The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
‘Good move’ for royals to adopt Windsor name
100 years since Queen’s grandfather dropped German surname
The Royal Family’s radical name change to Windsor a century ago was a “clever piece of branding” and a “very good move” in the long-term, a historian has suggested.
The House of Windsor is 100 years old today, the anniversary of when the Queen’s grandfather King George V dropped the German surname SaxeCoburg-Gotha in 1917 amid antiGerman feeling during the First World War.
Professor Jane Ridley said: “The effect of the First World War was to make people feel much more patriotic about being British, so having a monarch with a British surname was clever branding. “There was another war coming. “If in 1939 the royals had still had a German surname, and given the fact that many of the small German princes were rather friendly with Hitler, it would have been an extremely unfortunate situation, so it turned out in the long-term to be a very good move.”
On July 17 1917, the king issued a royal proclamation changing the royals’ house and surname, declaring that they would “be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor” and that they would “relinquish and discontinue the use of all German Titles and Dignities”.
The Royal Mint has marked the historic anniversary with a commemorative £5 silver coin which features Windsor Castle’s Round Tower.
George V’s decision followed concern in the press in the wake of the Russian revolution and the forced abdication of the Tsar Nicholas II that the King should not offer asylum to the Russian royals, and criticism that the UK was at war with Germany but had German royals on its throne.
In June 1917, the Germans intensively bombed the east end of London with a new plane called the “Gotha” and staged a daylight raid on a primary school which killed 18 children.
Prof Ridley, an author and history professor at Buckingham university, said: “The coincidence of the Gotha bomber and the King’s surname being Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was obviously not very good publicity and they had already decided to change the name before the June bombing, but it certainly made it more urgent.”
She added that the patriotic public welcomed the switch.