Prince Philip
Born: June 10th, 1921
Died: April 9th, 2021
After more than 70 years as Queen Elizabeth’s consort, Prince Philip is remembered by few people alive today as anything other than an irascible curmudgeon whose frequent gaffes added a little excitement to royal engagements. But for many years he was a reformer within the royal family with ambitions to help improve British society inspired by the example of Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert.
A champion of science and engineering as a route towards rebuilding Britain’s post-war economy, he was an environmentalist long before the concept of sustainability entered the political mainstream. His Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme has introduced millions of young people to volunteering, physical activities, life skills and expeditions.
On their 50th wedding anniversary in 1997, the queen described Philip as her “strength and stay” but the rigidity of their shared approach to duty had become a public relations liability for the monarchy a few years earlier as the marriages of three of their four children crumbled.
Born in Corfu on June 10th, 1921, Philip was the grandson of King George I of Greece, a member of the Danish royal family who had been put on the Greek throne in 1863. Philip’s mother Alice, a German princess who worked as a nurse during the Balkan wars of 1911-12, was a descendent of Queen Victoria.
A year after Philip’s birth, the Greek monarchy was overthrown and he fled Greece with his family aboard a British cruiser, spending much of the journey in an orange crate that had been converted into a crib. The family moved initially to Paris but Philip was sent to a preparatory school in England before moving in 1933 to Salem, a school in southern Germany founded by Kurt Hahn, an innovative educator who believed that adolescents benefited from taking on more responsibility and leadership and being treated with respect.
Hahn was Jewish and when he was forced to leave Germany after Hitler came to power, he moved to Scotland and set up Gordonstoun, a school based on the same principles. Philip moved to Gordonstoun too and thrived under a regime based on physical fitness, self-reliance and a lot of time outdoors.
In his leaving report for Philip in 1939, Hahn described him as universally liked, trusted and respected.
“He is a born leader, but will need the exacting demands of a great service to do justice to himself. His best is outstanding; his second best is not good enough. He will make his mark in any profession where he will have to prove himself in a full trial of strength,” he wrote.
Philip appeared to have found such a profession when on the advice of his uncle Louis (Dickie) Mountbatten, he joined the Royal Navy and saw action in the Mediterranean and Japan during the second world war. He first met Elizabeth in 1939 when she was 13 and he was 18 and they met a number of times during the war, beginning a regular correspondence in 1944.
He proposed to her during a visit to Balmoral in 1946 and they married the following year after he became a naturalised British citizen, renounced any claim to the throne of Greece, which had been restored, and was received into the Church of England. During the early years of their marriage, Philip continued his naval career but while they were visiting Nairobi in 1952 King George VI died and Elizabeth became queen.
Philip said he read a number of biographies of Albert, who had access to government papers and was such an influential adviser to Victoria that Privy Council clerk Charles Greville described him as “king to all intents and purposes”. The queen never shared her red boxes of government documents with Philip and his subordinate position was underscored when Winston Churchill insisted that the royal family’s name should remain Windsor.
“I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba. I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,” Philip complained.
The queen later reversed the decision so that her children’s surname is Mountbatten-Windsor but Philip understood from the beginning how the world viewed him. During a speech to 2000 teenagers in 1957 about his recent tour of the Commonwealth, he played a recording of some pidgin English.
“It is a very old language and has to be learned,” he said.
“For instance, they called me ‘Fella belong Mrs Queen.’ ”
Albert championed campaigns against child labour and for the reform of university education and his interest in science and technology inspired his greatest project, the Great Exhibition of 1851. In an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1951, Philip used Albert’s exhibition as the starting point for an hour-long speech he spent weeks writing himself.
He established a prize to reward innovation in engineering design and like Albert, he set about modernising the management of the royal estates. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, established in 1956 and modelled on Hahn’s principles of physical fitness and community spirit, has become the world’s leading youth achievement award.
Philip also sought to modernise the royal family’s public image, encouraging the queen to end the presentation of debutantes at court in 1958 and to broaden the guest list for palace garden parties. He was behind the decision to allow television cameras into the palace for Royal Family, a documentary broadcast in 1969 that showed the family in informal settings.
Despite his urge to modernise the monarchy’s image, Philip was deeply hostile to journalists, particularly from the tabloid press, an antipathy he never abandoned. For their part, reporters gleefully reported his sometimes offensive gaffes, such as when he told a group of British students in China “if you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed” and when he asked an Aboriginal businessman in Australia “do you still throw spears at each other?”
Philip’s attitudes came under further scrutiny during the breakdown of the marriages of Prince Charles and Prince Andrew, when he was portrayed as the family’s harshest critic of princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson. In his later years, he appeared to enjoy a more relaxed relationship with his grandsons William and Harry than with his own sons and his public image mellowed as he retreated from public life and retired to Sandringham in 2017.
Two years later, when Philip was 97, police were called to the estate after the Land Rover he was driving collided with another vehicle and overturned. Shocked but not badly hurt, he was pictured driving on the estate a few days later but he subsequently surrendered his driving license.
Admitted to hospital on February 16th after feeling unwell, he received cardiac treatment and did not return home for a month, staying at Windsor Castle for just three weeks until his death on Friday.
