The Duke’s life in the fast lane:
His driving mishap has triggered an outpouring of concern, but this is a man who has never believed in giving up, says Simon Heffer
The sight of a replacement Land Rover being offloaded from a trailer at Sandringham on Friday, less than 24 hours after another driven by the Duke of Edinburgh had been badly damaged in a road accident in west Norfolk, told the British public all they needed to know about the wellbeing of the Duke – and confirmed what they have come to expect about his unflinchingly robust attitude to life.
It simply does not occur to the Duke to give up, especially if stopping a certain activity compromises his independence. He has that in common with many of his generation, those who came through the war, the Blitz, rationing and austerity of a sort that makes the use of the word to describe recent economic conditions seem utterly fatuous. They grew up without a welfare state and with a necessary sense of self-reliance that has driven them on through life. They took their lead when young from Winston Churchill, whose outlook when faced with adversity was to “keep buggering on”. The Duke of Edinburgh has kept buggering on for nearly 98 years, and most of his friends believe his refusal to compromise in the face of advancing years is largely what kept him so vigorous for so long.
He reluctantly gave up public duties at 96, but as he had carried out roughly 22,000 since he married the Queen in 1947, he can be forgiven a desire for a quieter life. He was keen to support the Queen – another member of Generation KBO – on her engagements, but with age she too has scaled these down. Yet he has still been seen in public, apparently quite fit and still trying to extract the most out of life. And, as with her, he has been a part of our national life now for so long that it takes a leap of the imagination to envisage the world without him.
That, without question, explains the outpouring of concern at the news of his accident. For decades he was taken for granted, and was a regular means for the tabloid press to fill its pages with accounts of his salty and supposedly offensive remarks. The high – or low, depending on one’s sense of humour – point came on his and the Queen’s tour to China in 1986, when he warned a British student that if he stayed in the country much longer he would go home “with slitty eyes”. The Duke, meeting another student, in 1998 in Papua New Guinea, was congratulated on his endurance with the words: “You managed not to get eaten, then?”
Yet another of the Duke’s so-called gaffes – perpetrated in 1995 when interviewed for a documentary about the 50th anniversary of V-J Day – was revelatory about the mindset that led to him getting back on his metaphorical horse after his car crash. Asked about the development of stress counselling for British servicemen, he remarked: “It was part of the fortunes of war. We didn’t have counsellors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking: ‘Are you all right – are you sure you don’t have a ghastly problem?’ You just got on with it.”
Getting on with it is what the Duke did through his Spartan schooling at Gordonstoun, his career in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World War and beyond, and his public life as the Queen’s consort. One can accuse him of insensitivity (he will not be an icon to the snowflake generation), brusqueness or lack of tact, but never of hypocrisy. He has always had high standards of personal behaviour and duty himself, and fails to see why others do not think and act likewise.
Those quips and remarks that the tabloid press judged to be off-colour were usually greeted by censorious opinion articles asking what right a man who lived off the taxpayer, in palaces and surrounded by an army of flunkeys, had to be so unfeeling to those who did not share his advantages.
However, then his critics realised that he was still going on – and on – and on. He never gave up. Age for most people is a physical realisation of growing restrictions, but for the Duke it became simply a state of mind. Whatever the reference books said about his age, he simply ignored it and went on as before. And the public, with that grudging regard the British manufacture so well after decades of familiarity with people who just get on with it, came instinctively to respect and admire him.
A great turning point was the foul-weather day in 2012, when the Duke was a mere 91, and he stood in the elements on the Royal Barge as it sailed down the Thames for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee flotilla. He was taken to hospital within hours for a bladder infection, condemned the fuss made about his indisposition, and soon bounced back. On the day he left hospital he was asked whether he felt better, and with his legendary contempt for what he considers “damned fool questions”, he shot back: “Well, I wouldn’t be coming out if I wasn’t.” The public, however, had noticed his sense of duty, and the tone of his critics in the press changed.
As must inevitably be the case with anyone of so great an age, the Duke has had a number of episodes with his health. Six months before his drenching he had had a heart stent fitted. He had an exploratory operation on his abdomen in 2013 and a procedure on a hand the following year.
Heavy colds that once were shrugged off are now taken seriously, and unnecessary activity is forbidden until they have passed. In 2016, he had to cancel an appearance at the commemoration of the centenary of the Battle of Jutland, on medical advice, but a few days later rode in the Queen’s carriage to Trooping the Colour – an event to which he rode on horseback until he was 82.
While it seems so much of the Duke’s strength is to do with his iron state of mind, he has also taken great care over the decades not to let himself go.
John Kent, his tailor of more than 50 years, says he has never had to alter any of his clothes and that “there’s not an ounce of fat on him”. He eats carefully and walks as much as he can. Britain’s brewers will rejoice to hear that, while he drinks in moderation, his preference is beer.
But those who know the Duke well attribute his resilience not just to the habits of physical fitness that he acquired at school and in the Navy, but above all to his cast of mind. He is as hard-minded about himself as he is about others.
It is why it is second nature for him, following his accident, to have probably wanted to get back behind the wheel as quickly as he can: and one can be sure that no one will have needed to counsel him about that, or anything else.
For him, life is there to be lived: and 98 is the new 58.
So much of the Duke’s strength is to do with his iron state of mind