Memorable times for duke and me
THE duke and I went back over 60 years. We first met in that sweltering summer of 1954, when he visited with his good lady wife. I glimpsed him first from my vantage point on a beer crate as the young couple tripped along towards a civic reception at Timaru’s Ashbury Park.
That brief encounter might have been longer had I managed to turn up at the right time and thus have gained admittance to the enclosure where school kids waited to be inspected by Her Majesty.
Instead, I was simply left with a faint image of a man who seemed to be always a step behind his wife, which was in the 1950s an unusual occurrence but was a policy I pursued in later life during my own series of successful marriages.
Of course, in my childish innocence I envied the man. Good looking wife, lots of travel, food and drink in abundance, lackeys to clean your shoes and no homework to do.
Later, I realised that the man actually had a hell of a life, constantly on public display, obliged to make polite conversation with people he’d rather not bother with and watched closely by a media pack keen to discover him breaking the rules or at least roast him for some unfortunate gaffe made in the highpressure cauldron of constant public scrutiny.
And thus, one of his great legacies is the string of dodgy comments which endeared him to those of us who believe life should not be taken too seriously.
As the years rolled by and his children and grandchildren became enmeshed in a royal soap opera which you would not wish on anyone, the duke weathered it all.
A bit of polo and coach driving relieved the pressure, but I believe what helped him survive was the relative freedom he had to say things which his dear wife, obliged to be nice at all times, could never utter.
Would the Queen have been able to tell Elton John that his beloved motor car was “ghastly” or suggest to Tom Jones that to sing as he did, he must gargle with pebbles?
Sadly, this freespirited approach often led to comments which were offensive and you have to wonder if it was all getting a bit too much for him.
To tell his Canadian hosts during a 1976 royal tour. “We don’t come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves,” was the type of gaffe which marked him as a man who should, perhaps, pull his head in from time to time.
When the duke and I met again in Queenstown in the 1970s, the duke stood (impatiently, I thought) while a gaggle of locals clustered around trying to make him feel
❛ As the years rolled by and his children and grandchildren became enmeshed in a royal soap opera which you would not wish on anyone, the duke weathered it all.
at home.
One old dear touched his arm and pointed to The Remarkables. “What do you think of our Remarkables?” she gushed coyly.
“Nothing remarkable about them,” grunted the duke and you could feel the shocked disappointment of the Queenstown boosters.
Little did they realise that during the last 12 months he had probably been dragged along to see the Victoria and Niagara Falls, the Taj Mahal and the Matterhorn and been expected to enthuse about them all.
Meeting dignitaries was just as much a chore as dealing with commoners and probably explains his remark to the richlyrobed president of Nigeria, in 2003 “You look like you are ready for bed.”
During a visit to Oamaru the duke and I met up again: he to walk behind his wife picking off those locals she had ignored and me to cobble together something of a report on what he had talked about.
That day he said nothing. Perhaps he had been told to keep his mouth shut.
I’m glad he usually ignored such instructions because some of his comments were worthy of a comedy script.
Maybe there was a royal gagwriter in his entourage. That would explain good lines like his description of his daughter Anne, “If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she’s not interested,” and his tasteless but clever comment to a blind woman with a guide dog, “Do you know they’re now producing eating dogs for anorexics?”
And his take on marriage: “When a man opens a car door for his wife, it’s either a new car or a new wife.”
Those are lines scriptwriters for an American sitcom would die for.
In recent times the duke and I had not kept in contact but it was always comforting to know that there was someone in the castle giving the pot a stir. Perhaps, with his passing, we can all chose our favourite dukism. My own, and it may be apocryphal, is the question he asked of the Queen at her coronation, “Where did you get that hat?”
If he didn’t say it, then he damn well should have!