GROWING UP TO UGH IN HEARTBREAKING TIMES
HOW PHILIP TRIUMPHED OVER CHILDHOOD TRAGEDY
Philippos Schles wig Glücks burg was the youngest of five children, and the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg. Although his mother was a great-grand-daughter of Queen Victoria who’d been born at Windsor Castle, his upbringing did not give him the kind of background considered appropriate for the consort of a monarch.
When he was 18 months old, his family was forced into exile in France following a military coup in Greece and by the time he was 12, he was pretty much on his own. His mother, who was profoundly deaf, ended up in a Swiss asylum after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and his playboy father spent his time travelling around Europe with a mistress. His four older sisters married German princes (three of whom would later have Nazi connections) and one of them enrolled young Philip in a Nazi-run school.
After a year, his British relatives on his mother’s side of the family stepped in and whisked him off to England.
His surname was changed to
Mountbatten (the anglicised version of Battenberg) and he was sent to the tough Gordonstoun boarding school in Scotland.
His teenage years were no easier. He saw little of his father and nothing of his mother, and after Hitler came to power, it was difficult for him to visit his sisters in Germany. In 1937, his sister Cecilie, to whom he was closest, was killed – along with her husband and two children – in a plane crash. The following year his uncle George Mountbatten, Lord Milford Haven, who was his guardian, died of cancer.
Philip once spoke about that time, showing the typically
‘stiff upper lip’ attitude that characterised him for all of his life. “The family broke up,” he said. “My mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the South of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.”
When he left school, he became a cadet at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, which is where he met his wife-to-be. In fact, their paths had crossed twice before, at a wedding and the coronation of Elizabeth’s father King George VI in 1937, but on those occasions, they had paid no attention to each other.
‘The family broke up. My mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the South of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does’