Princess Olga: the reality TV royal who could have married Prince Charles
Princess Olga Romanoff is striding around in jeans and a blue gilet, distractedly clutching a phone to her ear. I have just arrived at Provender House, her 13th-century mansion in the Kent countryside, which she opens at regular intervals to the public. “No, you can’t come today,” she is explaining through gritted teeth to a would-be visitor on the other end of the line. “It’s just too cold.”
She cuts the call short. “You have to be so polite,” she sighs, shaking her head. It is not the first adjective I would use to describe her. Colourful, definitely. Entertaining, without question.
When the weather improves, beat a path to Provender. She plays to a tee the eccentric owner of a minor stately home. “If another person asks me why the oak-panelled dining room is called the Oak Room...” she murmurs menacingly.
Call me Olga,” insists the only daughter of the tsar’s eldest nephew, “no one gives a stuff about titles any more”
But it’s much more exotic than that, because this great niece of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, almost the last survivor of her generation of the imperial family, isn’t playing. She has no side. This, she reflects later, in a rare moment of introspection between gales of laughter and occasional barrages of less-than-polite language (as, for example, when her dogs scoff some chocolate biscuits she has left out when her back is turned), is just the way her peculiar upbringing has made her.
“Feisty” is how her publishers refer to the 66-year-old mother-of-three in their pre-publicity for her much anticipated memoir, Princess Olga: A Wild and Barefoot Romanov, due out this autumn. There will, she hints, be revelations in the book, not just about her “wacky” childhood, but also about the betrayal of the deposed tsar by his British first cousin, George V.
In a recent interview on Channel 4’s Royal House of Windsor, she broke down in tears on camera when discussing how the king himself, rather than prime minister Lloyd George as previously believed, had first offered then rescinded safe passage to the Russian royals, effectively signing their death warrant.
The book will be timed to mark the centenary of the October Revolution. Olga – “call me Olga,” she insists, “no one gives a stuff about titles any more” – is the only daughter of the tsar’s eldest nephew, Prince Andrei Alexandrovich, who escaped imprisonment in the Crimea by the Bolsheviks on a British naval frigate, and therefore the subsequent executions.
“Papa” – her cut-glass English accent naturally adds an extra ‘r’ at the end – “used to say to me that one day everything would be okay, but he never went back to Russia. He spoke a lot about his murdered cousins. They were brought up together. They were all the same ages.”
Instead, Prince Andrew Romanoff, as he styled himself thereafter, settled in England and made his own way in the world. The only possessions the fleeing family had been able to bring with them were some jewels, which were quickly sold to their Windsor cousins.
Prince Charles should have had the courage to marry Camilla in the first place. She’s a good egg and suitable.'"
Prince Andrew’s first wife, with whom he had three children, died in 1940 in the London Blitz, but he married again in 1942, to Nadine McDougall, a wealthy heiress from the flour-milling family. “I like food but I don’t do baking. Good God, no,” says Olga today, their only child, born when her father was 54. “I have a friend who does all the cakes for the tourists.”
She scarcely knew her step-siblings, she tells me in a matter-of-fact way over her scruffy kitchen table in the one warm room in the house. She grew up at Provender, a rambling 30-room architectural treasure trove, set in 35 acres, which was in her mother’s family. Instead of sending her to school, her parents employed governesses.
It must have been lonely, I venture. “I had nannies and donkeys and ponies and huge teddy bears,” she replies robustly. “One of my nannies did brilliant tea parties, christenings and weddings for the bears in the cherry orchard. It was Darling Buds of May mixed with Downton Abbey.”
Her mother was a terrible snob, Olga recalls. She once supplied Harpers and Queen with a photograph and a list of her daughter’s accomplishments so that she could feature in a list of European royal princesses suitable as brides for the then bachelor Prince Charles. “She made them up. It said I was a good tennis player. Can’t hit a ball to save my life. It made me so angry.“
In Downton terms, Princess Andrew, as Nadine became on her marriage, was Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess. But what about Olga? “I think I might have been Lady Sybil. [For those who missed it, she was the rebel who ran off with the chauffeur.] That sort of thing. We didn’t have a chauffeur, but I was just as bad.”
An appearance on Australian reality TV series, <Australian Princess> in 2005, doling out advice to royal wannabes, no doubt besmirched the family name. Long before then, she once found herself the love rival of Princess Anne, with whom she shared a teenage love of horses: when both vied for the affections of a dashing young Scottish officer at a Highland Ball, Olga received a swift kick in the ankle from her English cousin.
And the call from Buckingham Palace to set up a date with Prince Charles never came. “He’s a good person,” she says. “He should have had the courage to marry Camilla in the first place. She’s a good egg, and suitable.”
With their shared crown of blond hair, there is definitely something of the Duchess of Cornwall about Olga. Both are stuff-and-nonsense countrywomen who speak as they find and care not a jot about political correctness.
In 1975, Olga married Thomas Mathew and brought up their three children, two boys and a girl, in Scotland. A third and youngest son, Tom, died from a rare heart defect at 18 months. She is not one to dwell on pain or misfortune. “He’d be 29 now,” she says simply.
"Provender House is only not Grade I because Mother refused to let the inspectors, who she regarded as tradesmen, over the front door step”
Neither will she talk about her marriage, though it seems to have ended by 1989. It is, she says firmly and finally in response to my questions, a closed book.
After her father’s death in 1981, her mother had lived on alone at Provender, but in 2000, as she approached her 92nd birthday, Olga came back to care for her. Her childhood playground was in such a state of disrepair that this Grade II*-listed building – “it’s only not Grade I because Mother refused to let the inspectors, who she regarded as tradesmen, over the front door step” – was on the “At Risk” register.
“She was so keeping up appearances that it wasn’t true. Every time I came home, there would be gaps where the furniture had been. Mother was penniless and selling things to survive.”
When Princess Andrew died that summer, Olga made the choice to take on the mammoth task of rescuing Provender, on her own. “I’d always thought that I’d sell the house, but as I walking round with my dogs, looking at things, I thought, ‘You know, it’s really quite nice’. It is home after all.”
With the help of architect, historian and TV presenter, Ptomely Dean, she set about raising grants to do the necessary works, and finding her share of the matched funding required. “I sold Russian stuff left to me by my father. It was bloody but there was no other way forward.”
The Provender that greets visitors today is as much a shrine to the Romanovs as it is a stunning piece of English history. In 1998, Olga went to Russia for the first time, attending the reinterment of her great uncle, Nicholas II. “My father had adored Petersburg and had talked so much about it, so it was like going to a place I knew well.”
This year’s centenary of the Russian Revolution, she says, is not “my sort of thing”. 2018, the 100th anniversary of the murders of the Tsar and his family, is far more significant to her. “I am presuming that the Russians will take the opportunity to bury the bones that they have of his two children, Alexei [Nicholas’ son and heir] and Maria.”
And if they do, she wants to be there. Yet just how Russian does this British-born, British-raised princess really feel? She waves a typically dismissive hand. Feelings, her odd upbringing has taught her, are not something to be aired in public.
“I can only say three words in Russian - yes, no and darling.” But, momentarily, she softens. “Every night, when he put me to bed as a child, my father would kiss my hands and cheeks and say something in Russian. When I go to Russia now, there are occasions when I can hear words that he used to say to me.”
Princess Olga: A Wild and Barefoot Romanov will be published by Shepheard-Walwyn in October. Provender House, Provender Lane, Norton, nr Faversham, Kent ME13 0ST (provenderhouse.co.uk)
