Prince Philip – a century of experience spanning a most remarkable era

Fewer and fewer are left now of the generation that had reached adulthood by the start of the Second World War. The youngest surviving American veteran of the world war is now aged 87. He was just 15 when he enlisted in the US Army. Still fewer are those who have long memories of life before 1939, when old Europe had not yet blasted to smithereens, and before the Shoah, before the many catastrophes across the world, and the annihilation of whole cities in Europe and beyond.

In the first instalment of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s memoirs of his travels across the Continent in the thirties, A Time of Gifts, he writes of the opening stages of his long journeying in Holland: “The beautiful city [Rotterdam] was to be bombed to fragments a few years later. I would have lingered, had I known.” There are few now who can say that they felt like that, who can reflect to themselves that, had they known, they would have lingered a little.

Prince Philip’s early years would not have been out of place in one of Leigh Fermor’s stories of lost Europe. The fifth child of gold-star European royalty, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, and a descendant of Kings, Queens and Tsars, his earliest years were marked by political turmoil, the exile of his uncle Constantine I of Greece and a thrilling escape, his family fleeing in a Royal Navy cruiser, HMS Calypso, with Philip secreted in an unused fruit box.

A ramshackle childhood followed – school in Paris, then Germany and then in Scotland. Then a young life full of action, danger and sadness, several family tragedies, distinguished war service, and then courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Windsor. I’m fascinated by those lucky enough to have spanned almost a century in years. The relative I have known first hand who lived so long was my great grandmother, born Ursula Alers Hankey, who died at the age of 97 in 2006. Even as a young boy, I remember how very clearly I felt that it was a privilege to have met her, to speak, if only a few times, to someone who had seen so much. Leafing through her memoirs, A Pilgrim’s Progress, I am struck anew by the extraordinary things she experienced in her long life.

In an account of the life of her father, Maurice Hankey, Britain’s longest serving Cabinet Secretary, she recalls her family’s first car purchases: “My father bought a steam car (1913) which was most unsuccessful as it was always running out of water, and also very exciting swooshing by with a great cloud of steam pouring out of the back! I used to think it was dust and cover my eyes to protect them.” How Victorian! Their next car, rather fittingly, was the model T. Ford, the first successfully mass-produced motor car and epitome of the new machine age.

She remembers the First World War: “the air was full of the rumble of the guns from France … When I was in bed in our London lodgings, I used to hear the companies of soldiers marching from Paddington Station to Victoria Station… singing the war songs like Tipperary.” Her two brothers, Henry and Robin, both career diplomats, witnessed the onset of the Second World War first hand: “Curiously enough Robin was the first person who had to announce from Warsaw to the Foreign Office Germany’s invasion of Poland… A year later Henry had to do exactly the same thing from France… and had to announce that the Germans had breached the Maginot Line.”

It’s not just a personal thing either. For successive generations, the pre-war era has retained a deceptive closeness and familiarity in our collective memory: not just because of John Buchan-style derring-do war films, but because of a whole swathe of classic culture and writing so redolent of that time: PG Wodehouse’s prelapsarian world of country houses and frivolous marriages and jolly aristocrats, or Evelyn Waugh, whose novels constantly criss-crossed between London high society, war, and Empire. Celebrated television adaptations of Brideshead Revisited and Jeeves & Wooster followed in the eighties to reignite the popular imagination.

The great irony is that those who experienced those years at first hand knew that no miraculous excavation could bring back the old world, or find again its hidden jewels and treasures. Leigh Fermor’s only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, written in 1953, is the magical story of a Caribbean island, colonised by the French, which disappears after a volcanic eruption. Only one man survives, who tells us of the island’s dying moments: the last Mardi-Gras ball, the last violin recital, before oblivion. Afterwards, sailors in the waters where the island used to lie report strange happenings at sea. They hear the dim sound of violins, rising from the waters, humming in the air.

Of course, the novel is most obviously coloured by Leigh Fermor’s own experience of travels among the Caribbean islands of the late 40s, but its themes of loss, catastrophe, and what survives it are deeply in tune with his perceptions of the loss of pre-war European life. It is gone, he believes, but for the winging of the wind. And yet the stories continue to be told, continue to fascinate.

Prince Philip’s death gives us cause to reflect on his extraordinary life and a century of experience spanning a most remarkable era.