Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life. Philip Eade

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СКАЧАТЬ of them, she will find suitable companionship …’ Yet still she agonized over whether this was the right place for her daughter, who had arrived in Darmstadt looking physically healthier than she had been for some time and had behaved in many respects perfectly normally. ‘When she is enjoying being amongst us, I feel a brute,’ wrote Victoria to Nona Kerr, ‘& then again come moments when I clearly realize the need of her going away.’¹⁴

      She wrestled with her dilemma for nearly three weeks before finally asking Professor Wilmanns to come and take Alice away. When he arrived at the Neue Palais, Alice was alone. Andrea and two of the girls had already left Darmstadt and Victoria had made sure to take all those who remained – Philip, Theodora, Cecile, Ernie and Onor – out for the day. Alice at first greeted Wilmanns warmly, but the atmosphere changed as soon as he told her what he had come for. When she tried to escape he restrained her and injected her with morphiumscopolamine to sedate her. She was then bundled into a car and driven south for several hours to Lake Constance, arriving at the Bellevue sanatorium at eleven o’clock that night.¹⁵

      Alice’s committal on 2 May 1930 marked the end of their family life, although the children would not have realized this when they arrived back that evening to find their mother gone. Alice and Andrea’s marriage had been under strain for several years but it effectively finished at this point. They hardly saw each other from then on and, although they would never divorce, Andrea ‘relinquished his role as husband’, as Hugo Vickers puts it.¹⁶ He liberated himself from many of his responsibilities as father, too, shutting up their family home at St Cloud and thereafter leading a rather aimless life, drifting between Paris, Monte Carlo and Germany, interspersed with sporadic 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.

      The girls were by this time aged between sixteen and twenty-five, and they would all be married within eighteen months, so the disappearance of both their parents was of far less consequence for them than it was for their eight-year-old brother. Up until now, Philip had been doted on by both mother and father, to the extent that the girls had often felt the urge to squash their overindulged little brother.¹⁷ Alice had given him much of her attention, knitting him woollen jumpers, sleeping with him in the nursery when his nanny was away and telling another of his nursemaids in 1928 that ‘Philip is always very good with me’.¹⁸ Andrea, too, appeared to adore his only son, as the girls were made only too aware by the gales of laughter whenever they played together.¹⁹

      In those days, fathers of Andrea’s background had a rather more hands-off approach to child rearing than they do today, when more is expected of both parents, even those from the upper classes. But even so, his virtual abandonment of his young son at this critical time is surprising. The most likely explanation seems to be that he had been so traumatized by his treatment at the hands of the Greek revolutionaries and depressed by his subsequent exile that he did not feel up to the task of raising Philip on his own after this latest crisis. He may also have felt, not unreasonably, that his son might be better off with Alice’s family in England than he would be with his father in his jaded frame of mind.

      In recent years, as Alice’s mental health had begun to give cause for concern, her mother Victoria had already started to arrange many of the practical aspects of her grandson’s upbringing, such as where he was to stay at various stages during the school holidays. After the closure of the family home in 1930, Philip went to stay for a time with his grandmother at her apartment in Kensington Palace. However, another of the residents there, Philip’s seventy-three-year-old great-aunt, Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, was far from thrilled about the new arrival, muttering that the palace was not the right place for the ‘younger generation’.²⁰ For this reason it was soon decided that Alice’s elder brother, Georgie, who had succeeded his father as the second Marquess of Milford Haven, should also take Philip in.

      Georgie’s younger brother Dickie Mountbatten is more often thought of as Philip’s surrogate father, but although Philip would occasionally go and stay with him and Edwina at Brook House in London and Adsdean in Hampshire when he was young, it was only later that Dickie took on that role. From when Philip was nine until he was sixteen, it was Georgie who acted as the boy’s guardian, officially and in practice, turning up in loco parentis at school prize-givings and sports days, and providing a home for him during the shorter school holidays at Lynden Manor, the Milford Havens’ house on the Thames at Holyport, between Windsor and Maidenhead.

      A relatively obscure figure in all published accounts of the Mountbatten family, in terms of sheer intelligence and ability and charm Georgie was as remarkable as any of them. From the age of ten he had had a workshop in his father’s castle at Heiligenberg, with lathes and a forge and foundry; by fifteen he was designing and constructing his own working models of steam engines – he later laid out a spectacular model railway at Lynden. He was said to solve problems of higher calculus ‘for relaxation’,²¹ and at Dartmouth the second master pronounced him the cleverest and at the same time the laziest cadet he had taught. As a young naval officer he was supremely inventive, although his inventions were, as Philip Ziegler puts it, ‘as likely to be directed to the comforts available in his cabin as to the wider interests of the Royal Navy’.²² Among his creations was a system of fans, radiators and thermostats for air-conditioning his quarters when afloat, and a device controlled by an alarm clock for making his early morning tea, twenty years before any such contrivance appeared on the market. His enthusiasm helped fire his nephew’s budding interest in invention and design, and when Philip grew up he, too, would be forever in search of the latest gadgets.

      Georgie’s technical expertise was allied to great resourcefulness and skills of organization, and those who knew him best confidently predicted a brilliant career, and that he would, like his father, eventually succeed to the position of First Sea Lord. However, he did not have the obsessive ambition of his more dazzling younger brother, nor such a rich wife. So in the late 1920s, with German inflation having more or less wiped out his inheritance, and the Great Depression threatening everything else, he left the Royal Navy in order to make some much-needed money in business. After a spell at a brokerage house on Wall Street, he went on to become chairman of the British Sperry Gyroscope Company, and a director of Electrolux (of which his brother-in-law, Harold Wernher, was chairman), Marks & Spencer and various other companies.²³

      His business career was partly necessitated by the extravagance of his wife Nada, who once ordered a tub of champagne to soothe her feet after winning a Charleston contest in Cannes, whereupon her hostess was presented with a huge bill which read ‘Champagne for Marchioness of Milford Haven’s feet’.²⁴ Nada was the great-grand-daughter of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (after whose mother she was named), and daughter of Grand Duke Michael Mikailovich, who had been banished from Russia on account of his morganatic marriage and thereafter divided his time between the stately Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath, from where Nada was married,²⁵ and a lavish villa at Cannes, where he was remembered for distributing ‘lovely Fabergé things’ and for introducing Edward VII to Alice Keppel, his mistress-to-be. To begin with he could afford to give his daughters substantial allowances – £2,000 a year, with extra for jewellery and travel expenses – although the flow of funds dried up with the Russian Revolution.

      Dark and attractive, Nada was an engaging character, outgoing, rebellious, full of life and verve. Her niece Myra Butter remembers her as ‘off the wall, the best fun, completely different, very bohemian’.²⁶ Even her grandchildren occasionally found her too boisterous, such as when she was ‘squirting you with the garden hose or pouring a night pot full of water on people out of the window’.²⁷ Among other attributes, she also gained a reputation for her fluid sexuality: her girlfriends included Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, the American society beauty who regularly stayed at Lynden while Philip was there.²⁸ Nada and Georgie were nonetheless devoted to one another, both of them by nature adventurous and risqué, and both dedicated to the good life. They smoked cigars together after dinner, took СКАЧАТЬ