To the senior courtiers, to the aristocrats in Queen Elizabeth’s immediate circle, Philip did not feel like ‘one of us’. He spoke perfect English, he had impeccable manners, but he was by no stretch of the imagination a classic English gentleman. He was neither an Etonian, nor a Guards officer, nor a huntsman.58 And what little was known of his parents was not encouraging. The royal establishment did not welcome Philip with open arms. Far from it. According to John Brabourne, ‘They were bloody to him. We were at Balmoral that summer’ – the summer of the engagement – ‘and they were absolutely bloody to him. They didn’t like him, they didn’t trust him, and it showed. Not at all nice.’
What was Philip’s reaction to the hostility? I asked.
‘I think it hurt,’ Lord Brabourne said to me. ‘But he didn’t let it show. He just got on with it.’ It certainly rankled with Philip – and continued to do so, even into old age. He was snubbed by snobs. He was treated as an outsider, when he knew he was anything but. His father, after all, had been an ADC to Queen Victoria, Edward VII, and George V. Prince Philip told me the story of the first time he visited Windsor Castle after his engagement, when a courtier, patronisingly, began to tell him about the history of the place. Philip interrupted and silenced the man, saying, ‘Yes, I know. My mother was born here.’
Princess Alice was in England at the time of her son’s engagement. She was staying with her own mother at Kensington Palace. She was happy to see Philip and, together, they spent hours sorting through cases of Andrea’s old possessions – his papers and books, clothes, and bric-a-brac – sent up from the south of France following Philip’s visit to the Comtesse de La Bigne. Alice now spoke of Andrea almost as if they had never parted. She had high hopes for her son’s future happiness.
The betrothal was announced on 9 July, because a Buckingham Palace garden party was scheduled for the 10th and the young couple could make their first public appearance there. Alice sent a happy report to Dickie, now in India in his new role as Britain’s last Viceroy: ‘It amused me very much to be waiting with the rest of the family, for Philip to come down grandly with Bertie, Elizabeth & Lilibet. The young couple made their rounds of the garden alone, accompanied by the court people & received ovations from the guests. This morning the two came alone to visit Mama, who was delighted as she is very fond of Lilibet & likes her character very much.’ Alice told Dickie that Philip was at his most exuberant: ‘He was so excited he hardly knew what he was doing.’
The engagement announced, preparations for the wedding began at once. By royal standards, it was not to be an extravagant affair. Times were hard: the winter had been cruel, the economy was fragile, rationing was the order of the day. Tom Driberg, the Labour MP, wrote to his friend Dickie Mountbatten to warn him that the government’s backbenchers would not look kindly on public funds being lavished either on his nephew’s wedding or on his subsequent lifestyle. From India (where he had been transformed from Viceroy to Governor-General following India’s independence) Mountbatten sent a swift response to Driberg: ‘You can rest assured that he [Philip] thoroughly understands this problem and indeed he spoke to me about it when I was home in May. I am sure he is entirely on the side of cutting down the display of the wedding, and his own personal feelings are against receiving any civil list for the very reasons you give. I have, however, persuaded him that he should take something.’ Mountbatten explained that Philip had virtually no money beyond his navy pay and that his ‘little two-seater’ (his beloved MG) made ‘a big hole in his private fortune’. ‘As a future Prince Consort, however,’ he went on, ‘I think you will agree that Third-class travel would be regarded as a stunt and a sixpenny tip to a porter as stingey … It really amounts to this: you have either got to give up the Monarchy or give the wretched people who have to carry out the functions of the Crown enough money to be able to do it with the same dignity at least as the Prime Minister or the Lord Mayor of London is afforded.’
As it turned out, Philip was not destined to be Prince Consort. It would be ten years, in fact, before he would become a prince of the United Kingdom. At the outset of his marriage he did not go entirely without honours, however. The wedding was set for 20 November 1947. At the beginning of the month the King reported to Queen Mary, ‘I am giving the Garter to Lilibet next Tuesday, November 11th so that she will be senior to Philip, to whom I am giving it on November 19th. I have arranged that he shall be created a Royal Highness & that the titles of his peerage will be: Baron Greenwich, Earl of Merioneth & Duke of Edinburgh … It is a great deal to give a man all at once, but I know Philip understands his new responsibilities on his marriage to Lilibet.’
Mountbatten (who had become a Knight of the Garter himself at the end of 1946) returned from India for the wedding. For the eve of the great day, Mike Parker organised a stag night for Philip at the Dorchester Hotel. He told me about it: ‘It was a great night. Everyone was in naval evening dress. Mountbatten was the senior guest, alongside David Milford Haven and captains and first lieutenants of the 27th Destroyer Flotilla, the flotilla that wound up in Japan at the end of the war. It was a very happy occasion. It was an evening of comrades. Philip was an orphan of sorts and we were family.59 Philip was happy and we were happy for him.’ At the beginning of the evening, the gentlemen of the press were invited to take photographs of the guests. When they had done so, Mountbatten suggested that the guests might now borrow the press cameras to take a group photograph of the gentlemen of the press. Having done so, the guests, at Parker’s bidding, removed the flash bulbs from the cameras and smashed them against the wall, so preventing any further photography. ‘We were just having fun,’ Parker told me. ‘It was a good-humoured evening all round.’
At the time, that’s how the newspapermen saw it, too. Over the years, however, the incident has been cited, time and again, as an illustration of Philip’s fundamental hostility towards the press. He denied it absolutely. He said to me more than once, ‘I go out of my way to line people up for the photographers, to make sure everyone in the group is in the picture, to make sure the photographers have got what they need. I always have.’ He added, with a sigh, ‘Of course, they always want one more. They’re never satisfied. But I do my best. I do try to help.’ On the morning of his wedding, seeing the photographers huddled in the cold outside Kensington Palace, he ordered cups of hot coffee and tea to be sent out to them.
There is additional confusion about the eve-of-wedding stag night, confusion inadvertently caused by Larry Adler,60 who, in interviews reproduced in several books and used in a Channel Four documentary about Prince Philip, said, ‘I was at his bachelor party the night before his wedding to Princess Elizabeth.’ He wasn’t. Adler was at a different dinner, an earlier event, organised by the photographer Baron Nahum (always known simply as ‘Baron’), who had met Philip at Broadlands when he had been taking photographs of the Mountbattens, had become a friend of Philip’s, and was to take the official photographs of the royal wedding. When, not long before his death in 2001, I asked Adler about the stag night he remembered, he said, ‘I may have got the date wrong, but I’ve not forgotten the occasion – or the atmosphere. There were about twenty to thirty guys there, all cracking jokes at Philip’s expense – you know, dirty jokes, wardroom stuff. I couldn’t join in because it wasn’t comfortable. Philip wasn’t comfortable. He was getting married and he was scared. His face was white. He was beginning to realise what he’d let himself in for.’
Philip and his best man, David Milford Haven, spent the night before the wedding at Kensington Palace. John Dean, the Mountbattens’ butler who became Philip’s valet, said, ‘Their rooms were astonishingly poor and humble – floors scrubbed boards with worn rugs.’ (Robin Dalton recalled her boyfriend David’s room being ‘in the servants’ attic’. ‘We had a flat together in Chelsea,’ she told me, ‘but in the run-up to the wedding it was thought advisable that David, as Philip’s best man, move in with his grandmother. I remember David and me, on our nights together, creeping up t
he back stairs of her apartment at Kensington Palace as silently as possible.’) John Dean recalled bringing Philip his early-morning tea promptly at 7 a.m. and finding his young master in happy form and not the least bit nervous.
Patricia Mountbatten’s recollection was a little different. ‘I saw him just after breakfast that morning,’ she told me. ‘We were alone together – we were cousins and we knew each other very well – and I said something about what an exciting day it was and, suddenly, he said to me, “Am I being very brave or very foolish?”’ I asked Lady Mountbatten what she thought he meant by that. ‘He was apprehensive,’ she said. ‘He was uncertain – not about marrying Princess Elizabeth, but about what the marriage would mean for him. He was giving up a great deal. In many ways, nothing was going to change for her. Everything was going to change for him.’
For a start, that very morning he stopped smoking cigarettes. The King was a heavy smoker. (It was a family habit: Queen Mary was a smoker, too.) Princess Elizabeth saw the effect cigarettes had on her father and did not want her husband to smoke. Philip was happy enough to oblige his bride-to-be – and disciplined enough to be able to do so overnight. At 11 a.m., fortified by a gin and tonic, and dressed in naval uniform, sporting the insignia of a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter, and wearing the ceremonial sword that had belonged to his grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg, Philip, accompanied by his best man, set off for Westminster Abbey.
Over at Buckingham Palace, Elizabeth, too, had an early start. It was still dark when Bobo brought her little princess a cup of tea. ‘I don’t think any of us had very much sleep,’ reported Crawfie. ‘I went along to Lilibet’s room very early, and found her in her dressing-gown, peeping excitedly out of the windows at the crowds.’ Despite the bitter cold, people had slept out overnight to secure their view. Along the Mall and down Whitehall, the pavements were packed, fifty people deep. ‘I can’t believe it’s really happening,’ Lilibet told Crawfie. ‘I have to keep pinching myself.’
Norman Hartnell, who had designed the Princess’s wedding dress, delivered it personally to the Palace the night before. At 9 a.m. he and his entourage were on parade again for the final fitting. It took an hour and a quarter. ‘She looked so beautiful,’ recalled Margaret Rhodes, who was one of the eight bridesmaids. ‘We were all dressed by Mr Hartnell, too. It was very exciting. There was rationing, of course, and we used up all our clothes coupons.’ The bride’s dress alone absorbed three hundred coupons and cost £1,200. Given the prevailing austerity, the extravagance was considered controversial by some. Most, however, went along with the Leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, who welcomed the wedding and all that it involved as ‘A flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel.’ Norman Hartnell used to enjoy telling the story of how his manager – who had travelled far and wide gathering materials for the dress – was stopped at customs on his return from a buying trip to the United States and asked if he had anything to declare. ‘Yes,’ the man replied, ‘ten thousand pearls for the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth.’ The dress was made of ivory silk, decorated with pearls arranged as white roses of York, entwined with ears of corn embroidered in crystal. The effect was ravishing.
Inevitably, there were last-minute dramas, ‘the tensions common to any home on a wedding morning’, according to Crawfie. The bride’s bouquet was lost. A footman remembered receiving it and bringing it upstairs, but what happened to it after that, he couldn’t recall. Panic ensued and then, suddenly, happily, the footman remembered he had placed it in a cool cupboard near by for safekeeping. Next, the precious tiara given to the Princess by Queen Mary snapped as it was being put on her head. More panic, until nervous hands managed to repair the damage. Finally – and most dramatically – the Princess went to put on the double string of pearls that her parents had given her as a wedding present – and realised that they were half a mile away at St James’s Palace, where all the wedding presents were to go on public display.
The Princess’s recently appointed private secretary, Jock Colville, was summoned to her sitting room. ‘She stood there, radiant and entrancing in her wedding dress,’ he recalled. Could he, somehow, make his way to St James’s Palace and retrieve the necklace? she asked. ‘I looked at my watch,’ he said. ‘I rushed along the corridor. I galloped down the Grand Staircase and into the main quadrangle of Buckingham Palace. Take any car, the Princess had called after me. So I ran towards a large Royal Daimler. “To St James’s Palace,” I cried to the chauffeur, and I flung open the door of the car. Before I could leap in, a tall, elderly man, ablaze with Orders and Decorations, began to emerge. It was King Haakon VII of Norway. “You seem in a hurry, young man,” he said. “By all means have my car, but do let me get out first.”’
When Colville reached St James’s Palace, the detectives guarding the royal wedding gifts were not inclined to believe his story. He pleaded with them. He asked them to telephone Buckingham Palace. The line was dead. With his heart beating and the minutes ticking by, he told them his name and, when they discovered it printed in the official Wedding Programme, they reluctantly allowed him to escape with the necklace. Pushing his way through the crowd, apologising as he went, ‘with one hand firmly pressed against the pocket of my tunic where the pearls lay’, Colville made his way back to the car and reached Buckingham Palace with only moments to spare.
At 11.15 a.m. the Princess, carrying her bouquet, wearing her parents’ pearls, her grandmother’s tiara, and Mr Hartnell’s fairy-tale dress, clambered into the Irish state coach. Her father, slight and pale, but smiling, dressed in his uniform as an Admiral of the Fleet, sat next to her. Together, escorted by the Household Cavalry in full ceremonial dress uniform for the first time in six years, father and daughter travelled along the Mall and down Whitehall towards Westminster Abbey, crowds up to fifty people deep cheering them all the way. ‘The King looked unbelievably beautiful,’ Sir Michael Duff wrote to his friend, the photographer Cecil Beaton, ‘like an early French King and HRH the Bride a dream.’ It was a poignant journey for them both, but more so for the King than his daughter. For Lilibet a new life was about to begin; for George VI an era was coming to an end. ‘It is a far more moving thing to give your daughter away than to be married yourself,’ the King told the Archbishop of York later that day.
The Archbishop, Cyril Garbett, officiating alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, described the wedding – to the congregation of two thousand in the Abbey, to the few thousand more watching a film of the occasion on fledgling television in the evening, and to the millions tuned in to the live broadcast on the wireless around the world – as ‘in all essentials exactly the same as it would have been for any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some small country church in a remote village in the Dales’. Well, up to a point, Lord Archbishop. The Princess had chosen traditional hymns (‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, sung to the tune of Crimond, was Crawfie’s favourite moment) and vowed, until death, to ‘love, honour and obey’ her husband, ‘for richer or poorer, for better or worse’, so the essentials were certainly familiar, but everything else was truly beyond the ken of the average British cottager of the period. For a start, there were eight bridesmaids (led by Princess Margaret, walking alone, three paces ahead of the other bridesmaids, in recognition of her rank), two kilted page boys (Prince William of Gloucester and Prince Michael of Kent, who inadvertently stepped on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior), and the guests – the men in uniform and morning suits, the women in full-length dresses with long white gloves and glittering tiaras – included a remarkable array of royalty, some still reigning, others retired, hurt. According to one of the bridesmaids, Pamela Mountbatten, ‘Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands caused a stir, remarking that “Everyone’s jewelry is so dirty,” which may or may not have been the case; to me it was just remarkable that all those royal jewels had survived the war.’
On Lilibet’s side of the family, her Uncle David and his American wife, the Duke and
Duchess of Windsor, were conspicuous by their absence. On Philip’s side, the principal non-invitees were his three sisters and their German husbands. It was only two years since the end of the war, too soon for the British Royal Family to be seen extending the hand of friendship to the enemy. Philip’s youngest sister, Sophie, had three brothers-in-law still awaiting denazification, one of them still interned.
Alice wrote a twenty-two-page description of the wedding for her daughters, to ‘console them for their absence’. She was there, seated with her mother, the Marchioness of Milford Haven, and her sister, Louise, and her husband, Crown Prince Gustaf of Sweden, and her brother, Dickie, who, with Edwina and their younger daughter, Pamela, had come home briefly from India for the occasion.
From Philip’s father side of the family the contingent was smaller: of Andrea’s seven brothers and sisters, all but one was dead. Philip’s uncle, ‘Big George’, was there from Paris, with his wife, Marie Bonaparte, and their daughter, Eugénie, alongside assorted first cousins, second cousins, and cousins by marriage, including Queen Helen of Romania, Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia, and Queen Frederika of Greece.
There were so many foreign royals in the best seats for the wedding that members of the British Parliament had to draw lots to secure access to the ‘parliamentary enclosure’. Chips Channon was one MP who managed get in. ‘I thought Princess Elizabeth looked well,’ he noted in his diary, ‘shy and attractive, and Prince Philip as if he was thoroughly enjoying himself.’ A few days later Channon gave a spectacular post-wedding party – ‘a great, great success’ by his own account: ‘I “laced” the cocktails with Benzedrine, which I find always makes a party go’ – and entertained some of the royalty who were in town, including the Queens of Spain and Romania. ‘I am sorry that Queen Freddie [of Greece] and the Duchess of Kent [Princess Marina, Philip’s first cousin] could not come,’ he told his diary. ‘They are on a secret visit to the affronted German relations to tell them about the Wedding.’ They took Alice’s twenty-two-page account with them.
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 23
