by Robert Lacey
But history has viewed the trip less kindly – as a dated exercise in empire repair that ignored the complexities of late colonial politics, and as a patronising lads’ ‘jolly’. As one critic put it, Philip and his raucous naval comrades appeared to treat the south sea islands ‘as spaces of exotic sexual spectacle for the white male colonial gaze’.31 We see the Duke splashing ashore to be greeted by bemedalled British governors in white ducks and pith helmets, then vanishing into crowds of clay-caked locals – and oodles of straw-skirted dancing girls. Little is left to the imagination as we watch Britannia’s crew succumb to their embraces, and we hear the encounters described in leering tones in the (fictional) letters that Philip’s aide, Mike Parker, writes home to be read out to the cheering members of the Thursday Club.
‘We’ve pipped the locals pretty much everywhere we’ve been,’ writes Parker, describing the athletic contests and cricket matches organised by Britannia’s crew, ‘mainly because cricket as a sport has never been seen before in New Guinea … Philip, as you all know, is a work-hard-play-hard man who would never stand in the way of a bit of fun, and in New Guinea, as it turns out, there is no such thing as infidelity … [cue Loud cheers from the Thursday Club members …] By the end of this tour, I think we’ll be able to make a qualitative assessment about where the finest women in the world come from.’32
The Thursday Club was ‘the gang of cronies that the Duke of Edinburgh used to gather round him in the 1950s’ in the words of the humourist Miles Kington, recalling his own time at the club some 40 years later. The basic purpose of the gathering, in Kington’s opinion, was to provide the recently married – and hence, tied-down – Philip with ‘a bit of fun away from his serious life at Buckingham Palace’.33 Later feted as one of the developers of ‘Franglais’, Kington was then a young writer on the staff of the satirical magazine Punch. As such, he was rather impressed to find himself rubbing shoulders with the likes of Philip’s uncle, Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, as well as with Philip himself – along with such free-thinking figures of the time as the poet John Betjeman, actor David Niven and ‘Little Larry Adler playing his mouth organ in the corner’.34 The organiser and presiding spirit of these cosmopolitan Thursday gatherings at Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho, was Stirling Henry ‘Baron’ Nahum, Philip’s Jewish-Italian photographer friend who had taken the pictures at the royal wedding of 1947.
Kington recalled being puzzled by the number of ladies present at these supposedly all-male gatherings – ‘Flo, Loulou, Beryl, Gertie, Simone, Pat and one or two others …’
‘You men are all distinguished people …’ he later remembered questioning ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, ‘all distinguished in action or thought or culture…but these girls?’
‘Don’t knock these girls,’ said Lord Louis …’ [They] are all great ladies in their own right – the Duchess of Northumberland, the Percy, the Lady Devonshire.’
‘These are their titles?’ Kington asked, amazed.
‘No,’ replied Mountbatten, at that date the First Lord of the Admiralty. ‘Those are the pubs they work at!’35
This was precisely why Philip enjoyed his ‘Thursdaying’. The mildly louche atmosphere of the fish restaurant went some way, at least, to keeping him in touch with ordinary life – and it provides The Crown creator Peter Morgan with the ideal vehicle for Philip’s Pacific adventures to be related in the letters that Mike Parker reads out to his fellow club members in London by ‘Baron’ Nahum.
These letters are, of course, imaginary, as are the nighttime interactions depicted between the crew of HMY Britannia and various local populations. But the timetable and destination of Britannia’s southern tour of 1956–7 are based on the official records of the voyage, and there are vivid newsreel reports of the royal yacht being welcomed with dancing and feasting at receptions during the day. The sequence of Britannia coming to the rescue of a Polynesian man was inspired by an incident when the royal yacht diverted to meet the SS Mabel Ryan, en route to St Helena, in order to pick up a naval engineer who was in need of surgery.
While some of the Thursday Club antics may have been exaggerated, what went on inside Wheeler’s Restaurant did become more sinister as Parker’s wife, Eileen, went digging for evidence to support her suspicions of her husband’s infidelity. We do not, in fact, know precisely what evidence Eileen Parker gathered to sue her husband for divorce in 1957. But we do know that she suspected him of having affairs. She certainly went to meet Richard Colville, the Queen’s press secretary, in the winter of 1956–7 to give notice of her intention to divorce.
Buckingham Palace’s stance towards Eileen Parker’s marital problems was politely sympathetic, making no attempt to impede or dissuade her from her course, though they did ask her to delay going public until Philip and Parker were safely back from the tour.36 Eileen agreed, only for her lawyer to spill the beans at a press conference – held without her approval, Eileen later claimed37 – and the press pounced delightedly, starting with a dramatic feature in the pages of the Baltimore Sun.
‘A vague, unhappy discomfort is growing among Britons,’ reported the Sun’s London correspondent, Joan Graham, ‘that all is not well with the royal family …
‘The whisper started last summer … that the Duke of Edinburgh had more than a passing interest in an unnamed woman and was meeting her regularly in the private apartment of Baron, the court photographer … When it was announced that Philip was to make a four-month round-the-world-tour (which is just ending) there were plenty of people ready to say, “I told you so – he is being got out of the country to cool down.” When it further transpired that Baron had been invited to go along as a private guest and not in his official capacity as photographer, there were more wise nods …’38
The Baltimore Sun had first discovered the attractions of British royal scandal in the 1930s – Baltimore, Maryland, was the home base of Bessie Wallis Warfield, better known later as Wallis Simpson, and in due course as Duchess of Windsor.39 Now, 21 years later, the paper helped to whip up another media storm, bringing the press of Britain and the world to besiege the royal yacht in Lisbon in February 1957. Not a word might have been printed if ‘Baron’ Nahum had not died of a botched hip operation the previous September at the early age of 50. Thus he was not able to take up Philip’s invitation to go on the trip – and his death removed the possibility of any libel action from the photographer. Now insinuating stories about Philip could be printed using the credibility of Baron’s name, with the Baltimore Sun’s ‘un-named woman’ in the photographer’s apartment remaining conveniently un-named and hypothetical, with sinister whispers becoming a matter of public discussion. It was the most severe crisis to face Elizabeth II’s monarchy in the first decade of her reign.
The traditional Buckingham Palace response to such a media storm had always been to ignore it completely. But Elizabeth was not prepared to let the allegations go unchallenged. She was furious. She instructed Richard Colville to issue a flat denial – ‘It is quite untrue,’ Colville insisted, ‘that there is any rift between the Queen and the Duke’ – the first time that the Palace had deigned to address a personal rumour during her reign.40
Elizabeth then told her staff and the Foreign Office to accelerate her travel arrangements so she could arrive early in Lisbon, where she staged a private welcome ceremony to make her feelings clear to her husband and to her personal circle. Having heard that Philip and his Britannia companions had occupied their weeks at sea with a beard-growing contest, the Queen organised half a dozen theatrical ginger beards for herself and her ladies-in-waiting to be wearing when Philip bounded up the aircraft stairs and into the cabin.41
The story of the theatrical beards did not leak out for several years. But Elizabeth organised a very public gesture on the day after the couple arrived back in London. Ten years earlier, Prince Philip of Greece had had to forfeit both his nationality and his title in order to marry Princess Elizabeth as a naturalised British subject. King George VI had ennobled him
on his wedding day, 20 November 1947, as Duke of Edinburgh (and also Baron Greenwich and Earl of Merioneth),42 but he had offered his new son-in-law nothing grander. Philip remained an ex-prince.
Now seemed the moment to put that right, and on 22 February 1957 it was formally announced that His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh would, henceforward, carry ‘the style and dignity of a prince of the United Kingdom’. This was ‘in recognition of the great services which His Royal Highness has provided to the country’, read the citation – and, with a perceptible dig at the newspapers, it went on to praise the new Prince for ‘his unique contribution to the life of the Commonwealth, culminating in the tour which he has just concluded’.43
This elevation is depicted towards the end of Episode 203 – with a ‘mini-coronation’ ceremony, complete with Philip wielding a sceptre. The invented ritual devised for the screen was built around the Duke of Windsor’s 1911 investiture as Prince of Wales and was intended to give visual shape to the importance the Queen attached to honouring her husband as Prince of the Realm.
With regard to the ongoing development of the Suez Crisis in the background of all these family events, the screen timeline moves to and fro. Unlike the ballerina Ulanova in Episode 201, the Australian journalist Helen King is a fictional character, intended to embody the temptations in Philip’s life and to show him making decisions based on vanity – which, he quickly learns, gets him into trouble. King also provides a vehicle to explore Philip’s childhood themes, helping to explain why he was feeling homesick by the end of his tour of the southern seas.
The year 1957 brought Britain its first experience of a fullblown ‘rock ’n’ roll’ music tour in the shape of Bill Haley and the Comets, whose pulsating ‘Rock Around The Clock’ never failed to get the audience out of their seats – teenagers danced in the aisles. But a minority of troublemakers took advantage of the good-natured mayhem to turn violent – slashing and even ripping out the theatre seats,44 calling themselves ‘Teddy Boys’, after the supposedly Edwardian origin of their heavy-drape jackets and narrow ‘drain-pipe’ trousers. The ‘Teds’ were Britain’s first youth cult of the mass-media age and they made rock ‘n’ roll the anthem of their rebellion. Disaffected by the inequities of post-war Britain, and sensing the revolution in young hearts everywhere, the Teddy Boys were the working-class equivalent of the ‘Angry Young Men’ – the theatrical rebellion started in the year of Suez by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.45
The new Prince Philip took a keen interest in the Teddy Boys, declining to dismiss them as mere ‘juvenile delinquents’. In 1955 he had launched an appeal seeking 10,000 Londoners to contribute £1 each to sponsor a Teddy Boy becoming a member of one of London’s boys’ clubs. The clubs were to be divided into six groups each headed by one of Britain’s sporting heroes of the moment – the athletes Chris Chataway, Gordon Pirie and Roger Bannister, the first four-minutemiler; veteran footballer Stanley Matthews; the flyweight Welsh boxing champion Dai Dower; and Northants cricketer Frank ‘Typhoon’ Tyson, then the world’s fastest bowler, who could fling down deliveries at more than 100 mph.46
1956 – Suez on a platter: Anthony Eden and General Nasser
Philip was a pioneer in recruiting celebrities to worthy royal causes, but his scheme never flew. The ‘Teds’ did not prove ‘boys-clubbable’ – they were rebels, after all – and not everyone viewed them as a pressing social problem. ‘Why all this fuss about Teddy Boys?’ asked one letter in a London newspaper. ‘The boys at Harrow wear tails, wing collars, striped trousers and straw hats. The boys at Eton dress equally as ridiculous in clothes of another century. Why nag at the Teddy Boys? Is it all right for the wealthy to dress foolishly, but wrong for those with less money and social position?’47
The Duke went back to the drawing board, and in February 1956 he announced his new youth scheme, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, designed specifically to attract boys who did not want to join a club or dress up in the uniform of a movement like the Scouts or the Boys’ Brigade.48 The Award Scheme’s ideas of individual expeditions, social volunteering and the development of personal and physical skills drew heavily on Philip’s own experiences as a pupil at Gordonstoun School, which we shall be visiting in Episode 209, Chapter Nine, Paterfamilias. Kurt Hahn, the founder of Gordonstoun, had already created the Outward Bound scheme, which cultivated similar qualities of self-improvement to the new award – and Philip had served as Patron of Outward Bound since 1953.49
Much of the scheme’s organisation was administered and designed by Brigadier Sir John Hunt, who had led the British attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1953 (the news of whose success had reached London on Coronation Day). Hunt expressed the hope that ‘the DofE’, as the scheme soon became known, would attract Teddy Boys and other individualists of a ‘lone wolf’ disposition – as a mountaineer, he had fellow climbers in mind – and in November 1957 he announced that girls would also be invited to participate.50 The first D of E girls received their Gold Awards from Prince Philip personally in November 1959 at Buckingham Palace,51 and the scheme went from strength to strength in the decades that followed. At the time of writing in 2019, Philip’s Award Scheme has expanded to operate in 144 nations around the world, with hundreds of thousands of young people participating annually – quite the most successful youth and welfare organisation ever created by any member of the royal family.52
CHAPTER THREE
‘LISBON’
DECEMBER 1956–FEBRUARY 1957
THE HUMILIATION OF THE SUEZ DEBACLE MADE 1956 A year of particularly bitter disillusion in Britain, and if one single voice expressed that discontent it was John Osborne, the first of the ‘Angry Young Men’ who – with a number of angry young women – created the sardonic plays, poems and novels which expressed the rebellion of the rising generation in the late 1950s. Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger caused a sensation when it was staged at Chelsea’s Royal Court Theatre in May 1956, creating a new, gritty and unsentimental school of drama which summed up the turmoil of the Suez era.53
Always proud of possessing ‘an un-tuggable forelock’, Osborne was expelled from his minor public school when he dared to strike back at his headmaster, who had clipped him round the ear for listening to Frank Sinatra records.54 Osborne found himself on the dole in his early twenties, living on a leaky barge on the Thames, when he saw an advertisement soliciting scripts on behalf of the newly formed English Stage Company at the Royal Court in the corner of Sloane Square, beside the tube station.
He had already tried his hand at a few plays, while working on a number of trade magazines, including Gas World.55 Now, in a matter of weeks, he dashed off Look Back in Anger, the story of Jimmy and Alison Porter living not in Belgravia or the South of France – still the setting for so many of the Noël Coward-style drawing-room dramas of those days – but in a rented attic in the Midlands, with an ironing board centre stage, over which Alison is leaning as the curtain goes up.
‘The room is still, smoke-filled,’ wrote Osborne in his detailed stage directions. ‘The only sound is the occasional thud of Alison’s iron on the board. It is one of those chilly spring evenings, all cloud and shadows. Presently, Jimmy throws his paper down: “Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week’s, different books – same reviews … Do the Sunday papers make you feel ignorant?”’56
Next morning’s reviews of Look Back were far from ecstatic, and it seemed as if the struggling Royal Court, badly in debt after a succession of poorly reviewed productions, might have to close. But then came the reviews from the Sunday papers about whom Jimmy Porter had been so rude – Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times57 and, in particular, Kenneth Tynan of the Observer, who, as a critic, was not unknown for his own flights of anger.
‘All the qualities are there,’ wrote Tynan in his rave review, ‘qualities one had ever despaired of seeing on the stage – the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive Leftishness, the automatic rejection of “official” attitude
s, the surrealist sense of humour … the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for.’58
Tynan’s glorification of Jimmy Porter’s disillusion transformed the fortunes of the play – and also of the Royal Court Theatre, which spits out bravely experimental drama to this day. Osborne himself became the anti-hero of the moment and the spokesman of his generation – particularly after British paratroopers dropped into Suez that November. Dissent became big business, with ‘kitchen sink drama’ taking over half the theatres in Britain, and across the Atlantic onto Broadway. One impresario even enquired as to whether there might be a part in Osborne’s next play for Britain’s most famous thespian, Sir Laurence Olivier.
‘Laurence who?’ asked Osborne.
In fact, the prolific young playwright was already drafting a drama, The Entertainer, that contained the ideal role for the great theatrical knight – Archie Rice, a down-at-heel seaside song-and-dance man.59 When the play later became a movie, it was filmed on the crumbling pier on Morecambe beach, Lancashire.
Drunk, promiscuous and deeply self-pitying, Archie is a thoroughly unlikeable character, whose patter relies heavily on insulting remarks about his wife. ‘Why should I care?’ runs his theme song – ‘If they see that you’re blue, they’ll look down on you. So why should I bother to care?’60 Then, in a contemporary reference, we learn that Archie’s son Mick is among the British troops caught up in the ill-fated Suez adventure. We later hear that Mick has been bravely killed in action and has been awarded the Victoria Cross – but Archie is unimpressed. ‘Look at these eyes,’ he says in words that were much requoted as summing up the spirit of Suez Britain. ‘I’m dead behind these eyes. I’m dead.’61