In 1987, the British public learned that Queen Elizabeth II’s severely disabled cousins had spent most of their lives in a mental hospital — allegedly hidden from the outside world for decades.
Fair UseNerissa (left) and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, the “hidden” cousins of Queen Elizabeth II.
In 1987, the British tabloid The Sun published a shocking story.
Instead of juicy drama about Princess Diana’s troubled marriage, the public received the disturbing news that Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, cousins of Queen Elizabeth II, had been wrongly declared dead nearly a quarter century ago. Not only had they both survived much longer than originally thought, they had spent much of their lives in a mental hospital.
Nerissa and Katherine, born in 1919 and 1926, respectively, had developmental disabilities that were so severe they only ever reached a mental age of six years old. Apparently hoping to hide this from the public, their mother, Fenella Bowes-Lyon, had them institutionalized. Later, Nerissa and Katherine were wrongly recorded as deceased in the 1963 edition of Burke’s Peerage, which claimed the sisters perished in 1940 and 1961.
However, the ugly truth was revealed in 1987, just a year after Nerissa’s real death in 1986. Katherine, who was still alive but frail, was photographed for The Sun, and the widely distributed image shocked the British public. The controversy led to allegations of a scandalous royal cover-up, an eye-opening documentary about the disabled women, and even a scene in the hit Netflix series The Crown that featured the “hidden” sisters.
The Early Lives Of Nerissa And Katherine Bowes-Lyon — And Their Institutionalization
Chronicle/Alamy Stock PhotoFenella Bowes-Lyon and two of her children, Anne (left) and Nerissa (right).
Nerissa Bowes-Lyon was born on February 18, 1919 in London. She was the daughter of John Herbert Bowes-Lyon (the Queen Mother’s brother) and Fenella Bowes-Lyon. On July 4, 1926, the couple welcomed Katherine Bowes-Lyon. The couple also had three other daughters.
Soon after both Nerissa and Katherine were born, their developmental disabilities became apparent. The two girls were ultimately non-verbal, and that, combined with their limited cognitive abilities, led their relatives to believe that they had a severe hereditary condition, which was likely passed down from their maternal grandfather Charles Trefusis.
Later, Nerissa and Katherine’s professional caretakers discussed their disabilities — which were never precisely diagnosed — in more detail.
“They didn’t have any speech, but they’d point and make noises, and when you knew them, you could understand what they were trying to say. Today, they’d probably be given speech therapy and they’d communicate much better. They understood more than you’d think,” Onelle Braithwaite, a nurse who cared for the girls, stated, according to the Daily Mail.
Another caretaker named Dot Penfold said, “They were no problem to look after but they were mischievous, like naughty children. Katherine was a scallywag. You could scream at her and she’d turn a deaf ear.”
At the time, many families went to great lengths to hide their disabled relatives from the public eye. For a family with ties to the British royals, this was even more of a priority. The Bowes-Lyon sisters were first cousins of Queen Elizabeth II through Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (known as the Honourable Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon prior to her marriage to King George VI), Queen Elizabeth II’s mother. The girls’ father, John Herbert Bowes-Lyon, was the Queen Mother’s brother.
Given that it was then common practice for aristocratic families to hide certain relatives from society to avoid embarrassment, Nerissa and Katherine weren’t the only ones with ties to the royals to be tucked away. In 1916, King George V had sent his son, Prince John, away to the family’s Wood Farm at Sandringham Estate, due to the child’s severe epilepsy.
For the Bowes-Lyon sisters, the decision to institutionalize them came at the hands of their mother, Fenella, years after their father died from pneumonia in 1930. The girls were initially sent to Arniston School, an institution that was specially designed for the disabled children of aristocratic families.
But then, in 1941, the Bowes-Lyon sisters were moved to the Royal Earlswood Mental Hospital in Redhill, Surrey when Nerissa was 22 years old and Katherine was 15 years old. Curiously, Fenella’s sister, Harriet, had her three daughters, who had a similar disability, institutionalized there on the same day. Nerissa and Katherine would be virtually hidden until 1963, when the publication Burke’s Peerage, a reference book about the British aristocracy, listed Nerissa and Katherine as having died in 1940 and 1961.
Nearly a quarter century later, in 1987, it was revealed that Nerissa had actually died just one year earlier in 1986 — and Katherine was still alive.
How The Ugly Truth Was Revealed To The Public
PA Images/Alamy Stock PhotoThe Royal Earlswood Mental Hospital in Redhill, Surrey.
In 1987, a photographer from The Sun posed as a relative of Katherine Bowes-Lyon and successfully gained access to her facility. The British public had long believed that both Katherine and her sister Nerissa had died many years ago, but there was now clear evidence that Katherine was still alive. And while Nerissa was dead, she had died only a year prior.
Before long, a photograph of Katherine, looking weak and confused, appeared on the front page of The Sun with the headline: “Queen’s Cousin Locked in Madhouse.” A scandalous story soon unfolded in the media.
Not only were the sisters institutionalized, but they had apparently been hidden from the public for decades, and they were also wrongly declared dead. This sent shockwaves through the U.K. and led to a harsh backlash against the Bowes-Lyon family — and allegations of a royal cover-up. The public wanted to know how and why the women were recorded as deceased and why their family members had seemingly abandoned them.
Buckingham Palace released a simple statement regarding the news: “We have no comment about it at all. It is a matter for the Bowes-Lyon family.” Meanwhile, the Bowes-Lyon family was scrambling to do damage control.
Daily Mail The Daily Mail reports on Queen Elizabeth II’s “hidden” cousins in 1987.
Some relatives suggested that Fenella Bowes-Lyon had wrongly declared her daughters dead by accident, perhaps filling out forms for Burke’s Peerage in an incomplete manner. Later, other relatives fought back against allegations that no one in the family had ever visited the sisters at Earlswood.
Lady Elizabeth Anson, for instance, insisted that “there was no attempt at a cover-up” and that many relatives had visited the sisters regularly. But a general manager for the East Surrey Health Authority said, “Both sisters had regular visits from their families up until the early 1960s, when one of their closest relatives died. Since then, they have had few visitors.”
Dot Penfold, a former ward sister at the hospital where the Bowes-Lyon sisters stayed, also said that they went years without visitors: “The impression I had was that they’d been forgotten.”
Meanwhile, some members of the public argued that the sisters never should have been housed at the Royal Earlswood Mental Hospital in the first place. Since its inception, the hospital had a notorious reputation for being overcrowded and even faced allegations of abuse.
The Heartbreaking Legacy Of Nerissa And Katherine Bowes-Lyon
Andrew Stehrenberger/Alamy Stock PhotoThe cemetery where Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon were buried.
When Nerissa Bowes-Lyon died at Earlswood at age 66 in 1986 — just one year before The Sun story came out — no one from her family attended her funeral. She was laid to rest at Redhill Cemetery and given a meager grave consisting of a plastic marker with her surname and a serial number.
Though Katherine was still alive when the news about the sisters broke, much of her life was reportedly lonely, even after her fate was revealed.
An administrator at the mental hospital where Katherine lived described her as “an elderly, frail old lady, one who finds it very difficult perhaps to understand this sort of thing [and] what’s going on in the world around her. She’s really little more than a child,” according to Vanity Fair.
That same administrator claimed that Katherine had not been visited by a family member since the 1960s, and even after the story broke, there was still no evidence she had received any visits from relatives.
Netflix The Bowes-Lyon sisters were portrayed by Pauline Hendrickson and Trudie Emery in the Netflix show The Crown.
In 2011, a documentary called The Queen’s Hidden Cousins premiered on British television. The film sought to unpack the broader historical trend of U.K. society’s upper crust apparently hiding disabled family members.
Just a few years after the film’s release, Katherine Bowes-Lyon died on February 23, 2014, at age 87. Though she had been living in a different facility by that point, she was ultimately buried close to her sister.
The sisters’ story came to light once again in 2020, with the release of “The Hereditary Principle,” the seventh episode of the fourth season of Netflix’s The Crown, a fictional retelling of Queen Elizabeth II’s life story.
In one scene, Queen Elizabeth II’s sister Princess Margaret confronts the Queen Mother after learning about Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon being hidden from the public. The Queen Mother replies, “Their illness, their idiocy and imbecility, would make people question the integrity of the bloodline. Can you imagine the headlines if it were to get out?” This conversation is completely imagined. Still, it does speak to the attitudes about severely disabled people in the mid-20th century. The sisters, who never received an exact diagnosis, had indeed been medically labeled as “imbeciles.”
In another scene, the actresses playing the Bowes-Lyon sisters watch a television broadcast in which Queen Elizabeth II appears. The women salute the television, only stopping when nurses arrive to hand them medication.
After reading about Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, dive into the story of Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of JFK who was institutionalized after receiving a botched lobotomy. Then, read about Frances Farmer, the troubled Hollywood starlet who was institutionalized at the height of her career.