Princess Olga

"Princess Olga Romanoff, is the daughter of the eldest nephew of Tsar Nicholas II, murdered with his family by the Bolsheviks in 1918. She is the youngest child of the late Prince Andrei Alexandrovich of Russia, who was born in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1897. He fled Russia in 1918 with his pregnant (first) wife and his father, Grand Duke Alexander Michaelovich, while his mother, Grand Duchess Xenia, and his grandmother, Her Imperial Highness Maria Feodorovna, followed a year later. The fabled Romanov jewels that they were able to smuggle out had to be sold and the exiled family lived for some time at various grace-and-favour homes at Windsor and Hampton Court. The book is peppered with amusing anecdotes about the Royal Family, their British cousins. The reader will also get a glimpse of the Princess's cosseted childhood. She was looked after by a number of nannies and then privately educated at home for fear of mixing with ordinary local children. My mother was a frightful snob, says Princess Olga, who rebelled, and who still laughs about one of her mother's ambitions: to marry her off to Prince Charles! It was indeed an unusual upbringing with a snobbish and strict mother of Scottish and Scandinavian background, and a more relaxed and indulgent Romanov father whose occupation was stated as 'Prince of Russia' on Olga's birth certificate. Her home, Provender House is crammed full of fascinating Romanov memorabilia, from the crockery used by the tsar and his family during their final captivity in Ekaterinburg, to the diamond blade penknife used for scratching the news of Prince Andrei's birth on a window pane in the Winter Palace - still there for visitors to see. The rambling 30-room Provender House, now open to the public, has indeed been witness to some extraordinary tales - many of them hitherto untold - handed down by Princess Olga's father." — provided by publisher.