Mad Blood

Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon were born in 1919 and 1926, the daughters of John Herbert Bowes-Lyon, a brother of the future Queen Mother. That made them first cousins of Queen Elizabeth II. Both had severe intellectual disabilities and never developed past the level of a small child. Their father died in 1930, and in 1941 their mother, Fenella, had them admitted to the Royal Earlswood Institution at Redhill in Surrey.

Three daughters of their mother’s sister were admitted the same day. The 1963 edition of Burke’s Peerage, the standard reference on British aristocratic families, recorded Nerissa as having died in 1940 and Katherine in 1961. Both were alive at Earlswood. Family visits were already rare by the early 1960s, and they stopped after Fenella died in 1966. Nerissa died on January 22, 1986, at sixty-six; only hospital staff attended her funeral, and her grave carried a plastic marker with a serial number.

In April 1987 The Sun reported that Katherine was still living, aged sixty, and the false death entries became a national story. Buckingham Palace said little. Katherine moved in 1996 to a care home called Ketwin House and, after it closed in 2001, to another home in Surrey. She died there on February 23, 2014, at eighty-seven. Within weeks of the newspaper story the family paid for a proper headstone on Nerissa’s grave.