The GDER Society had special guests on the 24th of April, which was the Palm Sunday in our Church calendar. These were Inna Tsariova, the Deputy Head of the Orthodox School attached to the Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow and her friend and the Society member Anna Kunitsina from London. We showed them places in Eastbourne visited by our Grand Duchess Elizabeth in 1878, when she was 14, together with her siblings and her mother Alice Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhein (Princess of Great Britain and the daughter of Queen Victoria). You can read more about this visit on http://www.gdelizabeth.org.uk/html/st_elizabeth.shtml
This was first time when our Society offered a short pilgrimage to these places, some of them we were able to see for the first time ourselves. At Christ Church in Eastbourne we were welcomed by the curate, Father Adam Ransom, who kindly showed us their treasures, namely the inscription on the altar window in memory of the frequent visits to the church by Princess Alice. We were also shown some rare publications in the Church magazine of the period and after that the old Sunday school also visited by the family. We were pleasantly surprised by presence of some beautiful Orthodox icons around the altar.
Our next stopping places were houses owned by the Dukes of Devonshire where our Royal holiday makers stayed, one of them on the sea front (now a hotel) and another one, and more important, was the beautiful Georgian home of Devonshires, Compton Place, with the big park attached to it (now a language school). We were lucky to be allowed inside the building and to see interiors which have not been changed since Princess Alice and her children were there. Tragically, Princess Alice and her younger daughter May died the same winter in the epidemic of diphtheria which broke out in the family. The summer in Eastbourne remained in the memory of the children as the last happy holiday together with their mother. They came to this town in their later years for holidays and for very special occasions, as Alix did (the future Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia) who left her signature on a window at Compton Place in the year 1892, the year of her father’s death, when she was about to be engaged to the heir to the Russian throne.
Written by Maria Harwood