The Crown

by Robert Lacey

  Hahn brought to Gordonstoun his ‘Seven Laws of Salem’,269 based on educational ideas ranging from Plato to St Benedict and Rudyard Kipling – ‘If you can dream – and not make dreams your master’270 – along with some dippings into the British public school system, which he admired with reservations. ‘Every girl and boy has a “grande passion”,’ he wrote, ‘often hidden and unrealised … It can and will be revealed by the child coming into close touch with a number of different activities.’271 Hence the forestry, firefighting and expeditions.

  1938 – Prince Philip as Donalbain in Macbeth at Gordonstoun

  Young people, Hahn felt strongly, should experience defeat as well as victory. ‘Salem believes you ought to discover the child’s weakness as well as his strength,’ he wrote. ‘It is our business to plunge the children into enterprises in which they are likely to fail, and we do not hush the failure up.’272 The sensitive child must learn ‘to defeat his own defeatism’ the hard way, or risk being ‘crippled for the battle of life’.273

  This ‘tough love’ principle, Hahn’s second law of Salem, is what we see causing such problems for Prince Charles in this episode – a reflection of how the Prince, the first heir to the British throne ever to be sent away to school, experienced the cold showers and short, hairy tweed trousers of Gordonstoun when he became a pupil 30 years after his father. ‘Literal hell’,274 and ‘Colditz with kilts’275 were two of the Prince’s choicer verdicts. ‘He was bullied,’ recalled Ross Benson, the Daily Mail journalist who was his contemporary at the school. ‘He was crushingly lonely for most of his time there. The wonder is that he survived with his sanity intact.’276

  Charles was not given his father’s old bed when he went to Gordonstoun in 1962, as depicted in this episode, nor was Kurt Hahn still the headmaster – he had retired in 1953. But Hahn has been retained as a character through the school careers of both father and son to provide a constant against which to compare their very different experiences.

  The annual ‘Challenge’ in which Charles is shown participating is original to the drama, as is the presence of Prince Philip. But the ‘Challenge’ faithfully reflects the testing ethos of Gordonstoun’s cross-country races – as well as the school’s famously rugged expeditions – while also allowing the viewer to imagine Charles’s experience of not living up to his father’s glittering legacy.

  Hahn’s third law of the Salem-Gordonstoun code was that pupils should learn to put pursuit of the common good before personal ambition – with the help of the fourth law: that they should make time in their lives for silence and contemplation. ‘Unless the present-day generation acquires early habits of quiet and reflection,’ Hahn wrote, ‘it will be speedily and prematurely used up by the nerve-exhausting and distracting civilisation of today.’277

  Law five emphasised every child’s need to develop their imagination – ‘You must call it into action, otherwise it becomes atrophied like a muscle not in use.’ Law six was that sports and games should be ‘important’ but never ‘predominant’. ‘Athletics do not suffer,’ wrote Hahn, ‘by being put in their place.’278 The purpose of sport at the school was to promote teamwork rather than competitive achievement – the third and fourth cricket teams should be cheered on just as much as the first. Heads of house were called ‘Helpers’, and the head boy was the ‘Guardian’. The captain of rugby was, in theory, no grander than the captains of lost property, the linen room or bicycles.

  Finally, the children of the rich and powerful must be ‘liberated’ from their privilege. ‘Rich girls and boys wholly thrown into each other’s company are not given a chance of growing into men and women who can overcome,’ wrote Hahn, whose ambition was that a third of pupils should ideally come from ‘normal’ or poor backgrounds.279 In reality, however, Gordonstoun never became a comprehensive school. Its fees were among the highest in Britain – higher than Eton’s – and it remained an eccentric ‘posh’ college in the eyes of its critics, with its hair-shirt philosophy and even hairier shorts.

  The school’s incontestable failing was its shunning – certainly in Hahn’s day – of emotional intimacy of any sort. Never married nor seen relaxing in female company, Hahn made no attempt to help his boys investigate what women thought or felt – in fact, he fiercely banned any mention of sex, let alone sex education, from the school. Noting how their boss was visibly uncomfortable with women unless they were middle-aged mothers, most of his staff assumed that Hahn was of confused or uncertain sexual identity. The Founder could also be a stern disciplinarian, wielding the cane as a punishment for smoking offences.280 Sexual indiscretions merited expulsion.

  The child psychologist Oliver James has suggested that Philip’s striking lack of emotional education ‘might have rather diminished his capacity to have faith in intimacy or love or closeness … If you throw in the disappearance of his father … there’s a fairly high probability that he would have developed what psychologists call a “highly defended personality”. That’s to say that he doesn’t want to know about his emotions or other people’s emotions.’281

  As Philip’s confidential aide and naval best friend, Mike Parker, put it: ‘He doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. I always wanted to see him put his arms around the Queen and show her how much he adored her – what you’d do for any wife. But he always sort of stood to attention. I mentioned it to him a couple of times. But he just gave me a hell of a look.’282

  Philip would direct the same ‘hell of a look’ at anyone who dared criticise Gordonstoun or its founder, to whom he felt he owed so much. ‘I was wet, cold, miserable, probably sick, and often scared stiff,’ he later wrote of the school’s notorious ‘challenges’, ‘but I would not have missed the experience for anything. In any case, the discomfort was far outweighed by the moments of intense happiness and excitement.’283

  As a father, Philip wanted his eldest son to be enriched by all these experiences, with the miserable outcomes that we see on screen. Prince Charles’s ‘death of the soul’ at Gordonstoun was not just a metaphor; it was the painful, real-life consequence of his father’s own emotional aloofness. How could Prince Philip with his effectively unparented childhood, give or teach his son the things that he had never been given or taught himself?

  Kurt Hahn, however, had no such reservations about his star pupil. He always gloried that Philip had proved a living example of his highest hopes during his Scottish academy’s pioneering years. ‘Often naughty, never nasty’ was his verdict on the future Duke of Edinburgh284 – though he was not blind to his protégé’s shortcomings, noting how Philip’s positive leadership qualities could be ‘marred at times by impatience and intolerance’.285 In his final report, Hahn sounded another warning note, suggesting that Philip, like his father, leaned just a little too heavily on the game going his way: ‘Prince Philip is a born leader,’ he wrote, ‘but [he] will need the exacting demands of a great service to do justice to himself. His best is outstanding – his second best is not good enough.’286

  Philip was never punished at Gordonstoun by being detained over half-term. Thus, his sister Cécile did not die as a result of Philip’s misbehaviour at school, as depicted on the screen. She and her family were killed in November 1937 when their plane hit a factory chimney in fog near Ostend, Belgium, travelling to a wedding in London. When The Crown departs from historical accuracy, this reflects a deliberate creative choice by Peter Morgan and his team, so this dramatic invention has been devised to emphasise the despair that Philip felt at the tragic loss of his favourite sister – along with the irrational self-blame that children often develop psychologically when a parent or close family member dies.

  Philip had already effectively ‘lost’ his mother for a long period to mental illness, making Cécile and her husband his surrogate parents in many ways. Now they too were gone, and one practical consequence of their deaths was to cut him off from his European life and to point the 16-year-old even more directly towards ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten as his parental figure.
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  In Chapter Fourteen we shall be examining Prince Philip’s other parent, his eccentric mother, the deaf and distrait Princess Alice – much of Episode 304 is devoted to her complex character and her relationship with her complex son. But when it came to fathering there can be no doubt that Philip considered Kurt Hahn to be the father he never had – his ‘paterfamilias’, in fact.287

  Prince Charles, of course, did not view that particular fathering connection with any special warmth at all …

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘MYSTERY MAN’

  APRIL 1962–MAY 1964

  WHEN PLATO WAS ASKED BY A FRIEND TO RECOMMEND the best book to explain the ins and outs of ancient Greece, the philosopher suggested the comic satires of Aristophanes.288 It is through satire, he liked to teach, that we can edge closest to the truth.289 So if Plato had been asked the same question about Britain at the beginning of the 1960s, he would certainly have pointed the way to London’s Covent Garden and the Fortune Theatre on Russell Street, where the groundbreaking satirical review Beyond the Fringe opened in 1961, starring the impertinent young Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore.290

  ‘We are greatly enthused,’ declares Queen Elizabeth II (played by Dudley Moore), ‘by the prospect of our forthcoming trip to India and Pakistan. Prince Philip tells me that he is very much looking forward to taking me up the Khyber Pass.’291

  Laughter all round! Sitting in the Fortune Theatre as Episode 210 opens, we see the Prime Minister of the moment, Harold Macmillan and his wife Lady Dorothy, in an imagined scene, enjoying a lesson in what distinguishes satire from standard humour. With standard humour, you laugh. With satire, you may laugh but you wince as well – and somewhere in your brain, consciously or unconsciously, you also resolve that some sort of action is required beyond laughter. Successful satire is a challenge to change things. It is a call to reform and improve the society that produces it – and one of the questions that this episode asks is how satire should have become such a distinguishing feature of the second Elizabethan age.

  Britain’s modern satire boom exploded into life in the early 1960s. Private Eye – a more scabrous and investigative version of Punch – published its first issue in 1961, and in the following year even the BBC got in on the act with David Frost and Ned Sherrin’s That Was The Week That Was. Not afraid to ridicule the Corporation’s own deferential coverage of royal events, the late-night TV review produced a sketch that depicted the royal barge sinking – with the entire royal family on board. As the national anthem played, Frost intoned with solemnity: ‘And now the Queen, smiling radiantly, is swimming for her life! Her Majesty is wearing a silk ensemble in canary yellow … Perhaps the lip-readers among you can make out what Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is saying to the captain of the barge as she sinks.’292

  Episode 210, ‘Mystery Man’, concludes Season 2 of The Crown with the political events of 1963 that many people at the time considered beyond satire: the bungling collapse of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, the backstairs intrigues leading to the ‘emergence’ in October of his aristocratic successor Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the former fourteenth Earl of Home, and the scandal that provoked both these events – the Profumo affair of March in that year. The outdated and incompetent manoeuvrings of the Conservative Party seemed purpose-built for laughing at.

  The roots of the Profumo Scandal had been laid down two years earlier in the 1961 liaison between John Profumo, 45, the hitherto high-flying Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government, and Christine Keeler, a teenage model and show girl – at the same time that Keeler was involved with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché at the Russian Embassy in London.293 This created an obvious security risk, and when suspicions emerged in March 1963, Profumo at first denied any involvement with Keeler, only to admit a few weeks later that he had lied to the House of Commons. He had no choice but to resign humiliatingly from both the government and from Parliament.294

  1963 – Sitting pretty: Christine Keeler, aged 21

  When Macmillan had first cross-questioned Profumo on the issue, however, he had accepted his War Minister’s assurances without serious questioning, and Profumo’s bare-faced duping dealt a body blow to the Prime Minister’s reputation. Macmillan had little choice but to resign himself in October 1963. He tried to use an operation that month on a benign prostate complication as an alibi for his departure,295 but in truth his own reputation and that of the Tory Party had been shattered by the affair.296

  The scandal had high-society and even royal ramifications that were gleefully exploited by the press. Keeler, Profumo and Ivanov had been brought together at louche parties and country house gatherings organised by Stephen Ward, a fashionable society osteopath, who built on his skill at manipulating bones and tendons to create a social circle of aristocrats, diplomats and good-time girls like Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies. Ward’s party venues ranged from his mews house in Marylebone to the Thames-side cottage that he rented on Lord Astor’s country estate at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, where he assembled his glamorous and high-powered guests essentially for the purposes of sex.297

  The censorious considered the osteopath to be no better than a high-society pimp, and, after the scandal became public, Ward faced charges at the Old Bailey for profiting from the immoral earnings of Keeler, Rice-Davies and others. Condemned for plumbing ‘the very depths of lechery and depravity’ and found guilty on the charges relating to Keeler and Rice-Davies, Ward took an overdose of sleeping pills and died on 3 August 1963, aged 50, before he could be sentenced to what would certainly have been a lengthy term of imprisonment.298

  As the scandal spread wider – the screen timeline has been compressed into a few weeks rather than a few months – the cast of characters came to include Lord Astor himself (a patient of Ward’s and a political ally of Profumo); Peter Rachman, the infamous slum property landlord and a former lover of Keeler’s; Aloysius ‘Lucky’ Gordon, a flamboyant Jamaican jazz singer with a history of petty crime; Johnny Edgecombe, an ex-merchant seaman from Antigua who contrived to knife Gordon in a row over Gordon’s behaviour towards Keeler; several call girls – and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.299

  The Prince had certainly rubbed shoulders with Ward in the mid-1940s when both were young men about town, but Philip never received any medical treatment from Ward as an osteopath as shown in this episode’s opening scenes. Both had attended lunches at their friend Baron Nahum’s colourful Thursday Club,300 and then, on 9 June 1961, Ward paid Philip a visit at Buckingham Palace. The osteopath had developed a sideline in graceful sketches that could capture a flattering likeness, and he had secured a commission from the Illustrated London News, then the glossy staple of every dentist’s waiting room, to execute portraits of several members of the current royal family, ranging from Princess Margaret and Princess Marina of Kent to the Duke of Edinburgh himself.301 That 9 June Ward spent some 20 minutes with Philip sketching out several studies for an elegant portrait that featured on the opening page of the ILN two weeks later.302

  Episode 210 opens a year before these events in April 1962, with Prince Philip waking up in bed with a crick in his neck, which gets worse as he puts himself through his regular morning routine of commando exercises – the star jumps quite finish him off. But a visit to Stephen Ward’s clinic in Marylebone resolves the pain with the skilful neck manipulation and bone ‘clicking’ for which Ward was renowned. All this is dramatic invention – but mischievous observers of some photographs taken at Ward’s indiscreet parties later identified the shadowy dark silhouette of a faceless figure who, gossip asserted, was actually Prince Philip. Hence the title of this episode – Mystery Man.303

  In June 1963 a Conservative Party gathering in the Midlands made reference to ‘a rumour floating around the country that a member of the Royal Family is involved’ with Christine Keeler, and the Daily Mirror jumped forward ostensibly to defend the Prince’s reputation with a lurid front page
– ‘Prince Philip and the Profumo Scandal’. This rumour, it stated, was ‘utterly unfounded’, and the Mirror went on to set out the story of the royal sketches for the ILN. ‘Apart from these private sittings,’ the paper stated, ‘there were no further contacts between Dr. Ward and the members of the Royal Family concerned’, and that put paid to Prince Philip’s involvement with regard to the media.304 There were no more newspaper stories.

  Unfortunately, the Queen’s involvement in the political ramifications of the scandal were not so easily disposed of. By 1963 Elizabeth II had been working with Harold Macmillan for half a dozen years, her longest relationship with any of her prime ministers to that date, and they had come to appreciate each other’s company. When he fell ill on one occasion, the Queen sent him what she called a ‘small “reviver”’ – a bottle of champagne, with a handwritten note.305 Their weekly audiences expanded happily as Macmillan, 67 in 1963, enjoyed his fatherly tutelage of the still young Queen, 37, while Elizabeth herself grew in confidence – though not becoming so confident, at the end of the day, that she could challenge the arrangements which he would make for his own succession.

  Until the Profumo Scandal, Macmillan had enjoyed a more successful premiership than many would have anticipated after the debacle of Suez. Growing affluence in the late 1950s floated the Tories to victory in the 1959 general election under Macmillan’s catchy slogan, ‘You’ve never had it so good!’. When The Adventures of Superman reached British television in the mid-1950s, that suggested an obvious nickname for the premier, and ‘Supermac’ he became – until the summer of 1963 when the Profumo Scandal brought him down.306 The arrogance of Ward and his hedonistic upper-class circle reflected the less attractive aspects of Tory affluence, and it seemed to hit the normally resilient Macmillan harder than many expected. Some wondered if he had taken the betrayal by his War Minister as a personal blow, although he had never been especially close to Profumo.