Prince Philip was born in Corfu on 10 June 1921, the fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg (Lord Mountbatten’s sister). His father’s family were Danish/Russian/German, his mother’s German/British, but the baby was sixth in line to the Greek throne. This was not a glittering prize in the Euro-royal scheme of things. Prince Philip’s grandfather had been assassinated eight years earlier, his parents had already had one spell in exile and cousin Alexander’s reign had come to a sudden end in 1920 courtesy of a fatal monkey bite. Following another military coup, Prince Andrew was made a scapegoat for the disastrous 1919-22 war with Turkey during which he had commanded the 2nd Army Corps. He had fought gallantly but his reward was a death sentence – for ‘disobeying orders’ – from a kangaroo court in December 1922. Just hours later, a British diplomat managed to negotiate his release for long enough to get him aboard a British warship, dispatched by his cousin George V. Joined by his family, Prince Andrew set sail for a life of exile in France. Prince Philip, still a baby, was famously carried aboard in an orange crate. In Paris, the family lived perfectly comfortably although, by contemporary European royal standards, they were poor. By the age of seven, Prince Philip was sent to Britain to attend Cheam preparatory school and within two years the family had broken up. His four sisters had all married, his parents were separated and his mother was committed to a Swiss sanatorium after a mental breakdown.
When not at school, the young Prince would be passed among Mountbatten relations in Britain or make his own way across Europe to stay with his sisters and his network of royal cousins. It was a life of contrasts not easily comprehensible to modern minds. One week, this ten-year-old child might be alone on a train, heaving a suitcase from Calais to Germany. The next, he might be riding on the shores of the Black Sea with Cousin Michael, the schoolboy King of Romania. As he himself has remarked, it all seemed perfectly normal at the time – though not in hindsight: ‘It really is amazing that I was left to cross a continent all by myself – taxis, trains and boats – to get to my sisters.’ At school, he was a thoughtful, unstuffy child who neither complained nor bragged about his strange royal existence. Apparently he was known as ‘Flop’, although he was anything but. Few were aware of his royal links or of the photograph of his cousin George V, which he kept in a suitcase. Yet, come the holidays, he would set off for a kinsman’s schloss, often to be reunited with his adored father. There would, though, be no contact with his mother until his mid-teens, by which time she had emerged from self-imposed medical exile (mother and son would be much closer in later life). After Cheam, the Prince spent a year at Salem, a German school housed in a brother-in-law’s castle and run by the pioneering educationalist Kurt Hahn. Nazism was on the rise. More than sixty years later, the Duke would recall that every new boy was assigned someone called a ‘helper’ and that his ‘helper’ was Jewish. One night, a gang of pupils cornered the boy in his bed and cut all his hair off. ‘You can imagine what an effect this had on us junior boys,’ the Duke recounted. ‘Nothing could have given us a clearer indication of the meaning of prejudice and persecution.’ Prince Philip gave the boy the cricket cap he had brought with him from Cheam to cover his scalp until his hair grew back. ‘It taught me a very important lesson about man’s capacity for inhumanity,’ the Duke explained. ‘And I have never, ever, forgotten it.’
The Nazis drove Hahn (himself the son of a German-Jewish industrialist) into exile and Prince Philip was sent to join his new foundation at Gordonstoun in Scotland. It was a small school, dedicated more to helping every boy achieve his own potential than making him conform to type. Prince Philip flourished and became head boy before signing up for the Royal Navy in 1939. Years later, he said it was probably his maternal uncle, Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, who steered him into it. ‘He may have persuaded me. I just sort of accepted it,’ Prince Philip told Basil Boothroyd in 1970. ‘I didn’t feel very strongly about it. I really wanted to go into the Air Force. Left to my own devices, I’d have gone into the Air Force without a doubt.’ But he flourished at Dartmouth Royal Naval College, emerging as best cadet. It was also during his time there that the King and Queen came to visit with their daughters and Prince Philip was deputed to entertain the two Princesses. If the encounter did not have an enduring impact on him, it left a lasting impression on Princess Elizabeth.
During the Second World War, the Prince was again caught between two worlds. As he later reflected: ‘You get swept up into these things. It was tragic.’ His three sisters (the beloved Cecile had been killed in a plane crash in 1937) were all married to German officers. His father was marooned in German-controlled Monte Carlo where he would die in 1944. Prince Philip would never see him again.* The Prince’s mother, by now recovered, insisted on remaining in occupied Athens. There she organised food and medical supplies for the poor, hid a Jewish family from the Nazis and founded an order of nuns. In short, one way or another, Prince Philip’s entire family ended up in enemy territory. His own war took him to the Indian Ocean and then to the Mediterranean. Serving in HMS Valiant, he was mentioned in dispatches for his part in the Battle of Cape Matapan. It was his search-light battery which snared two Italian battle cruisers and helped send them to the bottom. With the characteristic modesty of his generation, he now looks back on it as nothing more than ‘a bit of activity’.
Promoted rapidly, he became one of the youngest first lieutenants in the Royal Navy, serving as second-in-command of HMS Wallace in the North Sea and during the Allied landings in Sicily. He would finish the war in HMS Whelp, witnessing the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. During his shore leave in Britain, he would stay with Mountbatten relations and, occasionally, with his distant cousin the King at Windsor Castle. ‘I’d call in and have a meal,’ he remarked years later, as if recollecting a favourite cafè. ‘I once or twice spent Christmas at Windsor because I’d nowhere particular to go.’ But, by now, he had definitely caught the eye of Princess Elizabeth. Despite introductions to a succession of eligible Guards officers on duty at the castle, her heart was set on her sailor Prince. With peace came progress. ‘When I got back in ’46 and went to Balmoral,’ he told his biographer, ‘it was probably then that it became, you know, that we began to think about it seriously and even talk about it.’
There was plenty of time to think about it. At the start of 1947, the Princess had to accompany her parents on their four-month tour of southern Africa. She celebrated her twenty-first birthday in Cape Town and returned to find her Prince waiting with a proposal (or, as he later put it: ‘it was sort of fixed up when they came back’). The engagement was announced in July and their November wedding brought a much-needed splash of colour to a monochrome, washed-out, ration-book nation. As Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, life got better and better. Charles and Anne were born in quick succession and the Duke was finally given his own ship, HMS Magpie, in 1950. But in 1951 it became clear that the King’s health was deteriorating and that the Princess would have to start deputising for her father more and more. The Duke returned from sea, ostensibly on a temporary basis, to assist his wife until the King and Queen returned from a forthcoming Commonwealth tour. That tour never happened and the Duke never went back to sea. On 6 February 1952, everything changed.
While the apparatus of monarchy was ready and waiting for the new Queen, the Court had no idea what to do with the new, well, … what was he? The wife of a King is automatically the Queen. But the husband of a Queen, rather like the husband of a Dame or a Baroness, receives no reciprocity. Queen Victoria had complained that no formal role had existed for Prince Albert after their marriage but nothing much was done about it. The Duke was perfectly happy to carry on being the Duke. He was much more concerned about the impact on his young family and, to a lesser extent, on himself. The first of several run-ins with the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, followed the Duke’s suggestion that the family might carry on living at Clarence House. Churchill, primed by the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Al
an Lascelles, was having none of it. Monarchs, the Duke was told firmly, lived at Buckingham Palace. There was even greater tension when the old guard got wind of a house party rumour. Lord Mountbatten, it was said, had been boasting that the ‘House of Mountbatten’ now reigned. Whether he had or not (Churchill thought it pure Mountbatten), the Prime Minister wasted no time in making it clear that he, the Cabinet and the Queen were adamant that there would be no change of name. It was still the House of Windsor. The Duke had never suggested otherwise but it hurt to be squashed so firmly and so publicly. He was, he said, no more than a ‘bloody amoeba’.
Within the Palace, there was a lot of territorial growling from the old guard – the ‘men with moustaches’ as the Duke’s staff would call them. They were determined to keep the new consort in his place in case he got any ideas about being the new master.
Among the dimmer patrician elements it was a case of plain snobbery, even bigotry. The chap was an impoverished outsider from a third-rate, clapped-out foreign monarchy and had a lot of dubious German relations. According to Kenneth Rose, the Duke received an extraordinary snub following the Queen’s accession and automatic promotion to Colonel-in-Chief of all the Foot Guards. She suggested that he might take her old appointment as Colonel of the Grenadier Guards. But the idea was sniffily rejected by a cabal of senior officers.* It is a measure of the man that when the same idea was proposed again many years later, the Duke did not tell the regiment where it could stick its offer. Instead, he accepted, went on to be a devoted Colonel – and still is. He even spent the evening of his ninetieth birthday – Friday 10 June 2011 – chairing the Household Division’s Senior Colonels’ Conference.
The Duke could live with the snobbery. He had never felt the slightest need to prove his dynastic credentials to anyone. He was neither marrying ‘up’ nor ‘out’ of his social position. As one Mountbatten cousin has pointed out, he was ‘more royal than the Queen’, with lineal connections to almost every throne in Christendom, past and present. It was a family joke that, when in London, his Aunt Louise would always carry a note in her handbag just in case she should fall under a bus. It stated (quite correctly): ‘I am the Queen of Sweden.’ Lord Mountbatten, never one to underplay pedigree, had traced his nephew’s lineage back to Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor. Years later, when a fantasist would claim to be the true Romanov heir to the Russian imperial throne, it was the Duke of Edinburgh who provided a DNA sample and stopped the claim in its tracks. He is even in the line of succession to the British throne himself, although it would take a pretty apocalyptic scenario to get him there. He currently hovers somewhere around the five hundred mark. Breeding was not his problem as far as the Duke’s more cerebral opponents were concerned. Their fear was that a headstrong young blade, fresh from a naval command, might put silly, new-fangled ideas in the head of the pretty young Monarch. What it all boiled down to was a simple issue of control. Lord Brabourne later recalled the Household hostility towards the Duke: ‘Lascelles was impossible. They were absolutely bloody to him. They patronised him. They treated him as an outsider. It wasn’t much fun. He laughed it off but it must have hurt.’
As the late Lord Charteris pointed out, the courtiers even kept the Duke at arm’s length during the Coronation itself. George VI had been crowned with his Queen at his side. The Queen was crowned alone. Even today, some members of staff are mindful of what happened to the Duke. ‘He was slightly bruised by all that, quite frankly, and he was pretty shoddily treated,’ says one. ‘If Courts want to gang up on someone, they can do it all right, I can tell you.’
The Duke, however, remains phlegmatic about it all. ‘I was told “Keep out” and that was that,’ he told Gyles Brandreth a decade ago. ‘I tried to find useful things to do. I introduced a Footman Training Programme. The old boys here hadn’t had anything like it before. We had an Organisation and Methods Review. I tried to make improvements – without unhinging things. Some of the old guard weren’t too happy. We met with a fair bit of resistance. But I think we made a few improvements, dragged some of them into the twentieth century.’ It would be another forty years before Michael Peat and his team of management consultants dragged the rest of the Household into the twentieth century. The Duke had long given up by then. If the Palace didn’t want his help, then he would carve his own role in the wider world. His office gained a reputation as the exciting place to be in the Palace, the only department where lady clerks were known as ‘the girls’ and called by their first names. ‘There was always lots of laughter,’ says one of them, recalling the gales of mirth when the Duke succumbed to jaundice and a lady wrote to him advising a daily diet of twenty-four grapefruit. ‘He has always had a wonderful team around him. And if he thinks you know the answer, he’ll always come to you. It’s great fun to work for someone like that.’
His office staff were a small, devoted crew led by Lieutenant General Sir Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, dashing war hero and errant husband of the writer Daphne du Maurier. A single office contained the four ‘girls’ – ‘none over forty; no one got institutionalised’ – while the Duke had two equerries next door. One was ex-RAF and one was the Duke’s old Royal Navy chum Mike Parker, a quick-witted, rumbustious Australian. ‘Boy Browning was an absolutely charming man,’ recalls one of the team. ‘But he had suffered in the war. He always talked about “me turn” – he’d had amoebic dysentery – and he had trouble with his nerves. Mike Parker could be exasperating at times but he was great fun and fitted the bill very nicely.’
It was Parker who would often bear the brunt of Establishment complaints about the Duke. On one occasion, he was summoned before Winston Churchill to receive a reprimand for allowing the Duke to travel by helicopter. ‘Is it your intention,’ Churchill asked him, ‘to wipe out the Royal Family in the shortest possible time?’ ‘Churchill was even against Prince Philip learning to fly. The thing you have to remember is that all those old men absolutely adored the Queen and couldn’t bear to think of anything happening which would upset her,’ says one of the team. The Prime Minister did not win that one. The Duke went on to master fifty-nine types of aircraft, including nine different helicopters, and logged 5,986 flying hours over forty-four years before retiring in 1997 with a last blast, from Carlisle to Islay, at the controls of a BAe 146.
All the sniping merely made him even more determined to do his own thing. When not accompanying the Queen on her travels, he expanded the range of his patronages enormously and created new ones. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award was born in 1956, despite the grumbles of some reactionary elements who warned that it smacked of the Hitler Youth and would kill off the Boy Scouts. Under his leadership – he was always a leader rather than a figurehead – organisations like the National Playing Fields Association, the Outward Bound Trust, the Automobile Association or the Industrial Society all found themselves propelled in fresh directions.
The Duke was part of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) from the moment it was founded around a dining-room table in Switzerland in 1961. President of the British arm for twenty years, he became International President for another fifteen and, by the time he left in 1996, it was among the most influential environmental voices in the world. He had paved the way for his eldest son’s environmental crusades a generation later – even if he occasionally despairs of some of today’s ‘tree-huggers’ (as he calls the more ethereal eco-warriors). His Commonwealth Study Conferences were ground-breaking assemblies of business and union leaders from all over the world, an international, industrial version of George VI’s boys’ clubs from a previous generation. Nor had the Duke entirely given up on innovation at the Palace. He knew that the ‘men with moustaches’ would never let him near state banquets, of course, but he introduced ‘Luncheons’. Interesting figures from random areas of national life would suddenly get a call to see if they might like to join the Queen and the Duke for lunch (then, as now, many assume it is a practical joke). They proved so successful that, in 1972, he introduced dinners on the same lines. I
n private, the Duke was sympathetic to those calling for a more modern monarchy. It is widely accepted that the Duke was instrumental in persuading the Queen to sever links with the annual debutante circus (which she duly did). He wrote books – fourteen in total – and forewords to other people’s books. He delivered lectures, to both lay and academic audiences, presented television programmes, visited parts of the world that had never seen a member of the Royal Family. And, over time, his willingness to embrace change started to rub off on the rest of the institution.
Throughout the reign, he has taken a hands-on, troubleshooting role in resolving issues which do not have a political or constitutional dimension but which have been of great sensitivity to the Queen – the organisation of the Coronation, the design of her coins, the filming of the first royal documentary, the restoration of Windsor Castle after the fire, the funeral plans for Diana, Princess of Wales, and so on. During the fifties, it was the Duke who suggested converting the ruins of the bombed-out Palace chapel into a public exhibition space for the Royal Collection. He was greeted by the usual shuffling of papers and courteous inertia, but he persisted. Since 1962, the Queen’s Gallery has been visited by millions. It proved so successful that, forty years later, another Queen’s Gallery was opened at the Palace of Holyroodhouse.
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