Royal surname query

“I was shot down in flames once when, as a quizmaster, I gave ‘Hanover’ as the answer to the Royal Family’s surname at the start of World War I,” writes a Craigie regular.

“I was told quite firmly that it was ‘Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’, the surname of Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, hence the surname of his son, Edward VII, and his grandson, George V.

“Although I was simply copying answers from a quiz book, I admitted defeat.

“Then, in the BBC’s documentary, ‘Royal Dynasties’, the narrator said George V in 1917 asked his secretary to find a surname ‘more suitable than the distinctly alien Saxe-Coburg-Gotha which some historians believed to be his surname’. Only some historians? I was laughed to scorn when I said it was ‘Hanover’.

“It was apparently the secretary who came up with the impeccably British ‘Windsor’.

“Of its two possible predecessors, which, then, is correct: Hanover or Saxe-Coburg-Gotha? All I can think of is that Albert took the surname of Hanover on his marriage to the Queen,since her dynastic surname would then have taken precedence over that of a Prince Consort, but I really do not know. Any offers of clarification?

“If I remember rightly, the Mountbattens also changed their name at that time from the German ‘Battenberg’, a very straightforward translation into English.”

Does anyone have any information that might help our reader?

Susan Mackay of Dundee has sent in this picture. See story above to see if you can help her trace these ladies.