Prince Philip covered his face with a newspaper on learning his wife had become Queen
LADY PAMELA HICKS has described how the Duke of Edinburgh covered his face with a newspaper and said “this will be such a shock” after learning his wife had become monarch.
Lady Pamela, the Duke’s cousin and a former lady-in-waiting to the Queen, said the young Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip were “the last people in the world to hear” that George VI had died. Speaking to her daughter on the India Hicks Podcast, the 90-year-old told how she was with the princess, staying in the remote Treetops guesthouse in Kenya in 1952, accessible only via a ladder, when she became Queen.
“She goes up as a princess. The king dies that night. She comes down the ladder as a queen,” she said.
Secret ciphers were sent by the British embassy to the governor, announc- ing the king’s death, but the messages could not be read as the key to the code was elsewhere. “We were the last people in the world to hear,” she said.
Martin Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary, was in the nearby town, having a drink in a restaurant, when a writer approached him and remarked on the news. Returning to the Sagana Lodge residence, he told Mike Parker, the Duke’s equerry, who took unusual steps to prevent the new Queen finding out via the radio. Lady Pamela said: “Philip is sitting reading a newspaper, while the princess is in another part of room, at the desk, writing to her father. Mike crawls in as he doesn’t want the princess to look up and see him so he’s crawling out of her sight line and gesturing to get hold of the radio.
“He secretly turns it very, very low and hears all the stations (playing) the same dirge-like music, being very solemn ... so it’s obviously true. Shortly afterwards, he told the Duke what has happened, getting him to listen to the radio. Philip just takes the newspaper and covers his face with it, hides behind it and says, ‘This will be such a shock’.”
She said the Duke convinced his wife to go for a walk in the garden, where he told her of her father’s death and that she was now Queen.