My Husband and I

by Ingrid Seward

  He and Prince Philip raced together on the Dragon class yacht Bluebottle and in the Flying Fifteen Coweslip that was designed and built by Uffa. The 20-foot Flying Fifteen was one of Uffa’s most successful post-war designs and Coweslip was presented to the Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip by the people of Cowes as a wedding gift. Uffa and Philip won the Britannia Cup in Coweslip in 1952.

  Bloodhound is a 63-foot ocean racing yacht built in 1936. She was purchased for the royal family in 1962 at the request of Prince Philip. During royal ownership, Bloodhound would accompany the royal yacht Britannia in the Western Isles when the royal family had their family holiday every year. She had a permanent crew of three and one skipper was a descendant of Sir Francis Drake. It was during these times that the young royals learned to sail on Bloodhound. When not in royal use, Bloodhound and her crew were made available by Prince Philip to yacht clubs across the country, and was used to teach thousands of young people how to sail.

  Cricket was another sport at which Prince Philip excelled at Gordonstoun. Although he likes to claim he was not particularly good, he became captain of the first XI in his final year. When he was first married, and had a weekend house in the country at Windlesham, he adapted the tennis court for use as a cricket pitch. Always keen to mix with ordinary people, Philip would make up teams from assorted friends, locals, gardeners, detectives and drivers.

  In 1949, Philip became president of Marylebone Cricket Club, the ruling body of the sport, and led a victorious English Invitation XI against Hampshire, piloting his own helicopter from Balmoral to the cricket ground at Bournemouth. He possessed ‘the perfect action’ according to no less a judge than Australian batsman Don Bradman. The MCC, of which the Queen is patron, celebrated Prince Philip’s ninetieth birthday with a lunch in the Long Room at Lord’s cricket ground, attended by representatives of his sporting charities, at which he was guest of honour. He is also patron and ‘Twelfth Man’ of the Lord’s Taverners, the official charity for recreational cricket in the United Kingdom.

  Until 1998, when the MCC voted to admit women members, the Queen was the only woman permitted to watch cricket from the pavilion. Both the Queen and Prince Philip still visit Lord’s occasionally during a Test match. The royal family’s patronage of Lord’s is infused with a hint of scandal, however. Hanging in the pavilion is a painting of ‘An Imaginary Cricket Match’ at the ground, commissioned to mark the MCC’s centenary in 1887. While England bat and Australia field, the Prince and Princess of Wales (the future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) stroll around the outfield, while in the foreground, wearing a yellow dress and scarlet bonnet, is the prince’s mistress, actress Lillie Langtry.

  Ever since Kurt Hahn had impressed upon Prince Philip how physical fitness should be a cornerstone of young people’s education, he has been a driving force to get more children into sports and physical activities of all kinds. In 1947, he became the patron of the London Federation of Boys’ Clubs. The following year, he accepted the presidency of the National Playing Fields Association, which he held for many years. When the Central Council of Physical Recreation for the United Kingdom appeared close to being disbanded in 1951, Philip assumed the presidency and guided the organisation into its present form as the Sport and Recreation Alliance. These organisations, together with the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme, have helped millions of young people to make fitness a priority.

  Philip would not have been able to keep up his customary punishing schedule of engagements past his ninety-sixth birthday if he were not supremely fit himself. Even in his nineties he follows part of the Royal Canadian Air Force exercise plan, which was created by a doctor in the 1950s. It is a stretching and toning twelve-minute plan designed to keep men and women fit without the use of gym equipment and most of the fashionable simple exercise plans today are based on it.

  One of the first things Philip did when he moved to Buckingham Palace from Clarence House was to get the squash court back into working order. He was also a regular user of the indoor pool at the palace. When the Queen was giving birth to Prince Charles, Philip passed the time with a game of squash with his equerry Michael Parker.

  Shooting has always been a sport that royalty has enjoyed as a favourite pastime. For example, King George VI was an exceptional shot, and as the Sandringham estate has a particularly fine shoot, a bag of 2000 pheasants in a day was not uncommon in his time. In addition, there was always grouse shooting to be had in the heather at Balmoral. George VI gave Philip a pair of matched Purdey shotguns as a wedding present and taught him the finer points of shooting at Balmoral and Sandringham. Up to that point, Philip’s shooting experience had been limited to hunting wild boar in Germany, where all four of his brothers-in-law had country estates. In time, he became a crack shot. After the death of George VI, Philip re-organised the shoot at Sandringham and for many years managed to achieve his target bag of 10,000 pheasant during the annual seven-week stay. He also enjoyed shooting wildfowl from a punt on the Norfolk Broads in the company of the actor James Robertson Justice.

  Prince Philip is also an ardent conservationist and for many years has been president of the World Wide Fund for Nature, formerly called the World Wildlife Fund. He has no problem in reconciling his position as president of the fund with his passion for shooting. Nor is he a fan of gun control. After the Dunblane shooting in 1996, when sixteen schoolchildren were shot dead with a pistol, there was a cry for more rigorous laws to control the ownership of handguns. Philip famously said: ‘If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?’

  Shooting is very much part of the Queen’s life, too – not as a keen shot but as a handler of gundogs trained to pick up the downed birds. The Queen’s love of dogs is well known, but it is not just corgis, which she has had as household pets all her life. She also has a deep involvement with the labradors and spaniels kept as working dogs in the royal kennels at Sandringham. Her skill as a dog handler is renowned. She uses hand signals and whistles to control her labradors. Bill Meldrum, who ran the Sandringham kennels for more than forty years, says that she is the best dog handler he has ever seen – ‘probably the best in the country’. Glimpsed behind the line of guns on shoot days, the Queen is simply, as one of the keepers recalls, ‘a lady in a headscarf with a load of dogs around her, and in a field of sporting people you wouldn’t pick Her Majesty out.’

  The dogs do not live only at Sandringham. When the Queen travels to Balmoral for her long summer break, many of the labradors and spaniels are put into lorries and driven through the night to be available for the grouse shoots. The Queen prefers the dogs to be worked outside every other day to avoid becoming too tired or getting bruised paws. After the grouse season, they return to Norfolk for the partridge shoots.

  Rather surprisingly, the Queen is also an expert on breeding and racing pigeons, and she has 200 of them. Ever since the days when she fed her grandfather King George V’s parrot with sugar lumps, she has loved birds. When she lived at Royal Lodge as a child, she and her sister had an aviary of budgerigars. She likes birds in their natural environment and knows the breed and songs of many that inhabit the woods and forests around Balmoral Castle.

  The music of nature is not the only form of music she likes: military bands, popular music from her younger days, singing and playing the piano (which she learnt to do as a child) are all things she enjoys. For the Queen Mother’s ninetieth birthday, she had the inspired idea of making a cassette of Scottish childhood songs with Princess Margaret. Neither of them played, choosing instead to concentrate on the singing, and to get it right asked Laurie Holloway, the renowned composer and pianist, to come to Buckingham Palace to help them create the surprise present. When he arrived at the palace, he was shown into a room containing a piano and two microphones. ‘There was a sound engineer. We recorded each song in one take,’ he recalled. ‘I think there were about
a dozen songs. The Queen has a nice, sweet tone to her voice.’

  At the Queen’s request, only one cassette tape was made and the only song Holloway could recall from the recording was ‘I Know Where the Flies Go in Winter Time’. ‘They sang to me without accompaniment, and I would then play in their key,’ he remembered. Sadly, after the Queen Mother’s death, the cassette went missing.

  ‘I don’t think the title was written on the cassette, so it might be stored somewhere and no one will realise its significance,’ says Holloway. Princess Margaret told him that the Queen Mother had really liked the tape – although she had to go into her car to listen to it as she did not own a cassette player. When Prince Charles heard about this, he reminded his grandmother he had given her a sound system which contained a cassette player and all she had to do was pop the cassette in and press the right button. There was no need to go and sit in her car after all!

  Another of the Queen’s interests is in military history. As head of the armed forces, the Queen feels it is her duty to know every uniform, how it should be worn and with what – which she does – but few realise she is also fascinated by military history. The Countess of Wessex, who is close to the Queen, shares her fascination and loves listening to her talking about great historical events. The pair are apparently sometimes gone for hours, pouring over ancient documents in the royal archives or books in the library at Windsor Castle.

  When Sophie visited some of the battlefields and cemeteries of the First World War in France, she told the Queen all about what she had seen.

  Both the Queen and Prince Philip have always loved photography, and the Queen was famously filming an old rhino at the salt lick on her cine camera at Treetops in Kenya at almost the moment her father died. Philip had the latest and most professional still camera equipment and used to get very irritated with photographers when they were slow when shooting official portraits. Cecil Beaton was subject to many caustic comments during his sessions, and years later cockney photographer Terry O’Neill recalled Prince Philip’s brusqueness at the christening of Princess Eugenie at Sandringham. ‘Haven’t you taken enough?’ he kept asking. ‘I can’t believe anyone can take so long just to take a few boring photographs.’

  More recently Prince Philip was at a lunch at the RAC Club in Piccadilly after a fly-past to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Britain. The duke was in an official photograph together with the Duke of Cambridge, the Earl of Wessex and the Duke of Gloucester and six remaining veterans of the day. Becoming more and more agitated at the slowness of the photographer, he said, ‘Just take the f***ing picture.’ In the age of social media, the video footage of the moment went viral.

  Even in their old age, the Queen and Philip retain their separate interests. The Queen loves walking her dogs, playing patience and completing complicated jigsaw puzzles. She keeps her photograph albums up to date and is meticulous about writing her diary every night. Philip is just the opposite and gets frustrated when he is not doing something physical.

  Even he, however, has had to bow to advancing years. In 2011, he received treatment for a blocked coronary artery after he was taken to hospital suffering chest pains. He was fitted with a stent to keep the artery open, because of which he has had to give up shooting. It was considered that the recoil of a gun was too dangerous as it could dislodge the stent. Fly fishing for salmon and trout has since become Philip’s favourite pastime at Balmoral. Despite his age, he is still steady enough to stand in the river Dee and, together with a ghillie, can spend hours in the water, wearing chest-high protective waders, only breaking to join the Queen and guests for lunch or tea in one of the huts near the river. The Queen used to be a keen angler, having inherited her love of fishing from her mother, to whom, being a Scot, fishing was second nature, but she has not fished for several years.

  In 1962, Prince Philip published a book entitled Birds from Britannia. As a keen bird-watcher and more than competent photographer, the book was illustrated with photographs he had taken during his solo tour of Commonwealth countries. His interest in ornithology came about because of his friendship with Sir Peter Scott, the founder of the World Wildlife Fund. Scott was also a gliding fanatic and was British champion in 1956, so he was responsible for involving Prince Philip in gliding; the prince is still patron of the British Gliding Association.

  Philip is a skilled and experienced pilot of both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. He confessed that he would have rather joined the Royal Air Force than the navy if he had not had his arm twisted by Dickie Mountbatten. In an essay on test pilots, he wrote: ‘I have to confess I have frequently speculated whether I would like to have been a test pilot . . . I came to the conclusion that a test pilot has an impossible job.’

  Despite opposition from the government, particularly Winston Churchill, Philip started flying lessons in 1952. He learned to fly with the RAF at White Waltham and gained his RAF wings in 1953, his helicopter wings with the Royal Navy in 1956, and his Private Pilot’s Licence in 1959. Curiously, he was made an honorary pilot of both the Chilean and Colombian air forces in 1962. He didn’t give up flying until August 1997, by which time he had clocked up over 6000 hours as a pilot in 59 types of aircraft in 44 years. He was grand master of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators from 1952 until 2002. In his centenary address to the Royal Aeronautical Society, he said: ‘I find that aviation as a human activity has certain highly individual characteristics. It is as much an enthusiasm as a scientific, technological or commercial undertaking.’

  To this day, Philip uses helicopters as often as possible and wrote a tongue-in-cheek treatise on helicopters in which he said: ‘I make frequent use of helicopters and indeed I very much enjoy flying them myself but I have sadly come to the conclusion that the time has come to ban the helicopter.’ He goes on to state the unfair advantages that helicopter users enjoy, concluding: ‘If the disappearance of the helicopter is assured 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.’

  With much of his life having been taken up with sporting activities and a full diary of public engagements, it might be thought that Prince Philip had little time for any other pursuits, but he did and still does. His interest in art, both as a creator and collector, dates back decades to when he invited the artist Edward Seago to accompany him on Britannia for the Antarctic and later stages of his 1956–57 world tour. On the voyage, Seago gave Prince Philip some lessons in oil painting, adding to his skill as a water-colourist. Hanging in the royal collection is a painting by Seago of Philip at work on deck with his easel and brushes.

  Philip confesses to have given much of his work away but one painting remains in his personal collection. Painted in 1956, it is entitled ‘The Queen at Breakfast, Windsor Castle’. The painting gives an intimate and detailed view of the Queen in an off-duty moment, reading a newspaper. The breakfast table is covered with a crisp white tablecloth, the plates, cups and saucers are white china, and there is a loaf of bread with a jar of marmalade and another place set for Philip. On the walls are two horse paintings by renowned equestrian artist George Stubbs.

  Prince Philip’s taste in art certainly didn’t appeal to Prince Charles. When he arrived for part of his honeymoon in the summer of 1981 at Craigowan, a small house on the Balmoral estate, he found it had been decorated with the duke’s collection of modern pictures, including one of Prince Philip’s own efforts – a Balmoral scene. So back on the walls went the Highland scenery and paintings and sketches of Queen Victoria and her children. ‘That’s better,’ the prince said to his valet, Stephen Barry. ‘But no doubt Papa will swap them again at Christmas.’ He was right. The next time Prince Philip arrived at the house he made the footman change them all around again. And so it went on.

  As a patron of the arts, Prince Philip has added many contemporary British artists to the royal collections. He was instrumental in getting the Queen’s Gallery open at Buck
ingham Palace, where the public can view changing exhibitions from the Queen’s collection, with the admission fees going towards the palace upkeep. It might surprise some to learn that he is even a fan of Tracey Emin and has said he found her ‘interesting’ when he met her at the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate. The Queen apparently didn’t know who she was and asked her if she had ever ‘exhibited internationally as well as in Margate’.

  Philip enjoys telling a story to illustrate his art expertise. When he was first married to the princess, he was going through the labyrinth of cellars and dungeons at Windsor Castle when he came across a cellar room that obviously hadn’t been investigated for years. On the walls were two oil paintings covered in dirt, but with a distinguished familiarity. When he got them out into the daylight and dusted them down, he excitedly realised he had some original Stubbs in his possession. To this day, they hang in his study at Windsor, a reminder that if it hadn’t been for his artistic eye, they might never have been discovered and for ever forgotten.

  Having a keen eye for art, Prince Philip has also championed improving design in the commercial world. From its inception in 1959, the Prince Philip Designers Prize has celebrated how designers improve daily life by solving problems and turning ideas into commercial reality. Winners have included everything from household products to buildings and great feats of engineering. Having headed up the judging panel and presented the prize since its inception, in 2011 Philip stepped down from the prize as he reduced his royal responsibilities in his ninetieth year.

  Prince Philip’s high regard for pleasing design is equalled by his admiration for engineers. He has always said they performed such an essential function that it was hard to imagine life without them. He also claimed engineers held the key to the future of humanity and its ability to continue to thrive on the planet. As senior fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, he has criticised the lack of a Nobel Prize for engineering. The Prince Philip Medal for Engineering is awarded biennially to an engineer of any nationality who has made an exceptional contribution to engineering.