Friends lost International polo community mourns
Prince Philip
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, beloved husband of Queen Elizabeth II, passed away on April 9, at Windsor Castle. His funeral procession and ceremony took place on Saturday, April 17, on the sun-filled grounds of the castle and in St. George’s Chapel, where he was interred. Philip was born on the island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea and at the time was sixth in the line of succession to the Greek throne. His original name at the time of his birth on June 10, 1921, was Philippos, Prince of Greece and Denmark, and was later known as Philip Mountbatten. Homer himself could hardly have painted a more dramatic portrait of a character who navigated gutwrenching twists of luck and destiny. Born in the cross hairs of historical chaos, Philip lived in the limelight of public attention and—his fatal flaw— occasionally provoked explosive controversy with a hasty remark. What should be of overriding interest to readers of these pages, however, is the fact that the prince became a convert to and a lifelong booster of modern polo as well as other equestrian sports. Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was born in Windsor Castle in 1885, a greatgranddaughter of Queen Victoria. Although her parents were more German than British, Alice was raised as an English princess. London was the main residence of Alice’s family but she also spent time in Malta as her father, an officer in the Royal Navy, was sometimes stationed there. It was on the island of Malta that modern polo was first played in Europe, in 1868. At only 17 years of age Princess Alice met a distant relative, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, with whom she quickly became infatuated. Upon marrying Prince Andrew in 1903 Alice became 34 POLO P L A Y E R S E D I T I O N
Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark. In the 10 years after marrying into what turned out to be the most unstable royal family in Europe, Alice mothered four daughters. She even managed to win over an increasingly anti-monarchist Greek public, for a time. Prince Andrew, however, never truly devoted to his wife and children, often ignored them. By 1912, Greece was sinking into a state of political turmoil as another brutal war in a series of conflicts broke out with Turkey. On March 18, 1913, Andrew’s father, King George I, was assassinated by a Greek anarchist eerily presaging the similar event the following year in Sarajevo that would ignite a massive global war. Andrew’s eldest brother, Constantine, ascended the throne as Constantine I after his father’s death. In 1914, when The Great War began, Prince Andrew continued to visit Britain as he had done in the past, but since his brother, the king, declared neutrality for Greece in order to stay out of the war, the British began to suspect that Andrew was a German asset. King Constantine and his government fought so furiously over the country’s neutrality policy that in June 1917, public support turned against the monarch and he was forced to abdicate. The Greek royal family, including Alice, her husband, and their children, fled the country to exile in Switzerland. The empty throne was soon offered to and accepted by Alexander, the second son of the recently deposed Constantine. Incredibly, Constantine was restored to the throne after King Alexander died of blood poisoning after being bitten by a monkey. Alice and her family returned to Greece to give it another try and moved into Mon Repos, a villa on Corfu that had once belonged to Andrew’s father. But political pandemonium continued when the
