At the age of twenty-one, Prince Philip wrote to a relative: ‘I know you will never think much of me. I am rude and unmannerly.’ Prince Philip probably never managed to change the opinion of his relative...
This affectionate compendium brings together both the best and a host of less well-known stories about the prince, giving an insight into the royal world where he ‘traipses around’ as a ‘fella who belongs to Mrs Queen’, rather than being ‘professionally qualified in something’.
From Prince Philip’s blunt speech-making, to his fearless mocking of officials and captains of industry, to his fond teasing of Her Majesty herself, here is an hilarious, truly regal celebration of the unusual daily life in royal circles.
Nigel Cawthorne was a science student at University College, London, but soon switched to a life of writing, specialising in topics that are uniquely British. He previously published the bestselling Outraged of Tunbridge Wells (2013) and has written for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mirror, Express, and has appeared on all major broadcast shows.
Contents
Philip on Philip
The Queen’s Business
Education
The Sporting Life
Official Duties
Industry and Science
Travel
Lady Folk
Arts and Entertainment
Food and Drink
All Creatures Great and Small
The Environment and Overpopulation
Politics and Officialdom
Theology and Religion
Professional Bodies
The Youth of Today
Public Speaking
North of the Border
Johnny Foreigner
The Press and Media
Finale
Biography
Philip on Philip
Although Prince Philip has published a number of books, he does not plan to write an autobiography. ‘I don’t spend a lot of time looking back,’ he said in an interview on his ninetieth birthday. Consequently, we must build a portrait of him from what he says about himself. ‘I know I am rude,’ he once said. ‘But it’s fun.’
His forthright manner arrived early. At the age of twenty-one, he wrote to a relative whose son had just been killed in the war, saying: ‘I know you will never think much of me. I am rude and unmannerly and I say many things out of turn which I realise afterwards must have hurt someone. Then I am filled with remorse and I try to put matters right.’
When asked if this trait was due to his turbulent childhood being passed around family members, he drily replied: ‘Wherever I happened to be. It was no great deal I just lived my life.’ ‘I haven’t been trying to psychoanalyse myself all the time.’ ‘But some people might…’ his interviewer interjected. ‘Well, some people might,’ he countered. ‘I’m telling you what I felt.’ After all, he said later: ‘What’s there to complain about? These things happen.’
The duke’s biographer Gyles Brandreth asked him how he thought he was seen. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘A refugee husband, I suppose.’ ‘If anything, I’ve thought of myself as Scandinavian. Particularly, Danish,’ he told the Independent in 1992. Although he was born on the island of Corfu in Greece, he was both a Prince of Greece and Denmark.
In 1947, he changed his surname from Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg to Mountbatten, the name adopted by his mother’s family, Battenberg, during the First World War. ‘We spoke English at home,’ Prince Philip said, his mother’s native language. ‘The others learned Greek,’ he said. ‘I could understand a certain amount of it. But then the conversation would go into French. Then it went into German, on occasion, because we had German cousins. If you couldn’t think of a word in one language, you tended to go off in another.’ Just how tenuous he felt his position to be was witnessed by what he wrote in a visitor’s book in 1946: ‘Whither the storm carries me, I go a willing guest.’
Even marriage to the heir to the British throne did not give him the security he craved. When the Queen came to the throne in 1952, he wanted the dynasty to be called the House of Mountbatten, but the Queen took the advice of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and kept the dynasty name Windsor which the royal family had taken since dropping the Germanic surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in World War I. Philip complained to a friend: ‘I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba. I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children.’ He once remarked: ‘Constitutionally, I don’t exist.’
The worst of its part of marrying British royalty was having to give up his career in the Navy. ‘If I thought of it at all,’ he said, ‘it was that I thought I could perfectly go on with my career. It would have been of great value to the Queen to have someone who was, in a sense, professionally qualified in something, not just traipsing around,’ he said.
When asked how difficult it was to give up his career in the Navy, he said replied: ‘Well, how long is a piece of string?’ He found himself thrown in at the deep end and swamped with royal duties. On leaving the Navy and taking on royal duties: ‘The first ten years I don’t remember much about.’
But he had no choice. On another occasion he explained the necessity of giving up his dream: ‘In 1947 I thought I was going to have a career in the Navy, but it became obvious there was no hope. The Royal Family then was just the King and the Queen and the two Princesses. The only other male member was the Duke of Gloucester. There was no choice. It just happened. You have to make compromises. That’s life. I accept it. I tried to make the best of it.’
He rued the loss of a naval career, but keeps a practical perspective: ‘There was no question of my going back, I had to do that but at that time I had not thought that was going to be the end of a sort of naval career. That sort of crept up on me and it became more and more obvious that I could not go back to it,’ he said. ‘But it’s no good regretting things – it simply did not happen and I have been doing other things instead.’
He had fond memories of the sea. ‘The sea is an extraordinary master or mistress,’ he said: ‘It has such extraordinary moods that sometimes you feel this is the only sort of life – and ten minutes later you’re praying for death.’
His decision to join the Royal Navy in 1940 he has explained light-heartedly and truthfully: ‘I didn’t particularly want to go into the army,’ he said. ‘I didn’t fancy walking much.’ The difference between ships’ officers, like himself, and sea pilots, he said: ‘They are birdbrains – they call us anchor-danglers.’
But there was something special about life on the waves. ‘If you go to sea in the Merchant Navy or in the Navy, or as a yachtsman, you are in a completely different environment and so you have to function in a different way and relate to people in a different way,’ he said. ‘The challenge is different and in a sense it’s not quite like any other profession – you are segregated in some way. And you are all equally liable to whatever happens. If something happens to your ship everybody on board is equally liable to get hurt.’
Even though he has started his naval career at the age of eighteen, he said: ‘I don’t think I ever thought of the sea as something to like. It’s cold and wet and it’s either marvellous or awful. You get lovely weather or there is no winds so you can’t sail. The thing is, it’s either wonderful because it looks spectacular, you see wonderful sites, but after four years of doing the morning watch I got fed up with watching the sun rise.’
Later he became a trustee of the National Maritime Museum, and said: ‘One of the things that is very important is to make sure that the whole of the maritime heritage is displayed in some way.’ It was a position he held for over fifty years.
What kept him going is a a sense of duty – a thing that Prince Philip exemplifies. In 1992, he told the In
dependent on Sunday: ‘Everyone has to have a sense of duty. A duty to society, to their family. I mean, you name it. If you haven’t got a sense of duty you get the sort of community we have now. Look around: mugging and drugs and abuse, intellectual abuse, intellectual mugging.’
Philip read the biography of Prince Albert as preparation for his role as Prince Consort. It was little help. ‘The Prince Consort’s position was quite different,’ he said. ‘Queen Victoria was an executive sovereign, following in a long line of executive sovereigns. The Prince Consort was effectively Victoria’s private secretary. But after Victoria the monarchy changed. It became an institution. I had to fit into the institution. I had to avoid getting at cross-purposes, usurping others’ authority.’
Otherwise, he was pushed in at the deep end. ‘When King George died, there were plenty of people telling me what not to do,’ he said. “You mustn’t interfere with this.” “Keep out.” I had to try to support the Queen as best I could, without getting in the way. The difficulty was to find things that might be useful.’
He explained the difficulties to the BBC in 2011 on navigating his role as husband to the soon-to-be-Queen: ‘The problem was to recognise what the niche was and to try and grow into it and that was by trial and error... There was no precedent. If I asked somebody, “What do you expect me to do?” they all looked blank. They had no idea, nobody had much idea.’
He found that that was to be his main job - not to get in the way. ‘In most cases that was no problem. I did my own thing,’ he said. ‘Got involved in organisations where I thought I could be useful. The Federation of London Boys’ Clubs, the Royal Yachting Association, the MCC. Of course, as long as they were going alright, there wasn’t much for me to do. But if an organisation was going bankrupt or had some crisis, then I’d help.’
When asked whether he got much fun out of his royal duties, he said: ‘I don’t think I think very much about ‘fun’. The Variety Club events were fun. The cricket matches for the Playing Fields were fun. The polo was entirely fun.’ (The prince was president of the Playing Fields Association for over fifty years after inheriting the position from his uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten. It was granted a royal charter in 1933 by King George V, its first president, and the Queen is patron.)
When he first arrived in Buckingham Palace, he was seen as a ‘moderniser’. ‘Not for the sake of modernising,’ he said, ‘not for the sake of buggering about with things. I’m anxious to get things done.’
He shook up the running of Buckingham Palace in the 1950s. ‘I introduced a Footman Training Programme... the old boys here hadn’t had anything quite like it before. They expected the footmen just to keep on coming. We had an Organisation and Methods Review. I tried to make improvements – without unhinging things.’
He also tackled the age-old custom of the bottle of whisky that appeared by the Queen’s bedside every night, even though she had not ordered it. He discovered that Queen Victoria had once had a cold and had asked for a Scotch before bedtime. As the order had never been rescinded, the servants continued to bring whisky every night some eighty years later.
The duke saw himself as a pragmatic facilitator, a banger-together of heads in a manner that can make the most ruthless management consultant seem like a pussyfooter. He dislikes intellectuals, bureaucrats, wafflers, wishy-washy lefties and romantics (yet years later he could open his heart to Princess Diana when she suffered her travail and the hands of the palace machine). And, of course, he hates journalists.
Prince Philip was never much taken in by his opulent surroundings. ‘In the first years of the Queen’s reign, the level of adulation – you wouldn’t believe it,’ he said. ‘You really wouldn’t. It could have been corroding. It would have been very easy to play to the gallery, but I took a conscious decision not to do that. Safer not to be too popular. You can’t fall too far.’
He has followed the advice given to him in 1955 by another consort, Prince Bernhard of Netherlands, husband to Queen Juliana: ‘Don’t let it get you down. In this job, you need a skin like an elephant.’
When Singapore became self-governing in 1959, he told the former colony: ‘I have very little personal experience of self-government. I’m one of the most governed people you could hope to meet.’ Asked who he most admired, he began by mentioning Bob Menzies, (prime minister of Australia 1939-41 and 1949-66), and Vincent Massey, the (governor-general of Canada 1952-59). Then he stopped: ‘No, no, a list would be invidious.’
The prince was only too aware of saying the wrong thing and attempted to make light of it. He told the General Dental Council in 1960: ‘Dontopedalogy is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it, a science which I’ve practised for a good many years.’
In another moment of candid humour, he said: ‘I know my reputation is not all that good. If anyone can offer me advice about how I can improve this, or even of any reason why I have this reputation, I shall be more than grateful.’
He was well aware how some of his remarks were received: ‘It seems I have a terrible reputation for telling people what they ought to be doing.’ And in his book Men, Machines and Sacred Cows, he admitted his attempts at humour sometimes fall flat. ‘Trying to be funny is a great deal more difficult than trying to be serious,’ he said. ‘What may strike me as a witty comment can easily turn out to be painfully tactless.’
Considering his image, Philip mused: ‘We know there are a number of what are known as image-producing organisations. They produce marvellous images, but no one believes them.’
He was, however, philosophical when he was asked if he was weighed down by the nature of his duties. ‘I’m a pragmatist,’ he said. ‘If I’m here I might as well get on with it. It’s no good going around wishing I was doing something else.’ Back in the 1960s, he quipped: ‘Princely gifts don’t come from princes any more. They come from tycoons.’ And in an interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman he pointed out: ‘Any bloody fool can lay a wreath at the thingamy.’
When pressed for his secret for handling so many public appearances, he shot back to the interviewer: ‘I never pass up a chance to go to the loo or take a poo.’ He also liked to ask the awkward question. ‘I suppose I challenge things to stimulate myself and to be stimulating,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to agree with everyone all the time.’
Asked how he would characterise the type of work he did, the prince replied: ‘I’m self-employed.’ And how did he feel about the people who want to end the monarchy? ‘If people feel it has no further part to play, then for goodness sake, let’s end the thing on amicable terms without having a row about it.’ After all, he famously remarked: ‘The art of being a good guest is to know when to leave.’
Always a hard-working member of the royal family, there were moments of relaxations. ‘I am interested in leisure in the same way that a poor man is interested in money,’ he said. ‘I can’t get enough of it.’
And when relaxing, Prince Philip admitted self-deprecatingly he was pretty lazy. ‘I’m pretty idle really,’ he said in the year 2000. ‘One reason I took up carriage driving is that I like watching the ponies do all the work.’ However he underrates his own contribution to the sport – the development of the bendy pole.
Despite his reputation for never suffering fools gladly, he said that after fifty years he had learnt to suffer fools ‘with patience’ and even humour it seems.
On his eightieth birthday, the prince was in reflective mood. With a string of divorces and the fire at Windsor Castle the previous decade, the royal family had been going through a tough time. ‘I imagine there are a few fortunate souls who have managed to get through life without any anxieties,’ he said, ‘but my experience is that life has its ups and downs.’
In his ninetieth birthday interview for the BBC, he was asked if he was proud of his achievements. The duke lookeds puzzled. ‘No, that’s asking too much,’ he said. So what of his successes? ‘Who cares what I think about it. That’s ridiculous.’
When a
sked whether he was proud of the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, he said: ‘I’ve no reason to be proud. It’s satisfying that we’ve set up a formula that works but I don’t run it. It’s all fairly secondhand.’ He had not even want his name to be attached to it. ‘That was against my better judgement,’ he said. ‘I tried to avoid it but I was overridden.’
In 2001, he had been asked if the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme would be more popular if it wasn’t named after him. ‘Whatever you call it, some people will think it is rubbish while some people would not be worried about this connection with this cantankerous old sod up here,’ he said.
In his ninetieth birthday interview for ITV, Alan Titchmarsh asked if the prince if he regretted any of his outspokenness. ‘Well yes,’ the prince said. ‘I would rather have not made the mistakes I did make, but I’m not telling you what they were.’
Titchmarsh also had the temerity to ask the prince which of his charities and committees gave him the most joy. ‘It’s not entertainment,’ he said. ‘I don’t do it for my amusement.’
If he did not already know he was a very important person, Philip discovered it when he was given the freedom of the City of London. The official citation said that the honour was given to ‘a person of distinction within the meaning of Section 259 of the Local Government Act, 1933…’ The prince remarked: ‘It is always comforting to be told that one is a person of distinction. But it is even more comforting to know that it is by Act of Parliament.’
Philip however has no illusions on that front. ‘In that splendid language, pidgin English,’ he said, ‘I’m referred to as fella belong to Mrs Queen.’
The Queen’s Business
It was Prince Philip’s father-in-law George VI who said that the House of Windsor was not a family but a firm. This is a tradition that Philip proudly maintains.
It seems, nonetheless, that he the prince is just as outspoken behind closed doors as he is on the public rostrum. The Queen Mother once asked an official court photographer: ‘And how did you find my son-in-law? Difficult, isn’t he?’
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