The Peterborough Evening Telegraph
From ‘no fixed abode’ t
Wandering prince who became head of the world’s most celebrated family
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten led something of a wandering existence. Shuttling between his Royal Navy duties and a camp bed in his uncle’s London home in 1946, he would write in visitor books: “Of no fixed abode.”
The gag reflected a profound rootlessness in the life of the dashing young naval officer who at the time was putting the finishing touches to his wooing of Princess Elizabeth, the woman he would marry within a year and to whom he would surrender his ambitions to support her reign.
From the age of nine, Philippos Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, as he was born, had been lodged with relatives and various boarding schools in Britain and Germany after his mother suffered a comprehensive nervous breakdown and his father absented himself to the Cote d’Azur.
With a flash of the flinty stoicism that many would later interpret, with no little justification, as self-reliance to the point of dispassion, the prince explained: “It’s simply what happened. The family broke up … I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.”
When once asked what language his family had spoken at home, the prince who was born in Corfu and raised in a shifting succession of palaces and dormitories across Europe, replied: “What do you mean ‘at home’?”
Yet by the time of his death, just three years and eight months after he had announced his retirement from public life at the age of 96 in the spring of 2017, Britain’s longestserving consort had achieved something diametrically opposed to this instability.
The once wandering prince, avowedly more at home in the Royal Navy than anywhere else, had established himself in the British psyche as a form of national pater familias – the steadfast, irascible but no less necessary adjunct to the continuity and stability represented by his wife.
A former senior member of the royal household, who spent several years working as one of his aides, said: “The Duke of Edinburgh was undoubtedly given a sense of permanence by his marriage into the Royal Family that was missing from earlier years.
“He, of course, would never see it that way. His attitude was never to brood on things or seek excuses. And he did indeed get on with the job in his own way. There should be no doubt that when it came to building and strengthening the Royal Family it was a partnership of equals with the Queen.”
If that was what emerged, it was an equality that was far from immediately evident.
The Danish-German prince (with a claim to the Greek throne) who had won the heart and hand of the next British sovereign when their engagement was announced in 1947 had had to overcome stiff opposition among the serried ranks of the House of Windsor and its most senior courtiers before the marriage – and his presumption that he would play an active role within it – could be realised.
Sir Alan Lascelles, the private secretary to George VI (and then later the Queen herself ), parsed the fears of many about Prince Philip in Buckingham Palace, saying: “They felt he was rough, uneducated, and probably would not be faithful.”
There were mutterings that Philip’s suitability was undermined by the fact he had not been educated at Eton, instead attending the decidedly alternative (by royal standards) Gordonstoun, run by a German exile whose philosophy of rigorously invigorating both body and mind was viewed with suspicion.
Were Philip in any doubt about the amount of influence that the royal establishment was prepared to let him have, a clear signal was laid down following the birth of Prince
‘They felt he was rough, uneducated and probably would not be faithful’ Sir Alan Lascalles, private secretary to George VI
Charles in 1948 after his father expressed a desire for him to bear his surname of Mountbatten.
Among those to forcibly veto such a notion (Philip himself had only taken the name relatively recently in an attempt to distance himself from the German side of his heritage) was Winston Churchill.
Philip did not take the rejection lightly. According to the most often repeated version of his response, he said: “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children. I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.”
According to the less sanitised version of events, what the prince really said was that, with a lacing of expletives, he was of the opinion that all the House of Windsor really wanted from him was his sperm.
Whether this outburst was drawn from a genuine sense of emasculation or simple frustration at the protective bubble of statehood that was drawn around his wife, in particular after her father’s premature death in 1952, is unclear.
What is certain is that the two decades of married life which Philip had, not unreasonably, calculated would lapse before if it was likely his wife would ascend to the throne – thereby leaving him a significant period in which to pursue his Royal Navy career – was dramatically curtailed.
After his wedding in November 1947, the newly-entitled 26-year-old Duke of Edinburgh, who had helpfully renounced his Greek and Danish hereditary titles in return for a triumvirate of British ones that included Baron of Greenwich, moved to Malta with his wife. For a short but glorious period the couple led a relatively normal life with Mrs Windsor popping to the local hairdresser for a shampoo and set.
The death of George VI, which the Duke broke to his wife while they were on safari in Kenya, brought such liberty to a juddering halt and while the young Queen began the steep learning curve of coping with her duties as sovereign, her husband began the equally testing role of defining his own role after finding himself unceremoniously dethroned as the authoritative figure in his marriage.
He once explained: “I suppose I naturally fitted the principal role. People used to come to me and ask me what to do. In 1952, the whole thing changed very, very considerably.