Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life

She was nevertheless determined that her son remain active and stimulated, and she wrote to MacJannet at the start of the autumn term of that year requesting that he form a Cub Scout group. Alice explained to the headmaster that Philip was ‘too young to be a scout and his character and clever fingers will fit him well to be a cub, and the training would have such an excellent influence on him, in turning his great vitality to good use’. She would be ‘infinitely grateful’ if he could manage it as soon as possible.

Alice’s letter has a slightly desperate tone, but she was not herself at the time. She was, as it soon became clear, on the verge of a serious nervous breakdown. The rapid deterioration in her mental state overshadowed not only Philip’s last year at the Elms but also the remainder of his early life. He has since 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 illness 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. As long ago as 1912 she had performed automatic writing at Tato? with Andrea’s brother Christopher, placing a finger on a glass and then watching as it slid about the table, spelling out a message from the spirit world. Her mother later described how Alice read extensively about this then fashionable activity and practised it whenever she had an important decision to make. She grew more and more superstitious and was forever dealing herself cards to obtain messages.

The murders of her aunts in Russia and the trauma of the family’s flight from Greece further steered her towards the spiritual, as apparently did her hopeless love for the mysterious Englishman in 1925, after which her biographer concludes that she turned to religion as a ‘safe outlet’ for her repressed feelings of unfulfilled desire.

Another equally plausible suggestion is that Alice suffered from manic depression – or bipolar disorder.

Besides her various spiritual interests, her wartime nursing activities had also been pursued with a fairly manic energy. As was her chimerical scheme to have Andrea installed as President of Greece – a plan hatched in 1927 after a chance encounter with an American banker, who persuaded her that Andrea’s presidency would not only suit moderate republicans and royalists, but would also boost the chances of Greece obtaining a large loan from the League of Nations. To this end, Alice dashed about canvassing politicians and diplomats, and even arranged an audience at Buckingham Palace with George V, who was horrified by her idea and promptly scotched it, observing tersely that ‘Ladies get carried away’, and that it would be ‘most unwise for Prince A to go near Greece’.

In October 1928, a fortnight after she and Andrea celebrated their silver wedding anniversary at St Cloud, Alice quietly converted to the Greek Orthodox faith, a move that did not greatly alarm the Anglican members of her family, given that this was the church into which her husband and her children had been baptized. But the next spring, 1929, her behaviour grew more peculiar. 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, which she deployed to no obvious ill effect on Nanny Roose’s rheumatism and later at a small clinic. She could stop her thoughts like a Buddhist, she said, and was getting messages about potential husbands for her daughters, whose marriage prospects were beginning to preoccupy her. By November she was no longer speaking to her family.

Realizing that she was ill, she took herself off with a maid to spend Christmas in a hotel at Grasse on the French Riviera, leaving Andrea, Philip and the girls to fend for themselves at St Cloud. She suffered from terrible headaches, barely ate and spent the best part of Christmas Day in a hot bath. Much of the time she felt thoroughly worn out and depressed; at other moments she was inappropriately elated and talkative. When she eventually came home, she declared herself a saint and ‘the bride of Christ’. She lay about the house with a seraphic smile and affected to banish evil influences with a sacred object she carried about with her.

When her mother Victoria came over to visit in January 1930, she told her lady-in-waiting, Nona Kerr, that Alice was ‘in a quite abnormal state mentally & bodily’, and looking ‘frail & exhausted’. She had had visions of Christ and had told Andrea’s cousin Meg Bourbon that within a few weeks she would have a message to deliver to the world. ‘She wanders praying about the house at times,’ wrote Victoria. ‘She told Meg she was in bliss & to me too she said she is happy. I think she has anaemia of the brain from too much contemplation & starvation & is in a critical state.’

Among those to whom the family turned for advice was Andrea’s sister-in-law, Marie Bonaparte, who had recently undergone psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud with the object of practising herself. She had also been helping to finance a new sanatorium at Tegel, on the outskirts of Berlin, established by a fellow Freudian, Dr Ernst Simmel. Tegel was the first clinic in the world designed to use psychoanalysis to treat patients and it was there that Marie recommended that Alice should go.

After several sessions, Simmel diagnosed Alice as ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ and suffering from a ‘neurotic-pre-psychotic libidinous condition’. During their discussions, she said that she believed that she was the only woman on earth, was married to Christ and ‘physically involved’ through him with other great religious leaders such as Buddha. Simmel consulted his friend Freud, who proposed ‘an exposure of the gonads to X-rays, in order to accelerate the menopause’ – the idea being that this would help to calm her down and subdue her libido. It is unclear whether or not she was ever consulted about this procedure, but it was carried out nevertheless. Shortly afterwards she began to feel better.

As she felt stronger so she also began to feel bored, restless and homesick. At the beginning of April she discharged herself and went back to Andrea and the family at St Cloud. ‘I found everybody looking very well indeed and the season far more advanced than in Berlin,’ she wrote to her daughter Cecile. ‘The fruit trees are blossoming & the leaves beginning to come out, & the air is very mild & I must say I am truly delighted to be back after 8 weeks absence.’ She went on to say how nice it was of uncle Ernie ‘to invite us all for Easter & we are looking forward to it so much – I fancy Philip & I will come by train & the others by car, Fondest love & au revoir soon, your ever loving Mama.’

Up the side of the letter she had scrawled ‘God Bless You’ and in the top left-hand corner she had drawn a cross.

However, it was soon clear to her family that she was little better than before she went away. In desperation, Andrea went to London and with Victoria saw two more doctors, who both advised that she should be interned in a secure sanatorium. ‘Andrea & I feel that it is the only right thing to do,’ Victoria told Nona Kerr, ‘both for Alice and her family. How hard it has been to come to this decision & what we feel about it you know. This Easter will be a miserable one.’

Victoria’s brother Ernie, the Grand Duke of Hesse, had asked the whole family to the Neue Palais at Darmstadt for Easter. However, what should have been a happy few weeks’ holiday was, as Victoria had foreseen, overshadowed by their anxiety about Alice.

Soon after reaching Darmstadt, Victoria went to Heidelberg, the nearby picturesque university town, to consult a noted expert on insanity, Karl Wilmanns, about a suitable sanatorium for her daughter. Wilmanns recommended the Bellevue private clinic at Kreuzlingen on the south-western shore of Lake Constance, run by a pioneer in the field of existential psychology, Dr Ludwig Binswanger, who had studied under both Jung and Freud. He was especially interested in subjects with unusual creative ability – his patients included the expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the Russian dancer Nijinski, who was being treating at Bellevue for schizophrenia at that time.

Victoria was reassured by the fact that the proposed clinic lay ‘in a fine park of its own & has 3 separate establishments for closely interned patients, semi-interned & a so-called free section where the patients can go into town etc with a nurse. The patients are all higher class, educated people, so if Alice likes to make the acquaintance of any of them, she will find suitable companionship …’ Yet still she agonized over whether this was the right place for her daughter, who had arrived in Darmstadt looking physically healthier than she had been for some time and had behaved in many respects perfectly normally. ‘When she is enjoying being amongst us, I feel a brute,’ wrote Victoria to Nona Kerr, ‘& then again come moments when I clearly realize the need of her going away.’

She wrestled with her dilemma for nearly three weeks before finally asking Professor Wilmanns to come and take Alice away. When he arrived at the Neue Palais, Alice was alone. Andrea and two of the girls had already left Darmstadt and Victoria had made sure to take all those who remained – Philip, Theodora, Cecile, Ernie and Onor – out for the day. Alice at first greeted Wilmanns warmly, but the atmosphere changed as soon as he told her what he had come for. When she tried to escape he restrained her and injected her with morphiumscopolamine to sedate her. She was then bundled into a car and driven south for several hours to Lake Constance, arriving at the Bellevue sanatorium at eleven o’clock that night.

Alice’s committal on 2 May 1930 marked the end of their family life, although the children would not have realized this when they arrived back that evening to find their mother gone. Alice and Andrea’s marriage had been under strain for several years but it effectively finished at this point. They hardly saw each other from then on and, although they would never divorce, Andrea ‘relinquished his role as husband’, as Hugo Vickers puts it.

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, interspersed with sporadic interventions in Greek affairs. 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.

The girls were by this time aged between sixteen and twenty-five, and they would all be married within eighteen months, so the disappearance of both their parents was of far less consequence for them than it was for their eight-year-old brother. Up until now, Philip had been doted on by both mother and father, to the extent that the girls had often felt the urge to squash their overindulged little brother.

Alice had given him much of her attention, knitting him woollen jumpers, sleeping with him in the nursery when his nanny was away and telling another of his nursemaids in 1928 that ‘Philip is always very good with me’.

Andrea, too, appeared to adore his only son, as the girls were made only too aware by the gales of laughter whenever they played together.

In those days, fathers of Andrea’s background had a rather more hands-off approach to child rearing than they do today, when more is expected of both parents, even those from the upper classes. But even so, his virtual abandonment of his young son at this critical time is surprising. The most likely explanation seems to be that he had been so traumatized by his treatment at the hands of the Greek revolutionaries and depressed by his subsequent exile that he did not feel up to the task of raising Philip on his own after this latest crisis. He may also have felt, not unreasonably, that his son might be better off with Alice’s family in England than he would be with his father in his jaded frame of mind.

In recent years, as Alice’s mental health had begun to give cause for concern, her mother Victoria had already started to arrange many of the practical aspects of her grandson’s upbringing, such as where he was to stay at various stages during the school holidays. After the closure of the family home in 1930, Philip went to stay for a time with his grandmother at her apartment in Kensington Palace. However, another of the residents there, Philip’s seventy-three-year-old great-aunt, Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, was far from thrilled about the new arrival, muttering that the palace was not the right place for the ‘younger generation’.

For this reason it was soon decided that Alice’s elder brother, Georgie, who had succeeded his father as the second Marquess of Milford Haven, should also take Philip in.

Georgie’s younger brother Dickie Mountbatten is more often thought of as Philip’s surrogate father, but although Philip would occasionally go and stay with him and Edwina at Brook House in London and Adsdean in Hampshire when he was young, it was only later that Dickie took on that role. From when Philip was nine until he was sixteen, it was Georgie who acted as the boy’s guardian, officially and in practice, turning up in loco parentis at school prize-givings and sports days, and providing a home for him during the shorter school holidays at Lynden Manor, the Milford Havens’ house on the Thames at Holyport, between Windsor and Maidenhead.

A relatively obscure figure in all published accounts of the Mountbatten family, in terms of sheer intelligence and ability and charm Georgie was as remarkable as any of them. From the age of ten he had had a workshop in his father’s castle at Heiligenberg, with lathes and a forge and foundry; by fifteen he was designing and constructing his own working models of steam engines – he later laid out a spectacular model railway at Lynden. He was said to solve problems of higher calculus ‘for relaxation’,

and at Dartmouth the second master pronounced him the cleverest and at the same time the laziest cadet he had taught. As a young naval officer he was supremely inventive, although his inventions were, as Philip Ziegler puts it, ‘as likely to be directed to the comforts available in his cabin as to the wider interests of the Royal Navy’.

Among his creations was a system of fans, radiators and thermostats for air-conditioning his quarters when afloat, and a device controlled by an alarm clock for making his early morning tea, twenty years before any such contrivance appeared on the market. His enthusiasm helped fire his nephew’s budding interest in invention and design, and when Philip grew up he, too, would be forever in search of the latest gadgets.

Georgie’s technical expertise was allied to great resourcefulness and skills of organization, and those who knew him best confidently predicted a brilliant career, and that he would, like his father, eventually succeed to the position of First Sea Lord. However, he did not have the obsessive ambition of his more dazzling younger brother, nor such a rich wife. So in the late 1920s, with German inflation having more or less wiped out his inheritance, and the Great Depression threatening everything else, he left the Royal Navy in order to make some much-needed money in business. After a spell at a brokerage house on Wall Street, he went on to become chairman of the British Sperry Gyroscope Company, and a director of Electrolux (of which his brother-in-law, Harold Wernher, was chairman), Marks & Spencer and various other companies.

His business career was partly necessitated by the extravagance of his wife Nada, who once ordered a tub of champagne to soothe her feet after winning a Charleston contest in Cannes, whereupon her hostess was presented with a huge bill which read ‘Champagne for Marchioness of Milford Haven’s feet’.

Nada was the great-grand-daughter of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (after whose mother she was named), and daughter of Grand Duke Michael Mikailovich, who had been banished from Russia on account of his morganatic marriage and thereafter divided his time between the stately Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath, from where Nada was married,

and a lavish villa at Cannes, where he was remembered for distributing ‘lovely Fabergе things’ and for introducing Edward VII to Alice Keppel, his mistress-to-be. To begin with he could afford to give his daughters substantial allowances – ?2,000 a year, with extra for jewellery and travel expenses – although the flow of funds dried up with the Russian Revolution.

Dark and attractive, Nada was an engaging character, outgoing, rebellious, full of life and verve. Her niece Myra Butter remembers her as ‘off the wall, the best fun, completely different, very bohemian’.

Even her grandchildren occasionally found her too boisterous, such as when she was ‘squirting you with the garden hose or pouring a night pot full of water on people out of the window’.

Among other attributes, she also gained a reputation for her fluid sexuality: her girlfriends included Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, the American society beauty who regularly stayed at Lynden while Philip was there.

Nada and Georgie were nonetheless devoted to one another, both of them by nature adventurous and risquе, and both dedicated to the good life. They smoked cigars together after dinner, took their son David, who was two years older than Philip and became a great friend, to a brothel in Paris when he was seventeen to round off his education and amassed one of the largest collections of pornographic books in private hands – an extensive library of ‘blue’ literature, photograph albums and marked catalogues for such enticing titles as Lady Gay: Sparkling Tales of Fun and Flagellation and Raped on the Railway – ‘a true story of a lady who was first ravished and then flagellated on the Scotch express’.

The Milford Haven mеnage was completed by their mentally retarded daughter, Tatiana, born in 1917, for whom they later retained an elderly woman to act as her companion.

There were also extended visits from Nada’s younger brother, Count Michael ‘Boy’ de Torby, who had great charm and painted well, often on rice paper or silk, but whose bipolar illness occasionally rendered him ‘decidedly odd, mooching about’. He complained of all the ‘terrible pills fighting inside me’ and when he felt his depression returning he would say ‘I’m afraid I must go back’, and have to be rushed to Roehampton.

All in all, Lynden Manor was unlike any home that Philip had previously experienced.

Alice was visited from time to time at Bellevue by various members of the family and at other times they kept in touch by letter. Three weeks after her admission, she learned that Philip would be going to prep school at Cheam in England that autumn and, according to Cecile, although initially nervous, he was now ‘thrilled’ at the prospect.

In the meantime, Philip was to spend his ninth birthday with the Hessian side of his family at Wolfsgarten, which had originally been built as their hunting lodge yet was nevertheless equivalent in size and layout to that of an average Oxford college. He relished the more relaxed and jollier atmosphere he encountered, in contrast to the regime of his grandmother Victoria, who tended to be quite stern with him.

On this occasion the family was gathering to celebrate the engagements of the younger two of Philip’s sisters. The youngest, Sophie, a very pretty girl, was not yet sixteen when she agreed to marry Christoph of Hesse, her handsome second cousin once removed, with whom she had fallen in love while staying with her great-aunt Irene at Hemmelmark on the Baltic. Thirteen years Sophie’s senior, ‘Chri’ was charming, extroverted and amusing. He had studied agriculture and spent the so-called ‘golden years’ of the Weimar Republic floating between various family schlosses, lending a languid hand to the running of their estates. He was a keen horseman and talented dressage rider, competing across Europe, but above all he was obsessed with flying and with motorcycles and cars – his passion was such that he would often sleep in a new car for the first few days after acquiring it. Recently laid off from a job in a factory producing engines, he was now reluctantly selling insurance in Berlin. While the marriage offered Sophie a welcome sanctuary after the break-up of her own family, for Christoph it represented a safe harbour after a series of stormy love affairs during the 1920s.

There was nothing arranged about their union and it proved to be one of lasting mutual devotion, undiminished by his subsequent staunch attachment to the National Socialist cause.

In 1939, shortly after reporting for active service with the Luftwaffe, he would write to tell her:

I miss you and long for you. It is simply terrible. I am so depressed and so miserable that I shall be pleased to get away from this house [their Berlin-Dahlem home] in which we have spent those lovely happy years together and enjoyed having our little Poonsies [their children]. Oh darling if only you were here! When I enter the house I think how often the door used to open like with magic and then you angel were there waiting for me smiling or laughing and giving me a thrill of happiness I feel a lump in my throat to think of it. I love you, love you, love you, my angel, and you mean everything to me … lovingly as your old adoring Peech [Christoph].

Philip came to know Christoph well while visiting Sophie during holidays in Germany before the war and years later described him as ‘a very gentle person, interestingly enough [in view of his politics], and very balanced actually. He was kind and had a good sense of humour. So he actually was the complete opposite of what you’d expect, I suppose.’

Sophie’s eighteen-year-old sister, Cecile, meanwhile, had been snapped up by another cousin, Grand Duke Ernie’s twenty-three-year-old son and heir, George Donatus of Hesse, known in the family as ‘Don’, like Christoph an avid sportsman and a fan of fast cars and aeroplanes. Though in Alice’s estimation ‘such a sensible, dear boy’,