Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Alice lived in Athens throughout the German occupation, and beyond. As her biographer, Hugo Vickers, says, ‘Alice was no threat to the Germans, politically or personally, and she moved about relatively unnoticed. She did her best to alleviate the suffering of the Greeks, but more as a nurse than as a princess.’ She shared in the privations of the Greek people. Food was in scant supply. During the first bitter winter of the occupation she lost fifty-seven pounds in weight. She was sometimes lonely, often hungry, frequently cold, but she had spirit – and hope. She imagined herself and her son – a Prince of Greece – living together in Athens after the war. In December 1941 she had written to Philip: ‘Even in these anxious times I am full of hope and when I go for walks I look at all the houses to see if there is not a suitable one for us later on, as I am tired of flats and prefer a whole house … I am still busy with my charities … Don’t worry about me. I am really and truly in good heart.’

  She was of good heart, too. She worked in one of the largest soup kitchens in Athens; she worked in a refuge for orphans; she organised a group of district nurses to provide care in the poorest areas of the city. She was in no way ostentatious about her good works. She was quietly determined, dogged, devoted, and ready to take risks. When the Nazi threat to the Jews of Athens was at its height, Alice offered refuge to a family of Cohens. When neighbours enquired, she said that Mrs Cohen was a former Swiss governess to her children. When the Gestapo questioned her, she simply exaggerated her deafness and looked uncomprehending.

  She never talked about hiding the Cohens. When I tried to talk to Prince Philip about his mother, he was reluctant to be drawn. When I told him how moving I had found Hugo Vickers’s account of her life, Philip said, in a very matter-of-fact way, ‘Yes, he did a lot of research.’ When I said Princess Alice seemed to me to be an extraordinary woman, he said, ‘Mm’ and changed the subject, asking me if I had yet read a new book that told the story of the Royal Yacht Britannia.

  It is clear to me that from his father Prince Philip inherited his appearance, his charm, his humour, his flirtatious way with the ladies. But with his mother he shared a wider, and perhaps more significant, range of characteristics. He guarded his privacy. He kept his own counsel. He did not wear his heart on his sleeve. He hid his light under a bushel. He found it uncomfortable to talk about himself – and had a feeling that it would have been both unmannerly and unmanly to do so. His manner was deceptive. He was a kindly person, and a caring one. He was more sensitive than he wanted us to think or know. He could be prickly and perverse, stubborn and wilful. He could also be visionary. His spiritual life was important to him. He was his mother’s son.

  In the late 1980s, some years after her death in 1969, surviving members of the Cohen family sought to honour the memory of Princess Alice. They secured for her a ‘Certificate of Honour’ as one ‘Righteous among the Nations’: she ‘risked her life to save persecuted Jews’. In October 1994 Prince Philip and his surviving sister, Sophie, went to Jerusalem, to the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem, to accept the posthumous award on their mother’s behalf. In his speech on the day, Philip said of her, ‘As far as we know she had never mentioned to anyone that she had given refuge to the Cohen family at the time when Jews throughout Greece were in danger of being arrested and transported to the death camps. I suspect that she never thought of it as something special. She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally natural human action to help fellow human beings in distress.’

  I would have been intrigued to know the range of thoughts passing through Sophie’s mind as, with her brother, in her mother’s memory, she laid the wreath in the Holocaust Museum in 1994. Sixty years earlier, her beloved husband, Prince Christoph of Hesse, had joined the Nazi Party and become a member of the SS – the Schutzstaffel, ‘Hitler’s bodyguard’. In 1945 Sophie told her grandmother: ‘Since 2 years my eyes have been open & you can imagine what feelings one has now about those criminals.’ As time went by, Prince Christoph grew less enamoured of the Führer, but in 1935 he was thirty-four, patriotic and ready to serve the greater German cause. He joined the Luftwaffe. In October 1943 he was killed in a flying accident in the hills outside Rome. Alice, in German-occupied Athens, was given permission to travel to Germany to visit her widowed daughter.

  Alice’s daughters suffered from the dilemma that faced several of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren during the two world wars of the twentieth century: divided loyalties. Their grandmother lived in Kensington Palace, under the protection of the British king. Their grandfather had become a British marquess. Their brother, Philip, and their uncle, Dickie, were officers in the British navy. They were married to Germans. Whose side were they on?

  Hermann Goering had attended the funeral of Cécile and her husband in 1937. Sophie’s husband had been a member of the Nazi Party. Theodora’s husband, Berthold, was a German, but not a Nazi. He was severely wounded in the leg in France at the outset of the war and was invalided out of active service. The eldest sister, Margarita, had the oldest husband, Gottfried (known as Friedel), who was already in his forties when war was declared. Relatively speaking, through the hostilities, they managed to keep a low profile and out of harm’s way.

  While Athens was occupied by the Germans, Alice was able to get permission to visit her sister in Sweden and her daughters in Germany and Switzerland. In October 1944, when, three and a half years after being driven out, British troops returned to Greece, Alice’s daughters were, once again, behind enemy lines. Throughout the war years Philip was unable to make contact with his sisters. While Greece was in German hands, he was unable to see his mother. He was twenty-three, and in a ship bound for Colombo, when his father – whom he hadn’t seen for five years – died in his hotel bedroom in the south of France.

  ‘You’re a poor bloody orphan just like me,’ thought Mike Parker when he met Philip at the time. ‘A poor bloody orphan.’

  ELIZABETH & PHILIP

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Don’t praise my charm too much …

  Don’t take my arm too much,

  Don’t keep your hand in mine …

  People will say we’re in love!’

  Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960), Oklahoma!

  Mike Parker was an Australian, from Melbourne. Born in June 1920, he was a year older than Prince Philip. They met in 1942, as fellow first lieutenants – Philip in HMS Wallace, Parker in HMS Lauderdale – on convoy duty on ‘E-boat Alley’. They became lifelong friends. Parker’s father was a captain in the Royal Australian Navy. Parker came to Britain to join the Royal Navy to prove his independence. ‘I was an orphan,’ he liked to say, ‘because I came from Australia. Philip was an orphan because he came from nowhere. His parents weren’t anywhere to be seen.’

  The two men had much in common. They were young. They were ambitious. ‘We were highly competitive,’ said Parker. ‘We both wanted to show that we had the most efficient, cleanest, and best ship and ship’s company in the Navy’. And they shared a sense of humour. For a prince, Philip was remarkably unstuffy. As an Australian, Parker did not stand on ceremony. In an unlikely way, each felt he was the other’s equal. The traditional middle-class British naval officer was relatively well heeled. Not so Philip of Greece and Parker of Melbourne. ‘He was better off than I was,’ said Parker, ‘but compared with many people he didn’t have a brass razoo!’

  Prince Philip dates the beginning of their close friendship to 1944, when, by coincidence, they found themselves in sister ships – Philip in HMS Whelp, Parker in HMS Wessex – on their way to the Pacific as part of the 27th Destroyer Flotilla under Admiral Sir James Somerville. They were looking forward to some action against the Japanese; they arrived just in time for the Japanese surrender in September 1945. In Tokyo Bay, Whelp’s final wartime assignment was to ferry newly released prisoners of war to light fleet carriers which then brought them back to Britain.

  En route for the Far East and after the Jap
anese surrender, Philip and Parker took shore leave together, in both north Africa and Australia. In 1990, interviewed by Tim Heald for his biography of Prince Philip, Parker recalled: ‘Of course we had fun in north Africa, but never anything outrageous. We’d drink together and then we’d go and have a bloody good meal. People are always asking, “Did you go to the local estaminets and screw everything in sight?” And the answer is, “No! It never came into the picture. There was so much else to do.”’ He did admit, however, ‘There were always armfuls of girls.’

  What exactly did he mean by that? When I asked him, Mike Parker simply exploded: ‘Nothing, for Christ’s sake.’ Commander Parker (as he became, and MVO, CVO, and Order of Australia, too) died at the very end of 2001, aged eighty-one, a plain-speaking Australian to the last.44 ‘Jesus, I wish I’d never used that phrase,’ he said to me. ‘Yeah, there were always “armfuls of girls”, showers of them, but nothing happened – nothing serious. What I meant was this: we were young, we had fun, we had a few drinks, we might have gone dancing, but that was it. In Australia, Philip came to meet my family, my sisters, and their friends. There were girls galore, but there was no one special. Believe me. I guarantee it.’

  In 1945 Philip was twenty-four, a bearded Adonis. According to his cousin, Alexandra of Yugoslavia, who wasn’t there, ‘Philip, with a golden beard, hit feminine hearts, first in Melbourne and then in Sydney, with terrific impact.’ According to Mike Parker, who was, ‘Philip was actually quite reserved, quite restrained really. He was always good company, but he was self-disciplined, too. And self-contained. And careful. He didn’t encourage gossip. He certainly didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. He didn’t give away a lot. There have been books and articles galore saying he played the field. I don’t believe it. People say we were screwing around like nobody’s business. Well, we weren’t. You didn’t. We didn’t. That’s the truth of it.’ Besides, in 1943, Parker got married. ‘In those days, if you slept with a girl, you married her.’

  Robin Dalton – in time a London-based film producer; in 1945 a twenty-three-year-old Australian girl working as secretary to the commanding officer of the ordnance department of the Southwest Pacific Area – remembered it a little differently. In her Incidental Memoir, she wrote: ‘What would seem like shocking promiscuity – not only physical but emotional – in peacetime, was felt as a beneficence of the heart. The fact that it was also rarely that one was caught out in one’s perfidious spread of affection blinded one to the dangers. The pleasures were freshly minted each week, as the turnover in admirers was brisk. If possible, our affections were limited to one per squadron, or PT boat, or Marine battalion, and the chief dread was that their leaves would overlap. They seldom did. We did not consider ourselves promiscuous. We were in love.’

  Robin was in love with Philip’s cousin, David Milford Haven. ‘We met in 1944, in Sydney, at a cocktail party on one of the warships. He was a signals officer working for Admiral Vian. He was adorable. It was love at first sight.’ Their affair lasted five years. ‘I met Philip through David,’ she told me. ‘They were like brothers, you know.’ She told me that Philip had two special girlfriends in Australia at the end of the war: ‘A society girl called Sue Other-Gee, and then Sandra Jacques – that was a terrific love affair.’

  Perhaps there was a licence to be more uninhibited in Australia?

  Sixty years on, in London, sitting with Gina Kennard in the elegant drawing room of her third-floor flat off Sloane Square, Prince Philip’s childhood friend said to me, emphatically, ‘It was a different world. Unmarried girls didn’t sleep with their boyfriends. It really wasn’t done. You went for dinner, you went dancing, you went shooting, you had fun, but you knew where to draw the line. Of course, some girls stepped over the boundary, but that was the exception, not the rule.’ Gina and her sister and their friends were brought up in an age when the Church of England’s traditional teaching on sexual morality went virtually unquestioned and mostly unchallenged. Married women (like Dickie’s wife, Edwina) might have affairs, and, because there was a war on, some unmarried sweethearts might indulge their boys on the way to the front, but, on the whole, most nice girls expected to be married as virgin brides. And there were practical considerations as well as moral ones: contraception was uncertain, illegitimacy a stigma, abortion illegal.

  I asked Gina Kennard if Prince Philip had been her boyfriend. She laughed. ‘Everybody said he was in love with me. My mother used to say that his mother – who was a saintly person, deaf but lovely – would have been very happy for Philip to marry me, but it never came up. I said to him recently, “Are you still in love with me?” and he said, “Yes, of course, I am.” The truth is, he was wonderfully attractive – he still is – and we were friends, best friends, and we went out together and had just the best time, but nothing really serious happened. It wasn’t like that. He was young and handsome and, of course, I loved him. At that age, you fall in love all the time, don’t you? Philip knew lots of girls. There was Osla Benning, wasn’t there? We were just young people having fun.’

  According to Alexandra of Yugoslavia, Philip started ‘having fun’ when he went on holiday to Venice in the year before the war and, aged seventeen, stayed with Alexandra and her mother, Aspasia (widow of Prince Alexander of Greece, nephew to Philip’s father, Andrea). Andrea cautioned Aspasia that his boy had exams to pass and urged her to ‘keep him out of girl trouble’. In the event, in Alexandra’s account, Philip discovered ‘blondes, brunettes and redhead charmers’ and ‘gallantly and I think quite impartially squired them all’.

  That said, one charmer, it seems, did stand out from the crowd: a seventeen-year-old American model and aspiring actress named Cobina Wright Junior, daughter of Cobina Wright Senior, established actress and ambitious hostess. Cobina Jr was a considerable beauty: tall and blonde, with large blue eyes and a contract from Twentieth Century Fox. Philip met her in Venice, in Harry’s Bar, and was seriously smitten. He met her again in London and, according to her friends, wrote her ‘impassioned love letters’, but the passion, apparently, was not entirely reciprocated. Cobina returned to the United States and, in November 1941, not long after featuring on the cover of Life magazine, she married Corporal Palmer T. Beaudette, the son of a wealthy automobile family from Pontiac, Michigan.

  (In the 1980s, by odd coincidence, Cobina Jr’s daughter, Cobina Caroline, known as CC III, was linked, fleetingly, to Prince Philip’s second son, Prince Andrew.)

  Osla Benning was another of Philip’s youthful flames. She was a Canadian-born, London-based debutante, with ‘dark hair, alabaster white skin, an exquisite figure and a gentle loving nature’, according to Sarah Norton, who shared a flat with her in 1939 – when Osla was just sixteen. Sarah, daughter of Richard Norton (soon to become the 6th Lord Grantley) and god-daughter of Louis Mountbatten, introduced Osla to the eighteen-year-old Philip and, from the start, ‘they got on like a house on fire’. When I asked Prince Philip how he remembered times with Osla, he simply said, ‘Fun.’ By all accounts – including her own – she was larky, high-spirited, and innocent. For the first two to three years of the war, when Philip wasn’t at sea he’d see Osla in London when he could – and then he saw her less. And less. And in 1944 she became engaged to someone else. ‘But you remained friends?’ I asked Prince Philip.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you kept in touch?’

  ‘Yes.’ Osla did not marry her first fiancé. In 1946 she married a thirty-year-old diplomat, John Henniker-Major, later the 8th Baron Henniker, and in 1947 Philip became godfather to their first-born son, who was given ‘Philip’ as one of his Christian names.

  As an old man Prince Philip would sigh at what he described as my ‘obsession with personalities and gossip’. But even as a young man, according to Mike Parker, ‘Philip wasn’t one for tittle-tattle. He was much more reserved than you’d think. Circumspect.’

  Richard Norton, 6th Lord Grantley, Sarah Norton’s father, was a banker turned film producer. Norton got to me
et Prince Philip when the young naval officer came to call on his daughter and her friend Osla. What struck Norton about the youthful Prince was his ‘forceful intellect’. ‘When asking me questions about films, for instance,’ he said, Philip ‘did not want to know about the stars but about the technicalities of how films were made’.

  In his despair at my ‘obsession with personalities and gossip’ Prince Philip quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.’

  Prince Philip was fascinated by ‘ideas’. He gave all sorts of ideas his time and careful attention. As just one example of his questing, challenging, intellectual nature I refer you to A Windsor Correspondence between The Duke of Edinburgh and The Right Reverend Michael Mann, Dean of Windsor. The correspondence, an exchange of letters triggered by Prince Philip, concerns evolution, science, religious conservatism, and morality. It is worthwhile, if not easy, reading. It was published in 1984 by St George’s House, at Windsor Castle, an institution that came into being in the mid-1960s, on the Duke’s initiative, ‘to provide a place where men and women in positions of influence and responsibility, drawn from every area of society, might consider and evaluate current questions in which important value judgements are involved’.