and her husband Prince Henry had their country property, Hemmelmark, where Philip jumped off a hay wagon and broke a front tooth. ‘Of course he was a great show-off,’ his sisters Margarita and Sophie recalled. ‘He would always stand on his head when visitors came.’49 By their account, as he grew older, he also became ‘very pugnacious and the other children were scared to death of him’.50
Philip and his sisters also went to stay with their cousin, Queen Helen of Romania (daughter of their uncle King Constantine of Greece and deserted wife of King Carol), and her son Michael, at the dilapidated Cotroceni Palace near Bucharest, repairing in the heat of high summer either to their castle at Sinaia high up in the Carpathian Mountains or to the newly built Mamaia Palace at the mouth of the Danube on the Black Sea, which had quickly become the centre of a thriving resort, where Philip first experienced pony riding on the beach. Michael, a more taciturn child, was a few months younger. In 1927, at the age of five, on the death of his grandfather Ferdinand, he was proclaimed King of Romania under a regency. When he asked his mother the next day why people were calling him ‘Your Majesty’, she thought it best to tell him, ‘It’s just another nickname, dear.’51 Philip and his two elder sisters, Theodora and Margarita, stayed at Mamaia the next year52 but Michael’s new status seemed to make no difference to the children’s play ‘except that there were always many more people about’, wrote Alexandra, and the three of them never quite seemed able to wander off by themselves. Michael, though, ‘fully realised he was King and early adopted courtly little ways’, once telling Alexandra’s mother: ‘I am most pleased with Sandra. She suits me very well.’53
The anecdotal evidence gives the impression that Philip saw little of his own parents in the course of his nomadic wanderings as a small child. While Victoria Milford Haven’s biographer asserts that Alice often travelled about with him and enjoyed ‘showing him things and watching his alert intelligence growing’,54 her nerves had been badly strained by all the anxieties surrounding the family’s exile from Greece, and because of this the children were regularly packed off to friends and relations for long stints without their parents, while the family home at St Cloud was shut up. ‘Philip goes to Adsdean [Dickie and Edwina’s country home],’ wrote Victoria to her friend Nona Kerr in June 1926, ‘where they can keep him until autumn if desired, only for Goodwood week his room will be needed for guests, so if you [Nona] still would like & could have him & Roose that would be the time for his visit to you.’55 Philip went regularly to Nona Kerr over the years and he took to calling her ‘Mrs Good … because she is good and that is the right name’.56
There are several indications that from an early stage in their new life in Paris, all was not well between Alice and Andrea. Prominent among them is the story of Alice’s infatuation with an unnamed, married Englishman, whom she fell in love with in 1925 when she was forty and Philip four. According to the account given to Alice’s doctor by her lady-in-waiting, it never amounted to an actual affair, and Alice eventually gave up, consoling herself that they would ‘meet again in another world’. Her biographer suggests that in any case Alice’s strictly conventional background and ‘high moral principles’ would have prevented anything improper from happening, pointing out that ‘nothing in her life was flighty or flippant’.57 However, the mere fact of this infatuation suggests that she and Andrea had already begun to grow apart.
In 1927, aged six, Philip started at a progressive American kindergarten housed in Jules Verne’s former home – a rambling old St Cloud mansion (also since demolished) at 7 Avenue Eugenie just above the Seine, opposite the western end of the Bois de Boulogne, and shaded by the large trees which gave the school its name, the Elms.58 His uncle Christopher paid the fees.59
The accounts we have of Philip’s time at the school all emerged after his engagement to Princess Elizabeth and thus they may have been embroidered with the benefit of hindsight. One of his teachers, though, remembered being struck by the young prince’s precocious sense of responsibility.60 Having walked to school with his nanny, she recalled, he usually arrived there half an hour early, and he would fill in the time cleaning blackboards, filling inkwells, straightening the classroom furniture, picking up waste paper and watering the plants. Another tale was later told how, on his first day, some of the other boys had demanded that Philip ‘fight it out’ with another new boy. After a brief scuffle, he whispered to his opponent, ‘Are you having fun?’ When the other boy admitted he wasn’t, Philip said ‘Let’s quit’, which they did.61
By all accounts, he settled in quickly, although he was teased for having no last name. Asked to introduce himself in class he insisted at first that he was ‘just Philip’, before eventually awkwardly admitting that he was ‘Philip of Greece’.62 The school’s founder and headmaster, a thirty-one-year-old native of New England, Donald MacJannet, known to the boys as ‘Mr Mac’, later recalled the young prince as exuberant and sometimes rowdy yet at the same time polite and disciplined: he regularly repeated the mantra learned from his elder sisters: ‘You shouldn’t slam doors or shout loud’. He ‘wanted to learn to do everything’, including waiting at table,63 his mother having taught him that ‘a gentleman does not allow a woman to wait on him’.64 He also appeared to take for granted his mother’s insistence on hard work: Alice made him do extra Greek prep three evenings a week, and asked the school to set him a daily exercise for the holidays.
When Philip first arrived at the Elms, Alice had told the headmaster that her son had ‘plenty of originality and spontaneity’ and suggested that he be encouraged to work off his energy playing games and learning ‘Anglo-Saxon ideas of courage, fair play and resistance’. She said she envisaged him ending up in an English-speaking country, perhaps America, so she wanted him to learn good English. Philip later recalled that at that time ‘We spoke English at home … but then the conversation would go into French. Then it went into German on occasion … If you couldn’t think of a word in one language, you tended to go off in another.’ Alice also wanted him to ‘develop English characteristics’, although she was thwarted in this for the time being.65 For one thing, Philip’s two best friends at the school were Chinese – Wellington and Freeman Koo, sons of the prominent diplomat V. K. Wellington Koo, then ambassador to Paris, later foreign secretary, acting premier, interim president of China and ultimately judge at the International Court at The Hague. Their mother, Hui-Lan Koo, was one of the forty-two acknowledged children of the sugar king Oei Tiong Ham and much admired in 1920s Parisian society for her adaptations of traditional Manchu fashion, which she wore with lace trousers and jade necklaces.
The two Koo boys had each been robustly introduced to Philip at the Elms as ‘Ching Ching Chinaman’66 but they proved well up to looking after themselves, and their knowledge of jiu-jitsu came in useful whenever Philip found himself outnumbered in playground tussles. He often spent the weekend at the Koos’ residence in Paris, where, invariably spurred on by Philip, the boys all ran steeplechases and played other raucous games amid the Chinese embassy’s precious artefacts. The ambassador’s wife admitted to Alice that however much they enjoyed having her son to stay, they were always a little relieved when the time came for him to go and nothing had been broken.67
Other friends at the Elms during his time included his Franco-Danish cousins Jacques and Anne Bourbon, who later married King Michael of Romania. But the majority of his classmates were American and Philip picked up something of their drawl and learned to play baseball before he played cricket. He coveted anything that came from the New York department store Macy’s and was only too pleased to swap a gold bibelot given to him by George V for a state-of-the-art three-colour pencil belonging to another boy.68
FIVE
Orphan Child
However much Philip enjoyed his first school, his restless energy still made him a handful for his parents when he came home each afternoon. Another option would have been for him to
