DUKE OF EDINBURGH—V Family decision on school and its consequences

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32636, 18 June 1971, Page 4

DUKE OF EDINBURGH—V Family decision on school and its consequences

During his year at Salem, Kurt Hahn’s original school in Germany, founded in 1918 by Prince Max of Baden, Prince Philip had not enjoyed himself much. It was one of the few periods of his life when he didn’t.

After Cheam, he was beginning to feel English. And at Salem, from which Hahn had already been removed by the Nazis, the looselimbed life was giving way to an irksome regimentation. There was a great deal of “ghastly footslogging.”

Besides, going to Salem was a “family” decision, which he vaguely felt had coerced him. His sister, Theodora, though in token consultation with the two Mountbatten uncles (and with the best of intentions) was all for the school so closely tied up with her recently acquired husband. There’s a curious pattern of ifs, buts, echoes and parallels. If Theodora had not married Prince Max’s son, Berthold, Philip would never have gone there. If Ramsay Macdonald had not scooped Hahn out of a Hitler gaol in 1933 (as George V in effect had scooped Andrew out of a Greek one in 1922) there would have been no Gordonstoun School to educate Greek Royalty in Moray.

Oddly, the house that Hahn eventually took there for the school had Royal associations of a kind. It belonged to the GordonCummings family, participants, long before, in the great Tranby Croft cardtable affair that landed the future King Edward VII as a witness in a common libel action. War suspicins Odd, again, that Kurt Hahn, with his Platoimpregnated philosophies, should be the German schoolmaster who went to Scotland to impart Athenian theories to the Greek, if now increasingly English, Philip; and should himself have got his ideas from a couple of English boys he met in his teens when they were on a German holiday from Abbotsholme School and full of the “free” attitudes of their own remarkable headmaster, Cecil Reddie (whose German university, at Gottingen, was to be later one of Hahn’s).

More echoes. Hahn gaoled by Hitler for “the decadent corruption of German youth,” and smuggling out his liberal principles to Britain, home of the free, found himself in the Second World War the object of British mistrust, not only as an undesirable influence on British youth, but even as a possible German agent. Didn’t his boys man a coastal outlook station, one of several peculiar “services” in the school’s curriculum? Who could tell what secret signals were flashing out over the Moray Firth? Hadn't the Gordonstoun schooner once actually sailed to Denmark, now in Wehrmacht hands? And with Prince Philip on board too? Whose uncle, come to think of it, was the suspect King Constantine of World War I . . .

when we had that Boche Battenberg at the Admiralty, remember? Not, of course, that Philip’s name came into it. Who knew him then? But it’s just the way things could have gone. Award scheme Hahn’s German teachers who had followed him from Salem were interned. Hahn himself was a British Citizen by now and beyond the reach of the Defence Regulations, but his school was given over to the army, and he had to re-assemble its tattered remnants in Wales. He got back after the war to find the buildings had taken an even worse beating than buildings usually dp from the military. They’d been set Are to. Hahn probably could not have got away with the award scheme. There were still those who saw him as

a sort of intellectual scoutmaster.

Dogooding for the young is a tricky exercise in Britain. All that running and jumping, digging, building, messing about in boats, rockclimbing, playing at coastguards and fire-brigades . . . these things alarm the islanders. Organised youth. Hearties. A master race in the making. Prince Philip was properly wary about getting mixed up in it, at any rate on that scale. But once he did, Organised Youth which isn’t organised in the offensive sense at all, the emphasis being on the individual—got its biggest single leg-up into acceptability. Anything goes, from clearing overgrown churchyards or walking across the Isle of Skye to making a pair of Elizabethan rapiers or teaching yourself Chinese Mandarin; boys have climbed

Snowdon, learnt stage lighting, ploughed through "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” to produce a 5000-word commentary: girls take up numismatics, geological surveying, firefighting, building shacks in refugee centres. They don’t all come through the bronze even. But those who hit the gold turn up at Buckingham Palace for a handshake, a word, a flashing smile and a diploma. The presentations come off four times a year, once in the gardens, twice in the ballroom. And once at Holyrood. Makes them laugh The ballroom presentations are spectacular as 400 or so winners file under the clustered chandeliers. Some of them forget the handshake and Philip, knowing they’d never forgive themselves, reaches down and grabs it. Some of the girls forget the cu-tsy and come scuttling back for a quick one. He makes most of them laugh, which takes some doing in half a dozen words. It would be easy to see a patronising grandeur behind it all and a useful shot of the monarchic mystique; impressionable young minds going off to spread the glittering word. This particular afternoon, as it happens, his next engagement is to visit drug addicts in Camberwell: the other end, you could say, of the achievement spectrum. He flops down in a rickety treatment centre chair and wades right in with the

rickety patients. What does one say? No trouble. He smiles at the nearest. "How did you get hooked?” And we’re away. Afterwards as the car moves off (not the Rolls, too

offensively oppulent for the East End) he waves and beams. There are cheers from the doorsteps and an urchin of about 10 runs alongside whistling loyally with two fingers in his mouth. Philip winds the window down.

‘"That’s very good. Can i you do it without the fingers?” Then he settles back to worry, but realistically, about drug addicts. It’s hard to say how much Gordonstoun made the Philip we know or how much was there already. But Hahn’s part, perhaps more as man than schoolmaster, must be great. Ifs and huts To take a last look at the ifs and buts, if Hahn had not defied and, in fact, publicly attacked Nazi doctrines in 1933 and got himself ousted from Salem, Prince Philip might have finished his schooldays there. His English relatives would just have been another fringe of the far-flung family, handy for the occasional visit and that’s all.

The British would have known no more about him than they know today about his fund of foreign cousins. If a war had come, even without benefit of Hitler, he would have served in the German Navy; afterwards, perhaps, married some archduchess or other. That it sounds so preposterous only marks our complacent acceptance of the way things have turned out.

July, 1951, brought goodbye to the Navy for Philip in everything but the letter. The King was ill. There were a lot of things he could not take on: fairly imminently, an east-west tour of Canada, with a' rounding off in the United States. American visit It was to be Philip’s first exposure to American security arrangements. The turnout of police, guards and F. 8.1. men was on an alarming scale, and he found it absurd. President Truman, who regarded a flock of detectives on his morning walk as a quite enjoyable part of the trappings said: “I suppose you haven’t got the tradition of nuts that we’ve

got.” They stayed at Blair House, the White House having the painters in, where Mrs Truman’s deaf and aged mother was bedridden in a top room. She would never forgive him, Truman said, if Princess Elizabeth left without a meeting. They toiled together up many stairs. Harry yelled, “Mother, I’ve brought Princess Elizabeth to see you!” Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister

i again in the course of the ! tour, and the old lady came ' back with topicality and 1 charm: “I’m so glad your father’s been re-elected." r >i Not by air

The tour had been planned as a moderate exercise, as such exercises go, but was now elaborated by additions and interpolations at the Canadian end into a 15,000irnile journey. Whitehall had decided that the Edinburghs

should do it. The grand departure in the Empress of Britain was fixed for September 25. The date was almost round the comer when the King’s doctors announced that he must undergo a grave operation. Could the Heiress to the Throne leave the country at such a time? Put it another jway, could Elizabeth leave | her much-loved father? It was one of those private jagonies just as real for Royalty as for the rest of us. The surgeons got to (work only two days before I the due sailing date. The operation was declared a success.

But even so, could they go? Certainly not by ship. Time had run out. It is hard to believe now. but flying the Atlantic was not on. Business men, other Royalties and statesmen were boldly buzzing to and fro. Princess Elizabeth must not. But how else to beat the calendar, and avoid disruptions and disappointments at the other end? Typically opportunist, Philip hatched a plan to beat the barrier—and once beaten it could hardly come back. He needed the King’s connivance. Ban overcome It would be announced that the visit was off. Alexander of Tunis, then GovernorGeneral of Canada, would lodge horrified protests. The British Government must respect his feelings. It would be the perfect time to advance the airborne solution. The ploy succeeded. It involved a call by Prince Philip on Clement Attlee: almost worse, Winston Churchill had to be talked round: though he was not in office, he was the older statesman most vigorously against the Princess's risking a transatlantic flight. But he now gave in. On October 8 they roared off for Montreal, leaving the flying ban shattered behind them. The tour was a triumph. The understudy ambassadors were considered qualified, and it was decided that they should again stand in, at the end of the following January, for the visit to Australia and New Zealand. Again they flew. It already seemed obvious. The King, bare-headed in the cold wind, waved from the tarmac. On their eighth day away, Elizabeth became Queen, and they both came home to the new and different life.

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