Prince Philip is being remembered as the longest-serving consort in British history, who sacrificed a
naval career to give steadfast support to his wife. But it is easy to forget he had endured an exceptionally turbulent childhood, writes historian Philip Eade.He was abruptly separated from his parents and four elder sisters at the age of eight, and destined never again to live in the same home as his immediate family.
In later years, while out and about on royal duties, he would gain a reputation for his quizzical, ragging, and, at times, startlingly blunt remarks. And to friends, his emotional reserve was every bit as striking as his bluff, no-nonsense exterior.
His tendency to hide his feelings meant that even those who knew him well were occasionally taken aback by his bouts of prickliness - presumed to be legacies of his unsettled early life.
Prince Philip was born in Corfu in 1921 eight years after the assassination of his grandfather, King George I of Greece.
He was the youngest child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg.
He was little more than a year old when his father was sent into exile by an army court-martial following Greece’s calamitous defeat in a war with Turkey.
The family’s subsequent flight across the Adriatic Sea to Italy aboard a British warship, with the infant Philip sleeping in a converted orange crate, was helped by King George V of the UK, Andrew’s first cousin. The monarch’s determination to rescue them owed much to his regret at having failed to save another first cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, during the Russian Revolution five years earlier.
Eventually, the family settled on the outskirts of Paris at St-Cloud, in a garden cottage owned by Philip’s aunt. Philip attended a small day school nearby, but in 1930 his world was again thrown apart when his mother, whom he had always adored, suffered a severe mental breakdown.
Alice, who was the daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg (whose family name was anglicised to Mountbatten during World War One), had been born profoundly deaf. She learned to lip-read in several different languages.
Brave, energetic and determined not to let disability hold her back, she had served as a latter-day Florence Nightingale during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, setting up and nursing in front-line hospitals.
Three decades later, during the war-time Nazi German occupation of Greece, she hid Jews in her house in Athens, earning, like Oskar Schindler, Israel’s award of Righteous Among the Nations.
Paranoid schizophrenic
In the years immediately after the family’s flight from Greece, however, her behaviour had grown disturbingly strange. One doctor who saw her, diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic who believed that she was the only woman on Earth, and married to Christ.
Eventually, Alice’s mother (Philip’s grandmother) bowed to the advice of psychiatrists, and agreed that her daughter should be committed to a secure sanatorium. So she arranged - while the family was staying for Easter 1930 with Alice’s uncle, the Grand Duke of Hesse - for a doctor to arrive one day while the children were out. He would forcibly sedate Alice, bundle her into a car and drive her off to a clinic near Lake Constance.
The committal of Philip’s mother, on May 2, marked the end of his family life, although he and his sisters would not have realised this when they arrived back at the grand-ducal palace that evening to find their mother gone.
Alice and Andrew’s marriage had been under strain for several years but it, in effect, ended at that point. They hardly saw each other from then on, although they would never divorce.
Andrew stopped acting as her husband. He freed himself from many of his responsibilities as father too, shutting up the family home at St-Cloud and thereafter leading a rather aimless life, drifting between Paris, Monte Carlo and Germany, interspersed with sporadic fruitless 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, in England.
Within 18 months of the family break-up, Philip’s sisters were all married to German princelings, so the disappearance of both their parents was of far less consequence for them than it was for their eight-year-old brother.
First, he lived with his maternal grandmother at Kensington Palace, before moving in with his uncle, Alice’s elder brother George, the Marquess of Milford Haven - whose son David would become Philip’s closest childhood friend (and later best man).
For the next eight years, “Uncle Georgie” acted as Philip’s guardian, turning up in loco parentis at school prize-givings and sports days. During some school holidays, he provided a home for Philip at Lynden Manor, on the Thames between Windsor and Maidenhead.
Philip only saw his mother a handful of times during the first two years of her confinement.
At the sanatorium, Alice was told her son would be going to boarding school at Cheam in England - her daughter Cecilie careful to reassure her that, although at first nervous at the idea, Philip had become “thrilled” at the prospect.
For five years, from the summer of 1932 to the spring of 1937 - by which time she had largely recovered her equilibrium - Philip neither saw nor heard from his mother at all. It was not in his nature to overstate the effect of all this. “I just had to get on with it,” he later told one biographer. “You do. One does.”
Yet being separated from his mother at such a critical stage in his upbringing undoubtedly left its mark.
However fond he was of his grandmother, uncle, and aunt, and appreciative of the homes they provided him, they could never make up for the family home he had lost.
Philip’s housemaster at Gordonstoun, Robert Chew, was in charge of “character building” at the school during its early years. By the time Prince Charles was sent there, Chew had risen to headmaster and Charles later shuddered when he remembered him as “a remote and austere character who adhered to the founder’s beliefs with the conviction of a true disciple”.
The founder he referred to was Kurt Hahn, an eccentric Jewish emigre from Salem School in Germany, where Philip had spent a year just after the rise of Hitler in 1933-34.
Hahn, the prince’s most influential mentor during his time at Gordonstoun, pitted his young charges against what he declared was a five-fold decay of civilisation.
Hahn and Gordonstoun provided Prince Philip with a much-needed sense of stability after the various upheavals of his childhood.
But his later years there were overshadowed by the death of his sister Cecilie, and her family, in a plane crash on their way to London for a family wedding in 1937. Philip was 16 years old.
Six months later, Philip suffered yet more sorrow when his guardian Georgie Milford Haven died from cancer at the age of 45.
For Prince Philip, the prospect of marriage to Princess Elizabeth offered the chance at long last for him to regain the family life that he had lost at the age of eight.
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