On the day of Prince Charles
and Lady Diana’s wedding, July 29, 1981, the Queen arrived at St.
Paul’s Cathedral and waved to the crowds; two middle-aged women in shapeless, baggy
dresses walked clumsily up to the TV
and waved and saluted back to the monarch,
unable to articulate speech but making excited noises.
One of the nurses who cared for them, Onelle Braithwaite, remembers
a particularly touching moment.
“I remember discussing with my coworker how, if things had been different,
they would have undoubtedly been guests at the wedding.”
Inmates at the Royal Earlswood Asylum in Redhill, Surrey, since 1941,
Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon were officially classed as imbeciles.
Join me now as we look at the alleged secret cover up
and sorrowful life of the royal family’s hidden sisters,
and please like the video and consider subscribing
for more historical stories.
Although it was common knowledge at Royal Earlswood and in the surrounding town
that the asylum had been housing intimate relatives of the Royal Family,
this fact had been erased from the public consciousness
after the 1960s, when the last known visitor had left.
Based on incorrect personal
information, Burke’s Peerage had long since pronounced them both dead.
But Katherine was still alive, as for Nerissa she did not pass away
until 1986, at the ripe old age of 66.
Reporters learned of their tragic tale soon after Nerissa’s death,
when they found her burial unmarked other then by displaying
a plastic name-tag and a serial number.
The subsequent incident, which led to a gravestone being provided
for Nerissa by an unknown source, had no impact on her sister’s existence.
As her aunt the Queen Mother continued to enjoy a pampered old age,
Katherine rarely had visitors in the asylum and, until her final years
there, had to borrow underwear from other patients.
A Channel 4 programme revealed the identities of the Queen’s
secret cousins, who were born into a time when having a child with special needs
was taboo.
Mischievous like naughty children, but otherwise easy to care for.
To put it bluntly, Katherine was a scallywag.
Onelle Braithwaite, a nurse who arrived at the asylum as a 20-year-old
in the mid-1970s, recalls that the sisters’ story
was general knowledge due to the striking likeness between Katherine
Bowes-Lyon and the Queen in photographs taken of the two.
Curtsying would be very royal and very low
if the Queen or the Queen Mother were ever to appear on television.
There was obviously a recollection of some kind.
But what happened was incredibly tragic.
Consider the possibilities of their future self.
It was clear that they were sisters because they were so beautiful.
Though they were unable to speak, they communicated through pointing
and noises, which, once familiarised, could be deciphered.
With the help of speech therapy available today, children
might likely improve their communication skills significantly.
but the two girls grasped a lot more than you’d imagine.
Retired nurse and former ward sister
Dot Penfold also looks back on her time in the hospital with fondness.
They caused no trouble, but they were naughty like
little children and required constant supervision.
To put it bluntly, Katherine was a person you may shout at, however
she would not hear a thing.
Katherine 1926 and her sister
Nerissa 1919 both arrived into an unstable future.
John Bowes-Lyon, an elder brother of the Queen Mother
and a son of the Earl of Strathmore, was their father.
John, passed away in 1930, while their mother,
Fenella, lived until 1966.
The sisters were born into a time when mental illness was stigmatised
and associated with antisocial behaviours like prostitution,
sex abuse, and petty criminality typical of the lower classes.
These ideas were popularised by the science of eugenics,
which the Nazis would later come to embrace.
Jan Walmsley, a professor at the Open University
who studies the history of learning disorders, notes
that this stigma stemmed from the widespread notion
that having a child with a learning disability meant something
was inherently wrong with the family.
The Bowes-Lyons were understandably concerned
that this would hurt their reputation and make it more difficult
for their other children to find suitable spouses.
By her second marriage, Nerissa and Katherine’s lovely and healthy
sister Anne became a princess of Denmark; by her first, she was Viscountess Anson
and the mother of the late Lord Lichfield, a renowned society photographer.
The country’s first dedicated asylum
for people with intellectual disability was the stately Royal Earlswood.
When admitted, Nerissa and Katherine were 15 and 22 years old, respectively.
A diagnosis of “imbecile” appears in Nerissa’s medical files.
A physician said, “She makes incomprehensible noises
all the time.” Affectionate to a fault...
yet can only babble incoherently’
Judy Wilkinson, of Godalming, Surrey, remembers the fear she had
when she first visited the Royal Earlswood in the 1950s, when her older sister
Nicola, who had suffered brain damage at birth, was sent there.
Judy says, “I’d get that clutching feeling of fear.”
and she recalls wondering why her sister always wore
the same green coat that never seemed to wear out.
As she has learned, however, inmates only wore their own clothes
when they received visitors.
However, Nerissa and Katherine didn’t have many guests.
It wasn’t until the scandals of the late 1960s that understaffed and overcrowded
facilities in many institutions were brought to light.
Since its closure in 1997, at least one former nurse
has claimed that patients at The Royal Earlswood were abused.
Many royal family members, including Queen Elizabeth
II, were aware of Katherine and Nerissa, but most assumed they had already died.
However, it eventually became clear that the reports of their deaths
were fabricated.
But why?
There was concern that the sister’s condition, and the stigma attached
to having a learning disability
at the time, could damage the royal family’s reputation.
In The Crown, Marion Bailey’s character, the Queen Mother,
tries to explain away the choice to fake their deaths.
She informs Margaret that her brother’s children paid an “awful price”
for her to transition from being the Duke of Yorks wife
to becoming the Queen and eventually the Queen Mother.
She continued by saying, as the Bowes-Lyons rose from being minor
Scottish aristocrats to having a direct connection to the crown, she explains.
“People would dispute the legitimacy of the family line
if they knew about their illnesses and their seeming ignorance
and imbecility, which have both been diagnosed by medical professionals.
Think about the headlines if word got out.”
Given how difficult it is to defend the idea of a hereditary monarchy,
the royal family had better have an utterly uncontaminated gene pool.
Even without the Bowes-Lyon illnesses,
there have been enough occurrences on the Windsor side to cause concern.
When was it that people found out who Katherine and Nerissa were?
In 1987, not long after Nerissa’s passing, the sisters’ plight made headlines
when the media learned that her burial bore merely a plastic name tag
and serial number.
Following a report in The Sun, the hospital confirmed
Katherine and Nerissa’s royal family ties.
In response to the report, Buckingham Palace stated,
“We have no comment about it at all, It is private business between the Bowes-Lyons
family.” The Bowes-Lyon family’s niece, Lady Elizabeth Anson,
also released a statement to the BBC on their behalf,
assuring listeners that “there was no attempt at a cover-up”
and that many relatives had visited the sisters.
When Channel 4 made a documentary, The Queen’s Hidden Cousins,
it was one account which brought the story back into the spotlight.
Because the documentary implied the cousins had been treated callously
by the royal family, it sparked fury among a new generation of viewers.
A source close to the royal family called the documentary’s assertions
“complete nonsense”.
According to the source, the Queen is “very, very disturbed”
by the idea that the programme is being made even though it is untrue.
It was said about Katherine and Nerissa, “Both could not speak,
and throughout their lives had the thinking age of four years old.
and that although disputed their family did visit them very regularly.”
When did the sisters receive a visit from the royal family?
Despite claims made in the Channel 4 programme, there is no evidence to imply
that any royal family member ever paid a visit to Katherine or Nerissa.
A former ward sister, Dot Penfold at the hospital where the sisters stayed,
expressed her regret at the lack of visits throughout the programme
over a period of years.
In the tv series The Crown
it is notable for how harshly it criticises the Royal Family.
It is implied that by the 1980s,
Nerissa and Katherine were largely forgotten.
But Princess Margaret learns of their existence and confronts the Queen Mother.
It’s suggested she yells “Locked up and abandoned.
The girls are the offspring of your favourite sibling,
making them your nieces.
It’s vicious and cold and nasty and totally consistent
with the ruthlessness I’ve seen first hand in this family. If you’re
not first in line, if you have unique characteristics and requirements,
or if you have an abnormal disposition, then you’ll be spat out,
hidden away, or worse: pronounced dead.
Shame on all of you; Darwin has nothing on you.”
Queen Elizabeth II makes no attempt
to conceal the fact that she helped keep secret, her first cousins.
She warns Margaret, “Don’t be too foolish,”
meaning “we had no option.” It’s all very strange especially as the Queen
mother was a supporter of the disability community
through her role as patron of the Royal Mencap Society.
The times then
are far different to what we know and see today.
New breakthroughs in understanding mental illness
has come along way over the years.
But the treatment these two girls received still leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
There is no rhyme or reason as to why they were hidden away,
why visits never happened and why the family didn’t make, allegedly,
any attempt to bring the two into the fold.
Maybe it was all a fear of losing credibility
and endangering their own climb through the social ranks.
So whatever conclusions you make about this story
we’ll leave the last words to Dot Penfold who summed up by sadly saying,
“I had the sense that they’d been forgotten.”