by Penny Junor
As is the way of these things, the people she was due to meet had been ready and in place for well over an hour, and so as to look good for their important visitor the children were out of their beds and standing to attention in their pyjamas. One little boy’s body was so buckled that he had been strapped to a board to keep him upright; whether it was the wait, the discomfort or general anxiety about what was going on around him, he whimpered as a trickle of pee ran down his leg to form a puddle on the linoleum floor.
These children had no idea who the Princess Royal was; neither had their carers. But someone somewhere had singled the hospital out as a place of excellence which she should visit on a tour of the country. And so it was sandwiched, if memory serves me right, between a visit to a poet’s grave, a look at some very splendid Islamic architecture and a wander round the spice market in Samarkand.
If the Princess’s expression changed for any of these sights, I didn’t notice it. It certainly didn’t change for the cameras; if anything, she simply scowled more fiercely. As she walked round, hearing about the work of the hospital – which clearly fascinated her – she turned to the doctor in a white coat escorting her, removed one hand from behind her back – where, Duke of Edinburgh-style, they spent most of the day – and pointed at two or three of the children as if they were exhibits on a trestle table at a WI fête. She seemed quite unmoved by the sight of their twisted limbs, bright, brave little faces and liquid brown eyes. She didn’t reach out to one of them; she didn’t smile; she didn’t even make eye contact. The visit was an academic exercise for her: the children were incidental. What mattered was the question of how you diagnose and treat cerebral palsy and fund research in a country which has so many inherent problems.
That same week the Princess of Wales was visiting sick and starving children in Africa, spoon-feeding gruel into their open mouths, comforting lepers and AIDS victims and hugging emaciated babies, watched and admired by the world’s media. Those children wouldn’t have known who Diana was any more than the Uzbeki children knew who Princess Anne was, but almost instantaneously the world knew about their plight; heart-wrenching images were on television screens and in newspapers and magazines all over the globe and the funds for humanitarian aid began rolling in. Publicity is what charities feed on and the bigger the star they can enlist to the cause the better the public awareness and the greater, therefore, their generosity. Diana was so glamorous and photogenic that any picture was certain to be front-page news, and when she announced she was retiring from public life in December 1993 and giving up all but a handful of her charities, the remainder were horrified.
‘Your Royal Highness,’ wrote the director of the Welsh National Opera, Brian McMaster, in one of several hundred similar letters from others equally aghast. ‘It is just so helpful to be able to use your name. We only ask you to do one engagement a year which is a reception followed by an opera, but 20 per cent or so of all our fundraising is achieved that night. What are we going to do now?’
Four years earlier the WNO had accepted a highly prestigious invitation to play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in America – the apogee of its forty-three-year history, but expensive. The tour was going to cost almost a million pounds. Diana agreed to fly to New York for the first night, to attend a reception in the interval and a fundraising dinner after the performance for a thousand people each paying $1000 for their meal and the privilege of eating it in the same room as the Princess of Wales. She looked a million dollars, charmed everyone and in that one evening the charity recouped the entire cost of the tour.
And yet, Save the Children, the charity of which Anne has been President since 1970, wouldn’t have swapped her for two Dianas, nor, I suspect, for anyone else. Because although she has probably never cuddled a stranger’s child in her life – and one wonders even about her own – and has never knowingly smiled for a press camera, the Princess Royal is the most effective President they could hope to have. She is professional to her fingertips; she chairs meetings with utter precision, has a memory like an elephant’s, speaks superbly and usually without notes and is always completely on top of her brief. She is also a brilliant fundraiser.
Her attitude in that hospital in Uzbekistan shocked me at the time. I longed for her to reach out to one of those children, as any mother – as anyone with an ounce of humanity – would. But she is very clear about her role in life and doesn’t believe being touchy-feely forms a part of it. There are other people who can do the hands-on stuff. Her value, she knows, is to get things done, to persuade governments to give money to hospitals such as the one in Tashkent, to bring in funds to run them or to buy beds and equipment. And she is not going to stand and pose with a sickly child in order to do it.
Charity work has become one of the monarchy’s main and most important functions. The tradition of a charitable monarchy goes back to the reign of George III, but in the Queen’s reign it has become an integral part of her family’s daily work. In the immediate post-war years, the assumption that the welfare state would take care of the poorer and weaker in society and make charitable giving unnecessary, did not materialize. What the welfare state did was make people think they didn’t need to look after their neighbours any more, and wealthy employers felt that ageing employees, their widowed spouses or orphaned children were no longer their responsibility. And although the rich have continued to grow richer, and those at the bottom of the heap poorer, the rich have become increasingly tight-fisted.
As Will Hutton, journalist and chief executive of the Work Foundation, wrote in 2003, ‘As inequality of wealth balloons back to nineteenth-century levels there is no sign of nineteenth-century levels of civil engagement and philanthropy by the rich.’ Six per cent of the British population provides 60 per cent of the money given to charity, but it is the poor who give away proportionately more of their money than the rich. In America, giving is part of the culture – to be rich and not give to charity is to be a social outcast – and there is a tradition of the super-rich setting up charitable foundations. Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is the world’s biggest philanthropist. His foundation is worth $30 billion and he plans to give away 90 per cent of his $50 billion fortune. When Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, gave a billion dollars to the United Nations in 1997 he mocked his fellow billionaires: ‘What good is wealth sitting in the bank?’ he asked. The rich lists were really lists of shame – encapsulated in the words of Andrew Carnegie a century earlier, who gave away his fortune to finance free libraries and a peace foundation: ‘He who dies rich, dies disgraced.’ There seems to be no such stigma in Britain, where old money finds ingenious ways of passing it on to its children and new money simply flaunts it. But if anyone can squeeze money out of the rich it is the Royal Family.
According to one historian the charitable work done by the monarchy today has ‘made a genuine contribution to national wellbeing, but one which is largely ignored or misunderstood … It may sound curious to those obsessed by constitutional niceties or royal spectacles, but the humdrum, day-in day-out charitable activity of the monarchy may be far more important than the “dignified” duties.’ The charitable sector is now a huge industry and covers all manner of areas of society which government seems to have chosen to leave underfunded. The Charity Commission has 166,129 ‘main’ charities on its register which last year raised a total income of £34,567 billion. The Queen is currently patron or president of 635 organizations and charities, the Duke 863, the Prince of Wales 619, Princess Anne 270, Prince Andrew 161, Prince Edward 30 and his wife, Sophie, Countess of Wessex, 61. And as was painfully clear when Diana ducked out of hers, those charities that manage to secure a royal patron to put on their letterhead do appreciably better in the fundraising stakes than those that don’t. The WNO claimed that Diana’s presence brought in 20 per cent of the charity’s annual income – others have put the value of a single royal appearance at 10 per cent. Either way, it is a major contribution – and however you do the sums, the monarchy raises far more
for charity than it receives in payment from the Civil List and Grant-in-Aid funding put together. In the last year Prince Charles has helped raise around £100 million for his own seventeen core charities and millions more for the others with which he is associated – and on the polo field alone he raises about £800,000 a year for charity.
The Queen has less time to devote to charity than the other members of the Royal Family because of her constitutional obligations, so for the most part the value she brings to her charities is the respectability of the sovereign’s name on the letterhead, which sets them in a class of its own. She has added a few to the list during the course of her reign but most of them were taken over from King George VI at the time of her accession – and in those days patronages were given far more readily than they are today. Prince Philip also inherited a large number of patronages, but he took the view (which his children have followed) that it was better to limit the number of new patronages to those organizations in which he could take an intelligent and active interest.
The first he took on was the National Playing Fields Association in 1949, the only national organization, then and now, devoted to stopping Britain’s open spaces and playing fields being sold and concreted over by developers. It ‘has specific responsibility for acquiring, protecting and improving playing fields, playgrounds and playspace where they are most needed, and for those who need them most – in particular, children of all ages and people with disabilities’. George VI had been involved with the charity before his own accession and thought it would be a useful vehicle for his son-in-law to forge links with the community. ‘I want to assure you,’ said Prince Philip at his first meeting, ‘that I have no intention of being a sitting tenant in the post.’ He immediately redrafted a £500,000 appeal that was to go out in his name and masterminded an elaborate publicity campaign to back it up. He worked regularly at the NPFA office, then in Buckingham Gate, walking there from Clarence House, and went all over the country raising money and opening new playing fields. He played charity cricket matches, held fundraising lunches at Buckingham Palace and made an appeal film; he even persuaded Frank Sinatra to donate the royalties from two of his best-selling records – although associating with a divorcee, as Sinatra was (and dancing a samba with Ava Gardner, the voluptuous film star), thoroughly shocked his critics at court. He raised hundreds of thousands of pounds through his efforts – by 1953 playing fields were being opened at the rate of two hundred a year – and he is still at it, still President and still active. And the need is still as great as ever. The government makes noises about refusing planning permission but they have allowed nearly two hundred playing fields to be sold since 1998.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Rough with the Smooth
The charity for which Prince Philip is probably best known is the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, which he founded with Kurt Hahn in 1956. Nearly ten years ago I was asked to present Gold Awards on his behalf to young people who had achieved the top accolade and duly put aside a morning to spend in St James’s Palace. The Duke’s rudeness is legendary but his behaviour that morning took my breath away. With so many Gold Award recipients these days – about five thousand each year, which is a real testament to its success – he can’t do them all in person so celebrities of one sort or another are asked to help. In this instance each of us was given a group of award recipients and put into interconnecting state rooms; we were to present the awards and the Duke, we were told, would come into each room to meet us all and talk to the recipients. I did my stuff and the Duke came into the room as planned; he spoke genially to all the young recipients, quizzed them, joked with them, congratulated them heartily on achieving their Gold Award, but when he was introduced to me the smile vanished from his face, he looked me up and down – I swear he snorted but I could be making it up – and walked on past without a word. But I am in good company – he did the same, I am told, to Jennie Bond, for many years the BBC’s royal correspondent.
However, having now watched him on many occasions and spoken to dozens of the organizations with which he is involved, including the NPFA, I have had to swallow my pride and prejudice. They all agree that he can be unspeakably rude, he has a fearsome temper – which he has handed on to most of his children – and is not unknown to have reduced people to tears, but he is the ultimate professional, is as sharp as a razor, and still, despite being well into his eighties, phenomenally hard-working. There is no excuse for being rude to people who are not in a position to answer back (or failing to be civil to someone who has given up time on your behalf) but he is very much a product of his age and circumstance, and those who work with him appear to forgive him.
The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme was not the Duke’s invention although he has been the driving force behind it for nearly fifty years. The educationalist Kurt Hahn formed the basis for it back in 1934 but it was not launched in its present form as a national youth programme until over twenty years later, when he approached Prince Philip. Hahn was the man who founded Gordonstoun, the outward bound-type boarding school in Morayshire in the north of Scotland where Charles was so miserable during his teens, and where his brothers followed. Hahn also founded Outward Bound, another of the Duke’s charities. Prince Philip had been one of the first pupils at Gordonstoun, after Hahn was forced to flee Nazi Germany and move his revolutionary school from Salem to the Moray Firth. Gordonstoun was his solution for civilizing adolescents; the other feather in his cap was United World Colleges, which he founded in 1962 as an international sixth-form college, preparing adolescents for life. He believed that education could tear down national barriers and promote international cooperation and therefore peace.
The idea behind the Award Scheme was to give young people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five from every background and situation a chance to experience challenge and adventure, and thereby a sense of achievement and personal fulfilment. It was inspired by the same philosophy that drove his schools. He wanted to make the tough compassionate and the timid enterprising, to create citizens who would not shrink from leadership and, if called upon, could make independent decisions and put the right moral action before expediency and the common cause before personal ambition. The young people who sign up for the Award know none of that; they do it because it’s fun and their mates are doing it, but they come out at the other end with a lot of the qualities Kurt Hahn was rather pompously striving to foster.
Vice Admiral Mike Gretton, who was director of the Award from 1998 until 2005, had known the Duke of Edinburgh in a naval context ‘where his reputation for telling you that you were talking nonsense went before him’, so there were no particular terrors for him in working for the Duke on dry land.
And I’ve been told I’m talking nonsense quite a few times since – usually with a huge guffaw of laughter and as long as you argue back and make your case it’s fine. One of the most fascinating things I’ve found about him is when you’re having one of these ding-dongs – good discussions I would call them – at the end the outcome was not always clear – had HRH accepted my point? Then I’d go to Miles Hunt-Davis, his brilliant Private Secretary, and say, ‘We had this discussion and he didn’t actually say “Yes, Mike, I totally agree with you”, or “No, that’s nonsense”.’ And Miles would say, ‘Mike, if he’s said nothing, you’re okay. It means he’s accepted it, he just doesn’t say so quite so clearly.’ The first time this happened was over a very technical detail about the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award age limits. I went to brief him about this and he was pretty grumpy about it; he wasn’t liking it and I was arguing it backwards and forwards, and I came out not really knowing whether I had got his mind or not. Two weeks later we were at the Waterside Hall in Belfast having our General Council, with a thousand people there from the Award, and someone asked a fairly hostile question from the floor about this change to the age limits. It was fourteen but it’s more sensible to apply it as Year Nine in the English system when some children are thirteen and some fourteen �
�� that would allow the younger ones to join with their peer group. He answered that question from the floor with all of the points I had deployed to him, much better than I could have quoted them, and that shut the audience up and there was never another word about it again. It was a minor but contentious issue, which he had hoisted in totally and transmitted logically. Very, very impressive. I just wish he had told me earlier; but that’s not his style. I think he just likes to think about things and keep people on their toes, so they cannot presume which way he’s going to jump.
There are three different awards – Bronze, Silver and Gold – and four components to each award, but there is no element of competition. It has nothing to do with ability; each individual sets his or her own goals, has help from an adult mentor, and success is measured on a personal level by how far he or she advances. So it is as valuable for people with handicaps, special needs and social disadvantages as it is for the able-bodied sons and daughters of the middle classes. Indeed, in 1956 the scheme was initially aimed at young men who left school as early as possible and who did not get jobs before starting National Service at eighteen. So making the Award available to young people with different backgrounds has always been a priority for the Duke of Edinburgh.
It also thrives abroad. It is now operating in 115 countries – not always under the same name but always the same programme – and since 1956 over five million people have taken part in it.
Paul Arengo-Jones was, until he retired recently, general secretary of the International Award Association.
In very simple terms, it encourages young people to do what they like doing better, to learn more about it and to find an adult who will encourage them. The outcome is their own feeling of self-worth goes up in leaps and bounds because, for the first time in their lives, they are doing what they want to do, not what teachers or parents want them to do, and they are finding they can do it better and are having a relationship with an adult who is only there to help that person do what that young person wants to do.