Olav was born on 2 July 1903 as Prince Alexander Edward Christian Frederik in
Appleton House on the royal
Sandringham Estate,
Flitcham, United Kingdom. His parents were
Prince Carl, second son of
Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark (later King Frederick VIII), and
Princess Maud, youngest daughter of
King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, who was the eldest son of Britain's
Queen Victoria. In 1905, Carl was elected as Norway's first independent king in 518 years. The fact that Carl already had a son gave him an advantage over the other candidates, as it assured the continuance of the new royal line. When Carl accepted his election, he took the name Haakon VII. The king gave his two-year-old son the Norwegian name Olav after
Olav Haakonsson, the last independent king of Norway before its
union with Denmark. It was also chosen in honour of
Saint Olaf, the first effective king of Norway and a symbol of Norwegian independence and pride. Olav was thus the first heir to the throne since the
Middle Ages to have been raised in Norway, and his parents went to considerable length to give him as Norwegian an upbringing as possible. Unlike his father, who was a naval officer, Olav chose to complete his main military education in the army. He graduated from the three-year
Norwegian Military Academy in 1924, with the fourth-best score in his class. Olav then studied jurisprudence and economics for two years at
Balliol College, Oxford. During the 1930s, Crown Prince Olav was a naval cadet serving on the minelayer/cadet training ship
Olav Tryggvason. Olav moved up the ranks of the Norwegian armed forces in the army from an initial rank of first lieutenant to captain in 1931 and colonel in 1936. He was an accomplished athlete. Olav jumped from the
Holmenkollen ski jump in Oslo and competed in sailing regattas. He won a gold medal in sailing at the
1928 Summer Olympics in
Amsterdam and remained an active sailor into old age. On 21 March 1929 in Oslo, he married his first cousin
Princess Märtha of Sweden with whom he had two daughters,
Ragnhild and
Astrid, and one son,
Harald. As exiles during
World War II, Crown Princess Märtha and the royal children lived in
Washington, DC, where she struck up a close friendship with
Franklin Roosevelt. She died in 1954, before her husband ascended the throne. The British Film Institute houses an early film, made in 1913, in which a miniature car (a "baby Cadillac") commissioned by Queen Alexandra for Crown Prince Olav tows a procession of Londoners through the streets of the capital, before being delivered to a pair of "royal testers" of roughly Olav's age. The car is a battery-powered, one-third size replica on a four-foot wheelbase, and is on permanent loan to the
Norsk Teknisk Museum in Oslo. ==World War II==