Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon were born in 1919 and 1926, respectively, to John Herbert Bowes-Lyon. He was the uncle of Queen Elizabeth II, making his two daughters her first cousins. In 1941, the daughters were ousted from their family home in Scotland and sent to Surrey, spending the rest of their lives in the Victorian-era institution (pictured, in 1845). At the time they were committed, they were 15 and 22 years old.
Today, the medical field would term the sisters as developmentally disabled, but that wasn’t the case in the 1940s. According to Tatler, their official diagnosis at the time they were committed was to label them “imbeciles,” with notes that they were nonverbal and — depending on the source — had an estimated mental age of somewhere between three and six years old.
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“Burke’s Peerage” prides itself on being the Who’s Who of royal families around the world. They’ve been putting family trees together for a few centuries, but the 1963 edition had what’s best described as a whopping mistake: Nerissa, it claimed, had died in 1940, and her sister had died in 1961. When a 1987 investigation by The Sun found that the sisters had been alive all along, editor Harold Brooks-Baker said that they had based their information on what the family said, noting, “If this is what the Bowes-Lyon family told us, then we would have included it in the book. It is not normal to doubt the word of members of the royal family.”
