THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH, 1921 - 2021 to Buckingham Palace
‘There were plenty of people telling me what not to do. I had to support the Queen the best way I could’
“There were plenty of people telling me what not to do – ‘you mustn’t interfere with this’ and ‘keep out’. I had to try to support the Queen as best I could without getting in the way. The difficulty was to find things that might be useful.”
All of which neatly encapsulates the Duke’s life –both public and private – ever since.
There were some high up in the royal coterie who hoped and assumed that the prince would surrender to life as a relatively low-key appendage to the monarch, dutifully attending official engagements but otherwise spending more time on the polo pitch than the public stage.
Of course, this essentially restless, intellectually curious man was going to do nothing of the sort.
It is unhelpful to the caricature of Prince Philip as an unwavering but pugnacious consort (a title which was never formally bestowed upon him) whose chief talent was a dizzying facility in off-colour one-liners that he was widely read and probably the cleverest member of his family.
His private library at Windsor consists of 11,000 tomes, among them 200 volumes of poetry. He was a fan of Jung, TS Eliot, Shakespeare and the cookery writer Elizabeth David. As well as a lifelong fascination with science, technology and sport, he spoke fairly fluent French, painted and wrote a book on birds.
As president of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the UK for more than 20 years from 1961, he was one of the first high-profile advocates of the cause of conservation and biological
diversity at a time when it was considered the preserve of an eccentric few.
Similarly, when he first outlined his idea of a scheme to harness the values of his education at Gordonstoun by bringing character-building outdoor pursuits to the many rather than the fee-paying few, he received short shrift from the government of the day.
The then minister of education, Sir David Eccles responded to the Duke’s proposal by saying: “I hear you’re trying to invent something like the Hitler Youth.”
Some 65 years later, the Duke of Edinburgh awards have been bestowed upon some 2.5m youngsters in Britain and some eight million worldwide. Indeed, the “Dofe” is likely to be Prince Philip’s most enduring legacy.
For a man who once referred to himself as a “Greek princeling of no consequence”, his pioneering tutelage of these two organisations (alongside some 778 other organisations of which he was either president or a patron) would be sufficient legacy for most.
It should also be noted that it was the Duke, who understandably relished his role as a new broom once he had gained the necessary leverage over senior royal aides, who modernised the running of the residences – installing dishwashers and intercoms in Buckingham Palace and putting the Sandringham and Balmoral estates on a sustainable footing.
But when asked, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, what he was more proud of, he replied with characteristic bluntness: “I couldn’t care less.
Who cares what I think about it, I mean it’s ridiculous.”
All of which neatly raises the profound aversion to fuss and the proclivity for tetchiness often expressed in withering putdowns that, for better or worse, will be the reflex memory of the Duke of Edinburgh.
The bulging compendium of his epithets ranges from gaffes that showed him to be a man of his often misogynistic, by times casually racist era to paintstripping rudeness.
A former royal protection officer recounts how while on night duty guarding a visiting Queen and consort, he engaged in conversation with colleagues on a passing patrol.
It was 2am and the officer had understood the royal couple to be staying elsewhere in
The Duke of Edinburgh on having to play a secondary role
the building until a window above his head was abruptly slammed open and an irate Prince Philip stuck his head out of the window to shout: “Would you **** off!” Without another word, he then shut the window.
On another occasion, a Glasgow councillor who asked the Duke how his flight had been as he arrived at the city’s airport received the counter-question: “Have you ever flown in a plane?”
When the flustered official replied “Oh, yes, sir, many times”, Philip shot back: “Well, it was just like that.”
The Duke at least recognised from an early age that he was possessed of an abruptness that could all too easily cross the line from the refreshingly salty to crass effrontery.
One of his most perceptive biographers, Philip Eade, recounted how at the age of
‘I’m rude and unmannerly and say things out of turn’
The Duke on his very distinctive behaviour
21 the prince wrote a letter to a relation whose son had recently been killed in combat. He wrote: “I know you will never think much of me. I am rude and unmannerly and I say things out of turn which I realise afterwards must have hurt someone.
“Then I am filled with remorse and I try to put matters right.”
In the case of the royal protection officer, the Duke turned up in the room used by the police officers when off duty and said: “Terribly sorry about last night, wasn’t quite feeling myself.”
Aides have also ventured to explain away some of their employer’s more outlandish remarks – from asking Cayman islanders “You are descended from pirates aren’t you?” to enquiring of a female fashion writer if she was wearing mink knickers” – as the price of his instinctive desire to prick the pomposity of his presence with a quip to put others at ease.
When he first expressed a desire to retire on his 90th birthday in 2011, the Duke told the BBC that among the attractions of withdrawing from public life was “less trying to think of something to say”.
But behind the irascibility, some have argued there also
lay a darker bullying nature, unpleasantly distilled in his attitude to his eldest son.
One anecdote tells of how, in the aftermath of the murder of the Duke’s uncle and surrogate father, Lord Mountbatten, Philip lectured his son, who was also extremely fond of his “honorary grandfather,” that he was not to succumb to self-pity.
Charles left the room in tears and when his father was asked why he had spoken to his son with so little compassion, the Duke replied: “Because if there’s any crying to be done I want it to happen within this house, in front of his family, not in public. He must be toughened up, right now.”
Such bombast should be taken at face value. There could be a brutality to the conduct of Prince Philip and, for those who knew him, its roots
lay in his disjointed, somewhat unloving childhood.
The loss of his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, to a breakdown subsequently diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia, and the inability of his father, Prince Andrew of Greece, to cope with both that and the violent ejection of his family from the country they sought to rule, left Prince Philip with the survivor’s instinct that shows of emotion achieved nothing and were thereby best avoided.
As one of those who had known him since his childhood, Lady Georgina Kennard, once put it: “He had no home to go to, nobody to kiss him good night, nobody to help him pack his trunk, nobody much to go see him when he was at school.
“He never whinged, but it must have been awful not to have love.”
The progress of a long and relentlessly active life seems to
have had the effect of smoothing some of those edges.
When it was reported that the Duke had described his son as “precious, extravagant and lacking in the dedication and discipline he will need if he is going to make a good king”, Palace aides strenuously denied he had said anything of the sort and, despite his hard-knocks parenting style, he was capable of showing compassion to others.
Most notably, his counsel to Princess Diana during the break up of her marriage showed significantly more empathy than she received from elsewhere in the royal family.
His former aide said: “The Duke has never lacked confidence, nor determination, nor courage. What he has acquired is a tolerance and kindness that probably was never shown to him and which he never sought.
His legacy is his support not only to his wife but also as the
mainstay of his family and, in his way, the country. He built his ‘home’ rather than had it given to him.”
In 1937, a 16-year-old Prince Philip had walked behind his elder sister Cecile’s coffin after she was killed in a plane crash while heavily pregnant.
The remains of newly-born infant found in the wreckage suggested the aircraft had perished as the pilot sought to make an emergency landing in fog as the mother entered childbirth.
It was an excruciating taste of tragedy which would one day manifest itself in a very princely form of kindness.
Some 60 years later, the Duke stepped in to counsel his grandson, Prince William, after he had expressed a reluctance to follow his mother’s coffin after her death in Paris.
Philip told the grieving child: “If you don’t walk, I think you’ll regret it later. If I walk, will you walk with me?”