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My Husband and I

Page 5

by Ingrid Seward


  She subscribed to Louis XIV’s view that punctuality is the politeness of princes (and princesses) and was always on time. She was obedient – her only transgression of any note, apart from the occasional nursery scrap with her sister, was when she, aged seven or eight years old, turned an ornamental inkpot over the head of the mademoiselle employed to teach her French.

  She was discreet. When the King flew to Italy in 1944, he told his daughter where he was going. His trip was classified as top secret and Elizabeth kept the information to herself and didn’t even share it with those women – Allah, Bobo MacDonald and Crawfie – who she was so close to. She also acquired the royal family habit of banishing unpleasant thoughts and people from her mind. Uncle David was not dead, but he might as well have been. The Duke of Windsor had been particularly fond of his niece. He had been a frequent visitor to the house in Piccadilly and took a childish delight in joining her in her games, but since the abdication he had ceased to exist. ‘In the palace and the castle his name was never mentioned,’ Crawfie noted.

  With the crown now all but certain to pass to her, her father, from the day he became George VI, started taking his daughter into his confidence, ‘speaking to her as an equal’. By war’s end she was attending council meetings, taking the counsel of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and discussing the affairs of state with her father daily. Given her new status as heir to the throne, Queen Elizabeth enhanced her interest in her daughter’s education and it was on her instigation that she was sent to study constitutional history under Sir Henry Marten, the vice-provost of Eton College just across the river Thames from Windsor.

  Yet, for all her maturity, she remained in many ways a child. Her polished manners and grown-up conversation concealed a wealth of inexperience. Throughout her childhood and almost all of her teens, she was dressed in the same clothes as her sister, despite the fact that Margaret was four years her junior. She also shared her nursery classroom with Margaret. She never had to hone her talents on the grindstone of the competition of contemporaries of her own age.

  Isolated behind that glass curtain, she enjoyed minimal social life of her own. What little she did have she left it to her mother to organise. It was not until a special Girl Guide troop was formed for her that her circle widened out to include children from beyond her own privileged background. Several Cockney evacuees from the East End joined the royal troop at Windsor and it was ‘no doubt very instructive’, so Crawfie remarked, for Elizabeth to mix with youngsters who did not have a ‘tendency to let them have an advantage, win a game, or be relieved of the more sordid tasks’, as the children of the court had.

  Now, said Crawfie, ‘it was each for himself’. The princess was not comfortable in this competitive environment. She liked the security of the safe and simple routine of royal life. Ever since she was a little girl, she had shared her bedroom with Bobo, the Scotswoman twenty-two years her senior who became and remained her closest friend. She found the informal intimacy of a guide camp difficult to deal with. ‘She was getting older, and had been brought up so much alone, I could understand why she did not want to undress before a lot of children all of a sudden, and spend the night with them,’ Crawfie said.

  When it came to dealing with boys, she was even more inhibited. Boys of any kind, Crawfie remarked, were strange creatures out of another world to the princess and her young sister. But whereas Margaret was instinctively flirtatious when in the company of the opposite sex, Elizabeth, fundamentally shy, was always much more reserved in their rare company. ‘That unsophisticated air of hers has always been part of her charm,’ her governess remarked.

  When she was under the tutelage of Sir Henry Marten in his study at Eton, his regular pupils would sometimes look in, but they, with typical Etonian insouciance, feigned not to know who she was and, after politely raising their top hats, would speedily withdraw again. Elizabeth, for her part, pretended not to notice the interruptions.

  She was thirteen when war broke out, but that did not mean there were more openings for her. At the age of almost eighteen, she had not yet, her father’s equerry, Group Captain Peter Townsend, noted, ‘attained the full allure of an adult. She was shy, occasionally to the point of gaucheness.’

  No real attempt was made to put her more at ease with young men. Miss Betty Vacani, the London dancing mistress who would also teach the next royal generation their steps, was called out to Windsor during the war to organise dance classes for the princesses. By royal instructions they were for little girls only. ‘The princesses did not understand the antics of little boys, and this did not seem the moment to teach them,’ Crawfie said.

  Despite all that, there was one boy Elizabeth did notice, however. He was tall and blond, with ‘Viking’ good looks. His name was Prince Philip of Greece, and she was dazzled by him from the first moment she saw him, when she was just thirteen and he was eighteen. They were married eight years later, and he was the only man she had ever known.

  It wasn’t entirely inevitable that they would meet. Prince Philip’s parents Andrea and Alice arrived in London from Corfu in 1922 with their five children and retinue of six servants. King George V’s diary entry for 19 December reads: ‘Andrea came to see me, he has just arrived from Athens where he was tried and very nearly shot.’ On arrival they were given temporary shelter by the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven at Kensington Palace, where in later years as a schoolboy Philip maintained a base where he could keep his belongings and school trunk in the holidays.

  Andrea still owned his house in Corfu while Alice had an allowance from the Mountbatten family, but by royal standards they were not well-off. However, it cannot be said that Philip’s childhood was spent in impoverished circumstances; Andrea was fortunate in that he had two brothers who had married heiresses and who proved to be generous with financial assistance.

  Although deprived of Greek nationality, Andrea and his family were free to travel on Danish passports. When his son William became King George I of Greece, King Christian of Denmark had insisted that his descendants maintain Danish nationality. Soon after their arrival in London, Andrea and Alice sailed to New York as guests of Andrea’s brother Christopher, who had married an American tin-plate heiress complete with a yacht and homes in California and Florida. Christopher was later to provide funds for Philip’s school fees. Meanwhile, Philip was left in the charge of Nanny Roose, who took him on a daily pram ride round Kensington Gardens.

  Andrea’s elder brother George was married to Princess Marie Bonaparte, the great-granddaughter of Napoleon’s brother, whose mother had inherited a fortune from the family which founded Monte Carlo casino. George invited Andrea to bring his family to Paris, where George owned several properties. Uncle George provided a house for the family in the Paris suburb of St Cloud where Aunt Marie paid all the household expenses.

  It was Nanny Roose who bore the responsibility for Philip’s upbringing and had the greatest influence over him. She taught him British nursery rhymes and, despite the lack of funds, insisted on dressing him in clothes sent over from London. And she made certain that he spoke English and was brought up with English customs. ‘Nobody’s allowed to spank me but my own nanny,’ Philip informed a friend’s nanny who was about to discipline him for breaking an expensive vase. His nanny was obliged to have such a central role in his upbringing, because his mother Alice had been profoundly deaf since birth and communicated with the outside world by sign language, which Philip did learn.

  Nanny Roose remained with the family until arthritis forced her to retire to the warmer climate of South Africa. In her letters to Philip’s sisters, she once wrote that Philip told her that he loved her ‘as much as pineapple’. In another letter that Philip wrote to ‘Roosie’, as he called her, he reminded her of the time one Easter morning when she told him to get up quickly as they were late. While Roosie was out of the room, Philip dressed and got back under the covers, only to spring out fully dressed when Roosie came to scold him. ‘Full of fun’ was how she fo
ndly remembered him.

  One of Philip’s closest friends was Hélène Foufounis, at whose palatial family villa near Le Touquet Philip spent several summer holidays. Like Philip, she too eventually moved to Britain where, as Hélène Cordet, she became a London cabaret singer and nightclub owner, and remained one of his closest confidantes. ‘He was like an English boy rather than a Greek or German. He had an English nanny. Everyone adored him so much, particularly my mother, because he was so good looking,’ Hélène Cordet recalled.

  Holidays were spent rattling across Europe by train to stay with relations, many of whom had managed to retain royal estates and lived in style. To Romania, for instance, where his aunt Missy was Queen (she wore a tiara at dinner every evening) and where Philip’s cousin Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia remembered ‘our nannies all cheerfully sitting down to tea with bowls of caviar’. The young boy whose own means were straitened was allowed no such extravagance. He was trained, Alexandra says, ‘to save and economise better than other children, so much so that he acquired a reputation for being mean.’ Other holidays were spent in England at Lynden Manor in Berkshire, the country estate of Philip’s uncle George Milford Haven. There he found a best friend in his cousin David, who years later would be best man at Philip’s wedding.

  ‘He had such unbelievable charm,’ said his sister, Sophie. ‘He had a tremendous sense of humour.’ He was also a real boy with an adventurous, outgoing personality, fond of climbing trees, forever testing himself against the elements and his playmates. ‘It was always Philip,’ Alexandra said, ‘who ventured out of his depth’ at the seaside, ‘or who rounded up other boys encountered on the beach and organised an intensive castle-building brigade.’ He was given a Box Brownie and took up photography, which remained a lifetime’s hobby. He had a boy’s interest in motorcars.

  That humour his sister mentioned was of a somewhat rumbustious kind. ‘He was a great show-off, he would always stand on his head when visitors came,’ one of his sisters remarked. On one occasion, when staying with another aunt, Queen Sophie of Greece, and her sister, the Landgravine of Hesse, Alexandra recalled him releasing a sty of pigs and stampeding them through the ladies’ elegant garden tea party.

  He could be kind-hearted. When a rich cousin, who was very taken with Philip, once bought him a toy, she cruelly said to Hélène’s nine-year-old sister Ria, who was stricken with a diseased hip, ‘I didn’t buy you anything because you can’t play.’

  ‘Philip went very red and ran out of the room,’ Hélène said. ‘He came back with an armful of his own toys, and the new one, thrust them on the bed and said, “These are for you.” ’

  Philip’s early education was not notable for its classroom successes. At the age of five he was sent to The Elms, the exclusive American school in Paris. Philip rode there on a bicycle he had bought himself with savings that had started with the pound his uncle, the King of Sweden, sent him every year. His school report called him ‘a rugged, boisterous boy, but always remarkably polite’.

  These early years in St Cloud were happy ones, but as time went by Philip’s family began a gradual dispersal. His mother became deeply obsessed with religion and eventually had to be committed to a sanatorium in 1930, while his father Andrea, for lack of anything better to do, became a socialite eventually settling in Monte Carlo. Philip’s sisters gravitated towards their German relations, where they each found husbands.

  When Philip was eight, George Milford Haven entered him as a boarder for Cheam School in Surrey, one of England’s oldest preparatory schools, where David Milford Haven was a pupil. From that time onwards it was George and his wife who acted in loco parentis. George was a Cheam old boy himself and regularly attended sports days and prize-givings. George had recently left the navy to enter the world of business and became a director of several public companies. His interest in gadgets of all kinds and his inventiveness are traits that he passed on to Philip. As a young officer in the navy, George invented an automatic tea-maker to rouse him in the mornings and he air-conditioned his quarters with a system of fans. Years later, Philip went one better with the invention of a boot remover and cleaner which was commercially marketed.

  Cousin Alexandra had been sent to Heathfield School near Ascot at the same time as Philip entered Cheam and they kept up a correspondence with each other. Alexandra tells of some of the high-spirited adventures Philip shared with his cousin David. On one occasion the boys cycled to a scout camp from Lynden Manor in Bray to Dover, a journey of some 120 miles. They arrived extremely saddle sore, but elated. Anxious to avoid having to ride home, they stowed away in the hold of a barge in Dover Harbour that was bound for London docks. They spent two nights sleeping on sacks of grain and lived off some rock cakes they had bought with them.

  At Cheam, Philip excelled at sports. He won the school diving competition, came equal first in the high jump, won the under-12 hurdles and became a promising cricketer. Although he showed a keen interest in history, he did not shine academically at all. He did win the Form III French prize, but as his cousin Alexandra told him, so he should have, ‘after all the years he had lived in Paris’. In common with similar schools of the day, life for the boys was tough, with cold baths, bad food, hard beds and the cane for punishment. Philip believed his regime to be character forming, and in due course sent his son Prince Charles to Cheam, where he had an unhappy time.

  When Philip turned twelve it was time to move from Cheam. He might have been expected to enter one of the great fee-paying schools in England, but the German side of his family intervened. His sister Theodora had married Berthold, the Margrave of Baden, in 1931. Her father-in-law Prince Max of Baden, the last Imperial Chancellor of Germany, had founded Salem School with the help of his personal secretary, Dr Kurt Hahn, in 1920 in his family home in Germany. By 1933, when Philip arrived, there were 420 pupils, and Salem was considered one of the finest schools in Europe. The curriculum was rigorous, being based on physical fitness and self-reliance, and Theodora succeeded in persuading the Milford Havens that Philip should go to Salem.

  But the timing could not have been worse. In January of that year, Hitler had come to power as chancellor, and the Nazis quickly established control over every aspect of life there. Soon Kurt Hahn, a Jew, was in trouble with the authorities. The Nazis could not allow a Jew to educate the youth of Germany, so he was arrested and imprisoned. Influential people from all over Europe, including British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, petitioned Hitler to set Hahn free. As a result, he was allowed to emigrate to Britain where he set about establishing a new school in Scotland – Gordonstoun.

  Philip lasted less than a year at Salem. He got into trouble for mocking the Nazi salute and when the Hitler Youth began to infiltrate the school, Theodora agreed he should return to England and Gordonstoun. The school was in its infancy when Philip arrived in the autumn term of 1934. There were only twenty-six pupils, but such were Hahn’s abilities that the numbers grew to 156 by the time Philip left in 1939.

  Hahn took an immediate liking to Philip. ‘When Philip came to the school,’ he wrote, ‘his most marked trait was his undefeatable spirit . . . his laughter was heard everywhere . . . In his schoolwork he showed a lively intelligence. In community life, once he had made a task his own, he showed meticulous attention to detail and pride of workmanship which was never content with mediocre results.’

  It was Hahn’s belief that every pupil should learn seamanship and the subject Philip enjoyed most was sailing under the guidance of a retired naval officer, Commander Lewty, who led expeditions to the Shetland Islands and to the coast of Norway. Among Philip’s duties on board was that of ship’s cook. It was said he had a heavy hand with the butter when making scrambled eggs, but an interest in cooking and food has remained with him for the rest of his life. Not only did Philip greatly enjoy his days at Gordonstoun, he has given full credit to Hahn for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme. He said: ‘It was Hahn’s idea though not in all its details. I would never have started
it but for Hahn, certainly not. He suggested I ought to do it and I fought against it for quite a long time.’

  The situation on mainland Europe continued to develop. In 1935, the monarchy was restored in Greece. As part of the arrangements that followed, the bodies of the royal family who had died in exile were returned to Greece for reburial in the family vault. For this ceremony of state, Philip was given leave of absence from Gordonstoun and joined his extended family in Athens, where he saw his mother and father together for the first time since he had left St Cloud. He spent time with his mother, who had settled into a house in Athens where she remained throughout the war, dressed always in her nun’s habit. There was a great gathering in Athens of all branches of the royal house of Greece. Cousin Alexandra reported that Philip wanted to know exactly who was who and that he was surprised to learn that he was third in line of succession to King George II of Greece, who was back on the throne after being deposed in 1924. Andrea was pressed to enter Philip for the Greek Naval College but would not contemplate it on account of the treatment he had received when banished from Greece; Philip’s future, it appeared, lay in England.

 

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