The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Free-spirit princess with links to tragic Romanovs
At one time considered a potential bride-to-be for Prince Charles, Olga Romanoff shares tales from her remarkable life with Neil Drysdale
Princess Olga Romanoff has the sort of lineage which stretches all the way back to the days of the tsars, but she can only speak three words in Russian: “Yes”, “No” and “Darling”.
Born in London in 1950, she was the only child of Prince Andrew Alexandrovich of Russia and his second wife, Nadine McDougall, of the famous flour-milling family.
Yet, if her background sounds like something from Downton Abbey – brought up at Provender House, a listed building in Kent, and privately educated at home by tutors and governesses – she has spent a significant part of her life in the north-east of Scotland and has a wealth of stories in the process.
Many of these are in her new memoir A Wild and Barefoot Romanov, which flits between tales of the Russian Revolution, Ballater balls and the Loch Ness Monster with a breathless flourish.
That sums up the free-spirited woman, who once worked at William Young and Co antique dealer’s in Aberdeen’s Belmont Street and only discovered after she left the post her mother was paying them to employ her.
As Olga told the Press and Journal: “I didn’t find out until after I moved from the auction store what was really going on. I did think it was a bit strange that they didn’t mind when I arrived late, or when all my friends from the Bridge of Don Barracks came in and I was allowed off at lunch time longer than most people.
“I just thought they were very nice bosses.”
As the great niece of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, she has understandably led a peripatetic existence – and she doesn’t laugh about the circumstances of the grisly fate of the deposed tsar for which his British first cousin, George V, was partly responsible. She is quite candid about her conviction that the king himself, not the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, first offered, then rescinded safe passage to the Russian royals, following the revolution, which preceded their execution.
As she stated: “In the royal archives, there is a letter from George V to Lloyd George that says the Romanovs must not be allowed to come to England.
“All this happened at the time the king was trying to make the royal family ‘user-friendly’ to the British public by replacing their German name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha with the more English-sounding House of Windsor.
“Besides, the British didn’t want an influx of the Romanovs coming over here, because they were a huge family.” The consequence was that Olga first ended up in England, then moved to the north-east of Scotland in the 1960s. And, as a teenager, she suddenly found herself included among the potential brides-to-be for Prince Charles.
As she said: “It was in Harpers & Queen magazine, but, of course they never spoke to me. Instead, they asked my mother what my hobbies were. Mother thought it was not good enough to put down ‘riding’.
“‘That sort of thing is unfeminine’, or so she told me. So she said ‘tennis’, but I couldn’t hit a tennis ball to save my life. And ‘sculling’. When I read it, I asked: ‘What the hell’s sculling, mother?’ “And she replied: ‘Rowing, of course.’ “‘But I’ve never even sat in a rowing boat. I haven’t got a clue.’
“‘Yes, but it sounds good’, she said.” Incidentally, there isn’t any discrepancy in the fact that one of the Romanov dynasty spells her name Romanoff. She changed it after she and her family arrived in Britain and has been happy with it ever since.
Yet, during her time in such places as Banchory, Aberdeen and Inverness, she grew accustomed to dealing with attention and even competition from others with royal blood.
As she explained: “In 1968, the guards’ depot at Ballater gave a small, fairly informal dance for Prince Charles and Princess Anne. Although I was never formally introduced, she was aware of me, because we were both attracted to the same handsome young subaltern.
“He would often escort one or other of us to various balls. At this particular dance, we all came together in an eightsome reel. Anne and I were holding hands going round in a circle and just as we turned, she lifted the royal foot and walloped me on the shin. The pain was excruciating. I had the bruises for weeks.
“But I loved Scotland. We went all over the north and I am one of those who believe in the Loch Ness Monster.
“It’s a very deep place, with all these caves, and I just feel there is something there. In fact, my maternal grandmother, Sylvia, saw the monster from a window, through a mirror.
“So I have an open mind. I also went to Glencoe and Culloden and the former was one of the spookiest places I’ve ever been to.”
At that time, Olga admitted she was used to being ensnared in what was then referred to as “squeezing”, but is now viewed as sexual harassment.
“Anne and I were holding hands going round in a circle and... she lifted the royal foot and walloped me on the shin”
And yet, although the recent scandal surrounding disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein has sparked outrage, Olga seems surprised at the fuss.
She said: “It has all got a bit ridiculous. During my teenage years and later, men regularly used to pat me on the bottom or give me a little squeeze, and if you didn’t want them to bother you, you just told them firmly ‘no thanks’.
“Don’t get me wrong, this Weinstein is obviously a creep. He is unattractive and what he has done is unacceptable. But who are all these actresses complaining 20 or 30 years later about how they were treated? I know times have changed. But women should be able to tell men where to get off straight away. I can’t imagine why you would store it up for decades.”
Almost 20 years ago, with the help of English Heritage and by selling a few valuable Romanov pieces, she under-
took the restoration of Provender House, but describes this as being like “painting the Forth Bridge”.
At the outset, especially after the death of her mother, aged 92, in 2000, the task seemed herculean. As she recalled: “It had become a semi-ruin.” But she persevered and, as she added: “By the time we moved back in, it was wobbly, and we had to carry out extensive work. You got to the end of one wing and then you would have to start on another one.”
Olga declared she would relish a return to Scotland to reunite with some of the people she met in the 1960s and 1970s.
As she explained: “Mother used to get the Press and Journal delivered every week for more than 33 years – even when we were back down in Kent – so the north of Scotland had a big influence on us.”
A Wild and Barefoot Romanov is published by Shepheard Walwyn