertook royal duties from the outset of her marriage, though she later said that she did many more latterly than in the early days, due to an increased demand for royal visits by the public and the various charities, on account of television. She worked hard during the war, visiting Coventry two days after the bombing and continuing her tour despite an air-raid warning. The Gloucesters also visited Belfast in 1941.



She was president and patron of numerous organisations, Colonel-in-Chief of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, The Royal Hussars, the Royal Australian Corps of Transport and the Royal New Zealand Corps of Transport. She rose to be an air chief marshal in the RAF, having been air chief commandant since 1943, and was closely involved in the work of various hospitals and the Red Cross. In more recent times she was a keen traveller to and from engagements by helicopters of the Queen’s flight.



Immediately after the war she accompanied the Duke of Gloucester to Australia where for two years he was Governor-General. The Labour Prime Minister, John Curtin, was so churlishly hostile to the monarchy that he refused to meet the Duchess at any time during her stay in Australia. The Gloucesters were given a warmer welcome on their travels around the country, during which they covered 76,000 miles in all.

The Duke’s career had received a setback at the Abdication. His role as a possible regent in the minority of Princess Elizabeth lost him the chance to command his regiment and required his return from Australia in 1947, before the King and Queen and princesses set off to South Africa. Back in England, the Gloucesters undertook a heavy programme of royal duties, many of which were less glamorous than those of other members of the Royal Family. They also travelled extensively overseas on behalf of the Crown.



In London they lived at York House, St James’s Palace, looked after by a large staff of equerries, butlers and footmen. In the country they made their home at Barnwell Manor, the 16th-century Northamptonshire house that they had bought in 1938, and which was previously a Buccleuch property. Here, at one time, the Duke’s farm was considered the most modern in the country.



In January 1965 the Duke of Gloucester was at the wheel of his Rolls-Royce returning from Sir Winston Churchill’s state funeral, but possibly suffered a small stroke as a result of which they were involved in a nasty accident, the Duchess breaking her arm and requiring 57 stitches in her face. A devotee of homoeopathic medicine, she considered herself much helped by a preparation of arnica, administered by her maid at the roadside. The Duke’s always frail health deteriorated soon after this and in 1968 he suffered a bad stroke which deprived him of the power of speech.

The Duke retired to Barnwell and the Duchess spent as much time with him as possible. But she continued to work hard. The Duke being on the Civil List, the Duchess assumed responsibility for many of his commitments, while continuing her own duties. The Duchess found it soothing to sit with the Duke at harvest time watching the great machines going about their business.



In July 1972 Prince Richard married Birgitte van Deurs. That August the elder son, Prince William, died.  Prince William’s death was followed, two years later, by that of the Duke (in June 1974).

The Duchess now assumed the title of Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester. Alice requested permission from her niece, The Queen, to use the title and style HRH Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester instead of HRH The Dowager Duchess of Gloucester. The Queen allowed her aunt to adopt this title, in part to avoid confusion with her daughter-in-law, the new Duchess of Gloucester. Princess Alice also apparently did not wish to be known as a dowager duchess and so followed the example of her late sister-in-law, Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, following the marriage of her elder son in June 1961. However, Princess Marina was a princess by birth. The de facto Dowager Duchess of Gloucester was allowed to be known as Princess Alice as a courtesy from the Queen. Although not specifically created a Princess by letters patent, the Princess was entitled to style herself as a British princess, even though she was not born a British princess.

She continued to live at Barnwell, spending as much time there as possible — she liked dogs, especially Australian terriers — and shared her London apartment at Kensington Palace with the young Duke and Duchess. She welcomed the arrival of three grandchildren and lived to see Lord Ulster married and just reach his 30th birthday. She loved to visit Australia privately and unaccompanied.

Princess Alice was a Lady of the Crown of India (1937), a GCVO (1948) and a GBE (1937). In 1975 she was proud to be the first lady Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath.

Princess Alice retired from much of royal life at the time of her 90th birthday, but continued to keep in touch with favourite organisations. She remained remarkably spry until well into her nineties, though she found the minutiae of royal duties a strain — such as trying to remember the right regimental brooch.

More wedding:

In her autobiography, Memories Of Ninety Years (1991), she recalled a rather grand luncheon before the first world war, when she saw, for the first time in her life, a woman smoking a cigarette. She watched fascinated as Countess Brassova, the morganatic wife of the Grand Duke Michael of Russia, fitted the cigarette into a long holder, and then, to the amazement of all, called for a servant to light it.

Alice made her "miserable" debut into society in 1919, at a dance given by the King and Queen for their daughter, Princess Mary. Alice was very shy and plump, and, she said, and spent the evening for the most part, hiding miserably behind a pillar. She found the endless round of debutante dances "dreadful", and as season followed season, she felt the need to lead a life other than that of "pointless and boring" dilettantism. Formal occasions were never to be her idea of fun. She neither smoked nor drank, and far preferred outdoor life to London entertainment. This love of freedom she found most satisfied at home, and the same was true for the royal princes when they came to visit. When Prince Henry, an army friend of her brother Billy, used to stay, the Duchess of Buccleuch insisted on rolling out a red carpet; but the high-spirited Scott sisters had no such respect for the young man's rank and subjected him to the usual ordeal of apple-pie beds and burning mustard-plasters on the seat of his trousers.



http://cache.gettyimages.com/xc/3421167.jpg?v=1&c=NewsMaker&k=2&d=D278A15CF533E62CA557D46039C6136C

Starting in April 1993 the Queen took responsibility for the Civil List paid to her aunt as the widow of a son of the Sovereign (£87,000 annually in 1995). It was a particular sadness that early in 1995 financial reasons forced Princess Alice to leave Barnwell Manor, her home for 58 years. The family decided that she should live at her old apartment at Kensington Palace, by now more the home of the young Duke and Duchess. She therefore lost the garden she had tended so lovingly and in which she found solace in the long years of her widowhood. But the young Gloucesters re-created her drawing room from Barnwell for her at Kensington Palace. At the time, Prince Philip upbraided Prince Richard, telling him that his mother should be allowed to live out her days in her old home, whatever the cost. It was unfair, he said, to uproot an old lady, who lived only for her garden and her dog. Prince Richard argued that the matter was out of his hands. Huge death duties on the estate of his father and elder brother had eroded much of the family fortune. Some death duties, I'm not sure how much, were deferred from the Duke's death until the Duchess's recent passing. An auction was held in either 2005 or 2006 of many personal possessions of the late Duke & Duchess.

In recent years she gave up attending royal engagements, though still occasionally received representatives of her regiments and charities at Kensington Palace. So unknown was she to the public and the press in her later years, that she was able to take frequent strolls unrecognised in Kensington Gardens and walked unnoticed among the pilgrims who came to mourn Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.

Princess Alice achieved her 100th birthday on Christmas Day 2001. On December 12, 2001 she attended a parade at Kensington Palace, at which the King’s Own Scottish Borderers came to London to serenade her. She sat between her two bridesmaids, the Queen and Princess Margaret (her last public outing).



In August 2003, by then a little frail, she became the oldest member ever of the British Royal Family, beating the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s 101 years and 238 days. In July of 2004, by which time Princess Alice had retreated to her bedroom, she had the joy of seeing her granddaughter, Lady Davina Windsor and her handsome Maori groom, when they called on her after their wedding in the private chapel at Kensington Palace.



Princess Alice died on 29 October 2004 in her sleep at Kensington Palace, at the age of 102. Her funeral was held, on 5 November 2004, at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, and she was interred next to her husband, Prince Henry, and her elder son, Prince William, in the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore. The Funeral was attended by The Queen and other members of the Royal Family. A memorial service was held at St Clement Danes, on 2 February 2005.

Lady Alice was never particularly interested in social life in England and enjoyed a more outdoor life. In her day she was almost unconventional. She was therefore delighted to travel to Africa in 1924 to visit her uncle, Lord Francis Scott, who was one of the early and most influential British settlers in Kenya, and leader of the elected members of the legislative council. This was the first of a number of prolonged stays that Lady Alice enjoyed in Kenya. She loved Kenya, with its wide, open spaces and possibilities for freedom. She developed a talent for watercolours, both landscapes and the touchingly humorous depiction of animal life, and she held an exhibition in London, selling 64 pictures for 190 guineas which financed a later trip. Lady Alice took up photography and won a diploma of honour in the Kodak International Photographic Competition.

In her memoirs (published in 1983), Princess Alice took pleasure in recounting some of the adventures she had — how, during a shooting safari in Zululand she was obliged to hide under a camp-bed to avoid a mother rhinoceros and her baby, and how she came face to face with a leopard. On one occasion, when a local African lost a toe, she was able to replace it for him and rush him to hospital for treatment. In 1929 she made the break and set off on her travels, finding what she described as a wonderful freedom. In Africa she prospected for gold; became friendly with Karen Blixen, author of Out Of Africa, thought Blixen's husband "an awful old thing," but found Blixen's lover, Denys Finch Hatton "very attractive". She she was introduced to the Happy Valley set, notorious for promiscuity, drug taking, and hard drinking, but said she regarded them as "tiresome people, whom one avoided".

Lady Alice also visited India, but found it a sad country in comparison with Kenya. After visiting India, she undertook what she called her "great adventure", smuggling herself into Afghanistan, disguised as an Afghan, entering by a secret overland route, into an area off limits to women. She was undetected by the Afghans, but there was "a great row" when news of her escapade reached the British authorities.