The Queen - Ben Pimlott

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immersed himself in the writing of a book appropriately called Towards Disaster, about the military endeavours, and their failure, for which he had stood trial. His wife, with five children to care for, suffered a nervous breakdown, and turned to religion. The couple separated in 1930, Andrew eventually moving to Monte Carlo, where he died in December 1944.

      Against this troubled background, Philip began a cultural shift. Later, there was the question of whether ‘Philip the Greek’ was ever Greek at all; although born a Greek citizen, the son of a Greek prince, there were no ‘ethnic’ Greeks in his recent ancestry. In some ways this helped, but it also laid him open to a more damning charge. The description of him as a ‘blond Viking’, partly on the basis of his Danish ancestry, became a way of avoiding the fact, embarrassing in the 1940s, that his strongest family links were with Germany. All his four sisters married Germans and reverted to a German identity.

      Until Philip was adult, he really belonged to no nation, except the freemasonry of Romanov, Habsburg and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha descendants, which conferred an entry ticket to the great houses and palaces of Europe. It was the benign interest of his mother’s relatives, and perhaps a family appreciation that England was the most hopeful place for an uprooted royal to seek his fortune, that pushed him in a British direction. From early childhood, there were frequent English trips, especially to see Philip’s Battenberg grandmother, the Marchioness of Milford Haven, herself the eldest grandchild of Queen Victoria and sister of the last Tsarina. Sophie (‘Tiny’), youngest of Philip’s sisters, recalls annual visits by the children to the Marchioness in the 1920s. She remembers sunbathing on the roof at Kensington Palace, where the old lady had an apartment, meetings with members of the British Royal Family, and most influential of all, being regaled with stories of their Europe-wide connections, which contrasted so dramatically with the life they lived in St. Cloud. These expeditions served as a reminder, and a tonic: if the children had any doubt about their social standing, the Marchioness removed them.

      At about the time of his parents’ separation, Philip left the American school in St. Cloud at which he had been a pupil, and was sent to Cheam, an English preparatory establishment in Surrey; and from there to Salem, in Baden, a school owned by one of his German brothers-in-law and run by the legendary Kurt Hahn. But for Hitler, the rest of his education might have been German. In 1934, however, Hahn moved to Scotland to escape the Nazis, setting up a new school, Gordonstoun. Philip became a pupil and, as a result, in the words of the Countess of Airlie, was ‘brought up to all intents and purposes an Englishman,’27 except that few Englishmen ever had to suffer the rigours and eccentricities of the Hahn–Gordonstoun form of educational progressiveness.

      ‘I don’t think anybody thinks I had a father,’ Philip allegedly once complained. ‘Most people think that Dickie’s my father anyway.’28 Philip had been much affected by the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, and retained a great sympathy for Prince Andrew. ‘He really loved his father,’ says one close associate. ‘He had a big image of him which persisted, and his death was a great shock to him.’29 After 1930, however, he saw much more of his mother, Princess Alice, and was closer to her, despite all her difficulties – which were extreme. In addition to the psychological problems which developed during Philip’s childhood, she was congenitally deaf. Later, she used to say that she could not communicate with her children until they were old enough to speak, when she became able to read their lips.30 But the presentation of her as a demented recluse was false. Friends recall her, except when ill, as forceful, intelligent and amusing. Despite her marital and other difficulties, she was responsible for translating her husband’s book from Greek into English. Conceivably, as one friend of Philip puts it, her eventual decision to found a Greek Orthodox monastic order, and become a nun in it, ‘was a very clever solution to the problem of how she fitted into the world,’ as an elderly royal widow without money, but with an interest in good causes.31

      Nevertheless, Philip’s early life, with an absent father and often psychologically absent mother, was by any standards disturbed and unstable. Much of it, especially when his mother had to go into a sanatorium, was spent migrating between schools and foster-homes provided by relatives. There was a confusion: uncertainty, neglect, and the feeling of being special mixed together. The only son, as well as the youngest child, Philip was a particular focus of family attention, especially to his four sisters who adored, petted and mothered him. However, within the space of a few months in 1931–2 all of them solved the problem of a disintegrating home by marrying German princes, scattering what was left of his family across Europe.

      There were fixed points: Salem, for summer holidays, was one. When Philip was at school in Britain, his Uncle George, Marquess of Milford Haven and son of the dowager Marchioness, provided another, becoming his guardian in school vacations, and helping with fees. Although George was his main benefactor, Philip was also a frequent visitor at the house of his other uncle, Lord Mountbatten. ‘He was around with us a lot from about 1934,’ says Patricia.32 Another refuge was Gordonstoun where Philip became a model pupil – athletic, outgoing, enterprising, effortlessly displaying precisely those attributes which it had been Hahn’s vision to produce.

      Yet the standard portrayal of Philip in his teens as a kind of Boys’ Own Paper hero misses something out. There was a picaresque quality, the sense of the adventurer who lives by his wits, and for whom what one early writer called ‘the lean upbringing of expatriate royalty,’33 had provided as keen a training as any continental theory. Philip’s cousin Alexandra, Queen of Yugoslavia (and a fellow expatriate), recalled him on holiday with her family in Venice, a year before the Dartmouth meeting, as a genial sponger, living in a style not uncommon among displaced princelings, and giving the impression of ‘a huge hungry dog, perhaps a friendly collie who had never had a basket of his own’.34

      The summer of 1938 was an especially waif-like moment. George Milford Haven had died the previous April, leaving Prince Philip, as Philip Ziegler puts it, ‘stateless, nameless and not far from penniless’35 and particularly in need of open-handed friends. Luckily, more substantial help was available. The death of one benefactor cleared the way for another, of incomparably greater influence. Observing Philip’s predicament, George’s younger brother Louis – ‘Uncle Dickie’ – stepped in, and took over what remained of the job of bringing his nephew up. It was a generous undertaking, but also, in view of the young man’s obvious talents, a well judged one. Lord Mountbatten was a prominent naval officer and it had, in any case, already been planned that the best place for a déraciné young prince with a taste for travel, and no home base, was the British Navy. Hence, on 1 May 1939, Philip joined Dartmouth College as a Special Entry Cadet.

      When Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth met in July, he was an unknown young man barely two months into training. What did he make of his world-famous distant cousin, with her home in Buckingham Palace? Did he distinguish between the celebrity and the child-like person? It would be surprising if she did not have an impact, because of who she was: but it would also be surprising if, at this stage, Philip’s interest was romantic. Handsome and confident eighteen-year-old young men are not often greatly attracted by thirteen-year-old little girls scarcely out of short socks. According to Queen Alexandra, the previous summer the Greek prince had shown himself a girl-crazy party-goer on the Venetian social scene. ‘Blondes, brunettes and red head charmers,’ she recalled, ‘Philip gallantly and I think quite impartially squired them all.’36 Hélène Cordet, a cabaret singer who had been a childhood friend (and who was later dubbed by the French press as ‘the mystery blonde’ and ‘the one who will not be invited to the wedding’) had a similar view of him.37 Other accounts also show him as a happy-go-lucky enjoyer of female company, and player of the field. Yet Princess Elizabeth was pretty, royal, and obviously a catch. The thoughts that must have passed through his uncle’s mind, may also have passed through his own. At the time, however, there were other pressing things to consider. War was imminent, with everything that such a prospect offered to a prize-winning naval cadet, with excellent connections.

      If the British Royal Family had a good war, Philip in a more conventional sense, had a highly distinguished one. After a period of escorting contingents of troops from Australia to the Middle East, he was involved in several engagements in the Mediterranean. During the battle

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