‘I would have been a lousy imperial princess’: Meet Olga Romanoff, the Queen’s 'rebellious' cousin

There are moments in our cultural history that merit the question: “Where were you when?” The assassination of JFK, the outbreak of the Second World War, England winning the World Cup, the Queen’s Coronation. On the morning the Duke of Edinburgh died, four weeks ago, I was, quite by chance, visiting one of his cousins, Princess Olga Romanoff.

There to discuss the new documentary she appears in tomorrow night, The Queen and Her Cousins (she is also related to Her Majesty), Olga, as she prefers to be known, had spoken warmly all morning about the Windsor branch of her extended family, particularly the “quite divine” Prince Philip, whom she only met once but always admired. “I would love to have met [him] when he was younger because he is almost a hero of mine,” she said.

“I just think he’s wonderful because A, he’s very good-looking. B, he doesn’t take bullsh--. He says it how it is even if he gets into trouble.”

Moments after I had driven away from our interview, the news breaks that the Duke had died. I return to Provender House, Olga’s 13th-century mansion in the Kent countryside, to find her in tears. “He was nearly 100 so it wasn’t totally unexpected but he did so much and he was the Queen’s backbone and shoulder and he’ll be just terribly missed,” she says.

“Prince Philip was years younger than my Pa [Prince Andrew, Tsar Nicholas II’s eldest nephew, who escaped Russia on a British warship in 1919] but they were quite closely related on two sides, the Danish and the Russian. “I just feel terribly sorry for the Queen and the family, the children. Princess Anne was very close to her father. One could look up to him. Poor all of us. And they can’t even have a decent funeral.”

Before then, Olga had been on rip-roaring form. A no-nonsense, sharply witty woman, she was born Princess Olga Andreevna Romanoff, but has not lived the regal life of her Windsor relations. She would have made a “lousy imperial princess”, she says, “because I would rather shovel sh-- than have to be very charming and dressed up on a daily basis.”

She now lives alone at Provender, taking groups of tourists around her childhood home as her mother did before her, and renting out what was once the servants’ wing on Airbnb – “a necessity”, so it earns its keep.

“I did always say I’d never do anybody else’s dirty washing – it’s bad enough doing my family’s – but needs must and so I do it,” she says. “I sometimes have to take the sheets off, too.”

Fantastically forthright, she argues with her branding as the Queen’s “rebellious” cousin. “I’ve never done drugs! I didn’t even smoke pot in the Sixties, which was the time to have done it. Too late now, because it’s so strong. I never took to drink. Didn’t screw around. It’s all very depressing,” she concludes, of opportunities missed. “Underneath, [rebellion] was there. I would like to have given two fingers.”

Growing up, Olga, now 71, was named a possible bride for her third cousin, Prince Charles. “He wasn’t really [my] type,” she says. “Harper’s and Queen were doing a piece on foreign suitable princesses. My mother was the one that did the speaking, I didn’t know anything about it. I was only interested in horses – she put me down as a sculler. I couldn’t row. Mother was born in 1908. It was unladylike to only want to be on a horse.”

It’s a passion she shares with the Windsors, particularly the Queen and Princess Anne, who once kicked her in the shin during a dance. “We both were chasing the same [man]. Doing an eightsome together at the barracks, I was a little slow on the turn and the royal foot came out and kicked me. I admire her enormously now. She’s sensible. There’s no bullsh-- with her, either.” Charles, she feels, will make a very good king – “Poor man, he’s going to be quite old by the time he [does]" – and she is a fan of the Duchess of Cornwall, too, having first met her in 1969 at a cousin’s coming out dance. “She was pretty, funny, tanned, swore like a trooper then, like me, and we both smoked.”

Do they, these people whom she only knew a little as a young woman, feel like cousins, I ask?

“No. Well, I don’t know, I have so many cousins in all directions, I don’t know what a cousin feels like. You either like people or you don’t.”

She gives me a tour of Provender, which belonged to her grandmother, Constance Borgström, who bought it “on Finnish money” in 1921 from the Brabourns (also related to the Mountbattens). It’s both a British manor house and a living museum to Imperial Russia. There is something of Olga here, too – a swear box sits on a side table, and a plaque above a door reads “It’s not easy being the princess.” “The cleaners put, underneath it, ‘it’s much harder being the cleaner’,” she notes. A statue of her great-great grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, is topped with a feather hat. “Because this room is so bl---- cold I thought it would be a good idea to keep his little head warm.”

Paintings of tsarinas line the walls; cabinets are filled with china that “Nicholas [the last tsar, and first cousin of George V] and family ate off”. On a landing sit the trunks from HMS Marlborough, the naval frigate sent to rescue the remaining members of the Imperial family after the tsar, his wife and five children were executed by the Bolsheviks, and which contained “b----- all. Some Fabergé jewels which they sold for food. My grandmother, Xenia, had a moderately good collection which over the years dwindled, and they got away with their lives”.

“There’s Nick and George,” she says, pointing to a photograph of the Queen’s grandfather with his Russian cousin. “It was for the Kaiser’s daughter’s wedding – the last time all the European families got together, for a huge wedding. Before the world…” Before it changed forever? “Yes,” she says.

Olga has led a curious life. Hers was a traditional, aristocratic upbringing, but her own children went to state school in Scotland where they lived before she moved back to Provender. Having a princess for a mother wasn’t always easy, her daughter, Alex, who has been staying in lockdown, tells me. “There are some very narrowminded people that automatically assume with title there’s money. We did all get bullied for it. They automatically assumed I was a rich b----.”

Long-separated from her children’s father, Thomas Mathew, Olga has no plans to meet anyone else. “I’m far too old for dating apps,” she says.”

She is “cagey” about discussing her former husband. “I had a fourth child who would now be 32,” she explains, tentatively. “He died of a rare heart defect at 18 months. I stayed in Scotland and Tommy came south. It was fine. I mean, you know, the death of Tom was awful, poor wee boy, but anyway.” It’s one of several moments when Olga betrays a softer side, doting on her two-year-old grandson Andrew and becoming emotional talking about her father and his family. “Papa didn’t really talk enough about Russia,” she says. “I always thought I would have time as I got older, but he died when Alex was born so I never had the chance.”

As our interview winds up, Alex serves cake and tea in a mug which reads “Keep Glam and Rock On”. “Well,” she notes with some understatement, “some of the [others] are rude.”

The Queen and Her Cousins with Alexander Armstrong is on ITV at 9pm on Monday.