The sad lives of Nerissa and Katherine.
Every family has secrets, but the Queen's probably has more than the usual. One of them is the mysterious fate of the Queen's cousins, Nerissa and Katherine, daughters of John Bowes-Lyon, the brother of the Queen's mother. Their lives have also been brought to the attention of the creators of The Crown. In the seventh episode of the fourth season, they referred to the two mentally ill sisters who were committed to a mental hospital by their family.
Nerissa was born in 1919 and Katherine in 1926. Both were diagnosed with mental retardation shortly after birth. In 1941, they were committed to the care of Earlswood Hospital in Redhill, which was overcrowded and reportedly had disastrous hygiene conditions.
That Queen Elizabeth II's two cousins lived such sad lives was not the only cruelty that befell them. The Royal Burke's Peerage records that one of the sisters died in 1940 and the other 21 years later. That was a lie. Nerissa died in 1989 and Katherine in 2014.
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