The Duke

100 Chapters in the Life of Prince Philip

Ian Lloyd

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780750996082
• eBook ISBN: 9780750996990
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

'Witty and well-researched' - Daily Express

'A fascinating profile' - Daily Telegraph

For seven decades the Duke of Edinburgh was the Queen's 'strength and stay', far surpassing the predictions of courtiers who had feared 'a foreign interloper out for the goodies'. Journalists continually portrayed him as bluff and gaffe-prone – yet the letters he wrote in private show he had a kind and sensitive side.

Drawing on extensive interviews with those who knew him best, The Duke reveals the man in all his endlessly fascinating contradictions. While tracing his characteristic self-reliance back to a difficult childhood and six years' war service, Ian Lloyd highlights some rare aspects of the royal consort's personality – from his fondness for Duke Ellington to his fascination with UFOs. The result is a portrait like no other, and a rich tribute to Prince Philip's extraordinary life and legacy.

With an updated final chapter on Prince Philip's funeral, legacy and the future of the monarchy without him.

1

BORN WITH TWO BIRTHDAYS

The Queen is not the only member of the royal family with two birthdays: Prince Philip had two for an entirely different reason. Elizabeth II enjoys a private celebration on 21 April to mark her actual arrival into the world and an official one in June marked by Trooping the Colour.

At the time of Philip’s birth, Greece was still using the Julian calendar, under which the date was 28 May 1921. When the country adopted the Gregorian calendar two years later, the date was put forward by thirteen days to 10 June – the date it was celebrated on thereafter.

With his father, Prince Andrew, away on active service, it took four months to officially register his son’s birth, which was done on 24 October 1921 – Julian date – and ‘Entry No 449’ tells us that Prince Philippos of Greece, sixth in line to the throne, ‘was born on the day of the twenty-eighth of the month of May in the year 1921 on the day of the week of Friday at 10 o’clock in the morning’.¹

2

‘MY PLACE OF REST’

‘Mon Repos’ might sound like a bed and breakfast in Eastbourne, but it’s also the name of a neoclassical villa on the island of Corfu and the birthplace of Prince Philippos of Greece and Denmark. Built in the late 1820s for Sir Frederick Adams, Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands, it was given by Greece to Philip’s grandfather as a summer residence. It was bequeathed to the Prince’s father Prince Andrew and remained with the Greek royal family until its overthrow in 1967.

Philip’s cousin, Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia (the former Princess Alexandra of Greece), recalled ‘the broad, sunny hall, the wide staircase curling up to the upper floor’. Outside was the all-pervading ‘scent of orange and wisteria’ and the garden was ‘thick with eucalyptus, magnolia, cypress, olives and orange and lemon trees’.¹ According to Alexandra, Andrew ‘loved every part of it’ and ‘it was a particular joy and pride to him that his son should be born there’.²

Princess Alice was 36 and in a high state of anxiety when her baby was due and for some reason the local doctor thought it was more expedient for the mother to give birth to her son on the dining room table rather than her bed and carried her downstairs himself.

Afterwards, the recuperating Princess wrote to a relation: ‘He is a splendid, healthy, child thank God. I am very well too. It was an uncomplicated delivery and I am enjoying the fresh air on the terrace.’³

Like many of Queen Victoria’s descendants, Princess Alice was assisted by no-nonsense, salt-of-the-earth, English women. Nanny Miss Roose, ‘Roosie’, had already looked after Philip’s cousin Princess Marina of Greece and her sisters. Now once again she stocked up on English baby foods and ordered infant woollies from London.

Housekeeper Agnes Blower avoided ‘those messy foreign dishes which the Greek cook concocted’ and opted for soundly British ‘rice and tapioca puddings and good wholesome Scots porridge’ for the baby.⁴ Miss Blower was clearly no fan of the locals and recalled being assisted by ‘a few untrained peasant girls’, ‘and two unwashed footmen who were rough fellows’.

Meanwhile Philip was oblivious to the unclean staff and contented himself playing with nanny’s pin cushion, ‘for hours, sat quietly in his cot, pulling the pins and needles out and pushing them in again’.⁵ Stabbing a pin cushion for hours sounds a bit alarming for a 6-month-old baby but, looking back, he would no doubt have said his usual mantra: ‘it did me no harm’.

3

KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY: HOW PRINCE PHILIP AND THE QUEEN ARE RELATED

The Duke was related to the Queen through the ancestry of both his mother and father.

THE MATERNAL LINE

His mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice, who married the future Grand Duke Louis of Hesse.

The Queen is descended from Victoria’s eldest son, Edward VII.

In other words, both Philip and Elizabeth are great-great-grandchildren of Victoria and therefore third cousins. Queen Victoria is known as the ‘Grandmother of Europe’ and her living descendants also include Harald V of Norway, Margrethe II of Denmark, Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden and Felipe VI of Spain.

THE PATERNAL LINE

Philip’s father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, was the son of King George I of Greece. George was the younger brother of Britain’s Queen Alexandra, consort of Edward VII.

So both Philip and Elizabeth are descendants of George and Alexandra’s father, King Christian IX of Denmark. Since Philip was Christian’s great-grandson and Elizabeth is his great-great-granddaughter, in this line they are second cousins once removed.

Due to the fact that his six children made upwardly mobile marriages in the other courts of Europe, King Christian was dubbed the ‘Father-in-Law of Europe’. Like Victoria, he is an ancestor of Margrethe II, Harald V and Felipe VI, though unlike her he is also ancestor of Philippe of Belgium and Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg.

4

A SLICE OF BATTENBERG

‘My grandmother was an extraordinary character,’ recalled Prince Philip in a 1968 interview, some eighteen years after the death of the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven. ‘Tremendously well informed and with an ability to argue and discuss intelligently any subject you care to mention. She was the nearest thing to a perambulating encyclopaedia that anyone could possibly perceive.’¹

His admiration is unsurprising: the two had much in common. ‘Radical in her ideas, insatiably curious, argumentative to the point of perversity’, says the official biographer of her son, Earl Mountbatten.² It’s a description with a familiar ring – neatly summing up her grandson too.

Louis Mountbatten himself labelled his mother ‘outspoken and open-minded’,³ something his exact contemporary Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother echoed: ‘She was rather like a man … She was quite dictatorial. I remember she would say: “Now, I am going to tell you this.”’⁴

Born Princess Victoria of Hesse in 1863 at Windsor Castle, she was the first of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren to be born in Britain, the first to be named after her and the first of many to have been born in her presence. Princess Victoria’s mother was Queen Victoria’s second daughter Princess Alice, who in 1862 married the future Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse. Their five daughters included ill-fated Alexandra, Empress of Russia, who was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918 alongside her husband Tsar Nicholas II and their five children. The Empress Alexandra and another sister, Princess Irene – who married Kaiser Wilhelm II’s brother Henry – were carriers of the haemophilia gene. Their brother Frederick was a haemophiliac and died at the age of 2 following a fall from his mother’s bedroom window. Fortunate for the British royal family, Princess Victoria was not a carrier.⁵

Victoria married Prince Louis of Battenberg in 1884 at a lavish celebration at the Hessian court in Darmstadt in a ceremony attended by Queen Victoria. Legend has it that the famous Battenberg cake was created for the wedding banquet. Victoria’s granddaughter Lady Pamela Hicks likes to think it was: ‘It is very likely, though what’s the harm if it wasn’t! We were told about it, growing up, and that the four squares represented the four Battenberg brothers.’⁶

After the death of Princess Alice from diphtheria in 1878, when Victoria was 15, her grandmother acted in loco parentis and was a frequent correspondent with her Hessian granddaughter. She was concerned that the newly married Princess showed ‘a certain coolness and detachment’ (something her grandson would be accused of, particularly in his relations with his eldest son) and thought she failed to convey sufficient love and affection towards her husband.⁷

Certainly Princess Victoria’s grandchildren found her a rather imposing figure and they were expected to treat her with deference, as Lady Pamela recalls: ‘On meeting her we had to kiss her hand, then kiss her cheek before curtseying to her.’⁸ Prince Philip kissed her and bowed with similar deference.

Princess Victoria’s apartment at Kensington Palace was one of several bases the teenage Philip used during school holidays and then later when on shore leave from the navy. A Mountbatten family butler, Charles Smith, recalled, ‘The patience of Grandmama was sometimes a little exhausted by his restless enquiring nature. She would always keep a good eye on him, tidying up behind him and ensuring his clothes were in good order, but inevitably she needed breathing space to collect her thoughts.’ That’s where Charles the butler came in useful, and he was deputised to take young Philip to see a series of swashbuckling films, from Treasure Island to Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty.⁹

The boy Prince’s film choices show a maritime theme and it’s no surprise that, with war looming, a career in the British Royal Navy – following the path of his grandfather and uncles George and Louis – was inevitable. Princess Victoria surprisingly thought he might have stayed in Greece, which he visited in the late 1930s with his mother, and was ‘where he belongs … War is too serious a matter for boys of foreign countries to have to undergo the risks,’ she wrote to her younger son Louis, adding, ‘and they can only be an encumbrance & of no real use to our country’. Nevertheless, as both Lord Louis and the King of Greece felt Philip would be better serving in the Royal Navy, she acquiesced.¹⁰

The Princess lived to see her grandson serve with distinction in the Second World War. She attended his wedding to the granddaughter of her cousin George V and she was godmother to her great-grandson Prince Charles. Philip was serving at sea when his grandmother died peacefully at Kensington Palace on 24 September 1950, though a few weeks earlier he had been able to tell her of the birth of his daughter Princess Anne.

5

PHIL THE GREEK

When he first arrived on the scene as a suitor for Princess Elizabeth, sniffy courtiers dismissed him as ‘a penniless Greek prince’. By royal standards he was certainly impecunious but genetically he was faultless. In fact, his pedigree was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Born with Two Birthdays
• 2 ‘My Place of Rest’
• 3 Keeping It in the Family: How Prince Philip and the Queen Are Related
• 4 A Slice of Battenberg
• 5 Phil the Greek
• 6 Paris and a Bohemian Aunt
• 7 Baby Steps in Britain
• 8 Family Tragedy No. 1: Philip’s Mother is Forcibly Removed
• 9 First Meeting
• 10 Quips, Gaffes and Banter: The Duke’s Memorable Clangers 1–10
• 11 No Fixed Abode
• 12 Not a Hard Act to Follow: Philip and the Stage
• 13 Family Tragedy No. 2: The Death of a Beloved Sister
• 14 The Nazi Link
• 15 Girls, Girls, Girls
• 16 First Love
• 17 A Practical Joker
• 18 Breaking and Entering
• 19 It’s Not for Me, It’s for a Friend
• 20 Quips, Gaffes and Banter: The Duke’s Memorable Clangers 11–20
• 21 Two Degrees of Separation: Philip and the Duke of Wellington
• 22 For Queen and Country: The Duke’s Medals
• 23 Naval Hero
• 24 1945: The Final Surrender
• 25 The Moment They Clicked
• 26 Pathway to Love
• 27 The Mystery of Their Engagement
• 28 Philip Flunks an Exam
• 29 An Unwelcome Welcome
• 30 Quips, Gaffes and Banter: The Duke’s Memorable Clangers 21–30
• 31 Philip the Jewellery Designer
• 32 An End to His Vices
• 33 Phil the Dish
• 34 Pre-Wedding Jitters?
• 35 Philip’s Austerity Wedding
• 36 Wedding Presents
• 37 Honeymoon Hysteria
• 38 Philip and a Royal Mistress
• 39 A Working Royal
• 40 Quips, Gaffes and Banter: The Duke’s Memorable Clangers 31–40
• 41 Philip and Charles: Good Cop or Bad Cop?
• 42 Ol’ Blue Eyes
• 43 Two Dukes and the King of Jazz
• 44 The Thursday Club
• 45 First Home
• 46 Princess Anne: The Son He Never Had
• 47 ‘The Whole World Had Dropped on His Shoulders’
• 48 ‘That Damned Fool Edinburgh’
• 49 And to Crown It All …
• 50 Quips, Gaffes and Banter: The Duke’s Memorable Clangers 41–50
• 51 Don’t Call Me Albert!
• 52 Mother-in-Law Trouble
• 53 What Have You Come As?
• 54 Edinburgh Green
• 55 The Rumours
• 56 Tours de Force
• 57 The Day the Queen Sported a Beard
• 58 When is a Prince Not a Prince?
• 59 Special Brew
• 60 Quips, Gaffes and Banter: The Duke’s Memorable Clangers 51–60
• 61 The Dukebox
• 62 The Queen Raises Philip’s Six-Bar Limit
• 63 The D of E Awards
• 64 Sartorial Star
• 65 Royal Variety: Not Always the Spice of Life
• 66 Man of Faith
• 67 On the Police Database
• 68 A Very Mixed Media
• 69 Dodgy Palace Lifts
• 70 Quips, Gaffes and Banter: The Duke’s Memorable Clangers 61–70
• 71 Poesy Prince
• 72 … Talking of Poetry
• 73 Man Belonging Mrs Queen
• 74 Feature Film Philip
• 75 The Prince and the Profumo Scandal
• 76 1969: The Year the Queen Banned Christmas
• 77 Crash, Bang, Wallop: The Duke Behind the Wheel
• 78 A Fatherly Bond with JFK Jnr
• 79 Take the ****ing Picture: The Potty-Mouthed Prince
• 80 Quips, Gaffes and Banter: The Duke’s Memorable Clangers 71–80
• 81 Royal Winker
• 82 Turning the Queen Decimal
• 83 A Sensitive Touch
• 84 Diana: A Complicated Daughter-in-Law
• 85 Frozen-Out Fergie
• 86 Biblio-Phil
• 87 North of Watford Gap
• 88 Prince Philip: The Godfather
• 89 Philip the Good Father
• 90 Quips, Gaffes and Banter: The Duke’s Memorable Clangers 81–90
• 91 Charity Case
• 92 The Death of Diana
• 93 Is There Anyone There? Part 1
• 94 Is There Anyone There? Part 2
• 95 Cartoon Character
• 96 Cry Freedom
• 97 Fun Phil Facts
• 98 My Husband and I
• 99 Quips, Gaffes and Banter: The Duke’s Memorable Clangers 91–100
• 100 I Did It My Way
• Notes
• Bibliography