Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day

by David Cohen

  When his mother was put in hospital, Philip was just eight years old. For the next five years, he heard nothing from her, and very little from his father. Philip would be shuttled between France, England and Germany, and some of his family did not welcome him. In 1930, when he went to Kensington Palace, Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Beatrice (then in her seventies) sniped that the Palace was no place for the young. As one of three surviving children of the widow of Windsor, Beatrice had authority in the family and Philip had to leave to live with his mother’s younger brother, Georgie Mountbatten, the Marquess of Milford Haven. The boy with a religious mother was now in the care of other members of his family whose morals would have outraged not just the widow of Windsor, but the whole town.

  Georgie had married Nada, the great-granddaughter of the Russian poet Pushkin. She was bisexual and her lovers included the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. A little infidelity among friends did not mean that Georgie and Nada did not love each other, though. Unconventional parents too, they adored their son, David, who was two years older than Philip; the two teenagers became great friends. In a splendid show of defiance of convention, when David was seventeen, his parents sent him to live in a brothel in Paris. Perhaps not surprisingly, he became famous for his collection of pornography and catalogues, which included titles such as Sparkling Tales of Fun and Flagellation. Georgie’s sister-in-law, Edwina Mountbatten, had many lovers, including the first Indian Prime Minister, Nehru, while her husband, Louis Mountbatten, had a close and perhaps erotic relationship with his secretary, who it has been alleged was a KGB spy. Mountbatten’s biographer, Philip Ziegler, denies the two men were lovers, but others who have studied Mountbatten disagree. Mountbatten did say that he and Edwina spent their lives getting into other people’s beds, Ziegler also reported.

  Philip’s Parisian relatives were magnificently outrageous. In Paris, he lived with his uncle, Prince George of the Hellenes, and his wife, Princess Marie Bonaparte. The Princess was Napoleon’s great-grandniece. Her mother died a month after Marie was born and she was brought up by her grandmother, a monstrous snob who would not permit a descendant of Napoleon to mix with ordinary children.

  Princess Marie’s first lover was her father’s secretary, who then blackmailed her. She eventually married Prince George of the Hellenes in 1907. On their wedding night, ‘Big George’ told his new wife that he knew the act was distasteful but their loins had to do the necessary and provide heirs for Greece. The frustrated Princess took many lovers, one of whom was the Prime Minister of France. Her husband did not mind as he suffered from an unusual erotic fixation himself: he was in love with his uncle Waldemar. In her search for sexual fulfilment, Princess Marie had a bizarre operation to have her clitoris moved closer to her vagina. Later, she went to meet Freud, hoping he could cure her of frigidity as none of her many lovers had managed to do so. Freud suggested that she had witnessed ‘the primal scene’ in the form of her nurse making love with her uncle and this inhibited her. The Princess hared off in her Rolls-Royce, questioned the nurse and found that Freud had guessed correctly. From that moment on, she became totally devoted to him and their relationship became a platonic love affair. Freud gave the Princess analytic sessions which lasted two hours, a privilege granted to no other client. She even asked him if she might not overcome her sexual problems by committing incest with her son. A bad idea, Freud suggested, as he was quite conservative. In Milford Haven, Philip was in a Bohemian bisexual milieu; in Paris, among sexually curious psychoanalysts.

  The way children respond to trauma depends on their intelligence but also on personality and good and bad fortune in a way that psychologists have not yet managed to fully understand. Freud would probably argue that what gave Philip the ability to cope was that, before she fell ill, his mother had loved him and held him lovingly. That was well in the past, however. In Kreuzlingen, Philip’s mother talked not just with Christ but also with other religious luminaries after she read Les Grands Initiés, which promised secret spiritual knowledge to those who followed a strict regime of prayer, fasting and meditation. Alice, however, always insisted she was sane. Her psychiatrists who, like Freud, were mostly convinced atheists were not impressed.

  Philip was also lucky in his grandmother, Princess Victoria. He told an early biographer, Basil Boothroyd: ‘I liked my grandmother very much and she was always helpful. She was very good with children; she took the practical approach to them. She treated them in the right way – the right combination of the rational and the emotional.’ The latter remark is, of course, both measured and insightful. In later interviews, Prince Philip has been far more brusque. He told Fiona Bruce of the BBC when she tried to get him to discuss his childhood: ‘It’s simply what happened. The family broke up. My mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the south of France – I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.’

  The young Philip was not just abandoned, but was also aware of the conflicting attitudes in his family – his religious mother who was now in an asylum, his absent father and his Bohemian relatives. It is surprising that Louis Mountbatten and Marie Bonaparte never had an affair since they had affairs with virtually everyone else they shared a drink with.

  The unconventional life led by the Mountbattens did not make them uncaring, though. Louis Mountbatten felt that Philip needed a respectable education and sent him to Cheam, an old and reputable preparatory school. In the summers, Philip often went to visit relatives in Germany, but his mother was too ill to see him and his father does not seem to have been very interested.

  In 1933, when he was twelve years old, Philip was sent to an experimental school in Salem in Germany. It was run by Kurt Hahn, a teacher who believed the young were in danger from ‘five-fold decay’. According to him, they were not fit enough physically, they were not self-disciplined, they were not compassionate, they did not show initiative and they lacked many skills. Hahn admitted he had developed his ideas by studying the great thinkers of the past. He may not have been original, but he was certainly eccentric. He claimed, for example, that doing the high jump helped make children more decisive and was especially helpful to those who stammered and had a ‘refined intellect’.

  Like some Jews, at first Hahn did not want to see the threat Hitler presented. He did so only in 1933, when the Fuhrer condoned the murder of a Communist party leader. Hahn wrote to all the parents of the children at Salem, demanding they break with the Nazis. The local police put him in jail, but one of his former pupils was the private secretary of the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. The British persuaded the Nazis to release Hahn, who fled at once across the Channel. Philip was a pupil at Salem during this fraught period.

  Hahn then received backing to create anew Salem at Gordonstoun in Scotland. Philip was among the group of pupils who helped put up some of the buildings. The regime was Spartan but Philip was resilient – he did ‘get on’ with it. He also did well in becoming captain of cricket and he liked sailing. As he did not get seasick, he was given the job of cooking when Hahn took pupils on expeditions to the Hebrides and the Shetlands. One of his school friends revealed that Philip was not afraid of doing dirty work.

  In the holidays, Philip often went back to the Mountbattens and, while with them, he got an early experience of high-society controversy. Gloria Vanderbilt, Nadas lover, was involved in a custody battle for her ten-year-old daughter. The New York Daily News reported that Gloria was ‘a cocktail crazed dancing mother, a devotee of sex erotica and the mistress of a German Prince’. It hinted she was a lesbian when not in bed with her German and concluded, ‘it was a blistering tale no skin lotion could soothe.’ Nada wanted to fly to New York to help her lover, but George V, who was forceful even when old, persuaded her against that. The last thing the royal family needed was for the wife of one of Queen Victoria’s descendants to make lurid headlines all over the world.

  When Philip was in his early teens, his mother tried to escape from the asylum. She was watched more careful
ly after that, but, slowly, Alice did get better. In 1934, she was well enough to leave the asylum but she did not come back to see, let alone look after, her son. Instead, she cut herself off from the whole family, apart from her mother Victoria, and, for a number of years, travelled incognito around the Continent. Just before this happened, Philip attended the wedding of the Duke of Kent, one of George V’s other sons. Marie Bonaparte was also one of the guests. Philip’s biographer, William Eade, suggests she may not have told her relatives that she was going on to lecture at the British Psychoanalytic Society on her favourite topic, female sexuality. I doubt it. Bonaparte did not hesitate to shock her royal relatives.

  The wedding of the Kents was important for another reason. One of the bridesmaids was George and Elizabeth’s elder daughter, who was eight years old. It was the first time that the future Queen of England met her future husband.

  After the abdication

  Following the abdication of 1936, David’s brother became King and his family had to adjust to their new role. George VI still found time to play with his children and the family’s life did not entirely change. Crawford said they all found solace on the weekends when they went to Royal Lodge in Windsor, where court etiquette was forgotten. ‘We were just a family again,’ she wrote. Phrases like that may well have intensely annoyed the royal family: trusted as she was, Crawford was only a servant. She went on to describe the way the parents, the children, the butler, the chauffeur and herself put on old clothes and mucked about at Royal Lodge. The King had an assortment of tree-cutting implements that fascinated his daughters. He loved hacking away at trees and making bonfires and roped everyone in to work tirelessly. Gladstone had written a good deal about how cutting down trees helped him relax when he was Prime Minister; it was much the same with the new King.

  One of the many telling observations Crawford made brings out how much the King loved his daughters. He placed two rocking horses outside his study and Crawford wondered if he had put them there specifically for his horse-mad girls to use, so that he could hear them playing while he worked.

  She also records a number of differences between the girls. Margaret liked practical jokes; Lilibet did not. Crawford enjoyed such jokes and sometimes conspired with Margaret. They once hid the gardener’s broom in the bushes so that the man spent some time wondering why it was not where it should be: in his cupboard. Crawford was also sharp in pointing out the isolation of the royal family. The King and Queen wanted their children to be ‘members of the community. Just how hard this is to achieve if you live in a palace is hard to explain. A glass curtain seems to come down between you and the outside world.’ Crawford used the phrase ‘glass curtain’ over thirty years before the first use of the now familiar ‘glass ceiling’ in an American magazine piece about ‘The Up-and-Comers’.

  Not long after she had left the asylum, Alice had to face another tragedy. In 1937, her daughter Cecilie, her son-in-law and two of her grandchildren were killed in an air accident at Ostend. Cecilie was pregnant and the stillborn child was found in the wreckage. Alice and her husband met for the first time in six years at the funeral. Their son Philip was there and it seems to have been the last time he saw his parents together. Lord Louis Mountbatten came too, as did Hermann Goering. The Nazis kept on hoping that the British royal family would ally themselves to their cause.

  Cecilie’s youngest child was not on the plane and was adopted by her uncle, but the little girl only survived her parents and older brothers by nineteen months. Soon after, Alice’s brother, George Mountbatten, died of bone cancer. Princess Victoria’s granddaughter, Lady Pamela Hicks, remembered her grandmother weeping bitterly.

  After these tragedies, Alice stayed in contact with her family but, a few months later, she went back to Greece alone. She took a modest two-bedroom flat in central Athens and was totally committed to religion and to working with the poor. The family did not understand her behaviour.

  A joyful reunion

  As tensions grew in Europe, the royals had to show the flag abroad. Early in 1939, George VI and Elizabeth went to visit Canada and the United States and were away for months. Crawford highlighted not the separation, which was the only lengthy separation from their parents, but the ‘joyful reunion’. When their parents returned, it ‘was a great event in the children’s lives’. The girls took the train to Southampton, reading comics all the way, and then boarded a destroyer to sail into the Channel to meet their parents on the Empress of Britain. Once the destroyer reached the Empress of Britain, the girls, Crawford and Mrs Knight – no doubt in her white cap – had to climb down a ladder onto a barge. The King and Queen were waiting with ‘great eagerness’, as their daughters climbed another ladder up to them. ‘The little girls could hardly walk up the ladder quickly enough but when they reached the top they rushed to Mummie and Papa. They kissed them and hugged them again and again. Everybody else kept out of the way,’ Crawford added. Margaret had lost weight while her parents were away and demanded they notice that she was quite a good shape now, ‘not like a football as I used to be’.

  Fifteen years later, Prince Charles, then much younger than his mother and aunt had been when reunited with their parents, received a very formal handshake from the Queen.

  Once the war started, the Queen told Crawford that the possibility of moving to Canada had been raised, but she had to be with her children and there was no way she could leave the King. The royal family did not claim special privileges and did not eat more lavishly than their subjects while rationing was in force so they all got one egg a week and looked forward to it. Back then, the royals were making do in a way royals had not done for centuries. They still managed to have fun, however, as the Princesses put on a pantomime: Margaret played Cinderella, while Lilibet was the principal boy. Margaret dolled herself up in a white wig, which made everyone laugh.

  The King knew his daughter would one day succeed him and decided Crawford needed help. He arranged for Elizabeth to visit Eton to be taught by an expert in constitutional history. It was also important for the Princesses to mix with ordinary children. Crawford claims it was her idea that there should be a Girl Guide troop at Buckingham Palace. Lilibet was old enough, but Margaret was too young. The increasingly assertive Lilibet remained undaunted. She told her sister: ‘Pull up your skirts, Margaret, and show Miss Synge [later Commissioner for the Girl Guides] your legs! You can’t say those aren’t a very fine pair of hiking legs.’ Lilibet was persuasive. Miss Synge agreed that two Brownies could join the Palace troop and Margaret was allowed to become a Brownie herself.

  The experiment was a great success. When they went hiking, the girls did their share of the dirty work. Crawford remembered Lilibet ‘looking ruefully at a large cauldron full of greasy dishes, into which she had to plunge her arms to do the washing up’. The Princesses did not shirk or malinger: ‘They were more than willing to pull their weight.’ They mixed more with normal children than any other royal children had ever done since William, Duke of Gloucester.

  The Blitz has been the subject of many books, but the effect that the war had on British children has been less studied than one might expect. Crawford evokes the Blackout and the fears it provoked well. The first night that the Princesses had to live through the Blackout, they needed much reassurance as they saw ‘apartments were muffled in dust sheets’ while pictures were sent off to storage. ‘All night ghostly figures flitted around,’ and the task of blacking out a palace proved never ending. One old retainer told Crawford: ‘By the time we’ve blacked out all the windows here, it’s morning again, miss.’

  The Princesses were in the Castle when Windsor was bombed. Crawford and the staff hurried to get them into an air-raid shelter, but Lilibet called, ‘We’re dressing, Crawfie; we must dress!’ ‘Nonsense, you are not to dress! Put a coat over your nightclothes at once,’ Crawford replied. Finally, Lilibet came to the shelter. The scene offers a nice example of Lilibet’s anxiety that everything should be just so; her grandfather had been ve
ry similar. She would get out of her bed several times a night to check that her shoes were straight and her clothes ‘arranged just so. We soon laughed her out of this.’

  As the sisters grew up, Crawford noted there was much less friction between them than is usual between female siblings. She thought this was due to ‘Lilibet’s unusually lovely nature. All her feeling for her pretty sister was motherly and protective. She hated Margaret to be left out; she hated her antics to be misunderstood.’ The mischievous Margaret often made her family laugh, but sometimes at the wrong time. When posing for an official photograph, Lilibet occasionally nudged Margaret or gave her a ‘sisterly look that has said plainer than any words “Margaret, please behave”’ or made it obvious this was not the right time to laugh. As a teenager, Margaret became interested in clothes (which Lilibet never was) and started sketching designs.

  Like thousands of others, the royal family sent their children to live in the country, where they would be less vulnerable to bombing. With their governess in tow, the Princesses went off to Sandringham. The Queen told Crawford to carry on as usual, as far as that was possible.

  The huge majority of British men and women felt a sense of duty during the war and Crawford was no different: she wanted to marry, but delayed her plans because she felt that she would be deserting the royal family. In one of her few moments of self-aggrandisement, Crawford wrote that the King and Queen ‘carried such crushing responsibilities’ and that she knew they would have ‘considerable peace of mind so long as I remained with the Princesses. So duty won the battle.’

  Prince Philip and his mother

  The war also changed the lives of Philip and his mother. After leaving Gordonstoun, Philip entered the Navy, where he passed the examinations easily. He distinguished himself when his ship was bombed and a number of shipmates felt he had saved their lives. His mother, meanwhile, was in Athens, which the Axis powers had occupied. Her family was divided in its loyalties. While her son was in the Royal Navy, Alice’s sons-in-law fought for the Nazis. One of her cousins was also the German ambassador in Greece. Alice devoted herself to good causes, just as she had done in the 1914 war but this time more subversively. As well as working for the Red Cross and organising soup kitchens, she played on her royal status to fly to Sweden. She said that she was visiting her sister, Princess Louise, although in fact she used the trips to bring back medical supplies (she was helped by the fact that the Fascist powers presumed she was pro-German, as one of her sons-in-law was a member of the SS). Alice did not hide her true feelings when a German general asked her: ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ ‘You can take your troops out of my country!’ she replied. But she was a Princess, and so she was not arrested.