Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  The King was approaching his fifty-sixth birthday and far from well. Lord Moran (Winston Churchill’s doctor) reckoned ‘he can scarcely live more than a year’, but since the King himself was not told he had cancer, he was ready to believe the operation had cured him. He did all he could – mentally and physically – to rally his strength and determined on a policy of business as usual. On 8 October, with his blessing and encouragement, Princess Elizabeth became the first member of the Royal Family to fly the Atlantic when she and Philip went ahead with their postponed North American tour. It was essentially a visit to Canada – George VI was King of Canada, after all – with a brief foray into the United States thrown in for good measure. When the royal couple reached Washington, DC, the thirty-second President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, introduced the young Princess to his elderly and nearly deaf mother-in-law. ‘Mother!’ boomed the President, ‘I’ve brought Princess Elizabeth to see you!’ The old lady beamed at the young Princess. ‘I’m so glad your father has been re-elected,’ she said.

  Travelling with the Edinburghs on the thirty-five-day, twelve-thousand-mile, cross-continental tour was the Princess’s new private secretary, Martin Charteris. Jock Colville, having completed his two-year secondment to Clarence House (and happily married one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting) had returned to the Foreign Office in 1949.73 Charteris had come on board because he knew Jock Colville and because his wife was friendly with the King’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles. ‘It was as simple as that,’ he told me forty years later, still chuckling. ‘No vetting, no board interviews, no security clearance, no qualifications required, no training given. That’s the way it was.’ Certainly, Charteris had no technical qualifications for the job – he was neither a courtier nor a diplomat – but he was evidently the right kind of chap. His background was thoroughly sound: born 1913, second son of Lord Elcho (killed in action, 1916), grandson of the 11th Earl of Wemyss; educated at Eton and Sandhurst, he was a career soldier who had a decent war, much of it spent in the Middle East, where he eventually wound up running Military Intelligence in Palestine. He went to work for Princess Elizabeth in January 1950 and stayed at her side for twenty-seven years. He loved her – in the best sense – and loved to talk about her – in the best way. He was wholly loyal (he was devoted to her), but his anecdotes about her, while always affectionate, were both well observed and usually revealing.74 He liked to tell the story of the day he went for his first interview with his prospective employer and how impressed he was by her style before they even met. Charteris arrived early at Clarence House for his 11.30 a.m. appointment. At 11.25 a.m. Boy Browning rang through to the Princess. ‘Major Charteris is here to see you, Ma’am. Shall I bring him in?’ ‘Yes,’ said the Princess, coolly, ‘at half-past eleven.’ Charteris told me – and anyone else who cared to listen – that the moment he set eyes on her he was smitten. ‘She was wearing a blue dress and a brooch with huge sapphires. I was immediately struck by her bright blue eyes and her wonderful complexion. She was young, beautiful, and dutiful. I knew at once that I would be proud to serve her.’

  She was dutiful, and prepared for the worst. On the flight to Montreal on 8 October 1951, Charteris took with him the documents of accession in case they should be required. The Princess was already privy to a range of state papers. Throughout her time in Canada she carefully monitored the news from home, conscientiously reading the air-mail edition of the London Times.75 The tour was not an unmitigated triumph. The programme was exhausting – it took in every province in the dominion – and the Princess was anxious about her father. The Canadian press, who had been bowled over by the effortless charm of Queen Elizabeth when she and the King had toured the country twelve years before, complained that the twenty-five-year-old Princess was shy and unsmiling. ‘Please smile more, Ma’am,’ pleaded Charteris. ‘But my jaws are aching,’ sighed the Princess. (Exactly fifty years later, accompanying the Queen on a tour of the West Country, the Duchess of Grafton told me, ‘She does find this constant smiling very exhausting, you know. After a day like today, her jaw really aches.’) The royal couple did their best, of course. They scored well when – kitted out like characters from Oklahoma! by the ever-present Bobo and John Dean – they gave their all dancing a Canadian square dance. Philip did less well when – hoping to be humorous – he nonchalantly referred to Canada as ‘a good investment’. Forty-nine years later, in October 2002, when the royal couple were back in Canada for an eleven-day Golden Jubilee tour, Canadian newspapers were still quoting the remark.

  Martin Charteris said to me, ‘It was a long trip and it wasn’t plain sailing. It wasn’t easy for either of them.’ Is it true, I asked him, that, at breakfast one morning on the Governor-General’s train, the Duke called the Princess ‘a bloody fool’? ‘He might have done,’ said Charteris, smiling. ‘He had a naval turn of phrase.’ Was he often ratty with the Princess? I asked. ‘Not so much ratty,’ said Charteris, ‘as restless. He was impatient. He was frustrated. You must remember he had just turned thirty and he was obliged to give up a promising career in the navy to do – what? He hadn’t yet defined his role, found his feet as consort. He was certainly very impatient with the old-style courtiers and sometimes, I think, felt that the Princess paid more attention to them than to him. He didn’t like that. If he called her “a bloody fool” now and again, it was just his way. I think others would have found it more shocking than she did. Although she was very young, she had a wise head on her shoulders. She has always understood him – and his ways. And valued his contribution – which has been immense and is underestimated. I believe history will come to judge him well.’ When, in 2003, to discuss this book, I had lunch with the Queen’s then private secretary, Sir Robin Janvrin, in referring to Prince Philip, he used almost the same phrase: ‘Whatever the papers say about him now, I have no doubt at all that history will come to judge him well.’

  Fifty-two years after Elizabeth and Philip’s visit to President Truman in Washington, DC, in November 2003, George W. Bush, the forty-second US President, made a state visit to the United Kingdom. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, of course, hosted a state banquet in honour of the President at Buckingham Palace. During the reception, before dinner, there was a telling moment. On one side of the room stood the Queen and President Bush, alone, chatting quietly – amiably but with little animation – while two yards away, on the other side of the room, stood Prince Philip at the centre of a small group that included the First Lady, Laura Bush, and the American Secretary of State, Colin Powell. They were all laughing. Prince Philip was leaning forward, gesticulating with his hands, entertaining his guests, telling a funny story. This – exactly this – was what Prince Philip succeeded in doing for more than sixty years. While the Queen made intelligent, interested small talk, always amiably, but sometimes a little awkwardly, the Duke kept the party going. ‘He has done the state some service,’ Martin Charteris said to me. ‘I think the Queen appreciates his sense of humour, and values it.’

  On the long train ride across Canada in the autumn of 1951, Philip did his best to entertain his wife with a range of practical jokes. According to John Dean, these included surprising her with a booby-trapped can of nuts and chasing her down the corridor wearing a set of joke false teeth. When they flew to Washington, DC, on 31 October, the smiles were rather more forced when, at the British Embassy’s reception in their honour, they were expected to shake hands with each of the 1,500 guests. In terms of public relations, however, the brief visit to the American capital was an unqualified success. ‘We have many distinguished visitors here in this city,’ declared President Truman, welcoming his British visitors to the White House Rose Garden, ‘but never before have we had such a wonderful couple, that so completely captured the hearts of all of us.’ Sir Oliver Franks, the British Ambassador, reported to the King that when the sixty-seven-year-old President appeared with the twenty-five-year-old Princess in public he gave ‘the impression of a very proud uncle presenting his fav
ourite niece to his friends’. According to Martin Charteris, ‘Truman fell in love with her.’ The President was captivated, certainly. Memorably, he said, ‘When I was a little boy I read about a fairy princess, and there she is.’ When the royal couple had returned to Canada to complete their tour, he wrote himself to the King in England, ‘We’ve just had a visit from a lovely young lady and her personable husband … As one father to another we can be very proud of our daughters. You have the better of me – because you have two!’

  The Princess and the Duke returned to England by sea in the middle of the month, missing Prince Charles’s third birthday on 14 November. In a birthday photograph, taken at Buckingham Palace, the toddler Prince and his grandfather, sitting on a sofa side by side, look very much at ease. The photograph when it was published, combined with the King’s determination to think positively and the Queen’s ability to avoid the unpleasant by ignoring it (what Martin Charteris later called her capacity for being ‘a bit of an ostrich’), encouraged the public to believe that the King’s health was on the mend. On 2 December a day of national thanksgiving for the sovereign’s recovery was celebrated in churches throughout the kingdom. When, early in November, Princess Elizabeth, in a transatlantic call from Canada, had spoken to her father on the telephone, she reported that he sounded ‘much better’. When she saw him on her return home, later in the month, he ‘looked awful’, according to Charteris, ‘quite dreadful’.

  The King had hoped to travel to Australia and New Zealand in the spring of 1952, to undertake the antipodean tour his health had forced him to postpone in 1948. Now he knew that would be impossible. Again, Elizabeth and Philip would go in his place. On their return from Canada, by way of tribute to what they had already achieved, he made them both Privy Councillors. His own hope for the New Year was to enjoy a recuperative holiday in South Africa in March. First, there was Christmas and the ordeal of the 3 p.m. Christmas Day broadcast. Customarily, the King gave the broadcast live so that he could speak ‘directly’ to his people. Because of its significance, and because of his stammer, it was a ritual he dreaded. One Christmas morning he barked at his family, ‘I can’t concentrate on anything because I’ve got that damned broadcast coming up this afternoon.’ This year, his difficulty with breathing precluded a live broadcast. A BBC engineer, Robert Wood, came to Buckingham Palace on 21 December and, over two hours, painstakingly pieced together the ten-minute recording. Wood said afterwards, ‘It was very, very distressing for him, and the Queen, and for me, because I admired him so much and wished I could do more to help.’

  Christmas at Sandringham was a family affair and, by all accounts, the King – particularly because he did not have the cloud of ‘that damned broadcast’ hanging over him – was in mellow mood throughout. He was well enough to go shooting. He showed a revived interest in the business of the estate. He caught up with official correspondence, writing to, among others, President Truman and his successor, General Eisenhower. He began the New Year in a positive and determined frame of mind. On 29 January he travelled to London and saw his doctors, who, remarkably, pronounced themselves ‘very well satisfied’ with their patient’s progress. The next day, by way of celebration, there was a family outing to the theatre. The King and Queen took their daughters and their son-in-law (and the King’s equerry, Peter Townsend) to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to see a performance of South Pacific. Next day, Thursday, 31 January, the King and Queen, with the Prime Minister in attendance, went to Heathrow Airport to see Elizabeth and Philip off to Kenya, on the first leg of their journey to Australia and New Zealand. They were due to be away for almost six months. In photographs of the farewell, the King, standing on the tarmac, windswept, hat in hand, looks gaunt and bleak and lonely. But Churchill, who was there, said he was ‘gay, and even jaunty, and drank a glass of champagne’. ‘I think,’ Churchill added, ‘he knew he had not long to live.’

  On 1 February the King returned to Sandringham. It was the end of the shooting season. On 5 February he was out on the estate shooting hares and rabbits. In the evening there was a jolly dinner with the Queen and Princess Margaret, and members of the royal household, and one or two shooting friends. At 10.30 p.m. the King retired to bed. At midnight he was seen by a watchman in the garden standing at his bedroom window. At some time in the early hours of Wednesday, 6 February, he died, in his sleep, of a coronary thrombosis. ‘He died as he was getting better,’ said Princess Margaret.

  When George VI died, the Heiress Presumptive was in east Africa, in Kenya, about one hundred miles north of Nairobi, at Treetops, a three-bedroomed ‘hotel’ set, amazingly, in the branches of a giant fig tree, overlooking a salt lick, a unique vantage point for observing the wild animals ranging below. ‘She became Queen,’ Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary, ‘while perched in a tree in Africa watching the rhinoceros come down to the pool to drink.’ In fact, at the very moment of her father’s death, Elizabeth was either asleep, or taking a photograph of the sunrise, or having breakfast, watching, not watering rhino, but a troop of playful baboons who had captured paper rolls from the Treetops lavatory and were throwing them over the branches. The news from England did not reach her for several hours.

  At Sandringham, the King’s death was discovered by his valet at 7.30 a.m. when he took in his early morning tea. The Queen, a widow at only fifty-one, was heartbroken. ‘He was so young to die,’ she wrote to her friend Osbert Sitwell, ‘and was becoming so wise in kingship. He was so kind too, and had a sort of natural nobility of thought & life which sometimes made me ashamed of my narrower & more feminine point of view. Such sorrow is a very strange experience …’

  The King’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, telephoned the assistant private secretary, Edward Ford, in London and instructed him to break the news to the King’s mother and to the Prime Minister. At 10 Downing Street, Ford found Churchill, propped up in bed, cigar in hand, surrounded by paperwork. ‘I’ve got bad news,’ Ford said. ‘The King died this morning. I know nothing more.’ ‘Bad news?’ said Churchill. ‘The worst.’ He threw aside the papers he had been working on. ‘How unimportant these matters seem,’ he said. Later, when Jock Colville arrived, he found the Prime Minister in tears. Colville said that he tried to console Churchill with the thought of how well he would get on with the new Queen, but ‘all he could say was that he did not know her and that she was only a child’.

  The child, meanwhile, still unaware that she was now Queen, had finished breakfast at Treetops, clambered to the ground down the rickety ladders (she was wearing jeans), and, with Philip and the rest of her party, had driven the ten or so miles back to Sagana Lodge – the royal couple’s wedding present from the people of Kenya – to spend the rest of the morning fishing for trout in the River Sagana before preparing for the onward journey to Mombasa and the boat that was due to take them on to New Zealand and Australia via Ceylon. The party included Bobo and John Dean, Pamela Mountbatten as lady-in-waiting, Mike Parker as equerry, and a celebrated local ‘white hunter’, Jim Corbett, armed with a high-velocity rifle, to guard the Princess both from rampaging elephants and the possibility of an attack by local Mau-Mau terrorists. Martin Charteris was staying near by, at the Outspan Hotel in Nyeri, once the home of Robert Baden-Powell. It was at the Outspan, at lunchtime, that Charteris got the news – given to him, in a garbled version, by a local newspaper reporter. The King’s secretary at Sandringham had sent a telegram to Charteris in Nyeri, but it never reached him.76 From the Outspan, Charteris telephoned Parker at Sagana Lodge. Parker found a wireless, fiddled with the dial, and eventually tuned in to the BBC. Philip was having a siesta. Parker woke him and gave him the news.

  ‘I never felt so sorry for anyone in all my life,’ said Parker. ‘He looked as if you’d dropped half the world on him.’ The Duke said nothing, according to Parker, ‘nothing at all. He just breathed heavily, in and out, as though he were in shock.’ Philip found Elizabeth and took her into the garden. He told her what had happened. Did he hold her? I aske
d Parker. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘We were all in a state of shock. But she was quite calm, I do remember that. She said very little. They were out on the lawn together, alone, away from the rest of us. They walked slowly up and down the lawn, up and down, up and down, while he talked and talked and talked.’

  When Martin Charteris arrived back at Sagana, he found them in the sitting room. ‘I can still picture the scene,’ he told me. ‘The Queen, sitting at her desk, pencil in hand, making notes. She was sitting upright, erect, utterly resolved. Her cheeks were a little flushed, but there were no tears. Philip was lying back on a sofa, silent, holding a copy of a newspaper wide open over his face.’ Parker was busy making the arrangements for their immediate return to London. The new Queen was anxious to send messages back home and to Ceylon and New Zealand and Australia. She apologised for all the inconvenience she was causing. ‘I’m so sorry we’ve got to go back,’ she said to Pamela Mountbatten. ‘I’ve ruined everybody’s trip.’ Charteris asked her what name she wanted to use as Queen. ‘My own name, of course,’ she told him. ‘Elizabeth.’ Charteris said later, ‘I never imagined that anyone could grasp their destiny with such safe hands.’

  They changed, they packed, they got into their cars and drove to Nanyuki Airport. By now, reporters and photographers had arrived at Sagana. ‘I asked them not to take any pictures,’ Charteris told me, ‘and, as our cars left the Lodge, though the world’s press lined the road, not a photograph was taken.’ They flew first to Entebbe. There they were reunited with the rest of their luggage, flown up from Mombasa – including the black mourning clothes which Bobo and John Dean had carefully packed against this very eventuality. For two hours they waited in the airport lounge while a storm abated and then, at last, climbed aboard the BOAC Argonaut for the long flight home. Little was said on the journey. John Dean recalled that he saw the Queen get up once or twice and return to her seat looking as if she had been crying. Martin Charteris told me, ‘We slept for much of the first part of the journey. I discussed some of the details of the Accession with Her Majesty. She was completely calm, utterly composed. For a long time she simply gazed out of the window.’