Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Considering and evaluating ideas was central to Prince Philip’s life. At St George’s House, at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce from 1952 to 2011, through the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he became President in 1951, through the Commonwealth Study Conferences he established in 1956, and in any number of other settings, public and private, Prince Philip probed and tested ‘ideas’ in every area of endeavour and experience. Over sixty years he delivered more than five thousand properly considered speeches and lectures and was proud of the fact that his collected ‘works’ took up more than a yard of shelf space.45

  I was not surprised that Prince Philip approved of Eleanor Roosevelt’s dictum. To him, ideas were paramount. Events he accepted: he took them in his stride. ‘You take what life gives you,’ he said, ‘and make the best of it you can.’ People he kept at bay. When once I asked him who was the most impressive individual he had ever met, he began to answer – mentioning Vincent Massey, the Governor-General of Canada in the 1950s, and Sir Robert Menzies, twice Australian Prime Minister, 1939–41 and 1949–66 – and then stopped himself, saying, ‘No, that’s invidious. I don’t want to talk about individuals. Why do you have to bring everything back to people and personalities?’

  Because mine’s a small mind, perhaps, and because I am fascinated by people – I confess it. How people behave, in private as well as in public, provides clues to who they are – and who they are as people, as personalities, affects the way they behave and what they achieve. I said to His Royal Highness, ‘People are intrigued by people. That’s allowable, surely?’ He made no reply.

  I was certainly intrigued to read in the diaries of James Lees-Milne the story told by June Hutchinson (daughter of Diana, Countess of Westmoreland, and near-contemporary of Prince Philip) of a friend of hers who ‘swore that when in her teens she used to lie in the same bed with Prince Philip, a bolster between them. They would talk for hours. She was much in love with him. He would not transgress the bolster.’

  Lees-Milne was not sure he could believe the story. I think I do.

  Through the war years, while he was seeing Osla Benning, Prince Philip kept in touch with his young cousin, Princess Elizabeth. He wrote to her ‘from here and there’. He saw her ‘now and again’. That’s about as much as I got out of him. Around the time of his golden wedding anniversary he said to me, ‘I don’t remember much about it. It was a long time ago.’ In 1970, talking to his official biographer, Basil Boothroyd (whom he liked and trusted), he said, with the diffidence and touch of defensiveness that were the hallmarks of any conversation about his personal life: ‘During the war, if I was here [in Britain] I’d call in and have a meal. I once or twice spent Christmas at Windsor, because I’d nowhere particular to go. I thought not all that much about it, I think. We used to correspond occasionally. You see it’s difficult to visualise. I suppose if I’d just been a casual acquaintance it would all have been frightfully significant. But if you’re related – I mean I knew half the people here, they were all relations – it isn’t so extraordinary to be on kind of family relationship terms. You don’t necessarily have to think about marriage.’

  However sketchy he claimed his recollections to be, Prince Philip was adamant on one point. He did not think about marriage in any serious sense until more than a year after the war, when he went to stay at Balmoral in 1946. ‘I suppose one thing led to another,’ he conceded. ‘It was sort of fixed up. That’s really what happened.’

  By ‘fixed up’, he did not mean arranged by others. He meant that was the time when he and Princess Elizabeth came to a mutual understanding that met with the approval of their families. If he did have thoughts of marriage much before 1946, he kept them to himself. He certainly did not share them with Mike Parker, his contemporary and closest wartime friend. ‘He was the same, then as now,’ Parker told me in 2000, ‘good at keeping his feelings to himself. He didn’t tell me anything and I didn’t ask. I might have had my suspicions, but until around 1946, when an engagement was in the air, I didn’t know a thing.’

  Others, however, had their suspicions as far back as 1941. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon was one such. A wealthy American from Chicago, Channon came to Britain aged twenty-one in 1918, married Lady Honor Guinness, and became an English MP. He liked to feel he knew everybody and everything. He was a waspish chronicler of the social scene and took a special interest in royalty. In January 1941 he found himself staying at the British Legation in Athens and noted in his journal: ‘The Royal set-up at Athens is complicated: there is the isolated King who sees no-one; there are the Crown Prince and Princess (Frederika) who, madly in love, remain aloof from the world with their babies and their passion. She is a touch unpopular, being German (I met her first dining with General Goering in 1936); there is Princess Andrew who is eccentric to say the least and lives in semi-retirement: there is Prince Andrew, who philanders on the Riviera whilst his son, Prince Philip, is serving in our Navy …’ This was the January when Philip, on leave from HMS Valiant, was staying in Athens with his mother. On the 21st, Channon was taken to ‘an enjoyable Greek cocktail party’: ‘Philip of Greece was there. He is extraordinarily handsome, and I recalled my afternoon’s conversation with Princess Nicholas [Ellen, Philip’s aunt, widow of Andrea’s brother Nicholas]. He is to be our Prince Consort, and that is why he is serving in our Navy. He is charming, but I deplore such a marriage; he and Princess Elizabeth are too inter-related.’

  Prince Philip deplored the kind of tittle-tattle in which ‘Chips’ Channon revelled. In January 1941 Philip was nineteen, Elizabeth was fourteen, and, whatever his match-making aunt or her gossip-mongering teatime companions might care to invent, as far as Philip was concerned, marriage was not on the agenda. Channon, nevertheless, retained his watching brief. On 16 February 1944 he noted in his diary: ‘My parents-in-law, the Iveaghs, called to see me, after having had tea with the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace … I do believe that a marriage may well be arranged one day between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip of Greece.’ In October the same year, Channon’s nose went into an overdrive of twitching when he found himself a guest of Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, at Coppins, her country house in Buckinghamshire. ‘As I signed the visitors’ book,’ he reported to his journal, with a note of triumph worthy of Sherlock Holmes, ‘I noticed “Philip” written constantly. It is at Coppins that he sees Princess Elizabeth. I think she will marry him.’

  Prince Philip had no time for The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon. He and Princess Elizabeth were cousins; they became friends; they got to know each other better; they became closer; in due course, they became engaged. ‘That’s about it, really,’ he said to me, with a shrug. What Philip felt exactly, and when he felt it, is, as far as he was concerned, (a) frankly, none of our business, and (b) honestly, quite difficult to recollect at this distance in time.

  Getting an insight into Philip’s feelings about his relationship with Elizabeth was never going to be easy. Getting an insight into her feelings about him is more straightforward – if you are content to go along with the well-worn legend. As almost every one of the obituaries of the Duke of Edinburgh put it, Princess Elizabeth’s heart belonged to Prince Philip from the moment she saw him on that momentous day at Dartmouth when she was just thirteen. Once she had set her course, she did not waver from it.

  Horace Smith, her riding instructor, when she was both a child and a young woman, had the measure of her. He saw that she was single-minded, not one to take up interests ‘lightly, only to drop them just as easily a short time later. If and when her interest is aroused, she goes into whatever subject it is with thoroughness and application, nor does her interest wane with the passing of time or the claim of other new matters upon her attention.’

  As it was with her horses – and her dogs, and her faith, and her duty – so it was with Philip. Her first cousin, near contemporary, and friend, Margaret Rhodes, said to me, ‘Princess Elizabeth was enam
oured from an early age. I’ve got letters from her saying, “It’s so exciting. Mummy says that Philip can come and stay”. She never looked at anyone else. She was smitten from the start.’ ‘Yes,’ agreed Lilibet’s grandmother, Queen Mary, ‘it does happen sometimes and Elizabeth seems to be that kind of girl. She would always know her own mind. There’s something very steadfast and determined in her – like her father.’

  ‘Once she had set her course she did not waver from it.’ Is that really so? ‘She never looked at anyone else.’ Without doubt, that is the line that everyone takes and always has done. I took it, too, when I published the original edition of this book. Since then, however, I happened one day to find myself filming a television documentary at a country auction house when I was shown a letter that was up for sale, vendor unnamed. The letter was from Princess Elizabeth to her first cousin, Diana Bowes-Lyon.46 It was dated Tuesday, 30 November 1943 – so the young Princess would have been a little more than halfway between her seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays. It begins as a thank-you letter to ‘Darling Diana’: ‘I hope you will forgive me for not having written sooner to thank you for the handkerchief which you sent me. You know, it really was wicked of you to give me another one as I only wanted the other one as it belonged to a set, which I’ve had for years. It was angelic of you to give me a hanky but an unforgivable thing to do nowadays.’

  So far not so surprising. Anyone familiar with William Shawcross’s splendid collection of the letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother will be familiar with the effervescent family style. Anyone familiar with Princess Elizabeth’s ordered mind and thoughtful character will understand her delight at having her incomplete set of hankies made whole once more and her horror at the extravagance entailed at a time of war, privation, and clothes rationing. The opening of the letter is interesting – and charming in its way – but it is with what follows that there comes the revelation: ‘I saw Andrew for a moment last week. And the more I see of him, the more I wish he wasn’t my first cousin, as he’s just the sort of husband any girl would love to have. I don’t think one could find anyone nicer.’

  Well, there you have it. ‘He is just the sort of husband any girl would love to have.’

  And who was Andrew? He was Andrew Charles Victor Elphinstone, born 10 November 1918, the younger son of Queen Elizabeth’s eldest surviving sister, Mary (May), and Sidney, 16th Lord Elphinstone. The Elphinstones had five children in all: Elizabeth, John, Jean, Andrew, and Margaret – our Margaret Rhodes. Mrs Rhodes told me that she ‘hero-worshipped’ her brother Andrew, who had Victor added to his Christian names because his birth coincided with Armistice Day marking the Allied victory at the end of the First World War. When Andrew was staying with the Windsors during the Second World War, in May 1944, Queen Elizabeth wrote to Elizabeth Elphinstone to say: ‘It is delicious having Andrew. He is such fun, & so intelligent & so good-looking.’ He was bright – educated at Eton and New College, Oxford – and musical, too. ‘He has just bought me a piano, or rather he found it & I paid for it and he plays on it, & I listen.’

  And Lilibet listened, also. And she liked what she heard. She enjoyed her tall and handsome first cousin’s company very much. As a boy he had suffered from a stammer. It had not been as debilitating as her father’s, but it was a point of sympathy. And Lilibet was taken with her cousin, too, because, while he was fun to be with, he was so palpably decent. And he was fundamentally serious. He was destined to become a clergyman.

  He was not destined to marry Lilibet. In the summer of 1946 he married a young war widow, Jean Gibbs (née Hambro), then twenty-three, a friend and lady-in-waiting to Princess Elizabeth. Andrew and Jean had two children and Lilibet became godmother to the first, Rosemary Elizabeth, in September 1947. It was one of her last engagements before her own wedding seven weeks later.

  The Reverend Andrew Elphinstone died in March 1975, aged only fifty-six. From photographs he looks to have been a kindly as well as a handsome man. He became one of Princess Anne’s godparents and remained one of the Queen’s close friends for the rest of his life. ‘I don’t think one could find anyone nicer.’ That was Lilibet’s verdict in 1943. From what I have read and heard, that seems to be the general verdict.

  It was not a line that everyone would have used about Prince Philip of Greece. He was fun, too, and intelligent, and quite as handsome as Andrew (if not more so), but much less easy to read. By 1943 Philip had made his mark, for sure, but I do not believe that Lilibet had yet quite made up her mind. Philip is there, alongside Andrew, in that same letter to Diana Bowes-Lyon: ‘I still think he is charming and he is great fun. Hardly ever serious. But when he is, I think he talks good sense. We had a terrific time on Sunday night. We danced to the gramophone, which was great fun.’ The war notwithstanding, it seems they danced to Austrian tunes. ‘You go waltzing madly round the room, but it’s not like an ordinary waltz as your partner holds you round the waist and you hold his neck. Sounds odd, but it holds you together much better and you feel safer on a slippery floor.’

  At that Christmas of 1943, when the Windsor Castle pantomime was Aladdin, and Lilibet, aged seventeen and three-quarters, in fetching tights and tunic, was ‘principal boy’, and Margaret Rose, thirteen, played the heroine, Princess Roxana, Philip, now twenty-two, attended the third and final performance and sat in the very front row. Crawfie was impressed: ‘He looked more than ever, I thought, like a Viking, weather-beaten and strained, and his manners left nothing to be desired.’ Lilibet was positively pink with excitement. ‘I have never known Lilibet more animated,’ said her governess. ‘There was a sparkle about her none of us had ever seen before.’ According to Crawfie, ‘From then on, the two young people began to correspond.’

  But what did Crawfie know? The two young people had, in fact, been corresponding for some time. Writing to a friend in January 1944, Queen Mary insisted that they had actually ‘been in love for the past eighteen months. In fact longer, I think … But the King and Queen feel that she is too young to be engaged yet. They want her to see more of the world before committing herself, and to meet more men.’

  ‘Poor darlings,’ the King wrote of his daughters in his diary as the war rumbled to a close, ‘they have never had any fun yet.’ His Majesty need not really have worried. Princess Margaret was to have plenty of ‘fun’ in the years to come and Princess Elizabeth never complained that her life lacked excitement or romance. She was not a natural gaiety girl: she never felt she was missing out on what her mother’s friend Noël Coward called ‘cocktails and laughter – and what comes after …’ As Margaret Rhodes puts it, ‘She was not a flibberty-gibbet, by any stretch of the imagination.’

  And she did have fun, in her own way. At Windsor, as the war was ending, she was allowed her own space, beyond the nursery and the schoolroom. Crawfie described it: ‘There was a little boudoir done in pink tapestry between the schoolroom and her bedroom … This she could use as her private apartment. Lilibet was enchanted …’ At Buckingham Palace, as the war ended, she was given her own suite: a bedroom (in pink and beige, her mother’s favourite colours), a bathroom, a sitting room, all of her own, along the corridor from Margaret’s rooms, and Crawfie’s and Bobo MacDonald’s. Alah, the nanny, was no longer part of the nursery family: she died of meningitis, at Sandringham, at Christmas 1945. Lilibet was growing up – and having fun, albeit pretty innocent fun by today’s standards. When Philip came to call, reported Crawfie, ‘The three of them [Philip, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose] had dinner together in Lilibet’s sitting-room, and later romped in the corridor.’ Elizabeth was nineteen, Philip was twenty-four. According to Crawfie (who appears to have been as taken with the golden prince as her young charge), ‘There was nothing of the polished courtier about him. He came into the Palace like a refreshing sea breeze … Presently he began to come up as a matter of course, and have dinner informally, in the old comfortable nursery fashion, in the old nursery, which Margaret now used as her sitting-room. The food was of the simplest. Fish, so
me sort of sweet, and orangeade. Philip does not smoke and drinks very little.’

  After dinner, apparently, along the corridors of the Palace, there would be what Crawfie liked to describe as ‘high jinks’: ‘Philip removed from the door the old card with “Nursery” on it, and substituted another marked “Maggie’s Playroom”. They would play ball (a good many electric-light bulbs suffered) and race about like a bunch of high-spirited children. It was always a threesome, unless I took a hand and did something about it by removing Margaret on some pretext or other. I felt the constant presence of the little sister, who was far from undemanding, and liked to have a good bit of attention herself, was not helping on the romance much.’

  The playful presence of little Margaret notwithstanding, the romance was blossoming. In February 1945 Lilibet, approaching her nineteenth birthday, reported to her cousin, Diana: ‘I am now the proud possessor of a very large photograph of Philip, which stands on the mantelpiece and glowers at me. I had to go through a lot of ragging when it arrived – though I admit Mummy said, “He is a good-looking boy”, at which I agreed! I am sure all the housemaids at Sandringham looked at the photograph and said, “Ooh! I wonder who that is?”’

  Princess Elizabeth did meet other men, of course. Her parents encouraged her to do so. Her mother organised small dances, to which young courtiers, Guards officers, and aristocrats were invited. Crawfie, apparently, tried to encourage Lilibet to give ‘little cocktail parties of her own, in her own sitting room, to return the hospitality of her many friends’, but could never persuade her. ‘She was too accustomed to leaving it all to Mummie. Mummie always had done all the entertaining, and the habit was hard to break.’

  Princess Elizabeth’s paternal grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandmother had been royalty who had married royalty. Her father, however, only second in line to the throne, had married aristocracy (‘a different gether altothing’, as Princess Margaret liked to quip), but his marriage was universally accepted as a success, and, consequently, it was generally accepted that it would be equally acceptable for Elizabeth, although Heiress Presumptive, to settle for an aristocrat (top-of-the-range, of course), as Papa did when he married Mummie.