The Queen’s hidden cousins.
Two noteable persons were also inmates at the Royal Earlswood the Asylum where James Henry Pullen and his brother William Pullen had been resident.
Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, the daughters of John Bowes-Lyon - the lady they referred as their Auntie was Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon who would become Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. The girls were first cousins of Queen Elizabeth II.
The girls, were sent to the Royal Earlswood in 1941. Prior to this date, the sisters were kept away from public events and once they were admitted to the asylum were officially denied. The staff noted that the girls never had visitors or received birthday or Christmas cards, and in fact in the 1963 edition of Burkes Peerage, they were both listed as being dead, and details of their deaths were falsely recorded so that after a couple of decades of being institutionlised, they had been successfully wiped from any official records.
In 1986 when Nerissa died, she did not even have a proper gravestone and her burial plot was marked with plastic tags until the public got to know of her origins and the Royal Family then gave her a proper gravestone.
In 2014, Katherine Bowes-Lyon died and this was unannounced for several months. It would seem fair to say, although very unfair, that Katherine’s death as well as her life was kept well hidden.
Click on the link below to see a documentary of the Queens Hidden Cousins.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL71FCF1933D8D8362
