Esher and Claygate residents love to browse and shop at their local Princess Alice Charity shops that support our very own Princess Alice Hospice in West End. But who was this princess?

The Hospice opened in 1985 named for Princess Alice of Athlone, granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Like many of Victoria’s family she was haemophiliac so understood personal pain. Her father, Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s youngest son had himself died from the affliction when she was only 1. Although Princess Alice died herself in 1981, aged 97, her daughter, Lady May Abel Smith was adamant that this was a cause her mother would have whole heartedly supported.

Throughout her life the princess diligently carried out many royal family engagements and activities. Apart from her duties with her husband, the Earl of Athlone, as vicereine of South Africa and then Canada, in her own right she was Colonel-in-Chief of two British and one Rhodesian (now Zimbabwe) Army units. During the Second World War, she was Honorary Air Commandant of the Royal Canadian Women’s Air Force and in 1950, she became the first Chancellor of the University of the West Indies visiting the university every year, From the 1930s to the 1960s she was Chair of the Council of Royal Holloway College, University of London.

At the end of the WW2 the American Military in Bavaria, under the command of General George S. Patton, arrested and imprisoned Alice’s brother, Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha who served as a member of the Nazi Reichstag from 1937 to 1945. Alice, learning of her brother’s sudden detention rushed to Germany with her husband to plead his case with the Americans but to no avail and in 1946 he was sentenced by a de-Nazification court, heavily fined and almost bankrupted.