It seems Philip entertained them ashore as well. According to the ever-present Crawfie, ‘On the Sunday morning we were going to the College because there was to be a special service … I remember it was a lovely day, though it became a bit cloudy around eleven. Just about the time the service was scheduled to start and the boys had been paraded before the King and Queen, the Dartmouth College doctor said, “I am very, very sorry, but two of the boys have developed mumps.” There was a long conversation as to whether the children ought to go into the chapel …’
Eventually, it was decided – ‘better safe than sorry’ – that Crawfie should take the girls across to the Captain’s House and that Prince Philip would be detailed to entertain them. Lilibet and Margaret Rose were busy playing with the captain’s children’s train set when Philip appeared. ‘A fair-haired boy, rather like a Viking, with a sharp face and piercing blue eyes,’ is how Crawfie remembered him. ‘He was good-looking, though rather off-hand in his manner. He said, “How do you do,” to Lilibet, and for a while they knelt side by side playing with the trains. He soon got bored with that. We had ginger crackers and lemonade, in which he joined, and then he said, “Let’s go to the tennis courts and have some real fun jumping the nets.”’
Off they went, chaperoned by Crawfie. ‘I thought he showed off a good deal,’ she recalled, eleven years after the event, ‘but the little girls were much impressed. Lilibet said, “How good he is, Crawfie. How high he can jump.” She never took her eyes off him the whole time. He was quite polite to her, but did not pay her any special attention. He spent a lot of time teasing plump little Margaret.’
How much of this happened in fact and how much in Crawfie’s imagination, it is impossible to say. There are, however, in existence two photographs taken that weekend, each featuring Philip and Elizabeth, and each telling its own story. The first is a snapshot of the two of them alone playing croquet in the garden of the Captain’s House. The focus of the picture seems to be ships moored in the Dart estuary, but in the foreground, glimpsed behind a parapet, are the two teenagers. The eighteen-year-old boy appears to be concentrating on his next stroke. The thirteen-year-old girl, standing by a hoop, in her neat double-breasted summer coat, small hands clasped together in front of her, is gazing at him intently. She does look happy.
The other photograph shows the entire royal party watching the cadets on parade. Sitting in the front row, staring somewhat vacantly into the middle distance, is Lilibet. She is wearing a solemn expression and what looks like a beret to match her coat. She seems very young. Three places along, seated next to a tiny Princess Margaret (who doesn’t look plump at all), is the Queen, wearing a fabulous hat and chatting graciously to the captain. Standing immediately behind them, side by side, are Louis Mountbatten and Prince Philip. Mountbatten is looking amused and avuncular. Philip is leaning forward, grinning, gesticulating with his right hand: he is, without doubt, in the middle of telling a funny story. He has the unmistakable look of a charming young man who is often in the middle of telling a funny story.
That weekend the boy certainly made his mark. When the time came for Victoria & Albert to set sail, permission was given to the cadets to commandeer what vessels they could – rowing-boats, motor-boats, dinghies – and take to the estuary to give the royal visitors a memorable send-off. As the Royal Yacht made her stately progress out of the harbour she was escorted by a veritable flotilla of small craft manned by enthusiastic young men. ‘They followed the Victoria & Albert quite a long way,’ according to Crawfie, who was on deck with the royal party. ‘Then the King got very alarmed and said to Sir Dudley North [the Commander of the Royal Yacht], “It’s ridiculous, and most unsafe. You must signal them to go back.” Most of the boys did go back immediately, and all the others followed shortly except this one solitary figure whom we saw rowing away as hard as he could, who was, of course, Philip. Lilibet took the glasses and had a long look at him. In the end the King said, “The young fool. He must go back, otherwise we will have to heave to and send him back.” At last Philip seemed to realise they did want him to go back – they were shouting at him through the megaphone – and he turned back while we gazed at him until he became just a very small speck in the distance.’
Prince Philip told me that the story, as told by Crawfie, is somewhat exaggerated – the small boats only followed the Royal Yacht for a few hundred yards, then turned round and went home – but he does not deny the essence of it. And nor, I understand, would the Queen deny the essence of it either: that was the weekend when she fell for Philip.
And why not? He was enviably good-looking. He was fit.38 He was fun. He was funny. At this stage in the story, Louis Mountbatten – Uncle Dickie – did not know Philip that well. Through his teens, because he sometimes stayed with him during the school holidays, Philip had been much more under the wing of his other Mountbatten uncle, Dickie’s elder brother, Georgie, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, the father of David, Philip’s best friend at school and later, at his wedding, his best man.
Georgie had died of cancer on 8 April 1938, aged only forty-five, mourned by all who knew him. Dickie wrote in his diary that day: ‘The sweetest natured, most charming, most able, most brilliant, entirely lovable brother anyone ever had is lost. Heartbroken.’ Gina Kennard, who was nineteen at the time, and whose mother’s sister was married to Georgie, told me, ‘You couldn’t not love Georgie. Everybody adored him. I remember as a girl sitting under the dining-room table, hidden under the table cloth, thinking how lovely he was. Princess Elizabeth told me she loved him, too. His death was another blow for Philip, especially coming, as it did, only a matter of months after his sister Cécile and her family were killed in that awful air crash. It was a difficult time.’
On Georgie’s death, Dickie, aged thirty-eight, with only daughters himself, assumed the role of Philip’s informal guardian. The month before, in March 1938, Dickie had already had him to stay at Adsdean, the Mountbattens’ country house just outside Portsmouth. ‘Philip was here all last week doing his entrance exams for the Navy,’ Dickie reported to his wife. ‘He had his meals with us and he really is killingly funny. I like him very much.’
Prince Philip dismissed the suggestion when I put it to him, but I get the impression of a young man who felt some obligation to sing for his supper. He was handsome, engaging, well mannered. He was also homeless. And, by royal standards, virtually penniless. ‘Rubbish,’ he said. When he wasn’t at boarding school, he stayed with his grandmother (Princess Victoria of Hesse, widow of Louis of Battenberg, 1st Marquess of Milford Haven) in her grace-and-favour apartment at Kensington, or with one of his English uncles, or, until the prospect of war made it impossible, with one of his sisters and their German husbands. He would accept that his parents weren’t rich, but ‘you could hardly call them poor’. By this time, his father, Prince Andrea, had managed to get some funds out of Greece and Russia and gave Philip a small allowance when he joined the navy. His mother, Princess Alice, now received nothing from Andrea, and depended on an allowance from the ever-generous banking heiress, Edwina Mountbatten.39 ‘We weren’t well off,’ said Prince Philip, ‘but I don’t remember wanting for anything.’
While he chose not to complain about any aspect of his upbringing, he did not argue with the fact that from the age of ten or so, until he married Princess Elizabeth when he was twenty-six, he did not have one fixed address. ‘Whither the storm carries me, I go,’ he wrote in a visitors’ book at the beginning of 1946, ‘– a willing guest.’
And a welcome one. He had the glamour and energy of youth. He was funny. He had an engaging and memorable laugh. He was articulate and he was no fool. When he took the entrance examination to get into Dartmouth he came sixteenth out of thirty-four. At the College, his written work was no more than average, but in the oral exam, he scored 380 out of a potential 400 marks. At Gordonstoun he had become head boy. At Dartmouth he was awarded the King’s Dirk as the best all-round cadet of his entry. He had leadership qualities and ambit
ion. He strove to live up to the ideal of manhood set out in Kipling’s famous poem. Certainly, he ‘walked with kings’ without losing ‘the common touch’. While studying for the Dartmouth entrance exam, he stayed, as a paying guest, with a Mr and Mrs Mercer in Cheltenham. By day, Mr Mercer prepared young men for their naval examinations. By night, according to Philip’s cousin and exact contemporary, Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia, Mr Mercer’s teenage daughter entertained the student prince to ‘radio or record sessions’ in the family sitting room. Alexandra also recalled Philip enjoying a holiday dalliance in Venice at about the same time. ‘He was very amusing, gay, full of life and energy and he was a tease,’ she said.
It is frequently asserted that Saturday, 22 July 1939 was the day on which Philip and Elizabeth first set eyes on each other. ‘Not so,’ Prince Philip told me. ‘It’s one of those myths that’s just too good to let go. The journalists never like to let the facts get in the way of a good story, do they? But we’d certainly met before. We were cousins, after all.’ In Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Philip and Elizabeth had the same great-great-grandparents. In Queen Alexandra, the wife of Edward VII, they had the same great-aunt. ‘We came from different parts of the same family.’
As a small child Philip was taken to tea at Buckingham Palace with Queen Mary, who considered him ‘a nice little boy with very blue eyes’. His mother was born at Windsor Castle. His grandmother lived at Kensington Palace. His father, Prince Andrea, had been an aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria, Edward VII, and King George V. At his prep school, Philip had a framed photograph of the King-Emperor, signed ‘From Uncle George’. (He did not flaunt it: it was spotted, hidden in his trunk, by a dorm mate.)
Prince Philip told me that he and Princess Elizabeth certainly met – aged thirteen and eight – at Westminster Abbey on 29 November 1934, when his cousin, Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark, married Lilibet’s Uncle George, Duke of Kent. ‘We might have met before that.’ They certainly met again at the Coronation of George VI in 1937. What distinguishes their meeting in July 1939, of course, is not Philip’s attitude to Elizabeth – he was interested in girls, girls of his own age, not thirteen-year-olds – but hers to him. In The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene says, ‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’
Through her field glasses on the deck of Victoria & Albert Lilibet may have gazed at Philip in his rowing boat until he disappeared from view, but romance was some way off. There was a war to contend with first.
At the beginning of August 1939 the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, convinced that war was not, in fact, imminent, set off for a spot of salmon fishing. (Salmon fishing had long been a Chamberlain priority. Declining the office of Chancellor in May 1923, he wrote: ‘What a day! Two salmon this morning and the offer of the Exchequer this afternoon.’) On 6 August the King, who liked and trusted a good hunting and fishing man, set off for Balmoral for his customary family holiday. The grouse were expected to be particularly good that year.
On 9 August duty called, and the King came down briefly from Scotland to inspect the Reserve Fleet at Weymouth and, after the event, reported to his mother, Queen Mary, ‘I feel sure it will be a deterrent factor in Hitler’s mind to start a war.’
On 22 August news came that Germany and Russia had signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact. On 24 August Parliament was recalled and the King returned to London. The grouse had been magnificent. On 29 August he told a British ambassador who called at Buckingham Palace that he had never seen so many grouse, that he had bagged 1,600 brace in six days, that it was ‘utterly damnable that the villain Hitler had upset everything’. Happily, now that Britain had signed a formal treaty of alliance with Poland, he was convinced there would be peace and that ‘this time Hitler’s bluff had been called’. Unhappily, His Majesty was mistaken.
On 1 September German troops crossed the Polish border. On 2 September Britain and France issued an ultimatum to Germany: withdraw or face war. A deadline was set of 11 a.m. on Sunday, 3 September. Germany failed to respond with the undertakings demanded. The Second World War was under way.
‘Who is this Hitler, spoiling everything?’ demanded Princess Margaret. ‘I remember trying to give the Princess a painstaking and unbiased character sketch,’ said Crawfie, ‘but it wasn’t very easy.’ The King and Queen were now based at Buckingham Palace, staying at Windsor Castle overnight and at weekends. Margaret and Lilibet remained in Scotland, at Birkhall on the Balmoral estate, with Alah and Bobo and Crawfie. ‘Why had Mummie and Papa to go back, Crawfie?’ asked Margaret. ‘Do you think the Germans will come and get them?’ Crawfie was predictably reassuring and Lilibet, apparently, ‘was very calm and helpful, as usual, and at once ranged herself on the side of law and order’. ‘I don’t think people should talk about battles and things in front of Margaret,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to upset her.’
The Princesses’ parents telephoned their daughters every night at six o’clock. ‘Stick to the usual programme as far as you can, Crawfie’ was the Queen’s instruction. ‘Up there among the moors and heather it was easy to do this,’ said Crawfie. ‘The River Muick rippled merrily through the gardens just as usual in those lovely autumn days, while Poland was being over-run and “lights were going out all over Europe”.’
Now and then the horrors of war managed to penetrate the peace of the Highlands. The children listened to the wireless. They heard the anti-British propaganda broadcasts made by William Joyce, the notorious ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, and threw books and cushions at the wireless set in protest. On 14 October they heard the news of the sinking of Royal Oak at Scapa Flow with the loss of more than eight hundred lives. ‘Lilibet jumped horrified from her chair,’ according to Crawfie, ‘her eyes blazing with anger … “Crawfie, it can’t be! All those nice sailors.”’
On 18 December, to their surprise and delight, they were summoned to Norfolk to join their parents for the traditional Royal Family Christmas at Sandringham. They did not know what the future would hold. No one did. They listened to their father as he made his Christmas Day broadcast, live, seated in front of two large microphones, dressed in the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. The hesitancy with which he spoke – at one point having to start a passage again from the beginning – made what he had to say all the more moving:
‘A new year is at hand. We cannot tell what it will bring. If it brings peace, how thankful we shall be. If it brings continued struggle we shall remain undaunted. In the meantime I feel that we may all find a message of encouragement in the lines which, in my closing words, I should like to say to you:
‘“I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be better than light, and safer than a known way.’”
‘May that Almighty Hand guide and uphold us all.’
The King’s children were moved by what they heard. So were the British people. The poem the King had quoted was by a Gloucestershire-born poet and academic, Minnie Louise Haskins, and it first appeared in a collection called The Desert in 1908. It was Lilibet who gave the book to her father and it has remained a favourite with her throughout her life. She had the words of the poem engraved on brass plaques and fixed to the gates of the King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle, where her father was interred in 1952 and, fifty years later, the poem was read out at the funeral of her mother, Queen Elizabeth.
George VI had a good war. At first he was frustrated. ‘I wish I had a definite job like you,’ he wrote to Louis Mountbatten, now captain of HMS Kelly and commander of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla. ‘Mine is such an awful mixture, trying to keep people cheered up in all ways, and having to find fault as well as praising them.’ He was a constitutional monarch: his lot was to advise, counsel, and warn the government of the day. He was Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces: his role was to look the part, to lead by ex
ample, to be rather than to do. He delivered in full measure. He wore his uniform throughout the war. He paraded, he saluted, he inspected, he handed out medals whenever and wherever was required. When rationing was introduced, he made it clear that he and his family expected – wanted – to share the privations of the people.
And when, in September 1940, Buckingham Palace was bombed, it was akin to a blessing in disguise. ‘The King & I saw 2 of the bombs drop quite close to us in the quadrangle,’ the Queen wrote to Osbert Sitwell. ‘They screamed past the window and exploded with a tremendous boom and crash about fifteen yards away. We both thought we were dead, & nipped quickly into the passage, where we found our two pages crouching on the floor. They rose at once & we then descended to the basement, pretending really that it was nothing.’ It was quite something: the King and Queen were in the firing line and seen to be. As the Queen remarked, famously, after the bombing, ‘Now I feel I can look the East End in the face.’ ‘Thank God for a good King,’ someone shouted in the street as the sovereign inspected the damage done by yet another enemy air raid. ‘Thank God for a good people,’ the King replied.
George VI and his family knew, liked, and trusted Neville Chamberlain. When, in May 1940, he resigned as Prime Minister they were much distressed. After his farewell broadcast, the Queen wrote to him: ‘My eldest daughter told me, that she and Margaret Rose had listened to it with real emotion – In fact she said “I cried, mummy.”’ Later, the King wrote to Chamberlain, now dying from cancer: ‘You were my Prime Minister in the earliest years of my reign, & I shall ever be grateful to you for your help & guidance during what was in many ways a difficult period.’ The Queen was unequivocal: ‘How deeply I regretted your ceasing to be our Prime Minister.’ The King was more circumspect: ‘I have sympathised with you very much in seeing your hopes shattered by the lust & violence of a single man.’ He was not referring to Winston Churchill – although the King shared Chamberlain’s reservations about the arch-opponent of appeasement. Churchill, after all, wasn’t just a maverick: he had also been one of Edward VIII’s staunchest allies at the time of the Abdication. The King – whose constitutional duty it was to invite the parliamentarian best placed to form an administration to do so – would have liked to see Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, as Chamberlain’s successor, but he bowed to the inevitable. ‘There was only one person whom I could send for who had the confidence of the country,’ he noted in his diary, ‘& that was Winston.’
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 15
