‘I KNOW I AM RUDE ... BUT IT’S FUN!’
REMEMBERING THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH’S WICKED SENSE OF HUMOUR
Although Prince Philip published a number of books, he never planned to write an autobiography. ‘I don’t spend a lot of time looking back,’ he said in an interview on his ninetieth birthday. Consequently, we must build a portrait of him from what he says about himself. ‘I know I am rude,’ he once said. ‘But it’s fun.’
It was Prince Philip’s father-in-law, George VI, who said that the House of Windsor was not a family but a firm. This is a tradition that Philip proudly maintains.
It seems, nonetheless, that he the prince is just as outspoken behind closed doors as he is on the public rostrum. The Queen Mother once asked an official court photographer: ‘And how did you find my sonin-law? Difficult, isn’t he?’
However, he is not a man without sentiment. Recalling meeting his future wife in 1939 when she was thirteen, he said years later: ‘You were so shy. I couldn’t get a word out of you.’ That shyness hasn’t lasted. According to the Queen’s former private secretary, Lord Charteris: ‘It is not unknown for the Queen to tell the duke to shut up.’
Hours before marrying the princess, Prince Philip asked a friend: ‘Am I being very brave or very foolish?’
Reunited with the Queen at the door of Westminster Abbey at the end of the coronation, he observed her crown and asked: ‘Where did you get that hat?’
Since the coronation, Prince Philip has spent his life living in the shadow of someone much more revered – the Queen. Rarely does he meet anyone sympathetic to his plight. But once he was visiting a university in Australia where he was introduced to a couple identified as ‘Mr & Dr Robinson’. The husband explained: ‘My wife is a doctor of philosophy and much more important than I am.’ Philip replied: ‘Ah yes, we have that trouble in our family, too.’
In public, the prince has never shown the Queen up. However, according to Daily Telegraph photographer Ian Jones, once – in Belize City – they were going back to the Royal Yacht Britannia and the Queen stopped, chatting on the jetty. ‘The Prince stood on the boat and shouted: “Yak, yak, yak, come on, get a move on.” He suddenly sounded like any other husband teasing the missus,’ said Jones.
Although the photographer had followed the royal couple for ten years, at a royal reception at the end of a three-week tour around the Caribbean, the prince enquired: ‘Do you live locally?’ Correcting his mistake, the Queen said: ‘He isn’t wearing his cameras tonight.’
Philip, when allowed out on his own though, is entertaining. In Canberra in 1956, he said: ‘May I say right away how delighted I am to be back in Australia. The Queen and
I have not forgotten the wonderful time we had here three years ago. She had to stay at home this time because I’m afraid she is not quite as free as I am to do as she pleases.’
In 1960, he was at the opening of a British exhibition in New York, where he explained that he had to curtail his trip to be back in London to attend Trooping the Colour, which occurs each year on the monarch’s official birthday. ‘Don’t ask me to explain why it is that she had an official birthday in June, when her proper birthday is in April. You’ll just have to accept it like cricket, pounds, shillings and pence and other quaint, but quite practical, British customs.’ If the monarch’s consort can’t explain it, what hope have the rest of us got?
When Prince Philip introduced royal biographer
Gyles Brandreth to the Queen, he told her that Brandreth was writing about her. Then the prince leant forward and said: ‘Be warned, he’s going to cut you to pieces.’ After fifty years of marriage, he said with typical understatement: ‘You can take it from me, the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance.’ Ten years later, he said: ‘It’s the secret of a happy marriage to have different interests.’
On being a father, he said: ‘As a parent, you can either try to compete with your children or you can feel proud of them. I’ve opted for the latter.’
Of the Prince of Wales, he said: ‘He’s a romantic, and I’m a pragmatist. That means we do see things differently.’ After a reflective pause, he continued: ‘And because I don’t see things as a romantic would, I’m unfeeling.’
Maybe Prince Philip was closer to his daughter. In 1970, he said of the twenty-year-old Princess Anne: ‘If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, she isn’t interested.’
Prince Philip was worried that, by marrying commoners, the royal family might become ‘too ordinary’. However, he was happy that they mixed with people of all social classes.
On the announcement of Prince Andrew’s engagement to Sarah Ferguson in 1986, the Duke of Edinburgh said: ‘I’m delighted he’s getting married, but not because I think it will keep him out of trouble because, in fact, he’s never been in trouble in the sense the popular press would have it.’ (There was that business
“THE PRINCE IS OUTSPOKEN ... HOWEVER, HE IS NOT A MAN WITHOUT SENTIMENT”
with soft-porn star, Koo Stark.)
When Prince Edward was accepted into Jesus College Cambridge, despite only obtaining a C and two Ds at A-level, his father quipped: ‘What a friend we have in Jesus.’
When comedian Aaron Barschak gate-crashed Prince William’s twenty-first birthday party at Windsor Castle wearing a pink dress, false beard and a turban like that worn by Osama bin Laden, Prince Edward was the only one of the senior royals not present. After Barschak had stormed the stage and got himself arrested, Philip told guests that Edward must have been behind the stunt. ‘It’s bound to have been Edward,’ he said. ‘Only the boy could have coached such a rotten performance out of someone.’