Corporate DispatchPro Cover Story
Inside looking out Prince Philip did not have any constitutional position in the Palace, but his sheer strength of character has transformed the monarchy like no one else. With the exception of his wife, the Queen. The Duke of Edinburgh was a famously reluctant consort, but his loyalty and service to the Royal Family was unyielding. By the time he retired from official public life, aged 96, he had represented Britain in more than 22,000 solo engagements. His reputation ranges from witty and affable to stern and downright racist. In the hit series The Crown, Prince Charles is portrayed as a harsh, frigid father who has trouble accepting a supporting role to Queen Elizabeth. The world he was born into placed him in the line of succession to the Greek throne. But his destiny was summarily disrupted when his father was banished from Greece following a coup d’état in 1922. Aged just one, baby Philip will not have had any memories of the scramble out of Corfu aboard a British warship. His educational journey started in France before his family moved to Surrey in England when the prince was seven. He was later sent to a boarding school in Germany led by Kurt Hahn, but the pioneering educator of Jewish origin fled to Scotland amid rising persecution by the Nazi. Philip followed him to Gordonstoun, which instilled in him the hardy, self-reliant nature he was later to become known for. To a man without a land to truly call home, a young Philip was enamoured of the seas. He became a cadet at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, where he met Elizabeth, then a teenage princess, for the first time. 3
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