The Untold Life of Princess Mary: Rare Photos & Secrets

In December 1914 a brass box bearing a girl's face in profile reached the front, and more than two and a half million followed. Almost nobody can now say whose face it was, though she was the only daughter of a king. Mary, Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood (1897–1965), was the only girl among George V's six children. At seventeen she put her name to a Christmas gift for every soldier and sailor at the front. She trained on the wards of Great Ormond Street, was the first of her family into France after the Armistice, married in Westminster Abbey before fifteen newsreel cameras, and was the one person the family sent to her exiled brother after the abdication. In the Second World War she was Controller Commandant of the ATS, the women's army, while her own son was held at Colditz. And when she died, on a Sunday walk at Harewood in 1965, the crowds in London cheered someone else. A full-length documentary told from the documented record: her own diaries as later quoted, family letters, contemporary newspapers and newsreels, the Imperial War Museum's records of the gift fund, and her first full biography (Elisabeth Basford, 2021). Popular stories with no source behind them, including the claim that Lascelles won her in a bet and the unhappy marriage of the Downton Abbey film, are examined and named for what they are. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 A Face in Profile 1:22 The Only Girl 7:19 Please Will You Help Me 15:47 Probationer 22:03 The Boy at Wood Farm 29:41 Everybody Guessed 37:47 Fifteen Cameras 45:29 The Marriage 52:31 Ghastly and Never to Be Forgotten 1:03:10 Controller Commandant 1:09:47 Wounded and Missing 1:16:46 A Chill or Something of the Sort 1:25:19 More Human With Age 1:34:36 Eleven Days 1:45:06 The Face on the Lid 🔔 Subscribe to Royal Tea for long, unhurried documentaries on the forgotten and the fallen of the House of Windsor. Sources include Elisabeth Basford, Princess Mary: The First Modern Princess (2021); George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, The Tongs and the Bones (1981); the Imperial War Museum, Australian War Memorial and National Army Museum; Harewood House Trust; contemporary reporting (The Times, TIME, The New York Times, the Yorkshire Post, Reuters and the Associated Press via Papers Past), British Pathé, Tatler, Majesty and the Daily Express. Where accounts conflict or rest on one witness, the narration says so. Images: public domain and Creative Commons works via Wikimedia Commons (Library of Congress / Bain News Service, Bibliothèque nationale de France / Gallica, Auckland War Memorial Museum, Imperial War Museum, Nationaal Archief, Royal Collection Trust public-domain works and others); full attribution in CREDITS. Historical imagery is illustrative. Intro music: Erik Satie, Gymnopédie No. 1, public-domain recording.