Why Philip’s outrageous friends horrified the Palace
None more so than his drunken, foul-mouthed, gargantuan sailing partner, reveals the wife of the Prince’s best pal
EILEEN PARKER was married to Prince Philip’s closest aide, Mike Parker, for 15 years. As a young couple, they socialised with newly married Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth, sharing suppers and theatre trips, as revealed in the first extract from her republished memoir in Saturday’s Mail. Today, Eileen, who is 95 and lives in a care home, charts the growing concern over Prince Philip’s private life away from the scrutiny of Palace officials. From the moment that he became equerry to Prince Philip, my husband, mike, took it upon himself to act as his employer’s unofficial court jester.
Both naval officers, the two of them had been friends since they served in the same flotilla during the war, and mike always had an eye open for the oddballs whom he knew would amuse the Prince.
Chief among them was Uffa Fox, a gross, rambling Falstaff of a man who was commonly acknowledged to be a boat designer of genius and regaled his friends with a vast store of nautical yarns and rude ditties.
I once heard him boast that during one day’s sailing he had sung for eight hours without repeating a single song. He was no less colourful a character on land, where his motto was ‘Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie’.
To this end, he kept a wheelchair in the kitchen of his home on the Isle of Wight and in this he would shuttle between the two ovens necessary to accommodate the huge joints of roast beef and thick steaks to which he treated his guests, all washed down with umpteen bottles of red wine.
I first got to know Uffa when Prince Philip raced a yacht during Cowes Week in the summer of 1948. I noticed how both he and mike appeared rejuvenated in his company, behaving more than ever like schoolboys.
one of their pranks was to hide a bulb operated motor-horn under a cushion. When an unsuspecting victim sat on it, there would be a loud and flatulent honking, greeted by gales of laughter.
The Prince’s love of what Princess Elizabeth called ‘Philip’s funny friends’ would later cause much tension between him and the ‘old guard’ in the royal Household.
However, on our return from Cowes that summer, there was a more pressing matter on everyone’s minds: the birth of the royal couple’s first child that November.
Earlier that year, the Prince’s excitement about the prospect of having children had been apparent when he came to lunch at our new flat in De Vere Gardens, just across the road from Kensington Palace. ALTHOUGH the new flat was a definite improvement on the poky accommodation we had been living in, there was still no proper dining room. Instead, we crouched at a sofa table in the front hall.
‘When you are more settled, I’ll come round and cook you a cheese souffle,’ Prince Philip said. ‘It’s my favourite dish, but impossible to enjoy at Buckingham Palace. By the time it gets from the kitchen to the dining table, it goes flat.’
Prince Philip did have a cheese souffle on a later occasion, but who cooked it escapes my memory. I do remember that he had a particular interest in cooking, and when he moved into Buckingham Palace after the King’s death he had a kitchen installed in the private apartments.
It included every type of equipment for even the most sophisticated culinary experiments. He used to cook exotic dishes with many improvisations. According to mike, there was hardly a dish Prince Philip would not sample when they were on tour.
He was happy and relaxed that day, helping our three-year- old son, michael, use his spoon during the meal and showing much curiosity about the perversities of young children.
‘It must be an extra source of fun in life,’ he said of parenthood. THE moment the royal midwife called the gynaecologist to say Princess Elizabeth had gone into labour at Buckingham Palace, Prince Philip was also summoned and, like all fathers-to-be, became increasingly restive as he joined the King and Queen to await the announcement of the birth.
To relieve the tension, mike suggested a game of squash before cooling off in the palace swimming pool, and they were just drying themselves when a footman came running with the news that the Princess had given birth.
Their hair still wet, they both rushed up to the drawing-room where the proud grandparents were receiving the congratulations of a happy Household.
With his usual foresight, mike had arranged a supply of champagne and handed round the glasses while Prince Philip went in to see his wife and the new arrival, Prince Charles.
By the time Princess Elizabeth had come round fully from the anaesthetic, mike had a huge bouquet of roses and carnations ready for Prince Philip to give to her.
our daughter, Julie, was born a month later, on December 16 and, in due course, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip came to De Vere Gardens to see her.
our flat was at the very top of the block. The lift didn’t go all the way, even when it was working properly, and to reach us a further flight of stairs had to be climbed.
Answering the door, I found the Princess short of breath — ‘I never thought I’d get here,’ she gasped.
mike and I had deliberately kept Julie awake for her royal visitors. The Princess took her in her arms, saying all the nice things mothers love to hear about their babies.
We had so much of mutual interest to talk about that evening, and I particularly recall her asking if I had kept any of baby mike’s
clothes for Julie. She explained that she had been using some hand- me- downs for Prince Charles, including the very pram which had been used 22 years ago for herself.
While we were sipping our sherry, the royal couple’s detective and chauffeur were in the kitchen drinking beer with our nanny, Maisie.
Needless to say, she could barely wait for our guests to leave so that she could sit down and write to her family in Ireland. WITH a son and heir to raise, the Princess and Prince Philip were eager to move out of Buckingham Palace and into a home of their own, and in July 1949 they took up residence in Clarence house, newly refurbished according to their very specific requirements.
For example, Prince Philip made quite a point of getting the lighting in the kitchen to be the same as that in the dining room — ‘If they’re different, the chef would be preparing food that might have a completely different complexion once it was placed on the table!’
the move to Clarence house gave Prince Philip more freedom to run his private life as he wanted. While he was respectful towards the King and formed a close understanding with his motherin-law, Queen Elizabeth, he bridled at the Royal household’s proprietorial attitude towards the Crown and its seeming resistance to new ways of doing things.
For their part, senior Buckingham Palace officials were worried he might get involved with the wrong sort of people, not least photographer ‘Bill’ Baron, a leading member of the ‘funny friends’ with whom Prince Philip enjoyed regular ‘thursday Club’ lunches at Wheeler’s Restaurant in Soho.
Baron was not known as a model of propriety in the gossip columns, nor in the drawing rooms of Mayfair and Belgravia. And this apparent determination by Prince Philip to socialise with such characters and enjoy speeches, pranks and jokes reminiscent of his bachelor days remained a cause for concern, with matters not helped by the scrapes in which he and Mike often found themselves.
Once, when they had been locked out at night, they had to scramble over the gates. ‘Serves them right!’ commented Princess Elizabeth when she heard about it.
On another occasion, one of Mike’s pranks literally blew up in his face.
Carol Reed, the film director, had just completed a film called Outcast Of the Islands and had presented Mike with a model cannon used in the production. Intrigued by the explosive possibilities of this new toy, Mike and Prince Philip placed the cannon on the desk and stuffed strips of paper down the barrel.
the next time the door opened, Princess Elizabeth walked straight into a shower of confetti. FOLLOWING the move to Clarence house, the Royal Family spent the summer holidays of 1949 at Balmoral, as was traditional, and Mike and I were invited up one weekend with other guests from the Royal household.
On arrival, I found our bags unpacked and our evening wear neatly laid out. But something seemed to be missing — my nightgown of sheer nylon.
When I eventually found it, I discovered a large scorch right through the middle. Nylon was a new material at that time and the Princess’s dresser, Bobo MacDonald, later explained that she had tried to iron it.
Bobo was clearly not familiar with such new-fangled man-made fabrics, which could perhaps be forgiven at Balmoral, a place where even Princess Elizabeth’s feeding of her corgis took on the air of old-fashioned ritual.
I watched fascinated as she carefully mixed the ingredients on a silver tray provided by a footman. With a silver spoon she dished the mixture into bowls, arranged on a mat laid over the carpet.
By the end of the weekend, I had come to understand more clearly why Balmoral was one of the favourite retreats of the Royal Family. the work of the Crown went on each day, but in the background, the constraints of duty were balanced by the precious freedom simply to be themselves.
the next time I saw Princess Elizabeth as relaxed was in the spring of 1950, when she travelled to Malta to be near Prince Philip, who had returned to sea as second in command of the destroyer HMS Chequers, then based in the Mediterranean.
Bobo, as usual, accompanied her together with her two favourite footmen, Pearce and Bennett, one of whom would stand behind the Princess’s chair at meal times.
Apart from this small household the Princess came the nearest she had ever been to living a normal life. As the wife of a naval officer on a foreign posting, she went to the same shops and hairdresser as all the other naval wives, and attended the same dances and parties within Malta’s Naval society, where she and Prince Philip were known as ‘the Edinburghs’.
he, too, flourished. later that summer he was promoted to lieutenant-Commander and given his first command, the frigate HMS Magpie.
But in July 1951, barely a year after being piped aboard, he had to leave active service.
the King was ill. A bout of flu he had contracted in May had not cleared up and the royal tour of Canada he had been due to undertake would have to go ahead with Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip instead.
For the whole Royal Family and household — Mike and me included — life was about to change for good.