DUKE OF EDINBURGH—IV Influence of Gordonstoun’s principal was considerable

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32635, 17 June 1971, Page 4

DUKE OF EDINBURGH—IV Influence of Gordonstoun’s principal was considerable

I didn’t go to see Kurt Hahn, Philip’s headmaster at Gordonstoun. There was always a risk, with him, of being snapped up and enlisted in something.

One writer, David Wainwright, who saw him to collect material for a book on great headmasters, found he had agreed instead to help Hahn realise another great educational dream, the Atlantic Colleges (providing twoyear residential courses for boys of different nations before university). The book never got written.

When T. C. Worsley called' on him to fix a Gordonstoun place for • boy he was tutoring he ended up with a rum job as non-working master. "At the end of term you will tell me, frankly and fearlessly, what you think of the school.” He did, and they' finished by slinging books at each other. Hahn’s recruiting instinct was one of the things that rubbed off on Philip, who, ruthlessly co-opts for any favoured cause, from saving the Cutty Sark to finding homes for old pub-keepers. As late as 1969, then 83, Hahn was urging his former pupils to work at. reducing road deaths by getting first aid included in the driving test. The Duke of Edinburgh’s' Award was Hahn’s idea, < though it was adapted and 1 modified. 4 < "I'm one of those stupid ( bums that never went to a j university, and a fat lot of { ham it aid me." t I Many changes Old Etonians sending their * boys to Eton can rely on the j old place not having changed ( much. But the Gordonstoun ■ that welcomed Prince Charles ( in 1962 had changed a good, deal since his father went, there in the mid-thirties. Hahn had retired as head- > master in 1953, and material, expansions had occurred on > the grand scale. Philip went ( to a school of less than 30 t boys, with no playing fields, and all fixtures away, mostly t in near-by Elgin. Now it has j the lot,' indoors and out, a spread of games pitches, tennis and squash courts, a chapel, science blocks (eight laboratories), sports hall, and ( the heated and covered swim-, ming pool opened by the < Queen in 1967. , Warm, sheltered swimming , suggests a softening. But the : sea and cliffs a mile away,' and the mountains to the, north and south which Hahn . had spotted as a God-given 1 flexing area for the develop- > ing young, continue as before., One advantage of a school. in the north of Scotland,, more significant in the famous son’s time than the (then) obscure father’s, was simple remoteness: 400 miles ' from Fleet Street as the reporter flies. Eton would have liked to ■ have Charles. Well, naturally.' The arguments against it! included family doubts on' the desirability of that closed- 1 circuit, ruling-class ambi- 1 ence in an age of social level-: lings when Royalty was i beginning to muck in with the people. But it was also' just over the bridge from the Windsor home, and highly accessible to photog-1 rephers. t , 1 Cheam had been bad < enough, at least to begin with. Some diligent statis-, tician has noted that in Prince Charles’ first term of 88 days there, the papers had stories on 67 of them. It was hard on an eight-year-old, and with a more self-important child could have been disastrous, to find what you had for breakfast sharing the front page with Suez, Ike’s re-election or the Hungarian Rising. Publicity problems It was probably no joyride for the other children either. They’d been told to treat him like anyone else, which was easier than it sounded. One penalty of rank that he became aware of, though less at Cheam than at Gordonstoun, was that nice people kept their distance, for fear of seeming to court glory, while the less nice latched on and loved it. He turned out genuine enough himself, as nobody will deny. Helped to some extent when, after that first print-riddled term, the Queen’s press secretary, Richard Colville, invited a clutch of London editors to ; the palace and frankly asked them to lay off the lad. In the main, the point was , taken. , . For Colville it was almost : an unbending. He was often thought to be an overzealpus > guardian of the Family’s personal lives. But he had , begun the job under George i VI, and had had more than 20 years at it before he retired in 1968. 1 If Colville was a door rather than a window it was i from old custom and loyal 1 motives. His successor, William Heseltine, an Australian, i came in at a time when the i mystery of monarchy was < already losing a veil or two in the natural course of things, and he has since had a ; discreet hand in removing a few more dust-collecting ■ drapes. Besides, Colville was a former Navy man. They never did say much. Uncle intervenes There had been no need to soften up Fleet Street for , Prince Philip’s schooldays,, either prep or public. Only long afterwards was something of the sort done, and then not by the palace, but. by his uncle. In February, 1947, the chairman of the Express group of newspapers, and the editors of the "Daily Express” and “Sunday Express were unexpectedly bidden to Chester Street for drinks. Unexpectedly puts it

mildly. They had always gunned cheerfully for everything Mountbatten, and even then were laying into the head of the clan as a betrayer of Empire: Wasn’t he just off to India as Viceroy, to give it back to the natives? But this was why they’d been picked, naturally, rather than the less captious editors of the Fleet Street heavies. Lord Louis was at his most winning, humbly seeking advice from these hard heads. His nephew, Philip (who was amiably self-effacing in a comet; said nothing, and didn’t even get a drink), was intending to become a British citizen. What, in their distinguished opinion, would be the public feeling?

They said that it ought to go all right, what with the young man’s war record and his convincing impersonation of an Englishman bom and bred. Faced with such confidence in their judgment, they eould hardly say otherwise.

Beaverbrook, when he heard of the meeting, was more amazed than enraged. Three tough old war-horses out-manoeuvred like that? When the official announcement came out a month later their comments could only be indulgent. Strategy worked Colville’s strategy over Cheam, and Prince Charles, though less subtle in conception, also paid off. And when Gordonstoun loomed, four years later, he made a more general plea for the communications media to do the decent thing. Again it worked pretty well. There was the exercisebook story, but that was blown in "Der Stem” and “Time" Magazine; and the woman-journalist who got the cherry-brandy scoop was an astute freelance, in ambush at the Stornoway end of a school sailing trip. Charles certainly got no special attention in the school itself. An early out-of-class assignment was emptying the dustbins. (His father had built a pigsty.) A mild interest in refuse collection seemed to stay with him, right up to Cambridge and his well-received dustman sketch in the Trinity Review. This, it is fair to say, was well at the shallow end of his acting talent. He’d played Macbeth at Gordonstoun, and disgraced neither himself, Shakespeare nor his father and mother, who dutifully turned up in the audience with familiar parental flutterings. Prince Philip says, or pretends, that his own acting reputation at the school nearly ditched his son for the lead in “Macbeth." Hopes weren’t high for a boy whose father had only managed Donalbain’s two-lines-and-a-spit in the same play, and then because it was an openair production. “There was nobody else who could be trusted to enter on horseback and not fall off.”

The dustbins suggest that Gordonstoun was that sort of school. But the Prince of Wales emptied dustbins only because everybody emptied dustbins, as the roster came round.

Objectives of school

It wasn’t part of that public school system, held by many to be so pernicious, which believes in giving newcomers hell to mark their insignificance, until they achieve enough seniority to give hell to the next lot. Humanity, on the whole, is the thing. And individual fulfilment. To “discover his own powers”—which needn’t be those of an Aristotle or a Hercules. The school’s motto says most of it. “Plus est en vous." (And a boy who thought he couldn’t do French, but managed that bit, was already on his way.) “It’s somehow got the reputation,” says Prince Philip, “of being a spartan, tough, rigorous, generally bodybending sort of organisation. In fact, it isn’t at all, and never has been. It’s a misunderstanding of what it's all about. “I think it rationalises the whole of the physical activities. Instead of this obsession with games, which is the standard public school thing —the idea that you’ve got to be good at football or cricket or whatever it is to get anywhere—we in fact had a great many more activities. “But these are alternatives, they’re not necessarily absolutes, not everybody does everything." Kurt Hahn’s influence was considerable. It says something for his bowers and prestige that Gordonstoun’s first board of governors (assembled by a German in a foreign land) included the Archbishop of York, the headmaster of Eton, the historian, G. M. Trevelyan, and John Buchan—later Lord Tweedsmuir and GovernorGeneral of Canada.

This article is extracted from "Philip: An Informal Biography,” by Basil Boothroyd, published by Longman. Copyright-1971 Nagrapho, Ltd.