Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Back in May 1948, Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh undertook their first official foreign assignment: a four-day visit to Paris, a trip designed – as had been the King and Queen’s French tour in 1939 – to burnish the Entente Cordiale. It did the trick. The programme was packed and predictable: Versailles, Fontainebleau, a night at the Opéra, a trip down the Seine. There were lunches, dinners, receptions, and a banquet – the stuff of every royal tour. The French press was charmed: the Princess was beautiful, the Duke was handsome, and both spoke surprisingly good French – he, thanks to his decade in Paris as a child; she, thanks to the tutoring of Antoinette de Bellaigue. ‘In four hectic days,’ Jock Colville noted with satisfaction, ‘Princess Elizabeth had conquered Paris.’ Forty years before the phrase ‘the Diana effect’ became common currency, Colville watched Elizabeth going about her business and described what amounted to the same phenomenon: ‘Quite mysteriously, a visit by a young princess with beautiful blue eyes and a superb natural complexion brought gleams of radiant sunshine into the dingiest streets of the dreariest cities. Princes who do their duty are respected, beautiful Princesses have an in-built advantage over their male counterparts.’

  One of the things that saddened – and worried – the Queen and Prince Philip about Diana, Princess of Wales, was not that she was popular, but that she allowed her popularity to go to her head. Elizabeth was once adored, too – as much as Diana was, perhaps even more so. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, in Britain, in France, in countries around the world, thousands – tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands – turned out to cheer her. Once upon a time Philip and Elizabeth were seen – and talked about – and written up – as characters from a fairy tale. The difference between them and Princess Diana, I think, is that they did not take it personally. When I discussed this with the Duke of Edinburgh in his library at Buckingham Palace, he said to me, ‘You won’t remember this, but in the first years of the Queen’s reign, the level of adulation – you wouldn’t believe it. You really wouldn’t. It could have been corroding. It would have been very easy to play to the gallery, but I took a conscious decision not to do that. Safer not to be too popular. You can’t fall too far.’

  Years later, when Catherine Middleton came along as a potential bride for his grandson, Prince William, the Duke of Edinburgh was, he told me, ‘relieved to find her such a level-headed girl’. ‘If you believe the attention is for you personally,’ he warned, ‘you’re going to end up in trouble. The attention is for your role, what you do, what you’re supporting. It isn’t for you as an individual. You are not a celebrity. You are representing the Royal Family. That’s all. Don’t look at the camera. The Queen never looks at the camera. Never. Look at who you’re talking to. Look at what you’ve come to see. Diana looked at the camera.’ I have been on walkabout with the Duchess of Cambridge. She never looks at the camera.

  The four-day trip to Paris was the Edinburghs’ first overseas triumph. As a diplomatic and public relations exercise it was an unqualified success. At a personal level it was hell. The weather was unbearable: it was the hottest Whitsun weekend of the century. The schedule was alarmingly crowded: the couple were allowed one night off – ‘a private evening’ – and it was not a success. According to Jock Colville, ‘We went to a most select three-star restaurant; the French had been turned out, so we found a table, just a party of us all alone in this vast restaurant. Prince Philip spotted a round hole in a table just opposite us, through which the lens of a camera was poking. He was naturally in a frightful rage. We went on to a nightclub, again the French [were] all turned out. One of the most appalling evenings I have ever spent. Everybody dressed up to the nines – nobody in either place – except the lens.’

  Philip was in a rage and he had an upset stomach. Rumour had it that the kitchens at the British Embassy were to blame. Elizabeth stayed calm, of course. ‘She is always calm,’ according to her childhood friend Sonia Berry. ‘She might get annoyed about something, but as a rule she stays on an even keel. I have never seen her lose her temper.’ Elizabeth stayed calm, but she, too, felt a little queasy. She was three months pregnant. Back in London, in June, she wrote to her cousin, Diana Bowes-Lyon: ‘Life is very busy at the moment, but after this month I’m taking a rest for the baby’s sake. I am so excited about it and I really can’t believe it’s true.’

  THE QUEEN & THE DUKE

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Love does not consist in gazing at each other,

  but in looking in the same direction.’

  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–44), Wind, Sand and Stars

  ‘Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, was safely delivered of a Prince at 9.14 o’clock this evening. Her Royal Highness and the infant Prince are both doing well.’

  On Sunday, 14 November 1948, at a little after 11 p.m., Commander Richard Colville RN – a cousin of Jock Colville’s, but an older man and less subtle, who had joined the Palace as press secretary to the King the year before – took the formal announcement, written out in his own neat hand, and, accompanied by Jock, scrunched his way across the courtyard of Buckingham Palace and fixed it to the railings. The waiting crowd – some three thousand strong – greeted the news with sustained cheers and an impromptu chorus of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’.

  By daybreak word had spread across the nation – and the world. In the United States, radio programmes were interrupted with the news. In South Africa and India, in Kenya and Canada, in Australia and New Zealand, guns were fired, bells were rung, bonfires were lit. In the streets of London, news vendors cried, ‘It’s a boy!’ and across the mountain ranges of Wales a chain of beacons was lit. On the high seas, the ships of the Royal Navy – every one of them – put out more flags, and on the River Thames the humblest boats were festooned with celebratory bunting. In homes, and pubs and clubs and churches, there was – in a way that seems incredible to us now – genuine rejoicing. At Westminster Abbey the bells rung out with a peal of five thousand changes. In the chamber of the House of Commons, the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, on behalf of a grateful nation, saluted the virtues of the constitutional monarchy, ‘which have won the hearts of the people’, and spoke of the ‘great responsibilities’ that would one day settle on the shoulders of the infant Prince. The Leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, now seventy-four, rose to the occasion with a typical rhetorical flourish: ‘Our ancient monarchy renders inestimable services to our country and to all the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations. Above the ebb and flow of party strife, the rise and fall of ministries and individuals, the changes of public opinion and fortune, the British monarchy presides ancient, calm and supreme within its functions, over all the treasures that have been saved from the past and all the glories that we write in the annals of our country. Our thoughts go out to the mother and father and, in a special way, to the little prince, now born into this world of strife and storm.’

  At the very moment of the little Prince’s birth, his father was on the squash court at Buckingham Palace, having a game with his friend and equerry, Mike Parker. The Prince and Parker had had more than one game that evening – and a swim in the Palace pool. Princess Elizabeth’s confinement – in the Palace’s Buhl Room, specially converted into a well-equipped surgery – had been a painfully long one. The King’s private secretary, Tommy Lascelles, brought the good news hotfoot from the Buhl Room to the squash court. Philip raced back, with Lascelles and Parker trailing, on the way picking up the carnations and champagne he had at the ready, and went in to congratulate his young wife and admire his new son. ‘It takes a man to have a son!’ was the signal Philip sent to Parker when Parker’s first child was born. Parker told me, ‘Philip was thrilled to have a son. He was over the moon. Absolutely delighted.’ That same night Philip sent a telegram bearing the glad tidings to his mother in Greece.

  Princess Alice, now aged sixty-three, had recently moved to the Greek island of Tinos. She planned, she told her fam
ily, to ‘withdraw from the world’ and found ‘a religious sisterhood of Martha & Mary’, training girls to become nursing sisters. She was not a nun herself, but she dressed as one, and rose early every morning to attend to her devotions. Prince Philip said, in a typically matter-of-fact way, ‘Wearing the habit meant that she did not have to worry about clothes or getting her hair done.’ She led a life of comparative simplicity, in a modest house, where the electricity supply was erratic and there was no telephone. She was thrilled to receive her son’s telegram. She wrote to him at once: ‘I think of you so much with a sweet baby of our own, of your joy & the interest you will take in all his little doings. How fascinating nature is, but how one has to pay for it in the anxious trying hours of the confinement.’

  Princess Elizabeth recovered quickly from her confinement. She spent ten days in bed recuperating (as new mothers were encouraged to do) and breast-fed her son from the start. The Princess wrote to her former music teacher: ‘The baby is very sweet and we are enormously proud of him. He has an interesting pair of hands for a baby. They are rather large, but with fine long fingers quite unlike mine and certainly unlike his father’s. It will be interesting to see what they become. I still find it hard to believe I have a baby of my own!’

  The first cot-side report to reach the public came from one of Elizabeth’s aunts, her mother’s younger sister, Rose, by now Countess Granville, who told a gathering of Girl Guides in Northern Ireland that the new mother was ‘wonderfully well and radiantly happy’ and the new Prince ‘could not be more angelic looking’: ‘He is golden-haired and has the most beautiful complexion, as well as amazingly delicate features for so young a baby … The Queen says that she thinks the baby is like his mother, but the Duke is quite certain that the baby is very like himself.’ After a few days, in small clusters, Palace servants were allowed to gather round the royal crib (‘done up in buttercup yellow silk, with lace trimmings’, according to Crawfie: ‘The Royal Family do not observe the old tradition of pink and blue’) and coo and ooh and ah at the bonny little Prince, who had weighed in at a satisfactory seven pounds six ounces. John Dean described the infant as ‘a tiny red-faced bundle, either hairless or so fair as to appear so’. Crawfie thought that, like all royal babies in her experience, he bore a strong resemblance to George V, with ‘an absurdly mature look, and ridges under his eyes’.

  After the initial excitement of the royal birth – four thousand congratulatory telegrams were received at Buckingham Palace within twenty-four hours of the news breaking, closely followed by an avalanche of cards, letters, flowers, and assorted gifts, from teddy bears to hand-knitted bootees – a macabre rumour started. Around the land the whisper went: something is wrong with the child: he is disfigured, he might not live. Crawfie later wrote: ‘The stories that went around at that time about him were entirely without foundation of any kind.’ She believed the root cause of the stories was the Royal Family’s own obsession with privacy, what she called a ‘strange campaign of secrecy’: ‘For a long time no pictures were issued, and even the household did not know what the baby’s names were to be.’

  There was a news vacuum and on the streets it was filled with wild speculation. The baby might be ‘healthy and strong, and beautifully made’, as Crawfie insisted, ‘with a flawless, silky skin’, but, if so, why not show him off to the world? And why not name him? The answer to both questions, it seems, was a simple desire on the part of the Princess for privacy. Just as fifty years later, on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the Queen’s first instinct was to shield her grandsons, protect their privacy, and keep her own counsel, so, in November 1948, on the birth of Prince Charles, Princess Elizabeth instinctively wanted to guard her baby son’s privacy. There would be photographs – of course65 – and the baby’s names would be made known – naturally – but all in good time … Why should the Heiress Presumptive and her little boy have to dance at once to the public’s tune?

  Throughout her life the Queen has fulfilled her public duty conscientiously and with complete commitment, and has hoped, as a consequence, to be allowed some private space for her private life. Do we really need to know how the infant Prince took to the breast (quite well, apparently), or whether and when he was circumcised (yes, on 20 December 1948, it seems: Dr Jacob Snowman performed the operation)? Of course, we don’t need to know. It is none of our business. And yet, we are curious.

  From the birth of her son to the present day, Elizabeth II has struggled to maintain a degree of privacy for herself and her children. It has not been easy. Hugh Dalton, the Labour MP and sometime Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote in his diary in the week that Prince Charles was born: ‘If this boy ever comes to the throne … it will be a very different Commonwealth and country he will rule over.’ Dalton was prescient. Elizabeth had been born in the reign of George V, King-Emperor. She grew up in an age of deference and discretion, when bowing and curtsying to royalty was automatic, when you did not speak to a royal unless first spoken to, when her Uncle David could conduct an open affair with a married divorcee and know that it would go unreported by a self-denying press. The world has changed. The Empire has gone, deference has disappeared, and newspapers will print what they like – and the more intimate and salacious it is, the more they like it. When Edward VIII and his girlfriend, on holiday together, swam naked off the coast of Albania, there were no paparazzi hiding on the hillside. When, half a century later, the Duchess of York, on holiday with her boyfriend in the south of France, appeared topless by their swimming pool, the revealing photographs, taken with telephoto lenses from the adjacent hillside, appeared on front pages in Britain and around the world. In the summer of 2012, when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were holidaying at the Château d’Autet, near Viens in Provence, another photographer with a telephoto lens managed to take a series of pictures of Prince William’s wife, Catherine, topless. The French edition of the magazine Closer splashed three of the photographs on its cover and, on the inside pages, published more pictures – with captions to match: ‘On the terrace of Château d’Autet, Kate has decided to release the pressure, to get rid of convention, to free herself from the protocol, but also to get rid of her bikini top! At the time of feminist struggles, militants were burning their bras. Kate doesn’t wear hers, and that’s her absolute right. Exulted by the fragrance of lavender from the neighbouring fields, Kate takes advantage of those delicious moments of doing nothing and offers her breasts to the soft caress of the Provence sun.’

  For Princess Elizabeth in 1948, the desire for privacy was more than a matter of personal preference and natural reticence. It was a matter of policy. In 1867 Walter Bagehot, writing about the role of the monarchy in The English Constitution, declared: ‘We must not let daylight in on magic.’ Bagehot believed that sustaining the mystique of the monarchy was essential to its authority – and survival. Elizabeth had studied Bagehot, and Commander Richard Colville, who was the Palace’s press secretary from 1947 until 1968, believed in Bagehot’s maxim completely. When Colville got the job he had no experience of press relations: he had been in the navy for twenty-two years. For the next twenty-one years he dealt with the press in a manner that suggested that relations with them were the very last thing that either he or the Royal Family desired.

  According to Kenneth Rose, a journalist and biographer who dealt with him on a regular basis, Commander Colville did not discriminate between hacks: ‘All were made to feel that their questions were impertinent if not downright vulgar.’ Colville would supply information about the sovereign’s public engagements, and that was all. In his view, as he explained to the Press Council, the Queen was ‘entitled to expect that her family will attain the privacy at home which all other families are entitled to enjoy’. Somewhat impertinently, the Press Council begged to differ, maintaining that ‘the private lives of public men and women, especially royal persons, have always been the subject of natural curiosity. That is one of the consequences of fame or eminence or sincere national affection. Every
thing therefore that touches the Crown is of public interest or concern.’

  All their adult lives Elizabeth and Philip remained wary of the press. Take it from those who know her, the Queen is a delightful person – amusing, engaging, and intelligent – but she is not comfortable with journalists. She has never given an interview and has no desire to do so. When she comes face to face with a journalist or broadcaster, at a public event or a private reception, she watches her words. She is determined to give nothing away. Jennie Bond was the BBC’s royal correspondent for fourteen years. When she gave up the job in 2003, she told me, ‘I never got to know the Queen. I barely got to meet her. As a royal reporter you don’t. You are kept at arm’s length. And on the rare occasions when you are admitted to the royal presence, the small talk is very desultory. When the Queen went to South Korea, I covered the visit for the BBC and met Her Majesty briefly at a reception. She said, “Oh, have you come here specially?” I felt like saying, “No, I just happened be in South Korea and thought I’d drop by.” I think it’s sad that, after fourteen years, I still had the most distant relationship with the Queen and Prince Philip. I think, from their point of view, it’s bad public relations. From my point of view, I didn’t dislike them. I just didn’t get to know them. There were endless opportunities when they could have made their mark with the media, and they simply didn’t take them. They avoid journalists. They walk away from them. They dismiss them. The Duke’s even worse than the Queen. He’s really perfected the art of saying hello and goodbye in the same handshake.’

  Prince Philip, in fact, was almost invariably good company and, in my experience, usually went out of his way to be agreeable to strangers. He did not trust the press, however. ‘If I’m doing something I care about,’ he once said to me, ‘I really hope the press won’t come along too, because I know they’ll only ruin it.’ When I reminded him that he was the member of the Royal Family who, in the 1950s, first talked to the press, giving a series of newspaper, radio, and television interviews, he said, ‘Yes, I made a conscious decision to talk to the media – but not about me, only about what I’m doing, what I’m supporting.’ When I told him that, fifty years on, that was no longer enough, that the modern media need something more sexy, they need ‘personalities’, he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, with a sigh, ‘the press have turned us into a soap opera.’