Princess Mary was born on 25 April 1897 at York Cottage on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, during the reign of her great-grandmother Queen Victoria.

Her father was the only surviving son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, while her mother was the eldest child and only daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Teck.

She was named Victoria Alexandra Alice Mary, after her paternal great-grandmother Queen Victoria;[1][2] her paternal grandmother, Alexandra, Princess of Wales; her maternal grandmother, Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck; and her great-aunt, Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine, with whom she shared a birthday.

She was baptised at St Mary Magdalene's Church near Sandringham on 7 June 1897 by William Dalrymple Maclagan, Archbishop of York.

In June 1918, following an announcement in The Gentlewoman, she began a nursing course at Great Ormond Street Hospital, working two days a week in the Alexandra Ward.

She visited centres associated with Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service or Voluntary Aid Detachment Units, and hospitals with wounded soldiers.

[10] Princess Mary's public duties reflected her concerns with nursing, the Girl Guide movement, and the Women's Services.

[15] She received the Silver Fish Award, Girl Guiding's highest adult honour, in recognition of her contribution to the movement.

[16] It was reported in July 2013 that British Pathé had discovered newsreel film from 1927 in which the ancestors of Catherine Middleton are, as Lord Mayors of Leeds, playing host to Princess Mary at the Young Women's Christian Association in Hunslet, Leeds; both Sir Charles Lupton and his brother Hugh Lupton, were the uncles of Olive Middleton, the Princess of Wales's great-grandmother.

[21] By the 1940s, Princess Mary was attending the opening nights and many of the festival's performances, as was her son, George, and his wife, the Countess of Harewood, née Marion Stein, a former concert pianist.

[38] While at Goldsborough Hall, Princess Mary had internal alterations made by the architect Sydney Kitson, to suit the upbringing of her two children and instigated the development of formal planting of beech-hedge-lined long borders from the south terrace looking for a quarter of a mile down an avenue of lime trees.

The limes were planted by her relatives as they visited the Hall throughout the 1920s, including her father, King George, and mother, Queen Mary.

[6][38] In farming pursuits, Princess Mary also became an expert in cattle breeding and was on the board of trustees of the Royal Agricultural Society of England of which her husband had been president.

[39][40] In December 2012, some of the Princess's belongings were sold in "Harewood: Collecting in the Royal Tradition", an auction organised by Christie's.

After the abdication crisis, she and her husband went to stay with the former Edward VIII, by then created Duke of Windsor, at Enzesfeld Castle near Vienna.

Later, in November 1947, she allegedly declined to attend the wedding of her niece, Princess Elizabeth, to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten as the Duke of Windsor had not been invited.

[45] In March 1953, she cut short her tour of the West Indies and before returning to London, made a surprise diversion to New York, where she met with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

[46] She posed for photographs with them before she and the duke boarded the ship they travelled on to visit their ailing mother, Queen Mary.

The Princess Royal visited her brother, the Duke of Windsor, at the London Clinic in March 1965, while he recovered from recent eye surgery.

[62][b] In 1932, her father gave her the title Princess Royal, which had previously belonged to her aunt Louise until her death the year prior.