Front row, left to right: Margarita, Philip, mother Alice, father Andrew and Theodora. Top row, left to right: Cecile and Sophie.
There, on Scotland's bracing north-east coast, far from his Mediterranean roots, the displaced prince found a home away from his family. "Andrew flatly refused to speak anything but Greek, displaying precisely the same stubbornness with which his son years later flatly refused to learn Greek at all," Alexandra wrote.ĭespite their closeness, Andrew was absent for much of Philip's teenage years, as the young prince was sent to attend a boarding school in England, followed by an institution in Germany before, finally, he settled at the Gordonstoun School in Scotland. Philip adored his father and the two were said to closely resemble each other in both looks and personality. With Alice's confinement also came the end of her marriage to Andrew, who moved to the south of France. She was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in Berlin, where Sigmund Freud was consulted about her case, and sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland for two years. In 1930, when Philip was nine, his mother suffered a nervous breakdown. While Philip was thriving at school, cracks began to show elsewhere in his life that would, in time, irrevocably tear his first royal family apart. Philip was also related to Elizabeth - although most European royals were at the time. While Philip had been taken in by his British relatives, the Mountbattens, when he was seven years old, his four sisters were married to Germans, three of whom had links to the Nazi party. He and his family were poor compared to other members of the European aristocracy.Īnd as a young prince of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, Philip was also too German for the liking of a Britain which had recently fought one world war against Germany, and was on the brink of a second. The pair began exchanging letters after this second meeting, and it was well known that Philip had by this point become the object of the young princess's affection (she was rumoured to have a photo of the handsome naval cadet on display in her bedroom).ĭespite Elizabeth's growing infatuation, Philip came with various strings attached. The shy princess Elizabeth barely said a word as together they ate ginger crackers, drank lemonade and played a game of croquet.īut after Philip had left, Elizabeth admired: "How good he is." "Philip rather resented it, I believe - a youth of 18, called to help entertain a girl of 13 and a child of nine," Alexandra wrote in The Australia's Women's Weekly in 1960. One day at the college in July 1939, he was called to chaperone two young girls while their parents attended a special service - Elizabeth, then-heir to the throne, and her sister Margaret. Philip, front centre, went on to have a distinguished naval career.