Other members of the family were almost as excited by the prospect of the union as Dickie. But Philip gave them no encouragement. In February 1944 Philip’s grandmother, Victoria, having had Philip to stay on leave, reported to Mountbatten, ‘As he has not touched on the subject you spoke about to me with reference to his future, I also refrain from doing so.’ In March, having seen more of Philip, she wrote again to Dickie: ‘I touched on the subject on which you gave him advice, but he was not inclined to confide in me, so I did not press him.’ In June, Alice wrote to her son from Athens, hoping to tickle some titbits from him: ‘I heard you stayed with Marina [at Coppins] at Easter and paid an interesting visit, as well as lunching with a certain young lady & her parents before you left …’ Philip did not rise to the bait.
Philip was his own man, resistant to all outside interference. Yes, his cousin Marina was helpful in providing a discreet venue for the young couple to meet. Where else could they meet, after all? He had no home of his own and they could hardly have romantic trysts in public places – but she was not party to any intriguing. In January 1945 she wrote to Dickie: ‘Of course the less said about the question we have sometimes discussed the better – & as you say it must take its course.’
Lilibet did not hide her feelings from her mother or her sister or her closest friends. Margaret Rhodes told me, ‘She’d say, “Philip’s written again” or “Philip’s coming to stay – isn’t that exciting?” She was happy to be in love.’ On the mantelpiece in her sitting room she kept her framed photograph of Philip. ‘Is that altogether wise?’ asked Crawfie. ‘A number of people come and go. You know what that will lead to. People will begin all sorts of gossip.’ The teenage Princess removed the offending portrait – and replaced it with another one, featuring her adored first lieutenant hidden behind a full naval beard. ‘There you are, Crawfie,’ she said. ‘I defy anyone to recognise who that is.’
Philip had a picture of Lilibet, too, a small one, kept – according to John Dean, who discovered it in the Prince’s overnight travelling bag – in a scuffed leather frame. Philip did not discuss his love life with his uncle’s butler, nor even, if he could help it, with his uncle. He did not discuss it, either, with the women in his family or – until the engagement was imminent – with his two closest contemporary male friends: his first cousin, David Milford Haven, and his fellow first lieutenant, Mike Parker. I think he was a man (like many) who did have difficulty in openly expressing his feelings. He would deny it, of course. He would simply say that he was not a man who liked to wear his heart upon his sleeve – for daws to peck at, and hacks to feed upon.
Where young Philip did cooperate with his uncle was in the matter of achieving British nationality. Philip was a Prince of Greece, but he did not feel Greek and, as I say, had never professed any particular sympathy for the Greek people.
In terms of blood, Prince Philip of Greece was not Greek at all. He was Danish, German, Russian, and English. He was born in Greece, but spent his early childhood in France and Germany. From his adolescence onwards he was based in England. Once he had joined the Royal Navy, therefore, and started to make headway as a young officer, becoming a naturalised British subject seemed to be a wholly sensible move. Mountbatten took the initiative, and did so with the family’s general approval. In September 1944 Victoria wrote to Dickie: ‘I think it is the best thing for him & it will give a firm basis for his life, which without a fixed career or home country it was wanting in, poor boy.’ Princess Marina concurred: ‘I think it is a very good idea & apart from it being a help in his naval career it might also be an asset for other “matters”.’
Turning Philip from Greek prince to British subject proved a more challenging undertaking than Mountbatten had envisaged. For a start, the blessing of both George II of Greece and George VI of Britain was an essential requirement, and, initially at least, neither monarch seemed in a hurry to give it. In George II’s case, it may have been a matter of national pride, a reluctance to have Greece lose any prince to another country. In George VI’s case, it may have been because the King suspected that Mountbatten’s concern over Philip’s nationality was as much to assist his nephew with the ‘other matters’ as with his naval career. In August 1944, when the King’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, called on the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office to discuss the matter, he noted in his diary: ‘I suspect there may be a matrimonial nigger in the woodpile.’
This hesitation of the two kings, combined with sustained doubts in government circles about the wisdom of getting embroiled in any aspect of Balkan politics except when absolutely necessary, and simple bureaucratic delay (there was a war on and this was not a priority), meant that it took three years – and much toing and froing and huffing and puffing, lobbying, and letter-writing by Mountbatten – to arrive at a satisfactory outcome. Eventually, on 18 March 1947, the deed was done.51 The news of Philip’s naturalisation was officially posted in the London Gazette, alongside that of several hundred others, many of them Poles who had fought with the British through the war, many of them German Jewish refugees. Once, when I asked Prince Philip how he thought he was seen by most people in Britain, he said, after a moment’s consideration, ‘Refugee husband, I suppose.’
Along with a new nationality he needed a new name. The surnames on offer on his father’s side of the family had little to commend them. Prince Andrea was the grandson of the King of Denmark and the family name of the Danish royal house was Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. Another, more manageable, paternal family name was Oldenburg and a bright spark at the College of Arms suggested that ‘Oldcastle’, as its English equivalent, might find favour. It didn’t.52 Instead (apparently at the suggestion of James Chuter Ede, Clement Attlee’s Home Secretary), Philip agreed to take the already established anglicised version of his mother’s surname, Battenberg. On 18 March 1947 Prince Philip of Greece became Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, RN.
In time (in the mid-1980s), his mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth, would describe Prince Philip as ‘an English gentleman – completely’. In the mid-1940s she was less certain. Her younger brother, David Bowes-Lyon, to whom she was very close (Elizabeth and David were the Benjamins of the family, seventeen and nineteen years younger than their eldest sister), did not believe that Philip was an appropriate husband for the future Elizabeth II.
According to Gina Kennard, ‘David Bowes-Lyon was a vicious little fellow. He had it in for Philip right from the start. He was completely against him.’ He was not alone. Lord Salisbury (whose ancestor had been on hand to advise Elizabeth I, after all) had profound reservations. As did Lord Stanley and the Earl of Eldon. As did most of the senior men at court. Philip might now be eligible for a British passport, but he wasn’t really British. He was German and you couldn’t trust a Hun. Yes, he was royal (of sorts), but Greek royalty was a standing joke. The Greek throne was notoriously unstable and the Greek royals undeniably the bottom of the pack. All right, he was serving in the Royal Navy – and that ‘mention in dispatches’ was to his credit – but where had he been to school? Gordonstoun? What was that all about? And where were his parents, for God’s sake? And wasn’t he a protégé of Dickie Mountbatten’s? Need more be said?
Many at court, and much of the Establishment, were wary of Mountbatten. As his daughter, Patricia, put it to me, with a smile, ‘My father was a progressive and the one thing the courtiers were not was progressive.’ Never mind ‘progressive’: the courtiers considered Mountbatten dangerously Left-wing. And not quite as royal as he liked to think he was. Hadn’t his grandfather, Prince Alexander of Hesse (whose own parentage was doubtful), run off with a lady-in-waiting – a Polish girl called Julie Hauke? She might have been elevated to the rank of Serene Highness eventually, but she was certainly a blot on the Battenberg escutcheon. (‘I believe that the Battenbergs have always behaved somewhat peculiarly,’ commented Heinrich Himmler after studying the Gestapo file on Mountbatten and his family.)
Mountbatten had a questiona
ble pedigree and a rum set of louche and Left-leaning friends – such as Tom Driberg.53 He was also, in the eyes of those who did not take to him, inordinately full of himself, impossibly pushy, and incurably inclined to interfere where he wasn’t wanted.
‘Yes,’ chuckled Patricia Mountbatten, ‘My father had colossal energy and drive. He was a dynamo. He made things happen. He got things done. And he didn’t go through “the usual channels”. He by-passed the officials. That really infuriated them. If he wanted to speak to the King, he just picked up the telephone. I’m sure they thought he’d be a very bad influence on Philip and that Philip might prove to be a chip off the old block.’
Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles (Educ: Marlborough; Oxford; Address: Sutton Waldron House, Blandford; Clubs: Travellers’, Pratt’s, MCC; TA: Fontmell-Magna), assistant private secretary to the Prince of Wales throughout the 1920s, assistant private secretary and private secretary to successive kings from 1935,54 encapsulated some of the family’s and most of the courtiers’ initial estimation of Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten: ‘They felt he was rough, uneducated, and would probably not be faithful.’
In time the King’s private secretary warmed to Philip, describing him (to Harold Nicolson in June 1948) as ‘such a nice young man’, and ‘not a fool in any way’, saluting his ‘sense of duty’, and acknowledging him to be ‘so much in love poor boy’. The King himself warmed to the young Prince from the start. In the spring of 1944 he told Queen Mary, ‘I like Philip. He is intelligent, has a good sense of humour & thinks about things in the right way.’ The King’s only real reservation in the early days of the romance was his daughter’s youth, but by the summer of 1946 Lilibet was twenty, so when Philip, now twenty-five, came to stay with the Royal Family at Balmoral – and proposed to her, and was accepted – there was little the doting father could do but bow to the inevitable – and play for a bit more time. The King agreed, in principle, to the union, but made two conditions: there could be no formal engagement until after the Princess’s twenty-first birthday in April 1947 and, before that, there would be a period of reflection while the King and Queen took their two daughters with them on a twelve-week tour of southern Africa.
The tour was memorable on several counts. Princess Elizabeth was unhappy to be going away – Crawfie reports ‘tears in her eyes’ at the moment of departure – but ready, as ever, to do her duty, and excited by the prospect of her first trip outside the British Isles. The timing, however, was unfortunate. As the Royal Family set off from Portsmouth – ‘us four’, as the King called them – on 1 February 1947, on board HMS Vanguard, the Royal Navy’s newest battleship, the weather in the English Channel was appalling. The weather on the mainland was even worse. Britain was suffering its cruellest winter of the century.
By 12 February, when the royal travellers were basking in sub-equatorial sunshine, the news from home was dire: ‘Heavy snowstorms and sub-zero temperatures are combining with a serious fuel shortage to bring Britain to its economic knees. More than four million workers have been made idle by power cuts, and with hundreds of coal trains unable to battle their way through 20-feet high snow-drifts, thousands of homes are without heat or light for long periods of the day.’ The Thames at Windsor had frozen over. Buckingham Palace was candle-lit. The King volunteered to return home. The Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, said, ‘Thank you, but no thank you’: a dramatic return would simply exacerbate the crisis, advertising it worldwide. Besides, the African trip was also designed, in part, to give the King – exhausted by the war and in failing health – a well-deserved opportunity for rest, recuperation, and sunshine.
On board ship, when the calmer seas were reached, there was certainly some of that. The King and Queen relaxed. The Princesses had fun. There are delightful photographs of Lilibet and Margaret Rose playing deck games with the younger officers. They look really happy. (There is a key to these people in those pictures: as a rule, the Windsors are most comfortable and carefree, not in conversation or contemplation, reading books or listening to music, but when they are playing games, playing sport, riding, shooting, having larks, enjoying practical jokes, taking part in Scottish country dancing.) Off-duty in Vanguard, picnicking in Southern Rhodesia, visiting the Orange Free State, Basutoland, and Bechuanaland in a special ‘White Train’, almost as tourists: the trip had many highlights. The girls sent regular reports to Crawfie:
‘The letters I got back were a great pleasure to me. They were also a wonderful picture of the different make-up of the two sisters. Margaret [now sixteen] wrote with her usual gaiety, all about the fun they were having, how beautiful the White Train was, how warm the sun, how wonderful the food.
‘Lilibet wrote, immensely distressed by all that was going on in England in the bitter weather. It bothered her to feel she was far away having a good time, in a land so full of everything. She felt she ought to be at home.’
The South African leg of the tour was the longest and most trying. The King was in sympathy with the ageing South African Prime Minister, Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts,55 who was striving valiantly against the odds to achieve Anglo-Afrikaner unity. The Boers – whose Nationalist Party would defeat Smuts and his United Party government in the election of 1948 and usher in the era of apartheid – were not in sympathy with the King, nor with the ‘mingling’ of Europeans and non-Europeans in the crowds that came to greet him. The atmosphere was tense. The King was tired and tetchy. At Benoni, a gold-mining town in the south of the Transvaal, there was an unfortunate incident when a man broke from the jostling crowd and rushed towards the open royal car. The King, unnerved, began shouting angrily at the driver to get a move on. The Queen, fearing an attack, hit at the man with her parasol. The man was immediately felled by one of the attendant policemen, and half beaten up, before it became apparent that he was not a would-be assailant at all, but an ardent royalist who was trying to present Their Majesties with a ten-shilling note as a twenty-first birthday present for Princess Elizabeth. The King, distressed by the misunderstanding, sent to enquire after the unfortunate man, and, later, apologised for his own behaviour to his equerry, Group Captain Peter Townsend. ‘I’m very sorry about today,’ he said, ‘I was very tired.’
The South African tour had a profound impact on Princess Elizabeth. It was her first first-hand experience of the reality of the British Commonwealth and Empire, of a divided country, of native people, of the tensions of African politics, and the nastiness of white supremacists. The Nationalists – who sneered at the King’s halting attempt to say a few words in Afrikaans at the opening of parliament – trumpeted the ‘swart gevaar’ (‘black danger’) and campaigned to keep ‘Die kaffer op sy plek’ (‘the nigger in his place’) and ‘Die koelies uit die land’ (‘the coolies – i.e. the Indians – out of the country’). Lilibet was not impressed.
The Princess was taken with Africa and the African people – and the feeling was reciprocated. According to Peter Townsend, the Africans really loved her. As she drove past, they shouted, ‘Leave the Princess behind!’, ‘Stay with us!’ A popular song was composed in her honour:
Princess, in our opinion,
You’ll find in our Dominion
Greetings that surely take your breath,
For you have a corner in every heart,
Princess Elizabeth.
The climax of the tour coincided with her twenty-first birthday. Field Marshal Smuts declared 21 April a national holiday. There was a birthday parade, a birthday ball, and a civic reception at City Hall in Cape Town; Smuts presented the Princess with a gemstone necklace and a gold key to the city; the Princess reviewed hundreds of troops, shook scores of hands, and delivered a short speech at a celebratory ‘youth rally of all races’. She also made one of the key broadcasts of her life.
Her old tutor in constitutional history, Sir Henry Marten, had impressed on her the special significance to the modern monarchy of both the advent of broadcasting and the development of the Commonwealth. He must have been mighty proud of his dilige
nt pupil’s birthday broadcast to the Empire and Commonwealth. ‘Although there is not one of my father’s subjects, from the oldest to the youngest, whom I do not wish to greet,’ the Princess began, ‘I am thinking especially today of all the young men and women who were born about the same time as myself and have grown up like me in the terrible and glorious years of the Second World War. Will you, the youth of the British family of nations, let me speak on my birthday as your representative?’
The essence of the message was unsurprising and comfortably generalised: in the dark days of the war, the British Empire had saved the world and ‘has now to save itself’. With determination – faith, hope, and endeavour – the future of the Commonwealth might be yet more glorious, prosperous, and happy than its past. Then came the peroration – much less predictable and much more personal – spoken in a steady, high-pitched voice and heard by many millions around the world:
‘There is a motto which has been borne by many of my ancestors – a noble motto, “I serve”. Those words were an inspiration to many bygone heirs to the throne when they made their knightly dedication as they came to manhood. I cannot do quite as they did, but through the inventions of science I can do what was not possible for any of them. I can make my solemn act of dedication with a whole Empire listening. I should like to make that dedication now. It is very simple.
‘I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial family to which we all belong, but I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in with me, as I now invite you to do. I know your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.’
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 21
