The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (24 page)

with other royal cousins, they were largely reliant on the friendship of adults: their Aunt Olga, a few close officers, servants and ladies-in-waiting – and a forty-year-old reprobate and religious maverick

whose continuing influence over their family life was already sowing

the seeds of their ultimate destruction.

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In the late summer of 1909 the Romanov sisters at last found them-

selves with something exciting to look forward – a visit to their royal cousins in England. It would be their first proper official trip abroad, apart from private family visits to Uncle Ernie at Darmstadt and

Wolfsgarten. Crossing the North Sea, the
Shtandart
encountered strong winds from the south and the water was very choppy. All the

children were seasick, and many of the entourage too.1 The crew

made up an area of plaids and pillows for the children to sleep on

where the rocking of the ship was less intense. But Tatiana still

suffered terribly; she had never been a good sailor and had some-

times been seasick even when the yacht was at anchor. ‘A whole

trunkful of special remedies from America’ had been sent for but

nothing worked.2 En route to England, the family had stopped

briefly at Kiel to visit Alexandra’s sister Irene and her family, and then they had made a three-day visit to President Fallières of France at Cherbourg, where they were greeted with the usual pageantry of

gun salutes, crowds, bunting and massed bands playing the

Marseillaise
. After three days of diplomatic meetings, formal dinners and a review of the French fleet – at which the girls had been thrilled to be allowed to take photos of French submarines with their Box

Brownies – the
Shtandart
finally set sail for England.3

Having met at Reval for three days the previous year, both

Nicholas and his cousin Edward VII had been keen to rehabilitate

Russia in the eyes of the world after the terrible events of 1905, at a time when talk of war with Germany was increasing. But it was

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also an opportunity for a much-wanted family reunion. There was,

however, a problem: the impending visit of the tsar caused consid-

erable disquiet in parliament and the British press, far more so than the 1896 visit. After the events of 1905 British radical groups had

damned Nicholas as a brutal despot, the architect of Russian im-

perial oppression. In the run-up to the visit he was further vilified in socialist rallies at Trafalgar Square and elsewhere, with the evidence of Stolypin’s repressive measures against political activists

stacked up against him. In short, Nicholas II was seen as the re-

pository of all evil: ‘The Czar of the “Bloody Sunday”, the Czar of

Stolypins and the Czar of Pogroms and Black Hundreds’.4 The

impending visit divided public opinion in Britain, although Lord

Hardinge, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, put

much of the protest down to scaremongering and dismissed the

Trafalgar Square ‘demonstrators’ as a motley collection of ‘five

hundred Frenchmen, six hundred German waiters, a few Russian

Jews and Italian ice-vendors’.5 One of the most strident opponents

of Nicholas’s visit was the Labour leader Keir Hardie who inspired

130 resolutions from socialist groups, schools, evangelical societies, trade unions, pacifist groups and branches of the Labour Party and

the Women’s Labour League that were sent to the Home Secretary

condemning the visit.6 At some radical meetings there were open

calls for Nicholas’s assassination, should he step on to English soil.

Mindful of the huge security problem for the police on the Isle

of Wight it was soon made clear that the tsar and his family would

not stay on land but on board the
Shtandart
off Cowes, where it was much easier to protect them, surrounded as the yacht would be

by two Russian cruisers and three destroyers as well as ships of the

British fleet. Nevertheless, the most elaborate security arrangements were put into effect, with ‘every possible means of entrance, not

only to Cowes, but to the Isle of Wight’ – landing stages, roads and railways, and ‘even the peaceful rural villages of the interior’ – being watched by hundreds of plain clothes detectives, backed up by a

special ‘bicycle corps’ of thirty men. Many of the detectives adopted the token disguise of double-breasted yachtsmen’s jackets and white

sailing caps, but as one newspaper observed, ‘this was really more

of an advertisement of constabulary duty than a disguise. Instead of

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avoiding attention they invited it . . . As yachtsmen who wandered

about in couples without visible means of support afloat they were

marked men.’7 Cowes itself, as Liberal peer Lord Suffield recalled,

‘was crowded with detectives on the watch for possible assassins,

and everyone seemed to be in fear for the poor hunted Czar’. The

detectives were not just British either; Spiridovich had brought his

own Okhrana men. Suffield had found it all rather unnerving: ‘I do

not know how any man can submit to such thralldom; it is too big

a price to pay for being a potentate.’8

On the evening of 2 August (NS) the
Shtandart
and its escort sailed towards Spithead in the Solent for a rendezvous with the

British royal family on board their yacht the
Victoria and Albert.
The event was filmed and photographed too as an impressive naval review

and regatta of 152 ships watched by both families, following which

the royal yachts sailed into Cowes harbour to be greeted by an

armada of gaily pennanted steam and sail boats and yachts of every

description.9 Four days of intensive receptions and meetings followed, during which the only meal not shared with the British royals was

breakfast. The strain of it all on the empress’s face was evident to

Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s long-standing mistress. Up on deck in

the
Shtandart
surrounded by a dense crowd of people the tsaritsa had ‘presented a frigid calm’, yet, strangely, Alexandra’s moral probity did not prevent her from inviting Mrs Keppel to join her below in

her suite. As soon as the cabin door was closed behind them ‘there

was a sudden lightening of the atmosphere’, recalled Alice. ‘Dropping her regal mask, the Empress had at once become a friendly house-wife, “Tell me, my dear, where do
you
get your knitting wool?” she had urgently demanded.’10

For the Romanov children, spared the strains of officialdom, the

visit was an all too brief glimpse of an entirely new landscape, though for those protecting them it was yet another security nightmare.

They had till now seen little or nothing beyond their homes at St

Petersburg, Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof. On the morning of 3 August

all five of them made their first trip ashore, to East Cowes and a

visit by open landau to Osborne Bay, just down from Osborne House

(the large part of which had now become a naval officers’ training

college). Here they played with their cousins on the private beach,

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paddling in the sea, collecting shells and digging sandcastles, much

as their mother and their grandmother Alice had done before them.

Olga and Tatiana made a second impromptu trip ashore that after-

noon with their chaperones and a posse of detectives, and were

delighted to be allowed to walk rather than take the carriage into

West Cowes to do some shopping in the main street. It was such a

rare thing for them to be able to move freely in this way; the cobbled high street of West Cowes might not be the glamorous Nevsky

Prospekt but
Shtandart
officer Nikolay Vasilievich Sablin noted that many of the shops were subsidiaries of the big London stores, open

specially for the yachting season and the Cowes Regatta, and had

plenty of luxury goods and souvenirs with which to tempt the girls’

pocket money. Olga and Tatiana were extremely animated throughout

their visit. They talked in English to the shopkeepers and took great pleasure in spending their money in a newsagent’s shop on pennants

of the various nations, commemorative picture postcards of their

royal relatives and even of their own parents. After that they moved

on to a jeweller’s where they snapped up gifts for members of the

crew. They also treated themselves to some perfume from Beken &

Son’s pharmacy.

West Cowes meanwhile had come to a complete standstill, for

word had quickly spread about these charming young Russian visi-

tors in their smart matching grey suits and straw hats.11 Soon the

sisters were being followed round the town by a large crowd of

curious holiday-makers and across the floating bridge into East

Cowes, where they visited Whippingham Church and saw the chair

Great- grandmama had sat in when attending services. Throughout

their visit, as
The
Times
reported on 7 August, Olga and Tatiana

‘behaved with complete self-possession, smiling when one or two

enthusiasts raised a cheer for them’. They were still laughing and

talking excitedly at the end of their three-hour visit.12

The whole family came ashore the following day, the girls and

Alexey bowing and waving at the crowd, on their way to see the

private wing of Osborne House and the Swiss Cottage – a playhouse

for learning practical skills, created in the garden for his children by Prince Albert – in which Alexey took particular delight. After

enjoying five o’clock tea at Barton Manor with their cousin George,

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Prince of Wales, and his family, everyone sat for their photographs.

The Princess of Wales thought the Romanov children ‘delicious’

and everyone commented on how unaffected and delightful they

were.13 The two cousins, George and Nicholas, who had not seen

each other for twelve years, seemed remarkably alike with their blue

eyes, neatly trimmed beards and similar stature, particularly when

they posed for photos with their two sons – David in his naval

uniform (the future King Edward VIII was then at the Royal Naval

College at Dartmouth) and Alexey in his own trademark white sailor

suit.14 David had been delegated to escort his cousins at Osborne,

that task having originally been earmarked for his younger brother

Bertie (the future King George VI). But Bertie had gone down with

whooping cough shortly before the visit and such had been the

imperial doctors’ paranoia of exposing the tsarevich to any possible

infection that he was bundled off to Balmoral and his role given to

his brother. During the visit David took rather a shine to Tatiana

(despite his grandmother having seen Olga as a possible future bride

for him). He could see how protective she was of her timid little

brother and could not help noticing a ‘frightened’ look in Alexey’s

large, watchful eyes.15 But as for the ‘elaborate police guard’ thrown around the tsar’s every movement, he later recalled that it ‘made

me glad I was not a Russian prince’.16

During those four idyllic, sunny days in August 1909, when ‘all

the world was on the water’ and the Solent was ‘like a sea of glass,

the sun going down like a red ball leaving the evenings still and

warm’, one stately ceremony had followed another. As General

Spiridovich later recalled, ‘the colossal fleet’ that had gathered at Cowes ‘motionless and as if asleep, seemed a vision from a fairytale’

– the effect enhanced by the night sky illuminated by the lights

from all the ships anchored off shore. The night before the

Romanovs’ departure the bands played and there were fireworks

and dancing, with Admiral Fisher, commander of the British fleet,

partnering each of the girls in turn. Then everyone sat down to a

final grand dinner – the ladies with Alexandra in the
Shtandart
– the men with King Edward in the
Victoria and Albert
. After a final lunch party on the 5th – the hottest, and most windless, day of the year

so far – the
Shtandart
weighed anchor at 3.30 p.m. and, with Nicholas,
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Alexandra and their five children up on deck waving goodbye to

their relatives in the
Victoria and Albert
, the imperial yacht
headed off into the English Channel. As it disappeared from view,

Superintendent Quinn of the Cowes police force was seen ‘offering

a cigarette out of a gorgeous gold cigarette case, shining with

newness, and bearing the intimation that it was “a present from the

Czar”’. One of his colleagues was wearing ‘a scarf pin with the

Imperial crown in diamonds, and still another sported a gold watch’

– all of them ‘gifts for their care’ from a grateful Russian emperor

and empress. But the British police were, nevertheless, intensely

relieved that ‘the strain was over’.17

All in all the Russian imperial visit to England was a triumph

– an unforgettable coming together of two great royal families that