The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
A lesson for Prince Harry about duty?
The Queen’s cousin, the self-effacing Duke of Kent, is the first royal to publish a memoir about her reign
A ROYAL LIFE by HRH The Duke of Kent & Hugo Vickers 336pp, Hodder & Stoughton, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £12.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
When the Duke of Kent was christened in 1935, hundreds of people flocked to watch the baby coming out of his parents’ house in Belgrave Square, London. He was the son of the glamorous royal couple Prince George Duke of Kent (a younger brother of Edward VIII and George VI) and Princess Marina, a granddaughter of the King of Greece. As an infant, his pram was pushed by a liveried footman and followed by a detective.
The Duke of Kent has devoted his life to serving the Queen. He is her first cousin, a Knight of the Garter, the senior Freemason, and stands 12th in the order of precedence. Now 86, he can walk down Kensington High Street and nobody will recognise him.
His decision to publish a memoir comes as a surprise. Very few royals have written autobiographies in the present reign, and those who have – Princess Mary Louise, Princess
Alice, Countess of Athlone, and Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester – were concerned with previous reigns. No royal has published a memoir of the Queen’s reign.
The Duke is far too discreet to say this, but it’s hard not to read his memoir as an implicit reproach to Prince Harry, who has his own book coming out later this year. The Duke’s example of a royal life dedicated to self-effacing service stands in stark contrast to Harry’s career as a celebrity prince.
This book began as a lockdown project – a series of Zoom conversations between the Duke and his co-author, the royal expert Hugo Vickers. It consists of extracts from interviews with the Duke and his family, which Vickers has pulled together with a commentary. It’s a good way of writing a memoir, and a pleasure to read.
The Duke of Kent is “thoroughly royal” on both sides of his family. His mother, Princess Marina, was a first cousin of Prince Philip. He has so many cousins that he admits to getting “hopelessly confused” whether they are Greek or Russian or Serbian. The Duke grew up at Coppins, his parents’ home near Windsor, but his idyllic childhood was overshadowed by the war and the death of his father Prince George in an air crash in 1942. He was only six when his father was killed: “The sad thing is I can only remember isolated moments – he was away so much because of the war.” Prince George was a fascinating figure, a cultivated playboy prince who had a string of unsuitable affairs. The contrast between father and son could hardly be greater.
Princess Marina was left to bring up her three children on her own. “It was difficult for my mother,” says the Duke. “She really didn’t have many friends in England.” She was close to her relations and especially her two sisters, one of whom was married to a German count and lived in Germany during the war, while her other sister, Olga, the wife of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, was in exile in South Africa.
“We were too young to be aware,” recalls the Duke, “but what these people must have gone through, divided families and so on. It must have been terribly difficult.” Later, the three sisters came to be known as the Fabergé aunts. They would collapse into fits of helpless laughter at slapstick jokes, and were gifted mimics. Marina was effortlessly chic, and other royals seemed chunky and homespun by contrast.
Coppins was “the cosiest house possible” according to the Duke’s brother, Prince Michael, but after the war money was tight. Marina didn’t receive a war widow’s pension. The Duke suggests that Tommy Lascelles, the King’s private secretary, “maybe felt it would look bad for a member of the Royal family”. To pay the bills, Princess Marina “had to sell a lot of my father’s collection at Christie’s in 1947”. Eventually Marina was given a provision on the civil list.
The Duke was sent to prep school at Ludgrove. He recalls being “very much bullied. I had no father, which didn’t help, and I was no good at cricket or football, which were the two principal things that mattered there.” After three years at Eton, where his studies were cut short by health problems, he enrolled at Le Rosey in Switzerland, becoming a proficient skier.
The army was the obvious career choice for a duke, and he was sent
to Sandhurst. The author Alan Mallinson, who later chaired the selection boards for entry, looked up the Duke’s notes at the Royal Military Academy and found that in the psychometric tests (assessing innate intelligence rather than educational attainment) the Duke scored exceptionally highly, in spite of his selfeffacing manner.
He was the leading deb’s delight of his day, known as Fast Eddie and famed for his driving – he survived three dreadful car crashes. His daughter, Lady Helen Taylor, says it is still “just his greatest joy, peering under the bonnet of a car, inhaling the fumes”. In 1961 he married Katharine Worsley, the daughter of a Yorkshire baronet.
He stayed in the army for a time, occasionally undertaking functions for the Queen. The monarch never attends independence ceremonies, and as the winds of change blew through the British empire, it was the Duke who flew out to countries such as Uganda and The Gambia to watch the lowering of the union flag. He recalls his 1962 visit to Uganda: “When I look back on YouTube, everyone seems so excited with a bright future ahead of them. It was tragic what happened.”
The Duke did well at Staff College, and was “one of our outstanding young officers”. But he was frustrated in Northern Ireland, where he was pulled out for fear that he might either be captured or forced to order his squadron to fire on a British citizen. He retired from the army in 1975, and was faced with the problem that “the Royal family don’t do proper jobs”.
He found unpaid work with the British Overseas Trade Board and has been president of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for 50 years. For a time, the lack of available members of the Royal family meant that the Duke and his mother and sister, Princess Alexandra, were needed to undertake royal duties, but when Prince Charles and Princess Anne grew up, there was less for the Kents to do.
Reading this memoir, I was reminded of George V, the Duke’s grandfather, another royal dedicated to doing his duty. The Duke has led a blameless life. There are no scandals in this book, or outside it. But this memoir is a timely reminder of the need for service.
As Vickers says, “the best members of the family are those who support the Queen and don’t compete with her”. The Duke agrees. “I always felt I wanted to support her. That’s by far the most important thing in life.”
‘I had no father, and I was no good at cricket or football. I was very much bullied’