Just before she turned 18 and was unhappily wed to Prince Ferdinand of Romania, Princess Marie, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, spent three glorious years at Devonport, the Plymouth naval base of which her father, the Duke of Edinburgh, was commander-in-chief.

In her 1934 memoir, Marie described the Devon coast as “our dearest-playing ground...a sort of interlude, and in my own life it stands out as a last taste of all I was soon destined to leave and give up.”

Though the family were billeted at Admiralty House, an 18th century building remarkable only for its strategic view of the docks, she and her three “blue-eyed, fair-haired and unsophisticated” sisters – Victoria Melita, Alexandra and Beatrice – spent most of their time either at nearby Government House, home of the general-in-command Richard Harrison and his daughters May, Violet and Evelyn, or with the young heir to the earldom of Mount Edgcumbe, whose family seat on a bluff above the harbour boasted Riviera-style lawns overlooking the sparkling waters of Plymouth Sound.