Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  In 1948 the soap opera had something of the fairy tale about it. A month and a day after the royal birth came the royal christening. On the morning of Wednesday, 15 December, in the White and Gold Music Room at Buckingham Palace, wearing the flowing silk and lace christening robe his mother had worn for her christening twenty-two years before, the infant Prince was baptised into the Church of England and named Charles Philip Arthur George. His godparents included the King, Queen Mary, the King of Norway, Prince George of Greece, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, Elizabeth’s uncle, David Bowes-Lyon, and Dickie’s daughter, Patricia Brabourne. Patricia told me that she thought Philip and Elizabeth chose ‘Charles’ as a name simply because they liked it. Boy Browning was one of those who felt the name was ‘bad news’, given the precedents of Charles I and II, to say nothing of the unhappy fate that befell Charles Stuart, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. Princess Margaret, however, was delighted with the choice of name, explaining that henceforward she would be known as ‘Charley’s Aunt’, ‘probably my finest title’.

  After lunch, and the taking of the formal photographs (including a fine study of the sleeping Prince in the crisply starched arms of his nurse), Queen Mary invited the assembled company to gather round Queen Victoria’s photo albums to decide who among his forebears the new Prince most closely resembled. She decided, without doubt, it was Prince Albert. Queen Mary took the keenest interest in family history. Her christening gift was a silver cup and cover given by George III to a godson in 1780, ‘so that’, she noted in her diary, with allowable satisfaction, ‘I gave a present from my great-grandfather to my great grandson 168 years later.’ Queen Mary entertained few doubts about her family’s place in history. Baby Charles’s other great-grandmother, Victoria Milford Haven, was more circumspect. She wrote to Dickie of her ‘latest & important great-grandson’: ‘Let us hope he may live in a more peaceable & prosperous time than we & live to be some sort of reigning king.’

  Alice did not attend the christening, but she received news of her new grandson’s progress from other members of the family. She got a full report from her younger sister, Louise, the Queen of Sweden, which she shared with Dickie: ‘She says that Lilibet was looking so well & fresh, a good recovery after a hard time she had, 30 hours in all. The baby is sweet with a well-shaped head, an oval face & a little bit of fair fluff of hair. She says he is like Philip, but Marina says he is like Lilibet, so you can choose. I am so happy for Philip for he adores children & also small babies. He carries it about himself quite professionally to the nurse’s amusement.’

  By every account, Prince Philip was especially good with babies and small children. ‘They like him and he likes them,’ is what Countess Mountbatten told me. ‘No question about it, Philip was a very good father to his children when they were young.’ According to Lady Kennard, ‘He was a wonderful parent. He played with his children, he read them stories, he took them fishing, he was very involved. I remember we stayed with them in Scotland when Charles must have been about one. The three of them were so happy together, easy and relaxed. Philip has been marvellous with his grandchildren, too. He’s just good with the little ones.’ In the summer of 2002, when the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his wife, Cherie Booth, went to stay at Balmoral, Philip took a special shine to the Blairs’ two-year-old son, Leo. Proudly, Leo sang the whole first verse of the national anthem to Philip and Philip responded happily by singing Leo the second verse. Cherie Blair told me, ‘I have to say that both the Queen and Prince Philip are really, really good with little children. You couldn’t fault them.’ (Whether you could fault Mrs Blair is another matter. I was told, on good authority, that when the Queen came to see Leo in the nursery at Balmoral, Mrs Blair had instructed her nanny not to curtsy to Her Majesty.)

  Philip and Lilibet were very happy with their new baby. Parenthood suited them. According to all of their friends to whom I have spoken – friends who have known them across all their adult lives – the first few years of their marriage were, in many ways, the happiest. ‘Perhaps inevitably,’ Gina Kennard said to me, ‘Princess Elizabeth was not yet Queen, Philip was still in the navy. They were young, they were relatively carefree.’ And they were cosseted. They were devoted to little Prince Charles, but they did not have to tend to him unaided. He had two Scottish nurses in constant attendance: Helen Lightbody, who arrived on the recommendation of the Duchess of Gloucester, whose sons she had looked after, and Mabel Anderson, who placed an advertisement in a nursing journal and was amazed to find herself invited to Buckingham Palace for an interview with the Princess.

  Before Charles was born, Elizabeth had declared, ‘I’m going to be the child’s mother, not the nurses.’ Well, she was – but, inevitably, because she was a princess as well as a mother, because ‘royal duty’ called and all her life Elizabeth has made answering the call of royal duty her first priority, and because it was the way of her class and her time, much of the nitty-gritty of childcare was left to Mrs Lightbody and Miss Anderson. (Both nurses were maiden ladies. Because Helen Lightbody was the more senior, she was given the courtesy title of ‘Mrs’, as Alah Knight had been in her day.) Until Clarence House was ready for the family to move into in July 1949, the baby lived and was looked after in the country, at Windlesham Moor, only seeing his parents when they came down from London at weekends. The breast-feeding had stopped in January, when Charles was not quite two months old. Elizabeth had contracted measles and the doctors advised that, until she was better, mother and child should stay apart.

  The Edinburghs rented Windlesham Moor from a Mrs Warwick Bryant. It had useful grounds – fifty acres and a fine garden noted for its azaleas – but the house itself – two storeys, five bedrooms, four reception rooms, plus staff quarters – was by no means a mansion. According to John Dean, Philip was particularly happy there: ‘I believe that in those early days the Duke was uneasy in the atmosphere of the Palace with its formalities, and that this heightened his pleasure in having a country home that was so different.’ Clarence House, of course, was much grander, but, again according to Dean, Philip made it ‘his own’. The Duke, reported the valet, loved ‘home-making’ and was particularly keen on every kind of new-fangled labour-saving device. The facilities for the staff were ‘wonderful’, said Dean, ‘as near ideal as could possibly be imagined.’ Even so, the turnover in the ranks of the junior members of the household was quite high. The hours were long – when the royals were in residence, staff got just one half-day a week free and alternate Sundays off – and the wages were modest. The Edinburghs were not extravagant. The Princess was a ‘considerate employer’, according to Dean, concerned about the health and welfare of her servants,66 but, overall, the Duke was in charge, the undoubted captain of the domestic ship, ‘pleasant and courteous to servants’, but quite demanding, and liable to speak his mind ‘in naval fashion’. When the Duke called Dean ‘a stupid clot’, master and servant did not speak to each other for several days.67 Dean did not find Philip altogether easy to work for. ‘He is difficult to dress,’ he complained, ‘because he’s not interested in clothes and is set on his own ideas – he wears suede shoes with evening dress and he simply cannot tie a tie.’ The Princess, in her dressing room, would hear her husband and his valet arguing next door. ‘Listen to them, Bobo,’ she would say to her own, ever-present dresser, ‘they’re just like Papa and Jerram [the King’s valet]. Only sometimes I think they’re worse.’

  In fact, the Edinburgh household was a contented one. At Windlesham Moor, Mr Huggett, the head gardener, and an ex-Guardsman, playfully encouraged the Princess to take an interest in his team’s handiwork, saying, ‘Ma’am, from one Grenadier to another, I think you ought to come round the garden after church,’ while Philip encouraged general team spirit by getting the staff of all ranks to come together to play cricket on summer Sunday afternoons. At Clarence House, when films were shown in the Edinburghs’ home cinema, the members of staff were invited to join the guests for the show. In the staff sitting room at Clar
ence House there was even a television set.

  In 1949 there were very few households in Britain that could boast of having a television set, fewer still that could boast of having two. In an age of austerity the Edinburghs wanted for nothing. Their country house was thoroughly comfortable; their town house was unostentatiously palatial. The high-ceilinged reception rooms were filled with elegant eighteenth-century furniture. The Princess’s bedroom was freshly decorated in pink and blue (with a crowned canopy over the royal bed); the Duke’s bedroom and bathroom featured light wood panelling, red furnishings, and framed photographs of the ships in which he had served; Prince Charles’s nursery was all in white, with blue trimmings. The young couple took an active interest in the detail of the refurbishment of Clarence House. The Duke chose and arranged all the pictures, and personally supervised the installation of the kitchen and laundry-room equipment. The Princess helped mix the light lime-green paint for the dining room’s walls with her own hand and offered her own practical solution to the problem of the lingering smell of paint: ‘Put a bucket of hay in there and that’ll take it away.’

  One of the witnesses to Philip and Elizabeth’s early married life that I most enjoyed meeting during my researches for this book was John Gibson. He began his working life as a kitchen porter at Buckingham Palace in 1946. He went on to train as a footman and observed the romance between Philip and Elizabeth as it blossomed. Before the wedding, when Philip came to Sandringham to stay, John noticed that Philip’s socks needed darning and that he had to borrow a tie from one of the valets. When Prince Charles was born, in November 1948, John found himself working temporarily in Winston Churchill’s household. He told me, ‘When I heard the news on the radio I went in to tell Mr Churchill and he jumped up in the air and gave three cheers. He was over the moon for the Princess. He ran round the room waving his hands above his head and shouting, “Hooray! It’s marvellous news!” Tell everybody to come in, John. And bring the champagne. We must toast the heir to the throne.’

  Two months after Charles was born, John Gibson returned to royal service as ‘nursery footman’ at Windlesham Moor. ‘I had sole responsibility for the royal pram,’ he told me proudly. He assured me that Princess Elizabeth was ‘very hands-on’ with Charles, ‘like a real mother – not a princess’. He could not fault the young royal couple: ‘When they were on their own it was a very simple life. They were quite normal people really. They were waited on hand and foot, obviously, but they sat at the table and they had a natter about what was going on in the day.’ Princess Elizabeth loved lemon and sugar pancakes and chocolate cake. Much of the domestic conversation overheard by John related to home-making. ‘They couldn’t wait to get into their new home at Clarence House. They talked about it all the time. “I think Grandma is giving me a nice sideboard. I’m sure she is.” Grandma was Queen Mary, of course.’

  When John Dean, Philip’s valet, had a day off, John Gibson would take the young Duke of Edinburgh his early morning tea. Philip would look in on Elizabeth in her intercommunicating room and tease her for not being out of bed yet. When they were up at Birkhall in Scotland, Philip and Elizabeth would drive over to Balmoral with the staff piled into the back of the shooting brake. ‘He’d drive like mad over the country roads,’ according to John Gibson. ‘“Philip, Philip, slow down for God’s sake, slow down, you’re killing all the rabbits,” she said. “What’s the matter with you?”’

  These were the golden years. Elizabeth conceived her second child towards the end of 1949. Princess Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise was born at Clarence House at 11.50 a.m. on Tuesday, 15 August 1950. Elizabeth reported to a friend, ‘Both Philip and I are very thrilled about the new baby and we only hope that Charles will take kindly to it. He has only seen Fortune Euston’s baby at close quarters and he then tried to pull her toes off and poke her eyes out, all of which she took very kindly, having a brother of 2 who presumably did the same.’

  Elizabeth and Philip were proud parents and happy ones. They were good parents, too. That is certainly the impression I got, speaking to, say, the Duchess of Grafton (Fortune Euston, as was) or Countess Mountbatten (one of Prince Charles’s godmothers), but it is not the impression you will have gained if you have read any of the many books that have touched on the matter. Every one of them – without exception, I think – portrays Elizabeth as a well-intentioned but somewhat distant mother and Philip as a forbidding, formidable, and usually absent father. Sarah Bradford, for example, in her widely acclaimed portrait of the Queen, says of the young mother’s relationship with baby Charles: ‘Elizabeth, although fond of him, was not particularly maternal.’ Anthony Holden, in his acclaimed biography of Charles, describes the young children’s routine at Clarence House like this: ‘The royal nursery settled into a rigid daily routine in the care of the two nannies, “Mrs” Lightbody and Miss Anderson. Charles and Anne were got up each day at 7 a.m. sharp, dressed, fed, and played with in the nursery until nine, when they enjoyed a statutory half-hour with their mother. They rarely saw her again until tea-time, when Elizabeth would try to clear two hours in her day. She liked to bath the children herself when her schedule permitted, after which they were dressed up again to be introduced to distinguished visitors. Even before his third birthday, Charles had learned to bow before offering his cheek for a kiss from “Gan-Gan”, Queen Mary, and not to sit down in the presence of his grandfather. It was a formidable introduction to the complexities of any child’s life – basking but sporadically, and unpredictably, in the attentions of his mother, with his father all but a stranger. Already a pattern was being set that would come to haunt Charles’s life even in adulthood, even at times of his greatest need.’

  The tone and content of this account of nursery life at Clarence House is accepted as a reflection of the truth by nearly one and all – including Prince Charles, who, in 1994, allowed his authorised biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, to reveal that the Prince felt ‘emotionally estranged’ from his parents and, all his life, had yearned for the kind of affection that, in his view, they were ‘unable or unwilling to offer’. Charles’s strictures hurt his parents. (That he chose to make them in public angered them as well.) All that Prince Philip would say to me on the record about his and his wife’s parenting skills was, ‘We did our best.’

  In fact, Elizabeth saw her young children as much as any aristocratic mother of her generation and more, perhaps, than many busy working mothers today. And Philip, on the evidence of those who witnessed him in action as a young father in the late 1940s and early 1950s, far from being distant and forbidding, was hands-on and loving – more so than many of his stiff-upper-lip, Eton-educated, Guards officer contemporaries. The royal couple did not spend as much time with their children as they might have liked, for the simple reason that, as well as being parents, Elizabeth was Heiress Presumptive to an ailing King and Philip was a serving officer in the Royal Navy.

  George VI was fifty-three when Prince Charles was born in November 1948. He looked much older. In the preceding eighteen months he had lost seventeen pounds in weight. He was, he said, ‘in discomfort most of the time’, suffering from numbness and cramp in his feet and legs. He carried on with his duties – standing, in considerable pain, at the Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall and reviewing the Territorial Army in Hyde Park – but summoned his doctors. Two days before Charles’s birth, he was diagnosed as suffering from arteriosclerosis, a condition brought on by his chronic smoking. Two days after the birth, he agreed, reluctantly, to postpone a planned tour of Australia and New Zealand. In March 1949 he underwent an operation to help regulate the blood supply to his legs, and felt much better. Because of the continuing danger of a sudden thrombosis, he was advised to reduce his commitments, to rest more and worry less. He did his best. He promised his mother that he was trying to ‘worry less about political matters’ – he was an inveterate worrier – and avoid the bursts of bad temper – his notorious ‘gnashes’ – that were brought on by frustration and irritation. ‘S
ince he has become a recognised invalid,’ a courtier told Harold Nicolson, ‘he is as sweet and patient as can be.’

  As the King curtailed his workload, so the pressures on the young Princess increased. ‘It was inevitable,’ Prince Philip said to me. ‘You’ve got to remember that the Royal Family then was just the four of them: the King and the Queen and the two Princesses. It’s very different now. Now we have to avoid tripping over one another, so Charles goes off and does the arts, Anne does the prisons, and so on. Then, there was just the four of them – and the Duke of Gloucester – for everything. Because of the King’s health, it was inevitable that we did more. There was no choice.’

  But there were compensations. As well as dutiful days, there were glamorous nights. To mark Elizabeth’s twenty-third birthday in April 1949, they went to see Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in The School for Scandal at the New Theatre and then went on for supper and dancing with the Oliviers at the Café de Paris, off Leicester Square. The American entertainer Danny Kaye, then the toast of the town, danced attendance on them – literally. (John Dean reported watching the star of The Court Jester ‘capering round Princess Elizabeth’ at Windlesham Moor.)