There are few things guaranteed to gain public interest and affection more than a rags to riches story. There’s something eternally heart-warming about seeing a likeable figure, in literature or real life, get the happiness they deserve after facing a long wait or hurdles erected by others.
There’s no-one this is more true for than Princess Lilian of Sweden, Duchess of Halland, one of the most popular members of the Swedish royal family of and a beloved aunt to the King of Sweden and the Queens of Denmark and of Greece.
However, unlike some of the other stories you’ll see on this site, this one does not begin at Tatoi Palace, or Berg Castle, or the Tokyo Imperial Palace.
It begins in a Welsh mining town nearly 110 years ago…
On the 30th of August 1915, Lillian May Davies was born in Swansea, South Wales. Her early years were as far away from royalty as it’s possible to be; she grew up in a terraced house on Garden Street in the city’s slum district (which has since been demolished and has a shopping centre standing in its place) with her father William, who ran a market stall following a stint down Swansea’s coal mines, and her mother Gladys, who worked in a local shop.
By the early 1930s, William had walked out on the family (something Lilian never forgave him for), with Gladys dying of cancer not long after. These events gave Lillian little reason to feel any attachment to her home town; after leaving school at 14 and working in a local laundry house for a short time, she moved to London aged 16 with ambitions to go to into acting and modelling.
Her first job was as a housemaid, like many girls of her age who descended on the city. However, she quickly managed to land on her feet and found work modelling hats and gloves, which eventually led to her being photographed for Vogue magazine and receiving several exciting offers from a number of modelling agencies. Within a few years of arriving in London, she was being compared to Marlene Dietrich, had dropped one of the l’s from her name and met the Scottish actor Ivan Craig, whom she soon married.
However, the outbreak of war completely upheaved Lilian’s life; as well as Ivan being drafted to North Africa to fight Rommel’s Panzer Divisions, she had to give up her glamourous modelling career to help the war effort on the home front. She found herself working in a radio factory making equipment for the Royal Marines, as well as in a military hospital attending to wounded soldiers who’d been brought home from the battlefields.
At a similar time, Prince Bertil of Sweden, Duke of Halland and a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, arrived at the Swedish Embassy in London as the country’s naval attaché.
Lilian first met Bertil in 1943, although the two always disagreed on when exactly their first meeting was; Bertil always maintained it was at Lilian’s flat in Bayswater for her 28th birthday party, while Lilian remembered an earlier crossing of paths at the prestigious London nightclub Les Ambassadeurs, where, upon being told by someone who Bertil was, she reportedly replied ‘and I’m the Queen of Sheba.’ Other stories had them meeting on the London Underground or at another nightclub called Nuthouse.
Wherever they first met, it was clear that the Prince had caught Lilian’s eye; she later remembered the young Bertil as ‘so handsome, my prince, especially in uniform. So charming and thoughtful, and so funny. Oh how we laughed together‘.
The relationship between the two started slowly, with Lilian herself saying that ‘neither of us thought it was going to be very serious‘, until one night during the German bombing raids when Bertil left a dinner at the Dorchester Hotel and turned up at her home in his car to evacuate her from the danger. That, so it is said, is when the romance truly blossomed.
As the war ended and Lilian and Bertil’s relationship became more serious, Ivan Craig returned from overseas and admitted that he too had started another relationship. The couple separated on very amicable terms in 1945 and finalised their divorce two years later.
Bertil returned to Sweden after the war and Lilian followed him within a few years, both of them hoping to start a new life together. Their relationship, however, soon faced a problem.
On the 26th of January 1947, Bertil’s brother and the second in line to the throne, Prince Gustaf Adolf, Duke of Västerbotten, was on a flight home from a visit to Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, the heir to the Dutch throne, in Amsterdam. As the plane departed from a stopover in Copenhagen, it suddenly stalled while in the air and nosedived into the ground, exploding on impact and killing everyone on board.
Although Gustaf Adolf’s eldest child was his daughter Princess Margaretha, Sweden’s agnatic primogeniture laws (long since abolished) meant that it was his 9-month-old son, Carl Gustaf, who was now second in line to the throne. It was presumed that once Bertil’s grandfather, the reigning King Gustaf V and his heir, Bertil’s father Prince Gustaf Adolf, Duke of Scania, had both died, Bertil would have to step up as Regent in place of the infant Carl Gustaf.
This effectively ruled out the possibility of marriage between Lilian and Bertil. Her status as a foreign, working class divorcee was a non-starter for the royal court, especially as two of Bertil’s brothers had already had their titles and places in the line of succession removed for marrying an enskild mans dotter (private man’s daughter, or daughter of a common man).
However, the couple refused to give up on each other; despite being unmarried, they moved in together, living between Stockholm and Villa Mirage, a house in the south of France they used as a private retreat. Although their relationship was an open secret in Swedish high society, the country’s press agreed to keep their names out of the gossip columns, as Bertil was one of the only members of the royal family willing to give media interviews.
“The papers were wonderful, the press were absolutely fantastic, they were very loyal…they could’ve written an awful lot but they were very loyal to us and they were very kind to us” – Princess Lilian, c. 2000
Despite living together as man and wife at home, Bertil’s father (by now the King) refused to allow the couple to marry before Carl Gustaf and insisted that Lilian was not welcome to join him on his engagements or at public family events. Further to this, he ordered that she was known at court as ‘Mrs Craig’, despite her divorce.
She also received hostility from other members of the family; Bertil’s sister, Queen Ingrid of Denmark, and his late brother’s widow, Princess Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, were critical of the couple’s unorthodox arrangement and looked down on Lilian as a gold digger who was after a slice of royal wealth and 15 minutes of fame.
Lilian found this extremely difficult and struggled to find a place for herself in the royal household without straying too close to the limelight; when an invitation came from Queen Elizabeth II to take tea with her during a visit to London, Lilian didn’t dare accept.
“I was never invited. I officially did not exist. I had to sit at home and watch my darling on TV.” – Princess Lilian, c. 2000
As time went by and Lilian’s loyalty to the prince became clear, the family’s attitude to her softened; the King, albeit gruffly, told her she could call him ‘uncle’ and on the 11th of November 1972, after over two decades of being a private member of the family, Lilian was seen with Bertil at an official engagement for the first time, wearing a tiara which had belonged to Bertil’s mother. Notably, it was a banquet that was held to honour the King’s 90th birthday.
Less than a year later, King Gustaf VI Adolf passed away. Lilian had visited him in hospital in his final weeks and when the footage from his funeral was broadcast, Lilian could be seen walking behind Bertil and his siblings with the other spouses. On the 15th of September 1973, the infant who Bertil had been expected to serve as regent for finally ascended to the throne as King Carl XVI Gustaf, aged 27. As a young man with a modern outlook, he signalled a new era in the House of Bernadotte.
In 1976, the wait was finally over. As the new King had married a foreign commoner (Queen Silvia was the German daughter of a steel worker), he saw no reason why his Uncle Bertil and the woman who had been in his family since he was born couldn’t do the same. On the 4th of December, 6 months after the King and Queen’s wedding, Bertil and Lilian held their first ever press conference to announce their engagement and finally publicly discuss the worst kept secret in Sweden. They spoke about their early days together in London and dispelled some of the myths that had cropped up about them over the years. Most movingly, they spoke of their regret at not being able to officiate their relationship earlier so they could have had children. Bertil described the situation as ‘rather sad‘, before adding ‘but, after all, we’re still very happy, aren’t we?‘. The reply ‘very, very happy‘ came from Lilian with an adoring smile.
On the 7th of December 1976, 33 years after they first met, Prince Bertil of Sweden married Lilian Craig at the church of Drottningholm Palace with the King and Queen in attendance. Lilian became Her Royal Highness Princess Lilian of Sweden, Duchess of Halland and given her own royal monogram and coat of arms. She was 61, Bertil was 64.
‘It was the most wonderful half hour of my life. I am very happy.’ – Princess Lilian in an interview a few hours after the wedding.
Following the wedding, Princess Lilian fully immersed herself in royal life and began undertaking public engagements, attending every Nobel Prize ceremony for nearly 30 years from 1976 to 2005 and participating in the celebrations for the annual Sveriges nationaldag (National Day of Sweden). She quickly became one the most popular royals with the Swedish public, who saw her as something of a full package; a princess who looked completely natural at state events dripping in diamonds and pearls and wearing fabulous gowns and shoes, but who was also incredibly down-to-earth, warm and friendly.
Lilian had an incredibly cheeky sense of humour and no one was safe from her practical jokes, not even US President Ronald Reagan, who she squirted with fake ketchup, or Soviet President Boris Yeltsin, who she tricked into forcing one of his ministers to give her a kiss instead of the then-19-year-old Crown Princess Victoria, her great-niece and the current heir to the throne.
Although she was now a fully fledged part of Swedish public life and had (begrudgingly) renounced her British citizenship on her wedding day, there were certain elements of Britishness that she couldn’t shake off. Despite having a good grasp of the Swedish language, she almost always spoke English in both public and private. Her wedding dress was made by a British designer, her friend Elizabeth Wondrak, and guests who visited her would be served a full afternoon tea at 5 o’clock, complete with freshly baked scones.
One of the biggest hints to her glamourous years in Britain was her longstanding friendship with Sir Roger Moore, who she met as a result of them having so many mutual friends from their early careers in London. He described her as ‘a great asset to Sweden‘, while she described him as ‘charming‘ and ‘a wonderful friend‘. They were seen together publicly on numerous occasions through their work for charities such as UNICEF.
On the 5th of January 1997, after 21 years of marriage and over 50 years of companionship with Princess Lilian, His Royal Highness Prince Bertil, Duke of Halland, passed away following an aggressive lung illness. On his 80th birthday two years earlier, Lilian had said that “if I were to sum up my life, everything has been about my love. He’s a great man, and I love him.”
Although heartbroken by his death, she received enormous comfort from the country as well as the family. Thousands of Swedes lined the streets for Bertil’s funeral, with many wanting to be there to support Lilian. She walked up the aisle of the chapel of the Royal Palace of Stockholm hand-in-hand with Queen Silvia, who was said to be her closest friend within the family. In the days and weeks after Bertil’s death, the Queen slept next to Lilian on a camp bed so she wasn’t alone in her grief.
After Bertil’s death, Lilian took on many of his engagements, patronages and causes, such as various sporting organisations and the Swedish order of freemasonry, of which Bertil was the highest official. In 2000, she published her memoirs, Mit liv med Prins Bertil (My Life With Prince Bertil), with the proceeds of the sales going to a children’s charity. When the press asked, around the time of her 85th birthday, if she had any plans to slow down, she replied that she ‘loved to work and I think that’s the best medicine you can have…I love doing my job, I love meeting people…and at my age I’m lucky to have a job!‘
Though Lilian carried out her solo work very ably, her voice always trembled when she spoke about Bertil in interviews. She continued to perform engagements until 2010, when the royal court confirmed reports that she was suffering with senile dementia and would no longer be appearing in public. From then on, she remained at her home, Villa Solbacken, under the care of three nurses. Her ill health prevented her from attending the wedding of Crown Princess Victoria.
Three years later, on the 10th of March 2013, Her Royal Highness Princess Lilian of Sweden passed away aged 97. At the time of her death, she was the oldest member of the Swedish royal family.
Most of the immediate family were at her side during her final moments. This included Crown Princess Victoria and her younger sister Princess Madeleine, who both left the latter’s hen party in the Alps soon after it had started when they heard their beloved great-aunt didn’t have long left.
Tributes poured in from all corners of public life; the King spoke of her as ‘a much loved member of our family, and we all remember her as a happy, funny and quick-witted person. She spread such joy, and always had the ability to create a warm and pleasant atmosphere around her. The young members of the family always appreciated her jokes and her playful manner‘. The then-Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, called her a ‘much loved and appreciated member of the royal family‘, while the then-British Ambassador to Sweden, Paul Johnston, spoke of her having ‘a special place in the hearts of people in Sweden‘.
Back in her native Wales, the then-Mayor of Swansea, Councillor Dennis James, called her ‘one of Swansea’s most famous daughters‘ and said that ‘despite moving to London as a 16-year-old and then to Sweden, she remained proud of her Swansea links and this helped raise the city’s profile across Scandinavia and the rest of the world‘. Former Lord Mayor of Swansea Alan Lloyd claimed that ‘when I’ve met a Swedish person and they find out I’m from Swansea, they have proudly mentioned Lilian‘, while former Swansea East MP Lord Anderson called her story ‘a fairy tale‘ and paid tribute to her difficult early life in ‘a tough part of Swansea, an area which is no longer there after a slum clearance‘.
Her funeral was attended by royals from across Europe, including her niece Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, as well as her old friends Sir Roger Moore and his Swedish wife Kiki Tholstrup. The service featured a Union Flag and two British hymns; Vaughan Williams’ For All the Saints and Sir Hubert Parry’s Jerusalem, sung by the Palace Choir.
Though Lilian never had children of her own, she became a grandmother figure to practically every member of the Swedish royal family as its senior lady and in 2014, Princess Madeleine named her first child Leonore Lilian Maria in honour of the woman a dynasty and a country took to their hearts.
Her Royal Highness Princess Lilian of Sweden
Duchess of Halland
“Lily”
1915 – 2013
Disclaimer: some of the information in this piece was taken from sources which have either text or audio in Swedish, which I struggled to translate as its a language I don’t speak. if you think this piece contains any mistakes owing to mistranslation, please let me know!
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