COMMENT

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 anti-german 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 a clever piece of branding.

“There was another war coming. If in 1939 the royals 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.”

“The coincidence of the Gotha bomber and the king’s surname being Saxe-coburg-gotha was obviously not very good publicity”

PROFESSOR JANE RIDLEY