by Robert Lacey
‘How silly I should look,’ she said to her Prime Minister, ‘if I was scared to visit Ghana, and then Khrushchev went and had a good reception!’233
‘What a splendid girl she is!’ said Macmillan to his press secretary Harold Evans, describing how, at his final Palace audience before the journey, the Queen had been positively ‘indignant’ at the idea of cancelling the trip. She took her Commonwealth responsibilities ‘very seriously …’ recalled the Prime Minister.234 As Macmillan later wrote in his diary, Elizabeth had no patience with the attitude ‘to treat her as a woman’ – and he went on to set down some surprisingly spikey thoughts that could only have come from the Queen herself in the personal audience that he had described to Evans.235
‘If she were pressed too hard,’ he noted, ‘and if Government and people here are determined to restrict her activities (including taking reasonably acceptable risks) I think she might be tempted to throw in her hand. She does not enjoy “society”. She likes her horses. But she loves her duty and means to be a Queen and not a puppet.’236
Travelling through the streets of Accra a few days later, Elizabeth showed no hesitation in sitting in an open car beside Nkrumah, smiling broadly – bombs or no bombs. She had read all the telegrams about her host’s Russian flirtations and she had also been briefed on the local security concerns: Nkrumah’s regime was far from universally popular or stable. But she betrayed no sign of anxiety. Her courage was the more remarkable for being so unassuming – ‘I have to be seen to be believed,’ as she said on another occasion.237
Elizabeth’s Ghana visit of November 1961 proved to be a turning point in the building of the British Commonwealth that had meant so much to her since her accession in 1952. It was the moment when Black Africa came onside – an historic illustration of the strength in what had often been accounted her weakness, her essential passivity of character. Elizabeth II triumphed just by ‘being’ there.
Then at the state ball that final evening in Accra came a still stronger illustration of what could be achieved by the unspoken and the symbolic – the white Queen surrendered herself into the arms of the black President. When the band struck up ‘The High Life’, a popular West African reggae-style shuffle,238 the Queen rose to her feet in white gloves, tiara and sash to dance happily with President Nkrumah, laughing and joking for the best part of ten minutes,239 while Prince Philip boogied energetically beside them with First Lady Fathia.240 There is no evidence that Elizabeth discussed with Nkrumah the wider implications of the pair of them dancing together, but both Queen and President must have been fully aware of the message they would send out at that stage in history by dancing in each other’s arms as two people of different races.
1961 – Elizabeth II dances with President Nkrumah of Ghana
The photograph went around the world – to be greeted with predictable outrage in apartheid South Africa (which had voluntarily left the Commonwealth the previous year before it could be thrown out for its racial policies). ‘This spectacle of the honored head of the once-mighty British Empire dancing with black natives of pagan Africa is extremely scandalous …’ complained the nationalist newspaper Die Oosterlig in an editorial headed ‘Her Black Dancing Partners’.241
‘Trumpeting forth that the Queen apparently enjoyed it is just as bad,’ continued the complaint. ‘While realizing that Britons do not recognize colour differences, it remains in our opinion a pitiful outrage of the dignity one associates with a white royalty. Britain has given cause for shame in exchange for the good will of black tyrannies … It is just as well that we in South Africa are no longer linked to a Commonwealth where such things are becoming the fashion to an increasing extent.’242
America’s segregationist press did not rise to the bait, but at that date interracial marriages were still forbidden by law in 31 American states.243 In 1959 the black singer Sammy Davis Jr had delayed his marriage to a white woman, the Swedish actress May Britt, so as not to jeopardise the electoral prospects of his friend Jack Kennedy. Davis had campaigned tirelessly for Kennedy in black districts through much of 1960, but after his 13 November marriage to Britt (the presidential election had been on 8 November), he was removed from the list of entertainers – and even from the guest list – of the inaugural celebrations in Washington on 20 January 1961.
Elizabeth II’s gesture of dancing with Kwame Nkrumah was an expression of personal principles that she went on to uphold all her life. ‘On racial matters she is absolutely colour-blind,’ said David Owen, her Foreign Secretary from 1977 to 1979.244 It went back to her first experiences of South Africa in her early twenties with her father George VI in 1947, when the King – on a post-war victory tour to thank the imperial dominions for their help – became infuriated at the racial restrictions that stopped him presenting medals to non-white troops.
‘Gestapo!’ he harrumphed when Afrikaner police kept him away from the ‘native’ sections of the crowd – and he sniffed derisively when he spotted South Africa’s motto Ex Unitate Vires, ‘Strength from Unity’, on a tablecloth.
‘Huh!’ he exclaimed. ‘Not much bloody Unitate about this place!’245
Over the years Elizabeth II would get as close to some of her black African premiers – Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere and, later, especially, to Nelson Mandela – as to any of her middle-class Anglo-Saxon prime ministers. ‘It’s the one-man, one-vote principle,’ explained David Owen.246
Well, perhaps. But there is also the practical matter of one tribal totem recognising another – along with the role played by the Queen’s personal Christian faith.247 As we saw in Episode 206, Elizabeth II was much influenced by the American evangelist Dr Billy Graham. She invited the preacher to Windsor three times when he brought his crusades to Britain in the late 1950s248 – the same years in which Graham became a vehement anti-segregationist, preaching in Harlem and working alongside Dr Martin Luther King.249 ‘The ground at the foot of the cross is level,’ Graham liked to say, and his royal admirer worked to that very same principle.250
Decades later the Queen finally put definitive words to what she believed about race, touchingly revealing an unusual perspective of where she stood – and, we can presume, had always stood – on issues of discrimination and multiculturalism.
‘Everyone is our neighbour,’ she declared in her Christmas broadcast of 2004, ‘no matter what their race, creed or colour … And it was for this reason that I particularly enjoyed a story I heard the other day about an overseas visitor to Britain who said the best part of his visit had been travelling from Heathrow into Central London on the “Tube”.
‘His British friends were, as you can imagine, somewhat surprised, particularly as the visitor had been to some of the great attractions of the country. “What do you mean,” they asked?
‘“Because,” he replied, “I boarded the train just as the schools were coming out. At each stop children were getting on and off – they were of every ethnic and religious background, some with scarves or turbans, some talking quietly, others playing and occasionally misbehaving together – completely at ease and trusting one another.
‘“How lucky you are,” said the visitor, “to live in a country where your children can grow up this way …”’251
This snapshot of the give-and-take racial jumble on the Tube every day around teatime at Hounslow, Middlesex, exemplified the principles that Queen Elizabeth II tried to put into practice all those decades ago in Ghana with Kwame Nkrumah – and had also come to cherish as an ideal for her own country and its children.
‘I hope they will be allowed,’ she concluded in 2004, ‘to enjoy this happy companionship for the rest of their lives. A Happy Christmas to you all.’252
CHAPTER NINE
‘PATERFAMILIAS’
1937 AND 1962
BORN ON 10 JUNE 1921 ON THE ISLAND OF CORFU, THE blond-haired and blue-eyed Prince Philip of Greece looked rather Danish or even German – and he was, in fact, both. His father Prince Andrew was a member of the Danish royal
family, the house of Glücksborg, and his mother Alice, one of ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten’s two sisters, originally hailed from the Battenberg clan from Hesse in central Germany. Educated principally in English-speaking schools, from Paris, France, via Cheam in Surrey to Gordonstoun in north-eastern Scotland, the young Greek prince spoke perfect English, while claiming in later life that he could understand ‘a certain amount’ of Greek.253 But, as we noted in volume 1, ‘Phil the Greek’ had not a drop of Greek blood in his veins. (‘Phil the Greek’ was the nickname devised for the Prince by the satirical magazine Private Eye in the early 1960s. They also tried calling him ‘Keith’ for a period – but that did not stick.)
For a variety of reasons the ill-fated Kingdom of Greece, which lasted, on and off, until 1973, preferred non-local sovereigns, opting for a succession of royal families who came from anywhere but Greece. Following their hard-won war of independence that had ended four centuries of Turkish domination in 1830, they first tried a German, Prince Otto of Bavaria, who became King Otto the First – and also Otto the Last, following his deposition in 1862. After a referendum in November that year, the throne was then offered to Prince Alfred, the second son of Britain’s Queen Victoria, but she prudently declined on her son’s behalf, leaving the way clear for the 18-year-old Prince William of Denmark, who ascended the throne in 1863. As a gesture towards Greece’s patron saint, William took the title of King George I. Prince Philip was his grandson.
The young Prince Philip was not high in the order of succession, but that was no bar to him becoming King of Greece at some later stage, since kings tended to come and go quite rapidly in his family. His grandfather, George I,254 had been assassinated in 1913, and his uncle Constantine I255 was deposed four years later. His cousin Alexander I died in 1920 of blood poisoning following a monkey bite,256 and his uncle Constantine abdicated for a second time in 1922, having been briefly restored to the throne. Then his cousin King George II abdicated in 1923, to be successively recalled (1935), expelled (1941) and then restored again in 1946.257 As the commander of the British light cruiser HMS Calypso, remarked when he carried the 18-month-old Philip away from Greece in an improvised cot constructed from orange boxes in December 1922, this royal family seemed philosophical about being exiled – ‘for they so frequently are …’258
Calypso’s commander was Captain H. A. Buchanan-Wollaston, who was picking up Prince Philip, his mother and four sisters in a daredevil rescue operation inspired from London by no less a figure than King George V. Philip’s father, Prince Andrew, was in prison in Athens, under threat of execution for his role in the recent defeat of Greece’s armies by Kemal Atatürk and his ferocious Turkish troops. Six other Greek scapegoats for the debacle – five cabinet ministers and the army’s commander-in-chief – had been shot in November, and Philip’s father would almost certainly have met the same fate had it not been for the arrival in Athens of an undercover British agent, Commander Gerald Talbot.
Talbot had been sent out to Greece, complete with disguise and false papers, at the personal instructioin of George V, intervening as Andrew’s first cousin as well as uncle to Alice. Exercising the royal prerogative in a way that was, strictly, unconstitutional, the King had bypassed government channels to telephone the Admiralty directly and instruct that a British warship be sent to Greece to assist Talbot’s rescue mission. Talbot knew General Pangalos, the leader of the Greek revolutionaries, personally, but Pangalos was actually refusing all clemency at the moment when the cruiser – Captain Buchanan-Wollaston’s Calypso – steamed unexpectedly into the Bay of Athens. As Talbot later described it to the royal family, there was a dramatic scene when Pangalos, vehemently insisting that Prince Andrew had to die, was interrupted by an aide rushing into the room with news of the British warship in the bay.259
The Greek general’s attitude changed immediately and now it was Talbot’s turn to give the orders. He instructed Pangalos to release the prince from prison and to drive him down to the quay. So, in what was one of Britain’s last effective acts of gunboat diplomacy, Prince Philip’s father, and hence young Philip himself, were saved by the Royal Navy, thus making possible the baby prince’s destiny as future husband to Queen Elizabeth II.
But this providentially preserved baby was still a waif in many senses – and if it has sometimes seemed that Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and royal consort, has punched his way through adult life with an over-toughened emotional detachment, then that toughening and detachment were born in these difficult years. He left Greece in an orange crate and never really found a better or more permanent home until his marriage in 1947.
In England his uncles George Milford Haven and Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten did provide generous and supportive foster care for the growing boy. But his own parents were less sheltering. Having been married for 18 years and raised four daughters, Andrew and Alice had exhausted their affection for each other by the time of Philip’s arrival, and had effectively separated. The baby’s four elder sisters – aged 16, 15, 9 and 6 at the time of his birth – were the closest thing to parents that Philip ever had.
The newborn’s father, Prince Andrew, was poleaxed by the humiliating and nearly fatal end to his military career. It was not so much the danger of execution, but the public shame of his court martial after a lifetime of seeking to shape himself into the ideal soldier and commander. Andrew devoted his early years of exile to writing an angry and self-justifying memoir, Towards Disaster, whose unfortunate title proved all too apt. His cantankerous outpouring only served to convince the world of his resentment and self-pity – and those who have detected these qualities in his son’s tendency to bearishness might dip into the book with profit.260
Prince Andrew’s public humiliation was made worse by his reliance on the charity of others. From the moment he left Greece he was virtually penniless, dependent for his living expenses – along with costs such as Philip’s school fees – on handouts from rich relations like the anglicised Battenbergs, the Mountbattens. Over time the ignominy of exile beat down his outrage to shoulder-shrugging indifference, and his emotional detachment became physical so far as his family was concerned in the late 1930s when he gravitated to Monte Carlo.
Young Philip’s cousin and childhood playmate, Alexandra of Yugoslavia (later considered, pre-Princess Elizabeth, as a candidate for Philip’s hand in marriage),261 recalled how Andrew became no more than ‘a debonair and distant presence’ to his children. On the rare occasions they saw their father in Monaco, they tended to find him presiding over a white restaurant tablecloth with his latest lady friend and something on ice in a silver bucket close to his elbow – somehow the prince had reconciled himself to the charity of others – exhibiting a compulsion to keep everyone around him laughing continuously, a custom maintained by his son.
Prince Andrew also passed on his short-sightedness to Philip. Andrew’s trademark monocle or pince-nez made an elegant virtue for his necessity for spectacles, but his son would choose to be more discreet. Prince Philip became an early customer for contact lenses, often lost when playing polo.262
Alexandra remembered her playful cousin as a mischievous character, running into the Baltic on one occasion fully clothed, or falling into a muddy pigsty simply to annoy his English nanny, Nurse Roose, who liked to serve her charges cauliflower for lunch. Philip was the ringleader of the retaliation – ‘Whoosh, we simultaneously upturned our plates on the snowy tablecloth.’263 As the boy reached double figures, the family consensus was that more discipline was called for, and in 1933, aged 12, he was sent to the academy at Schloss Salem near Lake Constance on the border of Bavaria, founded by the legendary educator Kurt Hahn.264 All Philip’s sisters had married Germans who owned castles, and the largest of all was Schloss Salem – bigger than Buckingham Palace and the home of the Margrave of Baden, who had married Philip’s sister Theodora in 1931.
Born in Berlin in 1886 to a prosperous family of German-Jewish industrialists, Kurt Hahn sought to bring together what he saw
as the best in British and German traditions of character-building, and by 1933 he had developed Salem into a 500-pupil college that was attracting interest from educators around the world. But Hahn’s Jewish descent and scathing critique of the rising National Socialist (Nazi) Party meant that he had already spent a spell in prison before Philip’s arrival, accused of ‘the decadent corruption of German youth’.265 Hahn had to leave Germany. So Philip did just one year at Salem, where he spent a happy and stable 12 months in the home of his sister Theodora and her young family, before moving to join Hahn’s new venture at Gordonstoun House (as it was originally known) in north-east Scotland. He was one of a select group of 24 young pioneers.
This is where we join Philip in Episode 209, and we listen to Kurt Hahn as he sets out his educational ambitions. ‘On its current path,’ he tells Philip, ‘the world will fill with anger and soon will be destroyed. So here, away from the madness, we must build a new way. A new school. A new philosophy. A new ethos. The world needs saviours. A generation of remarkable young men …’266
Of Hahn’s first 24 young saviours a dozen or so were German, brought over, like Philip, from Salem, two were Spanish and the remaining eight or so were English and Scottish. German had been the school’s language at Salem. In Bavaria Philip had spoken nothing but German for a year – ‘Phil the Kraut’.267 But now in Scotland, German was banned to help the foreign students perfect their English, with just four teachers to cover conventional subjects like mathematics, geography and geology. Alongside these were a range of especially Hahn-inspired topics – forestry, seamanship, firefighting, mountain climbing and, most important, ‘expeditions’.268