Prince Philip was a strength and stay for us all throughout his turbulent near-century

The Prince’s no-nonsense personality was one of the things people loved him for - Warren Little/Getty
The Prince’s no-nonsense personality was one of the things people loved him for - Warren Little/Getty
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A lot changed in the Duke’s 99 years: the Beatles, the Pill, Google and Brexit. Philip was a rare constant, which is one of the basic strengths of the monarchy. Prime ministers come and go – Elizabeth II has seen 14 during her reign so far – but princes are for life, and that life becomes a way of measuring the story of our own.

Monarchy was going out of style when Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark was born in Corfu on June 10, 1921. Europe had been through war and Spanish flu; Greece was fighting over the remains of the Ottoman Empire. Defeat in that conflict forced Philip’s uncle, King Constantine I of Greece, to abandon his throne. The family fled to Britain by ship, a fruit box doubling as a cot for Philip.

Contrary to the coziness of Downton Abbey, the 1920s was really an age of revolution. Britain still had an empire, but Ireland won independence and India sought it. America was emerging as an economic power. Russia had fallen to the Reds. In 1937, when his sister and most of her family were killed in a plane crash, Philip travelled to Germany for the funeral, to find himself surrounded by swastikas. The German people saw Hitler as “attractive”, he later rationalised, because he offered false “hope” after the misery of the Great Depression. His own, utter rejection of fascism was proven in battle: only a few years later, he was fighting in the Mediterranean.

Britain emerged victorious from the Second World War, but at a price. When Philip married Princess Elizabeth in 1947, the country was desperately poor, and their wedding, much like the coronation of 1953, was a glamorous distraction from the grim reality of everyday life.

The monarchy, however, couldn’t just be a throwback to Medieval splendour: the Prince was among those who knew it must change to survive. Rituals that were once the preserve of the establishment were now broadcast on TV, and the Royal Family, which had hitherto refused to let daylight upon the magic, consented to a fly-on-the-wall documentary in 1969. Some felt it went too far: in one of its most charmingly awkward scenes, the Queen and Prince Philip swapped framed photographs with Richard Nixon on a visit to the UK.

President Nixon speaks with the Queen and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace - Bettmann
President Nixon speaks with the Queen and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace - Bettmann

Decades earlier, Nixon’s journey to England would have taken at least five days by ship. Now one could cross the Atlantic in a matter of hours. Philip, a skilled pilot, racked up 5,986 hours in the air in 59 different types of aircraft. Around him, the world got smaller and the leaps greater. In 1953, Edmund Hillary reached the peak of Mount Everest; in 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Millions once lived in fear of diseases such as smallpox or TB: today, across the West, they are a folk memory, which is perhaps why Covid took us by surprise.

Morality lagged behind technological progress. Nixon was a key personality in the Cold War game of chicken, and Britons went to bed each night with the very real threat of nuclear attack hanging over them. With conscription ended in 1960, actual fighting became, for most citizens, something other people did very far away. For the developing world, on the other hand, it was a horrible constant. There was bush war in Kenya and a unilateral declaration of independence in Rhodesia. The question of what to do about apartheid divided the Commonwealth.

The victory of communism, said the far-Left, was inevitable. How could dusty old Britain stand up to scientific socialism? But by the late 1970s, as the Queen celebrated her silver jubilee, many revolutionaries were now long in the tooth and fancied themselves as monarchs. In 1978, Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, who paraded around with a sceptre, visited Buckingham Palace. Walking the grounds with her corgis one day, the Queen saw him coming towards her and skilfully ducked into a bush to escape him.

Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu are welcomed at Victoria Station by the Queen and Prince Philip in 1978 - Mirrorpix
Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu are welcomed at Victoria Station by the Queen and Prince Philip in 1978 - Mirrorpix

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Ceausescus were put to a firing squad at Christmas. But history was not at an end. Ancient conflicts over race and religion returned to life and America, a country that once seemed safe, like a city on a hill, was struck by terrorists on September 11, 2001. There was also a new anxiety afoot about the condition of the very planet itself, an issue the Prince, who became president of the British division of the World Wildlife Fund in 1961, had been talking about for years. Being worried about ecology, insisted the Prince, did not make him a bleeding heart: in 2011, he told the BBC that there is a distinction between being “concerned for the conservation of nature and being a bunny-hugger”.

The Prince’s no-nonsense personality was one of the things people loved him for: he seemed untouched by political fashion, impervious to the sensitivities of the liberal elite. Attitudes have certainly changed. It’s remarkable to think that, in 1936, Edward VIII abdicated in order to marry a divorcee, or that in the 1950s, Princess Margaret felt obliged to end her courtship with Group Captain Peter Townsend because he, too, was divorced, too old and a “commoner”. The marriage of Charles to Diana in 1981, in retrospect, was a bit like the Falklands War: a last hurrah for a lost world, described by the then-Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie as “the stuff of fairytales”.

Society beyond St Paul’s Cathedral had changed. Women’s role was transformed in the Prince’s lifetime, thanks to contraception, education, work and feminism – and leadership. In 1979, Britain gained its first female prime minister, and though Margaret Thatcher’s ambition was to turn the clock back, the genie was out of the bottle. We were becoming more open, less conservative. Prince Philip, who was fond of Diana, tried to counsel her and Charles to stay together, but to no avail.

If you want a sense of how dramatically Britain altered from the 1920s to the 1980s, one only has to consider that all but one of Philip’s children divorced. One can even resign from the Royal Family now, and start a new life in America.

Britain in the 1920s looked one of the last redoubts of the old order; today, it is a multicultural, meritocratic society. Emblems of the past remain – the Church of England, public schools, the House of Lords – but seem to mean less to many Britons than to outsiders looking in. Tradition is our unique selling point in a globalised economy: the monarchy keeps us relevant.

“It is a complete misconception to imagine that the monarchy exists in the interests of the monarch,” Philip said in Canada in 1969. “It doesn’t. It exists in the interests of the people”. If the people want to get rid of it, he stated plainly, they can.

But they haven’t. That’s thanks to the character of Royals like Philip who understood that the monarchy is an inheritance. It might change – all things do – but one has a duty to pass as much of it on as intact as possible.

Prince Philip's remarkable life - Read more
Prince Philip's remarkable life - Read more