by Kerrie Alexander
Mary Ann Orchard was born in 1830 at Fordington which is now a suburb of Dorchester, the county town of Dorset in southern England. She was almost four when her father died and two years later she gained a step-father when her mother Jane married David Pitman, a shoemaker. In the 1841 census she was living with her family in Mill Street, Fordington which was said to have been a slum area.
By 1851 she, like her elder brother George, had moved to the Channel Islands and was a servant in the household of Reverend John Coghlan, the rector of St James Chapel, St Saviour on the isle of Jersey. It is difficult to know where Mary Ann was over the next fifteen years and I haven’t been able to find her in the 1861 census.
However, it was in 1866 that Mary Ann took up a position as a nurse to a family that would change her life forever and leave her as a witness to many of history’s climactic events. Mary Ann became a royal nurse! But how did a girl from the slums of Fordington join a royal household? Perhaps Mary Ann had moved on in the world of domestic service to become a nanny in the homes of other clergymen who were perhaps linked in some way to royal service and thereby came to the notice of the household of Queen Victoria.
In 1866 she received the following telegram: the queen has sent for you to see if you will suit Princess Alice. Come here by the first train tomorrow morning. Mary Ann duly arrived on the Isle of Wight, was interviewed and found acceptable to become nanny to Princess Alice’s children.1
The book From Cradle to Crown: British Nannies and Governesses at the World’s Royal Court has many references to Mary Ann and I have extracted some of them for this article.
Nothing was said of her life before 1866, when she was found by Queen Victoria to replace Elizabeth Moffatt as nurse to the Hesse children; she must either have been working for someone known to one of the Queen’s ladies or she herself may have known one of the royal nurses.2
Princess Alice was the third child of Queen Victoria and had married Louis Grand Duke of Hesse in 1862. They had seven children: Victoria, Elizabeth (Ella), Irene, Ernest Louis, Friedrich, Alexandra (Alix) and Marie (May).
Hesse was involved in the Austro-Prussian War which took place in 1866 and led to Prussian dominance over the German states. For their safety Alice’s two daughters travelled to England to stay with their grandmother and it was during this time that Queen Victoria engaged Mary Ann Orchard as a nurse to her two little granddaughters.
Mary Ann evidently proved a satisfactory nurse to the children during their time in England for when they returned to their home she remained with them and travelled to Darmstadt, in Hesse. As Alice’s family increased so Mary’s duties also increased but she probably had a number of under-nurses to assist her. Princess Alice was a devoted mother and spent as much time with her children as she could. The children called Mary Ann ‘Orchie’ and although she was strict she was deeply loved by the family.
‘I can’t praise Orchard enough’, Princess Alice told her mother in April 1867. ‘Such order she keeps, and is so industrious and tidy, besides understanding so much about the management of the children’s health and characters.’3
The nurseries were large, lofty rooms, very plainly furnished. Mrs. Mary Anne Orchard ruled the nursery. She was the ideal head nurse, sensible, quiet, enforcing obedience, not disdaining punishment, but kind though firm. She gave the children that excellent nursery training which leaves a stamp for life. Mrs. Orchard had fixed hours for everything; and the children’s day was strictly divided in such a way as to allow them to take advantage of every hour that their mother could spare for them.4
However not all was sunshine in the family of the Hesse children. Princess Alice’s fifth child, Friedrich (Fritzie), was a haemophiliac. Haemophilia is an inherited bleeding disorder where the blood doesn’t clot properly. When little Fritzie was two he was playing with his brother near an open first floor window when he climbed onto a chair next to the window. The chair toppled over and Fritzie fell through the open window. He died a few hours later from a brain haemorrhage.
As she struggled to accept what had happened, Princess Alice brought together photographs of Fritzie, one showed a painting with his birth date on the frame, another of Fritzie as a little baby… Fritzie laughing…. growing older…then the last, sad image of Fritzie on his deathbed. These she pasted into the book with handwritten verses that caught her mood. Some of the photographs she framed with bright scrapbook cut-outs of flowers, and she added real flowers too, pressed and sewn onto the page. This book became an intensely personal, painful record, but Alice did not make it for herself. Her dedication reads, ‘For dear Orchard, In remembrance of our darling Fritzie, Alice, June 1873.’5
Her grief at the little boy’s passing only increased Mary Ann’s devotion to the family. We have an interesting glimpse of Mary Ann’s role in the life of the children and in particular the younger Alix with this passage:
The legendary historic nanny of upper-class England was brought across the Channel to reign in the nurseries of the New Palace in the person of Mrs Mary Anne Orchard. Her role was all-important. Mrs Orchard woke Alix each morning; got her bathed and dressed; sent her off to her mother’s room to say good morning; taught her Bible lessons and told her bedtime stories; listened to her joys, and gave comfort in her sorrows – in short what Princess Alice should have and would have done had she not been a royal princess with limitations on her time.
Mrs Orchard had several nursery maids under her. The children must have been terrors, for they went through a rapid succession of nannies before finding Orchie. They had to get up early, for lessons began promptly at seven. Breakfast at nine was hearty: porridge, sausages, and cold meats. Such food was not uncommon. Orchie favoured simple, uncomplicated fare – lunches and dinners, more likely than not, included beef, rice, boiled potatoes and baked apples.
Alice was less and less a part of her children’s lives. She was increasingly gone from the palace. When she was home, she spent her days in bed suffering from exhaustion. She never really recovered from the death of Fritzie four years earlier and her children felt it keenly. Alix saw far more of Orchie than she did of her mother.6
Alice’s last child, May, was born in 1874 and four years later diphtheria was to strike the family. The Grand Duke and all the children except Ella fell ill and little May died. Princess Alice wrote to her mother ‘This is so dreadful, my sweet, precious Alicky so ill. At three this morning Orchie called me, saying she thought the child was feverish; complaining of her throat. I went over to her, looked into her throat, and there was not only spots but a thick covering on each side of her throat of that horrid white membrane’.7
Queen Victoria wrote in a letter to her eldest daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia, that as Alice was comforting her son Ernest after telling him of May’s death she too contracted diphtheria. Worn out from nursing her children and the burdens she took upon herself in assisting her husband to advance their Grand Duchy Alice did not have the strength to fight the illness and passed away in December 1878 at the age of 35.
This meant that the children, and particularly Alix, who was only six at the time, looked to Orchie even more for much of the love and affection previously given to them by their mother.
Mary Ann received a medal in 1885, possibly the General Honor Decoration awarded by the Grand Duke of Hesse for services to his family. She remained as nurse until around 1886 when Alix was about fifteen but was so beloved by the family that she remained in Darmstadt as a companion. There is a photograph taken of Alix as she prepared for her first ball in 1889. Arranging her hair is Mary Ann Orchard, while her sister Grand Duchess Ella of Russia supervised.
Alix had met the heir to the Russian throne, Nicholas at her sister Ella’s wedding in 1884 to the Grand Duke Serge of Russia. On a visit to her sister in Russia in 1889 they fell in love and married shortly after Nicholas became Tsar in 1894. So attached was Alix to Mary Ann that when she moved to Russia to start her new life as an Empress, Mary Ann accompanied her. It was said Her only friend was Mrs Orchard who had come from Darmstadt to stay with her.8
Mary Ann helped to dress her Princess for her wedding in the elaborate costume traditional at the Russian Court. A year after the marriage a daughter, Olga was born to Alix and Nicholas and Orchie was given overall control of the nursery. It was said the baby was especially fond of ‘Orchie’ smiling broadly whenever she caught sight of her.
However, age was catching up with Mary Ann, she was now in her late sixties and her days of actually nursing Alix’s growing family were over.
One day when Alix’s children were playing rather noisily old Mrs Orchard, who had brought up the Tsaritsa, came into the room. She began to rebuke the nurse for letting them romp, and declared that their mother had never made such a noise in all her life. The nurse replied ‘We have all heard so often that the Tsaritsa was a perfect angel when she was a child, but she has given me human children to look after’.9
Mary Ann had returned to England and particularly Dorset at various times over the years. She made her will there in 1899 and added a codicil in 1903. She was staying with her nephew Henry when she died in Essex on 8 August 1906 aged 76. Her room, Orchie’s Room, at the Alexander Palace outside of St Petersburg remained preserved until the Revolution.10
Thankfully Mary Ann did not live to see the revolution that swept through Russia in 1917 and resulted in the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917. Nicholas, Alexandra and their five children were taken prisoner and eventually moved to Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains where they and their servants were all brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks on the night of 17 July 1918. Mary Ann would have been horrified and heart-broken had she known the fate of her beloved Alix and her family.
Mary Ann’s will, in which she stated she was a ‘Nurse in the Household of the Empress of Russia of St Petersburg Russia’, recorded her many bequests. Her two god-daughters were mentioned, as were members of her brother’s families. Mary Ann was buried in East London and a beautiful Celtic cross headstone was erected by the children she had so lovingly nursed in Hesse.11
1. ↑ Email from Frances Wood September 2016. [Her husband is a descendant of Mary Ann’s brother, Henry Orchard.]
2. ↑ Zeepvat, Charlotte From cradle to crown : British nannies and governesses at the world’s royal courts. Sutton, Stroud, 2006.
3. ↑Zeepvat, op. cit., p.131.
4. ↑ Buksgevden, Sofiiā Karlovna baronessa The life & tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna : empress of Russia. Longmans, Green and Co, London ; New York [etc.], 1928.
5. ↑ Zeepvat, op. cit., p.130.
6. ↑ Greg King The last empress the life and times of Alexandra Feodorovna, Tsarina of Russia. New York Carol Pub. Group, 1994.
7. ↑ HRH the Princess Alice: Letters pub 1885
8. ↑ King, op. cit.
9. ↑ http://forum.alexanderpalace.org/index.php?topic=2412.msg495825#msg495825
10. ↑ http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/charlotte-zeepvat/books/romanov-autumn-stories-from-the-last-century-of-imperial-russia
11. ↑ Find a Grave, database and images (www.findagrave.com/memorial/126186575/mary_ann-orchard : accessed 20 July 2021), memorial page for Mary Ann Orchard (20 Mar 1830–8 Aug 1906), Find a Grave Memorial ID 126186575, citing Manor Park Cemetery and Crematorium, Forest Gate, London Borough of Newham, Greater London, England ; Maintained by Iain MacFarlaine (contributor 46514200) .
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