Alice, Duchess of Gloucester: She Wanted Her Story to End at 33

When Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, wrote her memoirs, she wanted them to stop on the day she married. Her publishers would not let her. Born Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott on Christmas Day 1901, a daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, she spent most of her late twenties and early thirties in Kenya: managing her uncle's farm, painting, filming lions, panning for gold, and once slipping across the border into Afghanistan in a heavy coat meant as a disguise. In November 1935, at 33, she married Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, the King's third son. She lived another sixty-nine years. This is the life she did not want to write about, and the one she did. The wedding moved from Westminster Abbey to a palace chapel on the night her father lay dying. Air Chief Commandant of the WAAF in the Second World War. Two years at Government House in Canberra. Tours from Ethiopia to Nigeria. A car crash in 1965, a husband's long illness, the loss of her elder son in 1972. Widowhood, a memoir at eighty-one, and at a hundred and two the longest-lived member of the royal family on record. A full-length documentary told from the documented record: the London Gazette, Hansard, The Illustrated London News, The Times, Papers Past (New Zealand newspapers), the Australian press, Evelyn Waugh's Remote People, BBC News, and the obituaries of 2004. Lines from her memoirs (1983, revised 1991) are quoted as published excerpts. Where accounts conflict, the narration says so. Statements about living people are limited to the public record. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 An Attempt at Disguise: The Caption 1:01 The Timing of My Arrival 5:32 Some Useful Purpose 12:09 The Road to the Isles 21:48 A Hundred and Ninety Guineas 29:25 An Attempt at Disguise 36:10 My Dear John 42:46 Instead of the Abbey 49:30 Royal Weather 57:46 Fourth Lady in the Land 1:05:08 A Very Secret Pledge 1:12:31 Heat, Snakes, Rats, Flies 1:19:28 My Ship 1:25:44 A Pride of Lions 1:33:26 Excellent Spirits 1:40:50 Five Women From the Almshouses 1:47:37 In Recent Years, Alone 1:52:47 Presumably 1:59:14 In Time to the Music 2:06:39 Direct to Frogmore 🔔 Subscribe to Royal Tea for long, unhurried documentaries on the forgotten members of the House of Windsor. Our films on her husband, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and her son, Prince William of Gloucester, are on the channel.