Alexandra wrote to Pollie for her twenty-fourth birthday.
The date, too, is significant – June 14 1894. Louise was specifically mentioned, in Alexandra’s letter to Pollie, written from Harrogate. The letter was contained within the 1968 biography of Alexandra’s niece, Princess Louise of Battenberg, youngest daughter of Alexandra’s eldest sister, Victoria, Princess Louis of Battenberg, written by the Swedish author Margit Fjellman, Louise Mountbatten, Queen of Sweden.įjellman mentions ‘Aunt Alix’ because Princess Louise of Battenberg was sent in 1894 on a cure to Bad Kreuznach for a month with her other siblings, to take the waters. I became intrigued by this friendship back in 2004 when I came quite by chance, across a single letter from Alexandra to Pollie, whilst researching the cure that the future Tsarina made in Harrogate in 1894, prior to her marriage to the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, an event which – whilst deeply happy for the young couple in personal terms – was expedited by the shock death of Tsar Alexander III in Livadia. Much less is known about this particular friendship of the future Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia, and even in most biographies of the Tsarina, footnotes or remote references to Pollie are all but scarce. Pollie was born in 1870, two years before Alix. Pollie was seemingly of royal descent her medieval ancestor was George, Duke of Clarence, brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV.
With these words, Princess Alix most probably refers to her friend, Marion Louisa ‘Pollie’ Delmé-Radcliffe, Baroness Ungern-Sternberg. Princess Alix of Hesse paused to add these words, almost as an afterthought, to a letter to her close friend, Toni Becker-Bracht, from Balmoral, on 27 September 1892. ‘ Where is Pollie?’ (Lotte Hofmann-Kuhnt, Briefe der Zarin Alexandra von Russland an ihre Jugendfreundin Toni Becker-Bracht, 2009).
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