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How Mary, George V’s daughter, became a very modern princess
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Mary‘s obituaries called her ‘unobtrusive and purposeful’. But was her life an unremarkable thing, or a shining example of royal duty?
Mary, Princess Royal, working as a nurse during the First World War
Credit: Hulton
The wicked make good copy. Virtue, by contrast, inspires less compelling narratives. In 1965, while the paparazzi were chasing Princess Margaret, her aunt Mary, Princess Royal, died of a heart attack at the age of 67. The obituaries of George V’s only daughter paid tribute to a life “active, unobtrusive and purposeful”.
It sounds unpromising stuff, but Elisabeth Basford’s account of this mostly forgotten princess celebrates a woman who, with understated charm, combined ideals with practicality, gentleness with a stiff upper lip, and an unshakeable sense of duty with self-effacement. Alec Douglas-Home claimed that Mary “personified everything which to all of us s ....

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