Queen Alexandra Road, Alexandra Close and Alexandra Drive, Salisbury

Queen Alexandra Road, Alexandra Close and Alexandra Drive in Salisbury are all named after ‘Her Majesty Queen Alexandra’, who was the wife of Edward VII, and mother of King George V.

I think this makes her the Great Grandmother of our current Queen Elizabeth. Queen Alexandra lived from 1844 to 1925.

Queen Alexandra probably has the distinction of having more roads named after her in Salisbury than anybody else – at least if you exclude Churchill Way East, North, South and West.

The Queen was a popular dedicatee for various organizations and buildings. These include:

- the Queen Alexandra Stakes, a two and three quarter mile horse race, which is traditionally the final event of the Royal Ascot meeting ¹

- the Queen Alexandra dock in Cardiff ²

- a butterfly, the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing ³

- Alexandra Rose Day – a charity event for one of Queen Alexandra’s charities. Crowds would throw roses into Alexandra’s carriage as it progressed through London – a ‘popular newsreel favourite’ ⁴, and reminiscient of Princess Diana’s final journey through London. The charity still continues – see Alexandra Rose Charities

- at least one ship ⁵

- a cavalry regiment the 19th Royal Hussars (Queen Alexandra’s Own) ⁶

- nursing corps within both the Army ⁷ and the Navy ⁸

Why was so much named after Alexandra?

What did Queen Alexandra do to have so many different things named after? Why is there a Queen Alexandra Road, but not a Prince Albert Road, a King Edward VII Road ⁹ or a road named after the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother?

This isn’t necessarily an easy question to answer.

Alexandra is not now a very well known figure – before looking her up for this website, I would not have been totally sure who she was. I think it’s fair to say that she didn’t achieve great things in a historical sense – she was Queen for less than 10 years, and in any case, by the 20th century historical significance has passed from the monarchy to the politicians.

She wasn’t really British, even by the standards of the royal family. She was ‘Princess Alexandra of Denmark’, and she had close relatives in positions of power in other nations: her brother George was King of the Hellenes (Greece), her sister became Empress of Russia, and her nephew was William II (‘Kaiser Bill’) of Germany. So she didn’t have the simply patriotic status of ‘England’s Rose’.

My guess is that there are two factors behind the number and range of things named after Queen Alexandra. In brief, these were:

• her popularity
• the times in which she lived

The popularity of Queen Alexandra

Alexandra was held in high esteem from the time she arrived in England, until her death in 1925.

On her arrival in Britain, she was seen as a beautiful¹⁰ and glamourous figure, especially in contrast to Queen Victoria, who was by then in her forties and soon in deep mourning for her husband, Prince Albert.

Also in contrast to Queen Victoria, Alexandra was much in the public eye, both as part of a glamourous social circle and in representing the royal family on public occasions. Victoria scarcely appeared in public in the years following Albert’s death¹¹.

Victoria wrote of Alexandra that

“to spare me the strain and fatigue of functions. She opens bazaars, attends concerts, visits hospitals in my place … she not only never complains, but endeavours to prove that she has enjoyed what to another would be a tiresome duty.”¹²

The growth of photography, which coincided with Alexandra’s early years, both emphasized how much she was doing in the public service and promulgated her reputation as a beauty – the Dictionary of National Biography says that

The invention of photography and the coming of illustrated magazines gave her image a currency denied to beauties of previous eras; her dresses, her hair styles, and the jewelled collars she wore to hide a scar on her neck were widely copied.

¹³

(Incidentally, one of the few pieces of oral history I’m including on this website is that I remember an elderly relative implying that the scar on her neck was not the result of a childhood accident as the ‘official version’ has it, but the outcome of some sort of violent ‘crime of the heart’)

Some part of Alexandra’s popularity may have been born out of public sympathy deriving from her marriage to Prince Edward, who was neither popular with the public, nor on the face of it, the ideal husband. From the start, ‘it had been decided that, as the carefully planned education given to ?Bertie? had not produced a paragon of virtue, an early marriage was the best hope of curbing his wayward inclinations.’¹⁴.

Prince Edward however had a string of affairs throughout his marriage ¹⁵, which possibly made Alexandra seem like the ‘paragon of virtue’ herself, both in contrast and for putting up with her husband.

Alexandra seems to have been devoted to her children – the head nurse Mrs Blackburn is quoted as saying that

“She was in her glory when she could run up to the nursery, put on a flannel apron, wash the children herself and see them asleep in their little beds.”

Further public sympathy accrued on the death of her first child, Prince Albert Victor – she said “I have buried my angel and with him my happiness.”

So, given her glamour, public works, private love for her children and some degree of public sympathy for her marriage to an unfaithful husband, one can understand why she was so popular. There are obvious parallels with the popularity of Princess Diana at the end of the Twentieth Century¹⁶.

Queen Alexandra’s time

Besides her popularity, the other major factor that caused so many things to be named after Queen Alexandra, I think, was the nature of the times in which she lived.

The monarchy was relatively popular, stable, and comparatively uncontroversial.

Whereas naming a road King Charles Street in the 1630s or Queen Mary Avenue in the 1560s might have seemed like a fitting tribute to the reigning monarch, it would have seemed increasingly bold and possibly dangerous with the passing of a few years. I would guess this is why in earlier, more precarious times roads were named simply ‘King Street’ or ‘Queen Street’. The only consideration really by the time of the naming of Queen Alexandra Road would be whether the dedicatee put off potential house buyers.

Derivation of the name Alexandra

The name Alexandra is the feminine form of Alexander ¹⁷, which in turn is derived from the Greek Alexandros, which meant ‘defender of men’¹⁸

Footnotes

1. MediaGuide_RoyalAscot2008.pdf (application/pdf Object) [↩]
2. BBC NEWS | In Pictures | 100 years of Queen Alexandra dock [↩]
3. Queen Alexandra’s birdwing – Ornithoptera alexandrae – ARKive [↩]
4. screenonline: Topical Budget 252-2: Queen Alexandra’s Drive Through London (1916) [↩]
5. QUEEN ALEXANDRA [↩]
6. 19th Royal Hussars – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
7. QARANC – Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps [↩]
8. Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service : Medical History : Medical Branch : RN Life : Training and People : Royal Navy [↩]
9. Apart from the ‘Edwardian era’ the next thing I think of named after King Edward would probably be the potatoes… [↩]
10. Princess Victoria (Queen Victoria’s daughter) described her as ‘outrageously beautiful’A. W. Purdue, ?Alexandra (1844?1925)?, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30375, accessed 12 Jan 20098 Jan 2009] [↩]
11. Constitutional History of the UK By Ann Lyon, Lyon, page 364 http://books.google.com/books?id=szhphPyesmYC&pg=PA364&lpg=PA364&dq=%22widow+of+windsor%22+-plaidy&source=bl&ots=JZXnl8cS-L&sig=yG5MFJONokH2kzSrUqJDDzICebI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result [↩]
12. Alexandra of Denmark – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
13. A. W. Purdue, ?Alexandra (1844?1925)?, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30375, accessed 12 Jan 20098 Jan 2009] [↩]
14. A. W. Purdue, ?Alexandra (1844?1925)?, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30375, accessed 12 Jan 20098 Jan 2009] [↩]
15. H. C. G. Matthew, ?Edward VII (1841?1910)?, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2008 [Oxford DNB article: Edward VII, accessed 13 Jan 2009] [↩]
16. As it happens, one of King Edward’s mistresses was Alice Keppel, the great grandmother of Camilla Parker-Bowles Camilla, duchess of Cornwall — Britannica Online Encyclopedia [↩]
17. Behind the Name: Meaning, Origin and History of the Name Alexandra [↩]
18. Behind the Name: Meaning, Origin and History of the Name Alexander [↩]