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doesn’t take easily to compliments. But he has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim or that we shall ever know.”
Both great-greatgrandchildren of Queen Victoria and therefore distant cousins, the couple first met in 1934 at a family wedding when Elizabeth, then the Princess of York, was 8.
However, the dashing Greek prince really captured her heart in 1939 on a visit with her parents to the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, when she was 13.
Philip, then 18, sealed their friendship over ginger biscuits and lemonade, with the athletic naval officer impressing ‘Lilibet’ and her younger sister, Margaret, by jumping over a tennis net. From that day on, she decided he was the one and, as Philip served in World War II, they sent letters and met at Windsor Castle whenever he was on leave.
“Elizabeth was truly in love from the very beginning,” said her cousin, Margaret Rhodes, in her 2011 autobiography, The Final Curtsey.
In order to marry Elizabeth, Philip renounced his Greek title and was created Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich. He wasn’t officially made a British prince until 1957, five years after his wife took the throne.
After their wedding and the birth of Prince Charles in 1948, perhaps their happiest time followed as they spent two years living on and off in Malta while Philip was serving with the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet.
Despite not seeing much of their young son, who was left in London with nannies, the couple enjoyed a ‘normal’ life – walking along the seafront arm in arm, holding hands in the back row of a cinema and dashing around narrow lanes in an MG sports car.
Practical jokes and Philip’s sense of humour were never far away. During a 1951 tour of Canada, he chased his young wife through a train wearing a set of false teeth. And once when he returned from a naval operation, she greeted him wearing a false beard.
Through the decades of service they kept each other’s spirits up with laughter and infinite patience. As the Queen’s late private secretary, Lord Charteris, once said: “Prince Philip is the only man in the world who treats the Queen simply as another human being.”
That included being the butt of his humour, such as when the Queen fell backwards at a Christmas lunch at Sandringham after a servant accidentally pulled her chair away, leaving Philip in uproarious laughter.
In a 2012 TV interview, Prince William said of his grandparents: “They love it when things go wrong … because obviously everything always has to be right, but when things go wrong around them, they’re the first people to laugh.”
Prince Harry adds Prince Philip and the Queen were “a team … I don’t think that she could have done her job without him”.
This sentiment is shared by Philip’s friend and biographer, Gyles Brandreth, who says: “Theirs was an extraordinary partnership … For more than 70 years he did everything he could to safeguard her person and dignity. He hated to see her taken advantage of in any way.”