Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  In May 1930, with Andrea’s agreement, Alice’s mother, Victoria, took the decision that Alice should be interned in an asylum. Against her will, and under sedation, Alice was taken to the Bellevue Clinic at Kreuzlingen in Switzerland, the psychiatric sanatorium of Dr Ludwig Binswanger.

  To all intents and purposes, Alice’s marriage, and her family life, were now over. Things had not been comfortable for some while. There is a formal photograph taken of the family at St Cloud in 1928, at the time of Andrea and Alice’s silver wedding anniversary. Everybody in the picture looks miserable. Andrea, seated, arms and legs folded, cigarette holder in hand, is gazing remotely into the middle distance. The two elder daughters look almost haunted, the two younger ones, positively sullen. Oddly, Alice, and young Philip, aged seven, in his sailor suit, holding his mother’s hand, both staring solemnly at the camera, appear the most composed, the least ill at ease.

  In 1928 Philip was still a pupil at his first school in Paris, The Elms, a pre-preparatory establishment, run by an American couple, Donald and Charlotte MacJannet, and catering largely for the children of wealthy American businessmen and the multi-national offspring of the diplomatic corps.12

  According to the MacJannets’ biographer, Princess Alice told the headmaster that, while her boy had plenty of originality and spontaneity, ‘instead of being constantly hushed up he should be working off his boundless energy by practicing games and learning Anglo-Saxon ideas of courage, fair play, and resistance. Philip should develop English characteristics, because his future will be in English speaking lands, perhaps American, and I want him to learn English well.’

  Philip, accompanied by his governess, walked to the school every morning and usually arrived half an hour early. According to ‘Mr Mac’, as the head was known, Philip made himself useful, cleaning blackboards, straightening furniture, and reminding all and sundry of his sisters’ dictum: ‘You shouldn’t slam doors or shout loud.’ He seems to have been something of a paragon. ‘He always got chairs for visitors, would not let women serve him, carried food from the kitchen but never broke a platter.’ Besides loving football, and baseball, he did well enough in his studies to get a silver star and even a gold one, ‘making great progress in his three years’. Apparently, he begged to be allowed to be a boarder and live at the school, but ‘we can’t afford it,’ his mother said. As it was, his school fees were paid by his father’s younger brother, Christo.

  Prince Philip remembered the MacJannets for the rest of his life and always spoke of them with respect and affection. Off and on, over the years, he would write to them. Once or twice he saw them and talked with them happily about the old times. ‘Were they the best times?’ I asked him. ‘They were good times,’ he said. ‘The MacJannets were good people.’ In 1947, when Philip married Princess Elizabeth, they sent an album of school pictures to the couple as a wedding present. Later, when Prince Charles reached school age, they sent him a story entitled ‘When Daddy was a Little Boy’, in which Charlotte MacJannet told of Philip’s school days.

  The Elms was an international school. I asked Prince Philip if he thought of himself as an ‘international’ person. ‘I’ve been a British subject since 1947,’ he said, side-stepping the question.

  ‘What language did you speak at home?’ I asked.

  ‘English … and then we might lapse into French – or German.’

  ‘Greek?’

  ‘Sometimes. We spoke English mainly.’

  ‘So by the time you were ten you spoke English, German, Greek, and French?’

  ‘I could hardly fail to learn French during nearly ten years’ residence in Paris,’ he replied tartly.

  In 1928, though his parents’ marriage was under strain and his home circumstances unusual, Philip was happy with his lot. Indeed, every account of him at this time contributes to a picture of a perfectly straightforward little boy: lively, boisterous, adventurous, not especially academic (but by no means a dunce), self-confident, self-reliant, noticeably charming.

  In 1929, when he was eight, funds were found to send him to boarding school – in England. He was dispatched to Cheam, in Surrey, England’s oldest preparatory school, where his mother’s younger brother, Georgie (2nd Marquess of Milford Haven), had once been a pupil, and where Georgie’s eldest son, David, was a near-contemporary, and, though two years his senior, would become Philip’s closest school friend and, eighteen years later, his best man. Cheam, founded at the turn of the seventeenth century, was a typical, traditional English prep school of the period, complete with cold showers, wet runs, corporal punishment, compulsory chapel, compulsory games, compulsory Latin and compulsory Classical Greek. Philip appears to have thrived in this environment. Years later, in a foreword to an official history of the school, written in 1974 (after Prince Charles had been a pupil at Cheam – and hated it), Prince Philip wrote: ‘Children may be indulged at home, but school is expected to be a spartan and disciplined experience in the process of developing them into self-controlled, considerate and independent adults. The system may have its eccentricities, but there can be little doubt that these are far outweighed by its values.’

  Philip’s arrival at Cheam coincided with a range of dramatic changes in his immediate family’s situation. From the age of eight, his mother virtually disappeared from his life for the rest of his childhood. For several years he received no word from her of any kind, not even a birthday card. And within the space of eight months, between December 1930 and August 1931, his four sisters were married to a quartet of eligible German princelings. Margarita, aged twenty-five, married Prince Gottfried of Hohenlohe-Langenburg; Theodora, twenty-four, married Berthold, Margrave of Baden; Cécile, twenty, married George Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse; and Sophie, seventeen, married Prince Christoph of Hesse. It was a parcelling off of daughters that would have done credit to Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.

  With Alice in a sanatorium, his daughters in their new family homes, and his son enjoying the spartan, disciplined life at his English boarding school, Prince Andrea gave up the house in St Cloud and moved, on his own, to live in a small flat in Monte Carlo. However much you pressed him on the matter, in my experience Prince Philip would make no complaint about any of this. ‘It’s simply what happened,’ he said to me. ‘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.’

  Prince Philip’s loyalty to the memory of both his parents was impressive. Occasionally, I heard him make withering comments about a member of his own family, but about his parents – who, in effect, left him without a settled home and family from the age of ten – I only heard him speak with sympathy, affection, and even admiration. Fine portraits of them both hung in his study at Buckingham Palace. To the end of his life, arthritis permitting, he liked to wear his father’s signet ring.

  Princess Alice was incarcerated in the Bellevue Clinic at Kreuzlingen for two and a half years. Her condition did not improve. There were times when she was ‘high’ – drafting loopy articles and working on a book of spiritual revelations – but, mostly she was depressed and, occasionally, she was suicidal. Philip visited her once, accompanying his grandmother. Andrea visited once, too.

  The environment at Kreuzlingen was not uncongenial – I get the impression of a country house hotel set in well-tended parkland – and the clinic’s staff appear to have been kindly and intelligent people. There was no electric-shock treatment, no automatic recourse to drugs, and straitjackets would be used rarely and only to restrain the most violent patients. Alice was offered care, kindness, and attention. The hope seems to have been that rest would lead to recuperation. It didn’t, and the Princess felt imprisoned. She resented being detained against her will. In July 1932, after jumping through a window, she managed to escape. Her freedom was short-lived. Within hours she was apprehended at the local railway station and forcibly returned to the clinic.

  Alice did not want to live with her own fa
mily (she was clear about that), but she did want to leave Kreuzlingen, and eventually, later in 1932, she persuaded her mother that the time had come when she should be allowed ‘freedom under surveillance’. For the next five years Alice led a nomadic existence, travelling between Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, living quietly in small hotels and in rented rooms. She sent Philip and her daughters the occasional message or birthday card. She did not see any of her children for five years. She lived among strangers. Gradually, she recovered her equilibrium.

  Andrea, meanwhile, was making a new life for himself on the French Riviera. The tall, elegant, monocled prince-in-exile, who smoked and drank a little more than was quite good for him, lived variously in a small flat, in hotel rooms, and on board a wealthy friend’s smart yacht moored in Cannes harbour. From around 1930 up until the time of his death he had a lady friend, the Comtesse Andrée de La Bigne, granddaughter of a mistress of Napoleon III. Andrea had a reputation as a charmer and enjoyed the company of women, but there is no evidence to suggest that he was a serial philanderer. He died at the Hôtel Métropole in Monte Carlo on 3 December 1944. He was sixty-two.

  Young Philip, meanwhile, when not at boarding school, travelled between the homes of assorted relations: his grandmother at Kensington Palace, his English Uncle Georgie (Milford Haven) in Berkshire, his sisters and their new husbands in Germany. He did see his parents together just once more, in late November 1937, when he was sixteen. There was a family reunion as a consequence of a family tragedy. A Hesse-Darmstadt cousin was getting married in London and Alice’s and Andrea’s middle child, Cécile, and her husband and their two boys (aged six and four), were all killed on their way to the wedding, when the aeroplane taking them from Darmstadt to England crashed in heavy fog outside Ostend.

  Alice travelled to Darmstadt from Berlin for the family funeral. Andrea brought Philip from London. At the funeral Alice’s brother Dickie (whom she had not seen since 1929) represented George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Both Kaiser Wilhelm (Queen Victoria’s grandson, who lived until 1941) and the German Third Reich were represented. Hermann Goering, founder of the Gestapo and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, came in person.

  For Alice and Andrea the death of their daughter and two of their grandchildren was a shocking event. They were united in grief, but only briefly. In better health than she had been for several years, Alice was ready to consider the possibility of sharing a life with her husband again. For Andrea, however, it was too late: he had moved on.

  From Prince Philip’s early childhood, I have three anecdotes to offer, each illustrating a different aspect of his character: his generosity, his get-up-and-go, his pig-headedness. Two of them were recounted by his cousin and exact contemporary, Princess Alexandra of Greece. In 1944 Alexandra married Peter, the last King of Yugoslavia, and, in 1959, in exile in England, she published Prince Philip: A Family Portrait. She was emotionally unstable and her book, according to Prince Philip, is ‘largely unreliable’. ‘She was a natural journalist,’ he said. But, having said this, he did not quibble with the stories.

  The first illustrates Philip’s instinctive kindness – one of his most attractive and least recognised characteristics. The story dates from the mid-1920s, when Philip was five or six, and on a family holiday, playing on the beach at Berck-Plage, the seaside resort in the Pas de Calais. A well-meaning visitor arrives on the beach one day with toys which he gives out to each of the children in the party – except for one little girl, who is disabled and whose disability, the visitor assumes, will prevent her from playing. Immediately, Philip goes into the house and collects his assorted toys and treasures and presents them to the little girl.

  The second story – again set at Berck-Plage – illustrates his initiative. Inspired by the nomadic salesmen – usually from north Africa – who plied their exotic wares along the beach, Philip collected a couple of oriental rugs from the house and set himself up on the beach in direct competition.

  The third story demonstrates his stubborn streak. It was told to me by Patricia Mountbatten, his first cousin, Dickie Mountbatten’s elder daughter, and dates from a few years later. She remembers: ‘I suppose Philip was about twelve and I was about nine. Our mutual grandmother took a great interest in Philip. She played an enormous part in his upbringing. But they were both strong-willed individuals and sometimes they argued – and sometimes Philip was really quite rude. I remember vividly the time when they had an argument about something and our grandmother said, “Philip, go up to your room.” And he wouldn’t. He just hung about in the hall. He would not go up to his room. Eventually, our grandmother came out into the hall and actually had to chase him up the stairs.’

  When in England as a boy, and not staying either with his grandmother, Victoria Milford Haven, or her son, Georgie, Philip spent part of his holidays with the Wernher family, either at Thorpe Lubenham, near Market Harborough, or at their splendid Bedfordshire mansion, Luton Hoo. In 1916 Georgie married Countess Nadejda (Nada) Torby, daughter of Grand Duke Michael of Russia and his wife, Countess Torby (an heiress from the Caucasus), and great-granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I. In 1917 Nada’s elder sister Anastasia, known as Zia, married Harold Wernher,13 for a while considered the richest catch in England. The Wernhers had three children and their daughter Gina, born in 1919, had vivid memories of Prince Philip as a little boy. ‘I suppose I was about eight and he was about six when I first met him,’ she told me. ‘He was a very obstreperous, rough little boy. Very strong, very active. He had a great sense of humour. We had a lot of fun. There were four of us who played together all the time: Philip, Philip’s cousin, David Milford Haven (he was my cousin, too, of course), me (I was known as “George”) and my younger brother, Alex, who was exactly Philip’s age and who was killed in the war, in 1942, aged twenty-one. We called ourselves “The Four Musketeers”.’

  I asked Gina Wernher – who later became Lady Kennard14 – whether she thought Prince Philip was happy as a boy. ‘As a little boy he was very happy,’ she said, ‘Very jolly, very lively. As he grew older, he became more thoughtful, more introspective. He never saw his parents, you know. Never. And he minded that. He told me so. He was perfectly happy at boarding school, but he said to me – I remember this clearly – “Everybody has a family to go back to. I don’t.” He loved his sisters very much and when Cécile was killed in that air crash, in 1937, it affected him deeply. He was very quiet. He didn’t talk about it much, but he showed me a little bit of wood from the aeroplane. It was just a small piece, but it meant a lot to him.’

  In 1933, aged twelve, Prince Philip first came under the influence of the German educationist Kurt Hahn. Hahn had been secretary and friend to Prince Max of Baden, former Chancellor of the German Empire, whose son Berthold had married Philip’s sister, Theodora, in 1931. A decade or so before that, Hahn and Max of Baden had founded a school together, based at the Baden family home, Schloss Salem, on the shores of Lake Constance, and designed as much to build the characters of its students as to educate them. Prince Max said of the school, ‘I am proud of the fact that there is nothing original here. We have cribbed from everywhere, from the public schools, from Goethe, from Plato, from the Boy Scouts.’

  Philip left Cheam and came to Salem. He explained to me, ‘The suggestion came from my sister and brother-in-law, who owned the school: it had the great advantage of saving school fees.’ Philip remained at the school for two terms. He might have stayed longer had it not been for Hitler’s rise to power (Hitler became Chancellor that year) and the growing and malevolent influence of the Nazi Party. Under the circumstances, Philip’s family felt he should return to school in Britain. ‘It was certainly a great relief to me,’ he said. At Salem, Philip could not take the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute at all seriously: at Cheam, exactly the same arm gesture was used to indicate to a master that a boy wanted permission to go to the lavatory. (When he saw this paragraph in draft, Prince Philip asked me, ‘Do you really want to keep the last sentence?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘becaus
e it illustrates your contempt for the Nazi Party even at an early age.’ When a Jewish fellow pupil had his head shaved by anti-Semites, Philip gave the boy his Cheam school cap to hide the indignity. He had nothing but scorn for the Nazis, yet there are those who persist in portraying him as a racist. I have come across two websites that label him, uncompromisingly, as a crypto-Nazi.)

  Kurt Hahn himself – not only Jewish, but also an outspoken critic of Hitler – was arrested by the Nazis in March 1933. He was later released and fled to Britain, ending up in Scotland, in Morayshire, where he founded another school, at Gordonstoun House, in a location close to the sea and mountains, where the wind and weather were appropriate to his challenging educational philosophy. Hahn believed that young people were ‘surrounded by a sick civilisation … in danger of being affected by a fivefold decay: the decay of fitness, the decay of initiative and enterprise, the decay of care and skill, the decay of self-discipline, the decay of compassion’.

  At Gordonstoun – where Prince Philip arrived in the autumn of 1934 – the regime was designed to tackle this decay and, years later, Hahn’s radical philosophy and methods would play their part in shaping two of the national and international ventures with which Prince Philip became most closely associated: the Outward Bound Trust and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme. How would Philip describe Hahn? ‘Eccentric perhaps, innovator certainly, great beyond doubt.’

  Hahn’s chief eccentricity lay in his appearance. As a young man he had had brain surgery which involved a silver plate being implanted in his skull. As a result of the operation he had an aversion to light, wore a huge black cape, a broad-rimmed black hat, and, when travelling by car, covered his face with a dark cloth. ‘There was an air about Hahn which commanded instant wariness and respect,’ said Philip. ‘Apart from that, his famous mannerisms – the stooping gait, the handkerchief screwed up like a ball and held in his mouth, the large-brimmed hat and the flashing quizzical eye – all helped to signal the presence of an exceptional being.’