Prince Philip

by Nigel Cawthorne

  In 2010, Prince Philip was showing the multinational benefactors of Cambridge University around Windsor Castle and demonstrated his sensitivity towards foreign visitors. Entering the Waterloo Chamber, built to commemorate the victory over Napoleon in 1815, he said: ‘If you happen to be French, it’s the music room.’

  Although Prince Philip is worshipped as a god by the islanders of Tanna in Vanuatu, he is notoriously forthright when it comes to native peoples. On visiting the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park in northern Queensland, he was told that the park was run by two Aboriginal tribes, the Djabugay and the Yirrganydji. He responded: ‘Djabugay, Yirrganydji, what’s it all about? Do you still throw spears at each other?’ The park’s founder, William Brin, appeared to choke with surprised laughter. ‘No, we don’t do that any more,’ replied Mr. Brim, whose indigenous name is Ngoo Nvi, meaning platypus. ‘I don’t mind; it was quite funny,’ he said later. ‘I’d call the question naive.’ In fact, Aboriginals who maintain the traditional lifestyle do use spears to inflict tribal punishments and one of their most guarded tribal traditions is a ritual spear-throwing ceremony, which is a rite of passage. The royal couple then watched a ten-minute display of Aboriginal music and dance, the highlight of which was a fire-lighting ceremony using fire sticks and dry grass. As one performer rubbed the sticks close to another man, the prince joked: ‘You’ve set fire to him,’ adding: ‘This is just like being back in the Scouts!’

  In 2000, on a visit to Canberra, Aborigine didgeridoo player Bob Slockee told the prince that he had learnt to play by puffing on the pipe from a vacuum cleaner. Philip said: ‘I hope it wasn’t turned on at the time.’ Then examining Bob’s instrument, he said: ‘I hope you haven’t got anything inside that tube?’

  But Prince Philip’s caustic wit was not confined to the Aboriginals. In Cairns, when a school band played ‘God Save the Queen,’ he said to the children: ‘You were playing your instruments, weren’t you? Or do you have tape recorders under your seats?’ And he insisted that a piezometer, used in the cotton industry to measure the depth of water in soil, was ‘a pissometer.’ ‘No,’ said an Aussie farmer. ‘I’ll spell it for you.’

  During the coronation tour of Australia, Prince Philip found a way to amuse himself on long car journeys. He would look out for Aussies leaning on the lampposts outside pubs and wave at them. When they tried to wave back, they would lose their grip on the lamppost and fall over drunk.

  In 2011, Prince Philip was back in Australia. At the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Perth, he was watching a troupe of Aboriginals perform in native dress and said: ‘You won’t see that in the Outback.’

  When opening an annexe to Vancouver City Hall in 1987, he said: ‘I declare this thing open, whatever it is.’

  Speaking on the key problems that faced Brazil, he simply said: ‘Brazilians live there.’ On a state visit to the country in 1968, he said: ‘The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined.’

  Introduced to a military man with chest full of medals, Prince Philip asked him where he got them. ‘In the war,’ the general told him. ‘I didn’t know Brazil was in the war that long,’ said the Prince. After the middle of 1942, the Brazilian navy and air force played a role in the Battle of the Atlantic and the 25,700 men of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force fought in Italy from September 1944 to May 1945, losing 948 killed in action. The general replied: ‘At least, sir, I didn’t get them from marrying my wife.’

  On another occasion Prince Philip asked a Sri Lankan veteran who had turned out with a chest full of medals: ‘Have you got any on the back too?’

  Prince Philips admitted to being a bogus holder of the Burma Star, a medal given to those who had served in the Burma campaign against the Japanese between 1941 and 1945. Though he had served in the Pacific, he had never gotten closer to Burma than Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. ‘I can’t say I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘because I’m not particularly fond of rain and I understand that campaign umbrellas were frowned upon.’

  At a breakfast to mark the 200th anniversary of St. James’s barbers, Truefitt & Hill, Prince Philip was approached by one reporter, who ‘wondered if he might like to talk to her.’ He brushed her aside with the riposte: ‘Well, you can carry on wondering.’ Plunging into his speech, he said: ‘There’s an interesting bunch of you who no doubt come here to have your hair cut, although there are a couple of obvious exceptions.’’ Addressing some foreigners present, he said: ‘You people from Iceland no doubt come here to have your beards trimmed.’

  In the Solomon Islands in 1982, when he was told that the annual population growth was five percent, Prince Philip said: ‘Five percent! You must be out of your minds. You’ll have a massive economic crisis in twenty years’ time and blame everybody else.’

  In 1998 during an official visit to Papua New Guinea, Prince Philip said to a British student who had been trekking along the Kokoda jungle trail: ‘You managed not to get eaten then?’

  Actor and former MP Gyles Brandreth recalled an incident in 1984 where Prince Philip introduced him to a distinguished, Indian-looking gentleman wearing a bright summer suit and an overblown rose in his buttonhole. ‘This is the president of Pakistan,’ the prince said before wandering away. Brandreth found himself completely out of his depth. When Prince Philip came back, he asked: ‘How are you two getting on?’ Brandreth was still struggling to make small talk. The prince listened for a moment to what he was saying and then interrupted: ‘He’s the president of the Pakistan Playing Fields Association, you idiot. He is not General Zia.’ General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq had made himself president of Pakistan after a bloodless coup in 1977, though the former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Zia’s patron was executed two years later. He declared martial law, banned political parties and trades unions, imposed strict censorship of the press and began in the Islamisation of Pakistan before dying in a plane crash in 1988.

  During a reception at Buckingham Palace for the four hundred most influential British Asians in 2009, Prince Philip spotted the name badge of business chief Atul Patel and said: ‘There’s a lot of your family in tonight.’ Indeed there are some 670,000 Patels living in the UK.

  Ten years earlier, Prince Philip had caused a similar controversy when he was inspecting a factory in Scotland and spotted an outdated fuse box. ‘It looks as though it was put in by an Indian,’ he said. Two hours and fourteen minutes later, Buckingham Palace backtracked. ‘I meant to say cowboys,’ the prince said. ‘I just got my cowboys and Indians mixed up.’

  A man of unerring aim, Prince Philip can write off anything that does not pass muster with one word: ‘Ghastly.’ That was his opinion of Beijing when he accompanied the Queen on a state visit in 1986.

  Refusing to stroke a koala in Australia in 1992, he said: ‘Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease.’

  In New Zealand, Prince Philip declined an opportunity to try his hand at sheep shearing, saying: ‘Not on your life. I might nick him, and we’ve had quite enough mutton on this tour already, thank you.’

  When the prince visited the Hanover Trade Fair in 1997, he greeted German chancellor Helmut Kohl as ‘Reichskanzler’ – a title that died with Hitler. Since 1947, the elected leader in Germany has the rather less imperious title Bundeskanzler, or ‘Federal Chancellor.’

  In 2000, he told guests at a reception marking the opening of the new £18-million British Embassy in Berlin that it was ‘a vast waste of space.’ However, later, when a journalist asked: ‘Your Royal Highness, could you give us your view on the building?’ He said simply: ‘No.’

  Prince Philip is at his most direct when it comes to foreign affairs. Back in 1967, he was asked whether he would like to visit the Soviet Union. He replied: ‘I would like to go to Russia very much – although the bastards murdered half my family.’ (He was the great-nephew of the last Tsarina, Alix of Hesse, who was killed along with her husband and family by the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg in 1918. His DNA was used to identity the rema
ins of her and her children).

  In the 1950s, Prince Philip had said to one French Minister of the Interior: ‘Too bad you sent your royal family to the guillotine.’ But, he counselled: ‘Getting angry about history is a sterile occupation.’

  In 1994, the prince asked Cayman Islander William Tennent, a museum curator: ‘Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?’ Indeed, as there appears to have been no native Amerindians on the Cayman Islands before the arrival of Europeans, most of the early inhabitants were pirates, along with refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, shipwrecked sailors and slaves. It is now the home for tax exiles, which are often the same thing.

  At a Commonwealth conference, Prince Philip charmed the leaders of the tiny South Pacific island Nauru, home to a huge phosphate mine. ‘So you’re from Nauru, eh?’ said the prince. ‘Haven’t they dug it all up yet?’

  In 2005, when London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, the prince, then eighty-four, told Cherie Blair: ‘I’m so old I won’t be here.’ He was, but he was no big fan. He told the Daily Telegraph that he detests them so much that he planned to do ‘as little as possible’ during the London Olympics in 2012. ‘Opening and closing ceremonies ought to be banned. Absolute bloody nuisances,’ he said. ‘I have been to one that was absolutely appallingly awful. At the Olympics in the old days, when they were more or less amateur, the last event of the whole Games was the show jumping in the main stadium because the horses used to cut up the ground. Well, blow me down I was suddenly told, at Munich I think it was, that we couldn’t have the main arena for show jumping because it had to be prepared for the ‘Closing Ceremony.’ So, I said: ‘What is the Olympics about? The competition or the closing ceremony?’ So I am truly fed up with opening and closing ceremonies. They’re a pain in the neck.’

  In at a Commonwealth Day party in 1999, Prince Philip asked Tory politician Lord Taylor of Warwick: ‘And what exotic part of the world do you come from?’ He replied: ‘Birmingham.’ His parents came from Jamaica.

  During President Barack Obama’s visit to the UK in 2009 for a meeting of the G20 leaders, he told Prince Philip: ‘I had breakfast with the prime minister [then Gordon Brown]. I had meetings with the Chinese, the Russians, David Cameron.’ The prince replied: ‘Can you tell the difference between them?’ Observers said they believed he was referring to the meetings, not the people.

  After meeting exchange students who were coming to Britain during a visit to Brunei in 1998, he said: ‘I don’t know how they’re going to integrate in places like Glasgow and Sheffield. I had to commiserate with them.’

  In 1956, at a dinner to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the return of Jews to Britain, the prince said: ‘I am in a bit of quandary this evening. The three hundredth anniversary of the resettlement of the Jews in the British Isles seems as good an excuse as any to have a party and an excellent dinner. I think it is also most appropriate that I should propose this toast to the Anglo-Jewish community. But here’s the snag: do I congratulate the ancestors of this community on having the good sense to come here in the first place? Or do I congratulate the community on having stuck it here for three hundred years?’

  Philip is sensitive about his Greek heritage. For the Queen’s golden jubilee, he rejected the design of a ceremonial carved pear-wood chair made for him because it incorporated olives. They were, he said, ‘too foreign’ and ‘not British enough’. At the last minute, the olives were replaced with carved bay leaves. However, bay also comes from the Mediterranean and bay leaves were used to crown victorious athletes in ancient Greece.

  While competing in the Fastnet Race, crewmen of a boat approaching the prince’s vessel yelled ‘water’ – a yachtsman’s term for moving out of the way – followed by ‘Stavros,’ a reference to his Greek origins. The prince shouted back: ‘It’s not Stavros and it’s my wife’s f***ing water and I’ll do what I f***ing please in it.’ Princess Diana always referred to Philip as Stavros and to her in-laws in general as ‘the Germans.’

  t a prize-giving ceremony for the Duke of Edinburgh Awards in 2010, a girl told him that she had been to Romania to help in an orphanage. He replied: ‘Ah good, there’s so many of those orphanages over there you feel they breed them just to put in orphanages.’ Prince Charles is a patron of FARA, a charity helping Romanian orphans.

  During a Royal visit to a Murugan Hindu temple in north London in 2002, Prince Philip asked the four priests which part of Sri Lanka they were from. One said: ‘We are from the north and east of the island. We are Tamils.’ The prince than asked: ‘Are you Tigers?’ The Tamil Tigers were a terrorist group in Sri Lanka, defeated in 2009. No one said anything for a few minutes and then the priest explained: ‘No, we are priests. We are not associated with violence.’ Later he insisted that no offence had been taken at what the prince said. ‘He does say interesting things, doesn’t he? It must be his sense of humour we keep reading about so much. We were not offended. We blessed him with a long life and health and peace.’

  After a visit to a Hindu temple in Gujarat, Prince Philip asked a journalist: ‘Have you seen the one in Neasden? It’s exactly the same, only bigger.’

  The prince always had problems with the subcontinent. At a conference in Washington in 1956, he asked an Asian gentleman: ‘Are you Indian or Pakistani? I can never tell the difference with you chaps.’

  In 1955, Dr. Salvador Allende, then a member of the Chilean senate, was attending a state banquet at Buckingham Palace. Observing that Allende was wearing a lounge suit, Prince Philip demanded: ‘Why are you dressed like that?’ Allende explained: ‘Because my party is poor, they advised me not to hire evening dress.’ The prince countered imperiously: ‘I suppose if they told you to wear a bathing costume, you would come dressed in one.’ Dr. Allende went on to become president of Chile and died in a coup in 1973.

  On a visit to Ghana, Prince Philip was shown a strip of brass in a churchyard that marked the Prime Meridian. ‘A line in the ground, eh? Very nice,’ he said. It is, of course, how the Meridian is marked in Greenwich as well.

  At a Malawi Independence Celebration in July 1964, an African waiter whacked a photographer over the head with a wooden sign as he was focussing on Prince Philip, who said: ‘Now, that wasn’t a friendly gesture, was it?’

  The prince is perhaps aware of reactions to his offensive comments to foreigners. When asked about the situation in South Africa in the 1960s during apartheid, he told a press conference: ‘Almost anything I say will be taken down and used in evidence against me.’

  Arriving at the airport in Delhi in 1959, he was saluted by a visiting US Navy lieutenant. ‘Ah,’ said Prince Philip, ‘So I see you’ve joined the Commonwealth.’

  At a dinner of the English-Speaking Union in June 1957, Prince Philip greeted the US ambassador John Hay Whitney, saying: ‘I don’t know how Mr. Whitney was chosen for his present job, but his qualifications make it very easy for anyone proposing his health. His grandfather, John Hay, held this post sixty years ago. Mr. Whitney himself went to Oxford, fought with the United States Air Force in the European theatre, was taken prisoner and escaped, and breeds race-horses. I think he must have had his eye on this post for quite a long time; those qualifications cannot have been fortuitous. On top of all this, he was obviously gifted with second sight. He foresaw this dinner and this speech, so he thoughtfully took up polo as well.’

  At the 150th anniversary banquet of the Canada Club, held at the Guildhall in 1960, Prince Philip was proposing a toast and said: ‘What a very great pleasure and honour it is for me to be able to preside… and also to wear this very delightful badge which was given for the chairman to wear on these occasions, and I can tell you so far I’ve managed to keep it out of the food.’

  There are, of course, perks to the prince’s duties. At a farewell dinner in Accra after a state visit to Ghana in 1959, he was presented with an inkstand made of ivory and gold. In his acceptance speech, he said: ‘Only the other day I found myself sympathising with the minister o
f finance about his little problem of paying for the next five-year plan. Now that I have accepted this present, I won’t be able to look him in the face.’

  In 1962, Prince Philip was asked whether a British businessman travelling to Latin America should wear a bowler hat or a sombrero. ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ he said. ‘But it would be better to send a bowler-hatted man speaking Spanish, than a man wearing a sombrero who could only speak English.’

  The Press and Media

  There is perhaps no relationship more contentious than Prince Philip and the British press. The press gets a kick out of his supposed gaffes and sass, and the prince has accepted this somewhat brutal portrayal: ‘There we are. I’ve become a caricature. I’ve just got to live with it.‘ On reading himself in the press: ‘’realized‘’and vowed to change:‘’this plan

  The prince was well aware of the disappointment he caused when he did not live up to his reputation. ‘When we were in South Africa some years ago, I flew up to Kimberley and was persuaded to take some media people with me,’ he explained. ‘On the way back, one of them said to my policeman that it had been a waste of time as I had not put my foot in it. Although he has complained of being ‘frequently misrepresented,’ the prince has learned to live with hostile media and only judges as he sees fit: ‘I don’t hate the press; I find a lot of it is very unpalatable. But if that’s the way they want to behave, well…’ It seems he’ll let it speak for itself.

  To those who might be sensitive to feelings of misunderstanding, the prince gives a dose of reality: ‘You cannot take quotations in newspapers seriously. It so happens that it is perfectly legal to put anything in a newspaper in quotation marks, and there is nothing you can do about it. You have no copyright on what other people say you said.’