Evelyn, Princess Blücher
| Evelyn Princess Blücher | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
10 September 1876 Brighton, Sussex |
| Died | 20 January 1960 (aged 83) Worthing |
| Education | Private |
| Occupation | Diarist and memoirist |
| Spouse(s) | Gebhard Leberecht Blücher von Wahlstatt II. |
| Parent(s) | Frederick Stapleton-Bretherton and the Hon. Isabella Petre |
Evelyn Fürstin Blücher von Wahlstatt (10 September 1876 – 20 January 1960), diarist and memoirist, wrote a standard account of life as a civilian aristocrat in Germany during World War I.
Princess Blücher was an Englishwoman, the daughter of Frederick Stapleton-Bretherton of a Catholic landed gentry family by Isabella, daughter of William Bernard Petre, 12th Baron Petre. They settled in Rainhill, Lancashire, living in what was then Rainhill Hall, now Loyola Hall. She was the great-granddaughter of Peter Bretherton, a coach proprietor, and a brother to the better known Bartholomew Bretherton, coach proprietor of Liverpool. On 19 August 1907, she married Gebhard Blücher von Wahlstatt, the fourth Fürst (Prince) Blücher (1865–1931), an Anglophile descended from the great Prussian General-Field-Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher (1742–1819), the first Prince, who had contributed notably to the allied victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Her sister, Gertrude Stapleton-Bretherton, married Vice-Admiral Kenneth Dewar (1879–1964).
After leaving the Channel Islands, where the family had taken the lease of Herm, the smallest of the habitable islands, she spent the War years with the Prince in Germany, where he commanded a hospital train for the Silesian Order of Malta. Here she kept a diary, describing life in Berlin and at the family estate of Krieblowitz (now Krobielowice) in Silesia (now Poland), from the point of view of an English exile among the deeply conservative Prussian nobility. This became the basis for her account of the war published as Princess Blucher, English Wife in Berlin: a private memoir of events, politics and daily life in Germany throughout the War and the social revolution of 1918 (Constable, 1920).
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