I just had to get on with it, Philip said of childhood tragedy
As a young boy, he had to deal with exile, a mentally ill mother, an absent father and the deaths of his sister’s family in a plane crash. Yet he always robustly played down the extent of his loss, writes Philip Eade
ALTHOUGH he was married for more than 70 years to the most enduringly famous woman in the world, the Duke of Edinburgh’s own origins remained strangely shrouded in obscurity. “I don’t think anybody thinks I had a father,” he remarked ruefully in the Seventies.
Born in Corfu on June 10, 1921, in the shadow of the First World War and Russian Revolution, the Duke’s was a childhood characterised by change.
By the time he was 18 months old, the family – his parents Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg, and four older sisters Margarita, Theodora, Cecile and Sophie – had been forced to flee Greece after a coup. Philip’s uncle, King George V, ordered a Royal Navy ship to collect them and facilitated their relocation to the outskirts of Paris, at St-Cloud, where they lived on handouts from relations. The young prince, sixth in line to the Greek throne, was famously carried to safety in a cot made from an orange box.
Alice, who had been born deaf, had her nerves badly strained by the family’s exile, and the children were regularly packed off to friends and relations for long stints without their parents. The rapid deterioration in her mental state overshadowed much of Philip’s early life. He always robustly played down the ramifications of his mother’s illness, however it can scarcely have failed to have had an effect on him. Alice’s condition has often been described as a “religious crisis,” and indeed the most obvious sign of her decline was her increasingly eccentric religious fervour, and her attendant interest in spiritualism and the supernatural.
Another equally plausible suggestion is that she suffered from manic depression, or bipolar disorder. She took to lying on the floor in order to develop “the power conveyed to her from above” and became convinced that she had acquired the power of healing with her hands.
Alice’s committal on May 2, 1930, marked the end of Philip’s family life. Not that he or his sisters could have realised it when they arrived back after a day out picnicking with their grandmother to find their mother gone – sedated and taken to Bellevue Hospital, a secure psychiatric sanatorium, at the instruction of her mother, Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine (later Victoria Mountbatten, Marchioness of Milford Haven), a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Alice and Andrew’s marriage had been under strain for several years but it effectively finished at this point. Although they would never divorce, Andrew relinquished his role as husband. He liberated himself from many of his responsibilities as father, too, shutting up their family home at St
Cloud and thereafter leading a rather aimless life, drifting between Paris, Monte Carlo and Germany.
He saw Philip now and again during the school holidays, but otherwise left him in the care of Alice’s family, the Milford Havens and Mountbattens. Philip’s sisters were by this time aged between 16 and 25, and would all be married to German noblemen within 18 months, so the disappearance of both their parents was of far less consequence for them than it was for their eight-year-old brother.
Philip went to stay for a time with his grandmother at her apartment in Kensington Palace, before it was decided that Alice’s elder brother, Georgie, who had succeeded his father as the second Marquess of Milford Haven, should take Philip in. Georgie’s younger brother, Dickie Mountbatten is more often thought of as Philip’s surrogate father, but it was only later that he took on the role that viewers of The Crown saw portrayed on screen.
Philip was taken to see his mother a handful of times over the next two years, and otherwise received only occasional letters and cards from her. For the five years after that, from the summer of 1932 until the spring of 1937, he neither saw nor heard from her at all.
He was subsequently at pains not to overstate the effect of all this. “It’s simply what happened,” Philip told one biographer. “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.”
Yet while he was never one to make a meal of the various vicissitudes that came his way in life, being separated from his mother for five years at such a critical stage of his upbringing must have left its mark. When, years later, an interviewer asked him what language he spoke at home, his immediate retort was: “What do you mean, ‘at home’?”
In the autumn of 1930 he started prep school at Cheam in England – “virtually an orphan and more or less friendless and speaking or certainly writing French better than he did English”, remembered the headmaster’s son, Jimmy Taylor – and soon got used to never knowing at the start of each school holiday where he would be spending them.
He settled quickly but left in the summer of 1933 to continue his education at his brother-in-law’s school at Salem in Germany. Philip later recalled that he felt vaguely coerced. It was greatly to his relief when, shortly after Hitler’s
Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, he was sent back to Britain to resume his education at Gordonstoun, the Scottish public school in Morayshire.
It was there, in November 1937, that it fell to Kurt Hahn, the headmaster, to break the terrible news to a 16 year-old Philip that the three-engine Junkers monoplane carrying his favourite and heavily pregnant sister, Cecile, her husband, the Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, and their two young sons, had crashed in Belgium, en route to a family wedding in London. Firemen sifting through the charred wreckage of the plane had stumbled upon the remains of an infant, prematurely delivered when the plane crashed, lying beside the crumpled body of Cecile.
Philip would never forget the “profound shock” with which he heard what had happened to his sister and her family, of whom he had been extremely fond. His childhood friend, Gina Wernher, later noted how deeply their deaths affected him. “He didn’t talk much about it but he showed me a little bit of wood from the aeroplane.”
Yet even before this latest tragedy, the young prince had suffered more than his share of blows during his short life and, perhaps thus fortified, he “did not break down”, leading his headmaster to later record: “His sorrow was that of a man.”
The next week, Philip travelled alone to Germany for the funeral at Darmstadt, the Hesse family’s home town south of Frankfurt. As the 11 coffins were borne through streets festooned with swastikas, he cut a distinctly forlorn figure walking behind them in his civilian dark suit and overcoat. This strange and desperately sad occasion was also the first time that Philip’s parents had seen each other since 1931.
The following Easter, sadness once again descended on the family as his uncle and guardian, Georgie Milford Haven succumbed to bone marrow cancer, at the age of 45. For Philip, the sweet-natured Georgie had come as close as anyone to providing him with a sense of stability after his mother’s breakdown, and his death caused him profound sadness. Yet he again dealt with the blow quietly. “I suppose he just buried his feelings,” remarked one of his fellow pupils at Gordonstoun.
As far as Philip’s future was concerned, the most important consequence was that Georgie’s younger brother Dickie Mountbatten now stepped in and took over what remained of the job of bringing his nephew up. The death of one father figure thus cleared the way for another, of far greater influence and ambition.
Approaching 17, tall and athletic, Philip was already very attractive to women. He was also fun to be with, ‘very amusing, gay, full of life and energy and a tease,’ according to a cousin. Mountbatten had long recognised Philip’s talents, and had his own ideas as to what could be done with them.
In May 1939, Philip entered Dartmouth as a cadet in the Royal Navy and on July 22, Mountbatten attended the Royal family on a visit to the naval college in the royal yacht, engineering several encounters with his young nephew. As Mountbatten’s biographer suggests: “It is hard to believe no thought crossed his mind that an admirable husband for the future Queen Elizabeth [then aged 13] might be readily available.”
Less than a decade later, Prince Philip married the most eligible young woman in the world, heir to the British throne. As the longest-serving consort in British history – always walking dutifully a pace or two behind his wife, emitting the odd robust remark – it is all too easy to forget what a turbulent time he had when he was younger.