I asked Sacha how she had got to know Prince Philip, not as a family friend of her parents but as a personal friend of her own. She smiled and sat back and thought for a moment. ‘I remember going to Cowes one year,’ she said. ‘My parents were going to go, but my father had cancer and couldn’t come, so I went on my own.’
Cowes, on the north coast of the Isle of Wight, is the headquarters of the Royal Yacht Squadron (founded 1812) and home of the annual Cowes Week yachting regatta, held every August. In 1947 the Island Sailing Club of Cowes gave Philip and Princess Elizabeth a Dragon-class yacht as a wedding present. It was painted dark blue and Philip named it Bluebottle. For several years he sailed her competitively in Cowes Week, with a regular crew that included the larger-than-life local character, yachtsman, and boat-builder Uffa Fox. Fox and Philip became firm friends. Fox persuaded the people of Cowes to give Philip one of the first of the small Flying Fifteen yachts, which Fox designed and Philip christened Coweslip. Probably the best known of Philip’s yachts was Bloodhound, a pre-war, twelve-metre yacht designed for ocean racing. He raced her at Cowes and, for several years, cruised the west coast of Scotland in her with Prince Charles and Princess Anne. He ended his years of competitive sailing in a series of yachts called Yeoman, all owned by another friend and fellow sailing enthusiast, Sir Owen Aisher, founder of Marley Tiles and ‘Yachtsman of the Year, 1958’. While Queen Victoria’s favourite home was Osborne House in East Cowes, as a rule Queen Elizabeth did not accompany Prince Philip to Cowes Week.
‘It was the chaps who did the sailing,’ Sacha Abercorn explained. ‘I think the girls were there to have fun. It was great fun. All the secretaries from his office were there. And I remember Princess Anne and myself, dressed up as serving wenches. It was hilarious. I remember Uffa Fox telling stories – telling, endless, endless stories. I suppose I was seventeen or eighteen, in that funny in-between world.
‘And then I got married – at twenty – in 1966. The Queen and Prince Philip came to the wedding. Oh, yes, everyone was there. They all rolled up. It was extraordinary. It was in Westminster Abbey. It really was amazing. And then we would see them, now and again, at weekends, particularly in November, when they came to Luton Hoo.97 My grandparents were there, and uncles and aunts. And the Brabournes. There were ten or twelve in the house party. There was shooting as usual and then, in the evening, some great entertainment. I remember Victor Borge particularly. And I remember the dinners – my grandmother being bossy, my grandfather bringing his heart and soul with him. The talk was always interesting. I remember my grandfather talking, and Prince Philip. I remember when they spoke, they took it in turns, they gave each other time, and we gave them full-blast attention. It was good.
‘But it was later that we became close. I think it was at The Gables – when Nicky was running the shoots – that we particularly got interested in each other. What brought us together? Jung. Yes, Jung. I’ve always been interested in Jung, his work, his ideas. And Philip is interested in Jung. Prince Philip is always questing, exploring, searching for meaning, testing ideas. We had riveting conversations about Jung. That’s where our friendship began.’
The Duke of Edinburgh was not the caricature to which all became accustomed. He was fascinated by Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), the great Swiss psychoanalyst, who eschewed Freud’s obsession with sex and the power of the sexual impulse, and focused instead on what he termed the inherited ‘collective unconscious’ with its universal ideas or images: the ‘archetypes’. Jung wrote on subjects as diverse as nature, mythology, and religion – subjects of deep interest to the Duke of Edinburgh. Philip read Jung, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, the Bible. From the 1950s his interest in psychology, philosophy, and religion developed and deepened, and became increasingly intermeshed with his concern for the natural world and the environment.
Philip’s interest in life’s spiritual dimension was given additional focus in 1962, with the appointment of Robin Woods as ‘Dean of Windsor, Domestic Chaplain to the Queen and Register of the Most Noble Order of the Garter’. Woods (son of a bishop; chaplain to the forces, mentioned in dispatches, 1944; ‘interests: sailing, shooting, painting’) and Philip became friends. With the Duke’s active support and involvement, Woods developed St George’s House at Windsor as a training college for clergy and a conference centre where clergy and laity could meet to explore issues and ideas. St George’s held its first weekend ‘consultation’ in October 1966. The theme: ‘The Role of the Church in Society Today’. In 1970 Woods moved on from Windsor to become Bishop of Worcester. Philip wrote to him: ‘It has been simply marvellous having you at Windsor and your help and guidance for us and for our children has been invaluable.’ Woods paid tribute to Philip as a ‘man I had come to respect very deeply, not only for the integrity of his religion but for his ability to judge men and situations’.
As Dean of Windsor, Woods was succeeded, briefly, by Launcelot Fleming, sometime Antarctic explorer and Bishop of Norwich, and then, in 1976, by Michael Mann, whose background, in several respects, echoed that of Woods (he, too, had been mentioned in dispatches) and whose education – at Harrow, Sandhurst, Wells Theological College, and Harvard Business School – and range of experience – as an officer in the King’s Dragoon Guards during the war, as a colonial administrator in Nigeria for nine years before his ordination in 1957 – made him a figure Philip could reckon with and relate to.
Together the Duke of Edinburgh and Michael Mann embarked on a series of intellectual and philosophical adventures, and their collaboration and friendship led to the publication of three books. The first, A Windsor Correspondence, is simply an exchange of letters, between Duke and Dean, sparked by a lecture given by the astronomer Fred Hoyle entitled ‘Evolution from Space’. The themes they touch on are science and Christianity, fundamentalism, evolution, and morality. The second is A Question of Balance, which explores ‘the crucial part that human nature plays in every aspect of communal life’. The Duke evidently had reservations about some of what the Church of England gets up to, but his conclusion was clear: ‘religious conviction is the strongest and probably the only factor in sustaining the dignity and integrity of the individual.’ The third book is Survival or Extinction: A Christian Attitude to the Environment.98 In 1986 the twenty-fifth anniversary of the World Wide Fund for Nature was celebrated with a conference held, at the Duke’s suggestion, at Assisi, in Umbria, home of St Francis, patron saint of birds and animals. The aim was to forge ‘a permanent alliance between conservation and religion’. By all accounts, the Buddhists stole the show, but, at the end of the conference, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians each issued ‘Declarations on Nature’. The World Wide Fund was later appointed ‘consultant to the Roman Catholic Church in programmes related to nature conservation’ and the Duke went to Rome for a private audience with His Holiness Pope John Paul II. In Survival or Extinction the Duke and Michael Mann explore some of the themes touched on at the Assisi conference. The book also distils thoughts and ideas contributed at seven separate ‘consultations’ held at St George’s House and includes a list of the various participants, beginning with ‘Her Grace the Duchess of Abercorn, Counsellor in Transpersonal Psychology’.
Sacha Abercorn poured me another cup of tea and continued with her story. ‘It began with Jung,’ she said. ‘Philip was having these consultations at Windsor, and he said, “Could you get some of your Jung people to come along?” And I did. These consultations went on for three years. Michael Mann was very involved and, between them, they brought together a really interesting pool of thought.’ Sacha sat forward on her sofa and said, with feeling, ‘Prince Philip cares about the environment. He has a feeling for nature – in a practical way. He is totally a sentient human being – in a practical way. I saw that at first hand when we travelled with him several times on Britannia – James and myself, Aubrey Buxton and Kay [his second wife]. We went to Borneo, Sarawak, the Galápagos. Philip’s feeling for the environment is not sentimental – not sentimental at all.
It’s emotional and practical.
‘He’s always asking questions, searching for answers. I think it was at Lubenham, and my mother and he were walking back to the house from church, and she said something like, “I don’t believe in anything.” That made him stop, suddenly, and ask out loud, “What is it? What’s behind it all?” He asks the difficult questions and that’s what drew me to him. I remember, in the 1980s sometime, we were staying at Windsor for Royal Ascot, and I had just discovered Anthony Stevens’s book Archetypes99 and I told Prince Philip about it and he was riveted. Riveted. We both were. One of the things that Stevens writes about is left-brain/right-brain theory. [In a nutshell, the left hemisphere of the brain controls logic and language: the right controls creativity and intuition.] People think of Philip as being “left-brain”, but he is so full of “right-brain”. Yes, he is practical, unsentimental and logical, but he is also emotional and intuitive. He is deeply sensitive. Deeply sensitive. His senses are so super-charged.’
Sacha was sitting forward now, smiling, her eyes shining. ‘Our friendship was very close. The heart came into it in a big way. There’s a hugely potent chemical reaction in him. It’s a highly charged chemistry. We were close because we understood one another. He felt he could trust me and I felt I could trust him.’
Silence fell in the little drawing room and the tea had gone cold. ‘In Eluthera,’ I said – the Abercorns have a beautiful holiday home on the island of Eluthera in the Bahamas – ‘In Eluthera, someone told me they had seen you and Prince Philip on the beach holding hands.’
Sacha smiled and said, without any awkwardness, ‘It was a passionate friendship, but the passion was in the ideas. It was certainly not a full relationship. I did not go to bed with him. It probably looked like that to the world. I can understand why people might have thought it, but it didn’t happen. It wasn’t like that. He isn’t like that. It’s complicated and, at the same time, it’s quite simple. He needs a playmate and someone to share his intellectual pursuits.’
‘Do you think he sleeps with his other playmates?’ I asked.
‘I doubt it, I doubt it very much.’ Sacha paused and thought a moment and said, ‘No, I’m sure not. But he’s a human being. Who knows? I don’t. Unless you are in the room with a lighted candle, who knows?’
‘And what about the Queen?’ I asked.
Sacha smiled and said, ‘She gives him a lot of leeway. Her father told her, “Remember, he’s a sailor. They come in on the tide.”’
‘Do you see much of him nowadays?’ I asked, as Sacha began to stack up the tea things and I put my pen and notebook away.
‘Not really. He used to come to Eluthera. And he’d come carriage driving at Baronscourt with Penny [Romsey], but we’ve stopped having the carriage driving. It was too expensive. I am sorry I don’t see him properly any more. Really sorry. He is a very special man.’
As I walked away from Sacha’s house, along Buckingham Palace Road, over Grosvenor Place, past the Royal Mews, I thought back on what she had told me – and the way she had told it to me: easily, fluently, without any sense of defensiveness or artifice – and I said to myself, ‘Yes, that’s it. That is all we need to know. It makes sense.’
It makes sense of the story told, nearly fifty years after the event, by Norman Barson, a royal footman, a former Grenadier guardsman, who worked for Philip and Princess Elizabeth at Windlesham Moor, the house, near Ascot, that was their weekend home at the beginning of their marriage. According to Barson, Philip would visit Windlesham Moor midweek, usually on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, early in the evening, and he would come, driving himself in his beloved MG convertible, accompanied by a young lady who was not the Princess. She was young, slim, pretty, well spoken. Philip made no secret of the visits. He telephoned in advance to say he was coming. Barson prepared them beef sandwiches and gin and orange. ‘He always poured the lady’s drink,’ said the footman. ‘He hardly drank at all. I could later hear them laughing and joking, but I never once heard him refer to her by name … I never saw them kiss or canoodle. I remember thinking he acted exactly the same with her as with the Queen. He was charming to both of them. He stared into their eyes with his head on one side and made them laugh.’
It makes sense of Sir Angus Ogilvy – the delightful husband of Princess Alexandra, granddaughter of George V, fifteen years Philip’s junior and long reported as one of the Prince’s ‘romantic interests’ – coming up to me at a party (at the London home of the newspaper publisher Conrad Black – not long before his imprisonment) and congratulating me on an article I had written about the Duke of Edinburgh. Ogilvy, who died in 2004, aged seventy-six, must have known what people used to whisper about his wife and the Duke, but it did not trouble him because he understood the Duke and the nature of the Duke’s relationship with his women friends. Sir Angus said to me, ‘Prince Philip’s a good man, a really good man, hopelessly misreported, misrepresented, and misunderstood.’ The Queen appointed Princess Alexandra as one of only a tiny handful of Lady Companions of the Order of the Garter in 2003.
It makes sense of Penny Romsey. Dr Johnson once said, ‘If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.’ The Duke of Edinburgh had duties, and an eye to the future, but nevertheless he was wholly at ease carriage driving with Penny Romsey, thirty years his junior, because he knew that the Queen knew that Penny was his playmate, not his mistress.
I think the Queen wanted us to know it, too. Her Majesty used to make a point of being on parade to cheer her husband and his carriage-driving companion as they took part in competitions. And memorably, one Saturday evening, on a day when the Daily Mail had carried photographs of her husband and his friend at a carriage-driving event – photographs with captions dripping with innuendo – the Queen said to Penny Romsey, who was staying for the weekend, ‘Penny, are you planning to go to church in the morning? If you are, would you like to come to church with me?’ The Queen was ready to send out a signal to the world that she was happy to be pictured on her way to church with her husband’s much younger friend. She was, and is, the Queen’s friend, too, of course.
Penny Romsey, the daughter of a butcher who made his fortune as founder of the Angus Steak House chain, married Dickie Mountbatten’s grandson, Norton, in 1979. The Romseys have two children, Nicholas and Alexandra. Nicholas, who is one of Prince Charles’s godsons, has struggled with drug addiction. The Romseys had another daughter, a little girl called Leonora, who died of cancer in 1991, aged five. I recall having lunch with Prince Philip one day in 2003 (it was a fund-raiser for the Playing Fields Association, held in the Cabinet War Rooms) and he told me that in the evening he was going to the theatre, to Drury Lane, to see Anything Goes, with the Queen and Lord and Lady Romsey. These people were kith and kin, cousins as well as friends.
At the start of 1996 there was a brief outburst of media frenzy when a hospital worker surfaced with a tape of a seventeen-minute late-night telephone conversation between Prince Philip and an unnamed woman. Using a simple £200 scanner the hospital worker had inadvertently intercepted a mobile call from Sandringham House and, somehow, a transcript of the 2,200-word exchange between the Queen’s husband and an unknown confidante fell into a newspaper’s hands. Who was Philip calling? Cherchez la femme! Given the clues in the conversation, she was both posh and horsey, and someone who could make His Royal Highness laugh. She was comfortable calling Charles and Diana – and Camilla – by their Christian names and chatting about the operation on the Queen Mother’s hip. The lucky lady was also due to be the recipient of a present from Prince Philip that he wanted her to be sure to unwrap in her bedroom … Speculation was rife. Was the lady Sacha Abercorn? Or was she another aristocratic lovely in her forties, Grania, wife of Hugh, Baron Cavendish of Furness, Conservative politician, owner of Holker Hall, and third in line to the Dukedom of Devonshire? It transpired that the lady on the line was none other than Penny Romsey, that the Prince was suggestin
g she open her Christmas present out of sight of the servants, and that as well as talking to his carriage-driving companion, during the call His Royal Highness also chatted with her husband. The tape was duly handed over to Farrer & Co, the Queen’s solicitors, and destroyed, but not before the press had enjoyed a few happy days fanning the flames of gossip and innuendo.
Penny Romsey’s mother-in-law, Countess Mountbatten, said to me at the time, ‘Philip is a man who enjoys the company of attractive, intelligent younger women. Nothing wrong in that. He’s always had somebody there, sharing one or other of his particular pursuits. He has special friends, like Penny. But I am quite sure – quite sure – absolutely certain – he has never been unfaithful to the Queen.’
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 39
