On 17 July 1917, an announcement from Britain’s royal family appeared in The Times of London: “Whereas we, having taken into consideration the Name and Title of Our Royal House and Family, have determined that henceforth Our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor. And do hereby further declare and announce that We relinquish and enjoin the discontinuance of the use of the Degrees, Styles, Dignities, Titles and Honours of Dukes and Duchesses of Saxony and Princes and Princesses of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and all other German Degrees, Styles, Dignities. Titles, Honours and Appellations to Us or to them heretofore belonging or appertaining.”
With the royal wedding between Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Windsor scheduled for May 19, it’s interesting to delve into why the British royals changed their surname in 1917 from the German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. The British royal family is in fact German. Queen Elizabeth II’s grandfather King George V spoke English with a guttural German accent. He was fluent though in German. During
WW I, the British government, which had kept the royal family’s German ancestry well-hidden from the general British public, could no longer do so.
As a report by Susan Flantzer put it: “By 1917, anti-German sentiment had reached a fevered pitch in the UK. The British Royal Family’s dynastic name had gone from one German name to another, the House of Hanover to the decidedly more Germanic-sounding, House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Many British people felt that this implied a pro-German bias. Even Prime Minister David Lloyd George remarked as he was on his way to see King George V, ‘I wonder what my little German friend has got to say.’ Letters were pouring into the Prime Minister’s office wondering how the British were going to win the war if the king was German.”
As WW I raged, not only did the British royals change their surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor but they asked royal relatives to follow suit. First in line was the father of the last Viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten, a cousin of the British royals. The Mountbattens’ family name was the Germanic Battenberg. In English berg means mountain—hence the quick anglicisation to Mountbatten. Had the family retained its original name, the last Viceroy of India would have been Lord Battenberg and the British monarch at Indian Independence King George Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
Why does all this matter? For several reasons. First, it exposes the deep hypocrisy and xenophobia of the British elite. Meghan, whose mother is black, is being projected as the symbol of plural, global Britain, at peace with its ethnic diversity. But subtle racism continues to infect British life at every level, from royalty to the yob on the street.
In his recent article in Vanity Fair, journalist Aatish Taseer, who had a three-year-long relationship with Princess Michael Kent’s daughter Lady Gabriella Windsor, exposed the petty racism that courses through the British bloodstream: “Princess Michael—recently in trouble again, for wearing a racist blackamoor brooch to her first lunch with Meghan—was famously scandal-prone. It was not that her father had allegedly been an SS officer, albeit a reluctant one; royals and Nazis go together like blini and caviar. It was that everyone above a certain age in Britain is at least a tiny bit racist. The colonial past made it almost second nature for Britons born at the tail end of the Raj to treat roughly a quarter of the planet as subject peoples. I was one of the first natives of that former empire to be dating a member of the royal family...(Princess Michael’s) pair of black sheep in Gloucestershire were named Venus and Serena.”
The racism drips down through the British establishment. Last week Britain’s Home Secretary Amber Rudd was forced to resign following the Windrush scandal. Dating back to 1971, the Windrush affair was a disgraceful British policy seeking “voluntary” deportation of black Commonwealth citizens who had arrived in Britain from 1948 to 1971 in response to Britain’s call to ease its post-war labour shortage. Around 1,30,000 mainly Caribbean immigrants are being targeted for deportation. Some have been placed in detention centres. British PM Theresa May as home secretary in 2012 tightened immigration rules. Her successor Rudd made it obligatory for landlords, employers and healthcare service providers to list immigrants who didn’t have paperwork when they arrived in Britain as children 60 years ago and now face deportation.
The Windrush scandal couldn’t have come at a worse time for next week’s royal wedding expected to showcase the ethnic diversity of bride Meghan. US President Donald Trump hasn’t been invited. Ironically, Trump is half-German and half-British himself. His mother Mary Anne Macleod sailed to the US from a small Scottish island in 1930 and in 1936 married his father Fred Trump whose family is from Bavaria in Germany. Like the British royals, the Trumps too changed their surname.
In his 2004 book, Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, Trump wrote: “A lot has been written about my family. A writer named Gwenda Blair spent twelve years on her thorough history, The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire. She even traced our lineage back to 1608, when a German lawyer named Hanns Drumpf settled in the town of Kallstadt, forty miles west of the Rhine river. According to Blair, one of my ancestors, a winegrower, changed the family name to Trump at the end of the 1600s—a good move, I think, since Drumpf Tower doesn’t sound nearly as catchy.”
Meghan, the talented daughter of a mixed marriage, would smile indulgently were she reminded that if the British royals she’s marrying into hadn’t changed their surname 101 years ago, she’d be known from next Saturday as Princess Meghan Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
Minhaz Merchant
The author is an editor and publisher
Tweets @MinhazMerchant