Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life

PROLOGUE

Autumn 1937

At around noon on 16 November 1937, Prince Philip’s heavily pregnant sister Cecile set off on the short drive through the woods from the Hesse family’s old hunting box at Wolfsgarten to Frankfurt aerodrome in order to fly to London for a family wedding. With her were her husband, George Donatus, or ‘Don’, who had recently succeeded his father as the Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, his widowed mother, the Dowager Grand Duchess, their two young sons, aged six and four, who were due to be pages, a lady-in-waiting and the best man.

The only member of the Grand Ducal family left behind at home was their baby daughter Johanna, who was too young to go to the wedding.

By the mid-1930s, air travel had become sufficiently popular for Bradshaw’s to begin publishing its monthly International Air Guide, looking much like a train timetable although unashamedly aimed at the travelling elite, with advertisements only for luxury hotels. However, it was still rare compared with travel by sea or rail and most Europeans considered it too risky and unpredictable, particularly in the high winds and dense fogs of late autumn. In December 1935, fourteen-year-old Philip’s grandmother had pleaded in vain with him before one of his frequent continental trips to visit relations: ‘This time I really think you had better not fly across, as it is such a stormy time of the year.’

Philip’s sister Cecile shared their grandmother’s misgivings. She was reputedly so terrified of aeroplanes that she always wore black when she flew. However, Don Hesse was a dedicated and fearless flyer, like his young brother-in-law, and with an aerodrome so close to home, he was not one to be put off by the potential hazards.

They took off just before two o’clock in bright sunshine in a three-engine Junkers monoplane operated by the Belgian airline Sabena and captained by one of its most experienced airmen, Tony Lambotte, the personal friend and pilot of King Leopold III, assisted by an engineer, wireless operator and mechanic. The plane had been scheduled to land en route near Brussels, but thick fog had swept quickly in from the North Sea and so they were instructed by wireless to proceed instead to Steene aerodrome on the coast near Ostend. There, too, fog had reduced visibility to a few yards, yet the pilot nevertheless went ahead with his descent, flying blind. The aerodrome staff fired three rockets to help him find his way, but only the first one worked.

An eyewitness later described having seen the aeroplane coming down out of the fog and hitting the top of a brickworks’ chimney, 150ft high, ‘at about 100 miles an hour. One wing and one of the engines broke off, and both crashed through the roof of the works. The remainder of the aeroplane turned over and crashed to the ground in the brickfield about 50 yards further on, where it at once burst into flames.’

Fire engines and ambulances raced to the scene but they could not get near the burning wreckage until there was no hope of there being any survivors. Additional news from Ostend later added a poignant footnote to the tragedy. 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.

The discovery gave rise to the theory that the pilot had only attempted to land after he became aware that the Grand Duchess had begun to give birth.

At Gordonstoun School in Morayshire it fell to the German еmigrе headmaster Kurt Hahn to break the terrible news to sixteen-year-old Philip, who would never forget the ‘profound shock’ with which he heard what had happened to his sister and her family.

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’, so his headmaster later recorded. ‘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 coffins were borne through streets festooned with swastikas, he cut a distinctly forlorn figure walking behind them in his civilian dark suit and overcoat, his white-blond hair standing out against the surrounding dark military greatcoats. Beside him marched his surviving brothers-in-law – Prince Christoph of Hesse, the husband of Philip’s youngest sister Sophie, the most conspicuous in his SS garb; and Christoph’s brother Prince Philipp of Hesse walking alongside in an SA brown shirt. Philip’s uncle Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten followed just behind in British naval dress.

The streets of Darmstadt were lined with detachments of soldiers in Nazi uniforms and, as the procession passed, many in the crowd raised their outstretched arms in a full ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting

– a gesture that Philip had become accustomed to seeing as a schoolboy in Nazi Germany four years earlier and on regular visits there ever since. Don and Cecile had recently joined the Nazi party themselves. Hitler and Goebbels had sent messages of sympathy; Goering attended the funeral in person.

This strange and desperately sad occasion was also the first time that Philip’s parents had seen each other since 1931, when his mother, who had been born deaf, had been committed to a secure psychiatric sanatorium after suffering a nervous breakdown. Shortly afterwards his father had closed down the family home near Paris and taken himself off to live in the South of France, leaving ten-year-old Philip to be brought up in Britain by his wife’s family, the Milford Havens and Mountbattens. For almost five years he had heard nothing from his mother and he had become reacquainted with her only shortly before the disaster that befell Cecile.

Almost exactly a decade after the tragedy, Prince Philip married the most eligible young woman in the world, heir to the British throne. As he approaches his ninetieth birthday – two years after surpassing the record of George III’s Queen Charlotte as the longest-serving consort in British history – still walking dutifully a pace or two behind his wife, emitting the odd robust remark, it is easy to forget what a turbulent time he had when he was younger.

ONE

Kings of Greece

Although he has been married for more than sixty years to the most enduringly famous woman in the world, Prince Philip’s own origins have remained strangely shrouded in obscurity. ‘I don’t think anybody thinks I had a father,’ he remarked ruefully in the 1970s. ‘Most people think that Dickie [Mountbatten] is my father anyway.’

The easiest way of understanding Prince Philip’s paternal ancestry is to start with his grandfather, King George I of Greece. A dashing figure, seen in photographs sporting a range of spectacular moustaches, King George was born Prince William of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gl?cksburg in 1845 in Copenhagen, the younger son of an army officer whose meagre pay meant that his children grew up in comparative poverty. Their home, the Yellow Palace, was not especially palatial, with a front door that led straight on to the pavement,

their lifestyle scarcely regal, with William’s mother doing much of the housework and his sisters sharing a room and making their own clothes. As a family, the Gl?cksburgs were loud and frivolous, informal and uncultured, apt to ‘make funny noises and yell if they saw anyone trying to write a letter’.

They were also distinctly unspoilt and unpretentious, yet within a very short space of time they had ‘colonised royal Europe’, as one chronicler put it.

In 1852, William’s father was unexpectedly named as heir to the Danish throne, by virtue of being a godson and distant kinsman of the childless king, although for the time being this made no difference to his income and the family still struggled to make ends meet.

However, their status changed dramatically in 1863, when, within a year, the father succeeded as King Christian IX of Denmark, William’s sister Alexandra married the Prince of Wales, destined to become King Edward VII, and a delegation from Greece came and asked seventeen-year-old William to be their king. Another sister, Dagmar, would shortly marry the future Tsar Alexander III of Russia, while yet another, Thyra, married the heir to the throne of Hanover – although that was soon dissolved by Prussia after the 1866 Anglo-Prussian war. Within the next half-century, the descendants of Christian IX would occupy no fewer than nine European thrones.

Only the descendants of Queen Victoria were more widely spread.

King George I, as William became on his accession, later maintained that he had accepted the Greek throne with great reluctance, since it meant abandoning his chosen naval career to go and rule a far-off country with a turbulent people and a language he did not speak.

Greece had only recently broken free from the Ottoman Empire as a result of the long and bloody war of independence that had claimed the life of Lord Byron among countless others. The new country – unstable, poor and less than half the size of what it was to become during George’s reign – was formally recognized by the London Protocol of 1830, in which the protecting powers, France, Great Britain and Russia, stipulated that a hereditary sovereign should be chosen from outside the country to lessen the chances of internal disputes. In 1833 a young Bavarian prince called Otto had arrived in a British frigate to fill this vacancy, but his tactless and despotic rule caused countless insurrections. In 1862 he was deposed in a bloodless revolution and left Greece just as he had arrived, in a British warship.

Many Greek people had wanted to have as his successor Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, whose portrait was carried through the streets of Athens by a cheering mob. But Alfred was ineligible as a prince of one of the protecting powers; and besides, his mother did not like the idea. Several alternatives were suggested before eventually they settled on the young Danish prince as the least contentious candidate.

When he first arrived in Greece, he was still not yet eighteen and as he took the oath to the new constitution at the national assembly, the British ambassador was moved by ‘the sight of this slight, delicate stripling, standing alone amidst a crowd of callous, unscrupulous politicians, many of whom had been steeped to the lips in treason, and swearing to observe, as he has so faithfully done, the most unworkable of charters, from which nearly every safeguard had been studiously eliminated’.

Athens then was no more than a collection of villages, with a combined population of about 45,000, and the young king developed an endearing habit of walking alone through the streets, stopping every now and then to talk to passers-by. So determined was he to master the Greek language and customs that over the next four years he never left the country, travelling instead to all corners of his realm by ship, carriage, mule and on foot.

While he never entirely lost his slight Danish accent, King George’s enthusiasm and lack of affectation were greatly appreciated by the Greek people. On Monday mornings, he was available to any of his subjects who wanted to come and air their grievances. He also gave an audience to any foreigner who requested one, provided they put on dress-clothes and white tie. The king tended to stand throughout these interviews and one of those who paid a visit, E. F. Benson, was disconcerted by his habit of continuously rising on his toes and rocking back on his heels. Benson found this ‘as infectious as yawning’ and it was only with the greatest effort that he could prevent himself from following the royal example. Aspirational American ladies began flocking to Athens because, as one of them remarked, ‘The royal family of Greece is the easiest royal family to become acquainted with’.

Affable and approachable the young King George may have been, but he still had to learn to stand up for himself against his wily ministers. Shortly after his arrival, a story was told of one cabinet meeting at which the boy king stood up and went over to a map to illustrate a point he was making. When he returned to his seat he noticed that his watch was missing. He looked around the table: ‘Will whoever has my watch please return it?’ he demanded. His ministers stared blankly back at him. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ the king continued, ‘I’m not accustomed to this type of joke. I’d like to have my watch back.’ Still nobody spoke. Adopting a sterner tone, the king announced that he was going to put out the light and count to sixty. ‘If I find the watch again on the table, the incident will be closed,’ he said. In the darkness he called the seconds out loud. When he turned the lights back on his silver inkstand had vanished as well.

Apart from dealing with his ministers and frequent changes of government (forty-two in the first twenty-five years of his reign), he also had to re-establish the rather ramshackle court, train his own aides-de-camp, butlers, footmen and so forth, and set the appropriate tone, although to begin with his youthful demeanour made it ‘sometimes difficult for his daily companions to maintain the respectful reserve and gravity due to a royal station’.

The young king was also regularly reminded by his counsellors of his dynastic responsibilities, to marry and produce a son born on Greek soil, and so in 1867, aged twenty-one, he visited his sister in Russia, where he hoped to find a wife.

Tsar Alexander II had persuaded George that his was the only country where he would find a girl with the requisite combination of royal breeding and Orthodox faith. The two-month trip would also enable him to see how the vast empire was run. He lost no time as regards his primary purpose and on a visit to the tsar’s younger brother Constantine at Pavlovsk he promptly proposed to the Grand Duke’s fifteen-year-old daughter Olga, a shy and pretty girl with beautiful dark eyes, whom Queen Victoria had thought might do rather well for her son Alfred.

Engaged within a week of meeting, they were married shortly after her sixteenth birthday in an elaborate five-day ceremony at the Winter Palace.

For her arrival in Athens, Queen Olga thoughtfully wore a dress in the Greek national colours of blue and white which delighted the huge crowd and her ‘fresh young beauty’ soon won the hearts of her subjects.

With her came a Russian lady-in-waiting, a governess and a trunk full of dolls and teddy bears to complete the entourage. At times overwhelmed and frightened by the reception she received, the young queen was once found hiding beneath the palace staircase ‘hugging her favourite Russian stuffed bear, and weeping bitterly’.

She never did entirely overcome her homesickness – whenever a Russian ship docked at Piraeus, she could scarcely keep away from it – but the marriage was extremely successful and as queen she won the enduring love of the Greek people.

Olga’s first child, a son, was born barely nine months after the wedding and named Constantine after the last emperor of Byzantine Greece, an augury which prompted much rejoicing. She went on to have a further seven children, three girls (one of whom survived only three months) and four more boys. Philip’s father, Andrew, known as Andrea, was the last but one, born in 1882 at Tato?, the royal family’s country estate, some thirty miles north of Athens. He was premature and so tiny that he spent his first few days in a cigar box being fed with a toothpick,

however after being wet-nursed by a ‘pleasant-looking peasant from the island of Andros, called Athena’,

he eventually grew into a tall and athletic figure, ‘like a thoroughbred horse’ according to Philip’s aunt Marie Bonaparte.

By common consent he was the most handsome of the king’s sons. It was from him that Philip inherited his high-domed forehead, his ‘fine nose and lips and the narrow Mountbatten eyes’ coming from his mother.

Andrea grew up with his brothers and sisters at the gaunt royal palace which had been built by King Otto on a hill overlooking old Athens and was extensively ransacked after his departure. Nowadays used as the Greek parliament, during Andrea’s childhood it was an ‘excessively uncomfortable’ family home, so his younger brother Christopher recalled, with only one bathroom where the taps emitted a dismal trickle of water and the odd defunct cockroach.

As a boy, Andrea suffered at least one bout of typhoid, presumed to have been caught from the palace drains.

Winters were especially spartan, with cold winds whistling through the long, dim galleries and countless unused rooms. King George seems to have grown sterner with fatherhood and whatever the weather bade his sons get up at six each morning for a cold bath and then lessons at 6.30 sharp. His sister Alexandra, who came to visit in 1893, when Andrea was eleven, noted that the king was ‘rather tyrannical in the family’ and failed to take his children into his confidence even when they grew up, which embittered them towards him.

However, he would occasionally unbend to lead bicycling or roller-skating processions around the palace with the whole family following in order of age.

He told his children: ‘You must never forget that you are foreigners in this country, but you must make them [the Greek people] forget it.’

The eldest children spoke Greek to each other at home and English to their parents, who in turn conversed in German. Andrea was always more Greek than any of his siblings and as a boy flatly refused to speak any other language.