The Telegram King Charles's grandmother sent on his birth

Time of India

21 hours ago

King Charles became the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom and 14 other Commonwealth realms on May 6th, 2023. The 76-year-old king has faced quite a lot of ups and downs in his life whose occurrence has been very public.
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Out of his entire family, he is surely the one whose life has been covered by the media a lot, be it as a king, husband, father or brother.
He was born on November 14, 1948, to the Queen and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace. While the others may have gotten the news of the birth of the Queen's eldest child through an official statement or word of mouth, King Charles' grandmother got to know about his arrival in a very unique way.
A royal biographer recently revealed that King Charles' grandmother Princess Alice, was living on a remote Greek island when the future monarch was born and found out about his birth through a telegram.
The mother of the Duke of Edinburgh was reportedly thrilled to finally receive the news of her grandson's birth.
The Telegram King Charles' grandmother sent on his birth
Image credits: Getty Images
As a member of the Greek Royal Family, Alice spent the whole of the Second World War in Athens. However, by 1948, she was residing in Tinos- a small island in the Aegean Sea where she had no access to a telephone.
As soon as she received the news of her grandson's birth, Princess Alice wrote back to Prince Philip, as per the royal biographer Ingrid Seward.
She sent a telegram back to the royal palace, writing, 'I think of you so much with a sweet baby of your own, of your joy and the interest you will take in all his little doings.
'How fascinating nature is, but how one has to pay for it in the anxious trying hours of confinement.'
Alice went on to live on the island for another 20 years before going back to the UK in 1967.
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Who was Princess Alice?
Image credits: Getty Images
Princess Alice of Battenberg was born Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Mary on February 25th, 1885 at Windsor Castle in the presence of her great-grandmother Queen Victoria. Her life as a royal is one of the most remarkable ones in royal history.
She was born congenitally deaf but grew up to speak clearly and lip-read in multiple languages.
While attending the Coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, she met Prince Andrew, the younger son of the King of Greece, fell in love with him and the couple got married a year later.
However, she married into the Greek royal family at a time when the family was exiled from the country in 1921, the same year Prince Philip was born.
By 1930, the Princess' health deteriorated to the extent that she was hearing voices and was having intimate relationships with Jesus and other religious figures. She was diagnosed as Schizophrenic before being treated by Sigmund Freud at a clinic in Berlin.
When she was released from the Sanatorium in 1932, she lived in some German B&Bs before eventually returning to Athens following the restoration of the Greek monarchy. She was stranded in Nazi-occupied Greece throughout the Second World War. During that time, she proved instrumental in aiding the escape of several Jews from Greece.
Following the war, she sold the rest of her jewels to create her own religious order, the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary in 1949 and became a nun.