This post is dedicated to Miss Lilian Wilson, Elisabeth’s nanny, who devoted 8 years of her life to love and comfort her little charge.
Elizabeth Jane “Lilian” Wilson was born in Northamptonshire (England) on 20 April 1864. Lilian’s father Edward Wilson was a railway porter. Lilian’s mother Emma Powell died while she was still a small child. Edward returned to his native London with his children and he remarried at that time.
Lilian Wilson found her position with royalty by personal recommendation. She arrived in Darmstadt to take up the position on her thirty–first birthday, 20 April 1895, when Princess Elisabeth of Hesse was about just over a month old: the connection between nurse and child was immediate and absolute.
Miss Wilson adored her little charge who seemed to have been a very special child. Glimpses of Elisabeth and Lilian Wilson abound in Meriel Buchanan’s writings. Meriel’s father was the British Chargé d’Affaires in Darmstadt until the autumn of 1900. For the first five years of Elisabeth’s life, Meriel spent most of her summer days with the little Princess and with Miss Wilson, who Meriel described as “a capable, fresh-faced woman in her white piqué dresses, possessed of endless patience and a warm, kindly heart, in spite of her occasional sharp reprimands, which were no doubt fully deserved”.
Lilian was warm and placid, happy to immerse herself in the nursery and its small doings. She became very good friend with Margaretta Eagar, Elisabeth’s Russian cousins’ nanny. In fact, caring for children who were cousins, and whose parents were close, Lilian and Margaretta met on several occasions; not frequently, but when they were together it was for weeks at a time and they became friends.
We know little Elisabeth adored Lilian, and the nurse adored her back. In fact, after Elisabeth’s parents’ divorce, when it was agreed that little Elisabeth would spend half of each year with her mother, half with her father, it was Lilian who had the job of taking the little girl from one parent to the other, of staying with her and becoming her stability in an atmosphere of deepening bitterness. However, she was caught up in her employers’ marital problems and she almost came to a violent end. The following incident happened in February 1902, while Lilian and Elisabeth were staying with Grand Duchess Victoria Melita and Elisabeth’s maternal Grandmother, Marie Alexandrovna, and it was described by the latter in a letter to her eldest daughter Marie of Romania.
“She (Victoria Melita) gave me a terrible fright about a week ago, as she went into a shameful fit of unbounded fury against Wilson about some letter from Darmstadt, mentioning her jewels. She began to scream in such a way that actually the whole of the servants rushed upstairs.
She slapped Wilson and tore at her hair and made a dart at a big lamp to throw it at her head. Wilson just had time to seize it and carry it out of the room. Frightened maids rushed into my room to fetch me as the saving angel and I found her crying, but the first fury over Everybody was trembling and quite pale… You know that she could have killed Wilson with the greatest ease.”
This event, among others, makes Lilian Wilson’s loyalty to the Grand Duke, and his child’s feelings, very easy to understand. Lilian accompanied Elisabeth during her tragic latest hours, on the 16 November, 1903. Tsar Nicholas II described how during her last minutes, “the little girl was lying on her side and with her big eyes looking at her nursemaid’s face… everything ended silently and imperceptibly”. When Lilian knelt at the deathbed of little Elisabeth, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig comforted her. For Lilian, who had endured the unimaginable at her employer’s side, the grief bound her to Darmstadt for ever. She stayed on with the Grand Duke though she had no more children to nurse.
Two years later, when Ernst Ludwig became a father once again with the birth of Georg Donatus, the nurse could only be Lilian Wilson. She nursed little “Georgie” as she used to call him, until September 1908, when she left the nursery after 13 years to marry Willhelm Scharmann, an accountant in the Grand Duke’s treasury. In 1919 she and Willhelm moved into a house on the Bessunger Strasse in Darmstadt. The city records contain no further mention of Lilian, though Willhelm lived there until the 1940’s.
Sources: From Cradle to Crown (Thank you Charlotte Zeepvat for your research and for writing this nice book)
I could not find any picture of Lilian with Elisabeth. Hovewer, I found some of her with Elisabeth’s brother Georg Donatus in the Hessian State Archives, Lilian Wilson is identified as “Nana Scharman” (her husband’s surname):
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