As part of the Greek royal family and an officer of the Greek army, Andrea had to accept a large part of the responsibility for the final disaster that seemed set to befall him and his family. During the hostilities with Turkey in 1921, he was a major-general with command of a division stationed in Asia Minor. His troops, he declared, were ‘riff-raff’, his officers useless, the high command incapable. His assessment was accurate but hardly diplomatic. Nor was it the height of military professionalism to disobey the clear and direct order to advance and instead ask to be relieved of his command. When Smyrna fell and the royal family were again ousted – a regular occurrence since they had first been invited onto the throne of Greece in 1863 – Andrea provided the new military rulers with a made-to-measure scapegoat with his actions the year before. He was arrested, tried and sentenced by a jury of junior officers who, said Princess Alice, ‘had previously decided that he must be shot’.

George V had been prepared to leave the Romanovs to their fate, but the idea of allowing another batch of close relations to fall to the executioner’s blade or bullet clearly proved too much to stomach, even for a monarch as imperious as this. Following appeals by Princess Alice through her younger brother, Louis, the future Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the King personally ordered that his incautious relation was for saving.

Commander Gerald Talbot, Britain’s former naval attaché in Athens, now employed as a secret agent in Geneva, was duly dispatched, in disguise and travelling under false papers, to open negotiations with Pangalos. Things did not go well until the cruiser HMS Calypso sailed in, her guns raised, to help concentrate the military government’s thoughts. Which it did: while Andrea’s fellow officers were duly being executed, he was driven to the harbour by Pangalos himself and put aboard the Calypso, where his wife was waiting for him.

The warship then steamed to Corfu to pick up eighteen-month-old Philip and his four sisters. The family seemed quite philosophical about being exiled, ‘for they frequently are’, as the Calypso’s captain, Herbert Buchanan-Wollaston, observed. Philip’s sister, Princess Sophie, eight at the time, was not so sanguine. She later recalled her abiding memory of leaving Mon Repos was the smell of smoke from the grates in every fireplace. Alice had ordered her daughters to burn everything: letters, papers and documents and leave nothing behind.

‘It was a terrible business, absolute chaos,’ she later recalled. The crossing to Brindisi in Italy was a rough one and the family, along with their Greek lady-in-waiting, French governess and English nanny, were all seasick.