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Neglected, hidden away, registered dead: the tragic true story of the Queen’s disabled cousins

Katherine Bowes-Lyon, the Queen's cousin, at Earlswood in 1987 - Rex/James Cutler
Katherine Bowes-Lyon, the Queen's cousin, at Earlswood in 1987 - Rex/James Cutler

The Crown turns a colder eye on the Royal family this season than it has in any previous period. Two prominent new personalities – Diana, Princess of Wales and Margaret Thatcher – are thrust into the limelight, and the treatment they receive at the hands of “The Firm” will leave many viewers recoiling at the unkindness and snobbery.

But perhaps the most damning portrayal so far of the Royals by Crown writer Peter Morgan – who is usually sympathetic towards them – comes in the episode telling the story of Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon.

The third and fifth daughters of John and Fenella Bowes-Lyon – John being the elder brother of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother – both women were born with severe developmental disabilities. Neither learned to talk. Their medical diagnosis is revealing of contemporary attitudes towards such conditions: officially, they were “imbeciles”.

Related video: Season 4 of ‘The Crown’ trailer

In 1941, when Nerissa was 22 years old and Katherine 15, the family had them committed to the Royal Earlswood Hospital, in Redhill, Surrey, apparently on medical advice. Three of their cousins, Idonea, Rosemary and Ethelreda, the children of Fenella’s sister, were similarly disabled and sent to the same hospital.

Earlswood was the first purpose-built facility of its kind, but it was not a happy place. Nurses and relatives of former inmates, interviewed in 2011 as part of a Channel 4 documentary about the sisters, recalled an institution that was regimented and devoid of fun. There were wards of up to 40 people, cared for by two nurses. “You gave them a bath, cut their nails, fed them if they needed help,” one recalled.

The Bowes-Lyon sisters seem to have been entirely abandoned by the Royal family, aside from the £125 a year they paid Earlswood. According to the programme, nobody – not even the women’s parents – ever visited, or remembered their birthdays, or sent them Christmas cards. Speaking to Thames News in 1987, a hospital representative said of Nerissa: “She was last visited, so far as I’m aware, by direct relatives in the early 1960s.”

In 1963, the family’s entry in Burke’s Peerage declared that both daughters were dead. This was made more poignant by their apparent awareness of their royal connections – as The Crown misses no opportunity to ram home: we see them with photographs of Elizabeth and Margaret kept lovingly framed by their bedsides and curtseying and saluting whenever the family appeared on television. Nurses recall their excitement at the wedding of Charles and Diana.

How involved the inner circle of the Royal family were in their treatment remains unclear. The Crown suggests that by the 1980s, Nerissa and Katherine had been all but forgotten. Princess Margaret stumbles across the fact of their existence entirely accidentally, via her own therapist, while the Queen, apparently a religious reader of Burke’s, believes them both to be have passed away.

In The Crown, Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) expresses anger at the Royal family for their actions - Netflix
In The Crown, Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) expresses anger at the Royal family for their actions - Netflix

Is this too generous a depiction? Nerissa and Katherine were, after all, their first cousins. It is even more difficult to believe that the Queen Mother was not aware or complicit in the stashing away of two of her brother’s children. When Margaret confronts her in The Crown, she does not attempt to deny it; indeed, she is defiant. “Don’t be so naive,” she tells Margaret, in response to her accusations of cruelty. “We had no choice.” (In a note of sour irony, the Queen Mother was a patron of the Royal Mencap Society, a charity working for people with disabilities.)

What has never been cleared up is the family’s motivation for its treatment of Nerissa and Katherine. How far was it a cruel but conventional reaction to disability at a time when it was extremely poorly understood, and how far a cold, calculating political strategy to protect the Windsors’ hold on the crown? Certainly, the existence of the false report of their deaths in Burke’s has the bitter flavour of a royal cover-up.

Peter Morgan makes no attempt to hide his belief in the more chilling interpretation. His fictionalised Queen Mother effectively confesses to masterminding the entire arrangement:

“The idea that one family alone has the automatic birthright to the crown is already so hard to justify,” she tells Margaret. “The gene pool of that family had better have 100 per cent purity.” The girls were sent to Earlswood just four years after Edward VIII’s abdication put the children of a Bowes-Lyon in the direct line of succession.

The Queen Mother also mentions Prince John, the youngest son of George V, brother to George VI and Edward VIII, in her explanation of the family’s actions. The Windsor side alone already had enough “examples” to worry people, she says. John was diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of three. When his condition deteriorated, he was sent to live on a secluded corner of the Sandringham estate with a nanny, away from the public eye – and the family. He died there at the age of 13, following a severe seizure.

Nerissa Bowes-Lyon's grave in Redstone cemetery; the headstone was a belated addition - Peter Payne
Nerissa Bowes-Lyon's grave in Redstone cemetery; the headstone was a belated addition - Peter Payne

The Crown’s Margaret is, perhaps implausibly, concerned about the implications of the existence of the sisters for her own chances of developing mental health problems. It is a plot device that allows her therapist to reveal that Nerissa and Katherine’s conditions were genetically inherited from their mother’s side and so could not conceivably affect the Windsor bloodline. The existence of the two women’s three disabled cousins proves the point. Nonetheless, Margaret concludes, “what my family did was unforgivable.”

Nerissa died in 1986 and was buried in Redhill Cemetery. Only hospital staff attended her funeral and her grave was marked with plastic tags and a serial number. But Katherine lived on, and when the story broke in 1987, people from all across Britain sent her flowers.

Descendants of the Bowes-Lyons, meanwhile, tried to defend the actions of the Royal family. Fenella’s great-nephew, Lord Clinton, told the press that the official death report must have been an accident; Fenella, who handled the Burke's forms, was “a very vague person”. Accidentally providing false death dates for two of your children was, he seemed to imply, easily done.

At the time, Buckingham Palace said the Queen was aware of the report, but had no comment on the matter. “It’s a matter for the Bowes-Lyon family,” a representative said.

The Crown is available on Netflix from Sunday