Prince Philip: the penniless exile who overcame a nomadic childhood marked by tragedy

Mary Kenny

Britain's Prince Philip in 2012. Picture: Reuters

April 10 2021 06:29 AM

WHEN it was first known that Prince Philip and the then Princess Elizabeth were in love – she had been smitten by him since she was 15 – the royal family was not delighted.

According to the diarist Harold Nicolson: “The family were at first horrified when they saw that Prince Philip was making up to Princess Elizabeth. They felt he was rough, ill-mannered, uneducated and would probably not be faithful.”

But he apparently soon won them over and King George VI subsequently warmed to his “forthright manner, joshing humour and love of the outdoors”.

All the same, her parents made Elizabeth wait until she was 21 before they could be married.

The family’s initial response was hardly surprising. Philip was a penniless foreign prince – even as recently as the 1990s he admitted that he felt Danish – and a safe English duke might have been preferred.

But as the biographer Sarah Bradford has written, there never was anyone else for Elizabeth and the handsome Philip reciprocated her feelings. Philip also seemed to be attracted to the family atmosphere.

During the courtship, he wrote a letter after staying at Windsor, expressing his appreciation of “the simple enjoyment of family pleasures and amusements and the feeling that I am welcome to share them”.

He didn’t really have much of a family life himself as a young person, which must have been a key element in his character and formation.

He was born on the dining-room table of his parents’ villa in Corfu – the only son and fifth child of Alice of Battenberg and Prince Andrew of Greece. But Greece was in turmoil in 1921, and the royal family were exiled, subsequently making their way to Continental Europe where Philip spent almost the first decade of his life in a Parisian suburb. His first language was French. A psychologist might diagnose Philip as having been the victim of childhood trauma.

His mother suffered from mental health issues – she was bi-polar and may have been schizophrenic – and was hospitalised before he was 10.

She had also been deaf from childhood, and although the condition improved, it was another handicap. His parents’ marriage broke up and he was sent to boarding school in England, and Germany. From the time of his mother’s incarceration in a psychiatric clinic, Philip lived a nomadic life, moving between different relations, some of them eccentric. At his spartan Scottish boarding school, Gordonstoun – the headmaster was a German-Jewish refugee, Kurt Hahn, who feared that civilisation would grow “decadent” without discipline – it was noted how few possessions he owned, and how he never knew where his next home would be. He was bright, good at maths, and polylingual.

Home was sometimes in Hitler’s Germany, since four of his sisters married German aristocrats, and three of them had Nazi connections. To his credit, Philip as a teenager mocked the Hitler Youth, which prompted the family to get him out of the country as swiftly as possible.

But there were embarrassments when it came to Philip’s marriage to Elizabeth in 1947. He had been baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church, so he had to be received into the Church of England. None of the German relations could attend the wedding, so soon after the Second World War, and it was kept quiet that his brother-in-law, his sister Sophie’s husband, Christoph of Hesse, had been in the SS. His mother, who dressed as a Greek Orthodox nun, was his only visible close family relation, although there were wider family kin, like his uncle Lord Mountbatten.

Alice, for all her mental health problems, was an admirable person, spiritual, and deeply committed to the care of refugees, including Jewish refugees. Other members of Philip’s family were unusual in different ways. His biographer Philip Eade describes his aunt Nada, a descendent of the Russian poet Pushkin, frequenting lesbian bars on the Cote d’Azur: “her girlfriends included Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, the American society beauty”. Another aunt, Marie Bonaparte, lectured on female sexuality at a progressive London psycho-sexual institute, also kept discreetly in the background.

There was tragedy in Philip’s young life too – his Russian cousins had been killed in the Bolshevik revolution. His favourite sister, Cecile, along with her husband and three children had died in a plane crash in 1937, which stunned him as a teenager. The uncertain and peripatetic upbringing must have been a formative influence on his character, but he retained one abiding characteristic, according to Gyles Brandreth, another Philip biographer: he always had a sense of humour, and he always made his wife laugh.

The marriage, like most marriages, went through a rocky patch in the early years – he didn’t easily take to being an appendage to his spouse.

He also didn’t really want to have four children, according to one of the queen’s biographers – he constantly spoke against over-population.

But in this, Elizabeth got her way, and Philip died a grandfather of eight and a great-grandfather of 10, soon to be 11.

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