Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  According to Patricia Mountbatten, Philip in the 1950s was ‘a dynamo, an absolute dynamo – he was very like my father at the same age’. In her autobiography Wallis Simpson described Dickie Mountbatten as she found him when they first met and Dickie was in his early thirties: ‘[He] bubbled with ideas on every conceivable subject – housing, relieving unemployment, new strategies of attack in polo, or how to cure the chronic maladies of the British Exchequer. The more baffling these problems, the more convinced Dickie was that he had a fundamental contribution to make and was determined to make it.’ According to Mrs Simpson, the hyperactive Dickie ‘bombarded’ her lover, then Prince of Wales, ‘with pamphlets, books, and clippings, all carefully annotated or underlined and all urgently commended to the Prince’s attention’. Philip – equally bubbling with ideas and initiative – might have liked to ‘bombard’ the Queen, as his uncle had once ‘bombarded’ hers, but he chose not to. He knew there was no point. It did not occur to the Queen to involve her husband in affairs of state: it would not have been constitutionally appropriate, and Her Majesty, a firm believer in the value of precedent, tradition, and continuity, has always been one for observing the proprieties.

  Besides, as Prince Philip put it to me, her advisers made his position crystal clear. ‘Keep out,’ they said. ‘You mustn’t interfere with this.’ Lord Brabourne, Patricia Mountbatten’s husband, told me that, at the time, Philip found the traditional courtiers’ hostility towards him ‘intolerable and deeply frustrating’. Fifty years on, the Duke of Edinburgh simply shrugged and said to me, ‘I had to fit into the institution. I had to avoid getting at cross purposes, usurping others’ authority. In most cases that was no problem. I did my own thing.’

  To get a flavour of Philip’s ‘own thing’ turn here and scan the official list of his ‘offices and involvements’. It is a long list – and extraordinarily varied – and each line represents many hours, weeks, and months of activity: meetings, minutes, briefings, speeches, arm-twisting, fund-raising, travelling hither and yon. As you will see from the list, 1956 was an especially fruitful year. Philip was just thirty-five. As well as publishing a collection of speeches (his thoughts on competitive sport, science, technology, and the environment), he initiated the Commonwealth Study Conferences that year. They were his own idea: three-week-long, high-powered international gatherings, to be held every six years or so, and designed to take a big issue, examine it, worry it, look at it in depth and from different perspectives. The delegates were to be ambitious, questing people from across the Commonwealth who wanted to ask challenging questions and seek out practical answers. The first conference, held in Oxford in 1956, focused on work and the changing demands of industrial society. In 1998 the conference was held in Canada and the theme was the impact of technology in a global ‘infodustrial’ society. The ninth conference was held in October 2003 in Australia and New Zealand. The theme was ‘People First in the Global Century’. In October 2011 Prince Philip, aged ninety, hosted a reception in Australia for some of the 2,500 Conference ‘alumni’. Fifty-five years after he started the ‘experiment’ (as he called it), the objective of the Conference remained the same: he said it was for ‘its members to look, listen, and learn in the hope that the process will help them to improve the quality of their decision-making when they reach the peaks of their occupations’. It was an ‘experiment’ little noticed by those not directly involved, but one that mattered to him and in which he stayed involved until the end of his life.

  Nineteen fifty-six was also the year when, with the Australian stockbroker and grazier Sam Hordern, Prince Philip founded the Royal Agricultural Society of the Commonwealth, and, with his old headmaster, Kurt Hahn, he founded the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme. The Award Scheme is arguably Philip’s ‘great achievement’. Prince Edward, the next Duke of Edinburgh, who has been actively involved in promoting the scheme since he achieved the Gold Award in 1986, said to me, ‘It’s my father great legacy. The scheme has spread to more than a hundred countries around the world. Since it started at least six million young people have taken part and some three million have achieved awards. As we speak, today, there are around six hundred thousand young people actively participating in it – and since community service is one of the components of the award that means that right now, this year, there is something like thirty million hours of community service taking place around the world as a direct result of my father’s initiative. That’s amazing when you stop to think about it.’

  The Award Scheme is indeed amazing. And the qualities the Award encourages – self-reliance, compassion, fitness, skill, enterprise, endeavour – were among those Prince Philip considered the most important. I asked Prince Edward if his father had ever discussed with him the best way to ‘run’ the Award Scheme – or if they had talked about the values that underpinned it. He said, ‘Not really. He just got on with it and I watched how he did it and I’ve done my best to follow his example.’

  More than once I tried to talk to Prince Philip about his ‘philosophy of life’. I did not get very far. I suspect that the best way to get the measure of the man is to look at the organisations he gave his time to – and to consider the books he chose to read and keep on his shelves. He owned more than 11,000 volumes, all carefully arranged and catalogued. The collection was both predictable and surprising: plenty of military history, science, and engineering; more than a thousand books on wildlife and conservation; six hundred books on matters equestrian; 494 on sport; a complete run of cartoon annuals by Giles; more than two hundred volumes of poetry; 990 books on art. Not many novelists were represented on the Duke of Edinburgh’s library shelves, but C.S. Forester was one of them. The heroes of the Hornblower stories exemplify the virtues Philip valued: decency, daring, courtesy, comradeship, kindliness, loyalty, courage. These were the very virtues that the youth organisations he headed, such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme and the Outward Bound Trust, were, in large part, designed to foster.

  Some years ago, while I was making the smallest of small talk with the Queen at a drinks reception (where she wasn’t drinking, or eating the nibbles, so nor was I), the subject of the National Playing Fields Association came up. The Queen is the charity’s patron; the Duke of Edinburgh was its president. ‘I don’t know very much about the Playing Fields, I’m afraid,’ Her Majesty said to me, with a slightly apologetic laugh. ‘That’s Prince Philip’s department. He doesn’t tell me much about it. He has his departments, I have mine.’

  Inevitably, since the Queen’s Accession, she and her husband, to an extent, led separate, parallel lives. As Head of State she does what heads of state must. (She is also Head of the Commonwealth, of course, and Supreme Governor of the Church of England.) Philip was her consort and, as consort, dutifully, and with some style, did whatever was required. And, when not required, he did his own thing. She has her role, her duties, her enthusiasms, her friends. He had his obligations, his interests, his enthusiasms, his friends. Frequently, they overlapped: often, they did not.

  At the start of her reign, the courtiers surrounding the young Queen were of a type, and it was not Philip’s type. Mike Parker, Philip’s private secretary until 1957, said to me, ‘They were old school – Eton, Oxbridge, the Brigade of Guards – which Philip was not, and which I most definitely was not. I think he had the measure of them, but I’m not sure they had the measure of him.’ Parker told me that Philip ‘understood, sort of’ that Elizabeth was required to exclude her husband from affairs of state; in return, said Parker, Philip was left ‘in charge of the home front’. Elizabeth wore the crown, but Philip wore the trousers. The Queen, it seems, was ready – anxious, even – to allow her husband the man’s traditional authority in their domestic and private life. Readily, Elizabeth bowed to Philip’s wishes in the matter of their children’s upbringing and education. (Prince Charles followed in his father’s footsteps by attending Cheam School and Gordonstoun – and was not at all happy, as we shall see.) She positively encouraged h
er husband to take on her late father’s role and responsibilities in the active management of the royal estates. ‘She was head of state,’ said Parker, ‘but he was head honcho.’

  In public he walked one step behind her. In private he treated his wife much as any strong-willed, independent-minded, intelligent, able, and energetic naval husband of his temperament and generation might. He questioned her judgement, he called her ‘a bloody fool’, he swore at her and them when he tripped over a clutch of her corgis. Martin Charteris said to me, ‘It sounds worse in the telling than it actually was. He can be grumpy. He is outspoken. He can be argumentative. But it’s just his way. If she hadn’t been Queen, you wouldn’t have noticed.’ But she was Queen and people did notice. Lord Mountbatten liked to tell the story of driving with the Queen and Prince Philip through Cowdray Park. Philip was at the wheel and driving far too fast. The Queen started drawing in her breath and flinching at the way her husband was driving. Philip turned to her and said, ‘If you do that once more I shall put you out of the car.’ When the hair-raising journey came to an end, Mountbatten asked the Queen why she hadn’t protested. ‘But you heard what he said,’ replied the Queen. ‘And he meant it.’ Charteris recalled an unhappy half-hour once on Britannia. ‘I’m not going to come out of my cabin until he’s in a better temper,’ said Her Majesty. ‘I’m going to sit here on my bed until he’s better.’

  Philip could be irascible – even with his wife. ‘It means nothing,’ Mike Parker insisted when I raised the subject with him. ‘Philip is an outspoken kind of a guy. Everyone knows that. He might use colourful language talking privately with the Queen – for all I know, they might have the odd barney, as couples do – but he is devoted to Her Majesty, absolutely devoted, don’t be in any doubt about that.’ And, according to several reliable witnesses, as the years went by, the Queen got better at holding her own with Prince Philip and, on occasion, giving as good as she got. Martin Charteris smiled impishly when I tackled him on the matter. ‘Have I heard Her Majesty say, “Oh, do shut up, Philip, you don’t know what you’re talking about”?’ he said, tapping his chin with his forefinger. ‘Possibly.’ ‘More than once?’ I persisted. ‘Perhaps.’

  In public and on parade – and the Duke of Edinburgh was relentlessly on parade with Her Majesty: at the State Opening of Parliament, at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, at the distribution of the Royal Maundy, at the Queen’s Birthday Parade, at Royal Ascot, at the Garter Ceremony, at the Thistle Service, at the Braemar Royal Highland Gathering, at garden parties and state banquets: the royal year is nothing if not predictable – towards his sovereign, Prince Philip’s manner and his manners were impeccable. Mike Parker said to me, ‘From day one, he was clear that his duty was to support the Queen, first, second, third and last. That’s what he’s there for. That’s what he does. And I don’t believe he has failed in his duty. Ever.’

  Together the Queen and the Duke undertook thousands of engagements within the United Kingdom, and overseas completed more than 260 visits to 128 countries. Their travels ranged from the Cocos Islands (5.4 square miles with a population of 655) to the People’s Republic of China (3.7 million square miles with a population of 1.25 billion).

  At the beginning of 1956 the royal couple spent three weeks in Nigeria, where, shaded from the African sun by an elegant canopy designed in London by Norman Hartnell, their programme included a spectacular Durbar at Kadona and countless cheerful encounters with colourfully clad and broadly beaming tribal chiefs. In Lagos, ten thousand masked ‘tribal warriors’ danced for them, and a crowd, conservatively estimated at a million strong, chanted, ‘Our Queen! Our Queen!’ with apparently heartfelt enthusiasm. (Within a decade Nigeria was a republic and soon after embroiled in a devastating civil war: the ‘tribal warriors’ turned tribal warriors.) In April of the same year Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin, the new leaders of the Soviet Union, visited Britain, took tea with the Queen and Philip at Windsor Castle, and presented Her Majesty with a thoroughbred horse as a thirtieth birthday present. Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and once a farmhand, plumber, and locksmith, had expected ‘haughtiness’ from a queen, but, to his surprise, found her ‘completely unpretentious’, ‘the sort of woman you would be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy summer afternoon’. In June, Queen and Duke paid a state visit to King Gustaf VI Adolf and Queen Louise of Sweden and, in July, received a state visit from King Faisal of Iraq.

  The Queen rarely travelled abroad without the Duke. Her solo foreign forays were usually related to her interest in horse breeding, visiting stud farms in Normandy in France and flying to Kentucky in the United States, where her host was William Farish, Texan racehorse owner and breeder and US Ambassador to London from 2001 to 2005. But the Duke undertook frequent overseas assignments without Her Majesty. Between the beginning of 1952 and the end of his life, on behalf of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, and the range of causes he supported, he took part in more than 620 overseas visits to over 140 countries.

  He set off on his single longest tour in October 1956. He was away for four months – 124 days to be precise. His travels took him to Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, the Gambia, Antarctica, and the Falkland Islands. The tour was controversial. To an extent, it still is. In 1999 Channel Four screened a two-part television documentary, produced by an independent company, Seven Sisters Productions, entitled The Real Prince Philip and designed to reveal just that. The Prince and his office cooperated with the film-makers, giving the programmes’ researchers a long list of names (including mine) to contact in the hope that – in the words of Prince Philip’s then private secretary, Miles Hunt-Davis – ‘they would be able to produce a fair and honest portrayal of His Royal Highness’. In the event, the Prince and his team were disappointed – ‘extremely disappointed’ – by the result. Miles Hunt-Davis took particular exception to the second programme and wrote to the film’s producers to say so: ‘Your portrayal of the 1956/57 World Tour in Britannia in Programme 2 was marred, firstly by implying that the journey was undertaken in order to get away from The Queen and the Court and secondly that it was a spree. This is totally wrong. The journey was planned to allow His Royal Highness to open the Olympic Games in Melbourne and the use of Britannia was specifically planned to enable Prince Philip to visit as many of the remote British Dependent Islands as possible. Most of these were only accessible by sea and had never before been visited by a Member of the Royal Family. The result of this trip was that Prince Philip had visited more of the then British Empire than any other member of the Royal Family.’

  The timing of the tour was unfortunate. In July 1956, on the fourth anniversary of his overthrow of King Farouk, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt announced that he was nationalising the Anglo-French-controlled Suez Canal Company, declaring that if the imperialist powers did not like it they could ‘choke to death on their fury’. In August, while she was attending a race meeting at Goodwood, the Queen was required to approve a proclamation, to be read out in the House of Commons that very afternoon, ordering 20,000 army reservists to be called up for service in the Canal zone. In October, as the Duke of Edinburgh, Mike Parker, and their party, in Britannia, were sailing east of Trincomalee, on the north-east coast of Ceylon, one of the world’s outstanding natural harbours, in the Middle East British and French bombs – and paratroops – were dropping on Egypt. In the event of war Britannia was designated a hospital ship. There was momentary uncertainty about whether or not the tour could proceed. It did. Within days, international uproar and the United States’ opposition to the Anglo-French action in Egypt brought about a ceasefire. The crisis was resolved. Anti-British riots in Singapore meant abandoning a proposed stop-over at the south end of the Malay peninsula, but, other than that, the royal itinerary was unaffected. On 22 November, in Melbourne, as planned, the Duke of Edinburgh formally opened the sixteenth Olympic Games, the first to be held south of the equator.

  The length of the tour was unus
ual, but, as Prince Philip pointed out, its scope was ambitious. ‘We were reaching parts of the Commonwealth that, in some cases, had never before been visited by a member of the Royal Family. And they seemed quite pleased to see us.’ To some in those days (and, perhaps, to many more today), for a young husband and father to be separated from his wife and family for four months may have seemed out of the ordinary, but to a naval officer – especially one with experience of war – a sixteen-week tour of duty is not so remarkable. Philip regarded the tour of 1956–7 as a duty to be done and a job worth doing. The Queen agreed and encouraged him to go. As she said in her Christmas message that year, ‘If my husband cannot be at home on Christmas Day, I could not wish for a better reason than he should be travelling in other parts of the Commonwealth.’

  To the end of his days, it infuriated the Duke of Edinburgh that this arduous tour was portrayed perennially as something of a princely ‘jolly’ and was used as the platform from which to launch a raft of what Miles Hunt-Davis called ‘innuendoes about Prince Philip’s private life which [are], in my view, overstated and unbalanced’.

  Back at the beginning of 1957, what first set the rumour-mill a-grinding – and allowed ‘innuendo’ to be translated from a whisper behind the hand to a headline on the front page – was really nothing to do with Prince Philip at all. It was a classic case of ‘guilt by association’. Mike Parker, Philip’s wartime naval friend, his Australian boon companion, and, since 1947, his private secretary, was being sued for divorce by Eileen, his wife of fourteen years. ‘We should never have got married in the first place,’ Parker said to me. ‘It was a wartime romance, exciting at the time, but we weren’t suited long-term. And Eileen wasn’t suited to royal life either.’ She called her memoirs Step Aside for Royalty. ‘I didn’t behave that well,’ admitted Parker. ‘It was a helluva mess.’ And a mess made public when news of Mrs Parker’s petition for divorce was published in February 1957, just as Britannia – with Parker and his boss on board – was cruising calmly towards Gibraltar on the final leg of the world tour. ‘When we reached the Rock,’ said Parker, ‘the world’s press was waiting. It was not a pretty sight.’83