Prince Philip

by Nigel Cawthorne

  When Calgary presented Prince Philip with his third Stetson – its version of giving a distinguished visitor the keys to the city – he remarked that he did not know what to do with it, other than to carry water or plant flowers in it. The Mayor of Calgary is said to have got his own back for what he considered to be a slight. Later when presenting the prince with some antlers, he told him: ‘Don’t ask me what to do with them, and I won’t tell you where to stick them.’

  The Arts

  Replying to a toast at a British Film Academy dinner in 1958, he said: ‘I warn you, this is going to be rather like one or two film premières that I’ve been to – you’re going to discover that the introductory item will have turned out to be much more amusing and interesting than the main feature.’

  Two years later, as president of the Society of Film and Television Art, he was presenting the awards at the BFA dinner and said: ‘I thought it would be a good idea to come along and keep my eye on things. I haven’t been disappointed either as I have already noticed several very nice things to keep my eye on.’

  On the Job

  Prince Philip had trouble opening the Animal Health Trust’s Farm in Essex in 1957. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me the greatest pleasure to declare this laboratory open,’ he announced, with one reasonable request: ‘… and if someone will lend me a key I will unlock it.’

  In September 1964, when Prince Philip was to make a speech at the opening of the parliament of the newly-independent Malta, opposition leader Dom Mintoff threatened to walk out. In the event, Mintoff did not even turn up, but as the prince stepped onto the dais, the sergeant at arms signalled for everyone to stand. Philip said afterwards: ‘For a moment I thought the whole audience was going to walk out on me!’ (Which they did, in fact, seven years later, when Mintoff won the election and Malta became a republic).

  In Australia in 1965, Prince Philip was asked what he had done at the two previous conferences for future industrial and community leaders in Oxford and Montreal. ‘I flitted about, went to all the drinking parties, and rang a little bell sometimes.’

  At the Defence Academy in Shrivenham, the prince was shown a grenade with a mini-parachute in the tail. After examining it closely, he said: ‘I thought Heath Robinson was dead.’ Prince Philip was asked to unveil a plaque he remarked casually: ‘You are about to see the world’s second-most experienced plaque-unveiler at work.’

  As president of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, Prince Philip vetoed the design of the new 50p coin in 1972, claiming ‘I don’t like that little “p.”’ The ‘p’ was replaced with the word ‘pence.’

  At a Master Tailors’ Benevolent Association Banquet, he said: ‘Your president has said that the royal family have a great beneficial effect on your trade, and what we wear today, you wear tomorrow – I hope there will be enough to go round.’

  Industry & Science

  Prince Philip has kept most of his more scathing remarks for Britain’s captains of industry who he believe had let the country down in the 60s and 70s. Among the most moderate of his comments was the 1967 declaration: ‘I’m sick of making excuses for this country.’ Ten years later, obviously unimpressed with the way things were going, he made it clear he was prepared for the worst: ‘Third World here we come.’

  Industry

  The problem with industry? ‘There are too many one-ulcer men holding’ two-ulcer jobs.’ The prince himself maybe dyspeptic, but has never been know to suffer from ulcers. Indeed, he was proofed against them. His secret to staying ulcer-free? ‘I think a sense of humour is almost vital for anybody nowadays, if you don’t want to end up with ulcers.’

  In 1948, it was suggested that he spend a month working as down a coal mine to bring him closer to the British people. But he could claim some experience already – visiting a Welsh steelworks in May 1962, he pressed the button to start a new blast furnace. Then he signed the work sheet: ‘Philip – turbine driver – 6 to 2 shift.’

  ‘Occasionally I get fed up, going to visit a factory, when I am being shown around by the chairman, who clearly hasn’t got a clue,’ Prince Philip said, ‘and I try to get hold of the factory manager but I can’t because the chairman wants to make sure he’s the one in all the photographs.’

  Philip sums up industrialism fairly accurately: ‘If anyone has a new idea in this country, there are twice as many people who advocate putting a man with a red flag in front of it.’

  At a luncheon of the National Union of Manufacturers, the prince expressed his views on management: ‘Many managerial problems seem to have perfectly simple and quite reasonable solutions, but if they fail to take the cussedness of man into account these are a waste of time.’

  He also put modern technical advances into perspective: ‘It is no good for man to seek to escape in luniks and rocketry and leave his soul morally earthbound among the television sets and expresso bars.’ But Britain need not despair: ‘We are certainly not a nation of nitwits. In fact, wits are our greatest single asset.’

  ‘Sacred cows are all right in some pastures but they should not be welcomed in the fields of industry and commerce,’ he said.

  Considering the plight of those amateur mechanics who had to fix their own cars, he said at the opening of the Motor Show in 1953: ‘As far as the owner-maintainer is concerned, beauty of line wears off very rapidly when he finds he can reach no part of the engine without standing on his head.’ He also took a swing at the interior design: ‘I am not always convinced that the driver’s comfort is given enough thought. Why is it, for instance, that there is always a handle or a knob just opposite one’s right knee? It may be, of course, that one should check that one is the same shape and size as the man who tested the car, but that many not always be possible.’

  In 1956, he told the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders: ‘I hope your products don’t make as much smoke as you do.’ He had more advice for motor manufacturers. As president of the Automobile Association, he suggested that the makers of diesel vehicles design their exhausts to send the fumes upwards. ‘If it goes upwards, there is a chance of it being dispersed before it comes down and asphyxiates all the dogs and cats,’ he said. ‘I am sure diesel smoke is shortening my life.’

  Never one to turn down an opportunity to tease with a pun, the prince once greeted the chairman of a textile group specializing in the production of knitting machines as the ‘head knit.’

  At a display of laundry equipment he asked: ‘Which is the shrinking machine?’

  At the annual dinner of the Institute of Fuel, guests were puffing on postprandial cigars, which provoked the prince to comment: ‘It makes a rather splendid picture to see the members of the Institute of Fuel smoking like the proverbial chimneys.’

  The Duke of Edinburgh said to a group of industrialists in 1961: ‘I’ve never been noticeably reticent about talking on subjects about which I know nothing.’ He later added: ‘I am sure many of you have noticed that there is no better way of finding out about a subject than having to speak about it.’

  In 1964, the Duke of Edinburgh told a meeting of aircraft experts that British safety standards are lower than those of several other countries. But he conceded: ‘Airline operation is a hideously complicated business. The passenger is subject to ruthless statistical surgery.’

  He told the Coal Board: ‘How much longer can we go on exploiting every feature of this country purely for gain?’

  And he told the Electricity Board, when it claimed that it wasn’t damaging the countryside as much as it had been damaged in the eighteenth century: ‘Previous mistakes are not an excuse for making them again.’

  Then again, he conceded: ‘Anyone can start an argument at any time just by mentioning British railways or British roads.’

  At a dinner to mark his eighty-seventh birthday in 2008, Prince Philip did his best Lord Browne at ease when he found himself sitting next to the former BP chief after a scandal concerning the disgraced peer’s gay partner. ‘I gather you’ve had some problem
s since we last met,’ the prince told John Browne. ‘Don’t worry, there’s a lot of that in my family,’ he continued.

  Unemployment

  In the 1960s the prince was concerned about the society’s pervasive laziness, which seemed to have taken as is mascot the perennially unemployed working-class cartoon figure Andy Capp. ‘I dare say there will always be a certain number of Andy Capps in the community,’ he said. ‘But more leisure, education, mobility and money are going to make matters worse in a few years.’

  On the rate of unemployment, the prince offers a little perspective: ‘A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone’s working too much,’ he said. ‘Now everybody’s got more leisure time they’re complaining they’re unemployed. People don’t seem to make up their minds what they want.’ This was at the height of the 1981 recession.

  A keen politician, the prince sees a smart way around the issue: ‘Everybody talks about the unemployed. We would do much better to talk about the number of people who are employed because there are more of them.’

  Science

  In an address on the British Association for the Advancement of Science given to the Indian Science Congress in New Delhi, he said: ‘I regret to say that my only degrees are honorary ones, a fact that will become only too apparent during my address about the British Association. The list of presidents alone reads like a telephone directory in the Hall of Fame; that is, of course, if you leave out a few names like mine, which are only conspicuous because they are so incongruous.’

  Prince Philip told the Institute of Chemical Engineers that, since he had succeeded the distinguish physicist Sir Harold Hartley as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it had gone ‘from the sublime to the goblimey’.

  In February 1958, he found himself address an audience of distinguished scientists at the annual luncheon of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee. ‘Once again, I find myself in a company of guests, each of whom is more qualified to speak than I am,’ he said. ‘There was a time when that sort of thing worried me, but I have since found that people like your guests are very long-suffering. Some of them, I suspect, are so delighted to be let off speaking themselves that they are prepared to put up with anything.’

  Addressing scientists and engineers at a luncheon in Toronto in June 1959, he said: ‘I would like to say how much I appreciate your invitation to address you today. I must add though, that it would be more appropriate for you to address me. Every now and then I get invitations of this sort and while I consider them a great honour I always try and get out of them because of the difficulty of trying to concoct something sensible to say. At least you’ve got together and saved me from doing this five times over. The course between platitudes and controversy is a rocky one, as most people who speak in public soon find out.’

  Opening the Man-Made Fibres Building Exhibition in Leeds, he pointed to his own thinning locks and said: ‘I’m not very good at man-made fibres myself.’

  Not one to be stuck in the past, Prince Philip addresses the complications of progress: ‘Progress is undiscriminating. Progress gives us better medical science, but it also gives us better bombs. How do you relate computers with compassion?’

  On one occasion Prince Philip halted an erudite explanation by an esteemed scientist with the words: ‘That’s all very well, but you still haven’t found out what makes my bath water gurgle.’ On another occasion, he said: ‘Science has been glamorised so long people think it can do no wrong.’

  In 1954, after watching a film about ultrasonics at London University, he said: ‘I was most interested to learn that the X-ray goes in one ear and out of the other.’ Nevertheless, three years later, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in science at Reading University.

  Proud of his progress, he told the boys of Uppingham School in Rutland: ‘Everybody has got to understand a little bit about science or he can’t understand what the hell goes on around him. Unless you know something about science, you won’t get into the House of Commons.’ Plainly that was where the boys from this exclusive boarding school were bound, but where Philip himself was sadly debarred.

  Travel

  Over her long reign, the Queen has become the most travelled monarch in history. Prince Philip often travels with her and has made numerous trips on his own. While official duties often make trips burdensome for the Queen, the prince is delighted with these junkets. ‘I am all for people travelling at other people’s expense,’ he said.

  As a frequent traveller, the prince is grateful for modern advancements: ‘If you travel as much as we do, you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort – provided you don’t travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly.’

  On travelling in style: ‘I usually change my trousers on the plane, otherwise I get out looking like a bag.’

  When Concorde was withdrawn after a crash in Paris that killed all one hundred passengers and nine crew, Prince Philip told British Airways staff: ‘I must be the only person in Britain glad to see the back of that plane.’ On its approach to Heathrow Airport, Concorde would fly noisily over Windsor Castle. Prince Philip’s favourite joke is about the American tourist who asked why they built Windsor Castle so close to Heathrow.

  The prince also sought the end of another noisy bane of modern living, saying in 1984: ‘If I can persuade you to join me in this campaign, the disappearance of the helicopter is assured and then we shall all be able to hold our heads high – as we march steadily back towards the caves our ancestors so foolishly vacated such a long time ago.’

  Prince Philip asks the pressing questions. At the headquarters of GB Airways near Gatwick Airport, he asked the aircrew: ‘When you think about all the publicity about planes being dangerous to fly in I wonder – why aren’t all of you dead?’

  Waiting at Newcastle Airport for an airliner of the Queen’s Flight in the uniform of a Field Marshal, Prince Philip stormed out onto the tarmac, bellowing: ‘Where’s my bloody plane?’ The air traffic controller in the tower, who failed to recognise their royal passenger, yelled back: ‘Get that bloke in uniform off the apron, he shouldn’t be there.’ Philip was politely informed that the plane was not there because he had arrived half an hour early.

  At a press conference in Sao Paulo in 1968, the Prince was asked about the American’s Apollo programme that would put a man on the moon the following year. ‘It seems to me that it’s the best way of wasting money that I know of,’ he said. ‘I don’t think investments on the moon pay a very high dividend.’

  In 1991, he visited NASA’s headquarters in Houston, Texas, where he sat in the command seat of a space capsule simulator, which he then had to dock. ‘It was like a bloody great mechanical copulator,’ he said.

  Prince Philip was stopped for speeding through Central London on 19 November 1947. ‘I’m sorry officer,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got an appointment with the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ He married Princess Elizabeth the next day and was on the way to a final rehearsal of the royal wedding.

  On a tour of cruise liner Queen Mary II in 2004, Prince Philip was shown the ship’s hospital. Senior medical officer Dr. Martin Carroll explained that about four people die on Cunard liners each year as they often carry terminally-ill passengers who had decided to live out their final days in luxury. When in the mortuary fridge, said the prince: ‘So they book one of these in advance, eh?’

  On the ship’s twenty-one bars: ‘You could have one big pub crawl,’ he told purser Claudette Kirkwood.

  In 1956, Prince Philip got the idea of visiting the Transantarctic Expedition, either at its base on the Ross Sea or the one on the Weddell Sea. Then it occurred to him that this would not be like one of his normal visits to one of the sunnier parts of the Commonwealth. ‘I had to drop the idea in the end because it involved the risk of getting stuck there for fifteen months when I felt that my nuisance value would be out of all proportion,’ he told the Antarctic Symposiu
m in Melbourne.

  At the annual dinner of the British Schools Exploring Society in April 1958, he addressed Sir Raymond Priestley, who was in the chair: ‘Some forty years ago he spent, entirely unintentionally, the whole Antarctic Winter in an ice-cave with Commander Murray Levick and four others. Last year, he spent two months on Britannia with me. I’m not sure which experience he found more nerve-racking.’

  In February 1957, Prince Philip had just returned from a world tour. He addressed a luncheon at the Mansion House, telling them of his travels: ‘I find it difficult to realise that I have been round the world and covered nearly 40,000 miles since the fifteenth of October last year. It would be quite easy to claim that this journey was all part of a deep-laid scheme, but I am afraid I have to admit that it all came about because I was asked to start off the Olympics Games in Melbourne. In fact, it would have been much simpler to have flown out and flown back…’

  When making a short TV film about driving on the newly introduced motorways, he said: ‘Forgive me if I don’t give examples of the wrong things which have been done, because that is sticking my neck out further than I usually do, and I don’t want to get into any more trouble than necessary.’

  When he was asked if there were countries he hadn’t been to that he would like to visit. ‘If I name them,’ he said, ‘they might invite me and then, if I couldn’t make it, there’d be trouble.’

  In 1962, ITV gave over forty-five minutes of air time to his South American tour. Out of deference to the prince they decided to run the show without any commercial breaks. However, at one point, he lost his thread. In an effort to regain his composure, he said: ‘This seems like a natural break. I wonder if I could do a spot of advertising? Would that be right?’

  That year, Prince Philip also published Birds from Britannia, an account of his visits to remote parts of the world during his world tours in 1956 and 1959. He began with an apologia: ‘The photographs are in black and white simply because I prefer taking photographs in black and white. Fortunately most of the birds themselves are black and white, or grey anyway, so not much is lost.’ The following years, he noted: ‘I have had two books of speeches published, and one on birds. Needless to say, the one on birds was more successful.’